But at last the cold had let go of them. It was April, the snow had gone
and the air promised that even to that valley spring would come. Ruth,
out feeding the chickens, felt that spring nearness. She raised her face
gratefully to the breeze. It had seemed almost unbelievable that the
wind would ever again bring anything but blighting cold.
As she stood there, held by that first feel of spring, an automobile
came along, slowed, and Stuart went running out of the house to meet it.
It was his friend Stoddard, a real-estate man there. He had become
friends with this man in the last few months. He had had little in
friendships with men and this had brightened him amazingly. He had a new
interest in business things, new hopes. It had seemed to make him
younger, keener. He and Mr. Stoddard had a plan for going into Montana
where the latter was interested in a land developing company, and going
into business together. Stuart was alive with interest in it; it
promised new things for him, a new chance. They would live in a town,
and it would be business life, which he cared for as he had never come
to care for ranching. He was beginning to talk to Ruth about moving, of
selling off their stock and some of their things. He was eager to make
the change.
She had gone in the house as the machine stopped, having seen that there
were people in the car with Mr. Stoddard and not feeling presentably
dressed. She went upstairs to do the work and as she glanced down from
the upper window she saw Stuart in laughing conversation with a girl in
the automobile. Something about it arrested her. He was standing to the
far side of the machine so she could see his face. There was something
in it she had not seen for a long time--that interest in women, an
unmistakable pleasure in talking with an attractive girl. She stood
there, a little back from the window, watching them. There was nothing
at all wrong about it; nothing to resent, simply a little gay bantering
with a girl. It was natural to him; it had been once, it could be again.
His laugh came up to her. So he could still laugh like that; she had not
heard him for a long time. He turned and started hurriedly for the
house, the car waiting for him. He was smiling, his step was buoyant.
"Ruth," he called up to her, and his voice too had the old buoyancy,
"I'm going into town with Stoddard. We want to go over some things.
He'll bring me back before night."
"All right, Stuart," she called back pleasantly.
She watched the car out of sight. Stuart, sitting in the front seat with
his friend, had turned and was gayly talking with the women behind. When
she first knew him, when she was still a little girl and used to see him
around with his own set, he had been like that.
She did not want to stay in the house. That house had shut her in all
winter. The road stretched invitingly away. About a mile down it there
was a creek, willows grew there. Perhaps there she would find some real
spring. Anyway she had an impulse to get out to the moving water. She
had seemed locked in, everything had seemed locked in for so long.
As she was getting her coat she put into the pocket a letter she had
received the day before from Deane Franklin. After she had sat a little
while by the running water she took the letter out to reread, but did
not at first open it. She was wishing Deane were sitting there with her.
She would like to talk to him.
This letter was a gloomy one. It seemed that Deane too was locked in.
Soon after Ted came back from Freeport in the fall she had got it out of
him about the Franklins. She had sensed at once that there was something
about Deane he did not want to tell her, and before he left for his own
place she had it from him that the Franklins had indeed separated, and
that the gossip of Freeport was that it was because of Mrs. Franklin's
resentment of her. And that was one of the things had seemed to make it
possible for the winter somehow to _take_ her; that was the thing had
seemed to close the last door to her spirit, the last of those doors
that had been thrown wide open when she left Annie's home in Freeport
the spring before.
She had tried to write to Deane. She felt that she should write to him,
but she had a feeling of powerlessness. Finally, only a little while
before, she had brought herself to do it. She knew it was a poor letter,
a halting, constrained thing, but it seemed the best she could do, and
so finally, after a great deal of uncertainty, she sent it.
His reply made her feel that he realized how it had been, why she had
been so long in writing, why the letter had been the stilted thing it
was. It gave her a feeling that her friend had not withdrawn from her
because of what she had brought down upon him, that that open channel
between him and her was there as it had ever been. And though his letter
did not make her happy, it loosened something in her to be able to feel
that the way between her and Deane was not closed.
"Don't distress yourself, Ruth," she now reread, "or have it upon your
spirit, where too much has lain heavy all these years. You want to know
the truth, and the truth is that Amy did resent my feeling about
you--about you and your situation--and that put us apart. But you see it
was not in us to stay together, or we could not have been thus put
apart. Love can't do it all, Ruth--not for long; I mean love that hasn't
roots down in the spirit can't. And where there isn't that spiritual
underneath, without a hinterland, love is pretty insecure.
"I could have held on to it a while longer, I suppose, by cutting clear
loose from the thing really me. And I suppose I would have done it if I
could--I did in fact make attempts at it--but that me-ness, I'm afraid,
is most infernal strong in my miserable make-up. And somehow the
withdrawal of one's self seems a lot to pay for even the happiness of
love. There are some of us can't seem able to do it.
"So it's not you, Ruth; it's that it was like that, and that it came out
through the controversy about you. Cast from your mind any feeling
adding the wrecking of my happiness to your list of crimes.
"But, Ruth, I'm _not_ happy. I couldn't get along in happiness, and I
don't get along without it. It's a paralyzing thing not to have
happiness--or to lose it, rather. Does it ever seem to you that life is
a pretty paralyzing thing? That little by little--a little here and a
little there--it _gets_ us? We get harness-broke, you see. Seems to have
gone that way with most of the people I know. Seems to be that way with
me. Don't let it do it to you!
"Somehow I don't believe it will. I think that you, Ruth, would be a
fine little prison-breaker. Might stand some show of being one myself if
I were anywhere but in this town. There's something about it that has
_got_ me, Ruth. If it hadn't--I'd be getting out of it now.
"But of course I'm a pretty poor sort, not worth making a fight for, or
it wouldn't be like this. And--for that matter--what's the difference?
Lives aren't counting for much these days--men who _are_ the right sort
going down by the thousands, by the hundred of thousands, so what--for
heaven's sake--does it matter about me?
"I wish I could see you!
"I'm glad for you about the divorce. I believe the case comes up this
April term, so it may be all over by the time you get this letter.
Pretty late in coming, and I suppose it must seem a good deal of a
mockery--getting it now--but maybe it will help some for the future,
make you feel more comfortable, and I'm awfully glad.
"Funny about it, isn't it? I wonder what made her do it! I was called
there this winter, maid sick--miscarriage--and Mrs. Williams puzzled me.
Didn't turn the girl out, awfully decent to her. I would have supposed
she would have been quite the other way. And now this. Queer, don't you
think?
"Write to me sometimes, Ruth. Sometimes write to me what you're thinking
about. Maybe it will stir me up. Write to me to take a brace and get out
of this town! If you went for me hard enough, called me all the
insulting names you could think of, and told me a living dead man was
the most cowardly and most disgusting object cluttering up the earth,
you might get a rise out of me. You're the one could do it, if it can be
done.
"One thing I _do_ know--writing this has made me want like blazes to see
you!
"DEANE."
* * * * *
Ruth sat there in the arm of a low willow, her hands resting upon
Deane's letter, her eyes closed, the faint breath of coming spring upon
her face. She was tired and very sad. She was thinking of Deane's life,
of her own life, of the way one seemed mocked. She wished that Deane
were there; she could talk to him and she would like to talk. His letter
moved something in her, something that had long seemed locked in stirred
a little. Her feeling about life had seemed a thing frozen within her.
Now the feeling that there was still this open channel between her and
Deane was as a thawing, an outlet.
She thought of her last talk with Deane, of their walk together that
day, almost a year before, when he came to see her at Annie's, the very
day she was starting back West. She had felt anything but locked in that
day. There was that triumphant sense of openness to life, the joy of new
interest in it, of zest for it. And then she came back West, to Stuart,
and somehow the radiance went, courage ebbed, it came to seem that life
was all fixed, almost as if life, in the real sense, was over. That
sense of having failed, having been inadequate to her own feeling,
struck her down to a wretched powerlessness. And so routine, hard work,
bitter cold, loneliness, that sense of the cruelty of life which the
sternness of the country gave--those things had been able to take her;
it was because something had gone dead in her.
She thought of that spiritual hinterland Deane talked about. She thought
of her and Stuart. She grew very sad in the thinking. She wondered if it
was her fault. However it was, it was true they no longer found the live
things in one another. She had not been able to communicate to him the
feeling with which she came back from Annie's. It was a lesser thing for
trying to talk of it to him. She did not reach him; she knew that he
only thought her a little absurd. After that she did not try to talk to
him of what she felt. Life lessened; things were as they were; they too
were as they were. It came to seem just a matter of following out what
had been begun. And then that news of the divorce had come to mock her.
But she must do something for Deane. Deane must not go like that. She
had brought pencil and writing tablet with her, thinking that perhaps
out of doors, away from the house where she had seemed locked in all
winter, she could write to him. She thought of things to say, things
that should be said, but she did not seem to have any power to charge
them with life. How could the dead rouse the dead? She sat there
thinking of her and Deane, of how they had always been able to reach one
another. And finally she began:
"Dear Deane,
"You must find your way back to life."
She did not go on. She sat staring at what she had written. She read it
over; she said it aloud. It surged in upon her, into shut places. She
sat looking at it, frightened at what it was doing. Sat looking at it
after it was all blurred by tears--looking down at the words she herself
had written--"You must find your way back to life."