If the world has little pity for a jilted girl, how shall it have much
understanding for any one who suffers after having voluntarily sent
her lover away, especially when it was her obvious duty to her family
to marry? So her world was not very kind to Ellen at a moment when she
most needed their kindness. We do not often understand the sicknesses
of the spirit; now we mete out to them the criminal indulgence that a
foolish woman does to a wayward child, and now we treat them with
bruising harshness.
During the summer matters were not so bad, because every one rather
expected that Ellen would come to herself. My grandmother used to
question me seriously if I were encouraging Ellen.
Even Mr. and Mrs. Sylvester, most unworldly people,--more unworldly, I
think, than any one I have ever known,--had seen the children
"enjoying advantages" through Ellen, for Ellen and Roger had planned
a thousand things.
Matilda had wept openly when Ellen had returned, and said:--
"Oh, Ellen, Ellen! Now that you're not going to be married, I suppose
I shall never visit you and study music in Boston, and, Ellen, I had
so make-believed it in my heart."
During the summer there was little written in her journal except
letters to Roger, which stopped abruptly with her determination to get
over the aching want which she had for him. With the coming of winter
there settled down over Ellen a limitless depression. She was very
gentle, but she seemed lost in a mist of sadness. I cannot describe to
what extent her spirit was dimmed. It seemed as though a strange,
withering age had crept over her before her time. People noticed it,
and word went abroad that Ellen Payne was "in a decline," which was a
word for almost everything that ailed one in those days, short of a
broken leg. I remember her walking around at that time with poses of a
very tired child, for all the hollow under her eyes and the troubled
lines in her forehead. She would let her arms swing before her like a
little girl that had outgrown her strength, and throw herself down
into chairs as though she had held herself on her feet to the utmost
limits of her endurance.
I ventured to ask her at last: "What's the matter, Ellen?" For we had
avoided, by common consent, talking of anything that might be
wounding, and had put the past out of sight.
She looked at me with eyes that had the hurt look of a little girl.
"I'll tell you what's the matter," she told me in answer. "I know well
enough what's the matter. There's no meaning to life any more at all.
The world goes on over there"--she waved her hand ever so
slightly--"and I'm here on the outside, and what they do doesn't mean
anything at all, Roberta. If life goes on like this, maybe I'll be
lucky enough to die, and the worst of it is that the hope of dying is
keeping me alive. I am afraid, Roberta, that when one has anything to
live for, even if it's dying, that one keeps on living. What it really
means," she added, "is that I've lost God, for I can't pray any more."
Since then I've known a great many women in mortal pain, and I truly
believe that it is the nearness of death that keeps many a suffering
soul alive. They are forever heartening themselves by looking through
the black, mysterious door, where there is an end to pain and where
one need not stay famished any more at life's feast. Death walks
consolingly so close; death is so easy and calls compassionately to
these forsaken ones, saying, "Out here is rest--so near; if it gets
much worse, you can come to me." Wherever one looks there is the
consoling possibility of death, and since death is so near and so
easy, people, who have forgotten for a while the reason for living, go
on just the same. For who, in the winter of the spirit, can again
believe in spring?
At this time even the children seemed to turn away from Ellen and give
her nothing. She had always meant laughter and gayety and the
heightening of the lives of all of us around her, and Alec and I were
the only two who remained faithful to her in this moment of
desolation, because the others did not see Ellen in this docile,
lifeless soul, who went around still called by the name of Ellen
Payne; and this withdrawal of human sympathy was as unconscious as it
was wounding. My sweet old grandmother, who had loved Ellen so,
combined with old Mrs. Butler, whose hair Ellen had done for
years,--since Alec had grown up,--would nod their heads together and
say that Ellen Payne ought to stop those mopish ways and use more
backbone.
That winter Ellen's mother was ailing and coughed badly also, and for
the first time in her life was a little querulous and complaining. I
ignored as much as I could Ellen's ill feelings, as she wished me to
do, but I remember this tragic winter well. There were a very few
entries in her journal, but not in this or in any other crisis of her
life had she failed to clarify her mind by the written word. I find
this:--
"I try as hard as I can to attach myself to the duties that
crowd around me. Sometimes it just seems to me that I am going
to succeed in being interested and then I am not. I think it
must be like this in those strange northern countries, where
the glow of dawn comes on the horizon, and, starved for light,
one says, 'Here is the dawn'; and even as one speaks the light
pales and the dreadful twilight thickens around one."
Towards spring--one of those soppy, wet springs, when it seems as
though the green would never come--I could stand the silence no
longer, and some word or look of hers that betrayed to me the desolate
abasement of her spirit made me cry out:--
"Ellen, isn't there anything on earth that you want?"
"I think I would like to see Alec," she answered.
It seemed to me a foolish wish, for Alec was in his first school and
far away, and his visits to us had been spasmodic and brief, and
shared, of course, with Elizabeth Greenough, though during the summer
he had been home and spent a good deal of time with Ellen, and she had
accepted his kindness as she always had, very much as the air one
breathes, or as she accepted my friendship--as one of the certain
things among the deep uncertainties of life.
I wrote to Alec what Ellen had said, without a hope in the world that
he could come. It seemed the sort of thing that only love
accomplishes, and he had seemed to me perfectly contented with his
engagement, making his visits to the home of his young lady with the
regularity of a lover, or of a clock. But almost sooner than seemed
possible he came. When Ellen saw him tears came to her eyes. For it is
just at these moments, when one is thirsting for help and sympathy,
that we seem to lose the way to the hearts of others, and this is
natural enough, for there is a terrible egotism in certain phases of
grief. The eyes of the spirit are turned inward and we cease to give,
and after a while, as with Ellen, grief becomes a habit and we slip
along smoothly enough in the deepening and dolorous grooves of sorrow.
It is easier to do this where the outside life is monotonous, and to
us, in our little town, our own point of view and our own spirits
furnished whatever diversity there was. One day went along after
another and one never met a new face on the street, and it was with a
true instinct for help that Ellen cried out:--
"I envy men who can go out in the world and forget. It must be easier
to forget among those who have never seen your face or ever heard what
has happened to you, and here everything brings me back to the
thoughts that I try in so futile a fashion to put out of my mind."
Alec's unexpected arrival had been the only thing that had happened
through the long winter and spring. I waited with anxiety for the end
of their interview.
"Well," I asked Alec, "how did you find her?"
And he answered:--
"She just wants to know how one manages to live when the meaning of
life is dead and I told her that that wasn't what she needed, but that
she needed to go and search for the meaning of life, and you know,
Roberta, a person who really seeks for that can always find it. I've a
plan that I'm going to try. Ellen has promised to do everything I tell
her, and keep her to it, even if it seems childish to you."
A day or two after Alec left, there knocked at the Sylvesters' back
door a sturdy boy of twelve; a shock of wild black hair blew across
his forehead, and funny, humorous blue eyes gleamed under straight
black brows. For the rest, he was freckled past belief. As Ellen
opened the door for him, he choked in a spasm of embarrassment, then
the words came, with a rush. He had a deep voice for his age.
"I've come to git Ellen Payne," he boomed.
When Ellen, who had opened the door for him, said:--
"Why, I'm Ellen Payne and what do you want?" he flushed furiously and
muttered:--
"He said you was a girl."
"Well," responded Ellen, with more briskness than she had shown for
some time, "I'm a girl."
"No," replied the boy, "you're a grown-up woman, tall 's ever you'll
be."
"Did you say you had come to get me?" suggested Ellen.
"He said you was to come with me."
"What are we going to do?" asked Ellen.
"Git mayflowers in a place you don't know," said the boy.
"There's no such place," said Ellen. "I know every cranny of this
place in my sleep."
"Well, I know it as if I'd _made it_," retorted the boy.
By the time Ellen came back ready to walk, a wave of shyness engulfed
the boy; he was as uncommunicative as the Pyramids. He was deeply
embarrassed by his companion, but he forgot now and then enough to go
ahead, shouting his joy at the return of spring, and then his gayety
would fall as a flag at half-mast when he saw Ellen after him. She
came home wet and very tired, to listen to the prophecy of her Aunt
Sarah that "no good would come of this weltering around in the wet,
and that it was just like one of Alec's unpractical thoughts."
While Miss Sarah loved Alec, his character annoyed her, winding as it
did around a devious road and springing upon you new view-points, as a
supposedly quiet road might discover unexpected and romantic vistas of
country. Especially his attitude toward the boys was annoying to those
who found difficulty in having wood-piles replenished and the "chores"
done.
"You'd think boys were something," my grandmother used to explain
with some heat, "besides trying, rascally, little scallywags; but the
older you grow, Roberta, the more you'll find truth in what I say, and
that is, that boys were put in this world by the Lord for women to
exercise their patience over."
Tyke Bascom didn't come again for two days. This time Ellen penetrated
through the shyness enough to find that he was a boy who lived over
the mountain-road in a little clearing, called Foster's Corners, which
had a sawmill and four houses.
"That's a long ways," said Ellen.
"Not so long when you're used to it," he replied. "It might be long
for a woman."
In his walks over the mountain, Alec had always stopped at the house
and, being fatal to small boys, Tyke had enrolled in the company of
Alec's friends. All that Tyke knew, it turned out, he had been taught
by Alec, as he sat there resting on his way home.
For the next two weeks Tyke Bascom came for Ellen, but irregularly.
Sometimes he would come each day, for two or three days, and once
three days went past, three days when Ellen watched for him. It had
been a long time since she had been out in the open air; it had been a
long time since she had gone back to the places she had known as a
little girl, when she was in that deep and almost mystic communion
with all life and growth around her, and when the mountain and the
river, and the small mountain streams were like personalities to her.
Only the very pure in heart and children have this intimate sense of
oneness with the world, and Ellen and Alec had lain for hours, under
cover, and watched to see a fox sneak past. They knew a marsh where
the blue heron lived, and when she was little, Ellen had talked about
the birds, squirrels, and chipmunks as intimately as though they were
people.
Now all this forgotten lore came back to her from out-of-the-way
places in her mind. When I was a girl, it was only too easy for people
to forget such things, for in my day, no sooner did one grow up than
the customs of young ladyhood demanded that one should spend most of
one's time in the house. Even skating was denied women, and Ellen's
love of the outdoors met with a steady stream of disapproval from
every one, including Roger. The only people who had not frowned on her
were her mother and Mr. Sylvester, who held the heretical theory that
it was good even for a woman to know the works of the Lord, even
though a close and intimate knowledge was bad for smoothness of hair
and neatness of frock.
More than that, there was a desire awakened in Ellen's mind, of
conquering this wild and morose child, who had given his heart so
unreservedly to Alec.
She asked him,--
"Do you like going out with me, Tyke?"
"No 'm," he said, "not especially."
"But"--she told him--"you don't need to come if you don't want to."
He flushed all over and said, "I didn't mean that. Don't you see, Alec
told me to, so I don't mind at all, 'cause it's for him."
"Now I realize," she wrote, "that whenever I've sat down anywhere
children have always come around me. Until the last year or two I've
known all the little boys; there's never been a time when some of
Alec's youngsters haven't been perched in our yard, and now comes
along this boy who takes me out with him as he would carry a package
for Alec."
There was nothing for it, she must make him her own. I think it was
the first desire she had had in a year's time, except the desire for
the ultimate peace. She wooed him first out of his shyness, and as I
would see them talking together I would see all the mannerisms of the
Ellen I had known, of whom Aunt Sarah said, "She seemed about to burst
into flame." All her forgotten shy guiles that had led her before into
the inaccessible hearts of boys woke up one by one. I don't know how
far she went back on the road to childhood, in these rambles, or how
much she remembered of the golden time when Alec and she played truant
together by the hills and brooks.
One day Tyke appeared with this command:
"You got to come up to my house, he says; ma needs help, she's sick.
He sent you this."
He gave her a note from Alec which read:--
"Dear Ellen: It was always easier for you to do housework out of your
house than in."
That was all.
"Ma's sick; she's got a new baby."
So every day Ellen trudged over the mountain-road and back. No sooner
was Mrs. Bascom beginning to be up and around again, and Ellen still
going to see her and the baby, than Mrs. Sylvester hurt her foot a
little and was kept in her chair, so more than ever fell to Ellen. She
wrote:--
"It is as though I had been walking down a long corridor and
suddenly had opened a door into the light; when I came in sight
of our house to-night and thought of all the people who can be
happier because of me, tears of happiness came to my eyes, and I
should have been glad if I could have gone down on my knees
there and thanked God that I was of use in the world to those
whom I love. All the selfish winter of my heart melted and my
mind went out to my friend who helped me to find myself and to
bring me home again. I suppose this is the road people have to
travel to learn the meaning of life. You hear a bird sing by the
road and you stop to listen, and by and by your heart starts
beating again."