“Tomorrow for the States—for me England, and Yesterday,”—murmured
Frances Candler as she stood at her window looking down over the tangle
and tumult of the Strand. “For me, England and Yesterday!” she repeated,
and it was not until she had said the lines twice over that she
remembered how she had first copied them into her day-book, during her
early homesick weeks in New York.
It was the lassitude of her week at sea, and the loneliness of her
second week in a London hotel, she told herself, that had brought about
the change. If there were deeper and more dormant reasons, she was
content to let sleeping dogs lie. But she did not deceive herself as to
the meaning of the move. It was more than flight; it was surrender. It
was, indeed, the bitter and desperate remedy for a bitter and desperate
condition. For, inappositely, on the very brink of what seemed the
waiting and widening vista of all her life, she had decided to go back
to Oxford and her uncle’s home.
The steps that led to this determination were no longer clear to her
questioning mind. She was also able, hour by brooding hour, to pile up
against it ever new objections. But she clung to it blindly, with a
forlorn tenacity of spirit that swept aside all momentary issues and all
dread of the future. For out of that seeming defeat, she contended, she
would wring her belated and her inner victory, even while her active
imagination, playing lambently ahead of dragging reality, showed her how
painful would be that return to old conditions and outgrown
surroundings.
For a woman who has known the world to go back to such a roof is always
a sign and a confession of defeat. Yet the sweep of her aggressive young
mind, once made up, flung blindly aside each half-accumulated bar of
indecision.
But was it fair to them?—she suddenly demanded of herself, as she
pictured the scenes and the faces that would confront her, the gentle
and mild-mannered women, the venerable and upright-hearted curate, so
jealous of equity and honor, with his unbending singleness and
narrowness of outlook. And as she asked this question each familiar
figure seemed to stalk grimly from its muffling childhood memories and
confront her, a challenging sentinel at the very threshold of that quiet
little home which she had dreamed as always open to her, as always a
harbor of ultimate refuge.
But now, could she face the unspoken deceit, the daily attrition of it,
month after month and year after year? For clearly she foresaw what her
life would be, from sunrise to sunset, from youth to old age, from the
moment the quiet parsonage gate closed between her and the outer world.
She foresaw it plainly, as distinctly and indelibly as though it had
been set down in black and white before her eyes—the long and narrow
and grimly defined path leading from a narrow and weather-beaten gate to
a still narrower open grave. In summer time, in the quiet grounds behind
the shielding gray walls, there would be the Provence roses to tend and
the border-flowers to cut and trim, the sedate visiting and receiving,
the frugal jam-making, the regular Bible-readings and the family
prayers, the careful mending and remaking, the hemming of the clerical
old-fashioned white cravats, the lonely cawing of the rooks through the
quiet mornings and the long afternoons. And in the winter there would be
the woollen jackets and cough mixtures to distribute throughout the
parish, the stockings to be knit for the workhouse children, the long,
silent games of chess in the mullion-windowed study, the lettering and
numbering of the new books for the parish lending library, the
pathetically threadbare suit of respectable broadcloth to press and
repair, the summer linens and serges to be made over, the discussions of
impending Disestablishment and the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill, the
languid flow of life within doors and the gentle diversions of life
without, punctuated by long Sundays, in gloomy high-partitioned pews
with faded crimson cushions.
“Oh, it is useless! It is too late, now!” she cried, hopelessly, as she
paced the floor, and the weight of her past life hung heavy upon her.
The roots of it lay too deep, she told herself, to be torn out. She was
already too tainted with the dust of that outer world, too febrile, too
passionately avid of movement and change. The contrast was too great.
They would make it too hard for her, too rigidly exacting. For what did
_they_ know of the dark and complicated and compelling currents of the
real world, lapped in their gentle backwaters of old-world clerical
life, secluded and sheltered and untried! She would still have been one
of them, if her paths had been theirs, if she had only breathed the
quiet air they breathed!
“It is too hard!” she moaned, in her misery. The test of life itself was
so crucial—that was the thought that kept recurring to her—the ordeal
by fire was foredoomed to be so exacting! All their old lessons and
creeds, which she had once chimed so innocently and so cordially, now
seemed to fall empty and enigmatic on her older and wiser heart. They
seemed to solve none of her imminent problems. Their mysticism only
bewildered her. And she sat amid the roar of London, idle and sick at
heart, unhearing and unseeing.
“I will do it!” she at last said aloud. “It will be my punishment!” She
could no longer demand so much of life. She looked on existence, now,
with older and disillusioned eyes. For what she had taken she must stand
ready to pay. It would be her penance and penalty for past
transgressions. And it would have to be borne; it was obligatory. It was
not happiness or well-being that was at stake, she argued, in that new
mood of amendment; it was something vast and undying and eternal within
her, something that came before happiness itself, something she had seen
her defiant and broken and dying father ignore and surrender and suffer
for.
While this new expiatory passion was still warm in her blood, she packed
her boxes, soberly, and then as soberly wrote to Durkin. It was not a
long letter, but she spent much time and thought in its composition. In
it, too, she seemed to cast off her last vestige of hesitation. For she
felt that the very note of impersonality in its unnatural stiffness of
phrasing was a new means of support. It was a support as clumsy and
retarding as a child’s walking-chair, but she was willing enough to
catch at it, whimsically, in those first tottering steps of
renunciation.
“My Dear Jim,” she began, after much hesitation, and with many long and
thoughtful pauses as she wrote, “it will surprise you, I know, but I
have decided to go back to Oxford—to the Oxford I have so often told
you about. Do not think it is only cruelty on my part, or cowardice, or
self-interest. I have thought over everything long and carefully. And it
has led, always led, to one end—that end is: neither you nor I must go
on leading the lives we have been leading! It will hurt me, and it will
hurt you, I believe, to break the ties that time has made. But there is,
today, all the width of the Atlantic between us—and it is there, I
think, that I am the coward. For it is only this that makes it possible
for me to do what I’m doing. With you, I would bend to your will; here
it will be easier. Now, above all things, both you and I must learn not
to look on ourselves as beings apart from the rest of the world. If we
have ever been enemies of society we must learn not to remember it—for
it is this feeling, I know, which holds the key of our undoing. I have
often wondered and looked to see in what ways I reproduced the atavistic
conditions of the primitive woman—for they say that we evil doers are
only echoes out of the past—but I’m going to do it no more. We are both
of us ill-fitted for the things and the deeds we have drifted into. They
make us suffer too much. It is work that should fall to souls dwarfed
and stunted and benumbed. We are not morbid and depraved and blind; we
have intelligence and feeling. We have only been unhappy and unlucky,
let’s say. So now we must fight along and wait for better luck, as you
used to put it. We are not what they call ‘recidivists.’ We are not
abnormal and branded; we must fight away the deadly feeling that we are
detached from the rest of the world, that mankind is organized and
fighting against us, that we are the hunted, and all men the hounds!
What we have done, we have done. But I know that we were both initiated
into wrong-doing so quietly and so insidiously that the current caught
us before we knew it. Yet I feel that I have none of the traits of the
Female Offender, though in my anxiety and crazy search for causes and
excuses I have even taken my cephalic index and tested my chromatic
perception and my tactile sensitiveness and made sure that I responded
normally to a Faraday current! Yes, we are both too normal to succeed
happily in the ways we began. . . . I shall miss you, but I shall always
love you. Oh, Jim, pray for me; as I, daily, shall pray for you! I can’t
write more now. Go back to your work, though it means being hungry and
lonely and unhappy, fight out the problem of your amplifier, and
struggle along with your transmitting camera, until you accomplish
something we can both take pride in and be happy over! Sometime, later,
when I write, I shall be able to explain everything more fully. . . . I
was eleven days in the hospital, and crossed on the _Nieuw Amsterdam_.
There will always be a scar—but a very small one—on my arm. That will
be the only reminder. Good-bye, dear Jim, and God bless and keep you,
always, in the right.”
She read over the letter, slowly, dispassionately, and fought back the
temptation to write further, to fling more of her true feeling into it.
That, at best, would be only a cruel kindness.
As she folded and sealed the letter she felt that she was sealing down
many years of her past youth. She already felt that she had passed over
some mysterious Great Divide, that some vast morainic loop already
walled her back from her former existence. And then, as a sudden,
rushing sense of her isolation swept over her, she broke down, in that
very hour of her ironic triumph, and wept miserably, passionately,
hopelessly.
Her misery clung to her all that day, until, late in the afternoon, she
caught the first glimpse of Oxford from her compartment window. At one
touch it carried her back to the six long years of her girlhood, for she
had been little more than a child when first taken from the dubious care
of her father—and the happiest stretch of her life had been lived
within sound of Oxford’s tranquil bells.
It had been her first plan, when she left the train, to take a carriage
and drive leisurely through the old university town. It would be her one
hour of freedom, before crossing that final Rubicon; it was only, she
protested, a human enough hesitation before the ultimate plunge. Vividly
and minutely she remembered the town, as she had seen it from the
familiar hills, wrapt in sunlight and purplish shadows by day, lying
cool and dark and tranquil under the summer moon by night, steeped in
the silences and the soft mistiness of the river valley, with here and
there a bell tinkling and a roof glimmering through the gloom. She even
used to say she found a strange comfort in the number of these bells and
in the thought of their wakefulness throughout the night. But now,
through some underground circuit of memory, they carried her thoughts
back to the clanging brilliance of Broadway at midnight, to the movement
and tumult and press of light-hearted humanity. And by contrast, they
now seemed to her to toll lugubriously. The quiet city about her seemed
tainted with antiquity, autumnal, overshadowed by the grayness of death.
It almost stifled her. She had forlornly hoped that the calm beauty of
that town of bells and towers would still fall as a welcome balm on her
torn feelings. But she had changed—oh, how she had changed! It was not,
she told herself, the mere fruit of physical exhaustion. Her one desire
on that day, indeed, was to reach that condition of bodily weariness
which would render her indifferent to all mental blows. It was only her
past, whimpering for its own.
She still felt the sheer need of fatigue to purge away that inner
weariness that had settled over her soul, so on second thoughts she
turned homeward, and went on foot, through the paling English afternoon.
Often, as a girl, she had walked in over the neighboring hills; and
there seemed something more in keeping with her return to go back alone,
and quietly. And as she walked she seemed to grow indifferent to even
her own destiny. She felt herself as one gazing down on her own tangled
existence with the cool detachment of a mere spectator. Yet this was the
landscape of her youth, she kept telling herself, where she had first
heard nightingales sing, where she had been happy and hopeful and looked
out toward the unknown world with wide and wondering eyes. But the very
landscape that once lay so large and alluring now seemed cramped and
small and trivial. It seemed like a play-world to her, painted and laid
out and overcrowded, like the too confining stage-scene of a theatre.
The afternoon was already late when the familiar square tower of the
church and the gray walls of the parsonage itself came into view. She
gazed at them, abstracted and exalted, and only once she murmured: “How
different, oh, how different!”
Then she opened the gate of that quiet home, slowly and deliberately,
and stepped inside. The garden was empty.
One great, annihilating sponge-sweep seemed to wipe five long years, and
all their mottled events, from her memory. Then as slowly and
deliberately she once more closed the gate. The act seemed to take on
that dignity attaching to the ceremonial, for with that movement, she
passionately protested to herself, she was closing the door on all her
past.