roughly. This was sentimentalizing. If she could, would she give up what
she had now and go back to being the little girl, deeply satisfied with
make-shift toys, which were only the foreshadowings of what was to come?
If she could, would she exchange her actual room at home, for this, even
to have again all the unquestioning trust in everyone and everything of
the child who had died in her heart? Would she choose to give up the
home where her living children had been born, at no matter what cost of
horrid pain to herself, and were growing up to no matter what dark
uncertainties in life, for this toy inhabited by paper-dolls? No, no,
she had gone on, gone on, and left this behind. Nor would she, if she
could, exchange the darker, heavier, richer gifts for the bright small
trinkets of the past.
All this ran fluently from her mind, with a swiftness and clarity which
seemed as shallow as it was rapid; but now there sounded in her ears a
warning roar of deeper waters to which this was carrying her.
Before she knew what was coming, she braced herself to meet it; and
holding hard and ineffectually, felt herself helplessly swept out and
flung to the fury of the waves . . . and she met them with an answering
tumult of welcome. That was what Vincent Marsh could do for her, wanted
to do for her,--that wonderful, miraculous thing,--give back to her
something she had thought she had left behind forever; he could take
her, in the strength of her maturity with all the richness of growth,
and carry her back to live over again the fierce, concentrated intensity
of newly-born passion which had come into her life, and gone, before she
had had the capacity to understand or wholly feel it. He could lift her
from the dulled routine of life beginning to fade and lose its colors,
and carry her back to the glorious forgetfulness of every created thing,
save one man and one woman.
She had had a glimpse of that, in the first year of her married life,
had had it, and little by little had lost it. It had crumbled away
insensibly, between her fingers, with use, with familiarity, with the
hateful blunting of sensitiveness which life's battering always brings.
But she could have it again; with a grown woman's strength and depth of
feeling, she could have the inheritance of youth. She had spent it, but
now she could have it again. That was what Vincent meant.
He seemed to lean over her now, his burning, quivering hand on hers. She
felt a deep hot flush rise to her face, all over her body. She was like
a crimson rose, offering the splendor of its maturity to be plucked. Let
her have the courage to know that its end and aim and fulfilment lay in
being plucked and gloriously worn before the coming of the inevitable
end! Thus and thus only could one find certainty, before death came, of
having lived as deeply as lay in one to live.
* * * * *
Through the glowing pride and defiance with which she felt herself rise
to the challenge, felt herself strong to break and surmount all
obstacles within and without, which stood in the way of that fulfilment
of her complete self, she had heard . . . the slightest of
trivialities . . . a thought gone as soon as it was conceived . . .
nothing of the slightest consequence . . . harmless . . .
insignificant . . . yet why should it give off the betraying clink of
something flawed and cracked? . . . She had heard . . . it must have
come from some corner of her own mind . . . something like this, "Set
such an alternative between routine, traditional, narrow domestic life,
and the mightiness and richness of mature passion, before a modern, free
European woman, and see how quickly she would grasp with all her soul for
passion."
What was there about this, the veriest flying mote among a thousand
others in the air, so to awaken in Marise's heart a deep vibration of
alarm? Why should she not have said that? she asked herself, angry and
scared. Why was it not a natural thought to have had? She felt herself
menaced by an unexpected enemy, and flew to arms.
Into the rich, hot, perfumed shrine which Vincent's remembered words and
look had built there about her, there blew a thin cool breath from the
outside, through some crack opened by that casual thought. Before she
even knew from whence it came, Marise cried out on it, in a fury of
resentment . . . and shivered in it.
With no apparent volition of her own, she felt something very strong
within her raise a mighty head and look about, stirred to watchfulness
and suspicion by that luckless phrase.
She recognized it . . . the habit of honesty of thought, not native to
Marise's heart, but planted there by her relation with Neale's stark,
plain integrity. Feeding unchecked on its own food, during the long
years of her marriage it had grown insensibly stronger and stronger,
till now, tyrant and master, with the irresistible strength of conscious
power, it could quell with a look all the rest of her nature, rich in
colored possibilities of seductive self-deceit, sweet illusions, lovely
falsities.
She could no more stop its advance now, straight though it made its way
over treasures she fain would keep, than she could stop the beating of
her heart.
A ruthless question or two . . . "Why did you say that about what a
modern, free European woman would do in your place? Are you trying to
play up to some trumpery notion of a rôle to fill? And more than this,
did you really mean in your heart an actual, living woman of another
race, such as you knew in Europe; or did you mean somebody in an
Italian, or a French, or a Scandinavian book?" Marise writhed against
the indignity of this, protested fiercely, angrily against the
incriminating imputation in it . . . and with the same breath admitted it
true.
It was true. She was horrified and lost in grief and humiliation at the
cheapened aspect of what had looked so rich before. Had there been in
truth an element of such trashy copying of the conventional pose of
revolt in what had seemed so rushingly spontaneous? Oh no, no . . . not
that!
She turned away and away from the possibility that she had been
partially living up to other people's ideas, finding it intolerable; and
was met again and again by the relentless thrust of that acquired
honesty of thought which had worn such deep grooves in her mind in all
these years of unbroken practice of it. "You are not somebody in a book,
you are not a symbol of modern woman who must make the gestures
appropriate for your part . . ." One by one, that relentless power seated
in her many-colored tumultuous heart put out the flaring torches.
It had grown too strong for her, that habit of honesty of thought and
action. If this struggle with it had come years before she could have
mastered it, flinging against it the irresistible suppleness and
lightness of her ignorant youth. But now, freighted heavily with
experience of reality, she could not turn and bend quickly enough to
escape it.
It had profited too well by all those honest years with Neale . . . never
to have been weakened by a falsehood between them, by a shade of
pretense of something more, or different from what really was there.
That habit held her mercilessly to see what was there now. She could no
more look at what was there and think it something else, than she could
look with her physical eyes at a tree and call it a dragon.
If it had only been traditional morality, reproaching her with
traditional complaints about the overstepping of traditional bounds, how
she could have overwhelmed it, drowned out its feeble old voice, with
eloquent appeals for the right to growth, to freedom, to the generous
expansion of the soul, of the personality, which Vincent Marsh could
give. But honesty only asked her neutrally, "Is it really growth and
freedom, and generous expansion of the soul?" Poor Marise felt her arms
fall to her side, piteous and defenseless. No, it was not.
It was with the flatness of accent which she hated, which was so hard
for her, that she made the admission. It was physical excitement,--that
was what it was. Physical excitement, that was what Vincent Marsh could
give her which Neale no longer could. . . . That and great ease of life,
which Neale never would. There was a pause in which she shivered,
humiliated. She added lamely to this, a guessed-at possibility for
aesthetic sympathy and understanding, perhaps more than Neale could . . .
and broke off with a qualm of sickness. How horrid this was! How it
offended a deep sense of personal dignity and decency! How infinitely
more beautiful and gracious those rolling clouds of vagueness and
impulsive illusion!
But at least, when it had extracted the plain, bare statement which it
had hunted down through the many-recessed corners of her heart, that
stern sense of reality let her alone. She no longer felt like a beetle
impaled on a pin. She was free now to move as she liked and look
unmolested at what she pleased. Honesty had no more power over her than
to make sure she saw what she was pretending to look at.
But at what a diminished pile she had now to look, tarnished and faded
like the once-loved bits of bright-colored silk and paper. She felt
robbed and cried out in a pain which seemed to her to come from her very
heart, that something living and vital and precious to her had been
killed by that rough handling. But one warning look from the clear eyes
of honesty forced her, lamenting, to give up even this. If it had been
living and precious and vital to her, it would have survived anything
that honesty could have done to it.
But something had survived, something to be reckoned with, something
which no tyrant, overbearing honesty could put out of her life . . . the
possibility for being carried away in the deep full current of passion,
fed by all the multitudinous streams of ripened personality. If that
was all that was left, was not that enough? It had been for thousands of
other women. . . .
No, not that; honesty woke to menace again. What thousands of other
women had done had no bearing here. She was not thousands of other
women. She was herself, herself. Would it be enough for her?
Honesty issued a decree of impartial justice. Let her look at it with a
mature woman's experienced divination of reality, let her look at it as
it would be and see for herself if it would be enough. She was no girl
whose ignorance rendered her incapable of judging until she had
literally experienced. She was no bound-woman, bullied by the tyranny of
an outgrown past, forced to revolt in order to attain the freedom
without which no human decision can be taken. Neale's strong hand had
opened the door to freedom and she could see what the bound-women could
not . . . that freedom is not the end, but only the beginning.
It was as though something were holding her gripped and upright there,
staring before her, motionless, till she had put herself to the last
supreme test. She closed her eyes, and sat so immobile, rapt in the
prodigious effort of her imagination and will, that she barely breathed.
How would it be? Would it be enough? She plunged the plummet down, past
the fury and rage of the storm on the surface, past the teeming life of
the senses, down to the depths of consciousness. . . .
And what she brought up from those depths was a warning distaste, a
something offending to her, to all of her, now she was aware of it.
She was amazed. Why should she taste an acrid muddy flavor of dregs in
that offered cup of heavy aromatic wine, she who had all her life
thanked Heaven for her freedom from the ignominy of feeling it debasing
to be a woman who loved? It was glorious to be a woman who loved. There
had been no dregs left from those sweet, light, heady draughts she and
Neale had drunk together in their youth, nor in the quieter satisfying
draughts they knew now. What was the meaning of that odor of decay about
what seemed so living, so hotly more living than what she had? Why
should she have this unmistakable prescience of something stale and
tainting which she had never felt? Was she too old for passion? But she
was in the height of her physical flowering, and physically she cried
out for it. Could it be that, having spent the heritage of youth, she
could not have it again? Could it be that one could not go back, there,
any more than . . .
Oh, what did that bring to mind? What was that fleeting cobweb of
thought that seemed a recurrence of a sensation only recently passed?
When she had tried to tell herself that full-fruited passion was worth
all else in life, was the one great and real thing worth all the many
small shams . . . what was it she had felt?
She groped among the loose-hanging filaments of impression and brought
it out to see. It seemed to be . . . could it have been, the same startled
recoil as at the notion of getting back the peace of childhood by giving
up her home for the toy-house; her living children for the dolls?
* * * * *
Now, for the great trial of strength. Back! Push back all those
thick-clustering, intruding, distracting traditional ideas of other
people on both sides; the revolt on one hand, the feeble resignation on
the other; what other women did; what people had said. . . . Let her wipe
all that off from the too-receptive tablets of her mind. Out of sight
with all that. This was _her_ life, _her_ question, hers alone. Let her
stand alone with her own self and her own life, and, with honesty as
witness, ask herself the question . . . would she, if she could, give up
what she was now, with her myriads of roots, deep-set in the soil of
human life, in order to bear the one red rose, splendid though it might
be?
That was the question.
With no conscious volition of hers, the answer was there, plain and
irrefutable as a fact in the physical world. No, she would not choose to
do that. She had gone on, gone on beyond that. She was almost bewildered
by the peremptory certainty with which that answer came, as though it
had lain inherent in the very question.
* * * * *
And now another question crowded forward, darkly confused, charged with
a thousand complex associations and emotions. There had been something
displeasing and preposterous in the idea of trying to stoop her grown
stature and simplify her complex tastes and adult interests back into
the narrow limits of a child's toy-house. Could it be that she felt
something of the same displeasure when she set herself fully to conceive
what it would be to cramp herself and her complex interests and adult
affections back to . . .
But at this there came a wild protesting clamor, bursting out to prevent
her from completing this thought; loud, urgent voices, men's, women's,
with that desperate certainty of their ground which always struck down
any guard Marise had been able to put up. They cried her down as a
traitor to the fullness of life, those voices, shouting her down with
all the unquestioned authority she had encountered so many times on that
terribly vital thing, the printed page; they clashed in their fury and
all but drowned each other out. Only disconnected words reached her, but
she recognized the well-known sentences from which they came . . .
"puritanism . . . abundance of personality . . . freedom of
development . . . nothing else vital in human existence . . .
prudishness . . . conventionality . . . our only possible contact with
the life-purpose . . . with the end of passion life declines and dies."
The first onslaught took Marise's breath, as though a literal storm had
burst around her. She was shaken as she had been shaken so many times
before. She lost her hold on her staff . . . _what had that staff been?_
At the thought, the master-words came to her mind again; and all fell
quiet and in a great hush waited on her advance. Neale had said, "What
is deepest and most living in _you_." Well, what _was_ deepest and most
living in her? That was what she was trying to find out. That was what
those voices were trying to cry her down from finding.
For the first time in all her life, she drew an inspiration from Neale's
resistance to opposition, knew something of the joy of battle. What
right had those people to cry her down? She would not submit to it.
She would go back to the place where she had been set upon by other
people's voices, other people's thoughts, and she would go on steadily,
thinking her own.
She had been thinking that there _was_ the same displeasure and distaste
as when she had thought of returning to her literal childhood, when she
set herself fully to conceive what it would be to cramp herself and
simplify her complex interests and affections back to the narrow limits
of passion, which like her play with dolls had been only a foreshadowing
of something greater to come.
She spoke it out boldly now, and was amazed that not one of the
clamorous voices dared resist the authenticity of her statement. But
after all, how would they dare? This was what she had found in her own
heart, what they had not been able, for all their clamor, to prevent her
from seeing. She had been strong enough to beat them, to stand out
against them, to say that she saw what she really did see, and felt what
she really did feel. She did not feel what traditionally she should
feel, that is what a primitive Italian woman might feel, all of whose
emotional life had found no other outlet than sex. . . .
Well, if it was so, it was so. For better or for worse, that was the
kind of woman she had become, with the simple, forthright physical life
subordinate, humble; like a pleasant, lovable child playing among the
strong, full-grown, thought-freighted interests and richly varied
sympathies and half-impersonal joys and sorrows which had taken
possession of her days. And she could not think that the child could
ever again be master of her destiny, any more than (save in a moment of
false sentimentality) she could think that she would like to have her
horizon again limited by a doll-house. To be herself was to go on, not
to go back, now that she knew what she had become. It seemed to her that
never before had she stood straight up.
And in plain fact she found that somehow she had risen to her feet and
was now standing, her head up, almost touching the rafters of the slant
ceiling. She could have laughed out, to find herself so free. She knew
now why she had never known the joy of battle. It was because she had
been afraid. And she had been afraid because she had never dared to
enter the battle, had always sent others in to do her fighting for her.
Now she had been forced into it and had won. And there was nothing to be
afraid of, there!
She spread out her arms in a great gesture of liberation. How had she
ever lived before, under the shadow of that coward fear? This . . . this
. . . she had a moment of vision . . . this was what Neale had been trying
to do for her, all these years, unconsciously, not able to tell her what
it was, driving at the mark only with the inarticulate wisdom of his
love for her, his divination of her need. He had seen her, shivering and
shrinking in the shallow waters, and had longed for her sake to have her
strike out boldly into the deep. But even if he had been ever so able to
tell her, she would not have understood till she had fought her way
through those ravening breakers, beyond them, out into the sustaining
ocean.
How long it took, how _long_ for men and women to make the smallest
advance! And how the free were the only ones who could help to liberate
the bound. How she had fought against Neale's effort to set her free,
had cried to him that she dared not risk herself on the depths, that he
must have the strength to swim for her . . . and how Neale, doggedly sure
of the simple truth, too simple for her to see, had held to the
certainty that his effort would not make her strong, and that she would
only be free if she were strong.
Neale being his own master, a free citizen of life, knew what a kingdom
he owned, and with a magnanimity unparalleled could not rest till she
had entered hers. She, not divining what she had not known, had only
wished to make the use of his strength which would have weakened her.
Had there ever before been any man who refused to let the woman he loved
weaken herself by the use of his strength? Had a man ever before held
out his strong hand to a woman to help her forward, not to hold her
fast?
Her life was her own. She stood in it, knowing it to be an impregnable
fortress, knowing that from it she could now look abroad fearlessly and
understandingly, knowing that from it she could look at things and men
and the world and see what was there. From it she could, as if for the
first time, look at Vincent Marsh when next she saw him; she would look
to see what was really there. That was all. She would look at him and
see what he was, and then she would know the meaning of what had
happened, and what she was to do. And no power on earth could prevent
her from doing it. The inner bar that had shut her in was broken. She
was a free woman, free from that something in her heart that was afraid.
For the moment she could think of nothing else beyond the richness of
that freedom. Why, here was the total fulfilment she had longed for.
Here was the life more abundant, within, within her own heart, waiting
for her!
* * * * *
The old clock in the hall behind her sounded four muffled strokes and,
as if it had wakened her, Agnes stirred in her bed and cried out in a
loud voice of terror, "Oh, come quick, Miss Marise! Come!"
Marise went through the hail and to her door, and saw the frightened old
eyes glaring over the pulled-up sheet. "Oh . . . oh . . . it's you . . . I
thought. . . . Oh, Miss Marise, don't you see anything standing in that
corner? Didn't you hear. . . . Oh, Miss Marise, I must have had a bad
dream. I thought . . ." Her teeth were chattering. She did not know what
she was saying.
"It's all right, Agnes," said Marise soothingly, stepping into the room.
"The big clock just struck four. That probably wakened you."
She sat down on the bed and laid her hand firmly on Agnes' shoulder,
looking into the startled old eyes, which grew a little quieter now that
someone else was there. What a pitiable creature Agnes' dependence on
Cousin Hetty had made of her.
Like the boom from a great bell came the thought, "That is what I wanted
Neale to make of me, when the crucial moment came, a dependent . . . but
he would not."
"What time did you say it is?" Agnes asked, still breathing quickly but
with a beginning of a return to her normal voice.
"Four o'clock," answered Marise gently, as to a child. "It must be
almost light outside. The last night when you have anything to fear is
over now."
She went to the window and opened the shutter. The ineffable sacred
pureness of another dawn came in, gray, tranquil, penetrating.
At the sight of it, the dear light of everyday, Marise felt the thankful
tears come to her eyes.
"See, Agnes," she said in an unsteady voice, "daylight has come. You can
look around for yourself, and see that there is nothing to be afraid
of."
CHAPTER XXVI
MARISE LOOKS AND SEES WHAT IS THERE
_A Torch in a Living Tree_
July 24.
Not since his fiery, ungovernable youth had Vincent felt anything like
the splendid surge of rich desire and exultant certainty which sent him
forward at a bound along the wood-road into which he had seen Marise
turn. The moment he had been watching for had come at last, after these
three hideous days of sudden arrest and pause. The forced inaction had
been a sensation physically intolerable to him, as though he had been
frozen immobile with every nerve and muscle strained for a great leap.
He felt himself taking the leap now, with such a furious, triumphant
sense of power released, that he came up beside her like a wind in the
forest, calling her name loudly, his hands outflung, his face glowing,
on fire with joy and his need for her.
For an instant he was dumfounded by the quiet face she turned on him, by
his instant perception of a profound change in her, by an expression in
her long dark eyes which was new to him, which he felt to be ominous to
him. But he was no untried boy to be cast down or disconcerted by sudden
alterations of mood in a woman. He was a man, with a man's trained
tenacity of purpose and experienced quickness of resource.
He wasted no time. "What has happened to you?" he demanded, peremptorily
as by right to know, and with the inner certainty of over-riding it,
whatever it was.
She did not seem tacitly or otherwise to deny his right to know, but
she seemed to have no words for it, continuing to look at him silently,
intently, with no hostility, with a sort of steady, wondering attention
in her face, usually so sensitively changing. He felt a resentment at
its quiet, at its lack of that instant responsiveness to his look which
had given him such moments of exquisite pleasure, which had been her
own, her wonderful gift to him. She was looking at him now as she might
have looked at any one else, merely in order to see what was there.
Well, he would show her what was there! The will to conquer rose high
and strong in him, with an element of fierceness it had not had before
because no resistance had called it out. He did not show this, indeed
only allowed it the smallest corner of his consciousness, keeping all
the rest tautly on the alert for the first indication of an opening, for
the first hint of where to throw his strength.
But standing in suspense on the alert was the last rôle he could long
endure, and in a moment, when she did not answer, he took a step towards
her, towering above her, his hands on her shoulders, pouring out with a
hot sense of release all his longing into the cry, "Marise, Marise my
own, what has happened to you?"
How he hated the quiet of her face! With what hungry impatience he
watched to see it break. How surely he counted on its disappearance at
his touch. For he had the certainty of his power to kindle her left
intact from the last time he had seen her, tinder to his spark,
helplessly played upon by his voice.
But now it was as though he had held a torch aloft into the green
branches of a living tree. A twitch of surface agitation on her face and
that was all.
And when she spoke, as she did at once, the sound of her voice was
strange and alien to him. With an extreme directness, and with a deep
sincerity of accent which, even to his ears, made his own impassioned
outcry to her sound inflated and false, she said earnestly, "I don't
believe I can tell you what has happened. I don't believe you could
understand it."
He did not believe a word of this, but with his brilliant suppleness of
mind he perceived that he was in the wrong key. She was not, for the
moment, to be kindled to flame, she who miraculously was never the same.
Perhaps it was the moment for a thrust of sheer power, straight at the
obstacle, for of course he knew the obstacle.
"I know what has happened," he said, "without your telling me. Your
husband has made a scene, and overborne you, and is trying to force you
back into the hen-yard of domestic virtue. . . ." He changed his manner. He
said in a low, beautiful, persuasive voice, his eyes deeply on her, sure
of himself with that sureness that no one had ever resisted, "But you
can never do that now, you bird-of-paradise! You would only . . ."
He was brought up short by a change in her. This time his words had had
the power to move her face from the quiet he hated. It was suddenly
alive with a strong emotion. But what emotion? He could not guess at its
meaning, nor why she should step quickly away, shaking his hands from
her shoulders, and looking at him sadly, her eyebrows drawn up as if in
pain. He hung uncertain, daunted by his inability to read her face,
feeling for the first time an instantly dismissed doubt of his mastery
over her.
She said very quickly, with the accent and manner of one who, shocked
and pitying, tries to save another from going on with an involuntary
disclosure in him of something shaming and unworthy.
"No, oh no! Not that. Neale has done nothing . . . said nothing . . .
except as he always has, to leave me quite free, all free."
As he was silent for a moment, watchful, not especially moved by her
words, which seemed to him unimportant, but alarmed by some special
significance which they seemed to have for her, she went on with the
single, only note of blame or reproach which was to come into her voice.
"Oh, how _could_ you think that?" she said to him, with a deep quavering
disappointment, as though she were ashamed of him.
He knew that he was the cause of the disappointment, although he could
not imagine why, and he regretted having made a false move; but he was
not deeply concerned by this passage. He did not see how it could have
any importance, or touch what lay at issue between them. These were all
womanish, up-in-the-air passes and parries. He had only not yet found
his opening.
He flung his head back impatiently. "If it is not that, what is it?" he
demanded. "A return of hide-bound scruples about the children? You know
that they must live their own lives, not yours, and that anything that
gives you greater richness and power makes you a better mother."
"Oh yes, I know that," she answered. "I have thought of that, myself."
But he had a baffled feeling that this was not at all the admission the
words would make it seem.
His impatience began to burn high, and a dawning alarm to translate
itself into anger. He would not be played with, by any woman who ever
lived! "Marise," he said roughly, "what under the sun is it?" In his
tone was all his contemptuous dismissal of it, whatever it might be . . .
outworn moral qualms, fear of the world's opinion, inertia, cowardice,
hair-splitting scruples, or some morbid physical revulsion . . . there was
not one of them which he knew he could not instantly pounce on and shake
to rags.
Marise stood very still, her eyes bent downward. "Aren't you going to
answer me?" he said, furious.
She nodded. "Yes, I'm going to answer you," she said, without raising
her eyes. He understood that he must wait, and stood opposite to her,
close to her, looking at her, all the strength of his passion in that
avid gaze.
She was stamped on his mind in every detail as she looked at that
instant, infinitely desirable, infinitely alluring, in her thin white
dress, her full supple woman's body erect and firm with a strong life of
its own, her long sensitive hands clasped before her . . . how many times
in his dreams had he held them in his . . . her shining dark hair bound
smoothly about her head and down low on each side of her rounded
forehead. Her thick white eyelids, down-dropped, were lowered over her
eyes, and her mouth with its full lips and deep corners . . . at the sight
of her mouth on which he had laid that burning kiss, Vincent felt a
barrier within him give way . . . here he was at last with the woman he
loved, the woman who was going to give herself to him . . . Good God! all
these words . . . what did they mean? Nothing. He swept her into his arms
and drew her face to his, his eyes closed, lost in the wonder and
ecstasy of having reached his goal at last.
* * * * *
She did not make the startled virginal resistance of a girl. She drew
away from him quietly . . . the hatred for that quiet was murderous in him
. . . and shook her head. Why, it was almost gently that she shook her
head.
How dared she act gently to him, as though he were a boy who had made a
mistake! How dared she not be stirred and mastered! He felt his head
burning hot with anger, and knew that his face must be suffused with
red.
And hers was not, it was quiet. He could have stamped with rage, and
shaken her. He wanted to hurt her at once, deeply, to pierce her and
sting her back to life. "Do you mean," he said brutally, "that you find,
after all, that you are a cold, narrow, cowardly, provincial woman,
stunted by your life, so that you are incapable of feeling a generous
heat?"
As she remained silent, he was stung by the expression on her face which
he did not understand. He went on vindictively snatching up to drive
home his thrust the sharpest and cruelest weapon he could conceive,
"_Perhaps you find you are too old?_"
At this she looked away from him for an instant, up to the lower
branches of the oak under which they stood. She seemed to reflect, and
when she brought her eyes back to his, she answered, "Yes, I think that
is it. I find I am too old."
He was for years to ponder on the strangeness of the accent with which
she said this, without regret, with that damnable gentleness as though
to hide from him a truth he might find hard to bear, or be incapable of
understanding.
How could any woman say "I find I am too old" with that unregretting
accent? Was it not the worst of calamities for all women to grow old?
What was there left for a woman when she grew old?
But how preposterous, her saying that, she who stood there in the
absolute perfection of her bloom!
He found that he did not know what to say next. That tolerant
acquiescence of hers in what he had meant to sting intolerably . . . it
was as though he had put all his force into a blow that would stun, and
somehow missing his aim, encountering no resistance, was toppling
forward with the impetus of his own effort. He recovered himself and
looked at her, choking, "You don't mean . . ." he began challenging her
incredulously, and could go no further.
For she nodded, her eyes on his with that singular expression in them
which he did not understand, and which he intensely resented.
He was so angry that for a moment he could not speak. He was aware of
nothing but anger. "It's impotence and weakness on your part, that's all
it is!" he cast out at her, hating her savagely as he spoke, "no matter
what fine words you've decided to call it to cloak your own feebleness.
It's the littleness of the vital spark in you. Or it's cowardly inertia,
turning from the real fulfilment that calls for you, back to chips and
straw because you are used to them. It's being a small, poor, weak,
cowed creature, traditional-minded, instead of the splendid, brave,
living woman I thought I loved. I am _glad_ to leave you behind, to have
no more of you in my life. I have no use for thin-blooded cowards."
She made no answer at all, not a word. His flaming eyes fell away from
her face. He turned from her abruptly and walked rapidly away, not
looking back.
Then he found he had ceased to advance rapidly, had stopped and was
standing still, wrung in so dreadful a pain that his hand was at his
side as though he had been stabbed. With no thought, with no awareness
of what he was doing, he ran back to her, his hands outstretched,
suffering so that he must have help. He did not mean to speak, did not
know what he was to say . . . he cried out to her, "Marise, Marise . . . I
love you! _What can I do?_"
The cry was desperate, involuntary, forcing its way out from unfathomed
depths of feeling below all his anger and resentment, and tearing him to
pieces as it came. It was as though he had taken his heart out and flung
it at her feet.
Her face changed instantly and was quiveringly alight with a pale and
guilty agitation. "No . . . oh _no_, Vincent! I thought you only . . . I
had thought you could not really . . . Vincent, forgive me! Forgive me!"
She took one of his hands in both hers . . . the last unforgotten touch
he was ever to have of her. . . .
* * * * *
It came to him through those words which he did not understand that she
was pitying him; and stung to the quick, he drew back from her,
frowning, with an angry toss of his head.
Instantly she drew back also, as though she had misinterpreted
something.
He stood for an instant looking full at her as though he did not see
her; and then with a wide gesture of utter bewilderment, strange from
him, he passed her without a look.
This time he did not turn back, but continued steadily and resolutely on
his way.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE FALL OF THE BIG PINE
August 2.
I
When Marise reached the place on the wood-road where she had had that
last talk with Vincent Marsh, she stopped, postponing for a moment the
errand to the Powers which she had so eagerly undertaken. She stood
there, looking up into the far green tops of the pines, seeing again
that strange, angry, bewildered gesture with which he had renounced
trying to make anything out of her, and had turned away.
It remained with her, constantly, as the symbol of what had happened,
and she looked at it gravely and understandingly. Then, very swiftly,
she saw again that passing aspect of his which had so terribly
frightened her, felt again the fear that he might be really suffering,
that she might really have done a hurt to another human being.
This brought her a momentary return of the agitation it had caused in
her that day, and she sat down abruptly on a tree-trunk, her knees
trembling, her hands cold.
That fear had come as so totally unexpected a possibility, something
which his every aspect and tone and word up to then had seemed to
contradict. Strange, how unmoved he had left her, till that moment!
Strange the impression of him, that first time after she had known
herself strong enough to stand up and be herself, not the responsive
instrument played on by every passing impression. Strange, how instantly
he had felt that, and how passionate had been his resentment of her
standing up to be herself, her being a grown woman, a human being, and
not a flower to be plucked. How he had hated it, and alas! how
lamentable his hatred of it had made him appear. What a blow he had
dealt to her conception of him by his instant assumption that a change
in her could only mean that Neale had been bullying her. It had been
_hard_ to see him so far away and diminished as that had made him seem,
so entirely outside her world. It had dealt a back-hand blow to her own
self-esteem to have him seem vulgar.
How strange an experience for her altogether, to be able to stand firm
against noise and urgent clamor and confusion, and to see, in spite of
it, what she was looking at; to see, back of the powerful magnetic
personality, the undeveloped and tyrannical soul, the cramped mind
without experience or conception of breadth and freedom in the relations
between human beings; to be able to hear Vincent cry out on her with
that fierce, masterful certainty of himself, that she was acting from
cowed and traditional-minded motives and not to believe a word of it,
because it was not true; not even to feel the scared throb of alarm at
the very idea that it might be true; to have it make no impression on
her save pity that Vincent should be imprisoned in a feeling of which
possession was so great a part that failure to possess turned all the
rest to poison and sickness.
What had happened to her, in truth, that she had this new steadfastness?
She had told Vincent he could not understand it. Did she understand it
herself? She leaned her chin on her two hands looking deep into the
green recesses of the forest. High above her head, a wind swayed the
tops of the pines and sang loudly; but down between the great brown
columns of their trunks, not a breath stirred. The thick-set,
myriad-leaved young maples held all their complicated delicately-edged
foliage motionless in perfect calm.
It was very still in the depths of Marise's complicated mind also,
although the wind stirred the surface. Yes, she knew what had happened
to her. She had seen it completely happen to three other human beings,
miraculously, unbelievably, certainly; had seen the babies who could
not tell light from dark, heat from cold, emerge by the mere process of
healthful living into keenly sensitive beings accurately alive to every
minutest variation of the visible world. It must be that like them she
had simply learned to tell moral light from dark, heat from cold, by the
mere process of healthful living. What happened to the child who at one
time could not grasp the multiplication table, and a few years later, if
only he were properly fed and cared for, had somehow so wholly changed,
although still the same, that he found his way lightly among geometric
conceptions, and only a few years after that was probing with expert
fingers at some unsolved problem of astronomy? He had grown up, that was
all. By calling the miracle a familiar name we veiled the marvel of it.
Insensibly to him, with no visible change from one day to the next, he
had acquired a totally different conception of the universe, a totally
different valuation of everything in life.
That was what had happened to her. She had grown up . . . why should not a
woman grow up to other valuations of things as well as her comrade in
life?
And it had happened to her as it did to the child, because someone
stronger than she had protected her while she was growing . . . not
protected from effort, as though one should try to protect the child
from learning his lessons. . . . Back there, such ages ago in Italy, in her
ignorant . . . how ignorant! . . . and frightened girlhood, she had begged
Neale, without knowing what she did, to help her grow up, to help her
save what was worth saving in her, to help her untangle from the
many-colored confusion of her nature what was best worth keeping. And
Neale had done it, had clung steadily to his divination of what was
strong in her, in spite of her clamor to him to let it go.
But Vincent had not grown up, was back there still in confusion, holding
desperately with all that terrific strength of his to what could not be
held, to what was impermanent and passing in its nature. Why should he
do that? Neale knew better than that. Then she saw why: it was because
Vincent conceived of nothing but emptiness if he let it go, and horribly
feared that imaginary emptiness. Out of the incalculable richness of her
kingdom she wondered again at his blindness. . . . And made a pitying guess
at the reason for it . . . perhaps for him it was _not_ imaginary. Perhaps
one of the terms of the bargain he had made with life was that there
_should_ be nothing later but emptiness for him. Yes, she saw that. She
would have made that bargain, too, if it had not been for Neale. She
would have been holding terrified to what was not to be held; with
nothing but that between her and the abyss. Who was she to blame Vincent
for his blindness?
That, perhaps, had been the meaning of that singular last moment of
their talk together, which had frightened her so, with its sudden plunge
below the surface, into the real depths, when, changed wholly into
someone else, he had run back to her, his hands outstretched, his eyes
frightened, his lips trembling . . . perhaps he had felt the abyss there
just before him. For an instant there, he had made her think of Paul,
made her remember that Vincent himself had, so short a time ago, been a
little boy too. She had been so shocked and racked by pity and remorse,
that she would have been capable of any folly to comfort him. Perhaps
she had seen there for an instant the man Vincent might have been, and
had seen that she could have loved that man.
But how instantly it had passed! He had not suffered that instant of
true feeling to have space to live, but had burned it up with the return
of his pride, his resentment that anyone save himself should try to
stand upright, with the return of the devouring desire-for-possession of
the man who had always possessed everything he had coveted. There was
something sad in being able to see the littleness of life which
underlay the power and might of personality in a man like Vincent. He
could have been something else.
She wondered why there should slide into her mood, just now, a faint
tinge of regret. . . . Why should there be anything there but the bright
gladness of thanksgiving for the liberation from the chains which her
own nature might have forged about her? She had at last stepped outside
the narrow circle of personal desire, and found all the world open to
her. And yet there was room in her heart for a shade of wistful wonder
if perhaps all this did not mean that she might be sliding from the
ranks of those who feel and do, into the ranks of those who only
understand.
But one glance at the life that lay before her scattered this hanging
mist-cloud . . . good heavens! what feeling and doing lay there before
her!
Had she thought that Neale was nothing to her because he had become all
in all to her so that he penetrated all her life, so that she did not
live an instant alone? Had she thought the loss of the amusing trinket
of physical newness could stand against the gain of an affection ill
massy gold? Would she, to buy moments of excitement, lose an instant of
the precious certainty of sympathy and trust and understanding which she
and Neale had bought and paid for, hour by hour, year by year of honest
life-in-common? Where was real life for her? Had she not known? Where
were the real depths, where the real food for the whole woman she had
grown to be? Neale had opened the door so that she could go away from
him if that was what she needed, or go back to stand by his side; and
through the open door had come the flood of daylight which had shown her
that she could not go back to stand by his side because she had been
there all the time, had never left it, never could leave it, any more
than she could leave half of her body in one place, and go on to
another.
II
There was other feeling and doing now, too, before her, this instant,
which she had forgotten, idling here in her much-loved forest, as much a
part of her home as her piano or her own roof-tree. She had been trying
to understand what had been happening that summer. Let her try first of
all to understand what she must do in that perfectly definite and
concrete dilemma in which she had been placed by that strange sight of
'Gene Powers, fleeing back from the Eagle Rocks. She must look squarely
at what she supposed was the legal obligation . . . she instantly felt a
woman's impatience of the word legal as against human, and could not
entertain the thought of the obligations of the situation. She must see,
and think and try to understand, with Neale to help her. She had not yet
had time to tell Neale.
But not today. Today she was only the bearer of the good tidings to
Nelly and 'Gene, tidings which would wipe out for her the recollection
of a day which was shameful to her, the day when she had conceived the
possibility of believing some thing base against Neale. It was not that
she had believed it,--no, she had stood it off till Neale came back. But
there was shame for her in those recurrent spasms of horror when she had
conceived the possibility that she might believe it. There had been
proof of it, of course, Eugenia's positive statement . . . strange how
Eugenia could have so entirely misunderstood the affair! . . . But what was
mere proof against human certainty? No, she had been attacked suddenly
and for an instant had failed to rise to defend what was hers to defend.
It was a failure to live down.
She stood up and moved forward along the path, changing the thick
envelope in one hand to the other. She had already lost time. She ought
to have been by this time through the forest and out in the edge of the
Powers pasture.
She became aware that for some time she had heard a distant sound, a
faint toc-toc-toc, like the sound of chopping. This being associated in
her mind with snow and winter woods, she had not thought it could be the
sound of the axe which it seemed to be. Nobody could be felling trees in
the height of the farming season, and on this day of swooning heat. But
as she came to the edge of the woods and turned into the path along the
brook, she heard it more plainly, unmistakable this time, not far now,
the ringing blows delivered with the power and rhythmic stroke of the
trained chopper. It came not from the woods at all, she now perceived,
but from the open farming land, from the other side of the pasture,
beyond the Powers house.
But there were no woods there, only the Powers' big pine which towered
up, darkly glorious, into the shimmering summer haze.
As she looked at it wondering, it came into her mind had somebody told
her, or had she overheard it somewhere? . . . that 'Gene had promised Nelly
at last to cut down the big pine he and his fathers had so cherished.
Could it be that? What a sacrifice! And to a foolish whim of Nelly's.
There had been no musty smell in the house till Nelly came there to keep
the shutters closed so that the sun would not fade the carpets. The old
pine was one of the most splendid things of beauty in the valley. And it
was something vital in 'Gene's strange, choked, inarticulate life. She
stopped to listen a moment, feeling a chill of apprehension and
foreboding. It was dreadful to have 'Gene do that. It was as though he
were cutting at his own strength, cutting off one of his own members to
please his wife. Poor 'Gene! He would do that too, now, if Nelly asked
him.
The resonant winter note rang out loud, strange in that sultry summer
air. She looked from afar at the tree, holding its mighty crest high
above the tiny house, high above the tiny human beings who had doomed
it. So many winters, so many summers, so many suns and moons and rains
and snows had gone to make it what it was. Like the men who had planted
it and lived beneath its shade, it had drawn silently from the depths of
the earth and the airy treasures of the sky food to grow strong and live
its life. And now to be killed in an hour, in attempted expiation of a
deed for which it bore no guilt!
Marise was coming closer now. The axe-strokes stopped for a moment as
though the chopper drew breath. The silence was heavy over the
breathless summer field.
But by the time she had arrived at the back door of the house, the
axe-blows were renewed, loud, immediate, shocking palpably on her ear.
She knocked, but knew that the ringing clamor of the axe drowned out the
sound. Through the screen-door she saw old Mrs. Powers, standing by the
table, ironing, and stepped in. The three children were in the pantry,
beyond, Ralph spreading some bread and butter for his little brother and
sister. Ralph was always good to the younger children, although he was
so queer and un-childlike! Nelly was not there. Mrs. Powers looked up at
Marise, and nodded. She looked disturbed and absent. "We're at it, you
see," she said, jerking her head back towards the front of the house. "I
told you 'bout 'Gene's sayin' he'd gi'n in to Nelly about the big pine."
Marise made a gesture of dismay at this confirmation. The old woman went
on, "Funny thing . . . I ain't a Powers by birth, Lord knows, and I never
thought I set no store by their old pine tree. It always sort o' riled
me, how much 'Gene's father thought of it, and 'Gene after him . . . sort
of silly, seems like. But just now when we was all out there, and 'Gene
heaved up his axe and hit the first whack at it . . . well, I can't tell
you . . . it give me a turn most as if he'd chopped right into _me_
somewhere. I got up and come into the house, and I set to ironin', as
fast as I could clip it, to keep my mind off'n it. I made the children
come in too, because it ain't no place for kids around, when a tree
that size comes down."
Marise demurred, "'Gene is such a fine chopper, he knows to a hair where
he'll lay it, of course."
"Well, even so, who knows what notion a kid will take into his head?
They was playin' right there on a pile of pole-wood 'Gene's brought in
from the woods and ain't got sawed up into stove-lengths yet. I didn't
want to take no chances; maybe they wouldn't ha' moved quick enough when
their papa yelled to them. No, ma'am, I made 'em come in, and here
they'll stay. Nelly, she's out there, walkin' round and round watchin'
'Gene. She's awfully set up havin' it come down. 'Gene he's told her
he'll give her the money from the lumber in it. There'll be a sight of
boards, too. It's the biggest pine in the valley."
Marise went to the window and looked at the scene, penetrated by the
strangeness of the difference between its outer and inner aspect: 'Gene,
his faded blue overalls tucked into his plowman's heavy cow-hide boots,
his shirt open over his great throat and chest, his long corded arms
rising and falling with the steady effortless rhythm of the master
woodsman. Nelly, in one of her immaculate blue ginghams, a white apron
over it, a white frilled shade-hat on her head, her smartly shod small
feet, treading the ground with that inimitable light step of hers,
circling slowly about, looking at 'Gene as he worked, looking up at the
crown of the tree, high, so insolently high above her head, soon to be
brought low by a wish from her heart, soon to be turned into money for
her to spend.
"I came over to talk to 'Gene and Nelly about some business," Marise
said, over her shoulder, to Mrs. Powers, not able to take her eyes from
the trio in the drama out there, "but I'd better wait till the tree is
down before I speak to them."
"'Twon't be long now. 'Gene's been at it quite a while, and he's
stavin' away like all possessed. Seems as if, now he's started in, he
couldn't get it over with quick enough to suit him. He acted awful queer
about it, I thought."
She left her ironing and, looking over her shoulder at the children,
came closer to where Marise stood. Then she stepped back and shut the
door to the pantry. "Mis' Crittenden," she said in an anxious troubled
voice, "'Gene ain't right these days. He acts to me like he's comin'
down with a sick spell, or something. He ain't _right_. Today Nelly told
me she woke up in the night last night and 'Gene wasn't there. She
hollered to him, and he didn't answer. It scared her like everything,
and she scrambled out of bed and lighted the lamp, and she said she
'most fainted away, when she see 'Gene, rolled up in a blanket, lying on
the floor, over against the wall, his eyes wide open looking at her. She
said she let out a yell . . . it scairt the life out of her . . . and 'Gene
he got right up. She says to him, 'For the Lord's sake, 'Gene, what
_ails_ you?' And what do you suppose he says to her, he says, 'I didn't
know whether you wanted me there or not, Nelly.' What do you think of
that? She says back, 'For goodness' sake, 'Gene Powers, where _would_
you be nights, except in your own bed!' He got back and for all Nelly
knows slept all right the rest of the night. She says she guesses he
must have had some sort of funny dream, and not been really all waked up
yet. But it must ha' gi'n her a turn, for all she ain't one of the
nervous kind."
Marise turned sick with shocked pity. The two women looked at each
other, silently with shadowed eyes of foreboding. Mrs. Powers shook her
head, and turned back into the pantry, shutting the door behind her.
Marise heard her speaking to the children, in the cheerful, bantering,
affectionate, grandmother tone she had always had for them. She was
brave, old Mrs. Powers, she always said she could "stand up to things."
She was the sort of woman who can always be depended on to keep life
going, no matter what happens; who never gives up, who can always go on
taking care of the children.
Marise herself did not feel at all brave. She sat down heavily in a
chair by the window looking out at the man who for his wife's sake was
killing something vital and alive. He had done that before, 'Gene had.
He went at it now with a furious haste which had something dreadful in
it.
Nelly, who had sat down to rest on the pile of brush and poles, seemed a
carved and painted statuette of ivory and gold.
She took off her ruffled pretty hat, and laid it down on the white-birch
poles, so that she could tip her head far back and see the very top of
the tree. Her braids shone molten in the sunshine. Her beautiful face
was impassive, secreting behind a screen all that Marise was sure she
must have been feeling.
'Gene, catching sight of her now, in a side-glance, stopped abruptly in
the middle of a swing, and shouted to her to "get off that brush-pile.
That's jus' where I'm lottin' on layin' the tree."
Somewhat startled, Nelly sprang up and moved around to the other side,
back of him, although she called protestingly, "Gracious, you're not
_near_ through yet!"
'Gene made no answer, returning to the fury of his assault on what he so
much loved. The great trunk now had a gaping raw gash in its side. Nelly
idled back of him, looking up at the tree, down at him. What was she
thinking about?
Marise wondered if someone with second-sight could have seen Frank
Warner, there between the husband and wife? 'Gene's face was still gray
in spite of the heat and his fierce exertion. Glistening streams of
perspiration ran down his cheeks.
What did the future hold for 'Gene? What possible escape was there from
the tragic net he had wrapped stranglingly around himself?
Very distantly, like something dreamed, it came to Marise that once for
an instant the simple, violent solution had seemed the right one to her.
_Could she have thought that?_
What a haunted house was the human heart, with phantoms from the
long-dead past intruding their uninvited ghastly death's-heads among the
living.
The axe-strokes stopped; so suddenly that the ear went on hearing them,
ghost-like, in the intense silence. 'Gene stood upright, lifting his
wet, gray face. "She's coming now," he said.
Marise looked out, astonished. To her eyes the tree stood as massively
firm as she had ever seen it. But 'Gene's attitude was of strained,
expectant certainty: he stood near Nelly and as she looked up at the
tree, he looked at her. At that look Marise felt the cold perspiration
on her own temples.
Nelly stepped sideways a little, tipping her head to see, and cried out,
"Yes, I see it beginning to slant. How _slow_ it goes!
"It'll go fast enough in a minute," said 'Gene.
Of what followed, not an instant ever had for Marise the quality of
reality. It always remained for her a superb and hideous dream,
something symbolical, glorious, and horrible which had taken place in
her brain, not in the lives of human beings.
* * * * *
Nelly, . . . looking down suddenly to see where the tree would fall,
crying out, "Oh, I left my hat where it'll . . ." and darting, light as a
feather, towards it.
'Gene, making a great futile gesture to stop her, as she passed him,
shouting at her, with a horrified glance up at the slowly leaning tree,
"Come back! Come back!"
Nelly on the brush-pile, her hat in her hand, whirling to return, supple
and swift, suddenly caught by the heel and flung headlong . . . up again
in an instant, and falling again, to her knees this time. Up once more
with a desperate haste, writhing and pulling at her shoe, held by its
high heel, deep between the knotty poles.
'Gene, bounding from his place of safety, there at her feet, tearing in
a frenzy at the poles, at her shoe. . . .
Above them the great tree bearing down on them the solemn vengeful
shadow of its fall.
Someone was screaming. It was Nelly. She was screaming, "'Gene! 'Gene!
'Gene!" her face shrunken in terror, her white lips open.
* * * * *
And then, that last gesture of 'Gene's when he took Nelly into his great
arms, closely, hiding her face on his shoulder, as the huge tree,
roaring downward, bore them both to the earth, forever.
CHAPTER XXVIII
TWO GOOD-BYES
August 10.
Marise welcomed the bother about the details of Eugenia's departure and
Mr. Welles', and flung herself into them with a frightened desire for
something that would drown out the roaring wind of tragedy which filled
her ears in every pause of the day's activities, and woke her up at
night out of the soundest sleep. Night after night, she found herself
sitting up in bed, her night-gown and hair damp with perspiration,
Nelly's scream ringing knife-like in her ears. Then, rigid and wide-eyed
she saw it all again, what had happened in those thirty seconds which
had summed up and ended the lives of 'Gene and Nelly.
But one night as she sat thus in her bed, hammered upon beyond
endurance, she saw as though she had not seen it before what 'Gene had
finally done, his disregard of possible safety for himself, his abandon
of his futile, desperate effort to free Nelly from the tangle where her
childish vanity had cast her, the grandeur and completeness of his
gesture when he had taken Nelly into his strong arms, to die with her.
Marise found herself crying as she had not cried for years. The picture,
burned into her memory, stood there endlessly in the black night till
she understood it. The tears came raining down her face, and with them
went the strained, wild horror of the memory.
But the shadow and darkness hung about her like a cloud, through which
she only dimly saw the neat, unhurried grace of Eugenia's preparations
for departure and far travels, and felt only a dimmed, vague echo of the
emotion she had thought to feel at the disappearance of Mr. Welles,
poor, weary, futile old crusader on his Rosinante.
On that last morning of their stay she drove with them to the station,
still giving only a half-attention to the small episodes of their
departure. She did see and smile at the characteristic quality of an
instinctive gesture of Eugenia's as they stepped up on the platform of
the station. Two oddly-shaped pieces of metal stood there, obviously
parts of a large machine. Paul stumbled over them as he climbed out of
the car, and held tight to Mr. Welles' hand to save himself from a fall.
Eugenia saw them instantly from afar as an element in life which
threatened the spotlessness of her gray traveling cloak, and as she
passed them she drew the thick folds of velvet-like wool about her
closely. Marise thought to herself, "That's Eugenia's gesture as she
goes through the world."
Neale turned off his switch, listened a moment to see if the Ford were
boiling from the long climb up the hill to the station, and now made one
long-legged step to the platform. He started towards Eugenia with the
evident intention of making some casual pleasant remarks, such as are
demanded by decency for a departing guest, but in his turn his eyes
caught the curiously shaped pieces of metal. He stopped short, his face
lighted up with pleasure and surprise. All consciousness of anyone else
on the platform disappeared from his expression. "Hello!" he said to
himself, "those mandrels here." He picked up one in his strong hands on
which the metal left a gray dust, and inspected it. He might have been
entirely alone in his shop at the mill.
Marise noted with envy how he gave all of himself to that momentary
examination, entirely escaped from any awareness of that tyrannical self
which in her own heart always clamored like a spoiled child for
attention. The impersonal concentration of his look as he turned the
metal about between those strong dusty hands, gave to his face the calm,
freed expression not to be bought for any less price than a greater
interest in one's work than in one's self. "They'll do," pronounced
Neale. This was evidently a thought spoken aloud, for it did not occur
to him to make any pretense of including the two women in his interest.
He set down the casting he held, and went off into the freight-house,
calling loudly, "Charlie! Charlie! Those mandrels have come. I wish
you'd . . ." his voice died away as he walked further into the dusky
freight-shed.
Marise happening to glance at Eugenia now, caught on her face an
expression which she took to be annoyance at a breach of manners. She
reflected, "Eugenia must find Neale's abrupt American ways perfectly
barbaric." And she was surprised to feel for the first time a rather
scornful indifference to all that was involved in Eugenia's finding them
barbaric. Heavens! What did it matter? In a world so filled with awful
and portentous and glorious human possibilities, how could you bother
about such things?
There was a silence. Mr. Welles and Paul had been standing near,
aimlessly, but now, evidently taking the silence for the inevitable
flatness of the flat period of waiting for a train, Mr. Welles drew the
little boy away. They walked down the cinder-covered side-tracks,
towards where the single baggage truck stood, loaded with elegant,
leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks, marked "E. Mills. S.S.
Savoie. Compagnie Générale Transatlantique." Among them, out of place
and drab, stood one banal department-store trunk labeled, "Welles. 320
Maple Avenue. Macon, Georgia."
The departure of the old man and the little boy left the two women
alone. Eugenia stepped closer to Marise and took her hand in her own
gloved fingers. She looked at it intently, with the expression of one
who is trying to find words for a complicated feeling. Marise made an
effort to put herself in the receptive mood which would make the saying
of it easier, but failed. The fall of the big pine roared too loudly in
her ears. She looked without sympathy or admiration at Eugenia's
perfection of aspect. "To look like that, she must care for looks more
than anything else. What can she know about any real human feeling?"
Marise asked herself, with an intolerance she could not mitigate.
And yet as she continued to peer at Eugenia through that dark cloud of
tragedy, it seemed to her that Eugenia showed signs of some real human
emotion. As she gazed at her in the crude brilliance of the gaudy
morning sun, she saw for the first time signs of years in Eugenia's
exquisite small face. There was not a line visible, nor a faltering of
the firmness of the well-cared-for flesh, but over it all was a faint,
hardly discernible flaccid fatigue of texture.
But perhaps she imagined it, for even as she looked, and felt her heart
soften to think what this would mean to Eugenia, an inner wave of
resolution reached the surface of the other woman's face, and there was
Eugenia as she always had been, something of loveliness immutable.
She said impulsively, "Eugenia, it's a stupidly conventional thing to
say, but it's a pity you never married."
As Eugenia only looked at her, quietly, she ventured further, "You might
really be happier, you know. There is a great deal of happiness in the
right marriage." She had never said so much to Eugenia.
Eugenia let Marise's hand drop and with it, evidently, whatever
intention she might have had of saying something difficult to express.
Instead, she advanced with her fastidious, delicate note of irony, "I
don't deny the happiness, if that sort of happiness is what one is
after. But I think my appetite for it . . . that sort . . . is perhaps not
quite robust enough to relish it."
Marise roused herself to try to put a light note of cheerfulness into
this last conversation. "You mean that it seems to you like the coarsely
heaped-up goodies set before a farmhand in a country kitchen . . . chicken
and butter and honey and fruit and coffee, all good but so profuse and
jumbled that they make you turn away?"
"I didn't give that definition of domestic life," corrected Eugenia,
with a faint smile, "that's one of _your_ fantasies."
"Well, it's true that you get life served up to you rather pell-mell,
lots of it, take-it-as-it-comes," admitted Marise, "but for a gross
nature like mine, once you've had that, you're lost. You know you'd
starve to death on the delicate slice of toasted bread served on old
china. You give up and fairly enjoy wallowing in the trough."
She had been struck by that unwonted look of fatigue on Eugenia's face,
had tried to make her laugh, and now, with an effort, laughed with her.
She had forgotten her passing notion that Eugenia had something special
to say. What could she have? They had gone over that astonishing
misconception of hers about the Powers woodlot, and she had quite made
Marise understand how hopelessly incapable she was of distinguishing one
business detail from another. There could be nothing else that Eugenia
could wish to say.
"How in the world shall I get through the winter?" Eugenia now wondered
aloud. "Biskra and the Sahara perhaps . . . if I could only get away from
the hideous band of tourists. They say there are swarms of
war-profiteers from Italy now, everywhere, low-class people with money
for the first time." She added with a greater accent of wonder, "How in
the world are _you_ going to get through the winter?"
Marise was struck into momentary silence by the oddness of the idea.
There were phrases in Eugenia's language which were literally
non-translatable into hers, representing as they did ideas that did not
exist there. "Oh, we never have to consider that," she answered, not
finding a more accurate phrase. "There won't be time enough to do all
we'll try to do, all we'll have to do. There's living. That takes a lot
of time and energy. And I'll have the chorus as usual. I'm going to try
some Mendelssohn this year. The young people who have been singing for
five or six years are quite capable of the 'Elijah.' And then any of the
valley children who really want to, come to me for lessons, you know.
The people in North Ashley have asked me to start a chorus there this
year, too. And in the mill, Neale has a plan to try to get the men to
work out for themselves some standards of what concerns them especially,
what a day's work really is, at any given job, don't you know."
What an imbecile she was, she thought, to try to talk about such things
to Eugenia, who could not, in the nature of things, understand what she
was driving at. But apparently Eugenia had found something
understandable there, for she now said sharply, startled, "Won't that
mean less income for you?"
She did not say, "_Even_ less," but it was implied in the energy of her
accent.
Marise hesitated, brought up short by the solidity of the intangible
barrier between their two languages. There were phrases in her own
tongue which could not be translated into Eugenia's, because they
represented ideas not existing there. She finally said vaguely, "Oh
perhaps not."
Her pause had been enough for Eugenia to drop back into her own world.
She said thoughtfully, "I've half a notion to try going straight on
beyond Biskra, to the south, if I could find a caravan that would take
me. That would be something new. Biskra is so commonplace now that it
has been discovered and exploited." She went on, with a deep, wistful
note of plaintiveness in her voice, "But _every_thing's so commonplace
now!" and added, "There's Java. I've never been to Java."
It came over Marise with a shock of strangeness that this was the end of
Eugenia in her life. Somehow she knew, as though Eugenia had told her,
that she was never coming back again. As they stood there, so close
together, in the attitude of friends, they were so far apart that each
could scarcely recognize who the other was. Their paths which in youth
had lain so close to each other as to seem identical, how widely they
had been separated by a slight divergence of aim! Marise was struck by
her sudden perception of this. It had been going on for years, she could
understand that now. Why should she only see it in this quiet, silent,
neutral moment?
An impalpable emanation of feeling reached her from the other woman. She
had a divination that it was pain. Perhaps Eugenia was also suddenly
realizing that she had grown irrevocably apart from an old friend.
The old tenderness felt for the girl Eugenia had been, by the girl
Marise had been, looked wistfully down the years at the end.
Marise opened her arms wide and took Eugenia into them for a close,
deeply moved embrace.
"Good-bye, Eugenia," she said, with sadness.
"Good-bye, Marise," said Eugenia, looking at her strangely.
* * * * *
Neale came back now, frankly consulting his watch with Neale's bluntness
in such matters. "Train's due in a minute or two," he said. "Where's Mr.
Welles?"
Marise said, "Over there, with Paul. I'll go tell them."
She found them both, hand in hand, sitting on the edge of the truck
which carried the leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks, bound
for Biskra or beyond, or Java; and the square department-store trunk
bound for Maple Avenue, Macon, Georgia.
"Mother," said Paul, "Mr. Welles has promised me that he'll come up and
visit us summers."
"There's no house in the world where you'll be more welcome," said
Marise with all her heart, holding out her hand.
Mr. Welles shook it hard, and held it in both his. As the train whistled
screamingly at the crossing, he looked earnestly into her face and tried
to tell her something, but the words would not come.
As she read in his pale old face and steady eyes what he would have
said, Marise cried out to herself that there do not exist in the world
any things more halting and futile than words. She put her arms around
his neck and kissed him. "Good-bye, dear Mr. Welles," was all she said,
but in the clinging of his old arms about her, and in the quivering,
shining face he showed as they moved down the platform together, she
knew that he too had not needed words.
Paul clung to his hand till the last moment, gazing up at him
constantly, silently. Marise looked down on the little boy's tanned,
freckled, sober face and strained, rapidly winking eyes, and had the
intuition, "This is one of the moments Paul will never forget. He will
always be able to shut his eyes and see this old Don Quixote setting
forth." With a rush of her old, jealous, possessive mother-love, she
longed to share this with him and to have him know that she shared it;
to put her arms around him and _make him let her in_. But she knew
better now. She yearned over him silently, and did not touch him.
"Well, good-bye, Paul," said Mr. Welles, shaking hands with him.
"Well, good-bye," said Paul dryly, setting his jaw hard.
"Oh, this is the day-coach!" cried Eugenia. "Where is the drawing-room
car?"
"At the far end," said the conductor with the sweeping gesture of a man
used to talking with his arms.
"Good-bye, Mr. Welles," said Eugenia, giving him for an instant a small,
pearl-gray hand. "Boa voyage! Good luck!"
"Same to you," said the old gentleman, scrambling up the unswept,
cinder-covered steps into the day-coach.
At the front end of the train, the baggage man was tumbling into the
express car the fine, leather-covered boxes and the one square trunk.
Neale carried Eugenia's two small bags down to the drawing-room car and
now handed them to the porter.
The two women kissed each other on both cheeks, hurriedly, as someone
cried, "All aboard!"
Eugenia took Neale's outstretched hand. "Good-bye, Neale," she said.
With the porter's aid, she mounted the rubber-covered steps into the
mahogany and upholstery of the drawing-room car.
"Good luck, Eugenia! Bon voyage!" called Neale after her.
She did not turn around or look back.
* * * * *
Marise noted that characteristically Eugenia had forgotten Paul. But
Paul had forgotten her, too, and was now back near the day-coach
searching one window after another.
The conductor signaled widely, the whistle shrieked, the wheels groaned.
Neale drew Marise a little back out of the whirl of dust and stood
holding her arm for an instant.
It seemed to Marise as they stood thus, Neale holding her arm, that she
caught a last glimpse of Eugenia behind plate-glass, looking at them
gravely, steadily.
Paul suddenly caught sight of Mr. Welles' face at a window, snatched off
his cap, and waved it frantically, over and over, long after the train
was only an echoing roar from down the tracks.
* * * * *
Then the mountain-silence settled down about them calmly, and they could
hear their own hearts beat, and knew the thoughts in their minds.
As they went back to their battered Ford, Marise said thoughtfully,
"Somehow I believe that it will be a long time before we see Eugenia
again."
Neale permitted himself no comment on this, nor showed the alteration of
a line in his face as he stepped into the car and turned on the switch,
but Marise cried out to him accusingly, "You might as well say it right
out, that you can support life if it is."
Neale laughed a little and put his foot on the starter. "Get in the back
seat, Paul," was all he said, as the little boy came up silently from
the other side of the station.
He added as they started up the hill road, "First time in my life I was
ever sort of sorry for Eugenia. It seemed to me this morning that she
was beginning to show her age."
Marise hid the fact that she had had the same idea and opposed, "Eugenia
would laugh at that from you, the husband of such a frankly middle-aged
thing as I."
Neale was silent for a moment, and then, "You'll always look younger
than she. No, not younger, that's not it, at all. It's _living_, you
look. I tell you what, she's a cut flower in a vase, that's beginning to
wilt, and you're a living plant."
"Why, _Neale_!" said Marise, astonished and touched.
"Yes, quite a flight of fancy for me, wasn't it?" commented Neale
casually, leaning forward to change the carburetor adjustment.
* * * * *
Marise felt Paul lean over her shoulder from the back of the car. "Say,
Mother," he said in her ear, "would you just as soon get in back with me
for a while?"
Neale stopped the care. Marise stepped out and in, and seated herself
beside Paul. He had apparently nothing to say, after all, looking
fixedly down at his bare brown feet.
But presently he moved nearer to his mother and leaned his head against
her breast. This time she put her arm around him and held him close to
her, the tears in her eyes.
CHAPTER XXIX
VIGNETTES FROM HOME LIFE
I
August 20.
Paul had been sent for blue-berries through the Eagle Rock woods to the
high upland pasture where the Powers cows fed during the day. On the
upper edge of that, skirting a tract of slash left from an old cutting,
was a berry-patch, familiar to all the children of Crittenden's valley.
When at four o'clock there was no sign of him, and then at five still
none, Marise began to feel uneasy, although she told herself that
nothing in the world could happen to Paul on that well-known
mountain-side. He had taken Médor with him, who would certainly have
come for help if Paul had fallen and hurt himself. She excused herself
to the tall, awkward lad from North Ashley come to try over his part in
a quartet, asked Touclé to help Elly set the supper things on the table
if she should be late, and set off at a rapid pace by the short-cut over
the ledges.
As she hurried over the rough trail, frankly hastening, now frankly
alarmed, she thought that probably for all the life-time of the people
in the valley the death of Frank Warner would set a sinister element of
lurking danger in those familiar wooded slopes. Nothing _could_ have
happened to Paul, but still she hurried faster and faster, and as she
came near the upper edge of the pasture she began to shout loudly,
"Paul! Paul!" and to send out the high yodel-cry that was the family
assembly call. That act of shouting brought her a step nearer to panic.
But almost at once she heard the little boy's answer, not far from her
saw his dog bounding through the bushes, and as she emerged from the
woods into the open pasture she saw Paul running towards her, pail in
hand, evidently astonished to know her there. But there was about him
something more than astonishment, something which Marise's mother-eye
catalogued as furtitve, that consciousness of something to hide which
always looks to grown-ups like guilt. She gave no sign of seeing this,
however, stopping short to catch her breath, smiling at him, and
wondering with great intensity what in the world it could be. He looked
a little frightened.
He came up to her, answering her smile uneasily, and she saw that he had
only a few berries in his pail. At this she was relieved, thinking that
possibly all that had happened was that he had lingered to play. But
when she glanced back at his face, she had the impression that there was
something more, very much more. He had received some indelible
impression and it was his instinct to hide it from his mother. Her heart
sank forebodingly.
"What is the best thing to do?" she asked herself. "To speak about it
first, or to wait till he does?"
She sat down on a stone, fanning herself with her hat, watching him,
trying to make out the meaning of every shift of expression, turn of
eye, position of his hands, carriage of his head, bringing to this all
her accumulated knowledge of Paul, afire with the sudden passion to
protect him which had flamed up with her intuition that something had
happened to him.
(Come and gone with the dry rapidity of fingers snapped, she had
thought, "The point is, that other people may be more clever than
mothers, but nobody else _cares_ enough, always, always to try to
understand!")
"I thought I'd come up and walk back with you," she offered.
"I haven't got very many," said Paul, abashed, looking down at the few,
blue, bloom-covered balls in the bottom of his shining tin pail. "I was
trying to hurry up and get enough for supper, anyhow."
Marise in spite of herself, moved by pity for his confusion, offered him
a way out. It always seemed to her too dreadful for anyone not to have a
way out, even if it implied a fib. "Weren't there very many on the
bushes?" she asked.
But he refused it with a characteristic integrity. "Oh yes, there were
lots there," he said.
A silence fell. The little dog, sensitively aware of something wrong,
whined uneasily, and pawed at Paul's hand. But Paul did not look down at
him. He stood, his bare feet wide apart, the empty pail in his hand,
looking down the beautiful green slope of the pasture, golden now in the
long rays from the sun poised low on the line of the mountains opposite.
Marise looked at him, seeing nothing in all the world but that tanned,
freckled, anxious little face. With what an utter unexpectedness did
these moments of crisis spring on you; something vital there, and no
warning, no chance to think.
"Anything the matter, Paul?" she said gently.
He nodded, silent.
"Anything you can tell Mother?" she asked, still more gently.
Paul said gruffly, "I don't know: it's about Ralph Powers. He was up
here this afternoon." He looked down at his brown, bramble-scratched
legs.
Marise's imagination gave an unbridled leap of fear. She had always felt
something strange and abnormal about Ralph. But she thought, "I mustn't
tyrannize over Paul, even by a too-waiting expectant silence," and
stooped over with the pretext of tying her shoe. A lump came to her
throat. How terribly, helplessly, you _cared_ about what came to your
children!
When she lifted her head, Paul had come nearer her and was looking down
at her, with troubled eyes. "Say, Mother, he didn't _say_ not to tell
you. Do you suppose it would be fair?"
She made a great effort at loyalty and said, "I can't tell, Paul. You
saw him. You know better than I, if you think he meant you not to tell.
Try to remember if he said anything about it."
Paul thought hard. "You wouldn't tell anybody?" he asked.
"Not if you don't want me to," she answered.
Paul sat down by her and drew a long breath. "I don't believe he would
care, your knowing it, if you never told anybody else, nor said anything
to him. Mother, I was going along, up there by the big rock where the
white birches grow, and I saw Ralph. . . . He was in front of a sort of
table he'd fixed up with a long piece of slate-stone, and he had some
queer-shaped stones on it . . . oh, _Mother_ . . . he was crying so, and
talking to himself! And when he saw me he got as mad! And he told me
about it, just as mad all the time, as though he was mad at me. Mother,
it's an altar!
"An altar!" said Marise, stupidly, utterly disconcerted by the word, so
totally other than what her fears had been foreboding.
"Yes, an altar, and he says the stones on it are idols, and he bows down
and worships them, the way the Bible says it's wicked to."
Marise was too much astonished to open her lips.
Paul said, "Mother, Ralph says he hates God, and isn't going to say his
prayers to him any more. He says God let his father and mother both get
killed, and he don't know what the devil could do any worse than that.
He said he started in having an altar to idols because he thought from
what the Bible said that if you did you'd be so wicked lightning would
strike you dead. But it didn't, and now he doesn't believe _any_thing.
So he's going on, having idols because the Bible says not to."
Marise's first rounded and exclusive emotion was of immense relief.
Nothing had happened to her own son, and beside this relief, nothing for
the moment seemed of any consequence. She drew Paul to her with a long
breath of what was, she recognized it the moment afterward, her old,
clear, undiluted, ferocious, hateful mother-egotism. For that instant
she had not cared an atom what happened to another woman's child, so
long as hers was safe.
But the next instant, the awareness of her hard heart cut across her
like the lash of a whip. She shrank under it, horrified. She hung her
head guilty and ashamed, divining the extremity of the other child's
misery.
As she sat there, with her living arms around her own little son, the
boy whose mother was dead came and stood before her in imagination,
showing those festering, uncared-for wounds of sorrow and bitterness and
loneliness, and furious, unavailing revolt from suffering too great to
be borne.
She felt the guilt driven out from her narrow heart as it swelled larger
to take him in. Any child who needed a mother so much, was _her own
child_. He had no longer any mother who would care enough to try to
understand, but _she_ would care enough.
"He bowed down and worshiped," said Paul, in a shocked, frightened
voice. "He knocked his head on the stones and cried like anything. He
said he hated God."
"Oh!" cried Marise, intolerably stung by sympathy and pity. She started
up to her feet, her heart burning, the tears on her cheeks. Her arms
ached with emptiness till she should have drawn that suffering into
them.
Paul said shyly, "Say, Mother, it's _awful_ hard on those Powers kids,
isn't it, not having anybody but their grandmother. Say, Mother, don't
you think maybe we could . . . we could . . ." He turned his freckled,
tanned, serious little face up to hers.
His mother stooped to kiss him, furiously, burningly, passionately, as
she did not often kiss Paul, and he clung to her with all the strength
of his strong little arms. "Yes, yes, you darling, you darling," she
told him brokenly. "Yes, yes, yes."
II
September 10.
Marise was slowly going through a passage of Scriabine, which had just
come in the mail. She was absorbed in the difficulties and novelties of
it, her ear alert to catch a clue to the meaning of those new rhythms
and progressions, her mind opened wide to understand them when she heard
them.
It was with an effort that she brought her attention back to Elly, who
had come in behind her and was saying something urgently. Marise turned
around on the piano-stool, her head humming with the unfamiliar,
tantalizing beauties and intricacies of the page she had left half
unread, and considered the little girl for an instant before she heard
what she said. How Elly did grow! That dress was already much too small
for her.
Well, Elly was not the only one who had grown out of her old clothes
this summer . . . the old garments that had been large enough and now must
be laid aside! . . . Elly was saying, "Mother, one of my chickens looks
sick, and I don't know what to do. I _wish_ you'd come!"
Marise began a process of mentally weighing which was more important,
Scriabine or Elly's chicken. Elly looked at her mother with imploring
eyes. "Mother, he looked awfully sick. And he is my nicest little
Downy-head, the one I've always loved the best. I've tried to take such
good care of him. Mother, I'm _worried_ about him."
Marise decided that Scriabine had at least the capacity to wait, while
the chicken might not. She got up, saying, "All right, Elly, we'll see
what we can do."
Elly pulled her along rapidly to the chicken-yard where grossly
self-satisfied hens scratched in trash and filth undiscriminatingly,
and complacently called their families to share what they had found
there, or indeed at times apparently to admire them for having found
nothing. Marise stood regarding them with a composed, ironic eye. It was
good, she reflected, to be able to know that that was the way you looked
from the outside, and not to care a bit because you knew firmly that
there was something else there that made all the difference. All the
same, it was a very good thing to have had the scaring thought that you
were like that . . . "there but for the grace of God. . . ." Was it
complacent to say that? Oh, what did it matter what you called
it,--complacent or not, if you knew! It all came back to not caring so
much about what things could be called, if you knew what they were.
Elly had disappeared into the chicken-house and now came back with a
perplexed face. "Downy-head was there, by the nests, and now he's gone."
Marise caught in the child's eyes the realness of her anxiety and
thrilled to it, as she always did to any real emotion. "I'll help you
look," she said, turning her eyes about the chicken-yard, crowded with
voluble, intently self-centered, feathered personalities. "Which hen is
his mother, Elly?
"This one, Old Speckle. Oh, Mother, there he is, lying down. He must be
feeling worse!" She ran forward and stooped over a little panting yellow
ball. Across the intervening space and beyond all those carelessly alive
bodies, Marise's eyes caught the unmistakable aspect of death in the
tiny creature lying there.
"Mother!" cried Elly, "his eyes look so! He can't get his breath.
_Mother!_" Marise felt the child's agitation and alarm knock at her
heart. She looked down helplessly at the dying creature. That tiny, tiny
scrap of down-covered flesh to be alive, to contain the miracle and
mystery of life, and now to be struggling, all alone, with the miracle
and mystery of death!
The little thing opened its glazing eyes once more, drew a long breath,
and lay still. An age-old inherited knowledge and experience told Elly
what bad happened. She gave a scream, picked it up and held it in her
cupped hands, her little face drawn in horrified incredulity. She looked
up at her mother and said in a whisper, "Mother, he's _dead_."
Marise nodded silently. Poor Elly! She wished she could think of
something comforting to say. But what is there to say? For her there had
never been anything but stoic silence. The mother hen clucked
unconcernedly at their feet, and with coaxing guttural sounds called the
rest of the chickens to eat a grain. The strong ammonia smell of the
chicken-yard rose in the sunshine. Elly stood perfectly still, the
little ball of yellow down in her hand, her face pale.
Marise looked down on her with infinite sympathy. Her child, flesh of
her flesh, meeting in this uncouth place the revelation of the black
gulf! But she remained silent, not knowing what to say.
Elly spoke in a low voice, "But, Mother, how _can_ he be dead, just so
quick while we were looking at him? Mother, he was alive a minute ago.
He was breathing. He looked at me. He knew me. And in just a minute like
that . . . nothing!"
She looked around her wildly. "_Mother, where has his life gone to?_"
Marise put her arm around the little girl's shoulders tenderly, but she
still only shook her head without a word. She did not know any more than
Elly where his life had gone. And surely loving silence was better than
tinkling words of falseness.
Elly looked up at her, glistening drops of sweat standing on her
temples. "Mother," she asked, urgently, in a loud, frightened whisper,
"Mother, do we die like that? Mother, will _you_ die like that? All in a
moment . . . and then . . . nothing?"
It came like thunder, then, what Marise had never thought to feel. With
a clap, she found that this time she had something to answer, something
to say to Elly. Looking deep, deep into Elly's eyes, she said firmly
with a certainty as profound as it was new to her, "No, Elly, I don't
believe we do die like that . . . all in a moment . . . nothing."
She was astonished by what she said, astonished by the sudden
overflowing of something she had not known was there, but which was so
great that her heart could not contain it, "comme une onde qui bout dans
une urne trop pleine." And she was as moved as she was astonished. Elly
came into her arms with a comforted gasp. They clung to each other
closely, Marise's ears humming with the unfamiliar beauty and intricacy
of that new page at which she had had that instant's glimpse. Here was a
new harmony, a new progression, a new rhythm to which her ear had just
opened . . . heard here in this uncouth place!
* * * * *
That evening, after the children were in bed, she stopped her reading of
the new music for a moment to say to Neale, "You know those ideas that
other people are better for children than their parents are?"
"Yes," said Neale, laying down the baseball page of his newspaper,
instantly all there, looking at her intently.
"Well, I don't believe a word of it," said Marise.
"I should say it depended on which parents and on which children were
meant," advanced Neale guardedly.
Marise had at first an affectionate smile for this, and then a laugh.
She got up from the piano-stool and went to kiss him. He said with a
whimsical suspicion of this, "Why so?"
"Because you are so entirely you," she told him, and went back to
Scriabine.
III
September 22.
It was the half-hour of pause after lunch. The children played idly with
the fox-terrier and lounged on the steps of the side-porch, strong and
brown, living cups filled to the brim with life. Neale had pushed his
chair back from the table, lighted his pipe, and sat meditating.
Presently he put out his hand and laid it on Marise's, who had turned to
look down the sun-flooded valley.
It was high-noon, dreamy, entranced, all the world golden with the
magnificent weather as a holly-hock is golden with pollen. From the
brook came the living voice of the water, with the special note of brave
clarity it always had for brilliant noons.
It seemed to Marise that she too was all gold-powdered with the
magnificence of life, that in her heart there sang a clear living voice
that did not fear high-noons.
IV
October.
Would Vincent come back at all? Marise had wondered so often. Not
Vincent in the flesh; that last angry bewildered gesture had finality in
it. He had given her up then, totally. But would he come back to haunt
her in those inevitable moments of flat ebb-tide in life, when what
should be moist and living, withered and crisped in the merciless
drought of drudgery and routine? She feared it, frankly dreaded it at
first, and tried to think how to brace herself against it. But it was
not then that tie came, not when she was toiling with dishes to wash, or
vegetables to pare, or the endless care of the children's never-in-order
clothes. Instead she found in those moments, which had been arid before,
a curious new savor, a salt without which life would seem insipid,
something which gave her appetite for the rest. "This is all Tolstoyan
nonsense and sentimentality," she told herself mockingly, "there is
nothing sacred about scrubbing the floor." Or on another day, "I wonder
if it's a twist of the absurd mediaeval ascetic perversity left over?"
Or again, "All it does for me is to take off the curse of belonging to
the bourgeoisie." But no matter what skeptical name she called it, nor
how much she minimized the reality of it, she felt some odd value in it
which she would not have gone without. Once she said to herself, "It's
ballast, to a person like me," although she did not know exactly what
this meant. And another time she said, "Perhaps it's that I'm making an
honest effort to do my share." But it was true and real, the fact that
after such work the reading of the day's news of the world brought her a
less oppressive sense of guilt. And stranger than this, music had
greater vitality for her. She felt it a deeper, richer soil than even
she had dreamed of, and struck her roots profoundly into depths which
kept her whole complicated organism poised, steady, and upright.
And here it was that Vincent came back. Not the Vincent of the hawk-like
imperious face, or burning eyes of desire, which had seemed to him his
realest self. But the Vincent who had come in from the porch that day in
March when she had first played to him, who had smiled at her, the good,
grateful, peaceful smile, and had said to her music, "Go on, go on." It
was the same Vincent of the afternoon in Cousin Hetty's garden when the
vulture of the desire to possess had left him for a moment in peace.
Often and often he came thus as she played and leaned his head back and
said, "Go on." And thus Marise knew he would always come. And thus she
welcomed him.
This was what was left of him in the house he had so filled with his
smoky, flaming brilliance.
V
December.
They had been talking around the fire of the stars and their names and
stories, she and Neale and the children. Presently interest overcoming
inertia they decided to go out and see if the clouds had blown away so
that the stars could be seen. They huddled on hastily found wraps,
thrust their feet into flapping, unbuckled overshoes, and leaving the
still, warm, lamp-lit room, they shuffled out, laughing and talking,
into the snow which lay thick and still before the house.
At first they carried out between them so much of the house atmosphere
that it hung about them like warm fog, shielding them from the fiercely
pure, still cold of the air, and from the brilliant glitter of the
myriad-eyed black sky. They went on talking and laughing, pointing out
the constellations they knew, and trying to find others in the spangled
vault over their heads.
"A bear!" cried Mark. "I could draw a better bear than that any day!"
And from Paul, "They can call it Orion's belt all they want to, but
there's no belt to it!" And from Elly, "Aldebaran! Aldebaran! Red-eyed
Aldebaran!"
But little by little the house-air began to be thinned about them, to
blow away from between them in wisps and wreathes, off into the
blackness. The warmed, lighted house dwindled to nothing. There were
only the great cold black sky and the small cold white earth. Their
voices were lowered; they stood very still, close together, their heads
tipped back, their faces and hearts upraised silently to receive the
immensity above and about them.
Elly murmured under her breath, "Doesn't it seem funny, our world being
just one of all those, and such a little one, and here we are, just
these few of us, standing on the world and looking at it all."
Marise thought, "We seem to be the only living things in all creation."
In that huge, black, cold glittering universe how tiny was the little
glow of life they made!
Tiny but unquenchable! Those myriads of hard staring eyes could not look
down the immortal handful of human life and love which she and Neale had
created between them.
There was a silence, filled with still, breathless cold; with enormous
space, with infinity.
Marise felt a rigorous shudder run over her, as though something vital
were coming to her, like the rending pang of pain which heralds
child-birth. After this, did she close her eyes for a moment, or did it
come to her while she continued to gaze wide-eyed at the stern greatness
of the universe? What was this old, familiar, unknown sensation?
. . . as though, on a long journey in the dark it had grown light, so that
she had suddenly recognized which way she was going.
Then she knew what it was. Conscious and awake, she was feeling herself
one with the great current, advancing with an irresistible might,
majesty and power, in which she shared, to which she gave her part.
VI
January.
She was putting away the clean sheets from the washing on the shelves at
the end of the hall, upstairs, her mind entirely on the prosaic task,
wondering when she would have to replace some of the older ones, and
wishing she could put off buying till the outrageous post-war prices
went down. Someone stirred behind her and she turned her head quickly to
see who was there. It was Neale, come in early. He was standing, looking
at her back; and in the instant before he saw that she had turned, she
caught the expression on his face, the tender fathomless affection that
was there.
A warm gush of happiness surged up all over her. She felt a sudden
intense physical well-being, as though her breath came more smoothly,
her blood ran more sweetly in her veins.
"Oh, _Neale_!" she said, under her breath, flushing and turning to him.
He looked at her, his strong, resolute face and clear eyes smiled, and
opening his arms he drew her into them. The ineffable memory of all the
priceless past, the ineffable certainty of the priceless future was in
their kiss.
That evening, after a long golden hour at the piano, she chanced to take
down the Largo in the Chopin sonata. As she began it, something stirred
in her mind, some memory that instantly lived with the first notes of
the music. How thick-clustered with associations music became, waking a
hundred echoes and overtones!
This was the memory of the time when she had played it, almost a year
ago, and had thought how intimacy and familiarity with music but
deepened and enriched and strengthened its hold on you. It was only the
lower pleasures of which one grew tired,--had enough. The others grew
with your growing capacity to hold them. She remembered how that day she
had recalled the Wordsworth sonnet, "A beauteous evening, calm and
free," and had thought that music took you in to worship quite simply
and naturally at the Temple's inner shrine, that you adored none the
less although you were at home there and not breathless with adoration
like the nun: because it was a whole world given to you, not a mere pang
of joy, because you could live and move and be blessedly and securely at
home there.
She finished the last note of the Largo and sat silent. She was thinking
that her marriage was like that, too.
Presently she got up, took out the old portfolio of photographs, and
pinned upon the wall over the piano the view taken from Rocca di Papa.
VII
February 24.
Marise had been drilling the chorus in the Town Hall of Ashley after the
men's working-hours, and now in the dimming light of the early evening
was going home on snow-shoes, over the hill-path. She liked to use
snow-shoes and occasionally said that she could walk more easily and
more lightly on them than on bare ground. She trod over the tops of the
deep drifts with an accentuation of her usual strong free step.
The snow fell thickly and steadily, a cold, finely-spun, straight-hung
curtain, veiling all the muffled sleeping valley. There was an
inconceivable silence about her as she drew her snow-shoes over the
velvet-like masses of the snow. But within her were ringing echoes of
the rhythms and cadences of the afternoon's struggle, imperfectly sung
most of them, haltingly, or dully, or feebly, or with a loud
misunderstanding of the phrase. At the recollection of these failures,
she clenched her hands hard inside her fur gloves with an indomitable
resolution to draw something better from her singers the next time.
But mingled with them was a moment of splendor. It was when the men had
tried over the passage she had explained to them the week before. She
had not known then, she did not know now, how clearly or definitely she
had reached them with her summary of the situation of the drama: the
desperate straits of the Israelites after the three-year drought, the
trial by fire and water before the scorning aristocracy, Elijah stark
and alone against all the priesthood of Baal, the extremity of despair
of the people . . . and then the coming of the longed-for rain that
loosened the terrible tension and released their hearts in the great
groaning cry of thanksgiving. She had wondered how clearly or definitely
she had reached their understanding, but she knew that she had reached
their hearts, when suddenly she had heard all those men's voices pealing
out, pure and strong and solemn and free, as she had dreamed that phrase
could be sung.
[Illustration: Thanks be to God! He laveth the thirsty land.]
The piercing sweetness of the pleasure this had brought to her came over
her again in a wave. She halted on the crest of the hill, and for a
moment in place of the purples and blues of the late snowy afternoon
there hung before her eyes the powerful, roughly clad bodies of those
vigorous men, their weather-beaten faces, their granite impassivity,
under which her eye had caught the triumph of the moment, warming them
as it did her, with the purest of joys this side of heaven, the
consciousness of having made music worthily. The whole valley seemed to
be filled to its brim with that shout of exultation. It had taken all of
her patience, and will-power, and knowledge of her art and of these
people to achieve that moment. But it had lifted her high, high above
the smallness of life, up to a rich realm of security in joy.
The snow fell more and more thickly, covering her as she stood with a
fine, soft mantle of white. She had heard the men that afternoon saying
they had seen signs of the winter break-up, and she wondered at it now,
looking about the frozen, buried, beautiful valley and up to the frozen
towering mountains, breathing in the cold air, as pure as the ether
itself. It seemed to her that spring was as remote and unreal and
impossible an imagination of the heart as a child's fairy-tale.
Then suddenly, bursting out of the dimming distance, close in front of
her, flying low, silently, strongly, a pair of wild geese went winging
off towards the north, their gray shapes the only moving thing in all
the frost-held world.
Marise drew a great breath of delight in their strong and purposeful
vitality. She looked after them, her heart rising and singing with
comradely pride in them. She would have liked to shout an exultant
greeting after them, "Hurrah!"
They went beating off, fast and straight, for their unseen destination,
while, treading the velvet-like snow-drifts with her strong free tread,
Marise went home.
[Illustration: Music]
VIII
March 2.
It was the first warm day of the year. The hard-frozen ruts of the road
thawed on top and glistened. The snow-banks shrank visibly from one hour
to the next under a warm wind and a hazy sun. The mountains were
unbelievably beautiful and seductive in a shimmer of blue and silver.
The children had brought home a branch of pussy-willows, and as Marise
and Neale stood for a moment at the open door breathing in the new
softness, they saw Touclé, old and stooped and shabby, her reticule bag
bulging, her flat feet in enormous overshoes plodding up the road
towards the mountain.
They smiled at one another. It was in truth the first day of spring.
Marise said, after a pause, "Do you know what she goes off for?"
Neale shook his head with a wide indifference as to the reason. "Because
she's an Injun," he conjectured casually.
"She told me once," said Marise, with a sudden wonder what Neale would
think of that glimpse into the old mystic's mind, how he would (for she
knew beforehand he would) escape the wistfulness which struck at her
even now, at the thought of that door to peace. She repeated to him word
for word what Touclé had told her on that hot August day.
Neale gave her his usual careful attention. Marise thought to herself,
"Neale is the only person I ever knew who could listen to other people's
ideas." But when she finished he made no comment. She asked him, "Did
you ever think that old carven-image had that in her? How profound a
disdain for us busy-about-nothing white people she must have!"
Neale nodded. "Most likely. Everybody has a good deal of disdain for
other people's ideals."
"Well, you haven't for hers, have you?" challenged Marise. Neale looked
thoughtful. "I'm no mystic. Their way of managing life often looks to me
like sort of lying down on the job. I'm no mystic and I'm no fish. Looks
to me as though the thing to do isn't to go off in a far corner to get
your momentary glimpse of daylight, but to batter a hole in the roof of
your cave and let daylight in where you live all the time. I can't help
being suspicious of a daylight that's so uncertain you have to go away
from life and hold your breath before you can see it for a minute. I
want it where I do my work."
Marise looked at him, thinking deeply. That was just what Neale did. But
when she looked back at the old Indian woman, just now turning into the
wood-road, she sighed wistfully, and did not know why.
There was so very much growing always to be done in life.
IX
March 10.
(_A letter from Eugenia_:)
". . . I'm planning perhaps to make the trip to the temples in the Malay
jungle. Biskra was deadly, and Italy worse . . . vulgarity and commonness
everywhere. What an absolutely dreary outlook wherever one turns one's
eyes! There is no corner of the modern world that is not vulgar and
common. Democracy has done its horrible leveling down with a vengeance
. . ."
* * * * *
(_A letter from Mr. Welles_:)
". . . The life here is full of interest and change, and it's like dew on
my dusty old heart to see the vitality of the joy-in-life of these
half-disinherited people. I'm ashamed to tell you how they seem to love
me and how good they are to me. Their warmness of heart and their zest
in life. . . . I'm just swept back into youth again. It makes me very much
mortified when I think what a corking good time I am having and what
sanctimonious martyr's airs I put on about coming down here. Of course a
certain amount of my feeling younger and brisker comes from the fact
that, working as I am, nobody feels about me the laid-on-the-shelf
compassion which everybody (and me too) was feeling before. I _am_
somebody here and every time I say 'Dr. Martin' to a well-educated Negro
physician whom another white man has just hailed as 'Andy' I feel not
only a real sense of righteous satisfaction but the joyful mischievous
fun that a small boy has. Give my love to Paul (speaking of small boys)
and tell him I'm saving up for the fishing-pole I am going to use when I
go fishing with him next summer. He said in his last letter he wanted to
come down here and make me a visit; but you tell him I think he'd better
get his growth before he does that."
X
March 15, 1921.
From a profound sleep, serene warm infinity of rest, Marise was wakened
by a little outcry near the bed, a sobbing voice saying through
chattering teeth, "Mother! Father!"
Still drowned in sleep, Marise cried out, "What? What's that?" and then,
"Oh, you, Elly. What's the matter, dear? Notions again?"
"Oh, Mother, it was an awful dream this time. Can't I get into bed with
you?"
"Why yes, come along, you dear little silly."
The fumbling approach to the bed, Marise holding the sheets open and
stretching out her hand through the cold darkness towards the little
fingers groping for her; the clutch at her hand with a quick anguish of
relief and joy. "Oh, _Mother!_"
Then the shivering body rolling into bed, the little cold arms tight
around her neck, the cold smooth petal-like cheek against hers.
Marise reached over beyond Elly and tucked the covers in with one arm,
drew the child closer to her, and herself drew closer to Neale. She
wondered if he had been awakened by Elly's voice, and the little stir in
the room, and hoped he had not. He had been off on a very long hard
tramp over mountain trails the day before, and had been tired at night.
Perhaps if he had been wakened by Elly he would drowse off again at once
as she felt herself doing now, conscious sleepily and happily of Elly's
dear tender limbs on one side of her and of Neale's dear strong body on
the other.
* * * * *
The strong March wind chanted loudly outside in the leafless
maple-boughs. As Marise felt her eyelids falling shut again it seemed to
her, half-awake, half-asleep, that the wind was shouting out the refrain
of an old song she had heard in her childhood, "There's room for all!
There's room for all! What had it meant, that refrain? She tried
drowsily to remember, but instead felt herself richly falling asleep
again, her hands, her arms, her body.
"There's room for all! There's room for all!"
She was almost asleep. . . .
Someone was speaking again. Elly's voice, calmer now, wistful and
wondering, as though she were lying awake and trying to think.
"Mother."
"Yes, dear, what is it?
"Mother, aren't you and father afraid of anything?"
* * * * *
Marise was wide-awake now, thinking hard. She felt Neale stir, grope for
her hand and hold it firmly . . . Neale's strong hand!
She knew what she was saying. Yes, she knew all that it meant when she
answered, "No, Elly, I don't believe we are."
End of Project Gutenberg's The Brimming Cup, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher