“BEHIND THE LILAC WALL”
As soon as it was possible for Mahala to escape from the Moreland
residence, she left Ashwater and was driven back to her home. She sought
it instinctively as a shelter. It seemed to her that the River Road was
unending, that she never again would see the light of her house; and
because there was no light when she reached it, she was surprised at
last to find that she was there. As a haven she plunged into it and
closed the door behind her to shut out the horrors she had witnessed.
Predominant in her mind at that minute was the thought that there was
nothing in the whole world so dreadful as the power of riches wrongly
used. When she thought back to the peace, the happiness, the sheer
beauty of her childhood and her home life, it seemed to her quite
impossible that such disaster as had overtaken her had been made
possible by the unscrupulous power of one man holding his position
through the right of riches dishonestly accumulated. After the passing
of her father, after the testing of her own strength, she had found that
she was sufficient; that she could take care of herself and of her
mother as well. There was the possibility that she might find a
confident sort of happiness in facing life and making it clothe and
provision her that she never would have found had she gone ahead under
her father’s sheltering care. She had come dimly to realize that the
sheltered life is rather a dull affair. It lacks the spirit, the
development, the fraternity that can be found in an equal battle with
other men and women for food and shelter.
Then had come the final blow. The Morelands had heaped dishonour upon
her. From that hour she had felt that to be vindicated was the only
thing that life held in store for her. Now the thing had happened. A
thousand people had rushed around her. They had almost crushed her in
their desire to touch her, to weep with her, to tell her that they
always had known that she never could have been guilty. And there had
been an impulse hot in her soul to cry out at them: “Why, then, was I
deserted? Why, then, was I left alone? Why, then, did you not rise up
and make the thing that happened to me impossible as you have made it
impossible for the work of the Morelands upon their fellow men to
continue?”
The thing that dazed her, that kept sleep from her eyes, the knowledge
of how weary she was from her brain, and sent her wandering from one
room to another all through the night, and at the break of day, to the
little gold bird that still sang in her window, to the garden, and from
the garden to the pigeons, and from the pigeons to the calves, and back
again to the cases of her father’s books and to the pictured faces of
Mahlon and Elizabeth—the one thing that she found predominant out of the
whole matter, the one thing that in the end mounted above everything
else, was the fact that Jason had doubted her, that because he doubted
her, he had made another woman his wife, the mother of the child that
should have been hers.
All the morning Mahala struggled to understand him. She tried to tell
her heart that it was because of the scorching humiliations he had
endured in his youth, the worst of which she now understood she had
never realized. It was the taunts that had been flung at him, the
loneliness of his unloved childhood, that had influenced him in his
decision not to make any woman concerning whom there was a shadow of
doubt, the mother of his child. It was not in the power of a woman like
Mahala to gauge the depth of physical passion, to understand the force
that drove Jason, in addition to the knowledge that he had found the
money where he supposed she had, in some way, managed to have it placed.
Throughout the day, Mahala found her heart crying out achingly and
unceasingly over Jason’s lack of confidence in her. She had learned that
she could spare the rest of the world. They might think what they
pleased. It was Jason alone who mattered. In living over the previous
day in her tortured wanderings about the house, through the orchard, in
the dead stillness that always precedes a summer storm, she found
herself speaking aloud at times. She cried to the walls of her room:
“Oh, Jason, I would not have doubted you, if I had seen you take the
money myself!”
To the trees of the old orchard she stretched out her arms. She said to
them: “If it had been Jason, I’d have known that there had to be some
explanation. I’d have felt that anything else might have happened except
that he could have been guilty.”
Across the road and down a few rods farther, Jason had reached his home
and Ellen in a condition that alarmed her. He had tried to tell her what
had happened. He had tried to explain to her, but she had felt that he
was speaking as if there were a weight upon his heart and brain that was
almost more than he could endure. She had felt that he scarcely realized
what he was saying to her. She had tried to feed him; she had wept over
him; she had rejoiced with him that there could be no stain upon his
name and upon his birthright, and through it all she had seen that he
did not hear her, that he did not care for anything she might say or
anything she might do. Then she watched him stagger across the road and
start toward Mahala’s house.
She stood awhile meditating. She decided that probably there were things
that she might do. She ought to go herself and prepare some food. She
might give Mahala the comfort of playing with the baby while she worked.
She was half in doubt as to whether she should go, and yet she could
think of many reasonable excuses. She realized that it was on slow feet
that she walked down the road carrying the baby that every day was
growing a heavier burden for her slight young shoulders. She was
thinking a queer thing as she went along. He was heavier to carry when
he was asleep than when he was awake. Asleep, he lay a dead weight on
her arms; awake he clung around her neck, he scattered his weight over
her chest and shoulders. She was surprised that she had thought this out
for herself.
As she reached the gate, she was saying to herself: “He’s a dead weight
asleep. He’s not near so heavy when he’s awake!”
Seeing that the front door was closed, she followed the narrow path of
hard-beaten earth running around the house. As she came to the big clump
of lilacs at the corner, she heard Mahala’s voice cry, “Jason!”
Through the lilac bushes she saw that Jason had fallen at Mahala’s back
door. He was lying face down upon the ground, either exhausted or
unconscious. She stood one instant in paralysed apprehension. The thing
that kept her from movement was the look that was upon Mahala’s face as
she crossed the back porch and went to him. Ellen saw that Mahala’s
skirts were drawn back and there was a look of scorn and repulsion on
her face. It was quite out of the girl’s power to move. She merely stood
and stared at them. As she watched, she saw a slow change pass over
Mahala. She saw her clenched hands relax; she saw her face soften and
break up; she saw a quiver come to her lips and big tears squeeze from
her eyes; she saw her fall on her knees beside Jason, and with
unsuspected strength, lift and turn his body. She saw Mahala take
Jason’s head on her lap and lean over him; she saw her hands slip under
his vest and down to the region of his heart. She caught the torn note
of agony in Mahala’s voice as she cried to him: “Jason, have the
Morelands killed you, too?”
Then Ellen saw Mahala lose her self-control. She stood watching her as
she took Jason’s head in her arms and kissed him from brow to lips.
“Jason! Oh, Jason! I understand you now! I know that you’ve always loved
me. But you couldn’t, you simply couldn’t, make me the mother of your
child when you thought it would be born through me to the suffering you
have known. Oh, Jason, it wasn’t fair of you! Your love always has been
mine! Your very body is mine! Your child should have been mine!”
As Mahala talked she smoothed his hair, she beat his hands, she tried
with her fingers to make his eyes open. Ellen stood and watched. When
Jason came to his senses and realized where he was, she saw him look up
at Mahala, and then she saw him cover his face with his hands. She
watched with a kind of dumb indifference while his body was torn and
racked with the deep sobbing that seemed to rend him through and
through.
She saw Mahala kneeling before him, looking at him. She heard her saying
to him: “I understand now, Jason. I understand you now!”
She watched him struggle to a rising posture. She saw him reach out his
hands and help Mahala to her feet. She heard a voice that she did not
know crying: “Great God! What have I done? If I had not been a common
thing, a vile thing, myself, I might have known!”
Then Mahala laid her hands on his arm. She looked up at him and said
quietly: “Square your shoulders, Jason. You’ve got to adjust them to the
burden they must carry for the rest of your life. We both know now, but
we must finish our lives as if we didn’t.”
Then Ellen saw Jason lean forward. She saw his strong hands reach out.
She heard him cry: “Mahala, you know, you always have known, how I love
you. If there had been in me the manhood to wait for this hour, would
you have been mine?”
She watched Mahala lay both her hands in his. She saw her look at Jason
for a long time. She saw the smile of ecstasy that broke over her face.
She heard a sweetness she never before had heard in the tones of a human
voice as Mahala said: “Why, Jason, when I think it all out, I can’t
remember the time when my heart was not fighting your battles for
you—when I didn’t love you.”
Standing there, Ellen saw Jason gather Mahala in his arms, lift her
clear of the ground, and kiss her face, her hair, her shoulders, even,
in a passion of utter despair.
Then Ellen came in for her share of the Moreland tragedy. She turned
softly. Lightly she picked her steps around the house. She flashed
through the gate; with flying feet she ran back down the road to her
home. She had forgotten how heavy the baby was. There seemed to be wings
on her feet. When she reached home, she laid him in his cradle because
that was the thing she was accustomed to doing when he was asleep. Then
she dropped on her knees beside him and caught his little hands, and
without caring whether she awoke him or not, she laid them against her
face, on her throat, on her eyes, on her hair. At last she found her
voice.
She told him: “Your father does not love me. He loves Mahala. He always
has loved her. He is really hers and you should be hers. Oh, Baby, tell
me what I must do!”
She was kneeling there in a sort of dull lethargy when Jason staggered
back home, bowed by the weight of the crucifying revelation that Mahala
always had loved him; that he had sacrificed her love; that he had
thrown away the beauty of her soul and her body through his doubt of
her.
As he stepped inside his door and saw Ellen kneeling beside the cradle,
her unheeding head being rumpled and battered by the uncertain hands of
the baby, he wondered for a moment. Then he stepped over to her and
lifted her to her feet, and then he saw her distorted, pain-tortured
face, and there he learned, that in some way, she knew. There was only
one way in which she could know. Even then he revealed an inherent
fineness. He made no accusation.
He said to her gently: “You felt that you would be needed? You followed
me?”
Ellen assented. Then he was speaking again.
“You saw us? You heard what we said?”
She bowed her head in acquiescence.
Jason released her and dropped into the nearest chair, and Ellen sank
down again beside the cradle and buried her face in the baby’s clothing.
Finally, Jason could endure no more. He went over to Ellen and lifted
her up; he helped her to a chair.
With a halting voice and stricken eyes of misery she said to him:
“Because you found that pocket book when you were fixing up the house,
you thought that in some way she’d had it put there?”
Jason nodded.
In the passion of her agony, she cried at him: “How could you? Any one
so delicate, so beautiful—why, I have always known she never could have
done it! I couldn’t have loved her if I had thought her a common thief.”
Before the storm of her wrath Jason stood bowed and helpless. She seemed
a long way from him, and yet he could hear her voice crying at him: “You
loved her. You would work for her, you would take care of her, but you
had not the manhood to wait for her hour of vindication!”
Then Jason spoke: “When I found the money hidden in her house, I thought
there never could be such a thing as vindication. With my own hands I
hid it where it never would have been discovered, waiting for the hour
when she should come to me and tell me herself that she had taken it.”
Ellen cried to him: “And now, what are you going to do?”
He looked at her helplessly. The finger she was pointing toward the
cradle was shaking but her voice was clear: “You are giving her your
love. You have given me your child. What are you going to do?”
So these two souls battled in agony during an evening of that tense
stillness which almost always presages heavy storm in the Central
States. The elements outside seemed in keeping with the inside strain
when a sudden wind sprang up and boiling yellow clouds were driven
before it, and heavy black ones took their place. In a short time their
world was enveloped in thick darkness, broken by the flash of lightning,
the jarring of thunder and dangerous winds.
Worn out at last with nerve strain, Ellen stood up. She faced Jason,
crying: “You haven’t been fair. You had no right to make me the mother
of your child when you knew in your heart that you didn’t love me. It
isn’t truly mine. Martin Moreland robbed Mahala of her people, her home,
her wealth. He would have taken her honour if he could. And how much
better are you? You have robbed her heart of the love of a lifetime. I
heard her say it. And, at the same time, you robbed her of motherhood.
Your child belongs to her, not to me! You may take it to her!”
Jason had endured nerve strain almost to the limit. He was at that dumb
place where the brain ceases to function for itself. He realized that he
might have had Mahala in his home and in his arms if he had kept firm
rein on his physical nature and had had Ellen’s faith in her. The
foundations of his life had been shaken. It seemed to him that nothing
further could happen. He was past thinking clearly for himself. The
first thought that came to his muddled brain was one of protest.
“No, Ellen, no!” he said. “That can’t be done! You’re insane to think of
it!”
Nerve strain works one way with some people; it works differently with
others. First Ellen had cried until she was exhausted. Then she had
argued until she could think no further. When she reached her decision,
at that time she had meant what she said. She proved the courage of her
convictions by lifting the baby from its cradle, wrapping the blanket
around it, and thrusting it into Jason’s arms.
She opened the door, and with apparent calmness and deliberation, she
said to him: “I have told you until I’m tired. That child does not
belong to me. You may take it to its real mother.”
Jason took the baby because he did not know what else to do. But he
stood shaking his head.
“You can’t do this, Ellen,” he said to her pleadingly. “For God’s sake,
try to understand that you can’t give away your baby!”
Ellen caught up the words. “Give away my baby?” she repeated after him.
“It is not I who give it away. It is you. You gave it to me when it
belonged to Mahala. I tell you to take it to her!”
She pushed him into the night and closed the door behind him, regardless
of the storm into which she was thrusting him. Then Jason’s soul knew
fear. He was worn to the marrow with as keen suffering as any man can
experience. Every nerve in his body was strained to the breaking point
and a ghastly nausea possessed him inside. There was only one rational
thought in his head. He must get the baby out of that storm. He must do
what he had been told.
He was reeling like an intoxicated man as he staggered blindly down the
road through the wildly gathering storm which broke in a torrent as he
reached Mahala’s door. He realized that he might have been unable to
find her door if her house had not been filled with light. Evidently,
she was nervous and afraid. He could see light in every room of the
house, and as he stumbled toward it, he could see Mahala’s figure
passing from room to room, and he knew that she was alone and that she
was afraid.
There was in his heart a fear that his knock might frighten her further,
so he called at the same time. He heard her footsteps flying across the
floor, and she swung the door wide. He stepped through it, already
drenched, with the face and eyes of a stranger, huddling the baby
against his breast.
As Mahala closed the door, she stepped back to the centre of the room.
Jason held out the bundle to her. He was past the point of trying to
screen her. He was past anything except a parrot-like utterance of what
he had been told.
With no preliminaries, he said to Mahala: “Ellen saw us this afternoon.
She won’t have her baby any longer, because she knows now that I never
really loved her. She made me bring it to you. She says, because I love
you, my child is yours.”
Mahala held out her palms before her as if to keep back an enemy. Every
trace of colour faded from her face. Her eyes stretched their widest in
amazement. She had been trying to think, trying to plan, trying to
reason, all the afternoon, and the conclusion she had reached was, that
to the end of their days, she and Jason must travel different roads,
each carrying a burden upon their tortured shoulders, the weight of
which they must learn to endure. But here was the climax. This was the
worst of all. They might not even be permitted to suffer together. All
afternoon she had been thinking: “Ellen has had nothing to do with this.
She is perfectly innocent. She must never know.”
And now, smashing as the crash of the lightning outside, she was facing
the terrible knowledge that Ellen did know, and that she had practically
lost her reason through that knowledge. Her heart was primitive like the
heart of every other woman. She had seen her man, she had loved him, she
had taken his head on her breast, she had given him all she had to give.
And through youth and inexperience, through willingness to believe, she
had believed that she was having all that he had to give in return. Now
she knew that she had had nothing. She had merely been an instrument.
This knowledge had driven her to frenzy.
And this was the thing that Mahala now had to face. Through the months
of torture that she had experienced, striking her first in the heart,
then in the brain, and then physically, she had learned what this must
mean to Ellen.
She could only cry: “Impossible! Quite impossible!”
Jason advanced toward her, holding out the baby. It had awakened with
the flashes of lightning and the jarring of the thunder. Throwing up its
little arms, it pushed the blanket back, revealing its face, the soft,
curling brown hair, the pink cheeks, the delicately veined temples. The
little fellow knew Mahala. She was his beloved playmate. He reached his
hands toward her, crowing and laughing and begging to be taken for one
of the romps he was accustomed to indulging in with her. He liked
spatting her cheeks with his hands. He liked to tousle her hair. He
liked her kisses on his hands and his feet and the back of his neck and
all over his little head.
Mahala retreated until she was pressed flat against the wall. Even her
hands, as they stretched out at her sides, were hard pressed, palm to
the wall, behind her. She could go no farther. She was a tortured thing
brought to bay. Jason advanced.
“You’ve got to take him,” he said in a voice torn with suffering.
“You’ve got to take him!”
Then Mahala began to cry. She looked at Jason imploringly.
“What does my heart know of the heart of a child beating beneath it?”
she said to him. “How are my dry breasts to furnish life for another
woman’s baby?”
Jason still pressed the child toward her. Mahala became primitive. The
strength of temper that had always characterized her swept through her.
She lifted her head shamelessly. She used the lids of her eyes to
squeeze the tears from them. Her voice was stern and relentless as she
said to Jason: “You big fool! Ellen can’t give away her baby. Haven’t
you got the sense to see it? It’s bone of her bone and flesh of her
flesh. Take it back to her and make her listen to reason! Make her see
that a real woman couldn’t possibly give up her baby. You would drive
her as insane as your father did Rebecca.”
“You’re right,” said Jason.
He wrapped the blanket around the child, turned its face to his breast,
and started toward the door. As he opened it, there was a horrible
crash. He was blinded with running streaks of lightning till he
staggered back. There was the ripping sound of a bolt that had struck
something solid so close that it rocked the house. He turned appealingly
to Mahala. She darted past him and pushed shut the door.
“Wait!” she said. “Wait till I get the lantern, I’ll go to Ellen with
you. I can make her understand better than you can.”
Jason looked down at the small bundle struggling in his arms. “I ought
not take the boy out in this,” he said. “We might be struck.”
Mahala shook her head. “Ellen can’t be left alone. We’ve got to go. Some
terrible thing will happen.”
Mahala hurried to the kitchen to find and light the lantern. For one
second she stood at the window, her hands cupped around her face, trying
to peer through the darkness, to see if the lights were burning in
Jason’s house. She would not have been surprised to see great tongues of
flame leaping from it, but the rain was beating in sheets against the
window, small branches and wet leaves were plastered on it and a black
bird, blown from its shelter among the bushes, struck the glass and slid
down, white lights streaming from its green eyes, its wings outspread,
its breast bleeding.
As the door closed behind Jason, Ellen had turned and fallen across the
empty cradle. As she raised herself, her hands struck the warm sheets
and the little pillow where the baby’s head had lain. On her knees
staring into it, there came the first realization of what she had done.
She had sent her baby to be mothered by another woman. Dazed at the
tragedy that had befallen her, she caught up the little pillow and held
it warm against her face and then her empty arms folded around it.
Suddenly she was on her feet. She threw the pillow back into the cradle
and sprang to the door. She opened it wide and screamed into the night:
“Jason! Jason! Bring back my baby!”
She bent her head and tried to hear his voice in answer. But the wind
howled past her. Flying leaves and branches and a dust storm from the
road almost blinded her as she tried to raise her voice, to scream with
all her might: “Jason! Jason!”
She realized that she could not make him hear her above the fury of the
storm. She realized that she had only a minute. The rain would come in
torrents very soon. With her arms extended before her to protect her
face and breast, she rushed into the night. She found the gate and
started down the road. With every flare of lightning she could see a few
yards in advance of her. Until the next flare, she was in darkness. The
wind blew her wide skirts so tightly around her that she could scarcely
step. She realized that she could not have found her way had it not been
for the light in Mahala’s house. That she could see, and she tried to go
straight toward it. The difficulty in running told her that she had lost
the road, but so long as she could see the light, she knew that she must
reach the house. Once she had a fight to extricate herself from a
thicket of bushes and then she ran into a big tree, and the tree told
her where she was. She was very near the house now. This was a friendly
tree in whose shelter she liked to walk whenever she went to Mahala’s
house. She had stopped beneath it to pick up shining acorns for the baby
to play with. She had seen the squirrels racing up and down it. She had
seen great, horned owls spread their wings and sail from their day-time
shelter among its heavy, gnarled branches. It was almost like meeting a
friend in a time of extremity.
She threw her arms around it and laid her face against it and waited for
the next flare of lightning to show her how to find the road again, but
following that flash there came a dreadful bolt that struck the oak
tree, rending it from top to base.
Through the most terrific storm she ever had experienced, holding the
lantern high above her, Mahala stumbled down the foot path beside the
fence trying to light the way for Jason who kept as close behind her as
he could with the baby’s face buried in his breast. Trying to see her
way ahead of her, Mahala stumbled over the body of Ellen lying in a
crumpled heap at the foot of the oak tree. The flickering glare of the
rain-dripping lantern showed her still face and the splintered tree
beside her.
Wordless, Mahala set down the lantern and held out her arms for the
child. Jason gave the baby to her and lifted Ellen. Mahala picked up the
lantern, and they carried Ellen home and laid her on her bed. The baby
had fallen asleep and they put him in his cradle and covered him. Then
they knelt, one on each side of Ellen, and sobbed out the pain, the
grief, and the torture that had torn their hearts to the limit of
endurance.