STUDY OF THE STARS
She came back each September with delight and exultation. It was not so
much like going to the world's end now, and besides, her father seemed
resigned to it. Back to the gleam of the lakes, the flaming sunsets, the
moonlit nights filled with twang of guitars and floating harmony of
fresh boyish voices, back to her girl-lovers and her books, back to the
chalky odor of the recitation room.
It was so sweet to climb the circular stairway again. The booming roar
of the feet did not disturb her now. The greetings of the Professors as
they passed, made her eyes dim with pleasure. The spirit of the
University had established dominion over her.
These were days without care, days of silent pleasant growth. A year of
sweet gravity over books and wholesome laughter over games. She studied
hard, but it was a quiet pleasure to study, for she had the power of
concentration which gives mastery.
She was never behind, never fagged out with study. She had time for the
splendor of nature and for the world of books. She read more and more
each year because she felt lacking in literary knowledge. She read the
books she ought to know--read them religiously. Occasionally it chanced
the books were those she loved to read, but not often. Generally she had
to bend to them as if they were lessons.
She read also Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, a volume or two each. Then
one day in mid-winter it chanced she fell upon "Mosses from an Old
Manse," and then all the other books waited. She read it while she
walked home from the library. She read it after dinner and put it in her
satchel as she went to recite. She finished it and secured the second
volume; then came "Twice Told Tales," then "The Scarlet Letter," and the
world of woman's sin opened to her.
She read that terrible book, rebelling against the dark picture, raging
against the insatiable vengeance of the populace who condemned Hester as
if she had opened the gates of hell in the path of every daughter of New
England.
She could not understand, then nor thereafter, the ferocity of hate
which went out against the poor defenseless woman. What had the woman
done? She struggled over the problem. She felt in herself that terrible
ceaseless urging. Her thoughts were not clear, they were still only
raised figures in the web of organic thought, but she was accomplishing
great conceptions.
She knew it was wrong, but why it was wrong troubled her. The law--yes,
but what lay behind the law? The Mormon had one law, the Turks another.
Why was this English law better than any other? Why were the animals
freer than men? Their lives were good and healthy, they lived in the
sunshine and were untroubled. Such were a few of the questions she
grappled with.
God only knows the temptations which came to her. She had days when all
the (so-called) unclean things she had ever seen, all the overheard
words of men's coarse jests, came back like vultures to trouble her.
Sometimes when she walked forth of a morning, the sun flamed across the
grass with ineffable beauty. The whole earth was radiant; every sound
was a song; every lithe youth moved like a god before her, and it was
then that something deep in her, something drawn from generations of
virtuous wives and mothers, saved her from the whirlpool of passion.
At such times she felt dimly the enormous difference between her nature
and that of Josephine. Josephine's passion was that of a child--hers
that of an imaginative and complex man.
She was silent after these days of gayety. She was not a chatterer at
any time, but after these moods she was almost sullen once more, and she
fell upon her lessons with renewed zeal, as a monk flagellates his
rebellious flesh.
After these days of searching eyes she refused to look at any of her
young male friends. She answered them crustily and turned away from
them, but this did not serve to cure her nor to keep the young men away.
Always at such times William De Lisle's glorious presence drew near in
the dusk, insubstantial and luminous as a cloud, and she set her teeth
in fresh resolve to be wise and famous; to be worthy his look and his
word of praise.
She had suitors constantly. Her dark haughty face, warm with blood, her
erect and powerful figure excited admiration among the young men, and
they courted her with the wholesome frankness of clean and vigorous
manhood. The free and natural intercourse of the college kept the young
people healthy as a home circle.
As the Doctor came to take a different place in her love, Rose became
open to the advances of other men. Twice during the winter she felt the
power of love touch her. In the first instance her eyes sought and found
among her classmates a young man's physical beauty, and her imagination
clothed him with power and mystery, and she looked for him each day, and
life was less interesting and purposeful when he was not present.
She made no open advances, she scarcely needed to, for he also saw, and
when he came to her and she flushed and trembled with weakness, it
seemed as if her life had at last taken a fixed direction. For a few
weeks the man was her ideal. She saw him before her constantly. She knew
his smile, the lift of his eye-brows, the shape of his ears, the slope
of his shoulders, the sound of his voice. She looked at him stealthily
from her book. She contrived to sit where she could watch every motion.
She walked down the street with him each day, half numb with her
emotion.
But this ecstasy did not last. She felt eventually his shallowness and
narrowness. He was vain and ungenerous. He grew sere and bare of grace
and charm like the autumn elms, and at last he stood empty and
characterless before her, and her eyes looked over and beyond him, into
the blue sky again, and throughout it all she kept her place in her
classes and no one was aware of her new ideal.
When she turned away from him he did not grow pale and lean. He grew a
little vicious and said: "She is too cold and proud for my taste."
Her next suitor was a worthy young man who was studying law in the town.
A fine, clean young fellow, who paid court to her with masterly address.
He was older than she, and was a better scholar and brought to her less
of the clotheshorse and more of the man than her freshly outgrown lover.
Before spring began he had won great intimacy with her--almost an
engagement.
He was adroit. He did not see her too much, and he came always at his
best. He appealed to the most imaginative side of her nature. She
glorified his calling as well as his person. He was less handsome than
his predecessor, but he brought an ample and flowing phraseology, and a
critical knowledge of farm-life as well as of town-life. Once he took
her to the court-room to hear him plead.
He took her to the socials, and once to the theater. There was his
mistake! The play made a most powerful impression upon her, more
powerful than anything since the circus at Tyre.
It raised new and wordless ambitions. For the first time in her life she
saw society dress on the stage. The play was one which pretended, at
least, to show New York and London life. Therefore men in claw-hammer
coats came and went, with strange accents and with cabalistic motions of
hats and gloves, and women moved about with mystic swagger.
The heroine glowed like a precious stone in each act, now sapphire, now
pearl, now ruby. She spoke in a thick, throaty murmur and her white
shoulders shone like silver, and her wide childish eyes were like wells
of light-diffusing liquid.
Rose gazed at her with unwearying eyes. Her bosom rose and fell as if
she had been running, and she said in her heart: "_I_ can do that! I
could stand there and do that!"
Then the theme of the play filled her with strange new thoughts. These
people lived out before her a condition which she had read about but
which had never been discussed in her presence. A husband discovers his
wife to have been a lover and mother in her girlhood, and in a tempest
of self-righteous passion flings her to the ground in scorn and horror.
She clings to his feet (in approved stage fashion), pleading for mercy:
"I was so young!"
He would not listen. "Go!--or no, stay--I will go. I make the home over
to you, but never look upon my face again."
While Rose burned with shame and indignation, the outraged woman on the
stage grew white and stern.
"Who are you to condemn me so?" she asked in icy calm. "Are you the
saint you profess to be? Will one offence contain your crime against
me?"
"What do you mean?" thundered the man and husband.
"You know what I mean. In my weakness I was stained, ineffaceably; I
admit it--but you, in your strength, have you not preyed upon weak
women? The law allows you to escape disgrace--nature and law force me to
suffer with mine."
Rose thought of Carl and his courtship with such a shudder as one feels
in remembering a rescue from an abyss. A hundred great confusing
questions floated by in her mind, like clouds in a mist of
rain--formless, vast, trailing deeper shadow beneath them. The
self-sufficient young lawyer beside her said as the curtain fell:
"There was nothing else for her husband to do but just fire her out."
Rose heard him but did not reply. She felt a sharp revulsion of feeling
toward him for his coarse, hard tone. When he laid his hand on her she
shook it off, and when he asked a question of her she did not reply. He
was annoyed also, and so they waited for the curtain to rise on the
final act.
The wife was sick and dying. The dramatist had not the courage to work
out his theme. He killed the wife, so that the husband should not appear
to condone and take her to wife again. She died while he, magnanimously,
forgave her.
* * * * *
As they walked home, with fatuous insistence her lover talked with Rose
about the case. He took the man's side. He hinted at the
reason--presuming upon their intimacy. Men outgrow such experiences, he
said; women do not. They are either one thing or the other--either pure
as angels or black as devils.
Rose closed her lips tight, and her eyes flamed with indignant protest,
but she said nothing in reply. In her heart she knew it was a lie. A
woman can set her foot above her dead self as well as a man.
When he tried to kiss her good-bye she pushed him aside and left him
without a word. He, too, was a bare and broken ideal. Her heart went
back again to William De Lisle, as the young eagle goes back to the
sun-warmed cliff to rest and dream, with eyes to the sun.
That night put her girlhood far from her. She grew five years older in
the weeks which followed. Her mind took up irresistibly one insoluble
problem after another and wrestled with it in silence. Josie's chatter
went on around her like the sound of the swallows in the eaves of the
old barn at home.
Her mind was like a piece of inconceivably intricate machinery, full of
latent and complicated motion. A word, a touch, and it set to work, and
out of its working some fine inner heat and glow changed the whole
mental and physical equilibrium of her nature, and she became something
else, finer, more mysterious, and more alluring--though this she did not
realize.
Thereafter the young man of her acquaintance did not draw her. Her eyes
had been raised to higher altitudes. She fell upon her books with
terrible industry, in the hope that they would throw some light on her
problems and ambitions.
There was nothing she did not think of during these character-forming
days. The beauty and peace of love, the physical joy of it; the problem
of marriage, the terror of birth--all the things girls are supposed not
to think of, and which such girls as Rose must irresistibly think of,
came to her, tormenting her, shaking her to the inmost center of her
nature, and through it all she seemed quite the hearty young school girl
she was, for this thought was wholesome and natural, not morbid in any
degree.
She was a child in the presence of the Doctor, but a woman with her
suitors. The Doctor helped her very much, but in the most trying moments
of her life (and no man can realize these moments) some hidden force
rose up to dominate the merely animal forces within. Some organic
magnificent inheritance of moral purity.
She was saved by forces within, not by laws without. Opportunities to
sin always offer in every life. Virtue is not negative, it is positive;
it is a decoration won by fighting, resisting. This sweet and terrible
attraction of men and women towards each other is as natural and as
moral as the law of gravity, and as inexorable. Its perversion produces
trouble. Love must be good and fine and according to nature, else why
did it give such joy and beauty?
Natural as was this thought, she hid it from her associates. Most women
die with it unacknowledged, even to their own spoken thought. She would
have been helped by talk with the Doctor, or at least with his wife. But
there was a growing barrier between Mrs. Thatcher and herself, and the
Doctor did not seem the same good friend. She felt a change coming in
the whole household.
When she went home at the close of her second year, she had a feeling
that she would never again return to the old sweet companionship with
Dr. Thatcher. He was too busy now, apparently, to give her the time he
once seemed so glad to give. He never asked her to ride with him now.
She was troubled by it and concluded they were tired of her, and so she,
too, grew cold and reserved.
* * * * *
The day she left, the Doctor, after he had driven Rose to the train,
called his wife into the office.
"Sit down a moment, wife, I want to talk with you." He faced her
bravely. "I guess we'd better arrange for Rose to go to one of the
chapter-houses next year. There's no need to beat around the bush--she
takes up too much of my thought, and you know it and I know it."
It drew blood to say that. It took manhood to look his wife in the eyes
then, but he did it.
"It isn't her fault, and it isn't yours--it isn't mine, as a matter of
justice. Rose is just what she's always been, a good, sweet girl--I
wouldn't have her see anything but friendly interest in my eyes for half
my heart--I'm afraid she will, so--I guess----"
He was talking through set teeth. "I wish you'd tell her we can't offer
her a home; I can't do it."
He rose and went to his wife. "My dear, don't cry--you've watched this
thing come on in brave silence--not every wife would have kept silence
so long. It won't break up our comradeship, will it, dear? We've jogged
along so peacefully these fifteen years--we ought to overlook a little
thing like this!" He smiled a little, then he stooped and put his arm
about her.
"Come, give me a kiss, and let's adopt no more handsome girls till I'm
sixty-five."
She rose and lifted her sad face to his. "It's my fault, if I--"
He kissed her and said: "No more of that! You're my faithful wife. What
helps the matter materially is this--Rose thinks of me as a sober old
settler now."
This ended it so far as any outward showing ever defined his feeling,
but the presence of the girl never left him. At night, as he sat at his
desk at the hour which almost always used to bring Rose down from her
room to discuss her lessons with him, he grew sad and lonely. "If I had
a child," he said to himself, "I could bear it more easily."
When Rose returned, she went into one of the co-operative
boarding-houses, and slowly drifted away from the Doctor and his family.
She never quite knew why. It puzzled her for a time, and then she forgot
it--in the fashion of youth.