Poor bereaved Percy has just been spending the evening with me, because
I am supposed to understand his troubles. Why must I be supposed to
understand everybody's troubles? It's awfully wearing to be pouring out
sympathy from an empty heart. The poor boy at present is pretty low,
but I rather suspect--with Betsy's aid--that he will pull through. He is
just on the edge of falling in love with Betsy, but he doesn't know it.
He's in the stage now where he's sort of enjoying his troubles. He feels
himself a tragic hero, a man who has suffered deeply. But I notice that
when Betsy is about, he offers cheerful assistance in whatever work is
toward.
Gordon telegraphed today that he is coming tomorrow. I am dreading the
interview, for I know we are going to have an altercation. He wrote the
day after the fire and begged me to "chuck the asylum" and get married
immediately, and now he's coming to argue it out. I can't make him
understand that a job involving the happiness of one hundred or so
children can't be chucked with such charming insouciance. I tried my
best to keep him away, but, like the rest of his sex, he's stubborn. Oh
dear, I don't know what's ahead of us! I wish I could glance into next
year for a moment.
The doctor is still in his plaster cast, but I hear is doing well,
after a grumbly fashion. He is able to sit up a little every day and to
receive a carefully selected list of visitors. Mrs. McGurk sorts them
out at the door, and repudiates the ones she doesn't like.
Good-by. I'd write some more, but I'm so sleepy that my eyes are
shutting on me. (The idiom is Sadie Kate's.) I must go to bed and get
some sleep against the one hundred and seven troubles of tomorrow.
With love to the Pendletons,
S. McB.
January 22.
Dear Judy:
This letter has nothing to do with the John Grier Home. It's merely from
Sallie McBride.
Do you remember when we read Huxley's letters our senior year? That book
contained a phrase which has stuck in my memory ever since: "There is
always a Cape Horn in one's life that one either weathers or wrecks
oneself on." It's terribly true; and the trouble is that you can't
always recognize your Cape Horn when you see it. The sailing is
sometimes pretty foggy, and you're wrecked before you know it.
I've been realizing of late that I have reached the Cape Horn of my own
life. I entered upon my engagement to Gordon honestly and hopefully, but
little by little I've grown doubtful of the outcome. The girl he loves
is not the ME I want to be. It's the ME I've been trying to grow away
from all this last year. I'm not sure she ever really existed. Gordon
just imagined she did. Anyway, she doesn't exist any more, and the only
fair course both to him and to myself was to end it.
We no longer have any interests in common; we are not friends. He
doesn't comprehend it; he thinks that I am making it up, that all I have
to do is to take an interest in his life, and everything will turn out
happily. Of course I do take an interest when he's with me. I talk about
the things he wants to talk about, and he doesn't know that there's a
whole part of me--the biggest part of me--that simply doesn't meet him
at any point. I pretend when I am with him. I am not myself, and if we
were to live together in constant daily intercourse, I'd have to keep on
pretending all my life. He wants me to watch his face and smile when he
smiles and frown when he frowns. He can't realize that I'm an individual
just as much as he is.
I have social accomplishments. I dress well, I'm spectacular, I would
be an ideal hostess in a politician's household--and that's why he likes
me.
Anyway, I suddenly saw with awful distinctness that if I kept on I'd
be in a few years where Helen Brooks is. She's a far better model of
married life for me to contemplate just this moment than you, dear Judy.
I think that such a spectacle as you and Jervis is a menace to society.
You look so happy and peaceful and companionable that you induce
a defenseless onlooker to rush off and snap up the first man she
meets--and he's always the wrong man.
Anyway, Gordon and I have quarreled definitely and finally. I
should rather have ended without a quarrel, but considering his
temperament,--and mine, too, I must confess,--we had to go off in a big
smoky explosion. He came yesterday afternoon, after I'd written him not
to come, and we went walking over Knowltop. For three and a half hours
we paced back and forth over that windy moor and discussed ourselves
to the bottommost recesses of our beings. No one can ever say the break
came through misunderstanding each other!
It ended by Gordon's going, never to return. As I stood there at the
end and watched him drop out of sight over the brow of the hill, and
realized that I was free and alone and my own master well, Judy, such a
sense of joyous relief, of freedom, swept over me! I can't tell you;
I don't believe any happily married person could ever realize how
wonderfully, beautifully ALONE I felt. I wanted to throw my arms out and
embrace the whole waiting world that belonged suddenly to me. Oh, it
is such a relief to have it settled! I faced the truth the night of
the fire when I saw the old John Grier go, and realized that a new John
Grier would be built in its place and that I wouldn't be here to do it.
A horrible jealousy clutched at my heart. I couldn't give it up, and
during those agonizing moments while I thought we had lost our doctor,
I realized what his life meant, and how much more significant than
Gordon's. And I knew then that I couldn't desert him. I had to go on and
carry out all of the plans we made together.
I don't seem to be telling you anything but a mess of words, I am so
full of such a mess of crowding emotions. I want to talk and talk and
talk myself into coherence. But, anyway, I stood alone in the winter
twilight, and I took a deep breath of clear cold air, and I felt
beautifully, wonderfully, electrically free.
And then I ran and leaped and skipped down the hill and across the
pastures toward our iron confines, and I sang to myself. Oh, it was a
scandalous proceeding, when, according to all precedent, I should have
gone trailing home with a broken wing. I never gave one thought to
poor Gordon, who was carrying a broken, bruised, betrayed heart to the
railroad station.
As I entered the house I was greeted by the joyous clatter of the
children trooping to their supper. They were suddenly MINE, and lately,
as my doom became more and more imminent, they had seemed fading away
into little strangers. I seized the three nearest and hugged them hard.
I have suddenly found such new life and exuberance, I feel as though I
had been released from prison and were free. I feel,--oh, I'll stop,--I
just want you to know the truth. Don't show Jervis this letter, but tell
him what's in it in a decently subdued and mournful fashion.
It's midnight now, and I'm going to try to go to sleep. It's wonderful
not to be going to marry some one you don't want to marry. I'm glad of
all these children's needs, I'm glad of Helen Brooks, and, yes, of the
fire, and everything that has made me see clearly. There's never been a
divorce in my family, and they would have hated it.
I know I'm horribly egotistical and selfish; I ought to be thinking
of poor Gordon's broken heart. But really it would just be a pose if I
pretended to be very sorrowful. He'll find some one else with just as
conspicuous hair as mine, who will make just as effective a hostess, and
who won't be bothered by any of these damned modern ideas about public
service and woman's mission and all the rest of the tomfoolery the
modern generation of women is addicted to. (I paraphrase, and soften our
young man's heartbroken utterances.)
Good-by, dear people. How I wish I could stand with you on your beach
and look across the blue, blue sea! I salute the Spanish main.