July 25. George is having his house enlarged. Mrs. Weston is certainly energetic, with what is perhaps a Western energy. She has been married only about four months. George told me the other day that he meant to make the house larger.
"Gertrude wants a bigger parlor," he explained, rather ill at ease, I thought. "The house is big enough for me, but when a man has a wife things are different."
There was a labored playfulness in his manner which troubled me. He has bought a phaeton and pony for her. I hope that he is not going beyond his means. As for a larger parlor, I am afraid that Mrs. Weston will have to fill it with rather odd people.
July 27. Kathie has shown a new side to her character which troubles me. It is all, I suppose, part of her morbid, unhinged condition, but it is unpleasant. She has conceived a violent jealousy of baby. She refuses to stay in the house if I have Thomasine with me. This afternoon I had sent for her to come over and stay to tea. She came in about five, with a wild look in her eyes which she has almost all the time now. She sat down without saying anything, and began to pull the roses in a bowl on the table to pieces, scattering the petals on the floor.
I laughingly told her that she evidently thought she was in the woods where roses grew wild and there were no rugs. Instead of answering me, or apologizing, she looked at me strangely, and for a moment said nothing.
"Are you going to have baby brought down here this afternoon?" she demanded at last.
I said Tomine was out with Rosa, but that I expected them in soon, as it was almost time for baby's supper.
"Will she come in here?" Kathie asked.
"Oh, yes," was my reply. "You will see her. Never fear."
"Then I may as well go home now," observed this astounding child, rising, and going deliberately toward the door.
"What in the world do you mean?" I cried out, completely taken by astonishment.
"I never will stay in the room with her again," Kathie responded emphatically. "I just hate her!"
I could only stare at her.
"You're all taken up with her now," Kathie continued. "You used to like me, but now it's all that baby. I'm much obliged to you for inviting me to supper, but I can't stay any longer if she's coming."
If anybody could make me understand whether Kathie is sane or not I should have more confidence in attempting to deal with her. To-day I felt as if I were dealing with a mad creature, and that it was idle to try to do anything. It seemed to me it would be a pity to treat the matter too seriously, and I tried to act as if I thought she was merely joking. I laughingly told her that the idea was one of the funniest I ever heard, and that we must tell baby when she came in, to see if we could make the small person laugh. Kathie received my remarks with unmoved seriousness.
"It isn't a joke at all, Miss Ruth," she said, with an uncanny air which was most uncomfortable, but which in some indefinable way gave me for the first time in all my dealings with the girl a sort of hint that she was partly acting. "It is just my wicked heart. I hate" —
I interrupted her briskly.
"Your wicked fiddlesticks, Kathie!" I said. "Don't talk nonsense. What time has been settled on for the church fair?"
She was so taken aback that she had no defense ready, and after a sort of gasp of amazement she answered my question, and said no more about her wickedness. Baby came in with Rosa, and Kathie behaved as usual, only I remember now that she did not offer to touch Tomine. I went upstairs for a moment with Rosa and baby to see if everything was right, and when I went back to the parlor my guest had taken herself off. She had gone without her supper as she had said she should. I confess my first feeling was that she needed to be soundly shaken; but after all when a child is morbidly wrong in her feelings the particular way in which she shows it is not of much consequence. Perhaps she had better be expending her distempered mood on jealousy of baby than on religion. The question is what I had better do; and I confess I do not know how to answer it.
July 28. Mr. Saychase has made his purpose and his ideas entirely clear, and I wish I could think of them with less inclination to laugh. If he could for a single minute know how funny he was, it would do him more good than anything I can think of as likely to happen to him.
He came to call to-night, and so evident was his air of excitement that even Rosa must have noticed it; she was all significant smiles when she ushered him in. I tried to talk about commonplace things, but could get practically no response. For half an hour by the clock we went stumbling on with intervals of silence when I could think of nothing except that I must say something. At last he cleared his throat with a manner so desperate and determined that I knew something dreadful was coming.
"Miss Privet," he said, "I thought I would mention to you that I came to-night for a particular purpose."
It came over me with a sickening sense that old lady Andrews was right, and that it was too late to stop him. I did make a desperate effort to interpose, but he had at last got started, and would not be stayed.
"You must have noticed," he went on, as if he were repeating a lesson, "that I entertain a great respect for your character."
"Indeed, Mr. Saychase," I responded, with a laugh which was principally nerves, "you evidently mean to make me unbearably vain."
"That you could never be," he returned with an air of gallantry I should not have thought him capable of. "Your modesty is one of your greatest charms."
The girl who can hear her modesty praised and not be amused must be lacking in a sense of humor. I laughed aloud before I realized what I was doing. Then, as he looked hurt, I apologized humbly.
"It's no matter," he said graciously; "of course you wouldn't be modest if you knew how modest you are."
This sounded so ambiguous and so like comic opera that in spite of myself I laughed again.
"Come, Mr. Saychase," I begged him, "don't say any more about my modesty, please. We'll take it for granted. Have you seen Aunt Naomi this week? She has had a little return of her bad cold."
"I came over to-night," he broke out explosively, not in the least diverted by my question, "to ask you to marry me."
All I could do was to blurt out his name like an awkward schoolgirl.
"I dare say you are surprised, Miss Ruth," he went on, evidently relieved to have got the first plunge over with, "but that, as we were saying, may be laid to modesty."
I respect Mr. Saychase, – at least I think he means well, and I hated to be the means of making him uncomfortable; but this return to my modesty was too funny, and nearly sent me off into laughter again. My sense of the fun of the situation brought back, however, my self-control.
"Mr. Saychase," I said, as gravely as I could, "I am not so dull as not to feel the honor you have done me, but such a thing is entirely impossible. We had better talk of something else."
"But I am in earnest, Miss Privet," he urged.
I assured him that I was not less so.
"I hope you will not decide hastily," was his response. "I have long recognized your excellent qualities; our ages are suitable; and I think I am right in saying that we both find our highest satisfaction in doing good. Be sure my esteem for you is too great for me to easily take a refusal."
"But, Mr. Saychase," I argued, catching at any excuse to end his importunity, "you forget that I am not a sharer in your beliefs. A clergyman ought not to marry a woman that half his parish would think an atheist."
"I have thought of that," he responded readily, "and knew you must recognize that a clergyman's wife should be a helpmeet in his religious work; but I hoped that for the sake of the work, if not for mine, you might be willing to give up your unhappy views."
There was a sort of simplicity about this which was so complete as to be almost noble. It might be considered an amazing egotism, and it might be objected that Mr. Saychase had a singular idea of the sincerity of my "unhappy views;" but the entire conviction with which he spoke almost made me for the moment doubt myself. Unfortunately for him, a most wickedly absurd remembrance came into my mind of a sentimental story in an old red and gold annual that was grandmother's. A noble Christian chieftain has falled in love with a Moorish damsel, and says to her: "Beautiful Zorahida, only become a Christian, and thou shalt be my bride." Beautiful Zorahida took at once to the proposition, but I am made of more obstinate stuff. I hid the smile the story brought up, but I determined to end this talk at once.
"Mr. Saychase," I said as firmly as I could, "you are kind, but it is utterly impossible that I should change my views or that I should marry you. We will, if you please, consider the subject closed entirely. How soon do you go to Franklin to the annual conference?"
He evidently saw I was in earnest, and to my great relief said no more in this line. He could not help showing that he was uncomfortable, although I was more gracious to him than I had ever been in my life. He did not stay long. As he was going I said I was sure he would not let anything I had said wound him, for I had not meant to hurt him. He said "Oh, no," rather vaguely, and left me. I wonder how many girls ever get an offer of marriage without a hint of love from beginning to end!
July 30. Tomine is more adorable every day. I wish Tom could see her oftener. It would soften him, and take out of his face the hard look which is getting fixed there. He surely could not resist her when she wakes up from her nap, all rosy and fresh, and with a wonder-look in her eyes as if she had been off in dreamland so really that she could not understand how she happens not to be there still. I think the clasp of her soft little fingers on his would somehow take the ache out of his heart. Poor Tom! I wonder how far being sorry for a thing makes one better. Repentance is more than half discomfort, Mother used to say. I always told her that to me it seemed like a sort of moral indigestion which warned us not to eat any more of the forbidden fruit that caused it. Tom is unhappy. He is proud, and he feels the disgrace more than he would own. Any country town is so extremely pronounced in its disapproval of sins of a certain kind that a man would have to be covered with a rhinoceros hide not to feel it; and to stand up against it means to a man of Tom's disposition a constant attitude of defiance.
Sometimes I find myself feeling so strongly on Tom's side that I seem to have lost all moral sense. It is my instinct, the cruelly illogical injustice of my sex perhaps, to lay the blame on poor dead Julia. Only – but I cannot think of it, and how I come to be writing about it is more than I can tell. I do think a good deal about Tom, however, and wonder what the effect on his character will be. He is of a pretty stubborn fibre when once he has taken a determination; and now that he has made up his mind to fight down public opinion here he will do it. The question is what it will cost him. Sometimes it seems a pity that he could not have gone away from home, into a broader atmosphere, and one where he could have expended his strength in developing instead of resisting. Here he will be like a tree growing on a windy sea-cliff; he will be toughened, but I am afraid he will be twisted and gnarled.
I wonder if little Tomine will ever ask me, when she is grown, about her mother. If she does I can only say that I never saw Julia until she was on her deathbed; and that will have to do. Dear little soft baby! The idea of her being grown up is too preposterous. She is always to be my baby Thomasine, and then I can love her without the penalty of having to answer troublesome questions.
VIII
AUGUST
August 1. I said a thing to Tom to-day which was the most natural thing in the world, yet which teases me. He came to pay one of his rare visits to baby, and we were bending over her so that our heads were almost together. I was not thinking of him, but just of Tomine, and without considering how he might take it I declared that I felt exactly as if she were my very own.
"What do you mean?" Tom asked. "She is yours."
"Oh, but I mean as if I were really her mother," I explained, stupidly making my mistake worse.
"Would to God you were!" he burst out. "Would to God you cared enough for me to be now!"
I was of course startled, though I had brought it on myself. I got out of it by jumping up and calling to Rosa to take Tomine and give her her supper. Now recalling it, and remembering how Tom looked, his eyes and his voice, I wonder what I ought to do. I do not know how to make him understand that because George has left me I am no more likely to marry somebody else. I may not feel the same toward George, but nothing follows from that. I own to myself frankly that I respect Tom more than I do George; I can even say that I find more and more as time goes on that I had rather see Tom coming up the walk. The old boy and girl friendship has largely come back between Tom and me; and I am a little, just a little on the defensive on his account against the talk of the village. I think now all is over, and Julia in her grave, that might be allowed to rest. Only one thing I do not understand. I am no more moved by the touch of George's hand now than by that of any acquaintance; I cannot touch Tom's fingers without remembering Julia.
August 2. It is curious to see how Rosa's heart and her religion keep up the struggle. Ran's wife has obstinately refused to die, but has instead got well enough to send Rosa an insulting message; so the hope of finding a solution of all difficulties in Ran's becoming a widower is for the present at least abandoned. Rosa is evidently fond of Ran, and while the priest and her conscience – or rather her religious fear of consequences – keep her from marrying him, they cannot make her give him up entirely. She still clings to some sort of an engagement with Dennis; and she still talks in her amazingly cold-blooded way about her lovers, speculating on the practical side of the question in a fashion so dispassionate that Ran's chance would seem to be gone forever; but in the end she comes back to him. What the result will be I cannot even guess, but I feel it my duty not to encourage Rosa to incline toward Ran, who is really drunken and disreputable. I remind her how he beat his wife; but then she either says any man with spunk must beat his wife now and then when he isn't sober, or she declares that anybody might and indeed should beat that sort of a woman. I can only fall back upon the fact that she cannot marry him without incurring the displeasure of her church, and although she never fails to retort that I do not believe in her religion, I can see that the argument moves her. In dealing with Rosa it is very easy to see how necessary a religion is for the management of the ignorant and unreasonable. In this case the obstinacy of Rosa's attachment may prove too strong for the church, but the church is the only thing which in her undisciplined mind could combat her inclination for a moment.
Sometimes when Rosa appeals to me for sympathy I wonder whether genuine love is not entirely independent of reason; and I wonder, too, whether it is or is not a feeling which must last a whole life long. I seem to myself to be sure that if I had married George I should always have loved him, – or I should have loved the image of him I kept in my mind. I would have defied proof and reason, and whatever he did I should have persuaded myself that no matter what circumstances led him to do he was really noble in his nature. I know I should have stultified myself to the very end, rather than to give up caring for him; and it seems to me that I should have done it with my mental eyes shut. I should have been hardly less illogical about it than Rosa is. What puzzles me most is that while I can analyze myself in this lofty way, I believe I have in me possibilities of self-deception so complete. Whether it is a virtue in women to be able to cheat themselves into constancy I can't tell, and indeed I think all these speculations decidedly sentimental and unprofitable.
August 5. Aunt Naomi came to-day, like an east wind bearing depression. She has somehow got hold of a rumor that George is speculating. Where she obtained her information I could not discover. She likes to be a little mysterious, and she pieces together so many small bits of information that I dare say it would often be hard for her to say exactly what the source of her information really was. She is sometimes mistaken, but for anybody who tells so many things she is surprisingly seldom entirely wrong. Besides I half think that in a village like ours thoughts escape and disseminate themselves. I am sometimes almost afraid as I write things down in this indiscreet diary of mine, lest they shall somehow get from the page into the air, and Aunt Naomi will know them the next time she appears. This is to me the worst thing about living in a small place. It is impossible not to have the feeling of being under a sort of foolish slavery to public opinion, a slavish regard to feelings we neither share nor respect; and greater still is the danger of coming to be interested in trifles, of growing to be gossips just as we are rustics, simply from living where it is so difficult not to know all about our neighbors.
Speculation was the word which to-day Aunt Naomi rolled as a sweet morsel under her tongue. Any sort of financial dealing is so strangely far away from our ordinary village ways that any sort of dealing in stocks would, I suppose, be regarded as dangerously rash, if not altogether unlawful; but I do hope that there is nothing in George's business which will lead him into trouble. I know that I am bothering about something which is none of my affair, and which is probably all right, if it has any existence.
"I don't know much about speculation myself," Aunt Naomi observed; "and I doubt if George Weston does. He's got a wife who seems bound to spend every cent she can get hold of, and it looks as if he found he'd got to take extra pains to get it."
"But how should anybody know anything about his affairs?" I asked in perplexed vexation.
She regarded me shrewdly.
"Everybody knows everything in a place like this," she responded waggishly. "I'm sure I don't see how everything gets to be known, but it does. You can't deny that."
I told her that I was afraid we were dreadfully given to gossiping about our neighbors, and to talking about things which really didn't concern us.
"Some do, I suppose," she answered coolly, but with a twinkle from behind the green veil which is always aslant across her face. "It's a pity, of course; but you wouldn't have us so little interested in each other as not to notice the things we hear, would you?"
I laughed, of course, but did not give up my point entirely.
"But so much that is said is nonsense," I persisted. "Here Mrs. Weston has been in Tuskamuck for four or five months, and she is already credited with running into extravagance, and bringing her husband into all sorts of things. We might at least give her time to get settled before we talk about her so much."
"She hadn't been here four or five weeks before she made it plain enough what she is," was the uncompromising retort. "She set out to astonish us as soon as she came. That's her Western spirit, I suppose."
I did not go on with the talk, but secretly the thing troubles me. Speculation is a large word, and it is nonsense to suppose George to be speculating in any way which could come to much, or that Aunt Naomi would know it if he were. I do wish people would either stop talking about George, or talk to somebody besides me.
August 6. Mrs. Tracy came in to call to-day. She makes a round of calls about once in two years, and I have not seen her for a long time. She had her usual string of questions, and asked about me and baby and Tom and the girls and the summer preserving until I felt as if I had been through the longest kind of a cross-examination. Just before she left she inquired if Mrs. Weston had told me that her husband was going to make a lot of money in stocks. I said at once that I seldom saw Mrs. Weston, and that I knew nothing about her husband's business affairs; but this shows where Aunt Naomi got her information. Mrs. Weston must have been talking indiscreetly. I wonder – But it seems to me I am always wondering!
August 7. Kathie has not been near me since she left the house the other evening. It seemed better to let her work out things in her own way than to go after her. I hoped that if I took no notice she might forget her foolishness, and behave in a more natural way. I met her in the street this afternoon, and stopped to speak with her. I said nothing of her having run away, but talked as usual. At last I asked her if she would not come home with me, and she turned and came to the gate. Then I asked her to come in, but she stopped short.
"Is the baby gone?" she demanded.
"No," I answered.
"You know I shall never come into your house again while that baby is there," she declared in an odd, quiet sort of way. "I hate that baby, and he that hates is just like a murderer."
She said it with a certain relish, as if she were proud of it. I begin to suspect that there may be a good deal of the theatrical mixed with her abnormal feeling.
"Kathie," I said, "you may be as silly as you like, but you can't make me believe anything so absurd as that you hate Thomasine. As for being a murderer in your heart, you wouldn't hurt a fly."
She looked at me queerly. I half thought there was a little disappointment in her first glance; then a strange expression as if she unconsciously took herself for audience, since I would not serve, and went on with her play of abnormal wickedness.
"You don't know how wicked I am," she responded. "I am a murderer in my heart."
A strangely intense look came into her eyes, as if a realization of what she was saying took hold of her, and as if she became really frightened by her own assumption. She clutched my arm with a grasp which must have been at least half genuine.
"Oh, Miss Ruth," she said. "I don't know what I shall do. I know I am lost!"
I wanted to shake the child, so completely for the moment did I feel that a lot of her emotion was make-believe, even if unconscious; but on the other hand she was actually beginning to turn pale and tremble with the nervous excitement she had raised by her fear or her theatricals.
"Kathie," I said, almost severely, "you know you are talking nonsense. Come into the house, and have a glass of milk and a slice of cake. You'll feel better after you've had something to eat."
She looked at me with eyes really wild, and without a word turned quickly and ran down the street at full speed, leaving me utterly confounded. I am sure she acts to herself, and that her religious mania is partly theatrical; but then I suppose religious mania always is. Yet it has a basis in what she believes, and with her imaginative, hysterical temperament she has the power of taking up her ideas so completely that she gets to be almost beside herself. When she is so much in earnest she must be treated, I suppose, as if all her self-accusations and agony of mind were entirely real.
August 8. I have been to lay a bunch of sweet-peas on Mother's grave. I wonder and wonder again if she knows when I am so near the place where we left her, the place where it always seems to me some life must yet linger. I have all my life been familiar with the doubt whether any consciousness, any personality survives death; and yet it is as natural to assume that life goes on as it is to suppose the sun will rise to-morrow. I know that my feeling proves nothing; but still instinctively I cling to it.
In any case there is the chance the dead are alive and alert somewhere in the shadows, and if they are they must be glad not to be forgotten. I should not be willing to take the chance, and neglect the grave of one who had been fond of me. Mother loved me as I loved her; and this decides I shall run no risk of her being unhappy after death in the thought that I have forgotten.
I suppose I cling to a feeling that there must be some sort of immortality largely from the loneliness I feel. The idea of never seeing Father or Mother again is more than I could endure. Father used to say that after all each of us is always really alone in this world, and even our best friends can no more come close to us than if they did not exist; but this always seemed to me a sort of cold, forlorn theory. The warmth of human companionship somehow makes it impossible for me to feel anything like this. When I said so to Father, I remember he smiled, and said he was glad I did find it impossible.
One thing I am sure of to the very bottom of my heart: that things are somehow completely right, so that whatever death means it must be part of a whole which is as it should be.
August 10. To-day Tom brought me a bunch of cardinal-flowers. He had been up to the Lake Meadows, he said, and thought I might like them. The whole parlor is alive with the wonderful crimson – no, scarlet, of the great flaming armful of blossoms. Tom used to get them for me when I was a girl, but since those days I have had only a stray spike now and then. They bring back the past, and the life-long friendship I have had with Tom. I wonder sometimes why I have never been in love with Tom. Life never seemed complete without him. In the years he kept away on account of George I missed him sorely, and more than once I have thought of all sorts of ways to bring things back to the former footing; only I knew all the time it was of no use. It is the greatest comfort to have the old friendship back, and now Tom must understand that I have no more than friendship to give him. It would be vexing if he should misunderstand, but I must take care he does not.
August 11. I have been at the Town Hall helping to make ready for a raspberry festival, to raise money for the church. Miss Charlotte came after me, and of course I had to go. She said all that was wanted was my taste to direct about decorating the hall, but I have been told so before, and I knew from experience that taste is expected to work out its own salvation. To be really fair I suppose I should say I cannot stand by and give directions, but have to take hold with my own hands, so it is nobody's fault but my own if I do things. Besides, it is really good fun among the neighbors, with the air full of the smell of cedar, with all the pretty young girls making wreaths and laughing while they work, and with your feet tangled in evergreens and laurel whenever you cross the floor. Miss Charlotte is in her element at such a time. Her great-throated laugh, as strong as a man's, rings out, and she seems for the time quite happy and jolly with excitement.
It came over me to-day almost with a sense of dismay how old I seem to the young girls. They treated me with a sort of respect which couldn't be put into words exactly, I suppose, but which I felt. Somehow I believe the breaking of my engagement has made me seem older to them. Perhaps it is my foolish fancy, but I seem to see that while I was engaged I had still for them a hold on youth which I have now lost. I suppose they never thought it out, but I know they feel now that I am very much their senior.
At a time like this, too, I realize how true it is that I am somehow a little outside of the life of the village. I have lived here almost all my life. Except for the years I was at school, and a winter or two in Boston or abroad I have been generally at home. I know almost everybody in town, by sight at least. Yet I always find when I am among Tuskamuck people in this way that I am looking at them as if I were a spectator. I wonder if this means that I am egotistical or queer, or only that my life has been so much more among books and intellectual things than the life of most of them. I am sure I love the town and my neighbors.
The thing I wish to put down, however, has nothing to do with my feelings toward the town. It is that I am ashamed of the way I wrote the other day about Mr. Saychase. He entered the hall this afternoon just as old Mrs. Oliver came limping in to see the decorations; and the lovely way in which he helped the poor old lame creature made me blush for myself. I almost wanted to go to him and apologize then and there. It would have been awkward, however, first to explain that I had made fun of him in my diary, and then apologize! But he is a good soul, even if he did think I was a sort of nineteenth century Zorahida, to give up Mohammedanism for the sake of wedding a Christian chief. – And here I go again!
August 15. I have been reading to-night a book about the East, and it has stirred me a good deal. The speculations of strange peoples on the great mystery of life and death bring them so close to us. They show how alike all mankind is, and how we all grope about after some clue to existence. On the whole it is better, I think, not to give much thought to what may come after death, – no more thought, that is, than we cannot help. We can never know, and we must either raise vague hopes to make us less alive to the importance of life, the reality of life – I do not know how to say it. Of course all religion insists on the importance of life, but rather as a preparation for another existence. I think we need to have it always before us that what is important is not what will happen after we are dead and gone, but what is happening now because we are alive and have a hand in things. I see this is not very clear, but I am sure the great thing is to live as if life were of value in itself. To live rightly, to make the most out of the life we can see and feel, is all that humanity is equal to, and it is certainly worth doing for its own sake.