"It's not Flora I'm crying about … it is being so misunderstood." I was thinking that Helmeth Garrett would suppose I had stayed away from Flora's on his account; she would never dare to say she had not invited me. Tommy's arm came comfortingly along the back of the bench.
"It's just because they do understand that they are mad; they know a fellow would give his eyes to kiss you. Infernal cad! to snatch it like that; and I've never even asked you for one." His voice was very close to my ear. "I tell you, Olivia, I've thought of something. If you were to be engaged to me … you know I've always wanted … then nobody would have a right to say anything. They'd see that you just left it to me."
"Oh," I blurted, "it's not so bad as that!"
"You think about it," he urged. "I don't want to bother you, but if you need it, why here I am." It was because I was thinking of him so little that I hadn't noticed where Tommy's arm had got by this time. That unfulfilled kiss had seemed somehow to leave me unimaginably exposed, assailed. I was needing desperately then to be kissed again, to find myself revalued.
"It's awfully good of you, Tommy…"
I do not know how it was that neither of us heard Forester come up from the gate; all at once there was his foot on the step; as he came into the porch a soft sound drew him, he stared blankly on us for a moment and then laughed shortly.
"Oh! it's you this time, Bettersworth. I thought it might be that Garrett chap."
That was unkind of Forester, but there were extenuations. I found afterward that Belle had teased Flora to ask him and he had refused, thinking it unbrotherly when I was not to be invited, and he and Belle had quarrelled.
"I don't know as it matters to you" – Tommy was valiant – "whom she kisses, if I don't mind it."
"You? What have you got to do with it?"
"Well, a lot. I'm engaged to her."
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
The first notion of an obligation I had in writing this part of my story, was that if it is to be serviceable, no lingering sentiment should render it less than literal, and none of that egotism turned inside out which makes a kind sanctity of the personal experience, prevent me from offering it whole. And the next was that the only way in which it could be made to appear in its complete pitiableness, would be to write it from the point of view of Tommy Bettersworth. For after all, I have emerged – retarded, crippled in my affectional capacities, bodily the worse, but still with wings to spread and some disposition toward flying. And when I think of the dreams Tommy had, how he must have figured in them to himself, large between me and all misadventure, adored, dependable; and then how he blundered and lost himself in the mazes of unsuitability, I find bitterness augmenting in me not on my account but his. The amazing pity of it was that it might all have turned out very well if I had been what I seemed to him and to my family at the time when I let him engage himself to me to save me from immanent embarrassment.
My mother, though she took on for the occasion an appropriate solemnity, was frankly relieved to have me so well disposed. Tommy had been brought up in the church, had no bad habits, and was earning a reasonable salary with Burton Brothers, Tailors and Outfitters.
There was nobody whose business it was to tell me that I did not love Tommy enough to marry him. I have often wondered, supposing a medium of communication had been established between my mother and me, if I had told her how much more that other kiss had meant to me than Tommy's mild osculation, she would have understood or made a fight for me? I am afraid she would only have seen in it evidence of an infatuation for an undesirable young man, one who smoked and drove rakishly about town in red neckties on Sunday morning. But in fact I liked Tommy immensely. The mating instinct was awake; all our world clapped us forward to the adventure.
If you ask what the inward monitor was about on this occasion, I will say that it is always and singularly inept at human estimates. If, often in search of companionship, its eye is removed from the Mark, to fix upon the personal environment, it is still unfurnished to divine behind which plain exterior lives another like itself! I took Tommy's community of interest for granted on the evidence of his loving me, though, indeed, after all these years I am not quite clear why he, why Forester and Pauline couldn't have walked in the way with me toward the Shining Destiny. I was not conscious of any private advantage; certainly so far as our beginnings were concerned, none showed, and I should have been glad of their company … and here at the end I am walking in it alone.
About a month after my engagement, Henry Mills proposed to Pauline, and she began preparations to be married the following June. Tommy's salary not being thought to justify it so soon, the idea of my own marriage had not come very close to me until I began to help Pauline work initials on table linen.
The chief difference between Pauline and me had been that she had lived all her life, so to speak, at home; nothing exigent to her social order had ever found her "out"; but Olivia seemed always to be at the top of the house or somewhere in the back garden, to whom the normal occasions presented themselves as a succession of cards under the door. I do not mean to say that I actually missed any of these appointed visitors, but all my early life comes back to me as a series of importunate callers whose names I was not sure of, and who distracted me frightfully from something vastly more pleasant and important that I wanted very much to do, without knowing very well what it was. But it was in the long afternoons when Pauline and I sat upstairs together sewing on our white things that I began to take notice of the relation of what happened to me to the things that went on inside, and to be intrigued away from the Vision by the possibility of turning it into facts of line and colour and suitability. It was the beginning of my realizing what came afterward to be such a bitter and engrossing need with me, the need of money.
Much that had struck inharmoniously on me in the furnishings of Taylorville, had identified itself so with the point of view there, that I had come to think of the one as being the natural and inevitable expression of the other; now, with the growing appreciation of a home of my own as a medium of self-realization, I accepted its possibility of limitation by the figure of my husband's income without being entirely daunted thereby. For I was still of the young opinion that getting rich involved no more serious matter than setting about it. As I saw it then, Men's Tailoring and Outfitting did not appear an unlikely beginning; if Tommy had achieved the magnificence I planned for him, it wouldn't have been on the whole more remarkable than what has happened. What I had to reckon with later was the astonishing fact that Tommy liked plush furniture, and liked it red for choice.
I do not know why it should have taken me by surprise to find him in harmony with his bringing up; there was no reason for the case being otherwise except as I seemed to find one in his being fond of me. His mother's house was not unlike other Taylorvillian homes, more austerely kept; the blinds were always pulled down in the best room, and they never opened the piano except when there was company, or for the little girls to practise their music lessons. Mrs. Bettersworth was a large, fair woman with pale, prominent eyes, and pale hair pulled back from a corrugated forehead, and his sisters, who were all younger than Tommy, were exactly like her, their eyes if possible more protruded, which you felt to be owing to their hair being braided very tightly in two braids as far apart as possible at the corners of their heads.
They treated me always with the greatest respect. If there had been anybody who could have thrown any light on the situation it would have been Mr. Bettersworth. He was a dry man, with what passed in Taylorville for an eccentric turn of mind. He had, for instance, been known to justify himself for putting Tommy to the Men's Outfitters rather than to his own business of building and contracting, on the ground that Tommy wanted the imagination for it. Just as if an imagination could be of use to anybody!
"So you are going to undertake to make Tommy happy?" he said to me on the occasion of my taking supper with the family as a formal acknowledgment of my engagement.
"Don't you think I can do it?" He was looking at me rather quizzically, and I really wished to know.
"Oh! I was wondering," he said, "what you would do with what you had left over." But it was years before I understood what he meant by that.
About the time I was bridesmaid for Pauline, Tommy had an advantageous offer that put our marriage almost immediately within reach. Burton Brothers was a branch house, one of a score with the Head at Chicago, to whom Tommy had so commended himself under the stimulus of being engaged, that on the establishment of a new store in Higgleston they offered him the sales department. There was also to be a working tailor and a superintendent visiting it regularly from Chicago, which its nearness to the metropolis allowed.
All that we knew of Higgleston was that it was a long settled farming community, which, having discovered itself at the junction of two railway lines that approached Chicago from the southeast, conceived itself to have arrived there by some native superiority, and awoke to the expectation of importance.
It lay, as respects Taylorville, no great distance beyond the flat horizon of the north, where the prairie broke into wooded land again, far enough north not to have been fanned by the hot blast of the war and the spiritual struggle that preceded it, and so to have missed the revitalizing processes that crowded the few succeeding years. Whatever difference there was between it and Taylorville besides population, was just the difference between a community that has fought whole-heartedly and one that stood looking on at the fight.
It was not far enough from Taylorville to have struck out anything new for itself in manners or furniture, but the necessity of going south two or three hours to change cars, and north again several hours more, set up an illusion of change which led to a disappointment in its want of variety. Tommy went out in July, and in a month wrote me that he would be able to come for me as soon as I was ready, and hoping it would not be long. If I had looked, as in the last hesitancies of girlhood I believe I did, for my mother to have raised an objection to my going so far from home, I found myself, instead, almost with the feeling of being pushed out of the nest. It seemed as if in hastening me out of the family she would be the sooner free to give herself without reproach to a new and extraordinary scheme of Forester's. What I guess now to have been in part the motive, was that she already had been touched by the warning of that disorder which finally carried her off, which, with the curious futility of timid women, she hoped, by not mentioning, to postpone.
For a long time now Forester had found himself in the situation of having grown beyond his virtues. That assumption of mannishness which sat so prettily on his nonage was rendered inconspicuous by his majority. People who had forgotten that he had never had any boyhood, found nothing especially commendable in the mild soberness of twenty-three. I have a notion, too, that the happy circumstance of my marriage lit up for him some personal phases which he could hardly have regarded with complacence, for by this time he had passed, in his character of philanderer, from being hopefully regarded as reclaimable to constancy, to a sort of public understudy in the practice of the affections. However it had come about, the young ladies who still took on Forester at intervals, no longer looked on him so much as privileged but as eminently safe; and the number of girls in a given community who can be counted on for such a performance, is limited. That summer before I was married, after Belle Endsleigh had run away from home with a commercial traveller who disappointed the moral instance by making her a very good husband afterward, my brother found himself, as regards the young people's world, in a situation of uneasy detachment. And there was no doubt that the Coöperative, where he had been seven years, bored him excessively. It was then he conceived the idea of reinstating himself in the atmosphere of importance by setting himself up in business.
Adjacent to Niles's Ice Cream Parlours, there was a small stationery and news agency which might be bought and enlarged to creditable proportions. There was, I believe, actually nothing to be urged against this as a matter of business; the difficulty was that to accomplish it my mother would be obliged to hypothecate the whole of her small capital. What my mother really thought about her property was that she held it in trust for the family interest, and that, with the secret intimation of her end which I surmise must have reached her by this time, she believed to be served by Forester's plan. It was so much the general view that by marrying I took myself out of the family altogether, that I felt convinced that she meant, so soon as that was accomplished, to undertake what, in the face of my protesting attitude, she had not the courage to begin. I remember how shocked she was at my telling her that this tying up of the two ends of life in a monetary obligation, would put her and Forester very much in the situation of a young man married to a middle-aged woman. I mention this here because the implication that grew out of it, of my marriage being looked forward to as a relief, had much to do with the failure out of my life at this juncture, of informing intimacy.
A great deal of necessary information had come my way through Pauline's marriage, through the comment set free by Belle Endsleigh's affair, through the natural awakening of my mind toward the intimations of books. Marriage I began to perceive as an engulfing personal experience. Until now I hadn't been able to think of it except as a means of providing pleasant companionship on the way toward that large and shining world for which I felt myself forever and unassailably fit. It began to exhibit now, through vistas that allured, the aspect of a vast inhuman grin. Somewhere out of this prospect of sympathy and understanding, arose upon you the tremendous inundation of Life. Dimly beyond the point of Tommy's joyous possession of me, I was aware of an incalculable force by which the whole province of my being was assailed, very different from the girlish prevision of motherhood which had floated with the fragrance of orris root from Aunt Alice's bureau drawer in the Allingham's spare room.
I don't say this is the way all girls feel about the approach of maternity, but I saw it then like the wolf in the fairy tale, which as soon as its head was admitted, thrust in a shoulder and so came bodily into the room and devoured the protestant. Long afterward, when I was in a position to know something of the private experience of trapeze performers, I learned that they came to a point sometimes in mid-spring when the body apprised them of inadequacy, a warning sure to be followed in no long time by disaster. I have thought sometimes that what reached me then was the advice of a body instinctively aware of being unequal to the demands about to be imposed upon it.
I hardly know now by what road I arrived at the certainty that some women, Pauline for instance, were able to face this looming terror of childbearing by making terms with it. Life, it appeared, waited at their doors with respect, modified the edge of its inevitableness to their convenience. If Pauline had been accessible – but she was living in Chicago with Henry Mills, going out a great deal, and writing me infrequent letters of bright complacency. It was only in the last frightened gasp I fixed upon my mother. You must imagine for yourself from what you know of nice girls thirty years ago, how inarticulate the whole business was; the most I can do is to have you understand my desperate need to know, to interpose between marriage and maternity never so slight an interval in which to collect myself and leave off shrinking.
About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was when the light failed. Something in the work we had been doing, putting the last touches to my wedding dress, led her to speak of her own, and of my father as a young man. The mention pricked me to notice what I recall now as characteristic of Taylorville women, that, with all she had been through, the war, her eight children, so many graves, there was still in her attitude, toward all these, a kind of untutored virginity. It made, my noticing it then and being touched by it, a sort of bridge by which it seemed for the moment she might be drawn over to my side. On the impulse I spoke.
"Mother," I said, "I want to know?.."
It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right. Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended shock come over my mother's reminiscent softness, the nearly animal rage of terror with which the unknown, the unaccustomed, assailed her.
"Olivia! Olivia!" She stood up, her knitting rigid in her hands, the ball of it speeding away in the dusk of the floor on some private terror of its own. "Olivia, I'll not hear of such things! You are not to speak of them, do you understand! I'll have nothing to do with them!"
"I wanted to know," I said. "I thought you could tell me…"
I went over and stood by the window; a little dry snow was blowing – it was the first week in November – beginning to collect on the edges of the walks and along the fences; the landscape showed sketched in white on a background of neutral gray. I heard a movement in the room behind me; my mother came presently and stood looking out with me. She was very pale, scared but commiserating. Somehow my question had glanced in striking the dying nerve of long since encountered dreads and pains. We faced them together there in the cold twilight.
"I'm sorry, daughter" – she hesitated – "I can't help you. I don't know … I never knew myself."
CHAPTER II
It is no doubt owing to the habit of life in Higgleston being so little differentiated from Taylorville that I was never able to get any other impression of it than as a place one put up at on the way to some other; always it bore to my mind the air of a traveller's room in one of those stops where it is necessary to open the trunks but not worth while to unpack them. Nor do I think it was altogether owing to what I left there that my recollection of it centres paganly about the cemetery. In Taylorville, love and birth, though but scantily removed from the savour of impropriety, were still the salient facts of existence, but in Higgleston a funeral was your real human occasion. It was as if the rural fear of innovation had thrown them back for a pivotal centre upon the point of continuity with their past.
It was a generous rolling space set aside for the dead, abutting on two sides on the boardwalks of the town, stretching back by dips and hollows to the wooded pastures. Near the gates which opened from the walk, it was divided off in single plots and family allotments, scattering more and more to the farthest neglected mounds that crept obscurely under the hazel thickets and the sapling oaks, happiest when named the least, assimilated quickliest to their native earth. It was this that rendered the pagan touch, for though nearly all Higgleston was church-going and looked forward to a hymn-book heaven, they seemed to me never quite dissevered from the untutored pastures to which their whole living and dying was a process of being reabsorbed.
Higgleston, until this junction of railroads occurred, had been a close settled farming community, and a vague notion of civic improvement had ripped through the centre of its wide old yards and comfortable, country looking dwellings, a shadeless, unpaved street lined with what were known as business blocks, with a tendency to run mostly to front and a general placarded state of being to let, or about to be opened on these premises.
Beyond the railway station there was a dingy region devoted to car shops and cheap lodgings, known locally as Track Town, whose inhabitants were forever at odds with the older rural population, withdrawing itself into a kind of aristocracy of priority and propriety; and between these an intermediary group, self styled, "the leading business men of the town," forever and trivially busy to reconcile the two factions in the interests of trade. That Tommy was by reason of his position as managing salesman of Burton Brothers, generically of this class, might have had something to do with my never having formed any vital or lasting relations with either community; and it might have been for quite other reasons. For in the very beginning of my stay there, Life had seized me; that bubbling, frothing Force, working forever to breach the film of existence. I was used by it, I was abused by it. For what does Life care what it does to the tender bodies of women?
My baby was born within ten months of my marriage and most of that time I was wretchedly, depressingly ill. All my memories of my early married life are of Olivia, in the mornings still with frost, cowering away from the kitchen sights and smells, or gasping up out of engulfing nausea to sit out the duty calls of the leading ladies of Higgleston in the cold, disordered house; of Tommy gulping unsuitable meals of underdone and overdone things, and washing the day's accumulation of dishes after business hours, patient and portentously cheerful, with Olivia in a wrapper, half hysterical with weakness – all the young wife's dreams gone awry! And Tommy too, he must have had visions of himself coming home to a well-kept house, of delicious little dinners and long hours in which he should appear in his proper character as the adored, achieving male. Not long ago I read a book of a man's life written by a man, in which he justified himself of unfaithfulness because his wife appeared before him habitually in curl papers – and there were days when I couldn't even do my hair!
In the beginning we had taken, in respect to Tommy's position among those same live business men, a house rather too large for us, and we hadn't counted on the wages of a servant. Now with the necessity upon us of laying by money for the Great Expense, we felt less justified in it than ever. This pinch of necessity was of the quality of corrosion on what must have been meant for the consummate experience. I have to dwell on it here because in this practical confusion of my illness, was laid the foundation of our later failure to come together on any working basis. We hadn't, in fact, time to find it; no time to understand, none whatever in which to explore the use of passion and react into that superunion of which the bodily relation is the overt sign – young things we were, who had not fairly known each other as man and woman before we were compelled to trace in one another the lineaments of parents, all attention drawn away from the imperative business of framing a common ideal, to centre on the child.
What this precipitance accomplished was, that, instead of being drawn insensibly to find in the exigencies of marriage the natural unfolding of that inward vitality, always much stronger in me than any exterior phase, I was by the shock of too early maternity driven apart from the usual, and I still believe the happier, destiny of women.
With all this we were spared the bitterness of the unwelcoming thought. Little homely memories swim up beyond the pains and depressions to mark, like twigs and leafage on a freshet, the swelling of the new affection: Effie at Montecito, overruling all my mother's shocked suggestions as to her supposed obliviousness of my condition, sitting up nights to sew for me … the dress I tried to make myself … the bureau drawer from which I used to take the little things every night to look at them … the smell of orris.
"See, Tommy; I've done so much to-day. Isn't it pretty?"
"My dear, you've shown that to me at least forty times and I've always said so."
"Yes, but isn't it?.. the little sleeves … did you think anything could be so small? Tommy, don't you wish it would come?"
We had to make what we could of these moments of thrilled expectancy, of tender brooding curiosity.
I scarcely recall now all the reasons why it was thought best for me to go back to my mother in August, and to the family physician, but I find it all pertinent to my subject. Whatever was done there was mostly wrong, though I was years finding it out. I mean that whatever chance I had of growing up into the competent mother of a family was probably lost to me through the inexactitudes of country practice. We hadn't then arrived at the realization that the well or ill going of maternity is a matter of sceptics rather than sentiment. Taylorville was a town of ten thousand inhabitants, but at that time no one had heard of such a thing as a trained nurse; the business of midwifery was given over in general to a widow so little attractive that she was thought not to have a chance of marrying again, and by the circumstance of having had two or three children of her own, believed to be eminently fit. To Olivia's first encounter with the rending powers of Life, there went any amount of affectionate consideration and much old wives' lore of an extraordinary character. It seems hardly credible now, but in the beginning of things going wrong, there were symptoms concealed from the doctor on the ground of delicacy.
My baby, too, poor little man, was feeble from birth, a bottle baby; the best that could have been done would hardly have been a chance for him. Lying there in the hot, close room, all the air shut out with the light, in the midst of pains, I made a fight for him, tried to interpose such scraps of better knowledge as had come to me through reading, but they made no headway against my mother's confidential, "Well, I ought to know, I've buried five," and against Forester, who by the added importance of having invested all her fortune, had gained such way with my mother that she listened respectfully to his explication of what should be done for the baby. It was Forester who overbore with ridicule my suggestion that he should be fed at regular hours, for which I never forgave him. But I had enough to do to fortify my racked body against the time when I should be obliged to get up and go on again, as it seemed privately I never should be able.
And they were all so fond and proud of my little Thomas Henry – he was named so for his father and mine – Effie simply adored him; the wonder of his smallness, the way in which he moved his limbs and opened and shut his eyes; quite as if there had never been one born before. The way they hung over him, and the wrong things they did! Even Cousin Lydia drove into church the first Sunday after, for the purpose of holding him for a quarter of an hour in her large, silk poplin arms, at the end of which time she had softened almost to the point of confidence.
"I thought I was going to have one once," she admitted, "but somehow I couldn't seem to manage it." She looked over to where Cousin Judd sat with my mother. "He was always fond of young ones…" It occurred to me then that Cousin Lydia was probably a much misunderstood woman.
Of the next six months at Higgleston after I returned to it with a three months' old baby I have scarcely any recollection that is not mixed up with bodily torment for myself and anxiety for the child. I think it probable that most of that time my husband found the house badly kept, the meals irregular and his wife hysterical. I hadn't anything to spare with which to consider what figure I might have cut in the eyes of the onlooker. Tommy shines out for me in that period by reason of the unwearying patience and cheerfulness with which he successfully ignored the general unsatisfactoriness of his home, and at times for a certain exasperation I had with him, as if by being somehow less quiescent he might have opposed a better front to the encroachments of distress. We did try help in the kitchen after our finances had a little recovered from the strain of my confinement, a Higgleston girl of no very great competence and a sort of back-door visiting acquaintance with two thirds of the community. Her chief accomplishments while she stayed with us, were concocted out of the scraps and fag ends of our private conversations. I could always tell that Ida had overheard something by the alacrity with which she banged the pots about in the kitchen in order that she might get through with her work and go out and tell somebody. In the end Tommy said that when it came to a choice between getting his own meals and losing his best customers he preferred the former.
All this time I did not know how ill I was because of the consuming anxiety for the baby. I remember times in the night – the dreadful momentary revolt of my body rousing to this new demand upon it, before the mind waked to the selfless consideration; and the failure of composure which was as much weakness as fear; the long watching, the walking to and fro, and the debates as to whether we ought or ought not to venture on the expense of the doctor. And for long years afterward what is the bitterest of bitterness, finding out that we had done the wrong thing. To this day I cannot come across any notices of the more competent methods for the care of delicate children, without a remembering pang.
All the time this was going on I was aware by a secondary detached sort of self, that there was a point somewhere beyond this perplexity of pain, at which the joyful possession of my son should begin. I was anxious to get at him, to have speech with him, to realize his identity – any woman will understand – and along about the time the blue flags and the live-for-evers and the white bridal wreaths were at their best in the cemetery, it came upon me terrifyingly that I might, after all, have to let him go without it. We were walking there that day, the first we had thought it safe to take the baby out, for it was customary to walk in the cemetery on Sunday and almost obligatory to your social standing. The oaks were budding, and the wind in the irises and the shadow of them on the tombstones, and the people all in their Sunday best, walking in the warm light, gave an effect of more aliveness than the sombre yards of the town could afford.