"I'm damned tired making the best of things, if you want to know what is the matter with me," he had remarked crossly to his wife.
"The idea, Mr. Peachey! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" that sprightly lady had responded while she prepared herself for her victory over Cyrus.
"Well, I ain't," honest Tom had retorted. "I've gone on pretending for fifty years and I'm going to stop it. What good has it done, anyway? It hasn't put a roof on, has it?"
"I told you you oughtn't to go to sleep right on top of your dinner," she had replied soothingly. "I declare you're perfectly purple. I never saw you so upset. Here, take this palm-leaf fan and go and see if you can't find a draught. You know it's downright sinful to talk that way after the Lord has been so good to you."
But Philosophy, though she is unassailable when she clings to her safeguard of the universal, meets her match whenever she descends to an open engagement with the particular.
"W-what's He done for me?" demanded not Tom, but the whiskey inside of him.
Driven against that bleak rock of fact upon which so many shining generalizations have come to wreck, Mrs. Peachey had cast about helplessly for some floating spar of logic which might bear her to the firm ground of established optimism. "I declare, Tom, I believe you are out of your head!" she exclaimed, adding immediately, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself to be so ungrateful when the good Lord has kept you out of the poorhouse. If you weren't tipsy, I'd give you a hard shaking. Now, you take that palm-leaf fan and go right straight downstairs."
So Tom had gone, for his wife, who lacked the gift of argument, possessed the energy of character which renders such minor attributes unnecessary; and Oliver, passing through the hall a couple of hours later, found him still helplessly seeking the draught towards which she had directed him.
"Any chance of a breeze springing up?" inquired the young man as they moved together to the porch.
The force which was driving him out of the house into the suffocating streets was in his voice when he spoke, but honest Tom did not hear it. After the four war years in which he had been almost sublime, the old soldier had gradually ceased even to be human, and that vegetable calm which envelops persons who have fallen into the habit of sitting still, had endowed him at last with the perfect serenity of a cabbage. The only active principle which ever moved in him was the borrowed principle of alcohol – for when that artificial energy subsided, he sank back, as he was beginning to do now, into the spiritual inertia which sustains those who have outlived their capacity for the heroic.
"I ain't felt a breath," he replied, peering southward where the stars were coming out in a cloudless sky. "I don't reckon we'll get it till on about eleven."
"Looks as if we were in for a scorching summer, doesn't it?"
"You never can tell. There's always a spell in June." And he who had been a hero, sat down in his cane-bottomed chair and waved the palm-leaf fan feebly in front of him. He had had his day; he had fought his fight; he had helped to make the history of battles – and now what remained to him? The stainless memory of the four years when he was a hero; a smoldering ember still left from that flaming glory which was his soul!
In the street the dust lay thick and still, and the wilted foliage of the mulberry trees hung motionless from the great arching boughs. Only an aspen at the corner seemed alive and tremulous, while sensitive little shivers ran through the silvery leaves, which looked as if they were cut out of velvet. As Oliver left the house, the town awoke slowly from its lethargy, and the sound of laughter floated to him from the porches behind their screens of honeysuckle or roses. But even this laughter seemed to him to contain the burden of weariness which oppressed and disenchanted his spirit. The pall of melancholy spread from the winding yellow river at the foot of the hill to the procession of cedars which stood pitch-black against the few dim stars on the eastern horizon.
"What is the use?" he asked himself suddenly, uttering aloud that grim question which lies always beneath the vivid, richly clustering impressions in the imaginative mind. Of his struggle, his sacrifice – of his art even – what was the use? A bitter despondency – the crushing despondency of youth which age does not feel and has forgotten – weighed upon him like a physical burden. And because he was young and not without a certain pride in the intensity of his suffering, he increased his misery by doggedly refusing to trace it back to its natural origin in an empty stomach.
But the laws that govern the variable mind of man are as inscrutable as the secret of light. Turning into a cross street, he came upon the tower of Saint James' Church, and he grew suddenly cheerful. The quickening of his pulses changed the aspect of the town as completely as if an invigorating shower had fallen upon it. The supreme, haunting interest of life revived.
He had meant merely to pass the rectory without stopping; but as he turned into the slanting street at the foot of the twelve stone steps, he saw a glimmer of white on the terrace, and the face of Virginia looked down at him over the palings of the gate. Immediately it seemed to him that he had known from the beginning that he should meet her. A sense of recognition so piercingly sweet that it stirred his pulses like wine was in his heart as he moved towards her. The whole universe appeared to him to have been planned and perfected for this instant. The languorous June evening, the fainting sweetness of flowers, the strange lemon-coloured afterglow, and her face, shining there like a star in the twilight – these had waited for him, he felt, since the beginning of earth. That fatalistic reliance upon an outside Power, which assumed for him the radiant guise of first love, and for Susan the stark certainties of Presbyterianism, dominated him as completely as if he were the predestined vehicle of its expression. Ardent, yet passive, Virginia leaned above him on the dim terrace. So still she seemed that her breath left her parted lips as softly as the perfume detached itself from the opening rose-leaves. She made no gesture, she said no word – but suddenly he became aware that her stillness was stronger to draw him than any speech. All her woman's mystery was brooding there about her in the June twilight; and in this strange strength of quietness Nature had placed, for once, an invincible weapon in the weaker hands. Her appeal had become a part of the terrible and beneficent powers of Life.
Crossing the street, he went up the steps to where she leaned on the gate.
"It has been so long," he said, and the words seemed to him hideously empty. "I have not seen you but three times since the party."
She did not answer, and as he looked at her closer, he saw that her eyes were full of tears.
"Virginia!" he cried out sharply, and the next instant, at her first movement away from him, his arms were around her and his lips seeking hers.
The world stopped suddenly while a starry eternity enveloped them. All youth was packed into that minute, all the troubled sweetness of desire, all the fugitive ecstasy of fulfilment.
"I – I thought you did not care," she murmured beneath his kisses.
He could not speak – for it was a part of his ironic destiny that he, who was prodigal of light words, should find himself stricken dumb in any crucial instant.
"You know – you know – " he stammered, holding her closer.
"Then it – it is not all a dream?" she asked.
"I adored you from the first minute – you saw that – you knew it. I've wanted you day and night since I first looked at you."
"But you kept away. You avoided me. I couldn't understand."
"It was because I knew I couldn't be with you five minutes without kissing you. And I oughtn't to – it's madness in me – for I'm desperately poor, darling; I've no right to marry you."
A little smile shone on her lips. "As if I cared about that, Oliver."
"Then you'll marry me? You'll marry me, my beautiful?"
She lifted her face from his breast, and her look was like the enkindled glory of the sunrise. "Don't you see? Haven't you seen from the beginning?" she asked.
"I was afraid to see, darling – but, Virginia – oh, Virginia, let it be soon!"
When he went from her a little later, it seemed to him that all of life had been pressed down into the minute when he had held her against his breast; and as he walked through the dimly lighted streets, among the shadows of men who, like himself, were pursuing some shadowy joy, he carried with him that strange vision of a heaven on earth which has haunted mortal eyes since the beginning of love. Happiness appeared to him as a condition which he had achieved by a few words, by a kiss, in a minute of time, but which belonged to him so entirely now that he could never be defrauded of it again in the future. Whatever happened to him, he could never be separated from the bliss of that instant when he had held her.
He was going to Cyrus while his ecstasy ennobled even the prosaic fact of the railroad. And just as on that other evening, when he had rushed in anger away from the house of his uncle, so now he was exalted by the consciousness that he was following the lead of the more spiritual part of his nature – for the line of least resistance was so overgrown with exquisite impressions that he no longer recognized it. The sacrifice of art for love appeared to him to-day as splendidly romantic as the sacrifice of comfort for art had seemed to him a few months ago. His desire controlled him so absolutely that he obeyed its different promptings under the belief that he was obeying the principles whose names he borrowed. The thing he wanted was transmuted by the fire of his temperament into some artificial likeness to the thing that was good for him.
On the front steps, between the two pink oleanders, Cyrus was standing with his gaze fixed on a small grocery store across the street, and at the sight of his nephew a look of curiosity, which was as personal an emotion as he was in the habit of feeling, appeared on his lean yellow face. Behind him, the door into the hall stood open, and his stooping figure was outlined against the light of the gas-jet by the staircase.
"You see I've come," said Oliver; for Cyrus, who never spoke first unless he was sure of dominating the situation, had waited for him to begin.
"Yes, I see," replied the old man, not unkindly. "I expected you, but hardly so soon – hardly so soon."
"It's about the place on the railroad. If you are still of the same mind, I'd like you to give me a trial."
"When would you want to start?"
"The sooner the better. I'd rather get settled there before the autumn. I'm going to be married sometime in the autumn – October, perhaps."
"Ah!" said Cyrus softly, and Oliver was grateful to him because he didn't attempt to crow.
"We haven't told any one yet – but I wanted to make sure of the job. It's all right, then, isn't it?"
"Oh, yes, it's all right, if you do your part. She's Gabriel Pendleton's girl, isn't she?"
"She's Virginia Pendleton. You know her, of course." He tried honestly to be natural, but in spite of himself he could not keep a note of constraint out of his voice. Merely to discuss Virginia with Cyrus seemed, in some subtle way, an affront to her. Yet he knew that the old man wanted to be kind, and the knowledge touched him.
"Oh, yes, I know her. She's a good girl, and there doesn't live a better man than Gabriel."
"I don't deserve her, of course. But, then, there never lived a man who deserved an angel."
"Ain't you coming in?" asked Cyrus.
"Not this evening. I only wanted to speak to you. I suppose I'd better go down to the office to-morrow and talk to Mr. Burden, hadn't I?"
"Come about noon, and I'll tell him to expect you. Well, if you ain't coming in, I reckon I'll close this door."
Looking up a minute later from the pavement Oliver saw his aunt rocking slowly back and forth at the window of her room, and the remembrance of her fell like a blight over his happiness.
By the time he reached High Street a wind had risen beyond the hill near the river, and the scattered papers on the pavement fled like grey wings before him into the darkness. As the air freshened, faces appeared in the doors along the way, and the whole town seemed drinking in the cooling breeze as if it were water. On the wind sped, blowing over the slack figure of Mrs. Treadwell; blowing over the conquering smile of Susan, who was unbinding her long hair; blowing over the joy-brightened eyes of Virginia, who dreamed in the starlight of the life that would come to her; blowing over the ghost-haunted face of her mother, who dreamed of the life that had gone by her; blowing at last, beyond the river, over the tired hands of the little seamstress, who dreamed of nothing except of how she might keep her living body out of the poorhouse and her dead body out of the potter's field. And over the town, with its twenty-one thousand souls, each of whom contained within itself a separate universe of tragedy and of joy, of hope and of disappointment, the wind passed as lightly it passed over the unquiet dust in the streets below.
BOOK II
THE REALITY
CHAPTER I
VIRGINIA PREPARES FOR THE FUTURE
"Mother, I'm so happy! Oh! was there ever a girl so happy as I am?"
"I was, dear, once."
"When you married father? Yes, I know," said Virginia, but she said it without conviction. In her heart she did not believe that marrying her father – perfect old darling that he was! – could ever have caused any girl just the particular kind of ecstasy that she was feeling. She even doubted whether such stainless happiness had ever before visited a mortal upon this planet. It was not only wonderful, it was not only perfect, but it felt so absolutely new that she secretly cherished the belief that it had been invented by the universe especially for Oliver and herself. It was ridiculous to imagine that the many million pairs of lovers that were marrying every instant had each experienced a miracle like this, and yet left the earth pretty much as they had found it before they fell in love.
It was a week before her wedding, and she stood in the centre of the spare room in the west wing, which had been turned over to Miss Willy Whitlow. The little seamstress knelt now at her feet, pinning up the hem of a black silk polonaise, and turning her head from time to time to ask Mrs. Pendleton if she was "getting the proper length." For a quarter of a century, no girl of Virginia's class had married in Dinwiddie without the crowning benediction of a black silk gown, and ever since the announcement of Virginia's betrothal her mother had cramped her small economies in order that she might buy "grosgrain" of the best quality.
"Is that right, mother? Do you think I might curve it a little more in front?" asked the girl, holding her feet still with difficulty because she felt that she wanted to dance.
"No, dear, I think it will stay in fashion longer if you don't shorten it. Then it will be easier to make over the more goods you leave in it."
"It looks nice on me, doesn't it?" Standing there, with the stiff silk slipping away from her thin shoulders, and the dappled sunlight falling over her neck and arms through the tawny leaves of the paulownia tree in the garden, she was like a slim white lily unfolding softly out of its sheath.
"Lovely, darling, and it will be so useful. I got the very best quality, and it ought to wear forever."
"I made Mrs. William Goode one ten years ago, and she's still wearing it," remarked Miss Willy, speaking with an effort through a mouthful of pins.
A machine, which had been whirring briskly by the side window, stopped suddenly, and the girl who sewed there – a sickly, sallow-faced creature of Virginia's age, who was hired by Mrs. Pendleton, partly out of charity because she supported an invalid father who had been crippled in the war, and partly because, having little strength and being an unskilled worker, her price was cheap – turned for an instant and stared wistfully at the black silk polonaise over the strip of organdie which she was hemming. All her life she had wanted a black silk dress, and though she knew that she should probably never have one, and should not have time to wear it if she ever had, she liked to linger over the thought of it, very much as Virginia lingered over the thought of her lover, or as little Miss Willy lingered over the thought of having a tombstone over her after she was dead. In the girl's face, where at first there had been only admiration, a change came gradually. A quiver, so faint that it was hardly more than a shadow, passed over her drawn features, and her gaze left the trailing yards of silk and wandered to the blue October sky over the swinging leaves of the paulownia. But instead of the radiant autumn weather at which she was looking, she still saw that black silk polonaise which she wanted as she wanted youth and pleasure, and which she knew that she should never have.
"Everything is finished but this, isn't it, Miss Willy?" asked Virginia, and at the sound of her happy voice, that strange quiver passed again through the other girl's face.
"Everything except that organdie and a couple of nightgowns." There was no quiver in Miss Willy's face, for from constant consideration of the poorhouse and the cemetery, she had come to regard the other problems of life, if not with indifference, at least with something approaching a mild contempt. Even love, when measured by poverty or by death, seemed to lose the impressiveness of its proportions.
"And I'll have enough clothes to last me for years, shan't I, mother?"
"I hope so, darling. Your father and I have done the best that we could for you."
"You've been angels. Oh, how I shall hate to leave you!"
"If only you weren't going away, Jinny!" Then she broke down, and dropping the tomato-shaped pin-cushion she had been holding, she slipped from the room, while Virginia thrust the polonaise into Miss Willy's hands and fled breathlessly after her.
In the girl's room, with her head bowed on the top of the little bookcase, above those thin rows of fiction, Mrs. Pendleton was weeping almost wildly over the coming separation. She, who had not thought of herself for thirty years, had suddenly broken the constraint of the long habit. Yet it was characteristic of her, that even now her first feeling, when Virginia found her, should be one of shame that she had clouded for an instant the girl's happiness.
"It is nothing, darling. I have a little headache, and – oh, Jinny! Jinny! – "
"Mother, it won't be long. We are coming back to live just as soon as Oliver can get work. It isn't as if I were going for good, is it? And I'll write you every day – every single day. Mother, dearest, darling mother, I can't stay away from you – "
Then Virginia wept, too, and Mrs. Pendleton, forgetting her own sorrow at sight of the girl's tears, began to comfort her.
"Of course, you'll write and tell me everything. It will be almost as if I were with you."
"And you love Oliver, don't you, mother?"
"How could I help it, dear – only I can't quite get used to your calling your husband by his name, Jinny. It would have horrified your grandmother, and somehow it does seem lacking in respect. However, I suppose I'm old-fashioned."
"But, mother, he laughs if I call him 'Mr. Treadwell.' He says it reminds him of his Aunt Belinda."
"Perhaps he's right, darling. Anyway, he prefers it, and I fancy your grandfather wouldn't have liked to hear his wife address him so familiarly. Times have changed since my girlhood."
"And Oliver has lived out in the world so much, mother."
"Yes," said Mrs. Pendleton, but her voice was without enthusiasm. The "world" to her was a vague and sinister shape, which looked like a bubble, and exerted a malignant influence over those persons who lived beyond the borders of Virginia. Her imagination, which seldom wandered farther afield than the possibility of the rector or of Virginia falling ill, or the dreaded likelihood that her market bills would overrun her weekly allowance, was incapable of grasping a set of standards other than the one which was accepted in Dinwiddie.
"Wherever you are, Jinny, I hope that you will never forget the ideas your father and I have tried to implant in you," she said.
"I'll always try to be worthy of you, mother."
"Your first duty now, of course, is to your husband. Remember, we have always taught you that a woman's strength lies in her gentleness. His will must be yours now, and wherever your ideas cross, it is your duty to give up, darling. It is the woman's part to sacrifice herself."
"I know, mother, I know."
"I have never forgotten this, dear, and my marriage has been very happy. Of course," she added, while her forehead wrinkled nervously, "there are not many men like your father."
"Of course not, mother, but Oliver – "
In Mrs. Pendleton's soft, anxious eyes the shadow darkened, as if for the first time she had grown suspicious of the traditional wisdom which she was imparting. But this suspicion was so new and young that it could not struggle for existence against the archaic roots of her inherited belief in the Pauline measure of her sex. It was characteristic of her – and indeed of most women of her generation – that she would have endured martyrdom in support of the consecrated doctrine of her inferiority to man.
"Even in the matter of religion you ought to yield to him, darling," she said after a moment in which she had appealed to that orthodox arbiter, her conscience. "Your father and I were talking about what church you should go to, and I said that I supposed Oliver was a Presbyterian, like all of the Treadwells."
"Oh, mother, I didn't tell you before because I hoped I could change him – but he doesn't go to any church – he says they all bore him equally. He has broken away from all the old ideas, you know. He is dreadfully – unsettled."
The anxiety, which had been until then merely a shadow in Mrs. Pendleton's eyes, deepened into a positive pain.
"Your father must have known, for he talked to him – but he wouldn't tell me," she said.
"I made father promise not to. I hoped so I could change Oliver, and maybe I can after we're married, mother."
"If he has given up the old spiritual standards, what has he in place of them?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, and she had suddenly a queer feeling as if little fine needles were pricking her skin.
"I don't know, but he seems to have a great deal, more than any of us," answered Virginia, and she added passionately, "He is good, mother."
"I never doubted it, darling, but he is young, and his character cannot be entirely formed at his age. A man must be very strong in order to be good without faith."
"But he has faith, mother – of some kind."
"I am not judging him, my child, and neither your father nor I would ever criticise your husband to you. Your happiness was set on him, and we can only pray from our hearts that he will prove worthy of your love. He is very lovable, and I am sure that he has fine, generous traits. Your father has been completely won over by him."
"He likes me to be religious, mother. He says the church has cultivated the loveliest type of woman the world has ever seen."
"Then by fulfilling that ideal you will please him best."
"I shall try to be just what you have been to father – just as unselfish, just as devoted."
"I have made many mistakes, Jinny, but I don't think I have ever failed in love – not in love, at least."
Then the pain passed out of her eyes, and because it was impossible for her to look on any fact in life except through the transfiguring idealism with which the ages had endowed her, she became immediately convinced that everything, even the unsettling of Oliver's opinions, had been arranged for the best. This assurance was the more solacing because it was the result, not of external evidence, but of that instinctive decision of temperament which breeds the deepest conviction of all.
"Love is the only thing that really matters, isn't it, mother?"
"A pure and noble love, darling. It is a woman's life. God meant it so."
"You are so good! If I can only be half as good as you are."
"No, Jinny, I'm not really good. I have had many temptations – for I was born with a high temper, and it has taken me a lifetime to learn really to subdue it. I had – I have still an unfortunate pride. But for your father's daily example of humility and patience, I don't know how I could have supported the trials and afflictions we have known. Pray to be better than your mother, my child, if you want to become a perfect wife. What I am that seems good to you, your father has made me – "
"And father says that he would have been a savage but for you."
A tremor passed through Mrs. Pendleton's thin bosom, and bending over, she smoothed a fine darn in the skirt of her alpaca dress.
"We have loved each other," she answered. "If you and Oliver love as much, you will be happy whatever comes to you." Then choking down the hard lump in her throat, she took up her leather key basket from the little table beside the bed, and moved slowly towards the door. "I must see about supper now, dear," she said in her usual voice of quiet cheerfulness.
Left to herself, Virginia opened the worn copy of the prayer-book, which she kept at her bedside, and read the marriage service from beginning to end, as she had done every day since her engagement to Oliver. The words seemed to her, as they seemed to her mother, to be almost divine in their nobility and beauty. She was troubled by no doubt as to the inspired propriety of the canonical vision of woman. What could be more beautiful or more sacred than to be "given" to Oliver – to belong to him as utterly as she had belonged to her father? What could make her happier than the knowledge that she must surrender her will to his from the day of her wedding until the day of her death? She embraced her circumscribed lot with a passion which glorified its limitations. The single gift which the ages permitted her was the only one she desired. Her soul craved no adventure beyond the permissible adventure of being sought in marriage. Love was all that she asked of a universe that was overflowing with manifold aspects of life.
Beyond the window the tawny leaves of the paulownia were swinging in the October sunshine, and so gay they seemed that it was impossible to imagine them insensible to the splendour of the Indian Summer. Under the half bared boughs, on the green grass in the yard, those that had already fallen sped on, like a flock of frightened brown birds, towards the white paling fence of the churchyard.
While she sat there, with her prayer-book in her hand, and her eyes on the purple veil of the distance, it seemed to her that her joy was so complete that there was nothing left even to hope for. All her life she had looked forward to the coming of what she thought of vaguely as "happiness," and now that it was here, she felt that it put an end to the tremulous expectancy which had filled her girlhood with such wistful dreams. Marriage appeared to her (and indeed to Oliver, also) as a miraculous event, which would make not only herself, but every side of life, different for the future. After that there would be no vain longings, no spring restlessness, no hours of drab weariness, when the interests of living seemed to crumble from mere despondency. After that they would be always happy, always eager, always buoyantly alive.
Leaving the marriage service, her thoughts brooded in a radiant stillness on the life of love which would begin for her on the day of her wedding. A strange light – the light that quivered like a golden wing over the autumn fields – shone, also, into the secret chambers of her soul, and illumined the things which had appeared merely dull and commonplace until to-day. Those innumerable little cares which fill the lives of most women were steeped in the magic glow of this miraculous charm. She thought of the daily excitement of marketing, of the perpetual romance of mending his clothes, of the glorified monotony of pouring his coffee, as an adventurer on sunrise seas might dream of the rosy islands of hidden treasure. And then, so perfectly did she conform in spirit to the classic ideal of her sex, her imagination ecstatically pictured her in the immemorial attitude of woman. She saw herself waiting – waiting happily – but always waiting. She imagined the thrilling expectancy of the morning waiting for him to come home to his dinner; the hushed expectancy of the evening waiting for him to come home to his supper; the blissful expectancy of hoping that he might be early; the painful expectancy of fearing that he might be late. And it seemed to her divinely right and beautiful that, while he should have a hundred other absorbing interests in his life, her whole existence should perpetually circle around this single centre of thought. One by one, she lived in anticipation all the exquisite details of their life together, and in imagining them, she overlooked all possible changes that the years might bring, as entirely as she ignored the subtle variations of temperament which produce in each individual that fluid quantity we call character. She thought of Oliver, as she thought of herself, as though the fact of marriage would crystallize him into a shape from which he would never alter or dissolve in the future. And with a reticence peculiar to her type, she never once permitted her mind to stray to her crowning beatitude – the hope of a child; for, with that sacred inconsistency possible only to fixed beliefs, though motherhood was supposed to comprise every desire, adventure, and activity in the life of woman, it was considered indelicate for her to dwell upon the thought of it until the condition had become too obvious for refinement to deny.