There comes a moment in the life of almost every one when, bewildered,
for the first time they meet an everyday and faulty person in place of
the beloved. Sometimes this is the beginning of a long disillusion; it
is then that many find out that one has not been in love at all, but
only in love with being in love. With young lovers one often calls
this first glimpse the first quarrel. After marriage this slow torment
of becoming accustomed to another personality in the body of the
beloved is called the "time of adjustment."
With Ellen this moment was a severe spiritual crisis. As she had seen
concentrated in the last weeks only the lovable things in Roger, so in
this one moment she had a vision of all in him that was inimical to
happiness and peace. It was as if that blind, voiceless judge that
sits deep within all of us and bids us love, hate, or fear, had been
aroused to its depth, and its final judgment of Roger had been that
here was danger. Had there been any place to run to, she would have
fled, but there was nothing to do but sit still. She dreamed at night
that she saw his face savage in anger, heartless in its desire, and
relentless in its will to get what it wanted from life; and since she
could not leave home to run away from him, she ran from him
spiritually.
When he came to see her next, he could hardly find Ellen in the inert
and docile person who presented herself to his gaze. It was as though
the glance he had given his mother and the tone in which he had spoken
had been to her a prophecy of life to come. She saw him with that
terrible clairvoyance that love gives; she saw clearly what her life
in the hands of this other Roger would mean; and it seemed as if the
very inner spirit of her struggled to free herself from his power.
I, personally, fear the shocks of the spirit as some fear physical
pain, and instinctively I withdrew from the perversities of men, and I
now look shudderingly back on two marriages which I might have made
but for this warning bell which rang over the reefs of the spirit.
Her first movement had been one of flaming indignation; that burned
out, leaving behind it the ashes of a dull, apathetic fear. When he
asked her what was the matter and why, she told him she was afraid of
him. He called himself a brute, he apologized to his mother, but she
remained inert and docile, as aloof as a person who has been stunned
by the spectacle of a great disaster, and, indeed, the flood of her
emotions had ebbed back violently.
In despair Roger came to me.
"I've lost Ellen," he told me. "We've awfully bad tempers in our
family, and my mother didn't understand that since I've known Ellen
there are a whole lot of things in my life that I want to forget. The
me Ellen knows is a different me from the one mother knows."
He had never been as sweet to Ellen as he was now. She had seen before
a brave lover who rushed everything before him and when he was refused
anything would turn into a naughty little boy. Now he was a tender
suppliant asking for mercy, confessing his sins and inventing sweet
and touching things to do for Ellen. I think the men of my day were
crueler as men and warmer as lovers. A man like Roger possessed
himself more of a woman's mind and life than the men of to-day that I
see around me seem able to do with their sweethearts. There was no
little corner of her spirit that he did not wish to occupy, and to
gain admission to her frightened little heart he made himself small
and humble and appealing. Of the sincerity of his wretchedness and his
repentance there was no doubt.
"If she were only angry with me," he said to me, "but she's afraid,
Roberta. It's a terrible thing to see her shrink from me. She doesn't
mean to be unkind. She told me in all seriousness, as if she meant it,
that she thought it would be better for all of us if I left her now.
Why, she's my life, Roberta!"
I was profoundly touched, as who would not have been? Nor did I fail
to repeat this to Ellen. I had told Alec what the matter was, for
seeing Ellen listless and remote he had jumped to the conclusion that
Roger had hurt her in some way, and in Roger's defense I told him the
truth and he put himself stolidly on the side of Ellen's instinct.
Through one long day she and Alec went off together as they had when
they were children, while Roger raged up and down. Ellen wrote:--
"We played, as we did when I was little, 'Two Years Ago,' and
for one, beautiful afternoon I forgot how life can hurt. Just
toward the end Alec cried out to me, 'Oh, Ellen, why can't I be
older! Why couldn't it have been I? I'd never have hurt you, I'd
never have made you afraid of me.' And I know that's true, and I
know, too, that poor Alec could never find a key to the place in
me that could be hurt. There's something wrong with women, for
when once one has felt one's pulse beat fast, one can never
again be content with a sweet and kind affection. One must wish
forevermore to drown one's self forever and to let the waters of
life sweep over one's head, however bitter they may be."
Already, though she didn't know it, she was coming back to Roger.
Every day he went to see her with some carefully thought-out little
gift. Every night he wrote her a letter which he sent by me, and she
wrote in answer a letter that she didn't send.
"I suppose [she writes to Roger] that we can only be cured of
the worst hurts of all by those who have hurt us. Oh, please
hide me from yourself! Oh, protect me! from this Roger, since I
am so afraid of you that my whole spirit shudders away from you.
Shield me from this, or let me go now while I yet have strength
to leave you, or else make me forget forever how black life
could be if I ever saw again the face that you turned then on
your mother, and that yet was a part of you."
There is nothing truer in the life of the affections than this, that
the wound made by those whom we love can only be cured by them. One
may be sick even to death, and yet the only cure can come from the one
who has poisoned life for us. There is only one other way to cure the
hurt, and that is to stop loving. That's why a great many things
become easier to bear as the years go by. We find men and women
philosophically facing situations which formerly would have stopped
all life for them. These are the dead of heart who have forgotten to
care when they do this, and where one woman gains peace from a higher
understanding of the man she loves, a dozen others find it by ceasing
to love at all.
Ellen made her attempt at escape, and then came back because she
couldn't help it. The one person in the world who could have helped
her was Alec. She was sincere when she told me:--
"If Alec was my brother, and had a home for me somewhere where I need
not see Roger again, I'd go to him."
It was her very docility and lack of resistance that maddened Roger.
He told me:--
"Somehow Ellen has slipped out of my hands into a magic circle; she's
afraid of me. It's as though she lived inside a crystal shell--I can
see her and speak to her, but I can't touch her."
I, myself, was very much disturbed and moved by it all. There was
Ellen who had burned in a fire of happiness, whose very look at Roger
had been a caress, who seemed to give herself to him by the way she
stood,--her arms relaxed as though all her body cried out to him to
take her,--now lost in apathy; nothing that I told her affected her as
far as I could see. After days of this, just as I was giving up hope,
I met them one afternoon, swinging down the street toward me, with the
air of a god and goddess recently let out of prison. Roger had
Prudentia flung on his shoulder, and carried the child aloft as though
she were a flag of triumph. All the explanation I ever had of the
reconciliation was what I had then and there.
"He came down the street," Ellen told me, "with Prudentia on his
shoulder, and said, 'Hello, Ellen,' and I said, 'Hello, Roger,' and he
put out his hand to me and I took it. Why, Roberta, aren't you glad?"
asked Ellen.
"She wanted more pomp and circumstance," Roger jeered at me. "She
wanted you, Ellen, to rush to my arms and say, 'Roderigo, I forgive
thee.'"
They went on; I heard their laughter down the street. That was all the
thanks they gave me.