LETTERS HOME
"How does she seem since he went away?" asked Judge Blair of his wife
two days after Marley had gone. He spoke in his usual habit of deference
to his wife's observation, though his own opportunities for observing
Lavinia might have been considered as great as hers.
"I haven't noticed any difference in her," said Mrs. Blair, and then she
added a qualifying and significant "yet."
"Well," observed the judge, "I presume it's too early. Has she heard
from him?"
"She had a letter this morning; that is, I suppose it was from him; she
ran to meet the postman, and then went up stairs."
"You didn't mention it to her?"
Mrs. Blair looked at her husband in surprise, and he hastened to make
amends by acquiescing in the propriety of her conduct, when he said:
"Oh, of course not."
He seemed to drop the subject then, but that it remained uppermost in
his mind was shown later, when he said:
"I think she will be weaned away from him after a while, don't you? That
is--if he stays long enough."
Mrs. Blair was not so hopeful; perhaps, too, in her romantic ideal of
devotion, she did not wish Lavinia to be weaned away. But she avoided a
direct answer by the suggestion:
"Perhaps he will be weaned away from her."
This possibility had not occurred to the judge.
"Why, the idea!" he said resentfully. "Do you think him capable of such
baseness?"
Mrs. Blair laughed.
"Would you like to think of _your_ daughter as fickle, and forgetting a
young man who was eating his heart out for her far away in a big city?"
A condition of such mild romantic sorrow might have attracted Mrs. Blair
in the abstract, but it could not of course appeal to her when it came
thus personally. As for the judge, he dismissed the problem, as he had
so many times before, with the remark:
"Well, we can only wait and see."
The letter which Lavinia received from Marley had been written the day
he reached Chicago. It was a long letter, conceived largely in a
facetious spirit, and he had labored over it far into the night in the
little room of the boarding-house he had found in Ohio Street.
"I chose Ohio Street," he wrote, "because its name reminded me of home.
Ohio Street may once have been the street of the well-born, but it has
degenerated and it is now the abode of a long row of boarding--places,
one of which houses me. My room is a little corner eyrie in the second
story, back, and from its one window I get an admirable view of the
garbage dump, the atmosphere and certain intensely red bricks which go
to make the wall of the house next door. And my landlady, ah, I should
have to be a Balzac to describe my landlady! She wears large, vociferous
ear-rings, and she says 'y-e-e-a-a-s' for yes; just kind o' rolls it off
her tongue as if she didn't care whether it ever got off or not. She is
truly a beauteous lady, given much to a scarlet hue of her nasal
appendage; also, her molar system is unduly prominent, too much to the
fore, as it were. As for form or figure, I'm afraid I couldn't say with
truth that she goes in for the sinuous, far from it; she leans more to
the elephantine style of feminine architecture. And she has a way of
reaching out that is very attractive; probably because of the necessity
of reaching for room rent. She bears the air of one bent on no earthly
thing, of a continual soaring in quest of the unexpected; there is about
her the charm of the intangible, the unknowable.
"The boarding-house itself isn't so bad; I get my room and two meals for
three-fifty a week; my noon luncheons I have to take down-town. They
have dinner here, you know, in the evening. I haven't seen much of the
people in the boarding-house; the men are mostly clerks, and the women
have bleached hair. They all looked at me when I went into the
dining-room this evening. There is one young man who sits at my table
who is in truth a very unwise and immature youth. He is given greatly to
the use of words of awful and bizarre make-up. For instance, he said
something about the jokes they get off in the shows here about Irishmen,
but instead of saying jokes, he said 'traversities'! What do you think
of that?"
Marley had already described his journey to Chicago in terms similar to
those in which he described his boarding-house; of Chicago itself he
said:
"It seems that ages ago when the gods, or maybe the demons, were making
over plans and specifications of the infernal region, Chicago was
mentioned and considered by the committee. When it came to a vote for
choice of sites the place that won had only three more votes than
Chicago. They didn't locate the brimstone plant here, and from what I
can learn Chicago was a candidate for both the plant and the honor. It
was a mistake on somebody's part, as Chicago is certainly an ideal place
for it."
But the letter discussed mostly the things of Macochee, where Marley's
spirit still dwelt. The passages Lavinia most liked, of course, were
those in which he declared his love for her; it was the first
love-letter she had ever received, and this tender experience went far
to compensate her for the loneliness she felt in his absence.
It grew upon her after she had read her letter many times, that it would
be a kindness to take it over and read to Mrs. Marley those parts, at
least, that were not personal. It was a hard thing for Lavinia to do;
she had a fear of Mrs. Marley; but she felt more and more the kindness
of it, and so in the morning she set out. Lavinia was surprised and a
little disappointed, when Mrs. Marley told her that she too had received
in the same mail a letter from Glenn. It somehow took away from her own
act, the more when Mrs. Marley calmly passed her letter over for Lavinia
to read.
Lavinia, who had not been able to resist a pang that Marley had written
his mother quite as promptly as he had written her, found some
consolation in the fact that his letter to his mother was not nearly so
long as his letter to her, and it contained, too, the same information;
in some instances, identical phrases, as letters do that are written at
the same time. She felt that she should be happy in them both, and she
wished she could determine which of the letters had been written first.
After she had read Mrs. Marley's letter, she could not speak for a
moment; the letter closed with a description of the sensations it gave
Marley to open his trunk and come across the Bible his mother had packed
in it. But she controlled herself, and when she had finished reading
parts of her own letter to Mrs. Marley, she said:
"Well, he seems to be in good spirits, doesn't he? He writes so
amusingly of everything."
Mrs. Marley looked up at Lavinia with a curious smile.
"Why, don't you see?" she said.
"What?" asked Lavinia, glancing in alarm at the two letters which she
still held in her lap.
"Why, the poor boy is dying of homesickness; that's what makes him write
in that mocking vein."
"Do you think that is so?" Lavinia leaned forward.
"Why, I know it," replied Mrs. Marley, with a little laugh. "He's just
like his father."
For a moment Lavinia felt a satisfaction in Marley's loneliness, but she
denied the satisfaction when she said:
"He'll get over it, after a while."
"Not for a long while, I'm afraid," said Mrs. Marley. "Not until some
one can be with him."
Lavinia blushed, and before she knew it Mrs. Marley had bent over and
kissed her cheek.
"He has a long hard battle before him, my dear," she said, "in a great
cruel city. We must help him all we can."
Lavinia hesitated a moment, then she put her arms about Mrs. Marley and
drew her down for the kiss which sealed their friendship.
They sat and talked of Marley for a long time, and at last when Lavinia
rose to go, she held out to Mrs. Marley the letter her son had written
her. She looked at it a moment before handing it to Mrs. Marley.
"Would you like to keep it?" Mrs. Marley asked.
"May I?"
"If you wish. But you must come often; I shall be lonely now, you know,
and you must bring his letters and read parts of them. He'll be writing
so many more to you than he will to me."
Lavinia received a letter from Marley every day; it was not long before
Clemmons, the postman, smiled significantly when, each morning at the
sound of his whistle, she ran to meet him at the door. And Lavinia wrote
to Marley as regularly herself, sitting at the little desk in her room
every night long after the house was dark and still.
The judge could find no hope in the observations Mrs. Blair reported to
him.
"She seems to have developed a new idea of constancy," said Mrs. Blair.
"She will not allow herself to do a thing, or go to a single place; she
will hardly accept any pleasure because he isn't here to share it. I
believe she tries not to have a thought that is not of him. She is
almost fanatical about it."
"Oh dear!" said the judge. "I thought the nightly calls were a severe
strain, but they can not compare to the strain of nightly letters."
"He writes excellent letters, however," Mrs. Blair said. "I wish you
could read the one he wrote his mother. A boy who writes like that to
his mother--"
"How did you get to see a letter he wrote his mother?" interrupted the
judge.
"Lavinia showed it to me."
"Has she been over there?"
"Yes. Why?"
The judge shook his head gravely, as if the situation were now hopeless,
indeed.