When Susanna Nelson at seventeen married John Hathaway, she had the
usual cogent reasons for so doing, with some rather more unusual ones
added thereto. She was alone in the world, and her life with an uncle,
her mother's only relative, was an unhappy one. No assistance in the
household tasks that she had ever been able to render made her a welcome
member of the family or kept her from feeling a burden, and she belonged
no more to the little circle at seventeen than she did when she became a
part of it at twelve. The hope of being independent and earning her own
living had sustained her through the last year; but it was a very timid,
self-distrustful, love-starved little heart that John Hathaway stormed
and carried by assault. Her girl's life in a country school and her
uncle's very rigid and orthodox home had been devoid of emotion or
experience; still, her mother had early sown seeds in her mind and
spirit that even in the most arid soil were certain to flower into
beauty when the time for flowering came; and intellectually Susanna was
the clever daughter of clever parents. She was very immature, because,
after early childhood, her environment had not been favorable to her
development. At seventeen she began to dream of a future as bright
as the past had been dreary and uneventful. Visions of happiness, of
goodness, and of service haunted her, and sometimes, gleaming through
the mists of dawning womanhood, the figure, all luminous, of The Man!
When John Hathaway appeared on the horizon, she promptly clothed him in
all the beautiful garments of her dreams; they were a grotesque misfit,
but when we intimate that women have confused the dream and the reality
before, and may even do so again, we make the only possible excuse for
poor little Susanna Nelson.
John Hathaway was the very image of the outer world that lay beyond
Susanna's village. He was a fairly prosperous, genial, handsome young
merchant, who looked upon life as a place furnished by Providence in
which to have “a good time.” His parents had frequently told him that
it was expedient for him to “settle down,” and he supposed that he might
finally do so, if he should ever find a girl who would tempt him to
relinquish his liberty. (The line that divides liberty and license was
a little vague to John Hathaway!) It is curious that he should not
have chosen for his life-partner some thoughtless, rosy, romping young
person, whose highest conception of connubial happiness would have been
to drive twenty miles to the seashore on a Sunday, and having partaken
of all the season's delicacies, solid and liquid, to come home hilarious
by moonlight. That, however, is not the way the little love-imps do
their work in the world; or is it possible that they are not imps at all
who provoke and stimulate and arrange these strange marriages not imps,
but honest, chastening little character-builders? In any event, the
moment that John Hathaway first beheld Susanna Nelson was the moment
of his surrender; yet the wooing was as incomprehensible as that of a
fragile, dainty little hummingbird by a pompous, greedy, big-breasted
robin.
Susanna was like a New England anemone. Her face was oval in shape and
as smooth and pale as a pearl. Her hair was dark, not very heavy, and as
soft as a child's. Her lips were delicate and sensitive, her eyes a cool
gray,--clear, steady, and shaded by darker lashes. When John Hathaway
met her shy, maidenly glance and heard her pretty, dovelike voice, it
is strange he did not see that there was a bit too much saint in her to
make her a willing comrade of his gay, roistering life. But as a matter
of fact, John Hathaway saw nothing at all; nothing but that Susanna
Nelson was a lovely girl and he wanted her for his own. The type was
one he had never met before, one that allured him by its mysteries and
piqued him by its shy aloofness.
John had “a way with him,” a way that speedily won Susanna; and after
all there was a best to him as well as a worst. He had a twinkling
eye, an infectious laugh, a sweet disposition, and while he was
over-susceptible to the charm of a pretty face, he had a chivalrous
admiration for all women, coupled, it must be confessed, with a decided
lack of discrimination in values. His boyish lightheartedness had a
charm for everybody, including Susanna; a charm that lasted until she
discovered that his heart was light not only when it ought to be light,
but when it ought to be heavy. He was very much in love with her,
but there was nothing particularly exclusive, unique, individual, or
interesting about his passion at that time. It was of the everyday sort
which carries a well-meaning man to the altar, and sometimes, in cases
of exceptional fervor and duration, even a little farther. Stock sizes
of this article are common and inexpensive, and John Hathaway's love
when he married Susanna was, judged by the highest standards, about
as trivial an affair as Cupid ever put upon the market or a man ever
offered to a woman. Susanna on the same day offered John, or the wooden
idol she was worshiping as John, her whole self--mind, body, heart,
and spirit. So the couple were united, and smilingly signed the
marriage-register, a rite by which their love for each other was
supposed to be made eternal.
“Will you love me?” said he.
“Will you love me?” said she.
Then they answered together:
“Through foul and fair weather,
From sunrise to moonrise,
From moonrise to sunrise,
By heath and by harbour,
In orchard or arbour,
In the time of the rose,
In the time of the snows,
Through smoke and through smother
We'll love one another!”
Cinderella, when the lover-prince discovers her and fits the crystal
slipper to her foot, makes short work of flinging away her rags; and
in some such pretty, airy, unthinking way did Susanna fling aside the
dullness, inhospitality, and ugliness of her uncle's home and depart in
a cloud of glory on her wedding journey. She had been lonely, now she
would have companionship. She had been of no consequence, now she would
be queen of her own small domain. She had been last with everybody, now
she would be first with one, at least. She had worked hard and received
neither compensation nor gratitude; henceforward her service would be
gladly rendered at an altar where votive offerings would not be taken
as a matter of course. She was only a slip of a girl now; marriage and
housewifely cares would make her a woman. Some time perhaps the last
great experience of life would come to her, and then what a crown of
joys would be hers,--love, husband, home, children! What a vision it
was, and how soon the chief glory of it faded!
Never were two beings more hopelessly unlike than John Hathaway
single and John Hathaway married, but the bliss lasted a few years,
nevertheless: partly because Susanna's charm was deep and penetrating,
the sort to hold a false man for a time and a true man forever; partly
because she tried, as a girl or woman has seldom tried before, to do her
duty and to keep her own ideal unshattered.
John had always been convivial, but Susanna at seventeen had been at
once too innocent and too ignorant to judge a man's tendencies truly,
or to rate his character at its real worth. As time went on, his earlier
leanings grew more definite; he spent on pleasure far more than he could
afford, and his conduct became a byword in the neighborhood. His boy
he loved. He felt on a level with Jack, could understand him, play
with him, punish him, and make friends with him; but little Sue was
different. She always seemed to him the concentrated essence of her
mother's soul, and when unhappy days came, he never looked in her
radiant, searching eyes without a consciousness of inferiority. The
little creature had loved her jolly, handsome, careless father at first,
even though she feared him; but of late she had grown shy, silent, and
timid, for his indifference chilled her and she flung herself upon
her mother's love with an almost unchildlike intensity. This unhappy
relation between the child and the father gave Susanna's heart new
pangs. She still loved her husband, not dearly, but a good deal; and
over and above that remnant of the old love which still endured she gave
him unstinted care and hopeful maternal tenderness.
The crash came in course of time. John transcended the bounds of his
wife's patience more and more. She made her last protests; then she took
one passionate day to make up her mind, a day when John and the boy
were away together; a day of complete revolt against everything she was
facing in the present, and, so far as she could see, everything that she
had to face in the future. Prayer for light left her in darkness, and
she had no human creature to advise her. Conscience was overthrown; she
could see no duty save to her own outraged personality. Often and often
during the year just past she had thought of the peace, the grateful
solitude and shelter of that Shaker Settlement hidden among New England
orchards; that quiet haven where there was neither marrying nor giving
in marriage. Now her bruised heart longed for such a life of nunlike
simplicity and consecration, where men and women met only as brothers
and sisters, where they worked side by side with no thought of personal
passion or personal gain, but only for the common good of the community.
Albion village was less than three hours distant by train. She hastily
gathered her plainest clothes and Sue's, packed them in a small
trunk, took her mother's watch, her own little store of money and the
twenty-dollar gold piece John's senior partner had given Sue on her last
birthday, wrote a letter of goodbye to John, and went out of her cottage
gate in a storm of feeling so tumultuous that there was no room for
reflection. Besides, she had reflected, and reflected, for months
and months, so she would have said, and the time had come for action.
Susanna was not unlettered, but she certainly had never read Meredith or
she would have learned that “love is an affair of two, and only for two
that can be as quick, as constant in intercommunication as are sun and
earth, through the cloud, or face to face. They take their breath of
life from each other in signs of affection, proofs of faithfulness,
incentives to admiration. But a solitary soul dragging a log must make
the log a God to rejoice in the burden.” The demigod that poor, blind
Susanna married had vanished, and she could drag the log no longer, but
she made one mistake in judging her husband, in that she regarded him,
at thirty-two, as a finished product, a man who was finally this and
that, and behaved thus and so, and would never be any different.
The “age of discretion” is a movable feast of extraordinary uncertainty,
and John Hathaway was a little behindhand in overtaking it. As a matter
of fact, he had never for an instant looked life squarely in the face.
He took a casual glance at it now and then, after he was married, but it
presented no very distinguishable features, nothing to make him stop
and think, nothing to arouse in him any special sense of responsibility.
Boys have a way of “growing up,” however, sooner or later, at least
most of them have, and that possibility was not sufficiently in the
foreground of Susanna's mind when she finished what she considered an
exhaustive study of her husband's character.
I am leaving you, John [she wrote], to see if I can keep the little love
I have left for you as the father of my children. I seem to have lost
all the rest of it living with you. I am not perfectly sure that I
am right in going, for everybody seems to think that women, mothers
especially, should bear anything rather than desert the home. I could
not take Jack away, for you love him and he will be a comfort to you. A
comfort to you, yes, but what will you be to him now that he is growing
older? That is the thought that troubles me, yet I dare not take him
with me when he is half yours. You will not miss me, nor will the loss
of Sue make any difference. Oh, John! how can you help loving that
blessed little creature, so much better and so much more gifted than
either of us that we can only wonder how we came to be her father and
mother? Your sin against her is greater than that against me, for at
least you are not responsible for bringing me into the world. I know
Louisa will take care of Jack, and she lives so near that you can see
him as often as you wish. I shall let her know my address, which I have
asked her to keep to herself. She will write to me if you or Jack should
be seriously ill, but not for any other reason.
As for you, there is nothing more that I can say except to confess
freely that I was not the right wife for you and that mine was not the
only mistake. I have tried my very best to meet you in everything that
was not absolutely wrong, and I have used all the arguments I could
think of, but it only made matters worse. I thought I knew you, John,
in the old days. How comes it that we have traveled so far apart, we
who began together? It seems to me that some time you must come to your
senses and take up your life seriously, for this is not life, the sorry
thing you have lived lately, but I cannot wait any longer! I am tired,
tired, tired of waiting and hoping, too tired to do anything but drag
myself away from the sight of your folly. You have wasted our children's
substance, indulged your appetites until you have lost the respect of
your best friends, and you have made me--who was your choice, your wife,
the head of your house, the woman who brought your children into the
world--you have made me an object of pity; a poor, neglected thing who
could not meet her neighbors' eyes without blushing.
When Jack and his father returned from their outing at eight o'clock in
the evening, having had supper at a wayside hotel, the boy went to bed
philosophically, lighting his lamp for himself, the conclusion being
that the two other members of the household were a little late, but
would be in presently.
The next morning was bright and fair. Jack waked at cockcrow, and after
calling to his mother and Sue, jumped out of bed, ran into their rooms
to find them empty, then bounced down the stairs two at a time, going
through the sitting-room on his way to find Ellen in the kitchen. His
father was sitting at the table with the still-lighted student lamp on
it; the table where lessons had been learned, books read, stories told,
mending done, checkers and dominoes played; the big, round walnut table
that was the focus of the family life--but mother's table, not father's.
John Hathaway had never left his chair nor taken off his hat. His cane
leaned against his knee, his gloves were in his left hand, while the
right held Susanna's letter.
He was asleep, although his lips twitched and he stirred uneasily. His
face was haggard, and behind his closed lids, somewhere in the center
of thought and memory, a train of fiery words burned in an ever-widening
circle, round and round and round, ploughing, searing their way through
some obscure part of him that had heretofore been without feeling, but
was now all quick and alive with sensation.
You have made me--who was your choice, your wife, the head of your
house, the woman who brought your children into the world--you have made
me an object of pity; a poor, neglected thing who could not meet her
neighbors' eyes without blushing.
Any one who wished to pierce John Hathaway's armor at that period of his
life would have had to use a very sharp and pointed arrow, for he was
well wadded with the belief that a man has a right to do what he likes.
Susanna's shaft was tipped with truth and dipped in the blood of her
outraged heart. The stored-up force of silent years went into the
speeding of it. She had never shot an arrow before, and her skill was
instinctive rather than scientific, but the powers were on her side and
she aimed better than she knew--those who took note of John Hathaway's
behavior that summer would have testified willingly to that. It was the
summer in which his boyish irresponsibility slipped away from him
once and for all; a summer in which the face of life ceased to be an
indistinguishable mass of meaningless events and disclosed an order,
a reason, a purpose hitherto unseen and undefined. The boy “grew up,”
rather tardily it must be confessed. His soul had not added a cubit to
its stature in sunshine, gayety, and prosperity; it took the shock of
grief, hurt pride, solitude, and remorse to make a man of John Hathaway.