A HINT FROM CHILDHOOD
As the spring advanced and Judge Emery's widow recovered a little
strength, it became apparent that life in Endbury, with its
heartbreaking associations, would be intolerable to her. In anxious
family councils many futile plans were suggested, but they were all
brushed decisively away by the unexpected arrival from Oregon of the
younger son of the family.
One day in May, a throbbingly sunshiny day, full of a fierce hot vigor
of vitality, Lydia was with her mother in the Melton's darkened parlor.
As so often, the two women had been crying and now sat in a weary
lethargy, hand in hand. There came a step on the porch, in the hall, and
in the doorway stood a tall stranger. Lydia looked at him blankly, but
her mother gave a cry and flung herself into his arms.
"I've come to take you home with me, Momma dear," he said quietly, using
the old name for her, which had been banished from the Emery household
since Lydia's early childhood. The sound of it went to her heart.
The newcomer smiled at her over his mother's head. It was her father's
smile, the quaint, half-wistful, humorous smile, which had seemed so
incongruous on the Judge's powerful face. "I'm your brother Harry,
little Lyddie," he said, "and I've come to take care of poor Momma."
During all that summer it was a bitter regret to Lydia that she had seen
her brother so short a time. He had decreed that the sooner his mother
was taken away from Endbury, the better for her, and Mrs. Emery had
clung to him, assenting passively to all he said, and peering
constantly, with tear-blurred eyes, into his face to see again his
astonishing resemblance to his father. They had left the day after his
arrival.
He had found time, however, to go out to Bellevue for a brief visit, to
see Lydia's home and her little daughter--Paul was away on a business
trip--and the half-hour he spent there was one that Lydia never forgot.
The tall, sunburned Westerner, with his kind, humorous eyes, his
affectionate smile, his quaint, homely phrases, haunted the house for
the rest of the summer. The time of his stay had been too breathlessly
short for any serious talk. He had looked about at the big, handsome
house with a half-mocking awe, inspected the "grounds" with a lively
interest in the small horticultural beginnings Lydia had been able to
achieve, told her she ought to see his two hundred acres of apple-trees;
and for the time that was left before his trolley-car was due he played
with his little niece and talked over her head to his sister.
"She's a dandy, Lyddie! She's a jim-dandy of a little girl! She ought to
come out and learn to ride straddle with her cousins. I got a boy about
her age--say, they'd look fine together! He's a towhead, like all the
rest of 'em--like their mother."
For months afterward Lydia could close her eyes and see again the
transfigured expression that had come over his face at the mention of
his wife. "Talk about luck!" he said, after a moment's pause, "there
never was such luck as my getting Annie. Say, I wish you could know her,
Lyddie. I tell you what--shoulder to shoulder, every minute, she's stood
up to things right there beside me for twelve years--Lord! It don't seem
more than six months when I stop to think about it. We had some hard
sledding along at the first, but with the two of us pulling together--.
She's laughed at sickness and drought and bugs and floods. We're all
through that now, we're doing fine; but, honest, it was worth it, to
know Annie through and through as I do. There isn't a thing about the
business she doesn't know as well as I do, and good reason why, too.
We've worked it all out together. We've stuck close, we have. I've
helped in the house and with the kids, and she's come right out into the
orchards with me. Share and share alike--that's our motto."
He was silent a moment, caressing Ariadne's dark hair gently, and
reviewing the past with shining eyes. "Lord! Lord! It's been a good
life!" He turned to his sister with a smile. "Well, Lyddie, I expect you
know something about it, too. You certainly are fixed fine, and
everybody says you've married a splendid fellow."
Lydia leaned forward eagerly, the impulse to unburden herself
overwhelming. "Oh, Paul is the best man--" she began, "so true and kind
and--and--pure--but Harry, we don't--we can't--his business--" She
turned away from her brother's too keen eyes and stared blindly at the
wall, conscious of an ache in her heart like a physical hurt.
Later, as they were talking of old memories, of Lydia's childhood, Harry
asked suddenly: "How'd you happen to give your little girl such a funny
name?"
It was a question that had not been put to Lydia before. Her family had
taken for granted that it was a feverish fancy of her sick-bed. She
gazed at her brother earnestly, and was about to speak when he looked at
his watch and stood up, glancing uneasily down toward the trolley track.
It was too late--he would be gone so soon--like something she had
dreamed. "Oh, I liked the name," she said vaguely; adding, "Harry! I
wish you could stay longer! There's so much I should like to talk over
with you. Oh, how I wish you'd never gone away."
"You come out and see us," he urged. "It'd do you good to get away from
this old hole-in-the-ground! We live six miles from a neighbor, so you'd
have to get along without tea-parties, but I bet Annie and the kids
would give you a good time all right."
He kissed Lydia good-by, tossed Ariadne high in the air, and as he
hurried down the driveway he called back over his shoulder: "Take good
care of my little niece for me! I tell you it's the kids that count the
most!" It was a saying that filled ringingly for Lydia the long, hot
days of the quiet summer that ensued. As for Ariadne, she did not for
months stop talking of "nice, laughy, Unkie Hawy." Her fluency of speech
was increasing out of all proportion to her age.
Whatever slow changes might be taking place in Lydia, went on silently
and obscurely during that summer; but in the fall a new moral horizon
burst upon her with the realization that she was again to become a
mother. Another life was to be entrusted to her hands, to hers and
Paul's, and with the knowledge came the certainty that she must now
begin to take some action to place her outer life more in accord with
her new inner self. It would be the worst moral cowardice longer to
evade the issue.
Thus bravely did she exhort herself, and, though shrinking with
apprehension at the very thought of entering upon a combat, attempted to
shame herself into a little courage.
When Paul heard of his wife's hopes, he was enchanted. He cried out
jubilantly: "I bet you it'll be a boy this time!" and caught her to him
in an embrace of affection so ardent that for a moment she glowed like a
bride. She clung to him, happy in the warmth of feeling that,
responsive, as always, to his touch, sprang up in her; and when in his
good-natured, half-laughing, dictatorial way he made her lie down at
once and promise to rest and be quiet, the boyish absurdity of his
solicitude was sweet to her.
He disappeared in answer to a telephone call, and she closed her eyes,
savoring the pleasure of the little scene. How she needed Paul to
reconcile her to life! How kind he really was! How good! His was the
clean, honorable affection he had promised her on their wedding day. If
she were to have any faith in the novels she read (like most American
women of the leisure class, her education after her marriage consisted
principally in reading the novels people talked about), if there was any
truth in what she read in these stories, she felt she was blest far
above most women in that there had come to her since her marriage no
revelation of a hidden, unclean side to her husband's nature.
But Lydia had never felt herself closely touched by reading; it all
seemed remote from her own life and problems. The sexual questions on
which the plots invariably turned, which formed the very core and center
of the lives of the various female characters, had, as a matter of fact,
according to her honest observation of her acquaintances, a very
subordinate place in the average American life about her. The marital
unhappiness, estrangement, and fragmentary incompleteness in the circle
she knew, over which she had grieved and puzzled, had nothing to do with
what novels mean by "unfaithfulness." The women of Endbury, unlike the
heroines of fiction, did not fear that their husbands would fall in love
with other women. The men of Endbury spent as little time in
sentimentalizing over other men's wives as they did over their own.
She often wondered why writers did not treat of the other problems that
beset her class--for instance, why it was only women in frontier
conditions, like Harry's wife, who could share in their husband's lives;
why nobody tried to change things so that they could do more of their
part in the work of the world; why they could not have a share in the
activities that gave other men, even little boys like Walter, so much
closer knowledge of their husbands' characters than they, their wives,
had. She had a dim notion, caught from stray indications in the
magazines, that writers were considering such questions in books other
than novels, but she had no idea how to search them out. The woman's
club to which she belonged was occupied with the art of Masaccio, who
was, so a visitor from Chicago's aesthetic circles informed them, the
"latest thing" in art interests.
She decided to ask Paul if he had heard of such books. She would ask him
so many such questions in the new life that was to begin. They had been
married more than three years and, so far as their relations to each
other went, they were by no means inharmonious; but of the close-knit,
deep-rooted intimacy of soul and mind that had been her dream of
married life, there had not been even a beginning. Well, she told
herself bravely, four years were but a short period in a lifetime. They
were both so young yet. They could begin now.
Paul came back from the telephone, note-book in hand, jotting down some
figures. He smiled at her over the top of the book, and before he sat
down to his desk he covered her carefully with a shawl, stroked her
hair, and closed her eyes, saying with an absent tenderness: "There!
take a nap, dear, while I finish these notes."
He looked supremely satisfied with himself in the instant before he
plunged into his calculations, and Lydia guessed that he was
congratulating himself on having remembered her in the midst of
absorbing business cares. She lay looking at him as he worked, her mind
full of busy thoughts.
Chiefly, as she went over their situation, she felt guilty to think how
entirely apart from him all her real life was passed. The doubts, the
racking spiritual changes, that had come to her, she had kept all to
herself; and yet she could say honestly that her silence had been
involuntary, instinctive, she fancied whimsically, like the reticence as
to emotions that one keeps in the hurly-burly of a railway station. With
tickets to be bought and trunks to be checked and time-tables to be
consulted, it is absurd to try to communicate to a busy and preoccupied
companion inexplicable qualms of soul-sickness. Any sensible woman--and
Lydia, like most American women, had been trained by precept and example
to desire above all things to be sensible and not emotionally
troublesome to the men of her family--any sensible woman kept her
thoughts to herself till the time came when she could talk them over
without interfering with the business on hand.
As she lay on the sofa and watched Paul's face sharpen in his
concentration, it occurred to her that the point of the whole matter was
that for her and Paul the suitable and leisurely time for mutual
discussion had never come. That was all! That was the whole trouble! It
was not any inherent lack of common feeling between them. Simply, there
was always business on hand with which she must not interfere.
Paul lifted his head, his eyes half closed in a narrowed, speculative
gaze upon some knotty point in his calculation. This long, sideways look
happened to fall upon Lydia, and she turned cold before the profound
unconsciousness of her existence in those eyes apparently fixed so
piercingly upon her. She had a quick fancy that the blank wall of
abstraction at which that vacant stare was directed really and palpably
separated her husband from her.
For a moment she wondered if she were growing like the women she had
heard her father so unsparingly condemn--silly, childish, egotistic
women who could not bear to have their husbands think of anything but
themselves, who were jealous of the very business which earned them and
their children a living. She acquitted herself of this charge proudly.
She did not want all of Paul's time; she wanted only some of it. And
then, it was not to have him thinking of her, but with her about the
common problems of their life; it was to think with him about the
problems of his life; it was to have him help her by his sound,
well-balanced, well-trained mind, which, so everyone said, worked such
miracles in business; to have him help her through the thicket of
confusion into which she was plunged by her inability to accept the
plainly-marked road over which all of her world was pressing forward.
Perhaps it was all right, she thought, the way Endbury people "did." She
asked nothing better than to be convinced that it was; she longed for a
satisfying answer. But Paul did not even know she had doubts! How could
he, she asked herself, exonerating him from blame. He was away so many
hours of the day and days of the year; and when he came home he was so
tired!
It was characteristic of her temper that she had learned quickly and
without bitterness the lesson every wife must learn, that neither
tenderness nor delicate perceptions of shades of feeling can be extorted
from a very tired or very preoccupied man. Masculine fatigue brings with
it a healthy bluntness as to what is being expected in the way of
emotional responsiveness, and men will not allow their sense of duty to
spur their jaded affection to the point of exhaustion. Lydia noted this,
felt that she could not with any show of reason resent it, since it
showed a state of things as hard for Paul as for her; but she could not
blind herself to the fact that the inevitable result was Paul's complete
ignorance of her real life. She felt herself to be so different from the
girl he had married as scarcely to be recognizable, and yet there was no
way by which he could have caught even a glimpse of the changes that had
made her so. The short periods they spent with each other were
necessarily more than filled by consultations about matters of household
administration and plans for their social life, and about the way to
spend the money that Paul earned. Paul was a very good-natured and
consciously indulgent husband, but Lydia seldom emerged from an hour's
conversation with him without an uneasy feeling that she was not by any
means getting out of the money he furnished her the largest amount
possible of what he wanted; and this sensation was scarcely conducive to
an expression of what was, after all, on her part nothing but a vague
aspiration toward an ideal--an aspiration that came to her clearly only
at times of great tranquillity and peace, when her mind was quite at
rest.
She was going around and around the treadmill of her familiar
perplexities when a trifling incident, so small, so dependent on its
framing of situation, accent, expression and gesture as scarcely to be
recordable, gave her a sudden glimpse of quite another side to the
matter. She was shocked into realizing that just as their way of life
hid from Paul what was going on in her mind, so he also, in all
probability, was rapidly changing without her knowledge.
Paul finished his figuring, pushed the papers to one side with a sigh of
fatigue, and turned his eyes thoughtfully on his wife. "That's very good
news of yours, Lydia dear, about the expected son and heir. But it's
rather a pity it didn't come last winter, isn't it?"
"How so?" she asked.
"Why, you had to be out of things on account of being in mourning,
anyhow. If this had happened the year your father died, you could have
killed two birds with one stone, don't you see?"
Lydia's perception of a thousand reasonable explanations and excuses for
this speech was so quick that it was upon her almost before she was
aware of her resentment. She hurried to shut the door on a blighting new
vision of her husband, by telling herself loudly that it was to be
expected Paul should feel so; but, rapid as her loyal, wifely movement
had been, she had felt a gust of hot revulsion against something in her
husband which her affection for him forbade her to name.
She could not put out of her mind, his look, his accent, his air of
taking for granted that the speech was a natural one. The knowledge that
Marietta would be too bewildered by her dwelling on the incident even to
laugh at her, did not avail to free her of the heavy doubts that filled
her. Was she mistaken in feeling that it indicated an alarming increase
of materialism in Paul? She was really too fanciful, she told herself
many times a day, surprised to find herself going over it again. Was it
a mere chance remark--a little stone in the garden path--or was it the
first visible outcropping of a stratum of unconquerable granite which
grimly underlay all the flower beds of his good nature?
The final impression on her mind was of a new motive for coming to a
better, closer understanding with Paul about the fundamentals of their
life. It had not occurred to her before, in spite of all her struggles
"to be good," as she put it to herself with her childlike naivete, that
Paul might be needing her as much as she needed him! Spurred on by this
new reason for breaking through the impalpable wall that separated their
inner lives, she resolved that she would no longer let herself be
dominated by the inconsequent multiplicity of the trifling incidents
that filled their days.
If she could only get close to Paul she was sure that all would be well.
She made herself hope, with a brave belittling of the tangle that
baffled her, that perhaps just one long, serious talk with Paul would
be all that was needed. If she could just make Paul see what she saw, he
could tell her how to set to work to remedy things. Paul was so clever.
Paul was always so kind--when he saw!
She began watching for a favorable opportunity for this long, serious
talk, and as day after day fled past with only a glimpse of Paul
desperately in a hurry in the morning and desperately tired at night,
she was aware that her idea of the shape their life was taking had not
exaggerated the extent of the broad flood of trivialities that separated
them. Although the light laugh of her girlhood was rarer than before her
marriage, life had not proved it to be the result of mere animal
spirits. She still saw a great deal to laugh at, though sometimes it was
tremulous laughter, carrying her to the edge of tears. And she often
laughed to herself during these days at the absurd incongruity of what
her heart was swelling to utter and the occasions on which she would
have to speak.
'Stashie was away, tending her aunt who was ill, away for an indefinite
period, for Patsy's steady wages quite sufficed to keep his cousin at
home to care for his grandmother. Lydia sometimes feared the
satisfaction she took in Patsy's exemplary career was tinctured with
vainglory for her own share in it, but, if so, she was punished for it
now, since it was his very prosperity that took away from her the only
steady domestic help she had ever been able to keep. She had now only a
cook, a slatternly negress, with a gift for frying chicken and making
beaten biscuit, and a total incapacity to conceive of any other activity
as possible for her. Lydia had telephoned to the two employment agencies
in Endbury and had been informed, by no means for the first time, that
the supply of girls willing to work in the suburbs had entirely given
out. For the time being there was simply not one to be had, so for the
next few days Lydia, as well as Paul, was more than usually occupied;
but her fixed intention to "talk things over with him" was not shaken.
And yet--day after day went by with the routine unvaried--there was no
time in the morning; in the evening Paul was too tired, and on Sundays
there was always "Company," it being practically their only time for
daylight entertainment. Often Paul brought a business associate home for
dinner; his family or hers came in; there were always callers in the
afternoon; and they were usually invited out to supper or had guests
themselves. It was the busiest day of the week.
Ever since her father's death she had been reviving in her mind, shocked
to find them so few, her positive, personal recollections of him, and
one of them now came back to her with a symbolic meaning. It had been a
not uncommon occurrence in her childhood--a school picnic in the Black
Rock woods; but this one stood out from all the others because, by what
freak of chance she never knew, her father had gone with her instead of
her mother. How proud she had been to have him there! How eagerly she
had done the honors of the "entertainment"! How anxiously she had hoped
that he would be pleased with the recitations, the songs, the May-day
dance!
One of the events of the day was to be the recitation of a fairy poem by
a boy in one of the upper grades. He was to step out of the bushes in
the character of a Brownie. The child had but just thrust his head
through the leaves and begun, "I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals
wot not of," when a terrific clap of thunder overhead, followed by
lightning, and rain in torrents, broke up the picnic and sent everyone
flying for shelter to a near-by barn. Lydia had been very much afraid of
thunderstorms, and she could still remember how, through all her
confusion and terror, she had admired the fixity of purpose of the
little Brownie, piteous in his drenched fairy costume, gasping out, as
they ran along: "I come to tell ye--I come to tell ye, mortals--" to his
scurrying audience.
When they reached the barn and were huddled in the hay, wet and forlorn,
and deafened by the peals of thunder, the determined little boy had
stood up on a farm wagon on the barn floor, and the instant the storm
abated began again with his insistent tidings of a world they wot not
of. With her father's death fresh in her mind, Lydia could not without
a throb of pain recall his rare outburst of hearty laughter at the
child's perseverance. "I bet on that kid!" he had cried out, applauding
vigorously at the end. "Who _is_ he?"
"Paul Hollister," she had told him, proud to know the bigger children.
"He's a very especial friend of mine."
"Well, you can bet he'll get on," her father had assured her.
The opening of the Brownie's speech had come to be one of the humorous
catchwords of the Emery household, to express firmness of purpose, and
it was now with a mixture of laughter and tears that Lydia recalled the
scene--the dusky interior of the barn, the sweet, strong scent of the
hay, the absurd little figure grimacing and squeaking on the farm wagon,
and her big, little-known, all-powerful father, one strong arm around
her, protecting her from all she feared, as nothing in the world could
protect her now.
She was grown up now, and must learn how to protect her own children
against dangers less obvious than thunderstorms. It was her turn now to
insist on making herself heard above uproar and confusion. Her little
Brownie playmate shamed her into action. She would not wait for a pause
in the clatter of small events about Paul and herself; she would raise
her voice and shout to him, if necessary, overcoming the shy reluctance
of the spirit to speak aloud of its life.