Agnes expected to be followed.
Instead of going directly home she made a wide detour, skirting the
town, and ascended the west hill obliquely by a path the mill workers
used. Nobody would think to look for her there.
She meant to enter the grounds by the main gate, defiantly, but she
would take her time. As for the consequences,--well, the worse the
better. Any change would be welcome.
What made the feud with her father unendurable was its monotony. She
had meant to fight it out with him alone to the end, with no outside
help or interference. That was the true impulse of her nature. But it
had begun to be like fighting it out with some colossal stone image.
What terrified her was nothing he did, or could do, but the sheer
glacial mass of his hostility. No,--not hostility. It was something
else. It was a kind of malevolent indifference.
The feud was about nothing. It rested on their mutual obstinacy. A word
would deliver her. That word she could not utter, or would not, which
is all the same matter.
At school she had been one of ten girls suspected of having taken part
in a frolic much more exciting than wicked yet deserving the extreme
penalty. The nine denied it. When she was asked she said yes, she
had done it. When they asked who the others were she refused to tell.
They disciplined her. Still she refused. They offered her immunity if
she would tell. She refused all the more. They sent for her father.
He rashly said he would make her tell, and walked head-on into an
impassable wall. After an hour alone with her in the reception room he
marched her off, just as she was, saying as he crossed the threshold
that her things were to be sent after her. Defiance was something he
knew little about. Disobedience he could not comprehend at all. All the
way home he pondered it.
“I understand why you refuse to tell on the others,” he said. “Now I
waive that. You do not have to tell on them. But you shall tell me you
are sorry.”
She wouldn’t. She would say she was wrong; she had broken rules. But
she would not say she was sorry, for the reason that she wasn’t. This
she explained. That made no difference.
“You shall tell me you are sorry,” he said.
She refused.
“You will,” he said. “When you do you may have your liberty again.”
With that he banished her beyond the white line that had divided the
household in her infancy, set a woman to be her keeper, and then
apparently forgot her. She sometimes saw him at a distance. He never
looked at her.
The girls on whom she would not tell sent her a beautiful present.
She sent it back. That was the last of her contacts with the outside
world. Her mail was cut off. No one was permitted to see her. More
than a year had passed in this way. Once she sent word she wished to
see him. He answered: “If she is sorry she may come.” That ended her
overtures. Fighting it out with him apparently meant living it out, as
her mother did, and that for her was grotesque. Besides, in that kind
of contest he had the advantage of age. Age has all the time there is.
Youth has neither past nor future,--only the present. The situation was
impossible. It could not go on. Yet she had found no clear way out. She
was too proud to seek refuge with anyone she knew. Moreover, she was a
minor with no rights of her own. And as for casting herself free upon
the wide world,--well, she had not yet come to that desperate thought.
As she ascended the hill a mood that had been rising in her for several
days became suddenly intense and exulting. It made her short of breath.
The excitement of breaking bounds, of going to the party, of what she
did there, now a feeling of utter contempt for all the human values
it represented, an emotion of trampling upon her adversaries among
whom to her surprise was foremostly John, a sense of unknown power,
particularly that voluptuous unconcern with consequences--all these
different actions and reactions were as one effect. The cause was the
mood. She recognized it. She knew about how long it should last. Never
before had it been so tormenting. Never had she let it possess her
entirely. Surrendering to it was like a physical experience, fearful
and sweet.
She sat on a stone at the edge of the path, on the lower side, with
a wide view of the valley and gave herself up to ecstasy. She was
attuned to wonder and understood it. The hymn of night bewitched her.
Becoming luminous, her thoughts touched objects and subjects alike
and returned to her charged with sensation. In the vastness of space,
in one’s impulse toward it, in the thrust of the church spire through
the black panoramic foliage, in the tearing way the moon sliced his
path through the clouds, in the shapes of the clouds, in convexity,
concavity, temptation, and selfness, in hereness and thereness, in all
that one saw and felt there was one meaning,--and she almost knew what
it was. But the thought that excited her to suffocation was the thought
of all that had not yet happened to her,--in that same one meaning. The
rest of her, most of her in fact, was out there in the void. It was
everything that had not happened. It might be anything. Whatever it was
she embraced it, accepted it unreservedly, consented to it beforehand
for the thrill of consenting.
For the first time in her existence she felt knowingly the passion of
youth to pierce itself with life.