During all my life long I have occasionally had, in times of stress, a
recurrence of the spiritual nausea which I felt that night. When we
drove home in the closed carriage Mrs. Sylvester was prattling like a
girl about the beautiful party. Indeed, she had enjoyed the outward
circumstance of things almost more than Ellen and myself, and Roger,
making light talk with her, sat next to Ellen,--light talk that had
its undercurrent of meaning that Ellen and I understood. The cab
lurched noisily over the cobblestones, with which all Boston was paved
in those days, so that Roger and Mrs. Sylvester had to raise their
voices above the din. It was raining, and the yellow flare of the
street-corner lamps was reflected in pools of eddying light from the
damp pavements.
It seemed to me that we went on and on forever in this torment of
noise and talk, and the smell of the wet spring night conflicted with
the smell of the stuffy upholstery, and I suffered as though I was
witnessing the physical pain of a tortured child. It seemed to me that
the torment of the ceaseless, agonizing prattle of Ellen's little
mother, accompanied by the drunken lurch of the lumbering cab, would
never stop, for all the time I knew that Ellen's heart was breaking,
and that the only thing that life could give her at that moment was
darkness and rest. I knew this was the end as far as she and Roger
were concerned.
We had our room together, and I felt like a stranger in a house of
mourning. I knew that there was no comfort that I could give her at
all. She hadn't even tears with which to refresh herself, and all she
said to me was: "Roberta, I've been stripped bare of leaves to-night."
This was a true enough picture of her. She had been a blooming flower,
and now it was as if the frost of some inexorable and unseen winter
had touched her and she was bare of leaves and blossoms.
I suppose I was the only one among all those who loved her who did not
urge Ellen to reflect on her decision. There was so little to tell
when it came to it. Ellen's reason was so little one of the usual
causes for which an engagement may be dissolved, with the approval of
a girl's elders. Here was Ellen who had stood by Roger gayly, without
even, apparently, a proper understanding of his dissipation; who had
endured from him neglect, who had learned to school herself so that
she was able to ignore his temperamental interests in other women;
she, who had been without any end in her affections, gave the
appearance to the outside world of having suddenly, for no reason,
come to an end of her love.
In our town there was scant belief that Ellen had jilted Roger. Why do
such a thing? "Aren't they all as poor as church mice, and isn't Roger
as likely a young man as one would wish to see?" They clamored around
me inquisitively.
There is no time when the human race shows itself in such beauty and
in such heartless sordidness as in the time of grief. Then it is that
the world we know turns strange faces upon us, and mean, low-lived men
will show the gentle chivalry that one would expect only of angels,
and delicate women, of chaste and gracious lives, will develop, before
one's eyes, hideous and ghoulish curiosity. Any one who has been
through the death of those whom they love knows this, and still more
it is true in the other disasters of life, where there is no
ceremonial of grief. Death has dignity. Its august finality stops many
a wagging tongue and many an unkind word. But oh, the other griefs of
the spirit! One is shielded by no mourning; there is no protecting
tradition to fold its arms about one; and one's poor, shivering soul
is left naked on the highway, afraid of the heartless curiosity of
prying eyes.
The curious world has no mercy for a girl jilted by her lover. There
is no sanctity to all this suffering, no privacy allowable, not a
day's respite from the inquisitive natures and prattling tongues. One
must count one's self very fortunate if one is allowed to care for the
most bleeding of one's wounds with a certain degree of decent privacy.
And in our little town privacy was what was impossible for Ellen. I
was for a while the center of the storm, for, to Roger, Ellen had been
inexplicable; he had not been able to believe what had happened and
came storming down after us.
"I can't see him," Ellen told me. "There's no place anywhere in him to
explain anything. You'll see when you try and talk to him."
I begged her, out of kindness, to see him once because he was terribly
torn by what had happened. He told me that the sure foundations of
life had rocked under his feet, and when I repeated this to Ellen, she
shook her head.
"It's not that,--he can't bear that what's been so his creature should
defy him. He's never had life say no to him before." She said this
without bitterness, and more as an older woman might of a boy she has
brought up.
"Why won't you see him," I pleaded with her, "just for one moment?"
"I don't dare to," she told me. "Every habit I have says yes to him;
every strand of my body cries out to him; it's as if he had never been
and I had died; and yet our bodies go on living and caring for each
other. He doesn't need me any more than he needs any one else. He
needs no person, Roberta. Love and encouragement and companionship:
the world is full of it for him. Yet I need him and shall need him
always, to the end of my days."
Often it is that in the disintegration of a deep and long-lived
affection, it is the instinct of the body to shiver away first, before
the mind knows what has happened, but it is more dangerous when, in
the full splendor of love, the blow has fallen and instinct still
clamors for the beloved's companionship.
But she wasn't to be spared seeing him. They met by chance upon the
street. I was with Ellen, and he began at once babbling forth the
excuses he had said over and over to me. Because Ellen said there was
no place in him to tell him what it was all about, he persisted in
thinking that she had been outraged by his trifling again, with their
affection, at the eleventh hour.
At last he went away, but he had the satisfaction of feeling that he
had played the noble part. In the light of Ellen's actions, what he
considered his own small unfaiths, appeared as nothing.
"Now you are gone [she wrote] I would call you back if I could,
and I have to remember and say to myself that there is no one to
call back. There is nothing in you that would hear the things
that I wish to say to you, and yet you go on living and yet I
must love you; and yet, forever and ever in the night, my heart
goes out to you; and yet, when I walk along, I feel the touch of
your hand, as though it were placed in mine. But the you that
meant life to me never was, or died, perhaps, with your boyhood.
He was there a little while and smiled at me, and all the time
the real you was growing large and strong and killing that other
whom I loved. But I have bound my life up in you, so what can I
do, and where will I find comfort? I can have scarcely the
comfort of a memory, for I have loved only a ghost in you. I
envy those sad and haggard girls who have been deserted by their
lovers. I envy wives who have been left with little children to
care for, for they, at least, have had reality; they have been
able to give all of themselves, and what they have known has
been real. I wonder if I shall always have to bleed for you,
drop by drop, and that while I bleed, my strength also goes?
Everything talks to me of you. My hand stretches out for a pen
and I must write to you, though you aren't, and yet you are
dearer to me than all the world besides. Where did the sweet
soul of you go that I loved so well, and how can I live in a
world where such things happen? I go out upon the street and
hear people walking past and children playing and think with
surprise, 'Why, there are happy people in the world!'"