_August 5th.
Saturday Morning._
I think from the day Dicky left us I have been waiting with bated
breath for this letter. Ghost of our great, great, great-grandfather
who lies in the old cemetery at Lexington, Virginia! Dicky has been
answering a “Personal” in the New York _Herald_.
“Of course you won’t understand, Caroline,” she writes me. “There
never was a day in your life when you would have understood. Books
are people to you. You live placidly in that dull little mountain
town, and when your time comes you’ll die there placidly. Had you
been Eve the angel with the flaming sword would never have had the
unpleasant duty of driving you out. You to tempt a man! You’re like
that coldly beautiful statue Pygmalion fashioned. She waked to
life, but you never will. I wonder why I tell you, Caroline. The
probationers in this hospital—probably in all big city hospitals—are
made to feel like the dirt under foot—if there was under foot any
good honest earth-dirt. Every time her betters pass her she’s got to
paste herself against the wall, and all the inmates of the hospital
are her betters. There are some nice young doctors—but it is against
discipline for her to speak to them. If she does the older nurses
punish her with extra work. Last night, after a hard day, I walked on
the Avenue—we are just a block away—and one of the beautiful doors
opened just like enchantment, thrown back by a liveried servant. An
old, old man came out. Perhaps it would have been different if youth
and beauty had floated out. All that was his seemed so wasted. It
was just the youth in me, I suppose, that was so fierce at life and
its injustices. The lights down the Avenue beckoned and beckoned. I
wanted to follow them. The distance was swallowing the old man in his
car. Just for once in my life I wanted a taste of the city at night;
I wanted to forget the groans of the sick and dying. You’ve never
been a prune, and a potato, and a slice of bread. Try it, Caroline.
I, who used to be Henrietta Dickenson, am now one thousand four
hundred prunes. I am one thousand and ninety-five potatoes. I spare
you the slices of bread. If you think I exaggerate make the count
yourself. Prunes four times a week—five of them to a saucer. Potatoes
each meal—meals three per day. Potatoes, prunes, and bread—plain,
common food—maybe that’s why I have done such a common thing.
“I turned off the Avenue. At a news stand I picked up the _Herald_.
‘You don’t want that. You want an evening paper,’ the boy said.
Fate or the boy, I know not which, I took the _Herald_. The ‘ad’
I answered says the man is lonely; that he wants an attractive
woman friend. The ‘ad’ was signed Telemachus. His letter fairly
scintillated. I answered. He wrote again. Now he asks for a meeting.
But the letter is oh, so chivalrous, so witty, so wonderful,
Caroline. And there’s a reticence, an impersonal note in it that
piques a woman’s fancy, stirs her imagination——
“I am leaving the hospital now. It is dusk—the time to meet the hero
of one’s adventure. The place of meeting is not far away. It is only
a few blocks down Madison from the hospital. I have stolen out in a
gypsy dress that I wore at the hospital dance. I have thrown a long
dark cloak about me. In the twilight I shall escape—not be snatched
up and sent to Bellevue. Don’t worry, Caroline.”
Don’t worry! Since the day Dicky became our child (mother’s sister’s
only child, a little wailing thing three days old and orphaned of
her own mother) I have worried. Now my heart clutches with fear
as it clutched the day, now a year past, when Dicky threw into
our quiet midst the bomb of her determination to go away from us.
Nineteen-year-old Dicky alone in the great city of New York. Our
guarded and treasured lambkin thrown into the mouths of wolves. A
trained nurse! Under discipline! Dicky, the free, gypsy child of our
hearts.
We, poor dear old mammy and I, register Dicky’s emotions as
faithfully as a trusted thermometer. That Dicky should have to rise
with the sun, and, having risen, have to put her own room in order.
That Dicky must be silent in the presence of her superiors. It sounds
like the court of King James, anyway, and not free America—not that
the court of any king would awe Dicky.
Once, before we came to live in the mountains, when Dicky was six, we
paid a visit to grandmother. Dicky left a saucer of cottage cheese
untasted at her plate. Next morning at breakfast it was there,
at dinner, at tea. I saw when we went in to tea that the child’s
endurance of the saucer of cheese had been reached, and my coward
teeth chattered in terror—grandmother had attempted to discipline the
child before—the result being that for three interminable days Dicky
had appeared at meals, brought down in the arms of grandmother’s
old coloured butler, robbed of her clothes and dressed in a royal
defiance and a flannel nightgown. Dicky lifted the offending cheese
daintily. She didn’t look at me or at grandmother. She spoke to old
Benjamin, and she was as perfectly poised and dignified as a little
duchess. “Take it away, please,” she said; “it’s spoiled.”
“Her mar’s dead, an’ yore mar’s dead,” mammy said one morning as I
hurried away to my school teaching; “if you an’ Mr. John can’t an’
won’t do nothin’ to save the child from ruin, mammy will.”
I came home the day of mammy’s disciplining of Dicky to find the
child digging up the lawn. If we do live in the heart of the Blue
Ridge hills I cling to a remembered civilization—the front yard is
the lawn. Gypsy curls blowing, gypsy eyes flashing, Dicky with each
tiny upflung spade of dirt was shrieking (she couldn’t have been more
than seven), “Mr. Devil, Mr. Devil, can you hear? I’m going to keep
on digging till I get close enough and you can hear. I want you to
shovel mammy into your hot fire and burn her up.”
I picked Dicky up that day and kissed the anger out of her flaming
little face, and a few minutes later I heard her say in the voice
that makes us wax in Dicky’s hands, “I was just a little angry with
you, Mammy, and I asked Mr. Devil to burn you up—but I’m not mad now,
and I hope he won’t.”
Dicky went to New York. We knew that she would. That’s why John
and I, dear faithful old mammy, too, were so helpless, our hearts
contracting in fear.
_August 13th.
Sunday Night._
Scientists tell us that a change that is slow but complete takes
place in the human body every seven years. They are wrong about the
process. It happens in the twinkling of an eye—like that change in
the far-off judgment day of which the Bible tells. I know. This very
day it happened to me. This Sabbath morning I waked a healthy, happy,
normal spinster behind whom lay, except for this anxiety Dicky gives,
almost thirty barren-of-emotion years.
Breakfast was not ready when I came down, so I rushed up the lane.
If we lived more pretentiously it would be the drive. Beyond lay the
white road that leads up to Marsville and trails round the mountain
and out to a wider life.
The hills that neighbour with the blue ether were shaking night-caps
of trailing mist from their heads. The mountain world breathed deep
of August—proclaimed it exultantly in its vivid summer green as yet
untouched by change; in its full-eared, ripening corn, massed on the
hills like troops of soldiers. The insect shrills were August noises
as were the lazy little chirps of the birds that have forgotten their
joyous outpourings of spring. I loved it all—even the crow circling
majestically about the distant hills so far away that his raucous
cry came musically—and all of it contented me. Quite forgetting my
approaching thirtieth birthday I threw a kiss to that mountain on the
skyline that is so like a camel with a humpy back. There’s always
been a secret understanding between that mountain and me, I suppose
it is left over from my young girlhood, I was only eighteen the first
time I saw Camel Back, that some day he would dump all his treasures
into my lap—treasures from all the lands of the East. Yesterday I got
another editor’s check—Camel Back has always held me steady under my
rejections, hence the salute. Down through the ages how the world
would have laughed if the Egyptians had made their Sphinx a man—wise
Egyptians. As I threw the kiss to my mountain the shadow of no man
was on my heart, or had ever been, but I felt the thrill of life’s
infinite mystery and promise—felt it and called it an editor’s check.
At thirty a spinster woman may begin to run to fat, or she may show
tendencies to shrivel, but I boldly declare, my knowledge dating back
some dozen hours, that her heart is unwrinkled, ridiculously young,
and scanning the horizon for Eastern treasures that the camels that
hang in the skyline are to pour into her lap.
Back home, breakfast over, as John left the table he tossed a letter
to me. It was Dicky’s letter for which I have waited a whole week.
It is in answer to the dozen I have sent out to her—like wireless
messages of distress.
In the yard, out beyond the shadow of the big white pines, drying my
hair—the women of Marsville have no beauty parlour in which to ruin
it with dry air—lying full length in the sun, my head pillowed on a
cushion, pondering Dicky’s letter, reading it over and over, I was
jarred out of my reverie by a poke in the ribs and the mountaineer’s,
“Howdy.” I failed to respond, was poked in the ribs a second time,
sprang up indignantly and glared into the dirty, smiling landscape
that is the face of old Sallie Singleton. “I thought I knowed that
old back,” her harsh voice said amiably. Old back, indeed. Unmindful
of my lack of cordiality the floodgates opened and harsh verbal
oceans submerged me. I tried to shut it out, but I could not. “Mis
Golightly hadn’t let the fire go out on her hearth for nigh forty
year, but she went over the mountain to visit her daughter that had
her first baby. In hearing of the train she took homesick and hiked
it back. Savannah Lou was old-like, as I knowed, and, as I knowed,
her beau died. He was full of debts as a dog is full of fleas, and
the Lord knowed what he was doing when He took him. She had a picter
left stid o’ a man, and she was a sight happier with the picter then
she’d a ben with the man. When he was courtin’ they’d set and set,
and talk and talk. He never took her nowhere—not even as far as
her nose. She set store by the picter. She’d had a picter man put
whiskers on it. She’d allus knowed whiskers’d become him, but he was
stubborn and wouldn’t grow ’em. She——”
But I had fled, running for my life—or was it to save the life of
old Sallie that I ran? In the twinkling of an eye the mysterious
change had come. Sallie had poked in the back, the old back that
she knowed, a contented spinster teacher. A horse whisked about in
the shafts and made to go in a direction contrary to the one he was
travelling might understand the bewilderment of the woman who fled
from Sallie Singleton. I did not. We are strange creatures, blown
upon by winds from the Invisible. We dwell forever in a little
fenced-about cleared plot of ground that is our daily life and we are
frightened if we but glimpse beyond the cleared land. I had looked
over the fence, and I had seen a trackless region. In sudden panic
I hated placid spinster teachers content to trudge their sober path
through all the days allotted to them; in sudden terror age with its
hideous potentialities of loneliness fell upon me. Age and old Sallie
grown gray and dirtier but always with the Puck-like knowledge of
the psychologic moment at which to torture me with the neighbourhood
gossip. Age and John, dear, good John on one side of the fireplace
winter nights roaring at me the advancement of his rheumatism and
I on the other side roaring back the increasing feebleness of my
digestion.
All day this spectre, this fear of the future, has held me by
the throat. All day I have stumbled along in a maze of distorted
thought—swept from all moorings of common sense. Now I have come
into the night, the big, silent, star-filled night to ask peace of
it. Here under the giant pines that stand like sentinels to guard the
peace of the old house I sit on the bench. How still and warm and
sweet—a white, white August night, for the coming moon lights the
sky. Above all nights I have loved these August nights—the clematis
dropping from the upper porch airy and diaphanous as a bride’s
veil, and there in the border, running parallel with the low, long,
rambling, gray, gray old house the white phlox in masses neighbouring
with the August lilies. Looking at the lilies I catch my breath in
pain. In their faint, sweet breathings they say to me, “We live but
for a day. Take warning. Youth flees, dies as we die.”
John comes to the hall door and peers out into the dimness of the
shadowy pines. “Honey,” he calls, “are you out there? Good-night. I’m
turning in.” I call back, “Good-night.”
Big and red the moon that is only a little past full pushes over the
hill. The desire to taste the night, to drown my tumult in its peace
seizes me. Out on the hilltop, alone face to face with the night,
and unafraid, I am indeed swept from my moorings. There to the east,
where the skyline is so sharply irregular, just where Camel Back
marches eternally on the horizon, he makes me think of a city I have
never seen. I want to use his back as a stepping stone to the moon
and look down on a play I have just been reading about. When the
curtain lifts I want to see those real camels marching past, their
background a sunrise in the desert.
The mountains I love, my beautiful, misty mountains, are a giant wall
of earth to-night. I want to get over the wall. I want to sit in that
theatre, and after the play I want to be swept along in the street
with the surging crowd and go into a gorgeous, glittery place and eat
delicious things I have never tasted, wearing the sort of dress I
have never seen. I want to live. If but for one hour of life I want
my youth. I could be part of that pulsing, beating life, part of that
splendid friction—man’s mind stimulating man’s mind.
Back in my room, ready for bed, the light blown out, sitting at the
window, I acknowledge to myself that the cause of all the day’s
emotional upheaval has been Dicky’s letter. Dicky’s letter that reads:
“In my brave attire I went to meet the hero of my ‘Personal.’ He got
cold feet, Caroline. He did not come. He sent a messenger boy. I had
written my foolish heart out to him. I had told him the things I tell
you. Yes, I know it is reckless to write like that to a man one never
saw. Try being a prune and a potato and a slice of bread, though,
before you condemn me.
“His letter is the dearest ever, Caroline. I have read it over and
over. ‘Little gypsy child of nineteen, will you be just a little
disappointed that the messenger boy is there and not I? Will you
believe that I am going against my desire when I stay away? It isn’t
fair to you that I meet you. It is not fair to the nice little girl
homesick for her southland who has never as yet spoken to a man to
whom she has not been introduced. The “ad” was just a wager between a
man and me. My name will mean nothing to you, but I sign it.’
“The name was Robert Haralson, Caroline. And who can say why things
happen as they do? Who can really tell why that door flung open on
the Avenue to let an old man out should have stirred me to such
rebellion that I who have been well raised by you and dear old mammy
should have done such a madcap thing. The name did mean something to
me—it brought vague memories—where had I known a Robert Haralson?
And—queer world that it is—I got back to my room to find the answer
to my question on the table. Mary Tate answered it. When you and good
old John squeezed all the money you could out of the thin acres of
land that we call home and sent me to school I met Mary. Perhaps you
remember. But she was not a special chum. Soon she is coming on to
New York for her first visit. She has just left Roseboro and there
everybody is talking about Robert Haralson, known at home still
as Bobby. Everybody is saying that he was the cleverest and the
most popular lad that the town ever raised. A brilliant future was
prophesied for him, but he got a wanderlust and went trailing off to
the ends of the earth. Roseboro has just discovered that America’s
most brilliant writer and playwright, to quote the papers, is none
other than the man who as a little lad spilled the family wash—not
the clean wash—in front of the Methodist Church as the congregation
filed out from a revival service, and almost died of shyness.
Roseboro, of course, is shaking congratulatory hands with itself that
its prophecy has come true. Everywhere you go they talk of Bobby.
Now he seems permanently to have settled in New York and to have
found himself. Mary asks me if I have read, ‘Heart of the World.’ It
came out anonymously, as did no end of brilliant stories. But as a
playwright he can no longer hide behind his anonymity. Mary is coming
to New York soon. She wants to meet him. She begs for my assistance.
Her letter closes like this: ‘It can be done, Dicky. Gossip says
further that shy Bobby Haralson loved one girl like mad. That girl
was Caroline Howard.’
“Dear Caroline, I’ve fallen in love with Bobby’s fascinating letters.
I’ve fallen in love with his chivalrous protection of me, with his,
‘Little gypsy girl of nineteen.’ Right this minute his card, name,
and address lie on my table—and I am lonesomer than I was before I
answered the ‘ad’ but—I won’t do what it is in my mind to do. It is
your Bobby Haralson.”
The clipping Dicky sent says that Mr. Haralson, who is just
beginning to be known as Mr. Haralson, is at present one of the
most interesting men in American literature. That he has achieved
distinction both in fiction and in drama. That it is difficult to
say in which he holds the more prominent position, that when so many
writers seem to have written themselves out, he never seems to write
up to the full extent of his powers, that always there is that sense
of power held in reserve.
Dicky sent a clipping from a Roseboro newspaper that tells the story
of Bobby’s heroism on shipboard coming from one of the lands of the
Far East. I remember that story. It was some years ago. In mid-sea
the engines broke down, the boat sprung a leak, and the men were
forced to bail the water from the boat. No ship came near, and one
night a frightful storm swept the sea. With the boat at the mercy
of the waves the firemen deserted the boilers. It was then that the
blood of Bobby’s ancestors spoke in him; Old Governor Haralson,
Bobby’s grandfather, was a leader of men, could sway them. And father
told me that Bobby’s young father in a charge at the battle of Shilo
was a figure he never forgot. He said the young Colonel as he swept
into battle at the head of his men wore a beautiful, uplifted,
unearthly sort of expression and that he, my father, had often heard
him say he had never felt the sensation of fear on a battlefield.
So I know just how Bobby Haralson loomed above the discouraged men
that night, just how steady his voice was when he told them that
the firemen had deserted their posts saying it was death to go down
into the hold, but that he was going, and if they were men they
would follow him. Wet and naked and blistered in the water that was
waist-deep in the ship’s hold, death within and death without, with
no hope of saving the ship, with no help possible had help been near,
struggling to hold their places along the rope line they hauled the
buckets of water up, gaining perceptibly then losing again, but
sending a song up whether there was the gain of an inch of water or
that much loss—a song that rose above the roar of the sea, hungry for
what surely seemed its prey, and the hiss of the great boilers.
When we left Roseboro I was fourteen. Bobby must have been eighteen.
A fence divided his house from ours. There was a side gate, for the
families were intimate, but, mostly, he leaped it. Do I remember
Bobby? I have not thought of him in years, but to-night some little
door of the brain long closed opens and out of it comes my almost
forgotten boy friend Bobby, like a ghost. Why, just that minute I
saw his little flashing smile. It came right through the moonlit
window as a friendly hand reaches out to one on the street of a
strange city.
It must be very late, but how wide awake I am. And how sweet the
tuberoses there in the border under my window are. They seem to float
in still pools of moonlight. As they pour their heavy fragrance
over me the fancy comes, born of the silver, moon-flooded night, I
suppose, that they are trying to tell me something.
Maybe they are. The tuberose has a personality, strong friends and
stout enemies, like some people. There is nothing negative about
it. The fancy persists. Ah, I have it! Another little brain door
swings wide. But it wasn’t a tuberose. Bobby and the big boys, his
friends, have been on a tramp, they are again standing under my
window, they have waked me with the old familiar whistle. Mother has
said I may have the magnolias Bobby wants to send up at midnight
if I won’t speak to the boys, if the boys won’t speak to me, and
she has let Bobby suspend a cord from my second-story window. I am
fourteen years old again, and through the half-closed shutters I am
tugging desperately at those magnolias. Suppressed giggles from the
boys, suppressed giggles from me, too, and they ascend with slow
majesty. Inside the window the secret of their heaviness is revealed.
Candy—tons of it. The devil gets every inhabitant of Marsville who
dances, but in spite of the devil I waltz merrily to my bed.
_September 24th.
Sunday._
Yesterday one of those seemingly unimportant happenings that change
the current of a life came to me. I look up from the garden seat
here among my flowers and my eyes journey from one accustomed sight
to another. The long, low, rambling, gray old house drowsing in the
mellow, low-lying sunshine, beyond it the path past the honeysuckle
arbour that leads straight to the old-fashioned spring house, the
colts in the pasture, the cattle at the bars—it is all so familiar
that I smile at the words I have written. I am changed, not my life.
Yesterday I walked up to Marsville, a mile away, for the mail, as I
mostly do Saturday mornings, and Ellinor Baxter joined me. Ellinor
is not a native Marsvillian either. Back in the dim past she came
for the health of one of her family. Ellinor has always had musical
yearnings, quite a little talent, too. She is the village musician
and music teacher, and this year she has an assistant. The assistant
is fresh from a bigger life: last winter she studied in Boston, and
she has a friend who is doing wonderful things in Grand Opera abroad.
It makes Ellinor quite tragic. Yesterday when we reached the edge of
the wood, and the mountain world lay about us like a vast picture,
Ellinor flung out her arms as if to embrace all the several hundred
peaks in sight and cried out: “Oh, how I hate that wall of mountains!
If we could sweep it away we’d get a view, Caroline. We’d see what
the world is doing. It’s a prison wall. I can’t escape. It seems
that some hand of iron holds me here. If I had only gone eight years
ago when mother’s death gave me the freedom to go! Now I haven’t the
youth to make a new life for myself. Why don’t you go? What holds you
here?”
“John, dear, good old John, I suppose,” I answered slowly.
Ellinor Baxter laughed scornfully. “John would be a less spoiled
citizen without you. You are wasting the best years of your life.
Soon you will be thirty.”
“I am thirty. This is my birthday.” I said it defiantly, because,
uttered, it sounded so very, very ancient.
Ellinor suddenly softened. “You look a young twenty-five. Some women
begin to fade at twenty-five. Some mornings when you rush past to
school you look eighteen——
“And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth of
lustre.
Hid i’ the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the
wildgrape cluster,
Gush in golden-tinted plenty——”
“Ellinor!”
But Ellinor was in deadly earnest. Her eyes were full of tears.
“Child,” she said, “get away from here. Love, marry, fulfil your
destiny.”
For just a moment I stopped and shut my eyes, pretending that a brier
had caught my skirt. With shut eyes I knew that deep in the emerald
world about me the black gum flaunted its crimson leaves—emblem of
change; that the corn in long, straight rows stood hardening in
the ear; that the mountains, glistening chain on glistening chain,
were shimmering in the morning light. Standing there, I saw more:
October’s pageant; November’s dull, soft tones; the desolation and
the grayness that is December mountains’ dim forms seen through
curtains of rain; January’s white, white world—and then the surprise
of a snowdrop, the warm, fragrant spring breath of the south wind
shepherding flocks of snowy clouds.
“I love it all,” I said. And I spoke the truth. Since that August
Sunday now a month past, since that earthquake upheaval, I have
basked in peace. “I am busy. Most of the year I wake with just the
thought of scrambling into my clothes, swallowing my breakfast, and
getting to the schoolroom in time. When it is winter it is almost
dark when I get home; when it is spring I have my flowers. And
there’s always John’s clothes to mend and my own to make and——”
But with a gesture that was passionate Ellinor Baxter stopped me.
“All this may satisfy at thirty, but it won’t feed a woman’s heart at
forty. Then she feels the need of love—contact with a man’s broader
life. The monotony, the emptiness of life as she lives it alone
tortures at forty. I know, for I am thirty-eight. And if she finds
this out at forty it is mostly too late. Men pass us by for fresher
faces.”
I did not know this new Ellinor Baxter who had lifted her mask and
given me a peep at the real woman behind it, but for the first time
in my life I loved her.
* * * * *
As we turned into Main Street a big automobile was leaving the
post-office. Mr. Black and his nice little wife—new people who are
summering here—were in the tonneau. I hardly know how it came about,
but in what seemed the twinkling of an eye Ellinor and I were in
it, too. I did not understand where it was we were going, and when
I tried to find out I swallowed so many buckets of air that I gave
it up. But it was not of the slightest importance. All that had
ever happened to me was of slight importance. I was having my first
automobile ride. We seemed to winnow the air like birds: to dip and
dart down and around the curves, to soar up the hills with the flash
and swiftness of wings. A dozen miles from our village we raced up a
stately avenue and ran under a _porte-cochère_—our flight at end.
The lady who came out to greet us was surrounded by dogs, big and
little, aristocratic and plebeian, handsome and hideous. After
greeting her, Mrs. Black drew me forward and said: “Edna, this is
Caroline Howard, who adores every word you write. Edna is my sister,
Miss Howard.”
I draw a long breath of happiness at thought of yesterday. I
live it all over again. I feel sure it was no ordinary spark of
liking that leaped between Edna Kennedy and me instantaneously and
spontaneously. We had luncheon yesterday on a big wide veranda that
overlooks a winding ribbon of a river from the view we had of it
as calm and still as if frozen. After luncheon there was music:
Geraldine Farrar in “Madam Butterfly”—and the story unfolded before
me. I felt the anguish of that poor little waiting and trusting and
praying wife. Tetrazzini in the mad scene from “Lucia,” and the
flutelike voice going high and high and higher, till I bent forward
in breathless suspense to drop back in my chair in content at that
last marvellously dizzyingly high sweet bird note. Moved by a little
burst of confidence I could not control, I told Edna Kennedy that I
had never heard grand opera; that I had never been anywhere or seen
anything. And then I told her of the thrilly little waves running up
and down me that were fairly shouting it was the beginning and not
the end of beautiful happenings to me—just as though I had walked
through a wood and come to a beautiful palace, and only stepped up
on the portico with my hand still on the doorknob. I told her about
Robert Haralson, too: what friends we were when I was little, before
we came to live in the mountains. I was dreadfully disappointed that
she does not know him. She says few people know him. She says he is
shy; that he lives in his work—that the first night of the big play
that is making him so rich and famous he ran away from the theatre
afraid of the call that authors get to come before the curtain. As we
were leaving, Edna Kennedy gathered some magazines from the library
table and gave them to me. “He is in them all,” she said. “Nobody in
the literary and dramatic world is more in the public eye.”
I was very quiet coming home, and everything seemed little and mean
and isolated and countrified when I got here. I went to my room
immediately after supper. I said I was tired, but I was never less
tired in my life. I read all the things the magazines said about
Robert Haralson, and I looked long at the picture I found in one of
them of my old-time boy friend. I have not treasured any sentimental
memories of Bobby. I was little more than a child when I last saw
him. It is true that the whole town teased Bobby about me—they called
me his little sweetheart and accused him of robbing the cradle—but I
have no treasured memories of him or of any man.
I am indifferent to men, as Dicky says. Always I have turned with
distaste from the thought of marriage. In that I think I am different
from most women. There have been two—such nice splendid fellows I
knew in my college life—who have penetrated my wilderness more times
than one. And I? I like them. Life with either would seem to hold
much that it withholds now. I have tried to yield, but I cannot; the
thought of the nearness of what should be sweet and sacred to a woman
brings a wave of physical nausea. For that reason I don’t in the
least understand what came over me last night as I gazed at a picture
only dimly familiar to me. Ellinor’s words came back throbbing with
their loneliness and hunger. I knew them to be true. I saw myself
at forty rushing through breakfast and running the mile to school,
pottering about the flowers, mending the clothes—day after day, month
after month, year after year spent in dull monotony—and my youth
rolled away—my life.
I did a strange thing—I, trained to chain my emotions as we chain
wild beasts, in frantic haste I wrote to Bobby. It was not much of a
letter—just:
“Bobby, I wonder if the years have swept from your brain cells all
memory of the little girl who used to live next door? She’ll never
get to New York, never! There’s a wall of mountains that she can’t
scale. But if ever you come to Marsville, whistle across the fence,
won’t you? The little girl’s got one of your stories treasured in her
desk without knowing until some one’s letter gave away the secret of
its authorship. Big congratulations, Bobby!”
I went down to the yard and waked old Harris and paid him to walk to
the railroad station, three miles across the gap, and mail it. Now
it is late Sunday afternoon and it has been gone almost a whole day.
But of course I will never have an answer to it. I am sure Mr. Robert
Haralson keeps a female secretary who will scan it coldly and throw
it in the waste basket.
_September 27th.
Wednesday._
I can’t see how it got here in this marvellously short time, but I
have Bobby’s answer:
_80 Waverly Place,
September 25th._