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Title: The Heart's Country
Author: Vorse, Mary Heaton, 1874-1966
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Heart's Country" ***
THE HEART'S COUNTRY
BY
MARY HEATON VORSE
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ALICE BARBER STEPHENS
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1914
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY MARY HEATON O'BRIEN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published April 1914_
[Illustration: YOU MUST COME!
(p. 151)]
By Mary Heaton Vorse
THE HEART'S COUNTRY. Illustrated.
THE VERY LITTLE PERSON. Illustrated.
THE BREAKING IN OF A YACHTSMAN'S WIFE. Illustrated.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston and New York
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
Prologue 1
I 5
II 17
III 24
IV 30
V 36
VI 43
VII 50
VIII 58
IX 68
X 85
XI 97
XII 112
XIII 119
XIV 128
XV 146
XVI 153
XVII 168
XVIII 187
XIX 195
XX 203
XXI 221
XXII 230
XXIII 248
XXIV 253
XXV 261
XXVI 276
XXVII 282
ILLUSTRATIONS
"You must come!" (page 151) _Frontispiece_
"I Hate your Society, anyway! I never did
want to be an Old Maid!" 40
"She is very lovely" 108
She towered above Ellen, an Avenging Fate 176
From drawings by Alice Barber Stephens.
THE HEART'S COUNTRY
PROLOGUE
The actors in this drama are dead, or else life has turned them into
such different beings that their transformation is hardly less than
that of death itself. Their thoughts are scattered to the winds, or
live, oddly changed, in the bodies of their children--the girl who
brought me the journals and packages of letters smiled up at me with
the flashing smile of Ellen.
This girl, with a gesture of the hand, opened for me the gates of the
past, and when she was gone I walked through them with beating heart,
back over the steep path of years. This little package of
long-forgotten papers which she had given me, and of whose contents
she was ignorant, were a strange legacy, for it was my own youth that
I found in them and the youth of Ellen.
As I went over the scrawled journals and through the packages of
letters, the land of memory blossomed for me and the tears that came
to my eyes thawed the ice of many years. Ellen herself had forgotten
her youth; she may not have remembered that in the bottom of an old
trunk she had left for me things which she could not bear to
destroy--for there they found them after her death with a letter
addressed to me. As I read on, it was as though I had before me the
broken pieces of her heart, and as I looked, my own childhood and even
my girlhood lived again.
I had often looked for my girlhood and had never found it. Those years
when women are in the making--that land of glamour--are the hardest
thing of all for grown-up people to understand. Nothing stays fixed
there, all the emotions are at their point of effervescence and their
charm is their evanescence. The very power of early youth is in the
violence of its changes; it is the era of chaos in the souls of
people; when they are in the making; when the crust is only forming,
and the fire may break forth at any moment; and when what seems most
secure and fixed trembles under the feet and disappears in some
new-made gulf of the emotions. Then, too, in our youth they teach us
such cruel things, we spend ourselves in trying to keep alive such
spent fires, and no one tells us that it is anything but noble to live
under the destructive tyranny of love. We have to find our way alone--
The thought came to me that I would try to write a sort of story of my
friend. And yet, although I had before me the picture of a heart in
the making, I have taken up my pen and laid it down again because it
is not a story which "marches." Its victories and defeats went on in
the quiet of Ellen's heart, but I have learned that this silent making
and marring of the hearts of women means the fate of all men forever.
I fancy that women will have another bar of judgment and that the
question asked us there will be: "Have you loved well? Were you small
and grudging and niggardly? Did you make of love a sorry barter, or
did you give with such a gesture as spring makes when it walks
blossoming across the land?" I do not think that old age often repents
the generosities of its youth; perhaps it is my own too careful
sowing that makes me wish to write the life of my friend, who asked
only to spend herself and her own sweetness with both reckless hands.
CHAPTER I
Ellen and her mother drove in a "shay" to take possession of the old
Scudder house, which had been vacant long enough to have a deserted
and haunted look. It was far back from the street and was sentineled
on either side by an uncompromising fir tree. Great vans, of the kind
used in that early day to move furniture from one town to another,
disgorged their contents on the young spring grass, and though Mildred
Dilloway and Janie Acres and I walked to the village store and back on
a half-dozen errands, we saw nothing of the new little girl that day;
but there remains in my mind the memory of her little mother, a
youthful, black-clad figure, moving helplessly, and it seemed at
random, among her household effects that squatted so forlornly in the
front yard and then started on their processional walk to the house,
impelled by the puissant force of Miss Sarah Grant.
Ellen's account of this time is as follows:--
"We are going to live by ourselves, though we can't afford it,
because we are ourselves, mamma says, and will really give less
trouble this way, though my aunt and uncle think not. 'I want
you to win your aunt and uncle,' she said to me. It will be so
much easier for me to win them if they don't know me too well.
That is one of her reasons for not living in the house with
them. 'They would find us so slack that we should become a thorn
in their flesh.' 'Couldn't we stop being slack?' I said. Mamma
looked at me, and after a long time she said, 'You and I, Ellen,
will always be slack inside. Material things don't interest us.'
My mother doesn't know me. I like some material things, like
ploughing. I said to her: 'Wouldn't _they_ be a thorn in _our_
flesh?' She tried not to smile, and said quite sternly: 'Ellen,
you must never think of your dear aunt and uncle in that way.'
If it is so, why shouldn't I think so, I wonder? As soon as I
saw them I knew what mother meant. They are very nice and I love
them, but they have never leaned over the gate to talk to
peddlers. A lost dog wouldn't be happy in their home. We have
never had any dogs but lost ones. And Aunt Sarah didn't like
Faro's name or his ways. I like Aunt Sarah. She says just what
she feels like saying. Mother doesn't. Mother says the things
she wants to feel like saying. I annoyed my Aunt Sarah by
forgetting to come home to help, and mother said, 'Oh, dear, why
did you need to go and read the Bible to that woman next door
when we were moving in, and I wanted your aunt to have a high
opinion of you?' I said, 'She had the rheumatism.' Aunt Sarah
said, 'Does she read with her knee; and how came you there
anyway, Ellen?' I said, 'By the back door, because I like back
doors and I hate going in front doors.' Aunt Sarah looked at me
very sharply and said, 'That child of yours, Emily, is just such
a child as I should expect you to have, reading the Bible to
strangers who have the rheumatism when a pair of willing hands
would have been useful at home.' The way she looked at me, I
knew deep inside she didn't really mind, so I suddenly kissed
her. Later mother said, 'Mercy! I would never have dared to kiss
your Aunt Sarah like that.' I told her I knew Aunt Sarah wanted
me to. 'How can you tell?' asked mother; but I always know
things like that. It makes me feel rather vain, and vanity is a
sin. My Uncle Ephraim is like a picture and so is the big house
they live in. I had a moment that mamma called 'flesh-pottish'
and longed to live there. 'That's just it, Ellen,' she said.
'They are like pictures, and you and I would be sure to injure
their lovely surfaces. We are not violent, but so careless.'"
After this arduous day I remember Miss Sarah popped down in my
grandmother's sitting-room. Said she: "I'm all out of breath." My
grandmother waited for further information. "I've been settling," Miss
Sarah informed her with that frankness that kept all the older ladies
in town in a state of twittering expectation. "I've been settling my
do-less sister and her do-less child." She spoke in some exasperation.
My grandmother allowed a long pause and said reflectively:--
"You'd make any one do-less, Sarah."
And, indeed, Miss Sarah Grant was one of those energetic ladies who
leave no place for the energies of others to expand. But here the wind
shifted and her irritation disappeared.
"Oh, my dear," she said, "it's too sad. Those children are as little
fit to take care of themselves and to live alone as young robins in
the nest."
"The Lord looks after such," said my grandmother.
"Well," replied Miss Sarah, with asperity, "you may be sure that after
what I've seen of this world I'm not going to leave it with the Lord."
She was on terms of familiarity with the Deity that even permitted
criticism of his ways. Then she said: "Send Roberta soon to see that
poor, fatherless Ellen of mine."
This my grandmother did, shortly afterwards, and I started forth on my
first visit to the "poor, fatherless Ellen" at the slow and elegant
gait of a hearse with plumes. We were not far removed from that period
when young ladies employed their leisure by limning lachrymose females
weeping over urns. We were therefore expectant of a certain pomp of
mourning; long, black draperies were the least we demanded. Ellen, I
learned, was in the apple orchard, and thither I bent my solemn
footsteps.
It was in full bloom, one tree after another looking like bridal
nosegays of some beneficent giant. All was quiet save for the droning
of honey-bees. Suddenly two inches above my head there burst forth the
roars of an infant of tender years. I looked up and there I beheld my
tragic heroine. Her dress was of blue, checked gingham, a piece of
which was caught on a twig of the apple tree and rent nearly in a
three-cornered tear. One stocking was coming down in a manner
unbecoming to any girl. Her hair was plaited in two neat little
"plats," as we used to call them, and tied tightly with meager
ribbons; but though I took these things in at a glance, that which
naturally most arrested my attention was the fact that Ellen cherished
to her bosom a large, red-headed infant, whom I immediately recognized
as being one of the brood of the prolific Sweeneys.
The child ceased roaring for a moment, upon which Ellen remarked to me
with grave self-composure:--
"How do you do? I suppose you have come to play with me, but my
brother and I can't come down for a moment until I have managed to get
my dress from that twig. Perhaps you could come up and undo it, or if
you could perhaps come and get him--"
"Your brother!" I cried. "That's one of the Sweeney children."
Ellen's eyes flashed. "It _is_ my brother," she insisted. "You can see
for yourself it's my brother. Would one have taken anything but one's
brother up a tree? I have to take care of him all the time."
Said I: "I've known the Sweeney boys all my life; there are seven of
them and the third but one biggest always takes care of the smallest.
There's one littler 'n this."
"Oh, there _is_!" said Ellen. Her brow darkened. "And I got up the
tree with this large, hulking thing in my arms--and goodness knows how
I ever did get up it!" She spoke with vigor and precision.
"Aha!" I cried, "you say yourself it's a Sweeney."
"I say nothing of the kind," rejoined Ellen. "This is my brother.
Come," she wheedled, "why won't you say it's my brother?"
I bit my lip; I wanted to go, for I was not used to being made game
of. Moreover, I disapproved of her present position extremely. There
was I, my mouth made up, so to speak, for a weeping-willow air,
lachrymose ringlets, dark-rimmed eyes, and black raiment, and I had
encountered fallen stockings, torn blue gingham, and the Sweeney baby,
and the whole of it together up a tree.
Ellen now looked down on me. Her generous mouth with its tip-tilted
corners--an exotic, lovable mouth, too large for beauty, but of a
remarkable texture and color--now drooped and her eyes filled,--filled
beautifully, and yet did not brim over. And for all the droop of the
mouth, the saddest little smile I have ever seen hovered about its
corners.
"Won't you _please_ say that this is my brother?" she pleaded.
Though I knew it was the Sweeney baby and though I knew she was
play-acting all of it, stubborn and downright child though I was,
something gripped my heart. Though I couldn't have then put it into
words, there was a wistfulness and a heart-hunger about her that
played a game with me. It was my first encounter and my first
overthrow.
"Have it your brother," said I in a surly fashion.
When we had got the baby down from the tree, Ellen finished me by
looking at me with her sincere, sweet eyes in which there was a hint
of tears, and saying softly: "Once I had a little brother who died."
That was all. She turned her face away; I turned my face away; our
hands met. It was as though she was explaining to me her insistence on
the Sweeney baby.
It was her look and this silent and averted hand-clasp that brought me
to my feet in a very torrent of feeling when Alec Yorke, an engaging
youth of eleven summers, came ramping through the orchard shouting:--
"Oh, you'll get it! You'll get it! Mrs. Sweeney's given Ted a good one
already--she's after you!"
It was not the gusto in his tone at her ultimate fate that irritated
me, but this taking away of Ellen's baby brother.
"Mrs. Sweeney's got nothing to do with this baby!" I cried. "It's
Ellen's brother!"
I bent down and picked up a stone and threw it at Alec. Ellen did the
same. In one second we had performed one of those amazing sleights of
hand that are so frequent and so disconcerting at this moment of
girlhood. A moment before we had been swimming along the upper levels
of sentiment and crossing the tender, heart-breaking line of the love
of women for little children; now our teary mistiness vanished and we
were back at the green-apple-hearted moment of childhood. That
afternoon I had already been a young lady with all the decorous
manners of eighteen; I had been no age,--just a woman whose heart is
touched with pity and affection; and now I was just stern, hard
twelve, and I threw a rock at my little friend, Alec Yorke. So did
Ellen.
Together, with hoots and pebbles, we drove the invading male from our
midst. Ellen, I remember, had a "Yip! Yip! Yip!" which was
blood-thirsty and derisive at once. She barked it out like a terrier
gone mad. I remember also her crying out in a ferocious agony of
desire: "Oh, if I get near you, won't I _spit_ on you!"
These were her first words to Alec. He said in later years that their
first meeting was indelibly engraven on his memory. He retreated over
the fence vanquished by superior force, but with his head well up and
his thumb to his gallantly tilted nose. Here Ellen turned to me, the
light of victory flashing from her eyes, which fought with my
interrogatory gaze, filled with tears again, and at last sought the
distance.
"_I never had a little brother_," she muttered thickly.
Anger surged over me and then died as quickly as it had come. Again
she had me. The quiver in her voice showed me what her sincerity had
cost her, and so did her next words:--
"I wanted one so always that I just had to make-believe."
Here one had the heart of truth, stripped of the spirit of
make-believe which it had clothed in quaint and absurd garments. Again
I squeezed Ellen's hand in mine.
I tell all these things in detail because this was so Ellen. She had
this dual nature which fought forever in her heart,--the passion for
make-believe and the fundamental need of telling the truth,--always to
herself, and often embarrassingly to those she loved.
She comments as follows on this episode, unconsciously showing me as
the young prig I was:--
"The moment Roberta picked up a rock to fight for my brother, I
knew I should have to tell her the truth. I saw right away how
good Roberta was. She has very lovely blue eyes and her hair is
so smooth and shiny that I don't believe she musses it when she
sleeps. She looked at me so straight and her eyes were so round
that it was very hard work to tell her that the Sweeney baby was
not my brother, but I gritted my teeth and did it. The rest was
easy on account of her soft heart."
CHAPTER II
The heart of man is mysterious. Why a passionately expressed desire to
spit upon one should be alluring, God knows--I don't. It was fatal to
Alec. I see him now jumping up and down outside the fence, shouting
forth: "Ya ha! Ya ha! You can't get me!"--or wooing Ellen by the
subtle method of attaching a hard green apple to a supple stick and
flinging it at her. The relations of these two, as you can see, were
deep from the first.
Ellen, more than any of the rest of us, had sharp recrudescences back
to little girlhood just as she flamed further ahead on the shimmering
path of adolescence. Thus she covered a wide gamut of years in her
everyday life. I think it is this ability to roam up and down time
that makes life interesting, more than any other thing.
So when Janie Acres and Mildred Dilloway and Ellen and I would be
sitting under the trees discussing the important affairs of life,
Ellen would suddenly be moved to arise with her ear-rending "Yip!
Yip!" and "career" (I use Miss Sarah's word) across the landscape. Her
frocks, because of her mother's dislike to the dull work of letting
down tucks and hems, were shorter than those worn in my decorous young
days, and her thin little legs measured the distance like a pair of
dividers. There was an intensity to her flight that made one think of
a projectile.
From the excursions into tenderness that our little quartette of girls
was always making, from our sudden flashes of maturity, Ellen would
suddenly leap with both feet into full childhood. I remember sudden
jumps from high lofts and swinging from trees and the slipping off of
shoes and stockings for the purpose of wading in brooks. And these
impassioned returns to the golden age were always heightened by the
presence of Alec. Such "performances" were, of course, severely
criticized. New England at that time was staider than it is to-day; a
higher standard of what was named "decorum" was demanded of the young,
and yet smiles flickered around mouths while brows frowned when Ellen
played.
As I read Ellen's journal at this time, it is as though I could see
her growing up as the tide comes in; the receding wave toward
childhood meant Alec to her. He was a loosely built lad with a
humorous and smiling mouth. His shaggy mane of hair, which boys wore
longer in those days than they do now, gave him the appearance of a
lion's cub. His whimsical temperament and his easy disposition he got
from his mother. She was a placid woman who had spent her life in
adapting herself to the difficult temperament of Mr. Yorke, and it was
her boast that there was no other woman living who could have got on
with her husband without being fidgeted into an early grave. When Miss
Sarah opined that if she put her mind on that and on nothing else, she
could get on with any man living, Mrs. Yorke replied nothing, but said
afterwards to my grandmother:--
"Poor Miss Sarah! Ain't it queer about these unmarried women; no
matter how intellectual they be! It ain't puttin' your mind on it ever
made a woman get on with the man she's married to."
Whatever the knack was that made a woman accomplish this feat, Alec
had had imparted by his mother.
"Learnin' you to get on with your pa real easy an' smilin' is goin' to
help you a lot in life, Alec," the good woman had told her son. "Mebbe
it'll be worth more to you than as if we had money to leave you."
Understanding the virtues in a good but crotchety and trying man, had
bred in Alec a tolerant and humorous spirit of the kind that most
people don't ever acquire at all, and that Youth seldom knows. It made
him kind to boys younger than himself, and also made it easy for his
mother to make him play the part of nurse to smaller brothers and
sisters and also to nieces and nephews, for Mrs. Yorke's married
sister lived next door to her. It was the constant presence of a small
child in Alec's train that made Ellen discover the mystery about him.
"There's a deep mystery about Alec," Ellen told me. "Every day he
comes and leaves his baby with me at a certain time and runs off
rapidly toward the Butlers'."
Now I had seen Alec Yorke grow up; he was younger than I, and you
know the scorn that a girl of thirteen can have toward a boy a year
her junior and half a head shorter than she. At that time he fits into
no scheme of things; there is no being on earth who arouses one's
sentiment less. As a sweetheart he is impossible; equally impossible
is he as an object on which to lavish motherly feelings. For me, Alec
was a mere plague; he lured Ellen from me into skylarkings in which I
had no part, nor did I wish to have, having, by the New England
training of that day, already had my childhood taken from me. It was
not mystery that I had ever connected with Alec, but a baffling sense
of humor and an intensity in the way he could turn hand-springs. There
was a fire in his performance of cart-wheels that seemed to let loose
all that was foolish and gay, and, from the point of view of the
grown-ups of the time, reprehensible in Ellen. So it was obvious to me
that any mysterious doings of Alec's meant no good.
"We ought to find out," said I, "what he's about."
"Oh, Roberta!" pleaded Ellen; "then it wouldn't be a mystery any
more."
"We ought to find out what he's doing," I pursued, "and get him to
stop it. We should use our influence even if he is young."
We, therefore, stealthily made after Alec. He went out through a hole
in the fence of the Scudder place, circled a little wood, scaled some
outhouses of the Jones's, and in this circuitous method came back to
old Mrs. Butler's, next door, and there he lay on his stomach in the
woodshed, at a little distance. With a reappearance of guilty stealth,
he looked around and seeing no one he dove suddenly into Mrs. Butler's
house. Mrs. Butler was stricken with rheumatism and lived entirely on
the first floor, so by the simple method of flattening our noses
against the window-pane we might find out anything that was afoot. We
fathomed the mystery. There stood Alec, doing old Mrs. Butler's back
hair. He combed it out as best he might, while she punctuated the
performance with such remarks as these: "Lor! child, remember it's
hair in your hands, not a hank of yarn." Then she would groan, "Oh,
the day that I lost the use of my arms over my head and must go
through this!" All of which Alec bore with patience.
We made off a little shamefacedly while Ellen hissed in my ear, with
fine logic: "There, Roberta Hathaway, that's what you get by snooping
into people's business." We never mentioned Alec's mystery to him,
though from time to time Ellen would seem maddeningly knowing.
CHAPTER III
When Mrs. Payne had been in our village less than a year and the
interest of the village in the "do-less" sister of Miss Sarah had
somewhat dwindled, it flamed up again. Mrs. Payne had a visitor, to
our country eyes a splendid-looking, middle-aged gentleman. He put up
at the little inn and called on Mrs. Payne and brought her such little
trifles as a man might bestow upon a lady; sweets also he brought for
Ellen, and a most elegant little needlecase with a gold thimble,--an
incongruous gift, for since Ellen learned the use of the needle she
had abhorred it; if she lived to-day she would have darned her
stockings with a sail needle and dental floss. There went through the
town, "He's courting the widow," for he came again and again, and in
the mean time, according to the postmistress, there arrived letters
and a package or two.
Concerning this episode Ellen writes:--
"I wish aunts were made of different stuff. When Aunt Sarah
comes down here looking like a gorgon, I know that she has come
to make my mother cry and I am very glad that I called her 'old
gorgon-face' right before her one time, though it is a rude way
to address one's female relatives and I apologized to her
afterwards, and now I think I will have to undo my apology
because I feel so glad and happy every time I think I called her
it. I couldn't help hearing because I was in the next room, and
anyway I didn't mind if I did hear it. She said to my mother: 'I
suppose you've made up your mind already what to do about Mr.
Dennett.' 'About Mr. Dennett?' said my mother, and she sounded
frightened,--she is much more frightened of my Aunt Sarah than I
am. 'Even you can't be such a ninny,' said my aunt, 'as to think
he comes here for nothing. A man of his age doesn't come from
Springfield for the purpose of an afternoon's conversation.' 'I
hadn't faced it that way,' said mamma. 'Pooh! Pooh!' said my
aunt. 'There's a limit to even your folly; I hope you have
planned to do the sensible thing and if you have not, you should
save him the humiliation of declaring himself, which he'll do
now very soon, no doubt.' 'He pretended business brought him
here,' said my mother. 'Business, indeed,' said Aunt Sarah, and
she made a noise like a snort, which if I made she would
consider very rude. I wish there was one day a year when
children could tell their aunts how rude they are at times, just
as their aunts tell them every day in the week. 'The business of
courting is what he is about, and with an atom of honesty you
must know it, and now I want to know what you are going to do.'
'It's rather hard; I'm going to call Ellen,' said my mother; and
I had to move rather rapidly not to be found too near the door,
which showed me that I was listening, which one ought never to
do. 'Ellen,' said my mother; and my aunt then said a word which
I am not allowed to say. 'Squizzelty Betsey,' said she, 'what
has Ellen to do with it?' 'I'm going to consult with Ellen'; and
then, when I was in the room, 'Ellen,' she said, 'your aunt
seems to think that Mr. Dennett wishes to become a new father to
you. How do you like this idea?' 'Would you have to keep house
for him,' I said, 'the way you did for dear papa?' 'More so,'
said my mamma. 'I don't think we should be happy then,' said I.
At this Aunt Sarah rocked back and forth and she groaned as
though her stomach hurt her. While my aunt was groaning, I could
see my mother turn her back and I knew by her actions that she
was putting her handkerchief to her mouth to keep from laughing,
and which I have often seen her do when my aunt was here. 'It
made us both very nervous,' I explained to her, 'getting meals
exactly on time and doing all the things that a man has a right
to have perfect in his own house, which is what papa used to
say, but we have not, since we've lived together, had to have
anything perfect at all; we never think of meal-times or any
other sad things.' 'Listen, Ellen,' said my aunt; 'you are
almost more sensible and grown-up than your mother; your mother
is still a young woman, a long life of loneliness confronts
her,--more than that, a cramped financial situation. You'll
always have to go without and without and without. It would be
from every point of view a dignified and suitable alliance and
one which your mother should be happy to make and which any
woman of her age and position and an atom of sense would do.'
Here my mother flung out her hand in the air as though she were
throwing away something and were glad to do it. I wish I could
see her do that again. 'I respect him and I like him, and his
liking for me touches me and flatters me, but oh! the running of
a big house; but oh! the pent-up city streets.' 'And I say so,
too,' I cried. Then she suddenly drew me to her and stood me at
arm's length from her, and she said to me, 'Ellen, promise me
when you grow up, and when your blood shall leap high, and
nothing happens in this little town, and when the world calls to
you, that you won't blame me.' And my aunt said, 'Don't worry,
Emily; plenty will always happen where Ellen is.' I hugged and
kissed her and promised hard. Now there will be no more
presents, and no more bon-bons, for mother is going to shock him
so he will not want to come again, which she thinks is a good
way to save his vanity, but Aunt Sarah said: 'Emily, you are
incorrigible.' But we are both, my mother and I, very sorry to
lose our good friend. 'Can't men be friends with you,' I asked,
'without wanting to marry you?' And my mother said, 'It seems
not, dear.' But when I grow up it is going to be different with
me."
CHAPTER IV
Ellen wrote about this time:--
"Grandma Hathaway, Aunt Sarah and mamma, all don't know what to
do about me. I should be much grown-upper than I am. 'Mercy,'
said Aunt Sarah, 'that great girl of yours, Emily, acts so that
she makes me tremble for fear she will some day swing by a tail
from a bough, like a monkey.' [Here we see Miss Grant
foreshadowing the Darwinian theory.] They don't know I try to be
good, but I do try; but when joy gets into my feet I have to
run, and I love to feel like that. I think I only try to be good
when I am not happy. I have said my prayers about it, and the
awful thing is when I say my prayers I feel as if God said:
'Never mind, Ellen, run if you like.' They always say to me:
'Why can't you sit and sew under the trees with the other
girls?' Oh, if they only knew what we talked about when we sit
and sew! And even Roberta does, though she disapproves of all
silliness. I have never seen any girl disapprove of all
silliness as does Roberta. But what we sit and talk about is
_beaux_, though Roberta doesn't call hers that, and he isn't.
And when Roberta talks so beautifully, I often talk the same
way, but deep in my heart I know I wish I had a real beau, like
the grown-up girls we talk about. It's strange, though, that
Roberta has none, because she has more of one than any of the
rest of us, because she writes notes to Leonard Dilloway and he
carries home her books. When I said, 'He is your beau,' she was
very shocked. 'I wish you would not speak so to me,' she said,
'it pains me. I shall never love, anyway, but once. I am far too
young to think of such things.' 'Why do you do it?' I asked her.
This made her cross. 'I don't,' she answered. 'Leonard is my
friend.' But the rest of us know she is in love. So when they
talk to me about being a hoyden and ask me to sit and sew, I
feel like a hypocrite, because I know that young girls like us
are much more grown-up than they were when Aunt Sarah and
Grandma Hathaway were young, and that they would dislike one as
much as the other. Though I am young in actions I have such old
thoughts that I am surprised and wish I could help being proud
of myself for them. I have older thoughts than Janie or Mildred,
or even Roberta. Roberta sounds older, but her thoughts are tied
with strings while mine are not."
This sketch of hers is an accurate picture of the conversations
between young girls that are going on forever and ever when three or
four long-legged youngsters are together. Their talk leads inevitably,
as did ours, toward their business in life. To the lads we were
adventures--not to be confused with the real business they had to do
in the world; to us they were life itself.
Like all young girls, we lived in a close little world of our own. No
one entered it, nor could we come out toward others'. We were
passionate spectators at the feast of life, picking up the crumbs of
experience which came our way; for in our civilization we are treated
as children at an age when Juliet ran away for love, and Beatrice set
Dante's heart to beating. And yet our hearts beat, and we were tragic
and ineffectual Juliets, appearing on our balconies to youths who saw
only the shortness of our skirts. We knew without knowing that our
little lean arms were to be the cradles of the unborn generation.
Forever and ever we tried to tell those whom we met, "I am Eve," and
couldn't, not knowing the way past the angel with the flaming sword of
self-consciousness.
It was the great adventure of Janie Acres which made us conscious of
our absorption in boys. There had been a merry-making which took place
in a barn, and in talking it over afterwards, we recounted the
conversation of each boy who had spoken to us, giving the impression
of having snubbed them one and all; which, indeed, we often did, but
against our wills, because embarrassment made us gruff.
Janie had the adventure of hiding in the same corn-bin with a lad, and
what occurred in the corn-bin she was coy of telling. When pressed,
she flushed and looked the other way. It was Ellen who brought the
utter innocence and lack of romance to light with her merciless
truthfulness.
"Did he kiss you?" asked she.
We were shocked at her frankness. We never spoke of such things as
kisses directly. The delicacy of our little souls was deeply wounded.
And Janie replied:--
"Well, not exactly. But," she faltered, "he would have if I had stayed
there."
"How do you know?" asked Ellen coldly.
Thus it was she pricked the bubble of sentiment. We were all rather
horrified, immensely interested and rather envious. We now perceived
our sentimentality. We ourselves were shocked a little by some of our
temerities, for in the wide conspiracy of silence around us we
imagined we were the only adventurous ones in the world.
Characteristically, it was I who suggested that momentous association,
the "Zinias," or "Old Maid Club."
Ellen wrote:--
"We made up our minds that we were always to be true friends of
men and lift their minds up as women should. We are going to
think only of our studies, our homes, and of religion. Roberta
says we may as well begin now, for we are getting older every
minute, and one of us is already fourteen. And before we know it
we will be thinking of nothing but boys. We have only to look
around us to see what such things lead to. Patty Newcomb and
Elizabeth Taylor and all those big girls are both forward and
bold. When I said, 'Roberta, isn't noticing everything they do
and talking about it just the same as talking about boys?' she
said at once, 'It is not the same at all,' in the tone that I
know she doesn't want me to say anything more. And when I said,
'Oh, Roberta, aren't we rather young yet to think about being
old maids?' she replied sternly, 'It is never too young to
begin.'"
I feel rather sorry now for the stern, little Roberta. I feel sorry,
too, for Janie Acres and her kiss that never was. She would have been
so proud of it; it would have been her proof that she was a young
lady.
CHAPTER V
No sooner had Ellen covenanted "Thou shalt not!" than off she went on
her first adventure,--a trifling one but bleeding. She walked one day
to the academy with Arthur McLain. He wore long trousers. Of this
fatal occurrence Ellen remarks touchingly: "I tried very hard to be
interesting, but I chose the wrong thing." It is a mistake frequently
made by grown men and women. Alas! capricious fate that governs these
things turned my sweet, unconscious Ellen to one forever on the alert
for the appearance of this long-legged quidnunc.
I will give three or four paragraphs from her journal:--
"I asked Aunt Sarah if she wanted me to get her some more yarn
when hers ran short. She answered, 'Yes, you may, though I wish,
Ellen, my dear child, that you were as eager to do your work as
you are to wait on others.' But I knew all the time that I
offered to go because I hoped that I should see him, and I
should have told my aunt that that was why I offered."
A few days later comes the touching little expression of the desire of
the eyes:--
"Last week I walked all over town to catch glimpses of him. I
went to the post-office, and he wasn't there; I went down past
the school-house and past his house, and whenever I saw a boy
coming toward me, it was hard to breathe. The whole day was
empty and I thought it would never be night."
Again:--
"To-day I saw him; he passed by me and just said, 'Hulloa,
Ellen.' When I stopped for a moment, I thought he would speak to
me. In school this morning he stopped and talked, but all my
words went away and I seemed so stupid. At night I make up
things I would like to say to him, and when he stops for a
moment,--oh, he stops so seldom,--I forget them all."
Throughout all this, not once does she use the word _love_. From that
terrible and impersonal longing, unaware of itself and unrecognized,
Ellen walked out toward the long-trousered boy. She spread before him
as much as she could of her little shy sweetnesses. She walked up and
down the silent streets waiting for him. Later she writes: "I had no
single reason in the world for liking him."
I was with Ellen at the moment of her disillusion. We were out walking
together when Arthur McLain came toward us. Ahead of us, tail wagging,
ran the beloved mongrel Faro. He stopped to sniff at Arthur. Arthur
shooed him away. He was a lad timid about dogs, it seems. Faro saw his
nervousness, and, for deviltry, barked. Arthur kicked at him with the
savageness of fear.
I can see Ellen now gathering her dog to her with one regal sweep of
the hand and walking past the boy, her head erect, her cheeks scarlet.
"I _hate_ a coward," she said to me in a low, tense voice; and later
with a flaming look, "I would have killed him with my _hands_ if he
had hurt Faro," she cried.
So humiliated was she that she says no word in her journal for her
reason for her change of heart. She could not forgive him for having
made a fool of herself about him--about one so unworthy. For of all
things in the world hard to forgive, this is the hardest.
"I would be glad if he were dead. Oh, I know I am awful, but it
is like that. Think of him walking around this town day by day,
and I will have to meet him; when I go uptown, when I go to
school, I will be avoiding him exactly the way I used to look
for him. Oh, if he would only go away."
It is not only Ellen who would like to slay the dead ghosts of
unworthy loves.
"He walks up and down, and doesn't know I have looked at him.
Oh, if he knew that, I think I should die [her journal goes on].
He walks up and down and doesn't know that I so hate the sight
of him. I don't hate him, but just the sight of him--so awfully
I hate it. Everything he does seems to me so tiresome; his loud
laugh makes me feel sick, and he doesn't know anything. I
make-believe to myself that he walked all over town after me and
got in my way and annoyed me until I said, 'I will be very glad,
Arthur, if you would cease these undesired attentions.' How
could he cease anything he had never begun, for it wasn't at all
like that it happened. I should feel so much happier if I only
could have hurt him, too."
This experience, so phantasmal and yet so poignant, led to the Zinias'
premature death. Conscience invaded Ellen now that disillusion had
done its blighting work. There came a day when she could no longer
keep to herself her deviation from the precise morals demanded by the
Zinias.
It was after a walk toward evening up the mountain, full of pregnant
silences, that she confessed:--
"You would despise me, if you really knew me. I'm not the kind of a
girl we are trying to be."
[Illustration: I HATE YOUR SOCIETY ANYWAY! I NEVER DID WANT TO BE AN
OLD MAID]
It shocked me and thrilled me at the same time.
"What have you been doing?" I asked her.
"I can't tell you," she told me. "You would despise me too much."
"Why, Ellen!" I cried. "Tell me about it."
"No! No!" she said; and she buried her face in the moss in a very
agony of shame. "I can't tell a human soul."
And she still left me with a feeling of having had an interesting
sentimental experience. Thus may we, when young, rifle sweetness from
the blossom of despair.
It was communicated to the other two Zinias that Ellen's conduct had
been unbecoming a sincere old maid, and when they turned on her,
instead of shame, she had for them: "I hate your society, anyway! I
never did want to be an old maid!"
As I look back, this adventure closes for us a certain phase of life
as definitely as though we had shut the door. We all realized, though
we were not honest enough to say it aloud, that we too didn't wish to
be old maids. And all this happened because an unlovable boy had made
Ellen like him. So much at the mercy of men are women! Just a shadow
of the Cyprian over us and we blossomed. It was the shadow of a
shadow; it had not one little objective event to give it substance,
yet the Zinias withered.
CHAPTER VI
With a deep revulsion of feeling, Ellen gave up girls, sewing, and
Zinias, and made a dash into childhood with Alec Yorke. Alec at this
time was a strong lad of thirteen, a head shorter than Ellen. I
remember even then he seemed more a person than the other boys, though
at the monkey-shining age.
They egged one another on until the ordinary obstacles that stand in
people's way did not exist. They became together drunken with the joy
of life. In this mood, they disappeared together one day, to the
scandal of Miss Sarah. She was particularly annoyed because Mrs. Payne
refused to be disturbed by the event.
"While he and Ellen are off together, they are somewhere having a good
time. Why should I worry?" said she. They had come together to find
out if Ellen was at my house.
"If I had known Ellen was gone with Alec, Sarah, I should never have
gone to look for her. I wasn't worried about her, anyway; I only
wanted company," said she, with more asperity than usual.
The two returned at sunset, the glamour of a glorious day about them.
They merely told vaguely: "They had been off on the mountain."
It leaked out that they had been as far as the village, ten miles
away, and that the peddler had given them a lift back. This last was a
scandal.
An Irish peddler lived on the outskirts of our village, and this was
before the day when foreigners were plenty. He lived contrary to our
American customs,--the pig roamed at will, in friendly fashion,
through his cabin. He sang in Gaelic as he drove his cart with its
moth-eaten, calico horse,--songs that were now wildly sad, now wildly
gay. He was alien, so we disapproved of him.
I remonstrated with Ellen on this.
"I like him," was her only answer.
This had not been all the adventure, nor was this the end of it. To
tell the story in Ellen's own words:--
"Alec and I were picking currants at Aunt Sarah's when I heard
a voice behind me, and I never knew before what it meant when I
read in books, that 'their hearts were in their mouths.' I
thought mine would beat its way right out of me and lie thumping
at my feet when I heard a voice say: 'Oh, here are my little
friends from Erin's Isle.' I suppose it is because I am very bad
that it never occurred to me until that minute that fooling a
minister, by pretending to be the peddler's children, was not
right, especially when it was Alec's and my singing songs in
what we made him believe was Gaelic that made him buy so many
more things. I wonder if all people who do wrong only feel badly
when they are found out? I turned around and I thought I should
fall, for my mother was with him, and Aunt Sarah and uncle and
our own minister. Uncle Ephraim had not heard what he said, and
now, 'Permit me, Mr. Sweetser,' he said, 'to present my little
niece, Ellen, Mrs. Payne's little daughter, and our neighbor,
Master Alec Yorke.' I saw him wondering if we really could be
the same children, because, while we were playing that we were
the peddler's children, we had taken off our shoes and stockings
to make ourselves look like wild Irish children, and had
succeeded very well, indeed. I thought for a moment that perhaps
he wouldn't say anything, but Aunt Sarah's ears were open. 'What
was that? Did I hear you say "your little friends from Erin"?
Have you seen these children before?' This was an awful moment.
'These are the same children that came with the Irish peddler to
my house.' 'Ha! Ha! I knew that those children were gone for no
good, Emily, and that they were strangely silent about their
exploits,' Aunt Sarah said. 'Do you mean,' said Uncle Ephraim,
'that my niece and Horace Yorke's son made believe to be the
children of a drunken, Irish peddler, and thus appeared before
you?' 'Not only that,' said Mr. Sweetser sadly, 'but they sang
to us in Gaelic.' 'Gaelic,' snorted Aunt Sarah; 'never a word
does she know of Gaelic. I have heard her making up gibberish to
the tunes that that peddler sings on his way.' Here Alec acted
extremely noble, though it annoyed me very much, and I am sure
that I am a very ungrateful girl that it did annoy me. He spoke
right up and said: 'Mr. Grant, it is all my fault. It was I who
thought of being children of the Irish peddler and I who
suggested that we hop on his cart. I should take all the blame.'
There was not one word of truth in this, for we had often ridden
with the peddler before, and the idea of playing that we were
his children was my own, and without thinking I told them so.
'Let us say no more about this childish prank,' said Mr.
Sweetser. 'These children have shown real nobility, the little
lad in desiring to shield Miss Ellen and Miss Ellen in not
permitting herself to be shielded.' Well, I knew that we should
have more of it and plenty later, and we did when Aunt Sarah
came ravening--there is no other word to use for it, though I
know it is not polite--down to our house. It all oppressed me
very much, even though Alec whispered: 'We can make-believe we
are being persecuted by the Philistines.' I know I have
disgraced the family, but I shall never understand why riding
with the peddler should do this. If our family is any good, it
should take more than this. Uncle Ephraim and Aunt Sarah have
said that I am really too old to act as I do. When I answer,
'But if I act so, doesn't it show that I am not too old, Aunt
Sarah?' she says: 'Mercy, my child, as tall as any flagpole and
with legs like a beanstalk, you've got to be acting like a young
lady. We can't have young women of our family getting a
ridiculous name.' This means that I must give up Alec. 'Why you
want that child around all the time is incomprehensible to me,'
said my aunt. 'You are a good head higher than he is.' People
are always measuring things in length and breadth. How can one
measure one's friends by the pound? Roberta agrees with them.
She thinks I am giddy, and feels that she must be good for me. I
love Roberta more than any other earthly being beside mamma, but
when Roberta tries to be good for me, I am so wicked that I try
to be bad for Roberta, and can very easily be so."
This episode stopped the free skylarking with Alec. As you have seen,
it was explained to Ellen that since she was fourteen and nearly a
young lady, she must behave as such. When I think how many lovely
spontaneities have been offered on the sad and drab altar of young
ladyhood, I could weep, as Ellen did. Alec's suggestion that they were
being persecuted by the Philistines did not comfort her, and little
Mrs. Payne said sadly:--
"Your aunt and uncle are right, Ellen, and I suppose I'll have to
punish you to satisfy them, but I can't help knowing that you must
have had a perfectly wonderful day, and they are few in this world.
Don't let your punishment cloud your memory."
CHAPTER VII
Look back and see if you can remember when it was you drifted from
that part of the river of life that is little girlhood to that time
when you recognized that you were grown up, and the eyes of men rested
on you speculatively, interestedly, and your parents foreshadowed
these things by an irritating watchfulness that you did not
understand. The picture of Ellen that comes to me oftenest is one of
her progress through the streets, her hair in an anguished neatness,
from her desire to escape Miss Sarah's critical censure, her skirts
longer now, and behind her perpetually screeled the three motherless
babes of our not long widowed minister. He was a middle-aged man,
ineffectual except for some occasional Gottbetrunkener moments. From
my present vantage-point I now recognize him to be one of the brothers
of St. Francis by temperament. He had a true poetic sense, and Ellen
would go to his house for the purpose of washing dishes and helping
about, performing her labors with the precision which she had only for
the work of other people, her own room, to my anguish, being a whited
sepulcher of disorder, outwardly fair to the glance of her Aunt Sarah,
while dust lay thick in every unobservable spot. It was I who kept her
bureau drawers in order.
She writes:--
"I just can't waste a minute indoors. I don't know why grown
people have so many things to do. When I get married I am going
to live in a tent and have just one cupboard where I keep
everything, with doors that can't be seen through. Roberta
wrings her hands, but she would wring them more if she knew that
I have from earliest childhood learned to sleep quietly in my
bed as it takes less time to make it when I get up. And mother
doesn't care one bit more than I. I am so glad. She so
frequently says: 'Ellen, this is too sweet a day to cook'; and
we eat bread and milk all day, and don't even light the stove,
though there have been moments when I have been glad that there
is a big kitchen in which they are always cooking, up at my Aunt
Sarah's. We would get things done much better if it were not for
reading aloud, but so frequently mother finds things she wants
to read, and then we go on, but not on and on like Mr. Sylvester
and I. We began reading poetry the other day--how shall I tell
it? And he read and I read, and he read and I read, until we
understood everything we were reading, the very heart. We felt
as if we had made the poetry--just knowing it for ourselves, and
it was us. By pretending I am Mr. Sylvester's second wife sent
by the Lord to take care of his motherless children, I find I
can do housework very well, for me, though I feel rather guilty
when I look at him, for I know that even he might be exasperated
at the thought of me as his second wife. But one has to do
something."
Some weeks later this occurs:--
"Now I have learned to work so beautifully and have done so
well, besides taking care of the children and then baking, I
feel it isn't fair not to do it at home. Oh, how hard it is to
do work for one's self. I know I should think I am doing it for
my mother, and when I was very little I used to pretend that I
was a poor child who supported her mother; but the little silly
pretenses of childhood are now impossible for me since I am so
much over fifteen."
It was at this time that we began to be allowed to go to the young
people's parties, because with us there was no fixed and rigid time
when girls come out. They went when their legs were long enough and
when they had learned to fold their hands properly in their laps and
sit with decorum, which with Ellen and myself occurred somewhere
toward sixteen. Ellen writes of one of these parties:--
"I am sitting waiting to go. I have a new pale-blue dress with
little ruffles--little, tiny ruffles. Aunt Sarah is disgusted
that mother put so much work into my dress because it isn't
practical, when we need so many things, for her to waste her
eyes. And it is true, but oh, how much more fun it is to work on
ornaments than useful things, and parties are like ornaments. I
think they are like jewels, and a great, big, enormous party,
with lights and flowers, like one reads about in books, must be
like having strings of pearls. All I hope is that I will act
politely, and not show how pleased I am, because if I did I
should shout and sing. My Aunt Sarah said: 'Ellen, please, my
child, don't make me feel as if you were going to burst into
flame or perhaps slide down the banisters.' And, indeed, I often
look in the glass and wonder that I can look so quiet and
unshining."
It was in this high mood that Ellen met Edward Graham. I know now that
he must have been an honest lad, square-cornered, solid, with an
awkward, bearish, honest walk, nice, kind eyes, and a short mop of
wiry, glinting curls as his only beauty, which fitted his head like a
close-clinging cap, stopping abruptly instead of straggling down
unkemptwise, as hair is apt to do, on the back of his neck and
temples. It was Ellen who noticed this and wrote about it. He must
have been not over one-and-twenty, but he was instructor at the
academy in chemistry and mathematics.
Well do I remember hearing this conversation at the other side of a
vine-trellis at this party. In her low, pensive voice Ellen was
saying: "I lived by the sea; it was in my veins. The noise of its
beating is in my heart. One cannot live inland when one has been a
lighthouse-keeper's daughter."
Rage and anger surged in me, for Ellen had made but three visits to
the sea in all her days, and one of which occurred when she was too
small to remember it. As you may gather from this, her father had not
been a lighthouse-keeper. I stamped my foot; a little-girl _mad_
feeling came over me. I took my saucer of goodies and my cake firmly
in my hand and went to confront her then and there. She had talked so
beautifully about truth and life that very afternoon.
I couldn't do it. The little sarcastic remark that anger had invented
for me died still-born. She was too lovely; something almost
mystically beautiful radiated from her whole little personality. "I am
so happy," she seemed to say. "Let me stay happy one moment more."
There was always about her this heart-rending quality. It was not
until I could draw her by herself that I spoke to her, and then my
remonstrance was gentle.
"You must tell him the truth," I insisted kindly.
And Ellen wrung her hands and said:--
"Oh, Roberta! you make my heart feel like a shriveled-up little leaf;
you make me feel like a bad dream, like when you find yourself in
company without your clothes."
But I repeated inexorably:--
"You _must_ tell him."
I can see her now drooping up to him and the appealing glance of her
large eyes. Presently I saw him take both her hands in his, and then
she came toward me, her feet dancing, a glad, naughty look in her
eyes. She answered my glance of inquiry with:--
"He asked me why I told him what I did, and, since I was telling the
whole truth, I answered, 'I wanted awfully to have you like me.'"
That, you see, is what I got for interfering with my friend and
torturing her.
CHAPTER VIII
The next few weeks there were very few entries.
Ellen was very bad at mathematics, and her uncle, who rarely left his
seclusion to interest himself in her affairs and who merely enjoyed
her personality, thought it would be a fine plan if this responsible
young man should give his Ellen lessons. Mr. Grant was advanced in his
theories concerning the female brain, which, he said, lost its
vagueness and inexactnesses through a mathematical training. Ellen
merely makes a note of this.
There are very few entries in her journal at this time, for she was
playing with the great forces of life. God help us all! We didn't know
passion when it came to us, nor how should we? It was the warp on
which were woven all our generous impulses, all our high idealisms,
making in all the shimmering garments in which we clothed our fragile,
newborn spirits.
Ellen walked in a magic circle of her own ignorance, never dreaming
of love or of being in love. So absorbed was she that it seemed like
some one walking down a road that leads directly into a swift-flowing
river, and not knowing that the river was there until one had walked
directly into it. So close is the so-called silly moment of girlhood
to the moment of full development, that when the change comes it
sometimes takes only overnight. It was only a few pages, after all,
that separated Ellen, who managed to do the minister's dishes by
pretending that she was his second wife, from the Ellen who wrote:--
"I don't know how to begin what I am going to say. I thought
everybody in the world must know what had happened to me. I
thought my face must shine with it. I thought I must look like
some one very different from myself,--like a woman, perhaps. I
came home through Lincoln Field and squeezed myself through a
hole in the fence so no one could see me. I came up the back way
to my room and locked the door. My heart beat both ways at once
when I looked in the glass, but I looked just the same as before
I went out--as before he kissed me. I went downstairs and my
hand seemed too heavy to open the door and go in where I heard
their voices. I was afraid to go because I felt: 'They will
know, they will know!' Mr. Sylvester and mamma and Aunt Sarah
were there. 'Where have you been?' said mamma. And I could not
answer. I felt I had been gone so long and so far. I could hear
the blood beating in my ears, and when my aunt said: 'I wish,
Ellen, you would stand up straighter,' I could hardly lift my
head."
Next day there is an entry: "I didn't know we were engaged until
he told me, 'Why, of course, we are.'"
Thus simply does youth plight its troth. They had been together and he
had kissed her, and so, of course, they were engaged. Of course, they
were ready to fight the long battle of life side by side, and she who
had given so much in her kiss had walked out past the doors of
girlhood; through that one light touch she felt that her whole life
must be then surrendered to the boy who had had the magic word for
her. They decided to tell no one on account of their youth.
No sooner did this honest lad have my rainbow Ellen in his hands than
he started in trying to make some one else of her. I read her journal
that follows with a certain heartache because I was not blameless in
this matter. I, too, wanted to take this gay and shimmering child and
turn her into something else; trim her generosities and check her
impulses.
Another thing that makes me rage is the fact that my knowledge of the
lives of men teaches me that, had Ellen had one little affectation in
which to clothe herself, her young lover would have been on his knees
before her instead of being the pedantic young master. Ellen's journal
at this time varies from a thing glittering with life, from being
drunk with the heady wine of being beloved for the first time, to a
book of copy-book maxims, beginning with: "Edward says I must read--or
do--or act--or mustn't."
Poor young man! He wrote her decalogues by the dozen, and yet the
tragedy of him is that he tasted her special quality and loved her
while trying to kill it. The youth of Ellen and her high joy of living
carried him along in spite of himself, though he always made Ellen pay
for his happiness by lectures on the seriousness of life.
It was here that Alec began to perceive the place he had in her life.
They had a game they played that they called "Two Years Ago," in which
they outdid their own childish pranks. Ellen remarks ingenuously:--
"I suppose that I ought to tell Edward how Alec and I rest
ourselves from growing up, but there is no place in him to tell
this to. I tried it with Roberta, and she just understood what
it was about, but doesn't see why I want to do it; and I don't
know myself exactly, except that I just have to."
Then from one day to another Alec was sent West to an uncle and two
weeks later, as had been planned, Edward left. He was to go away for
a year and a half, and then come back and formally ask for Ellen's
hand. It shocked Ellen terribly that she missed Alec most.
Through all the year and a half that followed, Ellen never told me
anything of what was in her mind, nor did she tell her mother, and
here is the characteristic of their young girlhood that people seem to
forget--this nameless reticence. So, alone, she went through the
crucial thing that falling out of love always is. Another girl in her
situation might have deceived herself, the idea of a grown-up lover
was such a pleasant one to a girl of Ellen's age. Ellen was unaware of
the disillusion she was preparing for herself. She writes, appalled:--
"I don't know what has happened to me, I can only describe it by
saying I have waked up. I know now that I am not in love with
Edward and I just understood this from one day to another. He
has not done anything at all. He writes me just the way he
always has. He hasn't changed, so I suppose I am fickle and bad,
and that I can't trust myself, for if this wasn't real, I don't
know what can be real, and yet I feel as though I had never
loved him at all. I sometimes wonder if I should have become
engaged to some other person if it had happened that some other
person had kissed me."
Write him of her change of heart she could not, for as time went on
apparently the memory of her became dearer to the boy. Good and slow
and pedantic, he yet realized what a lovely thing life had put into
his hands, and he longed to keep it, and he communicated this
ever-growing longing to Ellen. She so wanted to keep faith with
herself and to live up to all the things about "one love and only one
love" that books from all time have taught young girls they ought to
feel. She felt a great need of talking about it with some one and
could not bring herself to do it.
"If I could only tell some one and ask what to do, but it seems
disloyal. Roberta wouldn't understand and some way I don't want
to worry my little mother. Sometimes I feel as if I did tell
her without saying any words, when I sit beside her and hold her
hand and feel afraid. The other night we sat alone in the dark.
The smell of honeysuckle vines was so sweet that I shall never
smell it again without thinking how soft her hand felt in the
dark. She said: 'When I was your age, I used often to want to
tell my mother things and didn't dare. My mother was more like
your Aunt Sarah.' My heart beat so when she said this that it
seemed as if she could hear it, but I only pressed her hand and
kissed it. Then she said to me: 'You have seemed a little
absent-minded lately, my darling child; have you anything on
your mind, Ellen?' And I said in a low voice, and blushing,--and
I took my face off her hand for fear she would feel me blush
against it,--'What should I have?'"
As I read her cramped little handwriting a sudden wave of shame creeps
over me as though I had gone back; I remember her so well; I was so on
the outside; I loved her so truly. Meantime, as every day shortened
the distance that separated them, a certain dread encompassed Ellen;
she visualized their approach one to another in this way:--
"It was as if I was standing still and he was standing still,
and that the space between us was being shortened by little
jerks, and each jerk was as a day that makes us come nearer and
nearer. I don't want to see him--oh, I don't want to see him. I
don't know what I'm going to say to him--perhaps nothing. He
will look at me kindly--oh, kindly and critically,--and then I
shall be afraid; afraid of hurting him--afraid of him."
A little later she writes again:--
"If I go on feeling undecided as to what I shall do, something
will snap inside my head. I can't feel so uncertain. He wrote to
me lately, 'Ellen, my life would be utterly worthless without
you.' I cannot ruin any one's life, and my life is pretty
worthless, anyway, so I am going to stand by my first promise,
which is the only brave thing to do. Now that I have decided
that, I feel at peace. I loved him once and my love will come
back."
She adds touchingly, "I have two weeks before he comes"; but these two
weeks of respite were denied her. I was going down to Ellen's when I
met Edward Graham on his way there also.
"I've come to surprise Ellen," he said. So it happened that it was I
who went to her with the words, "Edward Graham's waiting for you
downstairs," and wondered at the sudden ebb of color from her face.
CHAPTER IX
It was with her mind utterly made up as to what course to take that
she went to her ordeal. She was going to offer herself a little, white
offering before the altar of the fetish which decrees that we shall
keep our promises. Herding her to this doom were all the cruel things
which we teach our young girls. In New England in my day we did not
joke about engagements. In her innocence, having given her lover her
mouth to be kissed and her hand to be held, and having promised to be
his, she had definitely decided that in the sight of God she was his,
and so she dressed herself in her best that she might please him.
I suppose that had I made up my mind to do what Ellen did at that age,
I should have gone through to the iniquitous end, shut my eyes and
quieted my rebellious spirit with sophistries. I should have done
according to whichever part of the strange anomalous teaching which we
give young girls that I believed in most. Had I believed most that it
is the crime of crimes to marry without love, I should have frankly
made up my mind to break the engagement, but had I believed that one
may love but once, and that an engagement is a marriage of the spirit,
and that in giving this I had given so much to one man that I had
nothing left for any other,--it is strange, but this is still taught
to girls to-day,--I should have traveled that terrible road. For girls
as young as Ellen have to find their way around through a world that
is hung with a cobweb of lies, which is put there to screen us from
the real world. The suffering that the unlearning of these lies has
given to girls of our class from all time is greater than the
suffering through which we must pass to come to a wider religious
belief.
Ellen might make up her mind as to what to do, but she lived by
instincts. She writes about it:--
"I couldn't. All day I pretended to myself that I was glad he
was coming, and that as soon as I saw him everything would be
all right, but it is a terrible, awful thing. He cares. He put
his arms out toward me and said: 'Ellen, oh, Ellen!' All I could
say--I was so cruel, so stupid--was, 'Don't, don't'; and I meant
I didn't want him to touch me. And then he said, and it was
worse because he has grown much older looking, 'I don't
understand. What's the matter, Ellen?' I said, 'I can't marry
you; I don't love you.' He said: 'Why, what have I done?' What
could I tell him? It was just that he was he and I was I, and
that's no reason, and yet it is the only reason in the world
that you can't change, and that's why you love people and that's
why you don't love them. We both stood and just stared at each
other. While I looked at him all the color went out of his face
and it grew gray. 'When did it happen, Ellen?' he said. 'I don't
know,' I told him; 'it just went out.' 'You might have told me.'
'I meant never to tell you,' I said; and then his color all came
back to his face and this was worse than before. 'You meant to
marry me just the same? Then you _do_ care for me; it's just an
idea you've gotten; it's just because we have been apart so
long. Let's just go on just as you meant to, Ellen, if there is
no one else.' He opened his arms as if he wanted to hide me from
myself in them, but I don't know what happened to me. I just
said, 'No-no-no-no,' and ran out of the room, and out of the
house up into the orchard. I didn't notice, but threw myself
down under the tree and cried and cried. I don't know how long I
was there, but I heard my mother saying: 'Ellen, Ellen,' and the
sound of her footsteps coming toward me, but I couldn't stop
sobbing so that she wouldn't find me like that. She heard me and
came to me and said, 'Why, Ellen darling! Child, it is as wet as
a river here.' She felt my dress and at first it seemed to me
that it must be wet with my tears, but it was just the grass.
'What is it, Ellen?' she said to me, and I told her that we had
been engaged and that I had just seen Edward, and told him that
I didn't want to marry him; and she just folded me in her arms
and said, 'Why, darling, you needn't'; and she comforted me, and
I felt all safe from everything and just like a very little
girl. Not many people can feel like that with their mothers,
but I don't think unless you can that your mother's a mother to
you really. I couldn't go on feeling safe and rested forever.
I've broken faith with myself. I can't count on myself any more.
It's a terrible thing not to be able to count on people you
love, but it's worse not to be able to count on yourself. I
couldn't do what I thought was right; how do I know I will be
able to keep from doing what's wrong? I think I will try and
give up being good, because most of the things people think are
good I don't understand why. I might have saved myself all that
suffering and been happy and low-minded, comfortable and
contented, and I think I will be from now on."
I well remember this epoch in Ellen's life; she must have been between
eighteen and nineteen when she gave up hope of herself and went out to
be comfortable, low-minded, and happy, for she told me about this
spiritual change in her. It was a crisis with Ellen, a spiritual
crisis as important as the time in a boy's life when he makes a breach
in the "Thou Shalt Nots" that have guarded him around, and surrenders
himself to the heady wine of living and says to himself: "I am a
sinner; now let's see what there is in sin."
Just about the time Ellen broke her engagement, a boy named Landry lay
heavily on my conscience. At this time, also, Ellen was engaged and
yet was unhappy, and yet all I knew about Ellen was that there was
something weighing heavily on her mind, and all she knew about me was
my outward principles in this matter and none of my inward storm and
stress. I can remember very well the never-ending conversations we had
at this time. I suppose all young girls who are not on terms of
familiarity with their own souls thus cloak their real feelings from
each other. For there is happily nothing more usual than that
shivering, shrinking, spiritual modesty which can tell of no event in
life that implicates another human being. Later the weaker women
outgrow it shamefully, or the finer ones among us replace it with a
beautiful frankness. There are some happy girls who have been so
simply brought up that they have never felt the need for the
ambiguities of life as Ellen and myself did. The facts of the case
were these: Released from the torturing thought of Edward Graham, the
breath of life blew through Ellen in a storm, while I was being
discreetly courted by George Landry. I had never had a tumultuous
suitor, on account of my being matter-of-fact in my attitude toward
the boys I knew or instinctively withdrawing myself from any
sentimental approach. But now this sentimentally inclined youth had
called on me and shown a recurring disposition to try and hold my hand
when we were alone together. We read a great deal of poetry also and
with deep emphasis. Thus does Satan trick the unwary. I, Roberta, the
straightforward; I, the hater of philandering, and who sincerely felt
that a self-respecting woman should be proposed to only by a man she
would willingly accept as her husband, read verses far-gazing at
distant horizons and with gentle underscorings whose audacity set my
heart to beating. That I had gone into this slow-moving and decorous
little flight of sentiment seemed so contrary to my ideals that I
felt I must give up my friend and his poetry-reading and forego the
heart-throbbing performance of having my hand gently captured and as
gently withdrawing it again, both of us apparently blankly unaware of
the actions of our respective hands. Ellen and I would discuss our
affairs in ambiguities like this:--
"There's a doom threatening me," Ellen would confess.
"A doom?" asked I, impressed by the sinister darkness of the word.
"Fate has tangled up my life," Ellen averred. "I have been deceived in
myself, and now that I know what I am, I don't care."
"What sort of fate?" I then made bold to ask.
"One that will influence my whole life because it has made me glad I'm
not good like I tried to be. I love the feeling of having gotten rid
of goodness, Roberta"; and Ellen flashed me the smile of a naughty
angel, and turned from me to wipe the nose of the youngest Sylvester
baby, Prudentia, who accompanied us on our woodsy rambles. "Can you
always decide everything in your life?"
"Indeed I cannot," I answered quickly. "I must give up a thing that's
sweetest and dearest in life to me, and I can't decide to do it--I am
not strong."
"Oh, Roberta!" Ellen cried out. "You are so much stronger than I, for
I decided and did the opposite thing."
"What did you want to do?"
"The thing I did do," poor Ellen cried, tears welling up to her sweet
eyes. "I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and yet before I so wanted
to do what was right." Then, with her little fists pounding on the
moss on which we were sitting, she said: "And mighty often, Roberta
Hathaway, what people want to do seems to me the really right thing to
do."
As I grow older, it seems to me so very often that what people want is
really the right thing. There are so many needless sacrifices made in
life,--sacrifices that do good to no one and cripple and maim one.
* * * * *
I might have saved myself the worry of giving up the "sweetest and
dearest thing in life," for I had an experience which showed me what a
solemn young fool I was.
If Ellen and I had this intense spiritual modesty, Janie Acres was
not so afflicted. She was always prolific in detail of any sentimental
adventure which she had, and was generally only quiet when she had
nothing to tell. Ellen summed this characteristic up in her
observation on Janie's character:--
"When Roberta and I don't say anything it is because we have too
much to say, but when Janie acts as if she knew how God made the
world, it is a sure sign she has nothing to tell."
Poor Janie Acres! Through all this long stretch of years I can see her
perpetually heart-hungry, wishing for experiences her very eagerness
denied her; longing for sympathy, companionship, and love, and when
such things came her way, killing them. She had a curious jealousy
which was kept from its full bloom by her confidence in herself. When
Janie hadn't sufficient sentimental experiences she would invent them.
And it was because of her inventions that my little experience which I
was taking so seriously was turned to ashes before me.
This trait of Janie's was an incredible one to me. I, who so
diligently hid all trace of any sentiment in my life, could never
comprehend a temperament that would not only share all its secrets
with its friends, but who also invented them; and it was only when
Janie had repeatedly emphasized George Landry's attentions to her at
moments when I had been reading poetry with him that I realized this.
I listened with the gravest feeling of superiority to Janie's artless
prattle. If George Landry walked up the street with her, it was an
event. I think if she had refused to have him accompany her to a
Sunday-School picnic she would have recounted it to us as the refusal
of a proposal of marriage.
In some obscure way Janie's interest in George Landry quickened my own
feeling and gave me emotions of vast superiority which were very bad
for me. All this is brought vividly back to me by this page of Ellen's
journal which recounts the final dénouement:--
"We have been having an awful time this afternoon, and I don't
think that any of us will feel the same ever again. Roberta has
been crying in my arms and says she feels soiled, but she has
acted so nobly that it will be a comfort to her, because being
noble is always a comfort to Roberta--and to almost anybody
else. George Landry has been a friend of Roberta's for some
time, and when the other girls have joked her about it she has
been very stern, and I've believed everything Roberta has said
because I think it is horrid to do anything else. But Janie has
been talking about George, too, in the way she goes on about
anybody that notices her, only who could tell that Janie would
talk about those who don't notice her in the least? This
afternoon we were all talking together, and she began: 'Last
night George Landry came past my house and I pretended not to
notice him, and he stopped and said, "Can I come in?" And I
said, "No, it was too late."' 'What time was it?' asked Mildred
Dilloway. 'Oh, it was about eight o'clock, and he stayed and
talked and talked and leaned clear over the gate, and I kept
backing away, and if mother hadn't called me from the house,--'
Here Mildred broke in and said: 'Janie Acres! I don't see how
you can tell things like that! George Landry was at my house all
yesterday evening.' 'Well, it was the evening before that,' said
Janie. 'Well, it wasn't the evening before that,' said Mildred,
'because he was at my house all the evening before, too.' 'I
thought your mother was so particular,' began Janie; but Mildred
wouldn't let her change the subject the way Janie knows how to
do, and she said: 'The way you have gone on about George Landry
has almost made trouble between George and myself. It has made
me feel quite suspicious at times. But now I have caught you at
it.' Janie blushed very hard and said: 'You are very spiteful,
Mildred, about it. George Landry does like me and I haven't told
you anything that wasn't so. Perhaps it wasn't so late when he
leaned over my gate.' 'He wasn't anywhere near your old gate,'
said Mildred, 'and I might just as well tell you--' And here
Mildred, who is very soft when she loses her temper, and begins
to cry, did all these and made us all very much embarrassed.
'And I might as well tell you--and you can see how much you
have hurt me--he kissed me good-night. So you can see whether
it's nice of you to pretend that George Landry is interested in
you or not.' We were all perfectly quiet for a minute, and then
it was that Roberta made her great sacrifice. Mildred was still
crying from excitement and Janie was at a loss for something to
say for once, and looking very frowning-browed and jealous.
'Girls,' Roberta said, 'I have something to tell you. And you,
Mildred,--whether George has been attentive to Janie I don't
know, but--' 'He walked home with me yesterday afternoon,' said
Janie. 'He did not,' replied Roberta firmly; 'he did not. He was
at my house all yesterday afternoon, and we were reading poetry
and he held my hand.' If Roberta had been the least like
Mildred, she would have cried, too, but she stood there straight
and held her head up as beautiful as an avenging fate. What she
said stopped Mildred's tears, and she sprang to her feet and
stamped her foot, and said: 'Well, if he did that and then came
to my house and did what he did in the evening, he's a pig!' And
she stamped her foot again. 'I said the truth anyway'; and she
glared at Janie who now said, 'I was just trying to tease both
of you.' But Mildred snapped, 'You were trying to lie to both of
us.' And Janie stuck her head on one side in the most provoking
way and said, 'I don't want your horrid beau anyway.' It was all
very painful, especially to Roberta. She said: 'We must never
any of us speak to him again. He is unworthy of our notice.
Except to spare you more pain, Mildred, I would not have told
you about this at all, and I am very much ashamed of myself, and
it serves me right. I shall never let any one hold my hand again
as long as I live.' None of us knew that any boy could be so
double-faced, and we all have agreed, and Janie Acres, too, that
we shall act as though he did not exist at all, which will save
our dignity and we hope will teach him something."
When other people write our lives, they tell the dates of our births,
marriages, and deaths; they note the year we went to college and when
we left, and all the other irrelevant things; no one says that it was
at such and such a moment that his soul was born, or that the baptism
of fire that turned away the selfishness of this woman came at such a
time. We keep these great and obscure birthdays and many minor ones to
ourselves, and this droll little episode was the definite ending for
us of little-girlhood. In our town we dawdled along in what the
Germans call the "back fish" age until some such thing has happened,
for we had no custom of girls coming out all of a sudden full-blown
young ladies; we had to win our spurs in a way.
We thought of ourselves as grown up, to be sure. Mildred Dilloway had
had a very melodramatic love-affair with one of the lads in the
seminary who had gotten into some sort of a scrape and was expelled
from school. He had urged Mildred to fly with him. Alas! that women
should be so practical. Even young as she was, she asked, "Where?" and
when he had no special place to propose beyond his parents' house, to
which he was then repairing, she had laughed at him, but in spite of
all our experiments in sentiment we had remained immature in spirit.
Now, suddenly, through the actions of this soft youth, George Landry,
we found ourselves in an absurd position. The grown woman in us came
to life; we wanted to vindicate ourselves in our own eyes; and it was
during the next few months that we found ourselves suddenly grown up
and the world's attitude toward us suddenly changed. From being the
little girls who accepted the casual kindnesses of older men in a
panic of gratitude, suddenly our position was of those who are sought
out.
CHAPTER X
Ellen's formal renouncing of goodness helped us find our place in the
grown-up world. Her gayety had always made her overstep the bounds of
perfect decorum demanded of young women in my generation, and she set
about carrying out her resolution which she told me about. I remember
well the shocked sort of quiver with which I recognized myself, even
staid Roberta, in her question:--
"Roberta, when you're in company, don't you ever want to do foolish
things? When you see a lot of solemn people saying good-bye
downstairs, don't you want to slide down the banister into their
midst? When Edward Graham used to lecture me, again and again I've
wanted to take his hand and skip down the street singing, 'Hippity Hop
to the Barber Shop,' and see what he'd do. I've always wanted to do
all the foolish things I've thought of when I was in company, and now,
Roberta, I'm going to!"
I had had these erring impulses. Who has not? In each of us there is
a hinterland where thoughts as fantastic as anything that happens in
dreams gambol around with the irresponsibility of monkeys. Ellen
translated a certain amount of these into action--and see what
happened.
This is what makes virtue so discouraging in an imperfect world. It
was her naughtiness which advertised to the world of men, "I am a
sweet and adorable person; I can make you laugh, and I can make you
dream, and I have no fear." Ellen now acted before strangers with the
inspired foolishness which most of us keep for those best known to us.
Even for them this mad spirit is not at our beck and call, but must
wait for the time and place to bring it out. Youth, empty of such
lovely, high-spirited, and drunken moments, must be very sad.
The divine folly of such mirth is only for the partaker; one must feel
the wine of life coursing through one to understand its spiritual
significance. Joy-drunken young people seem to outsiders silly, if
they don't seem wanton; and while the things that we did would seem
mild enough if I told them, they set our little New England town by
the ears during the year that followed.
Our little coterie gradually acquired the reputation of giddiness
among the older people, while we steadily became leaders among those
of our own age, and Ellen the central flame around which we revolved.
I myself thought her too audacious, and even when carried away by her
I used to remonstrate seriously with her. This accomplished nothing,
but it eased my own conscience.
Edward Graham, who had come back to teach in the academy, also
lectured Ellen continually. He was one of those tenacious men who
desire a thing all the more when they have lost it, and I think the
full flowering of his affection for Ellen only came after he knew he
couldn't have her. I think it might never have come otherwise. His
love for her was deep and fundamental, and the sort of love men treat
like the air they breathe; but had she married him and been the docile
wife she would have been, he might never even have known himself to
what extent he cared, and still less have shown it to her. They
continued to see much of each other, because he had put to her the
plausible story that they could still be friends, and she, of course,
eagerly assented, wishing to make what little reparation she could,
and not realizing that at the back of his mind was a determination to
win her at whatever cost.
Now her growing popularity and light-mindedness caused him anguish.
Her growing popularity aroused in him a leaden jealousy. He alternated
from mad blame to pleading affection. His devotion to her was a
continual pain, and yet in her gentleness she didn't know how to
escape it, and his criticisms bred in her a certain defiance of the
world and of conventions and made her more extravagant. I suppose it
was because it came as a climax of a number of smaller follies that
the town took so much notice of the famous "Young People's Party,"
given by the gentle Mr. Sylvester. I well remember the next day. I see
myself demure in my grandmother's kitchen, demure and gingham-aproned,
my hands in dough, my hair sleek under its net. I see Ellen, a blue
ribbon around her hair, a sparkle in her eye, her little feet
crossed, with all the look of the cat which has swallowed the canary,
and is glad of it. This is what sin had brought her to, you see. Mrs.
Payne sat, sweet and helpless-looking, in one chair, and my
grandmother creaked portentously back and forth, her hands folded on
the place she called her waist-line, saying to Sarah Grant:--
"It couldn't have been _hens_, Sarah."
"It was hens," said Miss Sarah accusingly. "They went out to the
hen-yard and brought each hen into the house, and they flew around and
broke two vases." Her eyes meantime had not quitted Ellen, who at this
inopportune moment snickered with happy recollection. "Ellen," her
aunt broke off accusingly, "did _you_ think of bringing those hens
into the house?"
"We were hawking," explained Ellen. "I brought mine in on my wrist and
it flew across and perched on John Seymore's shoulder. That's how we
told off partners for 'Authors'; everybody got a hen, and on whichever
boy's shoulder it perched,--and often it wouldn't perch,--that's what
really happened." She laughed; her mother laughed; I laughed.
Whoever reads this will sympathize with Aunt Sarah, because it
doesn't seem witty for a grown company of young men and young girls to
have behaved that way in the house of their minister. It had been a
golden moment, I assure you,--a party that stood out;--and if ever the
laughter of the Greeks was heard in that staid, old New England town
it was when Ellen Payne stood aloft on the hassock, a squawking hen
trembling indignantly on her wrist; and she at that moment looked both
beautiful and absurd. Miss Sarah Grant saw nothing of all this.
"I am chagrined," she said. "Have you no respect for life?" And she
walked away heavily.
Ellen spent the afternoon gathering expiatory pond-lilies of which her
aunt was as a rule fond. She waded in the pond during the whole
afternoon, her skirts trussed up scandalously, emerging with a
stocking of black mud on either foot. She was sunburned, she was
mosquito-bitten, she was happy, she sung aloud for joy on her way
home; and when she left the offering at her aunt's door, this lady
said: "These are very pretty, Ellen, and I thank you, but I wish, my
dear, that you had made me some little gift that is a testimony of
your industry."
It was on our way home that we were stopped by some women from the
other church, who asked me:--
"Roberta, is it really true that you and Ellen started to bring in
_hens_ to the _minister's house_ at the Young People's Party?"
"Roberta never started it," said Ellen, who was easily drawn in ways
like this.
"We thought they were joking when they told us," said Mrs. Mary Snow,
who was a widow and very precise.
"Well," said Miss Amelia Barton, "I should think Mr. Sylvester would
have prevented it."
"Mr. Sylvester enjoyed it, the fowls enhanced the party," said Ellen.
I pulled her along. "Hateful gossips," she said. As we passed the
house where Edward Graham was living, this illustrious young man
joined us for the purpose of saying:--
"You remember, Ellen, I told you at the party, when I first saw you
coming in with the hen, that you had far better leave it outside. The
whole town is talking and buzzing."
"The whole town disgusts me deeply," cried Ellen, "and so does any one
who lets the buzzing reach my ears."
"You ought to want to know the reaction of the things you do,"
retorted Graham, whose belief in his moralities made him irritable
when attacked. "You are criticizing Mr. Sylvester for permitting it
and I think you went much too far."
When Edward Graham moralized on the subject Ellen replied
flippantly:--
"It is that you and everybody else criticize anything you're not used
to. What's the harm in hens; what evil does bringing a hen into the
minister's house lead to? Does it make you want to go and take the
amber beads off a baby's neck just because I brought in a hen and it
perched on John Seymore's shoulder? John Seymore didn't mind it, and
he's studying for the ministry. It is people like you, who talk about
an innocent thing like a hen, and fuss over it as if it was something
bad, who do harm," cried Ellen; and she swept me along with her. She
comments in this fashion about the episode:--
"At the party we were all very happy, and there's no rule that
says that a thing must be of a worthy sort before we may laugh
at it. That's one of the nice things about laughing, there's no
rhyme or reason to it. It was not among those things that mother
talks of that undermine our fineness of perception. But Mr.
Sylvester didn't realize how people were going to feel about it,
and now they are all talking and tongue-wagging as though
something terrible had happened. Am I wrong, or are they? I
think they are, and I hate them for it, and I feel as though
that was the worst thing I had done, because I hate poor Edward
Graham and I hate Mrs. Snow and Miss Barton because of their
smallness and injustice; and aren't they more wicked to talk
about innocent things and gossip about young people and make
those who are happy feel uncomfortable and sinful? It makes me
want to break a window when I think how virtuous they feel."
We hadn't heard the last of the talk concerning the "Hen Party."
Rumors of it reached our ears from all sides. I suppose our elders
exaggerated the talk, that we might learn decorum. Personally I could
not imagine, any more than Ellen could, just what harm the hens had
been supposed to have done us. One of the hardest things for me now to
understand is the annoyance so many people feel at the sweet, noisy
fun of young people. It seems to me the very laughter of fairyland,
but older people have a way of turning the fairy coach of mirth into a
pumpkin drawn by mice, and are proud of themselves for doing this.
It is strange that the ages of men have rolled on one after the other
without this being a basic principle laid down to all parents--you
can't disapprove a child into the paths of virtue any more than you
can scold a man into loving his wife.
There are a great many young people who are made reckless and sullen
by such disapproval, though Ellen was saved from the harm that Edward
Graham and the public opinion of which he was the voice might have
done her by the utter sympathy of her little mother. She joined in
all our little gayeties; she laughed with us. So did Mr. Sylvester. He
attended the next two or three young people's parties, explaining to
Ellen with his gentleness: "They say, my dear, that I'm not a fit
guide for youth, so I am going to try and learn to be so by being more
with you."
Of course, for their pains, these two grown-up children of God were
called overindulgent; it was prophesied that they would spoil us; yet
it was this that kept Ellen's audacities always sweet.
However, even so, Ellen's future destiny was despaired of by Edward
Graham.
"Ellen is in danger of becoming a jilt," he told me.
"She can't help it if people like her," said I; for I, myself, had
changed a great deal from that rigorous opinion that one should be
proposed to only by the man one intends to marry.
"Ellen has altered very much in the three years I have known her,"
said Edward.
"She has grown up," said I.
"She has not grown up in the way I hoped to see her."
"Then, why don't you turn away your eyes from the offensive
spectacle?" I asked him cruelly, not knowing that this--poor
fellow--was just what he couldn't do. But even I was inclined to agree
with Edward Graham.
CHAPTER XI
The old Scudder place in those days was full of laughter and young
people. We were happier there than any place else, and I have never
known any parties gayer than those, where the only refreshments were
weak lemonade and occasionally a batch of cookies. I remember once or
twice on great occasions Miss Sarah Grant provided "refreshments."
There came a time when I agreed with Edward Graham that Ellen was
going too far. This night I remember we were playing hide-and-seek all
through the house--and you may be sure it was only in little Mrs.
Payne's house that such a thing would be allowed; for, oh! how sacred
the guest-room in my day and how solemn and suggestive of a funeral
the parlors in all the rigor of their horsehair. The Scudder house was
a magnificent place for hide-and-seek,--the ell connected with the
front of the house by what was known in my day as a "scoot
hole,"--sort of a half-sized door,--and more doors opened from
downstairs to the outside air than any house I have ever seen. I was
hiding in one of the rooms when I heard the sound of running, and
Ellen dashed in, John Seymore in hot pursuit, Ellen's laughter
trailing out gay-hearted, careless, and irresistible.
"Now, I've got you," cried John Seymore's voice; and to my horror and
scandal, he kissed her and Ellen merely laughed, laughed as she might
have had she been ten instead of twenty, having run away breathless
from a kiss that she expected to get in the end, and over which she
was only making a mock panic. It was a romping sort of a performance,
because Ellen had slipped away from him without any sentiment, but I
was shocked and pained--and, besides, I liked John Seymore and he
liked me, and I didn't think such levity was becoming in one who was
to become a minister. I sought Ellen out.
"I saw you," said I.
"I heard you under the bed," said Ellen.
"That's why you went out?"
"I didn't want to embarrass you," said she, grinning a naughty
little-girl grin at me.
"You ought to be ashamed," I admonished.
"Do I look it?" asked Ellen.
Suddenly there rushed over me most poignantly the memory of all our
immature aspirations for the uplifting of those we knew. In a great
wave of sadness I felt that we were wasting our lives--and the boy
that liked me most of all had kissed Ellen in a romp. Twelve o'clock
had struck for me. I was little Cinderella.
I suppose I must have shown Ellen all I felt, for she had seen the new
look in my eyes and all her impishness vanished, and she cried out:
"Oh, Roberta dear!"--when we both heard voices shouting:--
"It's Alec! It's Alec Yorke!" And in strolled a grown-up youth with
wide shoulders, and a fine, open-air, swinging way with him, and on
top of it was perched the head of Alec Yorke, only Alec made over with
that incredible change that comes between fifteen and eighteen years.
He was a man grown, but from this face, so masculine in its youthful
quality, looked the touching young eyes of Alec, blue and sweet, and
fearless, angry blue. He was seized with a dumb shyness and shook
Ellen's hand over and over again, while his eyes rested on her as if
the sight of her fed the soul of him. After a while they drifted off
together. Ellen wrote about this meeting:--
"I can't tell how strange this meeting with Alec has been. It
was as though my dearest friend had been changed over and I had
to find _my_ Alec in this new grown-up boy, who was the same and
so different; even his voice was different. And then all at once
he began to tell me how much he cared for me, and I feel so
ashamed. I feel ashamed just because he says that the memory of
what I am like has kept him from doing things that he shouldn't;
he said I've always seemed to him like a white light burning in
his life. I seemed to myself so very silly. I have never had any
one talk to me as he did. Every one else who has cared for me
has wanted something for themselves and he wanted nothing. I
know now that I've never cared for any one in my life, for the
way I care means nothing compared to the way he cares for me.
What little bit of love I had for Edward was nothing. I feel
ashamed because I know so little beside this boy who is so sweet
and knows so much. He doesn't even expect I shall care for him.
He only wants to make me proud that he should have ever cared
for me, and to be something just for that. The things he said
were all very young and very quixotic, perhaps, but how much
more beautiful than the things that older spirits think of
saying, and if I ever care for any one, I pray to God that I
shall only think of what I can give. We sat there for a long
time, and he held my hand in his and told me again and again
about myself, and it was as if I had seen a reflection of the me
that I might be and that I ought to be in the dear things he
said; and when I said: 'Oh, Alec, you don't know me; you have
forgotten me,' he said, 'I look at you, Ellen; you're sweeter
than you were, sweeter than even I remember you.' But everything
he said he said in just a few words that were hard for him to
say, but each little, difficult sentence had his true self in
it, as though he had distilled his soul for me, and I am so
light-minded and have been so careless and I have tried so
little, but if any one can feel about me as Alec does, I can
try, even though I can't care for him, to be a little bit more
the person he thinks I am. I have found the only reason I've
ever yet found for acting the way people want you to act, and
that is to please the ones you love. Some of the foolish things
you do may hurt some one you really care for. Roberta was
shocked because John Seymore kissed me; but I know we were just
romping, and at most, perhaps, I was a little bold. It is funny
that just a little boy should open my heart so. Mother and Mr.
Sylvester love the me I am, or rather a younger me--the naughty
little girl whose naughtiness they know don't make much
difference; but somehow he has seen the sweetest person I ever
am. I feel I have been a long way off from her, just being
trivial and playing the same game over again and not going on. I
haven't felt before for very long that Life was a glorious
battle, and that every day, and all one's days, one must fight
an obscure and ever-encroaching enemy. I've got to go back to
the mountain. I have been seeing things close to and putting the
emphasis on little things. I wish I could write a letter to
everyone I am fond of. I think it would go like this: 'Dear
People: I am going to make you a present of all the small things
I do that you don't like. It will be the things I do, not the
way I feel, but when I feel so happy that I want to run down
Main Street, I won't run any more. I don't think these little
things matter, but as I haven't many things to give, I give you
my foolish impulses.'"
I can't say that I remember any marked change of action in Ellen
because of her change of heart, and I still had that rather breathless
feeling when I perceived that she was what she called "happy in her
feet," by which she meant that then it was she was so happy that she
must go romping through our staid, little town, a graceful harlequin.
It was just now, however, that she learned something about Miss Sarah
Grant that touched her and made her wish to put her newborn feelings
toward life into immediate action. Miss Grant, who had always lectured
us severely, it now seemed had defended Ellen against all comments.
"I enjoy the child's high spirits," we found her to have said. "This
town should not expect conventional actions from the Grants in
inessentials."
Finding this out, Ellen said to me:--
"She wants a sign of my industry; I'm going to _buy_ her something
beautiful."
"What with?" I asked, because actual money was scarce in the Payne
household, and their tiny income was eked out by trading eggs and
other things at the store; for in a day when most people raised
everything themselves it was desperately hard for two ladies to make
actual money.
"Well," considered Ellen, "Mrs. Salesby has gone away."
Mrs. Salesby was a gentlewoman who copied Mr. Sylvester's sermons, his
handwriting being quite illegible. The sum paid for this work was
trifling, the work demanded, long and laborious, and Ellen's
handwriting I might call temperamental. Mr. Sylvester was at this time
having a book of his sermons, which he called "Thoughts on Life,"
copied. So for long hours Ellen shut herself in Mr. Sylvester's
dust-covered study and copied the inspired wanderings of his spirit
which was what his sermons really were.
Living in such intimacy with his thoughts had a further effect on her
mind. They were the musings of a mystic who was not too acquainted
with the infantile tongue which mysticism must perforce employ since
it forever and ever has tried to impress the emotions for which the
spoken language has not yet coined exact phrases. Something of his
inner meaning came to Ellen. She worked on with a serene joy.
At this time also Edward Graham ceased to be a disturbing presence in
her life; for feeling the need of showing Alec the sort of a girl she
was she told him her whole little story and he had applied to it the
youth's rule-of-thumb logic and saw the thing as it really was. He
gave Ellen the first sensible talk she had ever had on her relations
with men.
As for Ellen's calm acceptance of Alec's devotion, she used the
sophistries with which women from all time have accepted the sweet,
undimmed love of those whom they consider boys. "He would, of
course,"--writes the candid Ellen,--"have cared for some one anyway at
this time, and it is better that he should care for me because I place
real value on his affection and try myself to be good so that I shall
never hurt them."
Through months of toil she had at last acquired the few dollars
necessary to buy the present, and something "boughten" at that moment
had a tremendous value. Gifts were much fewer, and such gifts as there
were were of course made at home.
The first afternoon after her long task was over, Ellen went up the
mountain to reflect. Our mountain and our river were two things which
moulded the souls of us. The austere mountain drew my eyes toward God,
and how often I lost my personal grievances as I mingled my bemused
little spirit in the swirling river, which, after one looked at it
long enough and steadily enough, seemed at last to absorb one in
itself and float one down seaward. I knew that Ellen was on the
mountain and Alec and I walked up to meet her. She was on what we call
"Oscar's Leap," a place where the mountain seemed cleft away above the
river, as though with some giant's knife, and just above there was a
clear platform, surrounded by trees and bushes. Our tradition had it
that Oscar, one of the chiefs, leaped his horse into the river below
to escape from his enemies.
This night the river was turned to a mighty sheet of burnished
crimson, as the sun set just beyond the black bulk of the mountain.
Our peaceful town took on an apocalyptical aspect. One felt that among
the serene silence of departing day, the end of the world had come,
and in some way the very silence of its coming made it more awesome,
for its color demanded cataclysmal sounds. Ellen said once: "It tears
one through like the noise of trumpets."
Presently Ellen came down the road toward us, the last slanting rays
of the sun outlining her in the light. She didn't see us as she came
toward us, as we stood in the shadow. As I look back at that time it
seems to me that she forever moved in a pool of light that came from
the radiance of her own spirit. There was a little hush over both Alec
and myself.
He said: "She is very lovely."
And I answered: "She has been on the mountain."
I felt, indeed, as if Ellen had gone there to commune with God.
"When I came from the mountain to-day," she writes, "the world
had a new look, as if I had never seen it before. I wish the
river had a face so I could kiss it. I had to hold my hands
tight so that I shouldn't fling them around the necks of Alec
and Roberta; I took it for a good omen that the two that I love
most should be waiting there for me. I have made a wonderful
friend. Though I have never seen him before, yet I have known
him always. I was sitting above Oscar's Leap, thinking hard,
meditating on the beautiful things in life, which if you think
hard enough about, Mr. Sylvester says, you will become like, but
to do this you must feel like a little child, very small and
humble and believing. I think I was nearer feeling this than I
have since I was really little, when I looked up and saw him
standing there. I had been thinking so hard I hadn't heard him
come even; he was just there as if I had thought him into life,
and I was no more afraid of him than as though I had always
known him, although a stranger frightens me as a rule, unless
I'm feeling foolish. He said: 'I have been watching you a long
time; I've been watching you think'; and I just smiled at him
and he sat down there beside me, and then it was as if all the
things I had never been able to say to any one came to me,
crowding to my lips. I don't know if I said them or not, because
I don't remember exactly what we talked about. We made friends
the way children make friends. I felt that if I knew him a
little more only, he would know me more as I am than any one in
the world, because the me, that my own people know, is so mixed
up with that gone-forever person that used to be myself. I wish
I could remember more what we said to each other, but the
meaning of them is like Mr. Sylvester's sermons--we haven't got
words for them yet; but I remember one thing that seems to me
like the truth of truths. He said to me, 'Ellen, I am coming
back to find you; it was more than chance that led me here this
afternoon.'"
[Illustration: SHE IS VERY LOVELY]
In all that she writes about him during the next two weeks, where he
crosses and recrosses the pages of her journal continually,--for she
wrote an almost day-to-day account, Time at that moment held its
breath and gave her space to look at the treasure that had fallen
into her hands,--she never once mentions the word "love." She merely
waited for the coming of her friend. During this time little bits of
their conversation creep out. They had told each other exactly nothing
about their lives, drowned as they had been in the poignancy of their
encounter.
I thought in my innocence that the white radiance of her, that was so
apparent to me who loved her so, was the blossoming of religion in her
spirit. One afternoon we had been notified that Ellen's gift had come
for her aunt. It had been sent direct from the city, very beautiful
toilet and cologne bottles, I remember it was, of the massive kind
with which ladies' dressers were then always supplied. We had it all
planned that we were to sit there while Miss Sarah undid her parcel,
and finally, after she had wondered who could have sent her this gift,
with a gesture Ellen was to tell her, but while Miss Sarah was about
to open the parcel, the wide door of the stately drawing-room opened.
A young man was framed in it. He stood there looking at Ellen, who was
sitting on a low hassock; she looked at him. It seemed to me that a
breathless silence elapsed before Miss Sarah looked up, while these
two talked mutely. I have only one other time in my life seen a look
on any human face that was like hers. It was that of one who in
another minute must hide her face in her hands to screen her eyes from
the sight of the glory of the Lord.
CHAPTER XII
Thus they stood through an eternity of understanding, which in the
actual flight of time was only the moment that it took for Miss Sarah
to turn around, but it seemed to me that her glad little cry of
surprise: "Why, it must be Roger!" was echoed deep in Ellen's heart;
and turning to Ellen she said:--
"This is Mr. Roger Byington. You remember, Ellen dear, I told you he
was going to stay with us.--But what a surprise--we didn't expect you
until this afternoon."
"I started a day earlier so that I could walk over the mountain. I
walked the last stage." He looked at Ellen, whose eyes had never once
left him and who had the look of having seen a miracle. So poignant
seemed her look to me, so much did it tell me, that I remember I had
the wish to stand between her and this strange young man, so that her
heart shouldn't be revealed to him, and between her and her Aunt
Sarah, so that she would notice nothing; but I might have spared
myself the pains. In a moment Aunt Sarah was leading him away to seek
for Mr. Ephraim Grant.
I knew without Ellen telling me that this must be her friend of the
mountain. She had told me about him in all naïveté. It had seemed to
me sort of an Ellenesque thing to have happened, charming and
delightful, though I had paid no attention to her belief that he was
coming back.
"Did you know Mr. Byington was the one, Ellen?" I asked.
She shook her head. "How could I guess?"
We had been told that old friends of Miss Sarah's had written asking
for a boarding-place for their son, who was reading law after his
return from abroad and wished a quiet place where he might study, and
that Miss Sarah had invited him to stay at her house, but naturally I
had not connected him with Ellen's stranger.
Once in a long time things turn out the way that we dream that they
will. Once, perhaps, in a lifetime all the dreamed-of and expected
things focus themselves into one full moment. At such times the doors
of our spirits open and we find the hidden roads to the spirits of
others, and this was what happened to Ellen. Instead of Roger's
arrival dimming her present, everything came about as she had planned
and it all worked in together into one marvelous day. For once Age
understood Youth, for when Miss Sarah learned how this money had been
laboriously come by, she said:--
"Ellen, you have the heart of a child, for only a child would have
treasured up my word that I meant and didn't mean, and I think, my
dear, I've often scolded you for this very reason. You are a darling
child, Ellen, but a trying one, and I hope you'll never grow up."
When Roger came back with Mr. Grant, "Look, young man," she said. "Do
you know what this is? This is one of the rarest things in the world;
it's a true gift. You have probably never made one in your whole life;
you and your family go in and plank down your money and buy something
pretty and go away. Now, whenever I look at this, Ellen, I shall think
of your patience and self-denial,--yes, and your industry, and oh,
dear, dear! I shall never be able to scold you again, which, as I
know, you will often deserve."
We sat there for a half-hour and I felt as though I were in the midst
of a story, with my Ellen for the heroine.
Roger won us all that afternoon. In conversation he was the most
delightful person in the world. There was about him a certain, subdued
arrogance when he wasn't talking, which changed when he smiled into
the most delightful sunny winsomeness. He listened to those much older
and those much younger than himself with an absorbed interest that
gave the speaker the sensation of saying something of deep interest.
Later we learned that this young prince and a trying bad little boy
were the same person, but that day we only saw the young prince. I
know that I myself had the impression of having had the window of Life
suddenly thrown open wide, for with unconsciousness of what he was
doing, he took us sweeping up and down the world. He had traveled a
great deal in a day when traveling was much more of an adventure, and
he had had adventures and real ones, as one of his temperament would
be bound to have. He made one feel that one was living with a higher
vitality, as Ellen did, and the way Ellen affected me then and later
was as though she were a beautiful jewel that I had seen in the sun
for the first time. On this first day she sat there shining with soft
radiance and saying almost nothing, becoming, it seemed to me,
transfigured before my eyes.
After a while Ellen rose to go, and Roger accompanied us, and I had to
stay with them, having no pretext for leaving, as my house was beyond
Ellen's down the street; but it seemed to me that, without meaning to,
they subtly shut me out by the very way that they included me in their
laborious conversation, for as soon as we three were walking down the
sidewalk, under the great double row of elms which bordered our
street, their touching courtesy made a stranger of me as nothing else
could have done. Ellen wrote:--
"The first thing he said to me when we were alone was, 'Ellen, I
thought you were a little girl and you're grown up. When you
meet strange men on the mountains and they say to you politely,
"May I ask your name?" do you answer, "Why, I am Ellen"?' I had
forgotten that I had said that. I suppose I did look young, with
my hair down and my brown dress that's so much too short for me.
'I came back to find a wonderful little girl; where is she?' I
answered,--and my heart was beating at my boldness,--'She grew
up while you were away.' 'Oh, Ellen, Ellen!' he said to me,
'those were the longest weeks in all the life I've lived, and
it's strange it should have been your aunt's house that I should
have come to. It is as if I had been led by the hand, first, to
you on the mountain, and now, to you here.' And then he looked
at me and said, 'Ellen, you focused all my life for me that day
on the mountain. I've spent two weeks clearing from my life
worthless trash, all the débris that a man accumulates living as
many years in the world as I have.' And he has really lived in
the world, ever since boys here are nothing but boys. He told
me, 'When I went by I stopped at our place on the mountain. Have
you been back?' 'Yes,' I said, and I looked down. 'Look at me,'
he said, and it seemed to me he drew my eyes to his. 'Have you
been there often?' 'Yes.' 'How often, Ellen?' and I shook my
head. I felt as though I was dying of shame, for I had been
there every day at sunset. What if he knew how I had worked to
get everything done so I could fly up there at sunset? I felt as
if his eyes were burning down into my heart and he said, as
though he could read my thoughts, 'Every sunset I remembered the
way I saw you there. I ought to have seen you there again,
Ellen; I wanted to take you and fly up there, and I am going to
get a good mark in heaven for having been so nice to your aunt
and uncle, and even to your nice little friend, for being so
terribly in my way.' And all of a sudden he looked like a
naughty, bad, little boy, which made me laugh at him, and made
me feel on earth again;--and now I'm going to see him at sunset.
I feel as if I had never been alive before. I went in and kissed
mother and she said: 'Was your aunt pleased with the present,
dear?' I had forgotten all about my aunt and all about the
present. It was as though I had returned from a very far-off
country."
CHAPTER XIII
That afternoon we were all quilting at our house and Miss Sarah was
pleased enough to give an account of her guest.
"I've had a long letter from Lucia Byington," she said to my
grandmother, "explaining that precious scapegrace of a son of hers,
but I can tell Lucia she might have spared herself the pains. The
minute I clapped my eyes on him I knew all about him, having known his
father and mother. He has all her charm and her willfulness, with the
iron will and talent of his father. I suppose, because I'm an old
maid, I can't understand why a man can't bring up a high-metaled son,
exactly like himself, without being at odds with him. But there! He
expects his son to start where he's left off, with all the sobriety
and solemnity of an aged Solomon. And why people like Lucia and David
should expect not to have trouble with their children, I don't know.
And as for David, he fights his own youth in the boy. Now the time
had come for Master Roger to stop skylarking over the earth; he was
holding out; leave town he wouldn't. They had words; he slung a
knapsack on his back and went off, and wasn't heard from for a week,
and then came back as meek as the Prodigal."
You may be sure that Ellen and I had our ears wide open to this story,
knowing as we did why it was that Roger had suddenly become the docile
son. We were so self-conscious that our eyes did not dare seek one
another's, and we sewed together the large, gay squares of patchwork
with the precision of little automatons.
My grandmother spoke up:--
"Well, Sarah, I half dislike having your stormy petrel in our little
town. I saw him this morning, and he seemed to me a restless-looking
bird. He'll be turning the silly heads of our girls next."
"Let me catch him at it, or them, for that matter!" cried Miss Sarah.
"He's here for _work_, and not to worry me with such-like goings-on!
You may be sure that his family have had trouble enough with him in
such imbroglios already."
We had tea early and did the dishes and fell to our quilting again. I
noticed Ellen becoming more and more abstracted until finally Miss
Sarah said:--
"Well, Ellen, try to bring your mind back to your work. Years haven't
taken your habit of 'wool-gathering' from you."
Ellen wrote about this:--
"When I was a little girl I was more afraid of the setting sun
than anything in the world and now I know why, for I was waiting
always for this moment to come, when the sun, red and round and
menacing, set right before my eyes and I stared hopelessly and
hopelessly into it, not able to move. I had that awful leaden
feeling of wanting to move and not being able to, as though I
had been quilting through the ages and listening to stories
about Roger, a strange and distorted Roger, who was as
infinitely far away from me as the sun, and yet that I must go
to him. I knew he was there at Oscar's Leap, and I felt as if he
called my soul out of my body and my body suffered. I tried to
tell myself that there was to-morrow. I tried to tell myself how
foolish I am to be so broken in two that I must needs go and
keep my word with this man that I've seen only twice in my life;
but though I have only seen him twice, I've known him always, as
I said before. There's no friend as dear and close as he in all
the world. Oh, beautiful day that I can never have! The things
that we would have said to each other to-night, we will say them
another time, but not in the same way. This day is lost to me
and I can never have it back again."
She tells this of the time when next she saw him:--
"It seemed to me as though he leaped at me, there was such
gladness in his face, although any one across the street would
have said he just walked. He said, 'Oh, Ellen, Ellen!' as he did
before; and then, 'I've been waiting ever since I saw you'; and
then his face turned stern, and he said, 'Ellen, why didn't you
come? Are you like other women; while I've been away did that
candid, little girl learn to hide herself and learn to be false
to her word?' I thought I should cry; tears came to my eyes; it
seemed so cruel that at the very first I should fail him this
way, and he saw how I felt and said to me, 'Oh! don't, don't,
dear.' And for a little while we walked on in silence. 'Where
were you, Ellen?' he asked me; and he stood still in the path
and said: 'Ellen, are you a coward? What chained you there?
Didn't you hear me calling to you from the mountain? Couldn't
you get up and walk out of the room? If you had gone and hadn't
come back, what would have happened?' And then he looked at me
in a way I shall never forget, and what he said I shall remember
all my days, for so I am going to live. 'Ellen,' he said, 'you
and I in our friendship are not to be tied down by rules.
Remember, courage opens all doors. Ellen, I threw away many
things to clear the road that led to you. Let us keep on that
way, Ellen; put your hand in mine and promise. We'll walk to
each other straight out of the open door, without fear, won't
we?' When I got home, I am so foolish and I am so weak and merit
his friendship so little, that I cried. I don't now understand
why it was that I stayed this afternoon."
In this brave and heady fashion Roger began his wooing of Ellen. Just
as his whole pose, forward swinging head and relaxed body, gave one
the impression of one ready to make a forward rush at any moment and
seize what it wanted, so was the action of his spirit. It was like the
wine of life to my Ellen. They saw the sunset on the mountain together
every night that they could, and he came down the pasture that led
down from the hill, through the meadow, to the brook back of the
Paynes' house. About these things I knew, for Ellen needed a
confidante. Love overflowed her, and this was no secret, little love
which she carried shyly, a secret lamp by which to light her way,
which she hid as soon as any one appeared; but this was a flaming
thing, as hard to hide as a comet. It swept her up and out and beyond
herself into that over-heaven that only the pure in heart can feel
when they are in love.
It was only a very short time when she stopped deluding herself with
any terms like "her dear friend"; for one of Roger's great strengths,
then and always,--and I think to this day,--was knowing exactly what
he wanted, and taking the shortest way to it, and to get his desire he
was splendid and ruthless, and beware to any one who stood in his way.
It was about now that she began the habit of writing what she called
"Never Sent Letters"; for could she have been with him all the hours
of the day, the day would yet not have been long enough for her, and
they saw one another what seemed to them only now and then. She writes
to him at this time:--
"What did I do with my time before I met you? The days that I've
spent before you came have no meaning now to me, and now that I
am away from you the only preparation is for you. Everything
that I see, everything that I think, all my thoughts, I save
them up and give them to you, tiny flowers from the country of
my heart. I wonder how it is that you can love me ever so
little, who have so little to give to you who have so much, and
the only bitterness that I know is that what I have to give you
is so worthless. You say that you love the joy of life in me. I
wish I could make all the joy I feel shine out like a flame. I
wish that I could distill all the love I have for you into one
cup and then give it to you that you could drink, for entirely
and utterly I am yours and have been yours always and forever,
and so shall always be until I am changed over into some one
else. When I'm with you I don't dare tell you these things for
fear that I should drown you in myself. Take my life and do what
you like with it, for without you it is a thing valueless to
me."
In this way was Ellen's touching prayer answered--that when she loved
any one she wished only to give.
For the time being everything else was blotted out for her; she had
this measureless, sky-wide joy of giving herself and all day long, and
all the time her spirit went out toward him in incense. Her days were
lost in contemplation of the wonder which had happened.
"From the moment I leave him, I walk toward him," she wrote--and in
the interim between she went on apparently with life as before, and
this woke in her a still wonder.
"It is so very strange to be doing the same things that I was
before, but all the work I do for my mother, every book I read,
every word I speak has a meaning that it hadn't. It is as though
my ear were at the heart of Life and I heard Life beat."
CHAPTER XIV
I saw a good deal of her and so did Alec. Alec at this time was
preparing to work his way through college. Even Roger, who treated the
village youth with the kindly tolerance of a splendid young prince,
treated Alec as an equal. Alec, of course, gave him the whole-hearted
admiration that generous lad does a man.
He guessed Alec's infatuation for Ellen, for Roger was one of those
experienced gentlemen who feel far off any emotional flurry and he had
paired all of us before he had been in town ten days, and that without
having appeared to observe us. So much was he the over-masculine that
nothing of this kind could come near him without his senses
registering it. He could mention John Seymore's name in a way to make
me blush and make me wish to stamp my foot on the ground with outraged
modesty. And as for Edward Graham, it was on his account that Ellen
first learned the terrible anguish that love may bring with it, and
she wrote:--
"I have learned how foolish I am and how weak. We were both at
Oscar's Leap looking down into the river. 'I walked up and down
the earth, Ellen,' he said, 'looking for you, and as I looked
from one person to another I said, "No, that's not Ellen," and
then I didn't know your name. I feel that it's strange of me
that I should not have guessed it.' 'Didn't you ever care,' I
asked him, 'for any one for a moment?' 'No,' he said, 'how could
I? Once in a while I saw some one that looked a little like you
and there I waited longer.' 'But people must have cared for
you,' I said. 'Not really; some people make a game of things
like that, Ellen,' he said. And already I felt deeply ashamed,
that though I am so much younger I should have been so foolish
as to think I cared once. 'And you, Ellen; you waited the same
way for me, didn't you? The people who cared for you, you knew
weren't me.'--And then I told him about Edward. He didn't speak
for a long time, and then he said: 'Isn't there anywhere on the
earth a woman so young and so sheltered that she doesn't pass
from one hand to another and snatch at love, and give a piece of
herself here and a piece of herself there? But, Ellen, I thought
you were different'; and the deep and bitter shame that rushed
over me then I don't think I shall ever forget. He asked me a
great many questions, and when he found that I was so little
when it all happened he forgave me. It seems wonderful to me
that he should have waited."
It seems wonderful to me, as I read this little, pitiful account, that
Ellen with her straight, clear mind should have let herself be so
bemused as to feel that something was wrong which her own inner sense
had told her was not wrong, honest as she had always been with
herself. She lived for the first time by another person's standard for
her. She had given him that most precious thing of all, her inner
judgment of herself. It seems still more wonderful to me that Roger
should have told her such a story, for he had had love-affairs
a-plenty; but I think he was utterly honest in this, and in his
honesty lay his danger and his charm. New emotions, as they came to
him, came with so overwhelming a force that they wiped out not only
the old love, but the memory of it, and when he had fallen in love
with the wild sweetness of Ellen the other experiences in his life
seemed to him only an unimportant outburst of passion. Yet for her he
had the Turk's jealousy: he wished not only for the utter virginity of
the body, but also for the virginity of the spirit to such a point
that he had to make-believe that there had been no Edward in her life
at all before he could "forgive."
They had both imagined that they could keep their love a secret for a
while until Roger should have done a certain amount of work.
"I want my parents to love the idea of Ellen from the first," he told
me, "and I've been so at cross-purposes with them that I want to get
back into their good graces a little before I tell them." And, indeed,
for Roger to have rushed away to a tardy acquiescence of his father's
will and to reappear immediately with a bride, we understood would
strain the patience of an irascible parent. Just how much we learned
from Miss Sarah, whom we heard saying:--
"The boy really seems to have turned over a definite new leaf. Lucia
writes that she has learned that Roger has not even once written to
that woman, whose entanglement with Roger worried them all so. She's
been ill ever since he left, and it serves her right, too. A married
woman of her age should have had better sense than to have let herself
be carried away by an attractive youngster. Young rascal!--to go off
on such a tangent when he was apparently just on the brink of making
an ideal marriage. He and Emmeline Glover, you know, had been
sweethearts for a long time when he got into this scrape."
In such a way were Ellen and I enabled to piece out Roger's life, and
it apparently did not occur to her to make any comparison between
herself and Roger; for in very truth the desire he had for her had
swept from him all his former life until it seemed so paltry and
meaningless that it was no desire of concealment that had led him to
speak so lightly of both of these women. They had walked across his
conversation with Ellen. Ellen had heard Roger's side of these
stories.
"This married woman of whom they speak," she explained to me, "was a
good friend of his and very much older than himself, but people are so
evil-minded in this world. As for Emmeline Glover, he called her a
sweet, little, silver-gray cloud, and another time, a graceful
shadow."
We realized, however, that some time should elapse before Roger should
tell his parents of his new love, or they would think it a weak
passing interest and fail to treat it seriously.
When his interest in a person flagged, he lacked the coxcombry that
makes a man afraid that his lack of interest has broken a woman's
heart. Quite the contrary, he was apt to despise them for having shown
affection for so light a cause. In the world of the affections he
related nothing that had happened to him before to anything which was
happening; each experience was fresh to him, a rising tide that had no
memory of any other tide before.
They might have gone on with their indiscreet friendship indefinitely,
but they counted without themselves. They were caught up, both of
them, in the fierce moving stream that sweeps and swings people out of
the orbit that they have planned. It was impossible to both their
natures, under the stress of what they were feeling, to wish to be
guarded. The clandestine element in their friendship, slight though it
was,--for Ellen's little mother was taken into the secret, how could
she leave her out; she needed to spill some of her happiness over on
every one who came near her,--became very irksome.
Roger told me that he longed to go down Main Street shouting: "I love
Ellen and am going to marry her; I love Ellen." And he would say with
his naughty, little-boy look: "Whenever I hear Aunt Sarah"--for with
what Miss Sarah called his usual impudence, Roger called her "Aunt
Sarah" from the beginning--"talking about what a good boy I am and
'high time, too'"--and here he mimicked Miss Sarah's manner--"I want
to say to her: 'Don't you know, you blind old fossil, that I'm here
because of Ellen--Ellen--Ellen--Ellen, the gentle, that you presume to
correct; Ellen, the joyful; Ellen, the glad of heart?' One of the
strangest things in life to me is the impudence of Age, that dares to
presume to touch so lovely a thing as Youth, and especially the youth
of my Ellen. I can't stand it much longer, Roberta. Think of my
knowing and submitting to my father's standing between Ellen and me.
He's a wise old man, but he's forgotten things more useful than any
that he knows, and I know them!"
And, indeed, he seemed the incarnation of the splendid and arrogant
Knowledge of Youth, and my heart beat that so splendid a youth should
be Ellen's; they seemed then God-appointed for each other.
Roger's direct mind found a way out of the difficulty. They were at
their favorite meeting-place, up above Oscar's Leap, and looking out
at the river which had turned to flame in the sunset light. Ellen
tells about it:--
"'Oh, Ellen!' he said, 'why can't you put your hand in mine and
walk out into the sunset with me? I often wonder why, when
people love each other as we do, why they let anything stand in
their way.' And then he said: 'Ellen, why shouldn't we--why
shouldn't we walk out together, just you and me to-night?' And I
said, 'Very well.' 'Come, then,' said he; and he held out his
hand, and if I had put my hand in his he would have come with
me, but I thought then he was joking. He said, 'Ellen, I'm not
joking; I mean it. Would I joke of such a thing? Why should we
waste one moment of what is so beautiful? You belong to me,
Ellen, don't you?' And then he put his arms around me and kissed
me so that I could hardly breathe, and said, 'Ellen, do you
belong to me?' I could only hide my head on his shoulder and
whisper to him, 'Yes'; and he said to me, 'Will you come with
me, then, bad girl?' And I said, 'How can I?' 'Think about it,
Ellen,' he said; 'think about it. I'll give you this week to
think of it in, and at the end of the week it's one thing or the
other. You come with me and be married or I'll tell them all. Am
I one to tiptoe around through life, hiding because a
cross-grained old man who happens to be my father will oppose at
first something he will in the end be glad of?' He was such a
bad little boy as he said this that I laughed, though he
shouldn't speak of his father this way, I am sure, even though
it is his father's fault. It is a terrible thing when any one as
sweet and as full of the desire to love people as Roger
shouldn't have been understood by his parents at home. His
mother is very sweet, but she has never known how to get at him.
All the mutinous things in Roger, and all the times when he
wasn't adjusted to life, should have been loved away and
understood away. He said to me: 'I've been good only since I
have known you, Ellen, because no one has loved me before.'
People have loved me all my life, and Roger, who is so much
fuller and better than I, has not had my chance."
Here we have the tragedy that all mothers must face. Their sons, that
they have brought up so tenderly and whom they have anguished over,
bring all their mistakes to the beloved to be wept over. If you have
worn a callous place in his spirit, the soft hand of his sweetheart
will find it and she will grieve over it.
All girls are sure of two things: that they understand their men
better than their very mothers do, and that they love them better as
well; and every woman in the world, who is harrowing her soul over her
little son that she is bringing up, may be sure that somewhere else in
the world there is growing up a girl who is later on going to find any
hardness or unkindness that she has left in his spirit. When she had
known him six weeks, Ellen could have brought up Roger better than he
had been. It was her first excuse for his willful idea. At first she
didn't take him seriously, but opposition was the food on which his
will fed. His father said of him that there was almost nothing one
couldn't oppose him into. He thought out all the practical details.
They could drive to the home of a minister he knew and be married at
once and come back after two weeks.
"Oh! why," Ellen wailed,--"why should we make them all unhappy when
all you have to do is to work a month or two more?"
"Yes, and then a long engagement, and then a making of my way; I in
Boston, Ellen, and you here." It was a moment of terrible conflict
for her. She wrote one of the letters to Roger she didn't mean to
send:--
"Oh, my dear! I told you this afternoon and I want to tell you
again in this letter how sweet this little hour is to me. It
seems to be the sunniest place in all of life. The world seems
to me to stretch ahead wonderful and splendid, and the great
storms of Heaven whirling through the sky, and the lightning and
the clouds, and I can hear in my ears the roar of cities and the
big tumult of seas, and here it is so sweet. Why hurry away from
it? Here it is so safe. The days of one's life when one is a
girl and loves one's man are so few. Oh, don't hurry me away.
Here is sunlight, and out there where you want to go it seems to
me darkness. I'm a little girl, afraid of the setting sun. I was
afraid of it and yet I couldn't help looking at it in its awful
splendor. I couldn't take my eyes off from it, as little by
little it dropped down behind the mountain, so wonderful and so
inexorable. My heart chokes the same way when I think of running
off in the night with you. Let's stay here with our hands in
each other's and then quietly go out into life together without
wrenching ourselves away from so many ties and without rending
everything that links us to this life that we now live. Every
bit of me, [she writes,] all my soul, all my heart and my mind,
and all my body wants to go with him as he says, but oh! the
needless hurt to them. When I said, 'Oh! how could we take our
happiness at some one else's hurt?' he said, 'Listen, Ellen; the
hurt is only temporary--just for a moment. Supposing we went
to-morrow night and then we came back after two weeks married.
My father, of course, will like you by and by--he just doesn't
want any one for me now; he wants me to go on working and I am
working like a giant, and then we would be free to go where we
want.' Oh, it would be so easy! Nights I can't sleep, and when I
do I am always deciding and deciding over and over again. When I
tell him to remember the talk that it will mean, he says to me:
'Are you afraid?' I tell him, 'No, not for myself; but my mother
will be left behind and there will be Mr. Sylvester and my aunt
all to bear talk, so we shall be happy.'"
It seemed as if it was an unequal battle, all the forces of love, and
Ellen's own nature even, waging a conflict with her little, soft
heart. She grew pale under the strain. I noticed it, but I didn't know
the cause, for here was something that naturally she didn't tell me,
being allied with the forces of order as I was. She would have given
him anything that she had to give, from her life on, but she could not
bear to deal him out some one else's happiness with a careless hand.
For his lack of understanding in this she writes:--
"He's never known what it is to have a home or people that you
really love about you, or to be part of things."
He was clever in his arguments. Ellen writes:--
"He fairly argued my soul from my body. He said to me, 'Ellen,
it is not as though they didn't want us to marry. It's just
better for us to go together right away. Why should we waste a
blessed year of our lives?' 'How could I run the risk of being
the cause of serious trouble between you and your father and
mother?' I said. 'You'll have to leave those things for me to
judge,' he answered. 'How could I interfere with your work?' He
grew almost angry at me. Then he threw his arms around me in
that way he has, as though he would fairly crush my life from
me, and he said: 'Ellen, Ellen, for my sake do it. I am not
stable; I'm weak, and weak with violence. In you I found all the
things that I haven't, all the sweet and all the true things in
life, the things that I've been just for a minute at a time,
when I've been a good little boy. You don't know me, Ellen.
You've only seen the me that you made, but you can keep that if
you want to. Don't play with it, Ellen. It's the most important
thing in life for me to keep the me that you call out. I didn't
know I could be so happy in a quiet place. I've always asked of
life more and more, more life all the time and life has meant
action, adventure, and danger, and all at once I find in you
more life than anywhere else, and I don't want anything but you.
Ellen, how can you continue this way to me for an idea, a
foolish, bad idea, a taught idea? That's where you're not true,
Ellen. If you were true, you would just put your hand in mine
and walk away.' 'If there was no one in the world but you, I
would put my hand in yours and do whatever you told me, but I'm
not just I alone,' I told him. 'Well, I am just I, just I, and
frankly in need of you--and in need of you right away. Ellen,
this conflict with you is destroying me. By to-morrow night you
must have decided.' I feel as though I had been shaken by a
great wind. When I hear him crying to me, it seems as though he
were crying for the safety of his soul; and yet there must be
something hard in me, because I know that being without me for a
few months more or less will not destroy a hard thing like
Roger, and all the time my foolish and weak heart likes to
pretend that it believes that this is so. But yet, how can I get
the strength to tell him to-morrow night that I won't do what he
wants me to? Oh! it is torture unspeakable to be ungenerous in
any way to the one whom one loves. I can't do it. I've got to
go, not because I believe down deep in me any argument that he
has given me,--I was strong as those against it,--but just
because he wants me to, because I can't help giving him whatever
it is he asks."
Thus goes the age-old cry. She writes to him:--
"Oh! my dear, why will you make me make you such a sad gift? Oh!
my dearly beloved, must I give to you the peace of mind, even
for a little while, of all those whom I have loved in the world;
and yet, I know myself that when I give you this that I shall be
glad of it. Now that I have decided, my heart sings aloud.
Somehow all that they will suffer seems small to me and
unimportant beside this great, sweeping gladness that I feel....
I feel the way that you feel, nothing matters except that we
should be together. Every day that we spend apart is a day
wasted--but I can't think of the rest of it. It isn't so
hard--it isn't so difficult, after all. We will come back and
everything will be all right, although I feel when I say this as
if it wasn't I, and that what carried me along was the black
current of a river on which I was floating, and that I had been
floating on it for always, only thinking before that I could
direct my poor, little boat. Now I know that it is something
quite outside myself that's swinging me on with the strength of
this fast-rushing stream."
CHAPTER XV
I remember that day very well. Ellen spent the day with me and with
Alec, and we all three lay under the trees together and then Ellen
went on a little tour of inspection. What she was doing really was
saying "Good-bye" to the place that she knew and to us. Her eyes were
bright and shining; I suppose she was thinking, "To-morrow I shall be
where?--to-morrow I shall be who?--and these dear people who love me,
what will they think? Not that I care!" She was so sweet to Alec that
her loveliness melted his poor heart still further.
So sweet she was that, with one of those ironies of fate that are
often more cruel than tragedy, Alec took this time to tell Ellen about
the work he had decided to do. I can see him as he stood under the
apple trees, the sun shining on his mane of hair, the brightness of
his eager eyes contrasting with his self-consciousness, while we two
girls stood there, each absorbed in her own affairs.
"I've looked all around life to see what I could do best--and I guess
I know more about boys than anything else. I sort of know how they
feel inside all the time. I don't forget. So I'm going to teach 'em.
Try and teach 'em the things they want to know most and that they
knock their shins so trying to find the way to. They have a hard time.
I had just one teacher--and he led me out of darkness; and that's what
I'm going to do. It's a business, you know, that means trying to
understand all the time. It's a present to you, Ellen," he added with
his crooked, whimsical smile.
He was so anxious that we should see what he meant, and we were so
polite and innerly so blank. Teaching grubby little boys seemed to us
an uninspiring profession for a splendid youth like Alec. We couldn't
know how many years he had looked ahead. Alec and his gift to Ellen
seem to typify man and woman. Man, who comes with his bright visions
of the future, bestows the gift of his high dreams on girls who see
nothing in them--and are polite. But Ellen was too heart-rendingly
sweet that afternoon to seem anything but understanding. She was
heart-breakingly gay.
After a while we went in together to Mrs. Payne's house. She and Mr.
Sylvester were standing in the drawing-room with their hands clasped,
and Mr. Sylvester spoke and said, "We may as well tell these dear
children first"; and Ellen's little mother said, as shyly as a girl,
"Mr. Sylvester and I have found very suddenly that we have always
loved each other."
He rejoined with his deep simplicity of manner, "Yes, quite suddenly
we found out that we've been to one another as the air we breathe, and
as the water we drink, and as the sun that shines."
"And so, of course," said the little mother of Ellen, "we will be
married."
She stood there violet-eyed, in her neat, little black dress, as
slender as a girl, more girlish in her looks than many of us for all
her forty years. I don't think that any of the three of us had
realized that people as old as Mr. Sylvester and Mrs. Payne could live
in the land of romance and could fall in love. Like most young people
in their early twenties, we imagined that this great gift of mankind
was for us alone and that it never lightened up the hearts of those
who had already lived and loved; but as these two stood, hand in hand,
there rushed over all of us the feeling that they were just great
children. The look of wonder was in their eyes; they had been living
for so long close to the land of enchantment, and just now had stepped
over its borders into its realization.
"We see no reason for delaying our marriage long. We waited long
enough; we've been close friends for eight years; and you, little
Ellen,"--he spoke as though speaking to a little child,--"you have
been already like a daughter to me and like a little mother to my
children."
"You'll help me now, Ellen, won't you?" pleaded her little mother; and
it was as though they had changed places and Ellen were the older. But
Ellen had them folded in her arms, kissing first one and then the
other, and we all followed suit; and for once the stern conventions of
New England reserve, which held in its iron grip such sweet and
simple spirits as Mrs. Payne and Mr. Sylvester, was broken through.
Now Ellen had a shining face, now everything had all been settled for
her by Life. She could not possibly go away and leave her mother at
such a moment, nor, of course, would Roger ask her this, and for a
moment the light that swept over the country of her heart was dimmed
by the quiet radiance of these two middle-aged people. Glad-footed she
started off to her trysting-place, and what happened there was as
though the sun had been eclipsed in mid-heaven, as though the solid
earth had shaken under her feet. She ran to Roger with this precious
tale of her mother's happiness in her hands, sure that he would
understand. She writes, almost with an unbelief in the fact that she
had herself heard and witnessed:--
"He wanted me to go with him just the same! He came forward to
me in that way that always makes me think of leaping flame and
said: 'You've decided to go, haven't you, Ellen?' And when I
told him, he said, 'That makes it simpler, doesn't it? They'll
be so occupied with themselves that they won't care what you
do. Hooray!' And he laughed like a little boy. I said, 'You
don't understand; now I can't go; I can't darken her happiness;
my mother needs me'; and he stood before me, looking at me with
eyes that burned with anger of his desire. 'Ellen,' he said,
'decide now, the long engagement with its perils for you and for
me; my good or their good; our happiness against a few stitches
put in your mother's clothes.' I said, 'I can't go.' He drew me
to him and said, 'Ellen, are you coming? You must come'; and I
felt as if my soul was shuddering out of my body, as if he tore
me in two, and part of me must go, and I don't know what there
was in my soul stronger than myself, because all of me never
wanted to do anything more than to do his will, which was my
will, too; but I had to say, 'I can't do it.' I know now that
there are a thousand things that make up this; Mr. Sylvester
being a minister, it would hurt him to have his daughter--oh!
what a sweet word--run away. All these things, all the tangled
and manifold ways in which my life is woven into those beloved
of me, and now a thousandfold more tightly woven than before
into the life of this little place, all held me back where the
inner, beating heart of me cried aloud to go. He stood there
pleading, and he raged with anger; his words beat me down,
shivering, like a heavy storm of wind and rain. The love of him
drew me toward him, as flowers lift up their heads to the sun,
but something deep down kept saying, 'No, I can't go. No, I
can't go.' 'Now, I know,' said he, 'at last how little your love
is worth'; and then he pulled me to him and kissed me roughly,
and again and again, and then almost threw me from him.
'Good-bye, Ellen,' he said; and I cried, 'Where are you going?'
'Oh, not far,' he said; but I felt as if his spirit had gone to
the end of the world, and he strode without me down the road. I
am writing like one in a dream, because I can't see and don't
know what's going to happen to us, and I want to run out into
the night and run to his house and cry under his window that
I'll go whenever he says, but then I know, if I did that, that
at the last moment I would decide I couldn't go."
CHAPTER XVI
While Ellen was going through these hours of anguish her mother and
Mr. Sylvester sat in my grandmother's kitchen, a pair of helpless,
middle-aged children, discussing how they would break the news to Miss
Sarah Grant. They didn't need to explain why Miss Grant would
disapprove of their marriage; she would disapprove of it just as all
the town would, for it was evident that if Mr. Sylvester was going to
marry again it was his duty to himself and to his children to marry a
"capable woman," and you might as well ask a moon-ray or a soft breeze
in the trees to be capable as Ellen's little mother.
"I have suggested," said Mr. Sylvester, "that we let Miss Sarah learn
of it as we shall the rest of the town. A simple and efficacious way
has occurred to me, Mrs. Hathaway, of informing all our friends,--I
shall merely tell Mrs. Snow and Miss Nellie Lee and then nature will
do the rest." He was quite grave and simple-hearted as he said this,
but I know that Alec and I did not dare to meet one another's eyes,
for the good man had mentioned not only two of the most talkative
ladies in town, but also two who had, according to gossip, felt
themselves very capable of taking care of an incapable but godly man.
Mrs. Payne, however, insisted that Mr. Sylvester should himself tell
her sister of their engagement.
"My dear," said Mr. Sylvester, "I trust I am a soldier of the Lord,
but I confess to a feebleness in the knees when it comes to
confronting Miss Sarah, for both of us have been a serious anxiety to
her even in an unmarried state, and what shall we be now when my
housekeeper has gone?"
"And, indeed, my dear, how do you suppose," inquired my grandmother
whose spiritual attitude had been one whose hands and eyes were both
raised to Heaven,--"how do you suppose you are going to take care of
the children?"
Ellen's little mother considered a moment.
"I shall love them," she replied after an interval.
Mind you, this statement was one of sheer anarchy in an age when
discipline was the keynote with children and the superstition still
flourished that one could not properly bring up a child without the
rod.
"Yes," said my grandmother, "I suppose you will love the holes out of
their clothes and love their gingham aprons into being, won't you?"
"I can depend upon Matilda a good deal," considered Mrs. Payne; "but
we have scarcely had time, dear Mrs. Hathaway, to think of the
material side of the question, and the children adore Ellen."
"And so, all together," rejoined Mr. Sylvester, "we shall get along
very well, but our only real trouble is the pain of breaking the news
to Miss Sarah."
"Well," said my grandmother, with brisk sarcasm, "if that's all that's
troubling you, I'll tell her myself. I'll go to her and tell her that
there's going to be a family consisting of two grown people, one grown
girl, and three helpless little children, none of whom realizes that
meals have to be got or housework done."
"Or, indeed," rejoined Mr. Sylvester, "where no one is occupied in
anything but considering the lilies, how they grow."
Upon this the two smiled at each other, for they both had the wisdom
of the simple in their spirits. However, it was apparent to any one
what a helpless ménage this would be with the strong hand of Mrs.
Gillig, the housekeeper, removed from it.
The news of the marriage ran through the town the way fire spreads;
from house to house it galloped, then it would seem to skip a space
and then mysteriously break forth afresh, as though by spontaneous
combustion, and their interested chatter hid Ellen from herself a
little. She wrote:--
"All day I have been receiving calls and answering questions. A
certain sort of vague envy has mingled itself with a more
definite commiseration and there has been a great deal of
affection mingled with everything. They don't know. They all
talk as though my little mother were a baby, and so she is.
She's a child of light. She has not grown up and she hasn't
made me grow up, and I hope I shall never have to, and I want to
say to all the people, 'Oh, you blind person, you blind person,'
when they speak in this half-patronizing tone of her. I want to
say: 'Don't you know how much more she has than you? My mother
is a happy person to live with; we are poor and our clothes are
patched,--and sometimes they aren't even patched,--and I suppose
she's a poor manager, but I am so glad she is because, when we
do clean, it's because we want to and not to fight it day and
night.' All through this day that's been so busy, when people
have knocked at our door on one pretext or another, I've been
waiting. All day Roger hasn't been to see me; it doesn't seem
possible that he can be angry at me or stay away from me like
this; it doesn't seem possible that he shouldn't understand me.
I'm going up to-night to Oscar's Leap. It seemed to me that all
the world had his voice to-day. Whenever I heard people talk far
off, it seemed to me that I heard Roger; every time some one
knocked on the door my heart leaped and I thought: 'He's coming
at last.' Twice I walked uptown looking for him, and once there
was a real errand,--not a make-believe one like when I was a
little girl and wanted to do something that took me up to Aunt
Sarah's; Aunt Sarah herself sent me, and how my ears were
strained for the sound of his voice, and there was no sound at
all in all the house. Then I did a thing that was very bold. I
sat down at the piano and opened it and played and began to
sing, hoping he would hear me, while I waited for the sewing for
which Aunt Sarah had sent me. Then I heard footsteps on the
stair and I knew that they weren't Roger's, but yet it seemed to
me they must be--so much I wanted to see him that the very
desire of my heart must call him to me--but no. I wonder what
has happened; I wonder if he's angry; I wonder if he's hurt. I
couldn't even ask Martha a word about him; I had to keep my
mouth closed. It is partly my fault that we have to skulk in
this way. It seems a curious thing that Martha should know if
Roger was in the house somewhere. But surely he couldn't have
been in the house or he would have come down when he heard me
sing. Why should I feel ashamed at having tried to make him
hear me? If I can go and call Alec from outside his house, why
is it more wrong for me to go and call for the one whom I shall
love all my days, and yet somehow I feel that I shouldn't. There
is some deep instinct in me that makes me know I was wrong."
I suppose it was because of Ellen's absorption in Roger that she
failed to write an aspect of these days that stand out to me as one of
the charming memories of my girlhood, for it so sums up our New
England society of that day. My grandmother had performed the kind
office of announcing the betrothal to Miss Sarah, and this good
woman's reply was characteristic.
"Well," said she, "trust Emily to get into mischief when Ellen gives
us a moment's pause, and what irritates me the most, Sophia, is that I
am not even allowed my just moment of anger. If I sulk, then there
will be talk, to be sure, so I've got to go out and countenance this
marriage of those 'babes of grace' as though it had been my fondest
hope. I, forsooth, have got to go around and smile until my jaws are
fairly dislocated to prevent the magpie chattering that there'll be;
but before my anger cools I'm going down to give Emily a piece of my
mind. When you consider her refusing a decent, advantageous marriage,
and then becoming sentimental at her time of life, it's enough to make
one's blood boil."
Miss Sarah eased her mind by making remarks like this to her sister
and then said she:--
"Sophia Hathaway and I are going to bring our sewing and spend the
afternoon, because you'll see that half the town will be here to find
out what's happened."
So there we were, my grandmother and I, Mrs. Payne, Ellen, and Aunt
Sarah--a solid phalanx.
"We'll answer," Miss Sarah announced, "no questions except those asked
us."
Deacon Archibald and his wife were the first to call. The deacon came
in cheerily, rubbing his hands.
"It was such a fine day," said Mrs. Archibald, "that we thought we'd
repay the many visits that we owe."
"Yes, we are always so remiss in that," chirped Deacon Archibald.
"Won't you be seated? Take this more comfortable chair," said little
Mrs. Payne.
"The weather's been fine lately," remarked the deacon.
"A fine summer, indeed, for the crops," agreed Miss Sarah; "the
tobacco's doing splendidly in the valley."
There came another rap on the door and Mrs. Snow was admitted.
"I thought I'd run in just a moment to see if you had that mantle
pattern," she said.
Mrs. Butler, stiff with rheumatism, came next. A knock was heard at
the back door and I heard her heavy breathing and her "Well, Ellen, I
just ran over to return your mother's hoe that Alec left at my house
when he hoed my potatoes for me, but why he can't take back the tools
himself I can't see. Has your mother got company; invited company, I
mean?--because, Land Sakes! I can _hear_ she's got _company_. I'm not
deaf."
The question that they all longed to ask lay heavy in the air. It was
good and _bona-fide_ gossip that they had heard as coming direct from
Mr. Sylvester himself, but so afraid is New England of making a
mistake and of committing itself, that two other ladies had dropped in
on an errand of one sort or another, or for calls, before Miss Sarah
took advantage of a little pause in the conversation to remark:--
"I suppose every one of you here has come to find out if my sister is
to marry Mr. Sylvester."
There was a little, fluttering chorus of dissent.
"Nonsense," said Miss Sarah, "I know what you wish to ask and what a
bushel more will come to ask before the evening is over, and that's
why I'm staying here; and tell every one that you meet that we shall
be happy to tell them ourselves that such, indeed, is the happy fact."
Miss Sarah spoke with a large and grim geniality, for she always had
the air of one who says, "Mankind, I am about to chastise you for your
weakness, but I realize that I am human as well as you."
Meantime my poor Ellen had heard in each one of these knocks on the
door Roger's knock, and so she continued to hear the next day. She
wrote:--
"He's gone away, and I have only learned about it by chance.
Just by chance I heard Aunt Sarah saying: 'As if it wasn't
excitement enough to have this happen yesterday, that young
scallawag gets up and leaves me at a moment's notice.' Two of
his friends came through, it seems, and Roger left with them. He
left without sending word or sending me any message. He says
he's gone for a day or two only. Aunt Sarah says she would not
be surprised if he never came back, but that can't happen. How
could it happen? Did he think that I had failed him so that he
doesn't want me any more, or that I lacked so in courage and in
love of him?... Another day has gone and no word from him. I
don't think I've ever felt so alone in all my life and so cut
off from all human help. I know it is wicked of me, but mother's
happiness hurts me. I want her to be happy, but oh! it hurts me
to watch it. I wish I could go off by myself somewhere, and yet
I know that there I will be worse than I am now, with a thousand
small things to do to somehow fill up the days. Something must
have happened to him. I watch myself like some other person for
fear I shall seem sad for a moment, for if I do it will look as
though I am not pleased about my mother. Oh! I hope that I won't
hurt their joy in any way. I wonder how women live who have to
wait long for news of those they love. I seem to move around in
the world, but I really do nothing but wait. Each time I see my
aunt I think that she will have news of him; I'm grateful to her
now if she only tells me he hasn't come. When I am asleep, I'm
still listening and waiting for him. Something must have
happened to him, because he must want to see me as I do him. It
seems to me that no one could hurt any one they loved as much as
this and be alive."
Here it was for the first time that Ellen tasted that bitter pain of
women, waiting. It sometimes seems to me that this is an anguish in
which we live and of which men know nothing. During the course of a
long life every woman passes so many hours of still agony when she
must fold her hands and smile and wait. We cannot go out seeking the
beloved, but must sit and wait until he comes. Like Ellen, when you
have had a misunderstanding it is not yours to run generously forward;
you can't clap your hat on your head and say, "Here, I'll make an end
to this; I'll go and find her." No, you must sit waiting for the sound
of his footsteps coming toward you; wait until your whole soul is
tense; wait until each sound is part of this hope deferred. All women
know this pain of waiting; and when our time of waiting for a
sweetheart is over, the sons we love go out into the world, and again
we can do nothing but sit still and wait for news of the travelers,
wait for the little, scant messages of love which their careless hands
pen to us in some casual moment. The long days pass and the letters
don't come, and still we wait. We sit and wait for our children to be
born, through the long months, with the black certainty of the birth
that may be death staring us in the face.
Some women get used to waiting. I think that those who do have closed
the doors of their hearts to the keener range of feeling, having
suffered so much that they say to themselves, "Here, I'll suffer no
longer." There are yet others who pass through the pain of waiting,
going by this thorny, bleeding, silent road of doubt and pain to a
higher acquiescence. It is a long way there, and the heart of us must
weep much in silence before we can attain this glorified peace. I have
known the spirits of women to snap like the overstrained strings of a
harp, as they waited with smiles upon their lips.
I am sorry sometimes for all women, and most of all for the impatient,
tender, and flaming spirits of young girls who meet this pain for the
first time.
It is because we have all suffered in this way that the most generous
among us run so eagerly to meet those whom they love. Having tasted
this pain, we wish forevermore to spare others anything like it. The
more shallow-hearted and, perhaps, wiser women, and those who are not
children of light, having tasted it, use the anguish of suspense as a
weapon in the everlasting warfare between man and woman. But there is
hardly a woman grown who could not echo the cry of Ellen when she
wrote:--
"I do not dare to go out of the house for fear I might miss some
word of him, and yet how can I stay in the house knowing my own
thoughts? I wish to fill the gray horror of these empty hours
with anything that the wayside will bring me; I want to go out
and play with the children; I want to find Alec and walk with
him. I try to remember just one thing--that some time to-day or
to-morrow, or the next day, I shall hear something. _This can't
go on forever; there has to come an end._"
CHAPTER XVII
I, with my eyes fastened on the romance of Mrs. Payne and Mr.
Sylvester, had noticed nothing; the explanation that Roger had gone
off for a few days with friends was enough for me; but it was Alec,
with a keener vision, who had seen something wrong.
"What ails Ellen?" he had asked me.
"Why--what should?" I asked.
"Roberta," said Alec, "is Ellen in love with Roger?"
"How should I know?" said I.
Alec looked down, kicking the dust before him with the gesture of a
little boy.
"It would be natural if they cared for each other," he continued. Then
he suddenly flung out his hand and said, "If it's so, he won't ever
make her happy."
"Why, Alec, what do you mean?" I said.
"He's only thinking about himself; he's interested only in Roger
Byington," Alec declared with vehemence.
He filled these next days as full of himself as he could; making
Ellen laugh at his fantastic goings-on as he pretended to be the
bulletin which announced how far the gossip had reached. With his
tender second sight he tried to hide Ellen from herself or whatever it
was that was troubling her.
As Ellen said, the trouble couldn't last forever, and the end came
unexpectedly. While we were sitting in the orchard I saw Ellen's hand
go to her heart and her face change color; she sat still a lovely,
quivering thing, with all the soul of her running out to meet Roger,
and he advanced through the sweet clover, swishing at it with a little
cherry wand that he had cut when walking. He had gone away a fairy
prince--his only fault had been loving Ellen too much--and he came
back a naughty little boy. Even I noticed the change in him. There was
an arrogant, willful tilt to his head which belied the lightness of
his disarming manner, and one which said: "First I'll try to coax you
into good humor, but beware of my stubbornness if you find fault with
me too far." He was the male that will not admit that he has faults.
"Be thankful that I'm back at all," was what his bearing implied; "and
we'll ignore also that I've been away, if you please."
Ellen, poor child, had no idea of blaming him, any more than she had
an instinct of hiding her emotions. Never once had she blamed Roger,
even to herself, for going away, and at the sudden end of her suspense
uncontrollable tears came to her eyes. Men have written books about
the folly of the tears of women. Who knows it better than they, poor
things? There are uncontrollable women, of course, who are as
spendthrift with tears as some men of anger. Tears like these of
Ellen's are as unexpected and uncontrollable as a sudden storm, and I,
knowing what it meant when Ellen cried, left them quickly.
Ellen wrote about it:--
"Oh, the unspeakable shame of having cried. I didn't know I was
going to; I haven't cried since he has been away; I've only
waited. He was sweet and tender with me, but he said
whimsically: 'You, too, Ellen! I've had many a tearful
home-coming with my mother. If one stays away unexpectedly from
women, no matter who they are, the first thing they do when you
turn up again is to find fault with you or else weep over you.'
Then he held me out at arm's length. 'Ellen, you're not going to
make of me the sinner that repented.' I don't know what leaden
weight I have in my heart; it seems all so different; it's like
a little, commonplace squabble. I'm always disappointing him; he
has thought me different from all other women and I would so
like to be, but I am just the same. He didn't even refer to the
cause of his going away. We talked of this and that and couldn't
find each other. He looked at me curiously two or three times
and said, 'Ellen, I thought I should never see tears in your
eyes.'"
Here, indeed, was a shifting of base; they had been playing the higher
harmonies that men and women play together; their spirits had been in
perfect unison; even the tragic parting had had its undercurrent of
understanding, and now here they were with their feet on earth; Ellen
with homesick eyes for the land of lost content and Roger with a
little sneer that she should have let him see that she had no pride
against him. Her absence of coquetry was her undoing. He knew now he
could put her down or take her up at will, and her price was a few
tears. Her spirit stood out in that moment of welcome, shining and
naked, her little shy spirit, the reflection of whose light alone had
been enough for Alec.
From the point of view of age, it is Roger for whom I am sorry, for
with all courage and charm and ability and the swift, pulsing flow of
life in him, life had tainted him already so that this ultimate gift
of herself made him think Ellen too easy of attainment. The situation
was one that had been repeated time and time again, sometimes by men
and sometimes by women. Roger had had his naughtiness and his lack of
consideration and his sudden and impatient vanishing out of a
difficult situation treated by tears and reproaches. Poor Ellen, by
her very innocence, had trodden a path of the emotion familiar to him,
since his way out of difficulties had been a sudden impatient
vanishing. If she could have only had the inspired sense to have
taken his return in a matter-of-course manner, it would have piqued
him, and again Ellen would have won; but how play sorry games like
this with the best beloved? One of the sad things of love is that it
is in absurd and trivial ways like this that it falls from its highest
state and loses its radiance.
From the account of her journal they jogged along a few days at a
slack-water; Ellen groping forever for Roger, Roger a little bored at
the too-eagerly offered heart; their positions oddly reversed; Roger
rather magnificently forgiving Ellen for having annoyed him.
Then suddenly into this doldrums of the emotions burst Miss Grant. A
flaming affection is hard to hide. It shines like a light behind a
closed door,--let two people walk ever so carefully. Now the eyes of
one follow the other and the look is a caress; now some one intercepts
an exchange of glances, and that exchange means, to any one whose
heart has beat fast for love, a promise of everlasting devotion; you
see a girl's hand steal to her fast-beating heart, or the young man
waiting for her with that aching impatience of the young.
So gossip had begun about Roger and Ellen. Some one had seen them
walking down the street so absorbed that they had seen no one else;
another had noticed Ellen walking across the bridge to the mountain
and Roger going before her. Little by little the people who had
separately observed these things had talked together until between
them they had pieced together from broken fragments the whole story,
and then, like a picture thrown unexpectedly on the screen, the gossip
of it came to Miss Grant.
I suppose she had gotten bits of it before, hints and innuendoes, of
the kind people give who are too pusillanimous to face a woman like
Miss Sarah with a point-blank question. The whole thing was focused
one afternoon when she had said lightly to Mrs. Snow that she didn't
know where on earth Roger had passed his time in such a quiet little
town.
"Well, Sarah, if you spent more time down at Emily's, perhaps you'd
know."
To Miss Sarah's hot, "What do you mean?"--
"I mean that wherever Ellen is, Roger's apt to be, and no reason
making such big eyes at me; a very nice sort of thing, I think it."
Miss Sarah merely put on her bonnet and shawl and marched majestically
down the hill. She found Ellen on the back porch, in the midst of a
foam of ruffles she was hemming for her mother's gown. She towered
above Ellen, an avenging fate, whose gray curls bobbed on each side of
her head.
"Ellen, what's this gossip I hear about you and Roger?" she demanded.
Before Ellen had time to reply, as though she read her confession in
the color that mounted to her face, "How could you do such a thing,
Ellen?" she fumed. "Don't you know that Roger Byington came here to
work and settle down; don't you know that he has a marriage already
planned? Don't you see the position you've put your family in, that of
snatching at the fortune of an old friend! A fortune that's destined
elsewhere, and that we were bound, you as well as I, to guard! You've
been deceiving the whole of us!"
Ellen rose to her feet and faced her, her sewing still in her hands,
the blue ruffles around her white frock like a wave of the sea.
"I've deceived no one, Aunt Sarah," said she, with a touch of
sternness in her voice, and just here Roger appeared.
He had heard voices, and had heard his and Ellen's names mentioned,
and he had then seen Miss Grant storming down the hill like some aged
New England Valkyrie and had followed her. He arrived in time around
the side of the house to catch her last words, and the flaming anger
that any one should scold his Ellen blew away forever the flatness
that had for a moment assailed them.
He threw his arms around Ellen as though he would protect her from
everything for all time. "Miss Grant," he said, "the reason I'm here
in this town is Ellen. I walked through here one time and I saw Ellen
and talked with her for a few minutes by the roadside, and so I came
back. No one else I've ever seen in life matters to me--nothing else
but Ellen matters. Please remember that if I amount to anything
_ever_, it will be because of Ellen, and if I fail, it will be because
I have failed Ellen. Had I had my way Ellen would not have been
here now with you; she'd be married to me."
[Illustration: SHE TOWERED ABOVE ELLEN, AN AVENGING FATE]
Ellen wrote:--
"I don't know what it did to me to have it talked about in the
open. I felt as if I belonged forever to Roger, as though some
way this outward profession of faith of his brought out and made
positive everything that he had said and that I had felt, and
that we truly belonged to one another."
The old lady measured the young people with an angry gaze.
"Young man," said she, "I consider you've abused my hospitality; you
have put me and my brother and my whole family in a false light before
your parents. You entangle yourself in sentimentalities with a married
woman, you play false with your sweetheart, and when your father
wishes you to reconstruct your life, you throw them both over and
place me in the position of having seemed to connive at a marriage
with my niece. I shall write your mother my disapproval by the next
post, and if Ellen knew as much of your past history as I do, she
wouldn't take this sudden infatuation seriously, and if she had any
dignity she would withdraw at once from this false position."
"Your letter," Roger replied with some heat, "will reach my mother
somewhat after my own. When Ellen's love for her mother overcame her
better judgment and she refused to go with me, I wrote my mother on my
return as I told her I would do; and now, permit me, Miss Grant, to
withdraw from your house which will save your pride in this matter."
It was an old-fashioned quarrel that Youth and Age indulged in, and
Ellen's journal gives more of it, full of stately words and innuendo
and recriminations cloaked in fine-sounding periods, and I think both
Roger and Miss Sarah enjoyed their own rhetoric heartily.
Mrs. Payne heard the noise of the combat, and when Miss Sarah realized
that her sister had been, as she said, "an accomplice," her
indignation knew no bounds, though she admitted:--
"I'll do you justice, Emily; you've so little common sense that I
don't suppose for a moment you thought of anything but the
sentimentality of this ill-governed young man and your Ellen. You
didn't, I suppose, for a moment consider that Ellen is not the sort of
a marriage planned for him by his father."
Mrs. Payne's wide-eyed, "Why shouldn't she be? Ellen's so sweet and
pretty," collapsed the older lady's anger like a pricked balloon, as
nothing else could have done. Ellen's picture of her is this: "Aunt
Sarah flopped down, she didn't sit, and gathered her draperies around
her like a wounded Roman matron."
* * * * *
Roger, at Mrs. Payne's words, again put his arm around Ellen and
laughed aloud. He adored their unworldliness. The bad little boy in
him vanished; so did the man of the world who cannot bear generosity
in the beloved. He spoke truly enough when he said all the best things
in him ran out ahead of him to meet Ellen. He said to Miss Sarah
gently:--
"You see, we really care for each other, Aunt Sarah, and I'm awfully
sorry about putting you in a false position, but that doesn't count
very much compared to Ellen's and my happiness, does it? Please
believe me when I tell you that your side of this never occurred to me
and so I'll take myself away to-night." The moment of high-sounding
periods was over.
"Hadn't you better stay?" asked Miss Sarah. "Think of the talk,
Roger."
"I want talk," he said,--"all the talk in the world; I would like
everybody to know how I care for Ellen--I welcome gossip."
"The way he laughed"--wrote Ellen--"made one feel the way Spring
looks; I was so proud, and wondered more than ever what I could
have done to have any one like Roger love me."
During the days when they had been at odds with life, they had taken
pains to have me with them; it was the first time that they had shown
themselves eager for my company together. I had been confidante first
for Ellen and then for Roger, and then again for Ellen, but seldom had
I seen them both at once. Now, after this explanation with Miss Grant,
they unconsciously thrust me aside with no more regard for me than if
I had been a withered flower. I was going to Ellen's to help with the
sewing. I had left her a little lack-luster, a little wistful; Roger
had been sulky and inclined to cynicism; and now they swept down on me
like a splendid young god and goddess, no longer making any effort to
keep the town in ignorance; they took it in in a magnificent gesture,
the way they looked at each other; shouted it aloud, and, as though to
carry out in very truth the words he had spoken to Miss Grant when he
said he would like to shout through the town that he loved Ellen, he
took her hand in his when he saw me and swung it to and fro; and in my
day such an action as this was one which would cause the quiet windows
to bristle with interrogatory eyes. You might be perfectly sure that
there would be quiet slippings through back doors and gossiping under
grape arbors.
That evening I met Roger coming down the street and he stopped to tell
me:--
"We've had it out with Aunt Sarah, and both Aunt Sarah and I have
written to my mother. Now we'll soon have an end to this
shilly-shallying."
"And if your parents don't like it?"
"God help them if they don't," he said. "Any parents I have will
_have_ to like it."
And there was so sinister a note in his voice that I shivered.
Sometimes when he spoke there was a weight to a light word that seemed
like a heavy wind.
It was not long before the town had more to talk about. Mrs. Byington,
in her beautiful and fashionable clothes, was as conspicuous as though
she had come riding in a palanquin. The city and country were much
more apart in those days, and home-made patterns taken from some
remote city ones were passed from hand to hand; dolls dressed in
Boston still carried the mode somewhat; and in our honest village,
loveliness was put by with youth, and lovely was the quality of Mrs.
Byington. At fifty she was tall and slender, her hair a little gray,
her neck graceful like a girl's; she walked swayingly, and age was not
a quality with which she seemed to have reckoned. With the changing
years she had a quality as compelling as youth itself, and this
without the slightest attempt at seeming less than her years.
Ellen writes:--
"Roger's mother came to see me alone, and before her, so
beautiful and soft, I felt as though I had been made yesterday.
It happened that I opened the door for her, and I knew who she
was and she knew me, for she said: 'Dear child, I know you are
Ellen; I wanted to come by myself.' She looked at me with
searching eyes that were a little sad, and all of a sudden I
felt very sorry for her, for it must be very hard, when you have
a son that you love, to learn all at once that his life belongs
to some one else. We sat down and talked a little, and my heart
beat so that I could hardly say anything, and I felt that I was
very stupid, and that if Roger could be there he wouldn't like
the way I was acting, and all of a sudden she put her arms
around me and kissed me, and said: 'Dear Ellen, you are very
lovely and very perfect, and, indeed, I knew you would be very
"something" to send my wild Roger after you at such a rate. You
love him very much, don't you?' I couldn't speak, and only
bowed my head; and she said, as though talking to herself rather
than to me, 'Poor child, it would be better for you if you loved
him less; he would be more yours.' I asked her what she meant.
She thought a moment, and then said: 'Perhaps you'll never find
out; you're so sweet, Ellen; even Roger wouldn't hurt a child.'
And for a moment I felt a little flaming anger at her for not
understanding him better. I wanted to tell her that there was
only sweetness in Roger for those who knew how to find it, but,
of course, I didn't dare. There was something in her tone that
made a cold shadow fall over me."
It seemed as though all difficulties were cleared from before them,
when Ellen found herself face to face with what really was the first
important issue of this time. After all, the things in love that count
are not all the obstacles imposed on us from without. It is strange to
me why people have always written of these rather than of those far
more important moments, as when, for instance, one first sees the
beloved face to face as he really is. Love for a moment makes us
transcend ourselves, and Roger was a brave lover, and Ellen had known
nothing of him except Roger the lover, when suddenly she caught a new
glimpse of Roger. She wrote:--
"I don't know what I'm going to do--nothing I suppose. I've seen
Roger angry with his mother. It was our last afternoon all
together and she was talking very seriously with us. She said:
'Your Ellen is very sweet, Roger. Keep her happiness, and if you
play fast and loose again, you deserve all the unhappiness the
world can bring you.' She has wanted me to see him as he is, and
has talked around the edges of this, and she said to me, 'I came
here wondering who you were, Ellen, and ever since I saw you
I've been wondering what Roger will do to you in this new life
of yours begun so sweetly.' One time she cried out, 'Oh! why do
women have to marry men?' And then she laughed at herself for
saying it. Ever since she came Roger has been watching her. He's
had a critical attitude and is ready to find fault at a
moment's notice. It was as if the impatience of the whole week
overflowed. What he said wasn't so much. Oh! he kept within
bounds before me, but the restrained anger of his manner was as
though he had struck her, as though he had hurt her, as though
the force of his anger would throw her from the room. She held
up her head a little proudly, but she only said, as though to
bring him to himself, 'Roger, Roger!' warning him, one would
think, not to lose further control of himself. She spoke as if
she were used to this wounding, terrible manner, a manner that
gets its own way in spite of everything; and I stood there
trembling inside, and I began thinking, 'Who are you, Roger, and
who am I?' Now it is all at once as if I had an answer to why
she seemed to pity me, as though she wanted to protect me from
everything. All my instinct is to run and hide in some place
where I shall hide from him forever. I know nothing of him or he
of me."
CHAPTER XVIII
There comes a moment in the life of almost every one when, bewildered,
for the first time they meet an everyday and faulty person in place of
the beloved. Sometimes this is the beginning of a long disillusion; it
is then that many find out that one has not been in love at all, but
only in love with being in love. With young lovers one often calls
this first glimpse the first quarrel. After marriage this slow torment
of becoming accustomed to another personality in the body of the
beloved is called the "time of adjustment."
With Ellen this moment was a severe spiritual crisis. As she had seen
concentrated in the last weeks only the lovable things in Roger, so in
this one moment she had a vision of all in him that was inimical to
happiness and peace. It was as if that blind, voiceless judge that
sits deep within all of us and bids us love, hate, or fear, had been
aroused to its depth, and its final judgment of Roger had been that
here was danger. Had there been any place to run to, she would have
fled, but there was nothing to do but sit still. She dreamed at night
that she saw his face savage in anger, heartless in its desire, and
relentless in its will to get what it wanted from life; and since she
could not leave home to run away from him, she ran from him
spiritually.
When he came to see her next, he could hardly find Ellen in the inert
and docile person who presented herself to his gaze. It was as though
the glance he had given his mother and the tone in which he had spoken
had been to her a prophecy of life to come. She saw him with that
terrible clairvoyance that love gives; she saw clearly what her life
in the hands of this other Roger would mean; and it seemed as if the
very inner spirit of her struggled to free herself from his power.
I, personally, fear the shocks of the spirit as some fear physical
pain, and instinctively I withdrew from the perversities of men, and I
now look shudderingly back on two marriages which I might have made
but for this warning bell which rang over the reefs of the spirit.
Her first movement had been one of flaming indignation; that burned
out, leaving behind it the ashes of a dull, apathetic fear. When he
asked her what was the matter and why, she told him she was afraid of
him. He called himself a brute, he apologized to his mother, but she
remained inert and docile, as aloof as a person who has been stunned
by the spectacle of a great disaster, and, indeed, the flood of her
emotions had ebbed back violently.
In despair Roger came to me.
"I've lost Ellen," he told me. "We've awfully bad tempers in our
family, and my mother didn't understand that since I've known Ellen
there are a whole lot of things in my life that I want to forget. The
me Ellen knows is a different me from the one mother knows."
He had never been as sweet to Ellen as he was now. She had seen before
a brave lover who rushed everything before him and when he was refused
anything would turn into a naughty little boy. Now he was a tender
suppliant asking for mercy, confessing his sins and inventing sweet
and touching things to do for Ellen. I think the men of my day were
crueler as men and warmer as lovers. A man like Roger possessed
himself more of a woman's mind and life than the men of to-day that I
see around me seem able to do with their sweethearts. There was no
little corner of her spirit that he did not wish to occupy, and to
gain admission to her frightened little heart he made himself small
and humble and appealing. Of the sincerity of his wretchedness and his
repentance there was no doubt.
"If she were only angry with me," he said to me, "but she's afraid,
Roberta. It's a terrible thing to see her shrink from me. She doesn't
mean to be unkind. She told me in all seriousness, as if she meant it,
that she thought it would be better for all of us if I left her now.
Why, she's my life, Roberta!"
I was profoundly touched, as who would not have been? Nor did I fail
to repeat this to Ellen. I had told Alec what the matter was, for
seeing Ellen listless and remote he had jumped to the conclusion that
Roger had hurt her in some way, and in Roger's defense I told him the
truth and he put himself stolidly on the side of Ellen's instinct.
Through one long day she and Alec went off together as they had when
they were children, while Roger raged up and down. Ellen wrote:--
"We played, as we did when I was little, 'Two Years Ago,' and
for one, beautiful afternoon I forgot how life can hurt. Just
toward the end Alec cried out to me, 'Oh, Ellen, why can't I be
older! Why couldn't it have been I? I'd never have hurt you, I'd
never have made you afraid of me.' And I know that's true, and I
know, too, that poor Alec could never find a key to the place in
me that could be hurt. There's something wrong with women, for
when once one has felt one's pulse beat fast, one can never
again be content with a sweet and kind affection. One must wish
forevermore to drown one's self forever and to let the waters of
life sweep over one's head, however bitter they may be."
Already, though she didn't know it, she was coming back to Roger.
Every day he went to see her with some carefully thought-out little
gift. Every night he wrote her a letter which he sent by me, and she
wrote in answer a letter that she didn't send.
"I suppose [she writes to Roger] that we can only be cured of
the worst hurts of all by those who have hurt us. Oh, please
hide me from yourself! Oh, protect me! from this Roger, since I
am so afraid of you that my whole spirit shudders away from you.
Shield me from this, or let me go now while I yet have strength
to leave you, or else make me forget forever how black life
could be if I ever saw again the face that you turned then on
your mother, and that yet was a part of you."
There is nothing truer in the life of the affections than this, that
the wound made by those whom we love can only be cured by them. One
may be sick even to death, and yet the only cure can come from the one
who has poisoned life for us. There is only one other way to cure the
hurt, and that is to stop loving. That's why a great many things
become easier to bear as the years go by. We find men and women
philosophically facing situations which formerly would have stopped
all life for them. These are the dead of heart who have forgotten to
care when they do this, and where one woman gains peace from a higher
understanding of the man she loves, a dozen others find it by ceasing
to love at all.
Ellen made her attempt at escape, and then came back because she
couldn't help it. The one person in the world who could have helped
her was Alec. She was sincere when she told me:--
"If Alec was my brother, and had a home for me somewhere where I need
not see Roger again, I'd go to him."
It was her very docility and lack of resistance that maddened Roger.
He told me:--
"Somehow Ellen has slipped out of my hands into a magic circle; she's
afraid of me. It's as though she lived inside a crystal shell--I can
see her and speak to her, but I can't touch her."
I, myself, was very much disturbed and moved by it all. There was
Ellen who had burned in a fire of happiness, whose very look at Roger
had been a caress, who seemed to give herself to him by the way she
stood,--her arms relaxed as though all her body cried out to him to
take her,--now lost in apathy; nothing that I told her affected her as
far as I could see. After days of this, just as I was giving up hope,
I met them one afternoon, swinging down the street toward me, with the
air of a god and goddess recently let out of prison. Roger had
Prudentia flung on his shoulder, and carried the child aloft as though
she were a flag of triumph. All the explanation I ever had of the
reconciliation was what I had then and there.
"He came down the street," Ellen told me, "with Prudentia on his
shoulder, and said, 'Hello, Ellen,' and I said, 'Hello, Roger,' and he
put out his hand to me and I took it. Why, Roberta, aren't you glad?"
asked Ellen.
"She wanted more pomp and circumstance," Roger jeered at me. "She
wanted you, Ellen, to rush to my arms and say, 'Roderigo, I forgive
thee.'"
They went on; I heard their laughter down the street. That was all the
thanks they gave me.
CHAPTER XIX
Ellen wiped the memory of their misunderstanding completely from her
mind. If she had cared for Roger before, now she burned her bridges
behind her; she swamped herself in her devotion to him. He stayed in
our town until late fall, and during these months he seemed to want no
other thing than the companionship of Ellen. The hours that he spent
in work every day were their tragedy. In her journal Ellen prattled of
a time "when they should be married and she could be with him even
when he was working."
"The world is full now," she complained, "of closed doors and
good-nights and good-byes."
All the diverse and many-sided problems of marriage resolved
themselves, in her simple mind, into one single meaning, and that was
the continual presence of Roger. She passed the hours away from him
drowned in the thought of him. Though at that time she wrote very
little in her journal,--she was happy,--she did write a series of
little, good-night letters that were like so many kisses, fond and
extravagant, the happy babblings of a perfectly happy heart. Meantime
Roger was studying. It was the first time he had applied himself to
work and found the power of his mind. In the quiet of this town he got
into a tremendous stride of work and ate up books before him as fire
licks up brushwood. They spent a great deal of their time together,
planning his future and talking how great a man he was going to be. He
had a gift of natural eloquence and loved an audience at any time. In
that New England fall, when the crisp air is like wine and the hills
are a miracle of color, Roger brooded over the picture of his own
future, sketching outlines which he afterwards filled out. By letter
he made friends again with his father.
Their engagement had been announced and Ellen was given the
consideration which a good marriage brings one in a little village, a
consideration which she didn't even notice. Mildred Dilloway, in the
mean time, had been--in the homely New England phrase--"keeping
company" with Edward Graham, and no one was surprised when it became
known that they were to be married. Ellen writes in connection with
this:--
"When I think of what a little fool I was at that time, I could
beat my head against the door. If I could have but looked ahead
a little, I would have had a little more sense. I needn't have
listened at all to Edward's blitherings and been saved two years
of discomfort. Edward himself told me about it. 'Do not think,
Ellen,' he said, 'that I'm unfaithful to the thought of you.'
'You couldn't be,' said I. 'You'll always be poetry to me,
remember that,' he told me. 'I shall try to forget it,' said I.
I have never before wished to throw something at any one as I
did then. It was easy to see that he was a little disappointed
in himself that he could care for any one else after having made
so great a fuss and mourned around so. I wish he would go away,
because I hate to be forever reminded of the me that used to be.
What if one should turn back into the person that one was once?
I wonder who the person is that I'm going to be. It will be a
happy person or else I shan't be alive; because if I have Roger
I shall be happy, and if anything happens to him it will happen
to me, too."
At that moment in her life she could not imagine any other separation
from him than that caused by some disaster. She hadn't even faced the
necessity of his leaving her when winter came. She knew he was going
away, but she didn't realize it. They drifted along, making more of a
drama all the time of the inevitable good-nights and the inevitable
separations. As Ellen wrote: "People who are in love should be
endowed; there isn't time for anything else."
During this little perfect time life held its breath until Roger went
away. The end came quite suddenly, with a peremptory letter from his
father, who had a chance for him to enter a very well-known law
office, under advantageous circumstances. While the shadow of
separation was over them, it was like a cloud that passes near by and
only bade the sunshine in which they stood more bright. She knew Roger
was going, but she didn't really believe it. She wrote:--
"I lived through months of learning to realize he was gone
between the time he left and dinner. Mr. Sylvester was there,
and for a time I had to put aside the selfishness of my own
grief and I was glad to forget it in talking of one little thing
after another, the way one does to stifle down the pain of the
heart. I wanted to run after Roger and look at his face once
more. I wanted to run after him and foolishly throw myself in
front of the horse and say, 'You can't go.' The part of me that
talks was gay, because deeper than anything else was the wish in
me to speed him joyfully and to have his last memory of me a gay
and triumphant one. Time is a strange thing; all day it's walked
along like a funeral procession, and before this it has been
going so fast that there has hardly been a chance to get a word
in edgewise between the striking of the hours; and since Roger
went it's taken an eternity for it to strike the next quarter.
I've tried to comfort myself by going up to Oscar's Leap, but my
heart was so heavy that I could hardly walk all of the
beautiful, weary way. I don't like myself for writing like this,
for I have him and he really loves me. The more I see people and
listen to the things they say, the more I am sure that very few
people really love any one, and those who do love are seldom
loved in return. It must be a terrible thing to love and feel
one's self unloved. Now I'm going to get ready for my mother's
wedding and then get ready for mine, and while my mind tells me
I must be good, my heart cries out, 'Oh! Why can't I trade off
the useless weeks at the other end of my life for the weeks that
would mean so much now!' As he went away from me, I felt as
though I were never going to see him again, and, indeed, this
Roger and this Ellen will never see each other again. It seems
to me that before he comes again I shall be made old by waiting,
the days crawl past so slow and leaden-footed. I've said
good-bye to this most beautiful time when I've said good-bye to
Roger."
At first he wrote her very often, but briefly. She wrote to him, in
the intimacy of the letters she did not intend to send:--
"Your dear letters mean, 'I love you, Ellen; I think of you; my
heart goes out to you.' Once in a while they say, 'I thirst for
you,' but they tell me nothing of all the many things that I
hunger so to know. I'd like to be able to see your life and know
what time you wake up, what time you go to your office, and how
your office looks, and which way it is set toward the sun so I
could imagine you moving around, and you don't even answer my
little, discreet questions. I would like to know the faces of
all the people you meet often and how you amuse yourself. I
wonder have you lost Ellen in your big and fearsome city. Roger,
I have times when I'm _afraid_, and I don't know of what--just
fear, as though the inner heart of me rang, 'Something's wrong,
something's wrong, something's wrong,' where my mind has nothing
to go on. Roger, I _wait_ for each one of your letters as if I
was afraid it wouldn't come, and as if it were to be the last.
I'm afraid. I don't trust life as I did, and when I don't trust
life, I can't find you; when I trust life, it's as if when I
shut my eyes I can put out my hand and touch you. But lately it
is as though I wander around in the dark looking for you. I tell
myself it's foolish, but my heart won't listen to the voice of
reason. It is as though my confidence had been taken away from
me, as though it had been a gift no one could touch with hands.
My mother's wedding doesn't mean to me any more her happiness,
but the day that you shall come back to me and give me back my
confidence in life, and when I look on you again I shall know
that everything is well in the world. I know that nothing has
happened and that nothing can happen, but my heart knows
differently."
CHAPTER XX
During the winter Alec came home from college every Saturday, walking
over the mountain each Saturday afternoon for fifteen miles, and going
back Monday morning by a stage that started at some unearthly hour,
and carried passengers over to the nearest town to us through which a
railroad ran in those days.
Various boys of those he had around him would straggle down the road
to meet him, so when he came into the town on cold winter nights it
was with an escort of red-nosed, red-tippeted and booted youngsters.
This was before any of the new forms of education for boys had even so
much as stirred in their sleep, and the town agreed in considering
Alec's friendship with the youngsters a waste of time on both sides:
the parents of the boys saying that they had something better to
do--in filling the wood-boxes for instance--than to tramp out and get
their toes frozen off to meet Alec. Alec's friends, on the other
hand, wondered what he wanted with a "parcel of young ones." It was
only Ellen and myself who caught a glimpse of just what it was that
Alec was accomplishing, when we also would walk out to meet him.
Besides supplying them in his own person with a hero to worship, he
drew them out and untangled their knotty minds for them; for the boy
of ten and twelve was, in my girlhood, even more misunderstood and
kicked about and generally at odds with life than he is now. Nothing
was done to make his school days happier or the path of learning
easier. Teachers, almost without exception, were the boys' natural
enemies. Almost all the communication boys had from older people in my
day, besides religious instructions, were recommendations to get to
work and to get to work quickly.
These snowy walks in the crisp air to meet Alec were the punctuation
points of our lives, and the long, pleasant Saturday evenings that we
spent together, with perhaps some of the other young people dropping
in, were our greatest pleasure. I am sure Ellen's house seemed to him
the gayest place in the world, because we concentrated into those few
hours on Saturday evening the gayety of the whole week, though Ellen
did not have much time for "mulling," as her aunt called it. Getting
ready for her mother's marriage meant not only the preparation of her
clothes, but also the preparation of the whole Scudder house for its
occupancy by Mr. Sylvester and Matilda, Flavilla, and Prudentia.
Ellen's mood was not at all consistent with that of vague
apprehension, and this warning note of her spirit she failed to listen
to most of the time; as long as Roger's letters came regularly, she
lived in a shimmering world of imagination, writing to him all the
things she dared, and then writing to him again all the things she was
too timid to tell him. All the outward details of her life were
constant and pressing enough, and very homely, most of them; while
within she lived in a shimmering world of her own, her lovely garden
inclosed of the spirit, into which she let no unkind breath blow; and
so her love for Roger blossomed throughout the long months of the
winter. Then toward Easter came her mother's wedding, which meant to
Ellen Roger's return. The Resurrection and Roger's return came all
together in Ellen's mind.
When his letter came that told her he couldn't leave his office at
this moment, she could not at first believe it, any more than she
could at first believe that he had gone away.
Alec was there, and he asked me shortly:--
"Why couldn't Roger come?"
"He's busy," I said.
Alec gave me an odd look.
"One can do what one wants to," said he.
He was one of those over whom Love passes a maturing hand. At twenty
he had lost the young-robin look of expression, just as he had lost
early the puppy aspect that a boy has before he has gotten used to
man-size hands and feet.
"It's hard," he said, "to sit back and do nothing. It's hard when you
love any one as I do Ellen not to be able to get for her any of the
things in life that she wants the most."
"What does she want," I asked, "that she hasn't?"
"Well," Alec reflected, "I can come to see her every week and Roger
can't." He might have said: "I can spend my life on her and give her
every thought of my heart and stand between her and unhappiness as
much as I can, and Roger can't."
This was one of the few times that Ellen played make-believe to
herself. I think she had to. It was only later that her straight mind
said what Alec had said, "We can do what we want to." She hid her own
disappointment from herself, and life was good to her in that it gave
her a great deal to do. Although in those days wedding journeys were
very rare, Mr. Sylvester had an old friend, a minister, near
Washington, who came up to marry them and they were to exchange
pulpits, and so directly after her disappointment Ellen was left alone
with the three Sylvester children. Matilda at this time was already
eleven and she remarked gravely to Ellen,--"Ellen, we've all decided
that you can be our mother. Of course we shall call your mother
'Mother,' too, and we shall love her like that, because we've made up
our minds that it is our _duty_,"--Matilda was very particular about
duty,--"but you'll be our real mother. I've done the best I can with
the children,"--for thus did Matilda always refer to her little
sisters,--"but our clothes are in a terrible state since Mrs. Gillig
went away." For the Sylvesters' housekeeper had gone promptly after
the announcement of her employer's engagement. She had departed to the
next town, where her relatives lived, saying that she was not going to
stay around and be any one's "kill-joy"; so with an occasional day's
work from Mrs. Butler and help from Ellen and me, they had gotten on
as best they could.
"I got their poor, little things unpacked [said Ellen] and got
them their supper and put them to bed and Flavia patted my cheek
and said, 'Ellen, you're so happy, that's why we love you,' and
Prudentia said, 'Yes, I love folks that laugh,' and it came over
me that for a while, anyway, I really am their mother--poor me,
who knows so little about doing anything. Before I went to bed
Matilda put her arm around me and said, 'Oh! Ellen, I want to
grow up and be capable and take care of father and mother and
everybody, and I've been just as capable as I know how ever
since Mrs. Gillig left. I've been so capable it makes my jaws
ache, and I want to stop and be a little girl.' And pretty soon
Aunt Sarah came in to see how badly I had done everything and to
grumble good-naturedly over my endeavors, and then Grandma
Hathaway dropped in to see if I needed anything, and they went
off together and left Alec and me alone, and the children in
bed. And Alec never once looked at me as though he cared for me;
he was only funny and told me stories, just as if he knew I
couldn't have borne affection from any one but Roger."
So it was that Ellen hid from herself and from the pain that was in
her heart. This was one of the few times she played make-believe with
herself. She was afraid of her own doubt and afraid of her own
thoughts, really afraid for the first time; for this is another of the
painful milestones which most of us have to pass in the long and
bleeding road of love--the first time that we are afraid to face our
fears.
Ellen and her mother had been buying cloth for Ellen's trousseau, and
she had put it all by for her mother to begin on when her mother
should be married. I was to help her, and so, of course, was Aunt
Sarah.
In our days, girls mostly made their own trousseaux, and the richer
among us had some seamstress engaged for a couple of months or six
weeks, but friends helped one another, and one was supposed to go to
one's husband with linen enough to last a long time in life, and with
good, substantial garments, suitable for various occasions in a
gentlewoman's life. Ellen had a poplin and a cashmere among other
things, and when I came a day or two after her mother's wedding to
encourage her to begin on her own things, I found her on her hands and
knees cutting.
"Why, Ellen Payne! What's that you're doing?" For instead of cutting
out one beautiful cashmere garment she was cutting three little
frocks. "Oh, Miss Grant!" I exclaimed, scandalized, to Miss Sarah,
"Ellen's cutting up her blue cashmere from her trousseau for the
children."
Miss Grant adjusted her glasses and peered down at the patterns on the
floor.
"Well, there," said she, "you have Ellen. We'll have Ellen Payne's
trousseau walking all over town on three pairs of legs, and rather
than patch up their old things, she begins her new life by taking the
very trousseau off her own back! Some would think you were
self-sacrificing, Ellen, but I know you."
Poor Ellen always remained the same, taking more pleasure in doing any
one's work than her own, and as she told me, "the soul of her sickened
in patching up the clothes of those poor children any more," and,
besides, said she: "Everybody else has new clothes, and there's no one
on earth quite so proud as a little girl with a new frock."
"But your own trousseau, Ellen," I objected scandalized, because I had
a proper sentiment for those things. Ellen was romantic, but seldom
sentimental at all.
"Cloth's cloth," she replied briskly, "and goodness knows when I'm to
be married and shall need it, and there's one sure thing, they need
new best dresses right straight away."
They needed new best dresses and they needed new almost everything
else, as Matilda had warned Ellen.
So here was Ellen with her hands full. In the day before the
sewing-machine, when every stitch had to be put in by hand and there
were no such things as ready-made garments, making clothes for a
family was no light undertaking. No wonder, then, that we made our
dresses of good stuff, intended to wear; and Ellen had not only to
provide for the little Sylvesters garments, but for her own trousseau
as well. The young ladies nowadays, who make themselves a few things
and order and buy ready-made everything else, do not realize what an
undertaking the preparations for a wedding used to be. It sometimes
seems to me that there was as much difference in our serious
preparation of our clothes and the way that girls prepare now, as
there is in the way that we prepared ourselves spiritually. Ellen
wrote:--
"The clothes that I am making mean my life, Roger. They are not
dresses to me any more. There is one dress I know I shall never
be able to put on without feeling my heart beat away the minutes
slowly while I waited and waited and waited for your letter.
There are some buttonholes made while it seemed as if my heart
sang like birds. What do you think I am building with the things
I dream of constantly, as I sit with the thought of you and sew
on the clothes that I shall wear when we are at last together
for always, for thinking is the way that one builds up or tears
down the things of the spirit? I think I build rather solidly,
and before I can be torn out of this house of my thoughts of
you, I shall have to be pulled out in little pieces no bigger
than your hand."
She wrote this after she had seen him, for he came for a two days'
breathless visit, just as spring was breaking. He came back the bad,
little boy, ready to sulk if he was scolded for not coming sooner.
This time Ellen had only sweetness for him, no tears; she was so
heart-brokenly glad to see him, but she wrote:--
"Where have you gone, Roger, and what's become of that lovely,
shining love that we had? The horizon has shrunken for us in a
curious way. Where it used to be wider than that of all the
world, and the heavens flung full of stars and a splendid wind
ramping over everything, our love lives now in a little world
full of small hopes and fears, a dwarfed place. I suppose all
this means that I wanted to ask you when you were here, 'What's
the matter, Roger? What has happened to your love for me?' And I
didn't dare to because I knew that you would say, 'Nothing.' I
know you would look at me as one who says, 'Am I not here with
you now? Don't be a tiresome woman.' When I said to you--and I
said it half smiling--'It's a terrible thing how a man can eat
up a woman's life as you do mine, so I am all yours,' you turned
away as though you didn't hear me. You made acknowledgment of a
word that was only half kind. I write this to you which I would
never say to you because if said to you it would be a reproach.
I write to you since I have need of my soul talking to yours,
and with no reproach in my mind, but to try and understand what
it is that has happened. Before, had I shown you my heart that
way, you would have caught me to you. Must I be careful not to
give you too much of myself, Roger; must I pour myself out to
you in small sips,--you who wished to drink of me, as though
your thirst for me would never become quenched? It seemed to me
that there were as many things to keep silent about while you
were here as before we had things to talk about. We were always
running into ghosts of the way we used to care, and yet you were
so dear to me and sweet to me."
Lovers forever have watched the affections ebb out bit by bit, and
have been as powerless to stop the ebbing as the tides of the sea.
This causeless change, this heart-breaking wintertime of the
affections, is one of the hardest things of all to bear. When people
quarrel they can "make up" again, but this slow alteration from life
to death comes as relentlessly as age and seems as little in our power
to change as age's coming. It has been the anguish of lovers from all
time.
All through the coming of spring and summer, Ellen had brooded over
this change, wondering if it was her fault, measuring Roger's
affection and cherishing every little phrase of love which he put in
his letters, every desire to see her, and magnifying them, and
stitching all the while her doubts and hopes--hopes a little frayed
and tarnished--into her wedding-clothes. There was a time when he
promised every week to come, and every week there came a letter
instead of Roger. He played fast and loose with her as it suited him,
now coming to see her a splendid young prince, now leaving her without
word for weeks.
It is an awful and bleeding thing when a woman realizes that the
beloved has changed toward her and she doesn't know the reason, and it
is still harder to have given more of one's self than has been wanted,
and this Ellen did continually. Suffering herself, she wanted to spare
Roger suffering.
So she lived along in that hope deferred that maketh the heart sick.
Then all word of Roger ceased for a time. She wrote to him as she had
always and then she wrote him a letter that she never sent, releasing
him.
"Once, when I was a little girl, I thought I was engaged
because I thought I was in love, and I spent two years of my
life in thinking that my life was dear to this man. I lived in a
torment of doubt of what to do rather than hurt him. I could not
bear to have any one live this way for me, and least of all you
who have been the heart of life to me, and so before this
happens to you let us say good-bye to each other as splendidly
and gayly as we first met each other. Love does not come at any
one's bidding, nor will it stay, and I would blame no one in
this world for ceasing to love, least of all the one whom I
love. But I could not endure from you a cowardly drifting away
from me, I could not bear to see you fear to face bravely a
moment of pain, nor could I bear the dishonorable shiftiness
with which some men loosen the bonds between themselves and the
women whom they have loved."
And under this page, which was written on good notepaper,--a true
never-sent letter,--she had written: "_Oh! if I had the courage to
send this now!_"
Then came Roger, triumphant and upstanding, his first pleaded case in
his pocket, a splendid young prince again, as prodigal with apologies
as he was with love. The miracle happened; they turned back the hands
of time for a few days.
"He held me from him, the way he does, at arm's length, and
said: 'Ellen, have you doubted me?' What could I say to him?
When I had courage enough to say, 'What's been the matter,
Roger? Where did you go so I couldn't find you?' he only laughed
and said, 'I've been in the devil's own temper.'"
This was the last time she fought against him. From this time on he
loosed his careless hand and tightened the clutch of it over her heart
until it bled, according to his mood. When she didn't write him for a
while he rushed to her, to see that his own was his own, and this was
as much as any woman ought to have asked, so he felt. She wrote:--
"There's one thing I've learned about you, Roger, when first I
saw the other Roger, and that was if any one denied you
anything, you loved to beg for it. As long as a thing denies
itself to you, you must strive for it, and knowing this of you,
it is a weapon that I can never use. If I played you as if you
were a trout in the stream, played you until I reeled you in to
me, tired and gasping, I might have held you in my hand always.
Whatever I shall do for you in life, I shall never do anything
that shows my love for you more, in that I won't traffic with
your love, and keep it for myself by playing a game with you. I
make you this present, a real gift, as my aunt once said, and
one that you won't know about ever."
So she wrote in the deep bitterness of her heart.
* * * * *
The wedding had been fixed for October and all the time there was one
little song that sung itself to her: "When we're married, then I can
show him how I really care; when I'm with him, nothing will be hard
for me, for it is suspense that kills." For she trusted him as women
must, in the face of disloyalty and carelessness.
In the early fall, after a season of silence, when she was too sick
at heart even to write, he came. He had a deprecatory air. He came as
one asking the favor of something which he ought not to have, and it
was characteristic of him, with his intolerance of the disagreeable,
that he should break the edge of telling Ellen, so to speak, by
telling me first.
He had come to defer the wedding, and his reason for wishing to do so
we found out later. I remember how he sat in my kitchen, his heavy,
handsome profile silhouetted against the flaming, evening sky, his
head swung forward. He lifted his face toward me with a sharp,
impatient gesture, looked at me, and asked a question, to me
inconceivable.
"Do you think she is going to make an awful fuss?"
CHAPTER XXI
Here my long-cherished resentment toward Roger overflowed. No one
could have been with Ellen as I had been without seeing the turmoil in
which her spirit lived. She had grown thin and of a certain
transparency as do those whose sufferings of the spirit affect their
bodies profoundly. I knew there were long times when he didn't write;
I knew how she waited for his letters; I knew how seldom he came. I
felt, in my wisdom, that she bore from Roger things I would stand from
no man. I had learned, step by step with Ellen, that Ellen's life and
all her happiness were in careless hands and, in Alec's language, that
there was no country of the heart there for her. I looked at Roger
with level-eyed disgust.
"Why, Roger," I asked him, "don't you break your engagement now, if
that's what you mean to do?"
To my point-blank question, he only stared at me.
"I don't want to break it," he said. "Ellen's just exactly the kind
of a woman I want for my wife," he added.
"But in your good time," said I bitterly.
He looked at me with his bold, laughing eyes:
"There's a delight of life with Ellen that I can find with no one
else. I know what she is, Roberta, a thousand times more than you.
She's the only _alive_ person in the world, but since you put the
words in my mouth, 'In my own good time!'" He had completely recovered
his good-tempered arrogance.
"I'd never stand from you what Ellen's stood, and I hope she says
good-bye to you now," I cried.
It is easy for those not in love to place the limit to love's
endurance. It is fortunately not easy to keep these shallow promises
to one's self.
I am sorry that so much of what was most unlovely in Roger creeps into
my story. At the time I had no patience with him, his undeniable charm
and interest offended me as it kept Ellen bound to him. I wanted, as
youth always does, people to be all bad or all good, and Roger would
be neither of these things. I realize now that, faithful or
unfaithful, he kept Ellen's life full of him, nor could she escape his
compelling personality. There are many men we should not quarrel
with,--men who can so absorb us, like him of the ultra-masculine type,
who have everything but pity and understanding of what they themselves
haven't felt. They are of all men the most attractive to women and
they care the least about the individual. From now on she loved him
always with a fear that he was waiting for her with a knife for her
back. She wrote:--
"Oh, how much make-believe we have had! I've pretended that I
thought it was nice for Roger to work, and he's pretended to me
that he wanted to work, but he doesn't want me--that's the real
reason. When I wake in the morning, I feel my heart crying
within me in the deep heaviness of my spirit before I can
remember what's happened, and then I remember that Roger doesn't
want me. He doesn't want me and I can't imagine life going on
without him. I've always thought to feel unbeloved would be the
worst thing that could happen to me. I don't know myself in this
beggared person. Life seems so empty for me, and I go shivering
up to Alec to warm my cold spirit at the fire of his affection.
I look back at the time when I waited for Roger to come back to
me, just three little days, and the touch of his hand still warm
in mine, and think how happy I was then."
A little later she became more accustomed to the idea and wrote:--
"Roger, I'm ashamed of how I felt, and I'm glad of one thing,
that you know nothing about it. Have you seen me as I am, and is
that why you no longer care as you did? I've been a cowardly,
shivering thing, afraid of your letters even, afraid of what
would come next. How can a man love so cowardly a woman? Why
should I count and measure love for love, instead of rejoicing
with you in your work? It is I that know nothing about love,
since I can whine and since I can compare and contrast yesterday
with to-day, instead of being glad that you are alive and in
the same world with me; and why should I care if, since you want
to marry me, you have lost some of the first hot flame, a flame
which burned us both? Are all women in life egotists that they
can't bear that the eyes of the beloved don't rest on them every
moment?"
There was very little use in her trying to hearten herself with brave
words, for women know when a part of the life of the man they love
belongs to them and when it doesn't. Many of us live for years
separated from the man we love, and know that his thoughts turn to us
continually, that time and space are a terrible, practical joke played
by destiny on mankind. There had been a moment in Ellen's life when,
whether he were thinking of her or not, there was no place in his life
where she might not go, and now the foundation of a real affection was
lacking between them, and that foundation is sincerity. In whatever
way she tried to go to him she came upon high walls and barriers of
silence, places in his spirit marked "No thoroughfare."
"I know nothing about you, Roger; [she writes] I only know that
things are going on that are hostile to me and to our love. I
suppose, that you do not tell me what it is shows you do not
trust me and that I've grasped too much and asked too much. I
fight forever with an unseen adversary. I don't even know if
this adversary has a face or if it is a set of circumstances in
your life, and I have nothing to fight with but my bleeding love
for you, and what good is that to you unless you happen to want
it? What thing is so worthless as an undesired love? Yet you
made it, Roger, and you are responsible for it. It is like
having a child and then finding it troublesome, letting it
starve to death, to create a love like mine for you and then
kill it. Women who love should never doubt. They should trust
and trust in the face of dishonor and in the face of disaster,
for distrust carries with it a bitter strength. A woman who
trusts utterly is a woman who gives herself utterly, and then,
when the blow descends from the blue, it also crushes her
utterly, perhaps it may even kill her, but she has had that
exalted peace even until the last moment. It's all the
difference between having one's beloved brought home dead, who
went out smiling, and having him die horribly inch by inch,
before one's eyes. It is better to have love killed than to have
it tortured to death, and I would rather have had you say, in
the midst of our deepest hour together, 'Ellen, I'm going away
and I shall never see you again,' than wait as I do for you to
tell me it's finished."
This was how Ellen's spirit lived, racked and torn between its grave
fears and its momentary and joyful hopes, while the day was passed in
a thousand details of a house humming with children. As Ellen said
herself, "The outer side of her life was living in sunshine and the
inner side in darkness and doubt." In town people said Ellen was
working too hard over Mr. Sylvester's brood, for she seemed at that
time so frail that through the transparent shell of her one could see
her spirit burning.
None of the family suspected that there was any misunderstanding
between them, for Roger had a very kindly generosity. He was a man
prodigal in the small acts of kindness, and was forever sending things
for the children and for Mrs. Sylvester, whom he treated like an elder
sister, teasing her and loving her. Miss Grant was the only one who
had had occasional misgivings, and I learned from my grandmother that
Roger's family were not satisfied with his "goings on," and that while
he was being a success, his mother was worried over him, which made my
grandmother remark:--
"I wish that young man had fallen from his horse and broken his neck
before ever he set eyes on Ellen Payne. Old women like us forget that
young creatures die of a broken heart now and again, and if they could
only die! The best friend I ever had, Roberta, had all the youth and
love killed in her and went on living like a dry, little automaton of
a woman, and is living yet. Instead of the things she might have
had,--children and a husband and a home,--she has just her own
dried-up body, which is like a little birch tree struck by lightning;
and the thing she thinks of most in life is the noise that the
sparrows make in her elm trees."
But I could not fear that a fate like that awaited my Ellen, for my
memory of her then is a lovely frail thing, with a hand forever held
out to Prudentia and Flavilla.
Prudentia when crossed stopped, as was her custom, to pray. She prayed
in season and out of season and for everything, and it was against her
father's principles to stop her.
"How stop a child communing with her Maker?" he would argue, to which
Ellen would reply with spirit:--
"She's only communing with her own selfishness when she says: 'Oh!
God, send the boys home so Ellen can tell me a story.'"
For several of Alec's youngsters hung around the old Scudder place a
great deal, and accompanied Ellen on her walks, as though Alec had
left her, in those boys, a bit of his protecting spirit.
CHAPTER XXII
Various important things happened that winter. The first was a deep
surprise to all of Alec's friends. He became engaged to his landlady's
daughter in the town where he went to college.
"How can you?" I asked him, "caring for Ellen?"
"Well, you see," he explained, "it's all over, isn't it, forever? No
matter what happens, Ellen is Roger's, and why should I hang around
and bay the moon? Elizabeth knows all about Ellen."
"I don't see how you can," I repeated.
And then he said:--
"Roberta, it seems a wonderful thing to me that any one should care
for me. How can I hurt a love that has been given to me? I care for
her in a different way from Ellen and there is all truth between us."
Then he laughed. "It's a funny thing; Roger loves no one, Ellen loves
Roger, I love Ellen, and Elizabeth cares for me. By doing this I'm
making the tangle less."
That is all he would tell me at the time, but, being romantic then and
still romantic, I have always thought that his chivalry and compassion
had been skillfully played upon.
With a touching belief in the generosity of woman that is possible
only in extreme youth, Alec effected a meeting between Elizabeth and
Ellen at which I was present. All three of us were painfully polite
and well behaved. Our cordiality was touching as we played to our dear
Alec as audience. "But," said Ellen to me afterwards, "isn't it
dreadful! why couldn't he have chosen any one else! She's sweet, of
course; but think, Roberta, of that doll-faced thing as Alec's wife."
While Elizabeth is reported to have said that on beholding Ellen she
could hardly keep herself from exclaiming aloud, "Why, is _that_ Ellen
Payne!"
It was in midwinter that Mrs. Byington asked Ellen to visit her. She
had often asked Ellen before, but there had been various reasons;
Roger always preferred to spend the time with Ellen in the country. It
seemed to me that in the days of her preparation it was like seeing a
person come back to life. She has written:--
"I've been so homesick for you, Roger, that I felt like those
people who die of homesickness in a far-off country. I feel as
though I had been put away in a place where there was no air to
breathe, and now I am to be let out into the sunlight once more,
since you want me to come to you."
Roger came back with her, but during the week she was away there was
no entry at all. The visit was a time of confusion and excitement.
Mrs. Byington gave her three beautiful frocks, more beautiful than
anything she had ever seen, and it seemed to Ellen that she had met
the whole city of Boston, and that she had been drowned in
compliments. They seemed to her to have only just learned of her
engagement, and she felt the weight of their curious eyes upon her,
and realized that they turned from compliments to gossip, and Mrs.
Byington, in the mean time, scarcely concealed her relief at Ellen's
presence and her pleasure at the impression Ellen had made. Miss Sarah
told these things to my grandmother, having accompanied Ellen.
Ellen made one friend, a girl younger than herself, a cousin of
Roger's, who unconsciously played a part, since she put in Ellen's
hands the answer to so many riddles, the uncertainties that so
tortured her.
"Now I know all the things that tortured me so," she wrote. "I
felt that I was in Boston for some definite purpose that I
didn't know about, and the reason Katherine showed me, as though
she had flung out a careless hand and pulled back a curtain, and
I felt as though I had listened at Roger's door. 'Aunt Lydia was
glad enough to have you come,' said she. 'Of course, we in the
family have known of Roger's engagement, even if he hasn't
talked about it outside, but since his quarrel with Mary Leckie,
he's been eager enough too.' And her little careless words gave
me a picture of all the things I didn't know, but that I had
felt, and as if to make it sure it seemed that Mrs. Byington
apologized to me when she said: 'Roger is making great strides
at his profession; it is a compensation for many things to know
that the man one loves is a man of great attainment.' It is as
though my heart had been dried up suddenly. I look back at the
time when I could cry as a time of happiness. If he should love
some one more than me, how could I blame him, but he has used me
as a pawn in the game, to hurt some one he's been unkind to,
perhaps some one who loved him, too. What attainment of his can
wipe out this cruelty? I saw the little look of triumph on his
face when he saw his friends approved of me. Now what hope have
I or where can I turn in this world? I have just one good little
word to cling to--he said to me wistfully, 'Oh! Ellen, why
wouldn't you run away with me?' They say love is blind, but no
man knows or excuses a man so little as the woman who loves
him."
She had not seen him alone when she wrote this, as Miss Grant
accompanied them home. It was on Saturday afternoon, and they went
walking on the road to meet Alec, that Ellen learned her own heart.
Roger was in a dangerous mood, kind on the surface, but underneath a
mood that said: "Take me or leave me; I am as I am." Perhaps he
regretted burning his bridges behind him; perhaps he chafed at the
restraint of the inevitable marriage. For once he was ready to draw
the hidden things to the surface. Ellen wrote:--
"I know now who I am, and I know that I have no pride in the
world and that there's no place where I stop in my love for
Roger; no matter what he does to me, I cannot leave him; no
matter what happens, I ask only to be with him. We started out
across the mountain. It was slushy underfoot and the cold, damp
air whining up from the river. All the world looked sullen, and
a sad little moon peered through a hole in the clouds. I felt
inside as sad and cold as the world seemed. Roger walked along,
his head thrown forward, looking into the dusk the way he looked
at his mother. At last he said: 'Did you have a good time in
Boston, Ellen?' And I knew he was questioning me as to what I
had seen, throwing the door open on everything; and I had gone
out with him, meaning to tell him what I thought and stand and
fall by that. I said to myself a hundred times to-day, 'There
are better things in this world than happiness,' but at his
menacing voice I could say nothing. I looked down into the abyss
of my need of him and there was no bottom to it. I felt that at
a word from me he would quarrel with me, perhaps fling me away
from him, and I didn't dare say anything. After a long silence
he said: 'You look dispirited, Ellen; you're never happy, are
you, unless some one is telling you that you're the Rose of the
World?' Tears burned behind my eyes, but I turned his challenge
into a joke. In that moment I had seen what life would mean
without him, and I saw it wouldn't be life, that I am his at his
own price--no matter what I must do, no matter what I must
suffer, if he gives me faith or unfaith. I thought I had pride,
but I know now that I ask for nothing but to stay near him at
his own terms. I know there is nothing I would not do to keep
him by my side, that the only thing intolerable to me is that he
should leave me. There's no little pride or self-respect left
for me to wrap myself in any more. I walked beside him fighting
back the tears, and it was like a deliverance to me when Alec
came striding toward me, his head up, and his hair blowing in
the wind, and I could blot out myself for a minute. When we got
home, the three children were in the cold hall. Matilda and
Flavilla were trying to make Prudentia come in, and Prudentia
was praying, as she had been for half an hour, that I would come
home. My little mother met me very shame-faced and said,
'Dearest, see what I've found,' and it was an enormous bag of
holey stockings that she had put away to mend as a surprise for
me, and had forgotten, and all the little details of life
wrapped around me sweetly, but it's hard to have every one good
to me but the one whom I love."
Love has its base places and its hideous slaveries of the spirit, but
yet there is a certain comfort in utter abandonment. Ellen was like a
man who has feared bankruptcy and who breathes again when he has at
last actually failed; she had nothing to lose any more in her own
spirit. She might lose Roger, but no other thing, for she now asked
for nothing for herself. She had reached the lowest grade where one's
soul may live, when she knows there is nothing that one wouldn't
suffer at the hands of the beloved. Pride comes first--a blessed
relief--between most women and such pain; but many women know
something of the shame akin to it when they sacrifice their sincerity
and their sense of truth rather than run the risk of a frown from the
man they love.
The whole event had been one of unspeakable defeat and horror to
Ellen; all that was fair and sweet in life to her turned black. There
was no explaining away or excusing what Roger had done; she was too
fair-minded to try. She saw the act in all its smallness, but it
didn't affect her want of him. During the next dark months she had all
the pain of one who has been utterly abandoned by her lover, and she
suffered, too, from jealousy and was ashamed of her suffering. Because
she had told herself the truth about herself always, she had not even
the disillusion that she was playing a fine and noble part. She only
knew that it was no virtue of hers, but just a necessity for her to
continue to spend herself endlessly for Roger. Her body, too, suffered
pitifully, and she seemed to me to do nothing but wait for the meager
words that Roger sent her.
Then happened in her heart that which I now know is the climax of the
whole story. I knew nothing of it except that I knew that at a certain
time Ellen grew happier.
She stopped waiting and became again master of her own soul, and the
light of her spirit shone high again. She told me nothing, for things
like this one cannot tell to another person. How can we tell another
person of the rebirth of one's own soul?
"I don't know how to tell what has happened to me, [wrote
Ellen,] but I know that I have come to the other side of
suffering. I know it is as though I had been sitting at the
bottom of a dark well, and suddenly, in the blackness of the sky
above me, I saw a star and climbed out toward it. I know I shall
lose this vision and go stumbling on, but sometimes it will come
back to me; and I shall always have the memory of it and never
again can I be in the muddy darkness in which my spirit has
lived. I sat awake all night thinking of Roger in a flooding
tenderness of love and understanding, and I realized that in all
this time I've only just been learning the first painful paths
on the road of love. Whatever one gives sorrowfully isn't love,
nor does love fear; it asks only to understand more and more. As
long as one has fear, one thinks of one's self; as long as one
is sad, one thinks of one's self. Until one has learned not to
say, 'Give, give,' one doesn't know the meaning of love. So many
sins are committed in the name of love continually and I will
commit no more. 'I love you' has been a reason even for killing
the ones whom we love, but for this one night I have had a
vision of something that transcends love of self. Let me give
and let me understand. Love must be either an equal exchange
between equals or else a complete giving by one person, so let
my giving be complete."
So it was that from a woman ashamed of her own abasement, Ellen walked
forth with head up, meeting the difficulties that life put to her and
turning them into sweetness. Roger felt this change in her. Lately all
intercourse between them had been, on Ellen's side, a silent
questioning, and on his side, silent anger at her questioning; and the
whole situation scarcely less strained than had they talked to each
other. After having gone through the painful Calvary of love, the pain
of waiting and the pain of doubt, and of trust misplaced and of
jealousy, she had come through to the other side of grief.
Her high mood had made her see life so truly that an event which
shocked the rest of us did not touch her, since she saw it in its true
relation to Roger's life, even though it again put off her wedding,
violently and cataclysmally.
He came during the winter occasionally, looking rather haggard and
gaunt and ill at ease with life, and he rested himself more and more
on her breast as if trying further and further and with deeper
confidence this unspeakable affection of hers.
Miss Sarah brought the news to our house, and she was agitated as I
never have seen her.
"You may as well stay, Roberta," she said, "because, after all, it
may be better that you shall tell Ellen. No," she contradicted
herself, "no one shall carry my burdens for me."
"What's happened to Roger?" my grandmother asked; and I sat silent and
trembling, pictures of a dead Roger in my mind.
"Roger's father has turned him off; he's been mixed up in some
disgraceful gambling scrape. He's been very wild this winter, poor
Lydia writes me,--poor heart-broken woman. He escaped actual arrest
only through his father's influence."
Little by little the whole series of events were made clear before my
horrified young eyes. Country New England in those days was a place of
rigid morals, nor were young girls taught to condone the frailties of
men, and gambling at that time had a guilty and glittering sound. All
our feelings, I think, were, how fortunate it should have occurred
before Ellen's wedding. When Miss Sarah told her, she said:--
"I know, he's written me already," but she didn't add, "And I've
written him to come to me." She wrote:--
"When I got his letter telling me what had happened and
releasing me, it seemed to me as if all the smouldering love in
me for him burst into flame, and now, in the moment when every
one's turned on him, I am triumphantly and gladly his more than
ever I've been. I feel as if I could stretch out my arms to him
in the darkness and shield him from all harm and trouble. I feel
as if I had been talking with him face to face, and that all
this had burned away all those things that have been between us
all this time. And he turned to me at this time with 'I suppose
you, too, Ellen, will want no more of me, but I wish, Ellen, I
could say good-bye to you myself instead of writing it--you've
been so true, Ellen.'"
So in the spring, two years after she first met Roger, Ellen went to
Oscar's Leap to await his coming. She loved the gallant bearing of
him, for he came no broken penitent. He was no coward before the
challenge of life; he loved the difficult and had a lovely joy in such
battles.
"They kicked me out, Ellen," he told her, "and I've kicked them all
out. Now it's me with my own two hands and my own two feet and you in
the world. Why didn't you tell me to do this before?" He loved the
feeling he had of foot-looseness. He needed just one person to hold a
hand out to him in the general wreckage of life, and his own woman had
done this for him. When he got her letter, it seemed to him as though
he had fallen to the earth only to spring up strong again.
This time Ellen's whole family was against her, even to Mr. Sylvester,
whose gentle nature always distrusted Roger. He had feared him from
the first, having that gift of judgment of character that gentle and
simple people often have. Ellen writes:--
"We had a fine scene, like that in a novel, at our house. Mr.
Sylvester forbade Roger the house, and I flung myself in Roger's
arms and said that I would never leave him. Mother cried, and I
could hear the children breathing at the keyhole and Prudentia
praying in the hall. I suppose I should take it more seriously.
I am sorry to be at odds with them, but what difference does it
make to me, after all? I am glad just that Roger is back. If I
could go with him now out into the world, I would put my hand in
his and go, but the last thing he needs at this moment is a
wife, and the first thing of all he needs is me. Now all my days
of waiting have been paid for, now all my nights of doubt. If
after this he should turn from me and love me no more, I should
have had this and it would have paid for everything in my life.
I can't take Mr. Sylvester's and my mother's attitude seriously,
because I know, as if I could read the future, that Roger will
go out in the world and come back and be forgiven. I am wrong to
be almost glad that it has happened, but it has made it possible
for me to show him my heart, my poor bleeding heart, that has
been silent for so long."
Roger found work in a neighboring village and they met at the house of
Ellen's old friend, the peddler, or he took Ellen with him. During
this time Roger flung from him again all of his life. He was one whom
the confessional would have served well, for he could purge himself
from all blame by telling everything and by passing to the innocent
the burden of all his weaknesses. Now that life made some demand on
him, the best of him shone out.
There was, to be sure, the making of a fine family scandal when it was
discovered that Ellen was meeting Roger, but Ellen refused to quarrel;
she refused to defend herself or do anything but laugh; and when I,
rather scandalized at the lightness with which she took this whole
situation, pointed out that her aunt was sulking and that her mother
and Mr. Sylvester were sad, she replied with levity: "They'll get over
it." During the long winter of silence and of forging her spirit into
this flaming thing it now was, she had learned that lesson which is so
difficult for youth, and that is that all things pass and that
to-morrow brings peace to the bruised heart.
Her prophecy concerning Roger came to pass. After the weeks spent with
her he went West, made friends with a friend of his father,--who had a
lighter attitude toward Roger's frailties, having had no opportunity
to be tired out by them,--did well in pleading some spectacular
cases, and came back, not the prodigal son, but triumphantly and
gladly; then after his year of self-denial he plunged deeply into all
sorts of amusements.
CHAPTER XXIII
Ellen, during his absence, had kept closer and closer to her high
mood. She knew that certain sorts of happiness were not for her with
Roger, and that certain things he did and his moments of neglect and
forgetfulness no longer wounded her to death. A month before her
marriage she went to Boston again to buy her best things. Mrs.
Sylvester had had a small legacy left her, and insisted that it must
go to Ellen's trousseau. I accompanied Mrs. Sylvester and Ellen. Roger
was frankly relieved in his mind to have Ellen in Boston and the day
of his wedding at last in sight.
"There was never a man," he told me, "looked forward to his wedding
with greater eagerness. I'm through with philandering, Roberta. No one
knows more than I what Ellen has stood for my sake."
I knew he was referring to a mild flirtation gossip concerning him
which had come to Ellen and to me.
It seemed as if now nothing could come in their way and as if all was
clear before them. Almost every detail was provided for when Ellen's
prayer that she had prayed day by day and day by day--"Give me
understanding and insight"--received its supreme answer.
It was Roger's temperament, and Ellen understood this, to fill the
vacant places in his life with small love-affairs. At first she had
suffered a certain jealousy and afterwards humiliation, and then
dismissed it all as negligible, never thinking of it, as was natural,
from the other woman's point of view. This last vague affair had been
with a young girl visiting from the South, who hadn't known Roger was
engaged, as he supposed she had. I noticed in the different places
where we went a little, frail figure with a pretty, strained face,
with eyes continually and irritatingly on Roger. His mother had said
of him, "He's not one who kisses and tells, but one who kisses and
runs"; and he was avoiding her with his instinctive avoidance of the
disagreeable. She was a foolish, suffering girl, like Ellen without
pride, and even lacking the guard of Ellen's reserve, haunting what
she had thought had been her love for the balm of a single word which,
though she had lost him, would make his memory sweet to her.
We were at a great party given by one of Roger's relatives, in Ellen's
honor, two dazzled, little country Cinderellas, and for a moment had
drawn ourselves apart to a recess of the big hall, and we saw Roger
looking for us. The young girl hurrying across ran almost into his
arms, and as they stood she cried out, in a little flowing voice,
"Roger." His face went white with anger and set itself into the lines
that since then have been known as "his sentencing face." He didn't
speak, but looked at her with quiet, cruel, and scornful eyes. There
was silence between them, and she tortured the long white gloves that
she held in her nervous hands, looking so frail that a breath might
have blown her away.
"I've been trying to speak to you."
"I think we said all that was necessary before," he told her with the
same cold, white scorn. He had been stopped in his search for what he
wanted, and here was being made a scene that he had tried to avoid.
"I've been trying not to speak to you," he said very quietly, "because
I had nothing to say to you that could please you."
Then tormented out of herself, she cried out:
"Roger, was there no reality of any friendship between us? Were you
engaged all the time that I've known you?"
"There's been nothing between us. What should there be? Just a
moonshine of words," he answered her. "I've been engaged three years.
Do you wish anything else?"
She didn't answer, but went away, a lonely, little, fragile figure,
shivering as though struck with a great cold. He had had no moment of
compassion; his instinct had been to crush her with as little pity as
he would an annoying fly. In his ruthlessness he took even the past
from her, not even leaving her the shadow of her romance for comfort.
Ellen and I had both seen her wilt before him and the light in her
eyes go out, and I felt Ellen's hand shaking in mine as the girl had
shivered, and she whispered in my ear:--
"There, but for the grace of God, goes Ellen Payne."
Here was her prayer granted and understanding was given her. The final
tragedy is not to be unloved, but to find out that one has loved
nothing;--that within the shell of the body there is nothing to which
we can give ourselves;--to have been cursed with the love of the
shallow-hearted; and there is a deep torment, beyond the loss of
death, which goes with the unknitting of two souls knit close
together, strand by strand. Ellen could stand any cruelty that he gave
to her and condone it, but she shivered back from this relentlessness
that she had seen in Roger. As he came to her she said to him:--
"I heard you, Roger."
His face was still set in anger.
"I gave her no cause," he exclaimed angrily, "nothing but a little
moonshine talk. When we're married I shan't be subjected to things
like that."
"We're not going to be married," said Ellen.
CHAPTER XXIV
During all my life long I have occasionally had, in times of stress, a
recurrence of the spiritual nausea which I felt that night. When we
drove home in the closed carriage Mrs. Sylvester was prattling like a
girl about the beautiful party. Indeed, she had enjoyed the outward
circumstance of things almost more than Ellen and myself, and Roger,
making light talk with her, sat next to Ellen,--light talk that had
its undercurrent of meaning that Ellen and I understood. The cab
lurched noisily over the cobblestones, with which all Boston was paved
in those days, so that Roger and Mrs. Sylvester had to raise their
voices above the din. It was raining, and the yellow flare of the
street-corner lamps was reflected in pools of eddying light from the
damp pavements.
It seemed to me that we went on and on forever in this torment of
noise and talk, and the smell of the wet spring night conflicted with
the smell of the stuffy upholstery, and I suffered as though I was
witnessing the physical pain of a tortured child. It seemed to me that
the torment of the ceaseless, agonizing prattle of Ellen's little
mother, accompanied by the drunken lurch of the lumbering cab, would
never stop, for all the time I knew that Ellen's heart was breaking,
and that the only thing that life could give her at that moment was
darkness and rest. I knew this was the end as far as she and Roger
were concerned.
We had our room together, and I felt like a stranger in a house of
mourning. I knew that there was no comfort that I could give her at
all. She hadn't even tears with which to refresh herself, and all she
said to me was: "Roberta, I've been stripped bare of leaves to-night."
This was a true enough picture of her. She had been a blooming flower,
and now it was as if the frost of some inexorable and unseen winter
had touched her and she was bare of leaves and blossoms.
I suppose I was the only one among all those who loved her who did not
urge Ellen to reflect on her decision. There was so little to tell
when it came to it. Ellen's reason was so little one of the usual
causes for which an engagement may be dissolved, with the approval of
a girl's elders. Here was Ellen who had stood by Roger gayly, without
even, apparently, a proper understanding of his dissipation; who had
endured from him neglect, who had learned to school herself so that
she was able to ignore his temperamental interests in other women;
she, who had been without any end in her affections, gave the
appearance to the outside world of having suddenly, for no reason,
come to an end of her love.
In our town there was scant belief that Ellen had jilted Roger. Why do
such a thing? "Aren't they all as poor as church mice, and isn't Roger
as likely a young man as one would wish to see?" They clamored around
me inquisitively.
There is no time when the human race shows itself in such beauty and
in such heartless sordidness as in the time of grief. Then it is that
the world we know turns strange faces upon us, and mean, low-lived men
will show the gentle chivalry that one would expect only of angels,
and delicate women, of chaste and gracious lives, will develop, before
one's eyes, hideous and ghoulish curiosity. Any one who has been
through the death of those whom they love knows this, and still more
it is true in the other disasters of life, where there is no
ceremonial of grief. Death has dignity. Its august finality stops many
a wagging tongue and many an unkind word. But oh, the other griefs of
the spirit! One is shielded by no mourning; there is no protecting
tradition to fold its arms about one; and one's poor, shivering soul
is left naked on the highway, afraid of the heartless curiosity of
prying eyes.
The curious world has no mercy for a girl jilted by her lover. There
is no sanctity to all this suffering, no privacy allowable, not a
day's respite from the inquisitive natures and prattling tongues. One
must count one's self very fortunate if one is allowed to care for the
most bleeding of one's wounds with a certain degree of decent privacy.
And in our little town privacy was what was impossible for Ellen. I
was for a while the center of the storm, for, to Roger, Ellen had been
inexplicable; he had not been able to believe what had happened and
came storming down after us.
"I can't see him," Ellen told me. "There's no place anywhere in him to
explain anything. You'll see when you try and talk to him."
I begged her, out of kindness, to see him once because he was terribly
torn by what had happened. He told me that the sure foundations of
life had rocked under his feet, and when I repeated this to Ellen, she
shook her head.
"It's not that,--he can't bear that what's been so his creature should
defy him. He's never had life say no to him before." She said this
without bitterness, and more as an older woman might of a boy she has
brought up.
"Why won't you see him," I pleaded with her, "just for one moment?"
"I don't dare to," she told me. "Every habit I have says yes to him;
every strand of my body cries out to him; it's as if he had never been
and I had died; and yet our bodies go on living and caring for each
other. He doesn't need me any more than he needs any one else. He
needs no person, Roberta. Love and encouragement and companionship:
the world is full of it for him. Yet I need him and shall need him
always, to the end of my days."
Often it is that in the disintegration of a deep and long-lived
affection, it is the instinct of the body to shiver away first, before
the mind knows what has happened, but it is more dangerous when, in
the full splendor of love, the blow has fallen and instinct still
clamors for the beloved's companionship.
But she wasn't to be spared seeing him. They met by chance upon the
street. I was with Ellen, and he began at once babbling forth the
excuses he had said over and over to me. Because Ellen said there was
no place in him to tell him what it was all about, he persisted in
thinking that she had been outraged by his trifling again, with their
affection, at the eleventh hour.
At last he went away, but he had the satisfaction of feeling that he
had played the noble part. In the light of Ellen's actions, what he
considered his own small unfaiths, appeared as nothing.
"Now you are gone [she wrote] I would call you back if I could,
and I have to remember and say to myself that there is no one to
call back. There is nothing in you that would hear the things
that I wish to say to you, and yet you go on living and yet I
must love you; and yet, forever and ever in the night, my heart
goes out to you; and yet, when I walk along, I feel the touch of
your hand, as though it were placed in mine. But the you that
meant life to me never was, or died, perhaps, with your boyhood.
He was there a little while and smiled at me, and all the time
the real you was growing large and strong and killing that other
whom I loved. But I have bound my life up in you, so what can I
do, and where will I find comfort? I can have scarcely the
comfort of a memory, for I have loved only a ghost in you. I
envy those sad and haggard girls who have been deserted by their
lovers. I envy wives who have been left with little children to
care for, for they, at least, have had reality; they have been
able to give all of themselves, and what they have known has
been real. I wonder if I shall always have to bleed for you,
drop by drop, and that while I bleed, my strength also goes?
Everything talks to me of you. My hand stretches out for a pen
and I must write to you, though you aren't, and yet you are
dearer to me than all the world besides. Where did the sweet
soul of you go that I loved so well, and how can I live in a
world where such things happen? I go out upon the street and
hear people walking past and children playing and think with
surprise, 'Why, there are happy people in the world!'"
CHAPTER XXV
If the world has little pity for a jilted girl, how shall it have much
understanding for any one who suffers after having voluntarily sent
her lover away, especially when it was her obvious duty to her family
to marry? So her world was not very kind to Ellen at a moment when she
most needed their kindness. We do not often understand the sicknesses
of the spirit; now we mete out to them the criminal indulgence that a
foolish woman does to a wayward child, and now we treat them with
bruising harshness.
During the summer matters were not so bad, because every one rather
expected that Ellen would come to herself. My grandmother used to
question me seriously if I were encouraging Ellen.
Even Mr. and Mrs. Sylvester, most unworldly people,--more unworldly, I
think, than any one I have ever known,--had seen the children
"enjoying advantages" through Ellen, for Ellen and Roger had planned
a thousand things.
Matilda had wept openly when Ellen had returned, and said:--
"Oh, Ellen, Ellen! Now that you're not going to be married, I suppose
I shall never visit you and study music in Boston, and, Ellen, I had
so make-believed it in my heart."
During the summer there was little written in her journal except
letters to Roger, which stopped abruptly with her determination to get
over the aching want which she had for him. With the coming of winter
there settled down over Ellen a limitless depression. She was very
gentle, but she seemed lost in a mist of sadness. I cannot describe to
what extent her spirit was dimmed. It seemed as though a strange,
withering age had crept over her before her time. People noticed it,
and word went abroad that Ellen Payne was "in a decline," which was a
word for almost everything that ailed one in those days, short of a
broken leg. I remember her walking around at that time with poses of a
very tired child, for all the hollow under her eyes and the troubled
lines in her forehead. She would let her arms swing before her like a
little girl that had outgrown her strength, and throw herself down
into chairs as though she had held herself on her feet to the utmost
limits of her endurance.
I ventured to ask her at last: "What's the matter, Ellen?" For we had
avoided, by common consent, talking of anything that might be
wounding, and had put the past out of sight.
She looked at me with eyes that had the hurt look of a little girl.
"I'll tell you what's the matter," she told me in answer. "I know well
enough what's the matter. There's no meaning to life any more at all.
The world goes on over there"--she waved her hand ever so
slightly--"and I'm here on the outside, and what they do doesn't mean
anything at all, Roberta. If life goes on like this, maybe I'll be
lucky enough to die, and the worst of it is that the hope of dying is
keeping me alive. I am afraid, Roberta, that when one has anything to
live for, even if it's dying, that one keeps on living. What it really
means," she added, "is that I've lost God, for I can't pray any more."
Since then I've known a great many women in mortal pain, and I truly
believe that it is the nearness of death that keeps many a suffering
soul alive. They are forever heartening themselves by looking through
the black, mysterious door, where there is an end to pain and where
one need not stay famished any more at life's feast. Death walks
consolingly so close; death is so easy and calls compassionately to
these forsaken ones, saying, "Out here is rest--so near; if it gets
much worse, you can come to me." Wherever one looks there is the
consoling possibility of death, and since death is so near and so
easy, people, who have forgotten for a while the reason for living, go
on just the same. For who, in the winter of the spirit, can again
believe in spring?
At this time even the children seemed to turn away from Ellen and give
her nothing. She had always meant laughter and gayety and the
heightening of the lives of all of us around her, and Alec and I were
the only two who remained faithful to her in this moment of
desolation, because the others did not see Ellen in this docile,
lifeless soul, who went around still called by the name of Ellen
Payne; and this withdrawal of human sympathy was as unconscious as it
was wounding. My sweet old grandmother, who had loved Ellen so,
combined with old Mrs. Butler, whose hair Ellen had done for
years,--since Alec had grown up,--would nod their heads together and
say that Ellen Payne ought to stop those mopish ways and use more
backbone.
That winter Ellen's mother was ailing and coughed badly also, and for
the first time in her life was a little querulous and complaining. I
ignored as much as I could Ellen's ill feelings, as she wished me to
do, but I remember this tragic winter well. There were a very few
entries in her journal, but not in this or in any other crisis of her
life had she failed to clarify her mind by the written word. I find
this:--
"I try as hard as I can to attach myself to the duties that
crowd around me. Sometimes it just seems to me that I am going
to succeed in being interested and then I am not. I think it
must be like this in those strange northern countries, where
the glow of dawn comes on the horizon, and, starved for light,
one says, 'Here is the dawn'; and even as one speaks the light
pales and the dreadful twilight thickens around one."
Towards spring--one of those soppy, wet springs, when it seems as
though the green would never come--I could stand the silence no
longer, and some word or look of hers that betrayed to me the desolate
abasement of her spirit made me cry out:--
"Ellen, isn't there anything on earth that you want?"
"I think I would like to see Alec," she answered.
It seemed to me a foolish wish, for Alec was in his first school and
far away, and his visits to us had been spasmodic and brief, and
shared, of course, with Elizabeth Greenough, though during the summer
he had been home and spent a good deal of time with Ellen, and she had
accepted his kindness as she always had, very much as the air one
breathes, or as she accepted my friendship--as one of the certain
things among the deep uncertainties of life.
I wrote to Alec what Ellen had said, without a hope in the world that
he could come. It seemed the sort of thing that only love
accomplishes, and he had seemed to me perfectly contented with his
engagement, making his visits to the home of his young lady with the
regularity of a lover, or of a clock. But almost sooner than seemed
possible he came. When Ellen saw him tears came to her eyes. For it is
just at these moments, when one is thirsting for help and sympathy,
that we seem to lose the way to the hearts of others, and this is
natural enough, for there is a terrible egotism in certain phases of
grief. The eyes of the spirit are turned inward and we cease to give,
and after a while, as with Ellen, grief becomes a habit and we slip
along smoothly enough in the deepening and dolorous grooves of sorrow.
It is easier to do this where the outside life is monotonous, and to
us, in our little town, our own point of view and our own spirits
furnished whatever diversity there was. One day went along after
another and one never met a new face on the street, and it was with a
true instinct for help that Ellen cried out:--
"I envy men who can go out in the world and forget. It must be easier
to forget among those who have never seen your face or ever heard what
has happened to you, and here everything brings me back to the
thoughts that I try in so futile a fashion to put out of my mind."
Alec's unexpected arrival had been the only thing that had happened
through the long winter and spring. I waited with anxiety for the end
of their interview.
"Well," I asked Alec, "how did you find her?"
And he answered:--
"She just wants to know how one manages to live when the meaning of
life is dead and I told her that that wasn't what she needed, but that
she needed to go and search for the meaning of life, and you know,
Roberta, a person who really seeks for that can always find it. I've a
plan that I'm going to try. Ellen has promised to do everything I tell
her, and keep her to it, even if it seems childish to you."
A day or two after Alec left, there knocked at the Sylvesters' back
door a sturdy boy of twelve; a shock of wild black hair blew across
his forehead, and funny, humorous blue eyes gleamed under straight
black brows. For the rest, he was freckled past belief. As Ellen
opened the door for him, he choked in a spasm of embarrassment, then
the words came, with a rush. He had a deep voice for his age.
"I've come to git Ellen Payne," he boomed.
When Ellen, who had opened the door for him, said:--
"Why, I'm Ellen Payne and what do you want?" he flushed furiously and
muttered:--
"He said you was a girl."
"Well," responded Ellen, with more briskness than she had shown for
some time, "I'm a girl."
"No," replied the boy, "you're a grown-up woman, tall 's ever you'll
be."
"Did you say you had come to get me?" suggested Ellen.
"He said you was to come with me."
"What are we going to do?" asked Ellen.
"Git mayflowers in a place you don't know," said the boy.
"There's no such place," said Ellen. "I know every cranny of this
place in my sleep."
"Well, I know it as if I'd _made it_," retorted the boy.
By the time Ellen came back ready to walk, a wave of shyness engulfed
the boy; he was as uncommunicative as the Pyramids. He was deeply
embarrassed by his companion, but he forgot now and then enough to go
ahead, shouting his joy at the return of spring, and then his gayety
would fall as a flag at half-mast when he saw Ellen after him. She
came home wet and very tired, to listen to the prophecy of her Aunt
Sarah that "no good would come of this weltering around in the wet,
and that it was just like one of Alec's unpractical thoughts."
While Miss Sarah loved Alec, his character annoyed her, winding as it
did around a devious road and springing upon you new view-points, as a
supposedly quiet road might discover unexpected and romantic vistas of
country. Especially his attitude toward the boys was annoying to those
who found difficulty in having wood-piles replenished and the "chores"
done.
"You'd think boys were something," my grandmother used to explain
with some heat, "besides trying, rascally, little scallywags; but the
older you grow, Roberta, the more you'll find truth in what I say, and
that is, that boys were put in this world by the Lord for women to
exercise their patience over."
Tyke Bascom didn't come again for two days. This time Ellen penetrated
through the shyness enough to find that he was a boy who lived over
the mountain-road in a little clearing, called Foster's Corners, which
had a sawmill and four houses.
"That's a long ways," said Ellen.
"Not so long when you're used to it," he replied. "It might be long
for a woman."
In his walks over the mountain, Alec had always stopped at the house
and, being fatal to small boys, Tyke had enrolled in the company of
Alec's friends. All that Tyke knew, it turned out, he had been taught
by Alec, as he sat there resting on his way home.
For the next two weeks Tyke Bascom came for Ellen, but irregularly.
Sometimes he would come each day, for two or three days, and once
three days went past, three days when Ellen watched for him. It had
been a long time since she had been out in the open air; it had been a
long time since she had gone back to the places she had known as a
little girl, when she was in that deep and almost mystic communion
with all life and growth around her, and when the mountain and the
river, and the small mountain streams were like personalities to her.
Only the very pure in heart and children have this intimate sense of
oneness with the world, and Ellen and Alec had lain for hours, under
cover, and watched to see a fox sneak past. They knew a marsh where
the blue heron lived, and when she was little, Ellen had talked about
the birds, squirrels, and chipmunks as intimately as though they were
people.
Now all this forgotten lore came back to her from out-of-the-way
places in her mind. When I was a girl, it was only too easy for people
to forget such things, for in my day, no sooner did one grow up than
the customs of young ladyhood demanded that one should spend most of
one's time in the house. Even skating was denied women, and Ellen's
love of the outdoors met with a steady stream of disapproval from
every one, including Roger. The only people who had not frowned on her
were her mother and Mr. Sylvester, who held the heretical theory that
it was good even for a woman to know the works of the Lord, even
though a close and intimate knowledge was bad for smoothness of hair
and neatness of frock.
More than that, there was a desire awakened in Ellen's mind, of
conquering this wild and morose child, who had given his heart so
unreservedly to Alec.
She asked him,--
"Do you like going out with me, Tyke?"
"No 'm," he said, "not especially."
"But"--she told him--"you don't need to come if you don't want to."
He flushed all over and said, "I didn't mean that. Don't you see, Alec
told me to, so I don't mind at all, 'cause it's for him."
"Now I realize," she wrote, "that whenever I've sat down anywhere
children have always come around me. Until the last year or two I've
known all the little boys; there's never been a time when some of
Alec's youngsters haven't been perched in our yard, and now comes
along this boy who takes me out with him as he would carry a package
for Alec."
There was nothing for it, she must make him her own. I think it was
the first desire she had had in a year's time, except the desire for
the ultimate peace. She wooed him first out of his shyness, and as I
would see them talking together I would see all the mannerisms of the
Ellen I had known, of whom Aunt Sarah said, "She seemed about to burst
into flame." All her forgotten shy guiles that had led her before into
the inaccessible hearts of boys woke up one by one. I don't know how
far she went back on the road to childhood, in these rambles, or how
much she remembered of the golden time when Alec and she played truant
together by the hills and brooks.
One day Tyke appeared with this command:
"You got to come up to my house, he says; ma needs help, she's sick.
He sent you this."
He gave her a note from Alec which read:--
"Dear Ellen: It was always easier for you to do housework out of your
house than in."
That was all.
"Ma's sick; she's got a new baby."
So every day Ellen trudged over the mountain-road and back. No sooner
was Mrs. Bascom beginning to be up and around again, and Ellen still
going to see her and the baby, than Mrs. Sylvester hurt her foot a
little and was kept in her chair, so more than ever fell to Ellen. She
wrote:--
"It is as though I had been walking down a long corridor and
suddenly had opened a door into the light; when I came in sight
of our house to-night and thought of all the people who can be
happier because of me, tears of happiness came to my eyes, and I
should have been glad if I could have gone down on my knees
there and thanked God that I was of use in the world to those
whom I love. All the selfish winter of my heart melted and my
mind went out to my friend who helped me to find myself and to
bring me home again. I suppose this is the road people have to
travel to learn the meaning of life. You hear a bird sing by the
road and you stop to listen, and by and by your heart starts
beating again."
CHAPTER XXVI
When Alec came back in the early summer, he told me he was to stay for
the year. The academy had offered him a place in it, and so had
another school and he had chosen the academy.
"Isn't the other place better?" I asked him.
He nodded.
"A little better; the experience is as good here."
We did not need to discuss why it was he had stayed. I was a good
enough friend of his to be able to ask:--
"Is it fair to Elizabeth?"
"Roberta," he said, "I'm going to give my whole life to Elizabeth as
long as it is of use to her, but I have a right to give a year of it
partly to Ellen when she needs me." For his insight into Ellen had
told him that she needed a hand out to her; during the moments of
doubt and moments of return to the dead center in which she had lived
so long.
"Seeing Ellen, and seeing her free, won't you care more for her than
you ought?" I objected.
"I'll have to get over it if I do. I've thought it out, Roberta.
Nothing that I give Ellen takes away from what I give Elizabeth. I
care for her just as much as I always did, and I've always cared for
Ellen the same."
"Oh, Alec!" I cried, "why does the world have to be so at
cross-purposes? Why aren't you free, and why can't you make Ellen care
for you? Are you sure that Elizabeth cares for you?"
"It's not for me to think things like that at all, Roberta," he
answered. "It would be a poor sort of love I'd bring to Ellen,
wouldn't it? I can't take kindness from Elizabeth and wrap myself in
the cloak of her sympathy when I need it and throw it away when the
sun comes out, even had the unimaginable happened, and Ellen cared for
me,--which she won't. Some faiths one has to keep with one's self."
As for Ellen, she accepted Alec's companionship as a matter of course.
She had no doubts at all about Alec's devotion to Elizabeth, for
Elizabeth was one who compelled sweetness when one spoke of her. She
was a little person, appealing and soft, and the sort of woman who
attends to the physical wants of the man she loves so kindly that this
devotion is almost spiritual. It never occurred to Ellen that she
still held any place in Alec's heart or that his early affection for
her had been anything more than a boyish devotion he had outgrown for
a real love. I think through the autumn and long winter, they both
lived in the radiance of their affection for one another; they two
were in the light together and the past and future were shut out.
Perhaps they were better friends that they were not lovers. They both
lived like children in the present, neither one looking into the
future, when Alec should no longer be hers, but another woman's.
"It's good [she wrote] to have something that lasts in one's
life. Never for a moment, in all that I've lived through, has my
affection faltered for Alec, nor his for me. We have each of us
had more absorbing loves than each other, but this steady little
flame remains unquenched."
I think in their mutual satisfaction and the consciousness of their
own virtue, they did not realize, as high-minded people often do, how
this flowering friendship might affect a smaller nature. Elizabeth
grew restless under it, and Miss Sarah found out from gossiping people
that Elizabeth had not scrupled to do what was little short of spying
on Alec.
"I hope," she said to Ellen, "that you're worldly wise enough not to
make trouble. Of course, we know that Alec might as well be your
brother, but a young woman in love can't be expected to realize it."
Alec was supremely unaware of any discontent on Elizabeth's part; he
went over to see her as regularly as he had come home while he was in
college, and whatever she felt she kept to herself. I fancy that Alec,
whimsical and humorous, large-hearted and kind, would have been hard
to approach with a small jealousy. Once in the light of his smile it
would have withered up.
It was after more and more of this talk had come to Ellen that I find,
for the first time, in her journal a note of emotion about Alec.
"When I hear them tell all the little things she does against
you, Alec, my heart weeps, for if she's like that, I must watch
you start out on a road of long disillusionment. It's so hard to
sit aside and watch sadness and even disgust grow in your eyes,
that my heart is heavy, and with unshed tears. What will happen
to you whose goodness has come out to meet the goodness in me
all your life? Either your own goodness will burn up the you
that loves her, or the you that loves her will eat and corrode
the you I love. I hope for you the high unhappiness and the sad
and hard-gained peace rather than the contented compromise with
the little, mean virtues that act as anodynes. Whatever happens
to the outward aspect of your life, I wish for you that your
spirit may walk free; but oh! I shan't be there to help you in
the hard places, I shan't be able to hold out my hand to you as
yours has been held out to me."
It was only when she realized that Alec was going out into a life
fraught with difficulties for him, since he loved a woman who had it
in her power to hurt him so, that Ellen looked at the future, empty
of her friend. From this time her journal is full of Elizabeth. From a
woman to be taken for granted, some one sweet whom Alec loved, she
became a sinister menace. In her little soft person she carried the
unhappiness of what had been sweetest in Ellen's life.
CHAPTER XXVII
There came a beautiful spring month where she put the thought of the
future from her, for Elizabeth was away on a visit and Ellen could
forget her. Alec might have gone to his very wedding-day without Ellen
knowing her very own mind and realizing that the dear and long-tested
affection had changed its name; and only after he left her would she
have wept at the grief of her heart, and, indeed, to me, a close
observer, it did not seem to change its complexion at all, and not
until the day of Alec's accident was I, a constant third in their
party, conscious of any change in them.
You know how disaster fills the air of a little town as a spiritual
thunderclap. I remember to this day the sinister feeling I had that
something was wrong when I saw two women meet two others in front of
my house and stop, talking and gesticulating. I remember the flash
that went over me was, "I wonder what's happened"; and then a patter
of bare feet and a little flying figure of a lad dashed past, and
they would have stopped him, but he made a wild circle around them,
crying as he went:--
"Alec Yorke's dead!"
Then I went out and became one of the gesticulating women. Then came
the doctor driving from the school; he was waylaid up the street, and
we scurried along, young and old, to hear what had happened. It seemed
there had been some sort of a boy's prank with some gunpowder, and
Alec, pulling away a boy, had been hurt. No, he wasn't dead, but there
was a question of his eyesight; one couldn't tell how badly injured he
was until the next day. That was all there was to tell. He was resting
quietly. Then there was the rattle of wheels, and I saw Ellen driving
down the street. She came straight toward us, but she was so drowned
in the dolorous contemplation of what had happened that I am sure she
did not see us, though at the sight of her face we all turned silent
and stared at her; and the doctor dropped an illuminating word:--
"She's going to get Alec's young lady. Coming to he was rambling on
about her, and"--he hesitated--"if the worst should happen it would
be a comfort to have her there."
But I, who knew Ellen so well, knew at the sight of her face what it
was that had happened to her, and an impulse so deep in me that the
words sprang to my lips involuntarily made me cry out, "Ellen, stop.
I'm going with you."
She obeyed me mechanically, but she seemed almost unconscious of me as
I got in beside her. It was one of those days in spring when the world
seems sodden with tears; when every tree drips all the day long. I
remember to this day how I felt as I sat there by Ellen's side,
fighting back tears until I was sick, for the hopeless tragic tangle
of life had overwhelmed me. I wanted to cry with the oblivion of grief
that unhappily one seldom knows this side of childhood. It seemed to
me that some hidden well of sorrow had been opened from which the
tears must gush forth unquenchable. And yet I must not cry, since
Ellen sat there like something turned into stone. It was an irony too
cruel to be borne that she should drive over this road to bring this
alien Elizabeth to Alec.
I knew, as though she had herself told me so, that all life could
give her no such sweetness as the right to comfort Alec in his moment
of trial, and that life had never given her anything harder than to go
seeking another woman to fill the place that she would have been glad
to fill herself. And with the same clearness of vision I knew that it
was Ellen for whom Alec had called. At the moment of his disaster the
old comfortable myth of friendship had ceased, and then Ellen had
known that for her Alec was the very foundation of life, woven into
its fabric, and that he had always been there. And this knowledge had
come so flooding, so overwhelming that it drowned her and with it came
the necessity of seeking a stranger for him.
The interminable wet and weeping road over the mountain swarmed with
memories of Alec; with the ghosts of the Alec and ourselves of bygone
days. It was up this road that we had walked to meet him through that
long and difficult winter, and the really glad spots of life were his
home-coming. What did "over the mountain" mean, anyway, but Alec? And
yet here we were going upon this errand; nor could I have opened my
lips to say a word against it, even though I was innerly certain it
was Ellen, and not Elizabeth, Alec wanted, for I was bound down by the
fierce and narrow-minded code which decreed that, while a woman might
refuse a marriage with a man, a man must go through to the bitter end.
I had permitted myself one protest and repented of it. As we go on we
will throw away all the false loyalties that have crucified so many of
us.
Both Ellen and myself faced this as though it was as inevitable as
death itself. I do not know how fully she realized what she was doing;
I do not know, but I cannot believe that deep down in her heart she
thought that Alec didn't care for her. But she had played the game of
friendship with Alec too long and too well to think that he gave her
anything else but friendship. So we drove, silent, over our beloved
road and down the other side of the mountain into the village street
whose elms dripped unceasingly, and up to Elizabeth's white,
commonplace little house.
There was an added irony to it all in the way she received us in her
parlor. She was the type of girl who preserves under all
circumstances the little punctilios of life. She didn't permit
herself the indiscretion of one surprised look at the sight of our
strained faces and our arrival in the midst of a slow-falling,
implacable spring rain. It was impossible not to avoid the polite
overtures of an ordinary call. If we had come on an important errand
it was plain that we should have to make the opening for the telling
of that errand ourselves. She was very polite to us, but her
politeness hid a mild resentment, for we had represented in life all
of Alec that she had never been able to possess; while to us
Elizabeth, so pretty in her commonplace way, so decorous, represented
the menace of Alec's happiness.
For a moment we bandied polite phrases, or rather Elizabeth and I did,
while Ellen sat inert and aloof as she had on the drive over, until
all of a sudden she seemed to awaken in a gush of pity for Alec and
for Elizabeth. She swept all the little politenesses out of the way
with one gesture.
"Elizabeth," said she, "you must put on your things and come with us.
Alec's been hurt. His eyesight is perhaps in danger."
There was something deeply sweet in the way she spoke and deeply
sweet in the look she gave Elizabeth, and at her complete sincerity
and goodness Elizabeth also dropped the politenesses that she was
using as a shield against us. The tears that were so easy for her
started to her eyes.
"Oh, Ellen!" she cried; "oh, poor Alec!"
"We'd better go, I think, Elizabeth," said Ellen gently.
"I can't go," Elizabeth answered; "I can't go with you, Ellen."
And to the amazed question of our looks: "I can't go because I care
for some one else," she told us. "I'd have written to him before," she
went on, "but I thought I'd let him wait. He'd let me wait long
enough." There was neither spite nor bitterness in her tone as she
said this. I think the very best of her came forward to meet us in
this moment. At the root of her narrow little nature was a certain
childlike candor. "I cared for him too long without having him ever
care. I tried to be real patient, but I got tired after a while,
Ellen, and it seems good to me to have the whole heart of a man." And
then a light whiff of anger flamed up in her. "Why did you come for me
anyhow, Ellen Payne," she cried, "when he might need you? You knew all
the time it was you he cared for; you knew all the time it was you he
wants! Now hurry, hurry back."
The conventionalities had fallen from her, and for the first and last
time we saw the Elizabeth for whom Alec had cared.
With this godspeed we started on our long drive back, I full of
disquieting fears, full of anguish concerning Alec; Ellen still and
withdrawn. After a while the strain of silence told on me and the
words forced themselves from my lips: "Oh, I can't bear to think of
its happening. I can't bear to think of having his life hurt this
way."
As if recalled from a very far distance, Ellen turned her head to me.
"It can't happen, Roberta," said she slowly.
I looked at her curiously. There was just enough light for me to see
the outline of her face, and I felt as if she had pulled herself back
by some great effort to answer me and that her spirit had been
somewhere with Alec, free for the first time. And I felt for the rest
of the ride as if in some obscure way he were near us; that Ellen
could call to him through the dark.
His mother opened the door for us.
"I'm glad you've come," she said with her profound simplicity. "He's
wanted you all his life, Ellen Payne."
So we three women sat ourselves down for the night watch to learn what
the morning would bring. Alec's mother sat there, her hands folded,
solid as a rock, impassive as fate. She had borne a great deal in her
life and had grown strong with it, and whatever happened she would be
there to help him. All through my life I shall remember Ellen's face
as it was through that long night, for it was the face of one who
defies death and disaster; and what I mean only those who have brooded
guardingly over the lives of those whom they love will understand. For
there comes a moment in the lives of most women and some men when they
seem to put their spirits, a tangible thing, between death and
disaster and the beloved.
And one more thing I shall remember forever was Alec's voice, as he
cried out in his sleep, "Ellen," and again, "Ellen," as though, sunk
fathoms deep in pain, he still called for her and his unconscious body
groped for her in the darkness. So we sat and waited through the
night, until the blessed word came to us at last that all was well
with him.
There was only one more entry in the journal and then blank leaves,
for I suppose she began another book that belonged to herself and Alec
alone. It told of the accident and went on:--
"I felt as if I had been waiting for this one moment all my
life; as if all I had ever been and could hope to be
concentrated itself in those long hours; as though the arms of
my spirit folded themselves around him as I prayed, and as I
prayed I knew that my prayer had been answered. I was as certain
that it was well with him as if I could penetrate into the
future. And that night I knew the meaning of my long life, and
that I had only been learning to love enough, so that when he
called to me, 'Ellen, Ellen,' I should have learned how to love
and how to give."
THE END
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Transcriber's Note
A table of contents has been added by the transcriber for the
convenience of the reader.
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