THE DESERT ISLAND.
THREE months later--August, September, and October, the months of
Stoughton’s glory--gave Emily Bromfield a minute acquaintance with all
that lay within her new horizon. She was as familiar with Stoughton as
Crusoe with his island--and was in a Crusoe-like state of depression.
She thought she had found the lowest despond of which human nature
is capable on the day she saw the top of the Washington monument
disappear, saw the last of the city of her enjoyments and her hopes.
But now she dropped to a still lower depth--that depth in which the
heart becomes a source of physical discomfort, the appetite fails, the
brain sinks into a stupor and the health begins to decline.
“Don’t be so blue, Emmy,” Mrs. Ainslie had said at the station as they
were leaving Washington. “Nothing is as bad as it seems in advance.
Even Stoughton will have its consolations--though I must confess I
can’t think what they could be at this distance.”
But the proverb was wrong and Stoughton as a reality was worse than
Stoughton as a foreboding.
At first Emily was occupied in arranging their new home--creeper-clad,
broad of veranda and viewing a long sloping lawn where the sun and
the moon traced the shadows of century-old trees. She began to think
that Stoughton was not so bad after all. The “best people” had called
and had made a good impression. Her mother had for the moment lifted
herself out of peevish and tearful grief, and had ceased giving double
weight to her daughter’s oppressive thoughts by speaking them. But
illusion and delusion departed with the departing sense of novelty.
Nowhere does nature do a kindlier summer work than in Stoughton. In
winter the trees and gardens and lawns, worse than naked with their
rustling or crumbling reminders of past glory, expose the prim rows of
prim houses and the stiff and dull life that dozes behind their walls.
In winter no one could be deceived as to what living in Stoughton
meant--living in it in the sense of being forced there from a city,
forced to remain permanently.
But in summer, nature charitably lends Stoughton a corner of the
gorgeous garment with which she adorns its country. The sun dries the
muddy streets and walks, and the town slumbers in comfort under huge
trees, whose leaves quiver with what seems to be the gentle joy of a
quiet life. The boughs and the creepers conspire to transform hideous
little houses into crystallised songs of comfort and content. The
lawns lie soft and green and restful. The gardens dance in the homely
beauty of lilac and hollyhock and wild rose. Those who then come from
the city to Stoughton sigh at the contrast of this poetry with the
harsh prose of city life. They wonder at the sombre faces of the old
inhabitants, at the dumb and stolid expression of youth, at the fierce
discontent which smoulders in the eyes of a few.
But if they stay they do not wonder long. For the town in the bare
winter is the real town the year round. The town of summer, tricked out
in nature’s borrowed finery, is no more changed than was the jackdaw by
his stolen peacock plumes. The smile, the gaiety, is on the surface.
The prim, solemn old heart of Stoughton is as unmoved as when the frost
is biting it.
In the first days of November Emily Bromfield, walking through the
wretched streets under bare black boughs and a gray sky, had the full
bitterness of her castaway life forced upon her. She felt as if she
were suffocating.
She had been used to the gayest and freest society in America. Here, to
talk as she had been used to talking and to hearing others talk, would
have produced scandal or stupefaction. To act as she and her friends
acted in Washington, would have set the preachers to preaching against
her. There was no one with whom she could get into touch. She had
instantly seen that the young men were not worth her while. The young
women, she felt, would meet her advances only in the hope of getting
the materials for envious gossip about her.
“It will be years,” she said to herself, “before I shall be able to
narrow and slacken myself to fit this place. And why should I? Of what
use would life be?”
She soon felt how deeply Stoughton disapproved of her, chiefly, as she
thought, because she did not conceal her resentment against its prying
and peeping inquiry and its narrow judgments. She was convinced that
but for her bicycle and her books she would go mad. Her ever-present
idea, conscious or sub-conscious, was, “How get away from Stoughton?” A
hundred times a day she repeated to herself, or aloud in the loneliness
of her room, “How? how? how?” sometimes in a frenzy; again, stupidly,
as if “how” were a word of a complex and difficult meaning which she
could not grasp.
But there was never any answer.
She had formerly wished at times that she were a man. Now, she wished
it hourly. That seemed the only solution of the problem of her
life--that, or marriage. And she felt she might as hopefully wish the
one as the other.
Year by year, with a patience as slow and persevering as that of a
colony of coral insects, Stoughton developed a small number of youth
of both sexes. Year by year the railroads robbed her of her best young
men, leaving behind only such as were stupid or sluggard. Year by
year the young women found themselves a twelvemonth nearer the fate
of the leaves which the frost fails to cut off and disintegrate. For
a few there was the alternative of marrying the blighted young men--a
desperate adventure in the exchange of single for double or multiple
burdens.
Some of the young women rushed about New England, visiting its towns,
and finding each town a reproduction of Stoughton. Some went to the
cities a visiting, and returned home dazed and baffled. A few bettered
themselves in their quest; but more only increased their discontent,
or, marrying, regretted the ills they had fled. Those who married away
from home about balanced those who were deprived of opportunities to
marry, by the girl visitors from other towns, who caught with their new
faces and new man-catching tricks the Stoughton eligible-ineligibles.
At twenty a Stoughton girl began to be anxious. At twenty-five, the
sickening doubt shot its anguish into her soul. At thirty came despair;
and rarely, indeed, did despair leave. It was fluttered sometimes, or
pretended to be; but, after a few feeble flappings, it roosted again.
In Stoughton “society” the old maids outnumbered the married women.
Clearly, there was no chance to marry. Emily might have overcome the
timidity of such young men as there were, and might have married almost
any one of them. But her end would have been more remote than ever. It
was not marriage in itself that she sought, but release from Stoughton.
And none of these young men was able to make a living away from
Stoughton, even should she marry him and succeed in getting him away.
She revolved the idea of visiting her friends in Washington. But there
poverty barred the way. She had never had so very many clothes. Now,
she could afford only the simplest and cheapest. She looked over what
she had brought with her from Washington. Each bit of finery reminded
her of pleasures, keen when she enjoyed them, cruelly keen in memory.
The gowns were of a kind that would have made Stoughton open its sleepy
eyes, but they would not do for Washington again.
The people she knew there were self-absorbed, inclined to snobbishness,
to patronising contemptuously those of their own set who were overtaken
by misfortunes and could not keep the pace. They tolerated these
reminders of the less luxurious and less fortunate phases of life,
but--well, toleration was not a virtue which Emily Bromfield cared to
have exercised toward herself. She could hear Mrs. Ainslie or Mrs.
Chesterton or Mrs. Connors-Smith whispering: “Yes--the poor dear--it’s
so sad. I really had to take pity on her. No--not a penny--I even had
to send her the railway fares. But I felt it was a duty people in our
position owe.”
And so her prison had no door.
Emily kept her thoughts to herself. Her mother was almost as content as
she had been in Washington. Did she not still have her diseases? Were
there not doctors and drug-shops? Was there not a circulating library,
mostly light literature of her favourite innocuous kind? And did not
the old women who called listen far more patiently than her Washington
friends to tedious recitals of symptoms and of the plots and scenes of
novels?
Emily could keep to her room or ride about the country on her bicycle.
She at least had the freedom of her prison, and was not disturbed in
her companionship with solitude. With the bad weather, she hid in her
room more and more. She would sit there hours on hours in the same
position, staring out of the window, thinking the same thoughts over
and over again, and finding fresh springs of unhappiness in them each
time.
Occasionally she gave way to storms of grief.
The day she looked over her dresses under the stimulus of the idea
of visiting Washington was one of her worst days. As she stood with
her finery about her and a half-hope in her heart, she recalled her
Washington life--her school days, her first season, her flirtations,
the confident, arrogant way in which she had looked forward on life.
Then came the thought that all was over, that she could not go to
Washington, that she must stay in Stoughton--on and on and on----
She grew hot and cold by turns, sank to the floor, buried her face in
the heap of cloth and lace and silk. If the good people of Stoughton
had peeped at her they would have thought her possessed of an evil
spirit. She gnashed her teeth and tore at the garments, her slight
frame shaking with sobs of impotent rage and despair.
When she came to herself and went downstairs, pale and calm and cold,
her mother was talking with a woman who had come in to gossip. She took
up a book and was gone.
“Your daughter is not looking well,” said Mrs. Alcott, sourly resentful
of Emily’s courteous frigidity.
“Poor child!” said Mrs. Bromfield, “she takes her father’s death _so_
to heart.”