herself from living any longer with him. His indifference in the
presence of her suffering; his pitiless withdrawal from her of touch
and glance and speech as she had gone down into that darkest of life’s
valleys; his will of iron that since she had insisted upon knowing the
whole truth, know it she should: all this left her wounded and stunned
as by an incredible blow, and she was acting first from the instinct
of removing herself beyond the reach of further humiliation and
brutality.
Instinctively she took off her wedding ring and laid it on his dresser
beside his watch: he would find it there in the morning and he could
dispose of it. Then she changed her dress for the plainest heavy one
and put on heavy walking shoes. She packed into a handbag a few
necessary things with some heirlooms of her own. Among the latter was
a case of family jewels; and as she opened it, her eyes fell upon her
mother’s thin wedding ring and with quick reverence she slipped that
on and kissed it bitterly. She lifted out also her mother’s locket
containing a miniature daguerreotype of her father and dutifully fed
her eyes on that. Her father was not silver-haired then, but
raven-locked; with eyes that men feared at times but no woman ever.
His eyes were on her now as so often in girlhood when he had curbed
her exuberance and guided her waywardness. He was watching as she,
coarsely wrapped and carrying some bundle of things of her own, opened
her front door, left her footprints in the snow on the porch, and
passed out--wading away. Those eyes of his saw what took place the
next day: the happiness of Christmas morning turned into horror; the
children wild with distress and crying--the servants dumb--the inquiry
at neighbors’ houses--the news spreading to the town--the papers--the
black ruin. And from him two restraining words issued for her ear:
“My daughter!”
Passionately she bore the picture to her lips and her pride answered
him. And so answering, it applied a torch to her blood and her blood
took fire and a flame of rage spread through and swept her. She
stopped her preparations: she had begun to think as well as to feel.
She unpacked her travelling bag, putting each article back into its
place with exaggerated pains. Having done this, she stood in the
middle of the floor, looking about her irresolute: then responding to
that power of low suggestion which is one of anger’s weapons, she
began to devise malice. She went to a wardrobe and stooping down took
from a bottom drawer--where long ago it had been stored away under
everything else--a shawl that had been her grandmother’s; a brindled
crewel shawl,--sometimes worn by superannuated women of a former
generation; a garment of hideousness. Once, when a little girl, she
had loyally jerked it off her grandmother because it added to her
ugliness and decrepitude.
She shook this out with mocking eyes and threw it decoratively around
her shoulders. She strode to the gorgeous peony lampshade and lifting
it off, gibbeted it and scattered the fragments on the floor. She
turned the lamp up as high as it would safely burn so that the huge
lidless eye of it would throw its full glare on him and her. She drew
a rocking chair to the foot of the bed and seating herself put her
forefinger up to each temple and drew out from their hiding places
under the mass of her black hair two long gray locks and let these
hang down haglike across her bosom. She banished the carefully
nourished look of youth from her face--dropped the will to look
young--and allowed the forced-back years to rush into it--into the
wastage, the wreckage, which he and Nature, assisting each other so
ably, had wrought in her.
She sat there half-crazed, rocking noisily; waiting for the glare of
the lamp to cause him to open his eyes; and she smiled upon him in
exultation of vengeance that she was to live on there in his
house--_his_ house.
After a while a darker mood came over her.
With noiseless steps lest she awake him, she began to move about the
room. She put out the lamp and lighted her candle and set it where it
would be screened from his face; and where the shadow of the chamber
was heaviest, into that shadow she retired and in it she sat--with
furtive look to see whether he observed her.
A pall-like stillness deepened about the bed where he lay.
Running in her veins a wellnigh pure stream across the generations was
Anglo-Saxon blood of the world’s fiercest; floating in the tide of it
passions of old family life which had dyed history for all time in
tragedies of false friendship, false love, and false battle; but
fiercest ever about the marriage bed and the betrayal of its vow. A
thousand years from this night some wronged mother of hers, sitting
beside some sleeping father of hers in their forest-beleaguered
castle--the moonlight streaming in upon him through the javelined
casement and putting before her the manly beauty of him--the blond
hair matted thick on his forehead as his helmet had left it, his mouth
reddening in his slumber under its curling gold--some mother of hers
whom he had carried off from other men by might of his sword, thus
sitting beside him and knowing him to be colder to her now than the
moon’s dead rays, might have watched those rays as they travelled away
from his figure and put a gleam on his sword hanging near: a thousand
years ago: some mother of hers.
It is when the best fails our human nature that the worst volunteers
so often to take its place. The best and the worst--these are the
sole alternatives which many a soul seems to be capable of making:
hence life’s spectacle of swift overthrow, of amazing collapse, ever
present about us. Only the heroic among both men and women, losing the
best as their first choice, fight their way through defeat to the
standard of the second best and fight on there. And whatever one may
think of the legend otherwise, abundant experience justifies the story
that it was the Archangel who fell to the pit. The low never fall far:
how can they? They already dwell on the bottom of things, and many a
time they are to be seen there with vanity that they should inhabit
such a privileged highland.
During the first of these hours which stretched for her into the
tragic duration of a lifetime, it was a successive falling from a
height of moral splendor; her nature went down through swift stages to
the lowest she harbored either in the long channel of inheritance or
as the stirred sediment of her own imperfections. And as is
unfortunately true, this descent into moral darkness possessed the
grateful illusion that it was an ascent into new light. All evil
prompting became good suggestion; every injustice made its claim to be
justification. She enjoyed the elation of feeling that she was
dragging herself out of life’s quicksands upward to some rock, where
there might be loneliness for her, but where there would be cleanness.
The love which consumed her for him raged in her as hatred; and hatred
is born into perfect mastery of its weapons. However young, it needs
not to wait for training in order to know how to destroy.
He presented himself to her as a character at last revealed in its
faithlessness and low carnal propensities. What rankled most
poignantly in this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact
that the cloven hoof should have been found on noble mountain
tops--that he should have attempted to better his disguise by dwelling
near regions of sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestable
to her was that which dares live within spiritual fortresses; and now
his whole story of the Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words
about the growth of the world’s spirit--about the sacrifice of the
lower in ourselves to the higher--this cant now became to her the
invocation and homage of the practised impostor: he had indeed carried
the Christmas Tree on his shoulder into the manger. Not the Manger of
Immortal Purity for mankind but the manger of his own bestiality.
Thus scorn and satire became her speech; she soared above him with
spurning; a frenzy of poisoned joy racked her that at the moment when
he had let her know that he wanted to be free--at that moment she
might tell him he had won his freedom at the cheap price of his
unworthiness.
And thus as she descended, she enjoyed the triumph of rising; so the
devil in us never lacks argument that he is the celestial guide.
Moreover, hatred never dwells solitary; it readily finds boon
companions. And at one period of the night she began to look back upon
her experience with a curious sense of prior familiarity--to see it as
a story already known to her at second hand. She viewed it as the
first stage of one of those tragedies that later find their way into
the care of family physicians, into the briefs of lawyers, into the
confidence of clergymen, into the papers and divorce courts, and that
receive their final flaying or canonization on the stage and in novels
of the time. Sitting at a distance, she had within recent years
studied in a kind of altruistic absorption how the nation’s press, the
nation’s science of medicine, the nation’s science of law, the
nation’s practice of religion, and the nation’s imaginative literature
were all at work with the same national omen--the decay of the
American family and the downfall of the home.
Now this new pestilence raging in other regions of the country had
incredibly reached her, she thought, on the sheltered lowlands where
the older traditions of American home life still lay like foundation
rock. The corruption of it had attacked him; the ruin of it awaited
her; and thus to-night she took her place among those women whom the
world first hears of as in hospitals and sanitariums and places of
refuge and in their graves--and more sadly elsewhere; whose
misfortunes interested the press and whose types attracted the
novelists.
She was one of them.
They swarmed about her; one by one she recognized them: the woman who
unable to bear up under her tragedy soon sinks into eternity--or walks
into it; the woman who disappears from the scene and somewhere under
another name or with another lot lives on--devoting herself to memory
or to forgetfulness; the woman who stays on in the house, giving to
the world no sign for the sake of everything else that still remains
to her but living apart--on the other side of the locked door; the
woman who stays on without locking the door, half-hating,
half-loving--the accepted and rejected compromise; the woman who
welcomes the end of the love-drama as the beginning of peace and the
cessation of annoyances; the woman who begins to act her tragedy to
servants and children and acquaintances--reaping sympathy for herself
and sowing ruin and torture--for him; the woman who drops the care of
house, ends his comforts, thus forcing the sharp reminder of her value
as at least an investment toward his general well-being; the woman who
endeavors to rekindle dying coals by fanning them with fresh
fascinations; the woman who plays upon jealousy and touches the male
instinct to keep one’s own though little prized lest another acquire
it and prize it more; the woman who sets a watch to discover the other
woman: they swarmed about her, she identified each.
And she dismissed them. They brought her no aid; she shrank from their
companionship; a strange dread moved her lest _they_ should
discover _her_. One only she detached from the throng and for a
while withdrew with her into a kind of dual solitude: the woman who
when so rejected turns to another man--the man who is waiting
somewhere near.
The man _she_ turned to, who for years had hovered near, was the
country doctor, her husband’s tried and closest friend, whose children
were asleep upstairs with her children. During all these years
_her_ secret had been--the doctor. When she had come as a bride
into that neighborhood, he, her husband’s senior by several years, was
already well established in his practice. He had attended her at the
birth of her first child; never afterwards. As time passed, she had
discovered that he loved her; she could never have him again. This had
dealt his professional reputation a wound, but he understood, and he
welcomed the wound.
Many a night, lying awake near her window, through which noises from
the turnpike plainly reached her, all earthly happiness asleep
alongside her, she could hear the doctor’s buggy passing on its way to
some patient, or on its return from the town where he had patients
also. Many a time she had heard it stop at the front gate: the road of
his life there turned in to her. There were nights of pitch darkness
and beating rain; and sometimes on these she had to know that he was
out there.
Long she sat in the shadow of her room, looking towards the bed where
her husband slept, but sending the dallying vision toward the
doctor. He would be at the Christmas party; she would be dancing with
him.
Clouds and darkness descended upon the plain of life and enveloped
it. She groped her way, torn and wounded, downward along the old lost
human paths.
The endless night scarcely moved on.
* * * * *
She was wearied out, she was exhausted. There is anger of such
intensity that it scorches and shrivels away the very temptations that
are its fuel; nothing can long survive the blast of that white flame,
and being unfed, it dies out. Moreover, it is the destiny of a
portion of mankind that they are enjoined by their very nobility from
winning low battles; these always go against them: the only victories
for them are won when they are leading the higher forces of human
nature in life’s upward conflicts.
She was weary, she was exhausted; there was in her for a while neither
moral light nor moral darkness. Her consciousness lay like a boundless
plain on which nothing is visible. She had passed into a great calm;
and slowly there was borne across her spirit a clearness that is like
the radiance of the storm-winged sky.
And now in this calm, in this clearness, two small white figures
appeared--her children. Hitherto the energies of her mind had
grappled with the problem of her future; now memories began--memories
that decide more perhaps than anything else for us. And memories began
with her children.
She arose without making any noise, took her candle, and screening it
with the palm of her hand, started upstairs.
There were two ways by either of which she could go; a narrow rear
stairway leading from the parlor straight to their bedrooms, and the
broad stairway in the front hall. From the old maternal night-habit
she started to take the shorter way but thought of the parlor and drew
back. This room had become too truly the Judgment Seat of the
Years. She shrank from it as one who has been arraigned may shrink
from a tribunal where sentence has been pronounced which changes the
rest of life. Its flowers, its fruits, its toys, its ribbons, but
deepened the derision and the bitterness. And the evergreen there in
the middle of the room--it became to her as that tree of the knowledge
of good and evil which at Creation’s morning had driven Woman from
Paradise.
She chose the other way and started toward the main hall of the house,
but paused in the doorway and looked back at the bed; what if he
should awake in the dark, alone, with no knowledge of where she was?
Would he call out to her--with what voice? Would he come to seek
her--with what emotions? (The tide of memories was setting in now--the
drift back to the old mooring.)
Hunt for her! How those words fell like iron strokes on the ear of
remembrance. They registered the beginning of the whole trouble. Up to
the last two years his first act upon reaching home had been to seek
her. It had even been her playfulness at times to slip from room to
room for the delight of proving how persistently he would prolong his
search. But one day some two years before this, when she had entered
his study about the usual hour of his return, bringing flowers for his
writing desk, she saw him sitting there, hat on, driving gloves on,
making some notes. The sight had struck the flowers from her hands;
she swiftly gathered them up, and going to her room, shut herself in;
she knew it was the beginning of the end.
The Shadow which lurks in every bridal lamp had become the Spectre of
the bedchamber.
When they met later that day, he was not even aware of what he had
done or failed to do, the change in him was so natural to himself.
Everything else had followed: the old look dying out of the eyes; the
old touch abandoning the hands; less time for her in the house, more
for work; constraint beginning between them, the awkwardness of
reserve; she seeing Nature’s movement yet refusing to believe it; then
at last resolving to know to the uttermost and choosing her bridal
night as the hour of the ordeal.
If he awoke, would he come to seek her--with what feelings?
She went on upstairs, holding the candle to one side with her right
hand and supporting herself by the banisters with her left. There was
a turn in the stairway at the second floor, and here the candle rays
fell on the face of the tall clock in the hallway. She sat down on a
step, putting the candle beside her; and there she remained, her
elbows on her knees, her face resting on her palms; and into the abyss
of the night dropped the tranquil strokes. More memories!
She was by nature not only alive to all life but alive to surrounding
lifeless things. Much alone in the house, she had sent her happiness
overflowing its dumb environs--humanizing these--drawing them toward
her by a gracious responsive symbolism--extending speech over realms
which nature has not yet awakened to it or which she may have struck
into speechlessness long æons past.
She had symbolized the clock; it was the wooden God of Hours; she had
often feigned that it might be propitiated; and opening the door of it
she would pin inside the walls little clusters of blossoms as votive
offerings: if it would only move faster and bring him home! The usual
hour of his return from college was three in the afternoon. She had
symbolized that hour; one stroke for him, one for her, one for the
children--the three in one--the trinity of the household.
She sat there on the step with the candle burning beside her.
The clock struck three! The sound went through the house: down to him,
up to the children, into her. It was like a cry of a night watch: all
is well!
It was the first sound that had reached her from any source during
this agony, and now it did not come from humanity, but from outside
humanity; from Time itself which brings us together and holds us
together as long as possible and then separates us and goes on its
way--indifferent whether we are together or apart; Time which welds
the sands into the rock and then wears the rock away to its separate
sands and sends the level tide softly over them.
Once for him, once for her, once for the children! She took up the
candle and went upstairs to them.
For a while she stood beside the bed in one room where the two little
girls were asleep clasping each other, cheek against cheek; and in
another room at the bedside of the two little boys, their backs turned
on one another and each with a hand doubled into a promising fist
outside the cover. In a few years how differently the four would be
divided and paired; each boy a young husband, each girl a young wife;
and out of the lives of the two of them who were hers she would then
drop into some second place. If to-night she were realizing what
befalls a wife when she becomes the Incident to her husband, she would
then realize what befalls a woman when the mother becomes the Incident
to her children: Woman, twice the Incident in Nature’s impartial
economy! Her son would playfully confide it to his bride that she must
bear with his mother’s whims and ways. Her daughter would caution her
husband that he must overlook peculiarities and weaknesses. The very
study of perfection which she herself had kindled and fanned in them
as the illumination of their lives they would now turn upon her as a
searchlight of her failings.
He downstairs would never do that! She could not conceive of his
discussing her with any human being. Even though he should some day
desert her, he would never discuss her.
She had lived so secure in the sense of him thus standing with her
against the world, that it was the sheer withdrawal of his strength
from her to-night that had dealt her the cruelest blow. But now she
began to ask herself whether his protection _had_ failed her.
Could he have recognized the situation without rendering it
worse? Had he put his arms around her, might she not have--struck at
him? Had he laid a finger-weight of sympathy on her, would it not have
left a scar for life? Any words of his, would they not have rung in
her ears unceasingly? To pass it over was as though it had never
been--was not _that_ his protection?
She suddenly felt a desire to go down into the parlor. She kissed her
child in each room and she returned and kissed the doctor’s
children--with memory of their mother; and then she descended by the
rear stairway.
She set her candle on the table, where earlier in the night she had
placed the lamp--near the manuscript--and she sat down and looked at
that remorsefully: she had ignored it when he placed it there.
He had made her the gift of his work--dedicated to her the triumphs of
his toil. It was his deep cry to her to share with him his widening
career and enter with him into the world’s service. She crossed her
hands over it awhile, and then she left it.
The low-burnt candle did not penetrate far into the darkness of the
immense parlor. There was an easy chair near her piano and her music.
After playing when alone, she would often sit there and listen to the
echoes of those influences that come into the soul from music
only,--the rhythmic hauntings of some heaven of diviner beauty. She
sat there now quite in darkness and closed her eyes; and upon her ear
began faintly to beat the sad sublime tones of his story.
One of her delights in growing things on the farm had been to watch
the youth of the hemp--a field of it, tall and wandlike and tufted. If
the north wind blew upon it, the myriad stalks as by a common impulse
swayed southward; if a zephyr from the south crossed it, all heads
were instantly bowed before the north. West wind sent it east and east
wind sent it west.
And so, it had seemed to her, is that ever living world which we
sometimes call the field of human life in its perpetual summer. It is
run through by many different laws; governed by many distinct forces,
each of which strives to control it wholly--but never does.
Selfishness blows on it like a parching sirocco, and all things
seem to bow to the might of selfishness. Generosity moves across the
expanse, and all things are seen responsive to what is generous. Place
yourself where life is lowest and everything like an avalanche is
rushing to the bottom. Place yourself where character is highest, and
lo! the whole world is but one struggle upward to what is high. You
see what you care to see, and find what you wish to find.
In his story of the Forest and the Heart he had wanted to trace but
one law, and he had traced it; he had drawn all things together and
bent them before its majesty: the ancient law of Sacrifice. Of old the
high sacrificed to the low; afterwards the low to the high: once the
sacrifice of others; now the sacrifice of ourselves; but always in
ourselves of the lower to the higher in order that, dying, we may
live.
With this law he had made his story a story of the world.
The star on the Tree bore it back to Chaldæa; the candle bore it to
ancient Persia; the cross bore it to the Nile and Isis and Osiris; the
dove bore it to Syria; the bell bore it to Confucius; the drum bore it
to Buddha; the drinking horn to Greece; the tinsel to Romulus and
Rome; the doll to Abraham and Isaac; the masks to Gaul; the mistletoe
to Britain,--and all brought it to Christ,--Christ the latest
world-ideal of sacrifice that is self-sacrifice and of the giving of
all for all.
The story was for herself, he had said, and for himself.
Himself! Here at last all her pain and wandering of this night ended:
at the bottom of her wound where rankled _his problem_.
From this problem she had most shrunk and into this she now entered:
She sacrificed herself in him! She laid upon herself his temptation
and his struggle.
* * * * *
Taking her candle, she passed back into her bedroom and screened it
where she had screened it before; then went into his bedroom.