# The Grandmothers/Chapter 10

IRA and Ursula Duff, Alwyn's maternal grandparents, were unhappily married; moral fanaticism and the extraordinary strength of both their characters had made of this common situation a bizarre tragedy. He was despotic and malicious, but she had succeeded, by intelligent malice and courage, in living in harmony with him, if not in peace. He was consistently insincere; she was too haughty to hide her resentment or explain it, and in general bore all the blame. Even their two sons, when as adolescents they ran away from home, muttered that it was their mother who was a demon.
She was a woman of singular beauty; her regular features wore a scarcely perceptible grimace of disdain; her protuberant eyes were piercing and sad. As she uttered the most cruel opinions very audibly, very mildly, there was never a trace of emotion in her melodious voice. All those who had anything to hide, even from themselves, had reason to fear or detest her; and her husband made friends with them on that basis. Accused by resentful neighbors and relatives of being unworthy of affection, she was too candid in her own defense; which not only offended the few admirers of her virtue and intelligence who accused her of nothing, but exposed her anew to her husband's skillful vindictiveness.
So it was in an atmosphere of anger and idealism that Alwyn's mother grew up, devoutly sheltered from immorality and irreligion, cruelly exposed to still more cruel passions: a lonely little girl singing old hymns and memorizing long rhymed prayers in the shadow of a woman's disaster, watching intently with large, gray-green eyes, but asking no questions.
As a child of eight Marianne saw that her mother had no friends, clung to her as if to hide the fact that no one else had the courage to love her, and began to receive in consequence all the tenderness of which that supposedly hard heart was capable.
At the age of twelve she had to admit that her mother was in fact proud and mercilessly outspoken, and had to learn not to try to defend her, even against schoolmates who had heard that she was a sort of witch.
When her brothers left home, Marianne would have hated them for their injustice and lack of respect, had not the Gospels which her mother read aloud to her every afternoon expressly forbidden hate. Before she was fourteen she realized that her father had fostered their resentment; that her mother's unpopularity as a whole was his work; that he was a sort of sorcerer, unctuous and loquacious, who had shut her up behind an impenetrable wall of his deceit, his pathos, his private unkindness and public saintliness, where she was growing old angrily, like an innocent prisoner in a mysterious jail.
Then, as ignorant people fear death and happy people, pain, Marianne feared the further effects of his malice. What was to protect her when her turn to be its victim came? At fifteen she prayed every night and morning that he might grow gentle by a sudden disenchantment; but later she imagined that there were pure spirits who may not change, and thereafter pitied him, more or less as the devil has always been pitied by devout women.
His hypocrisy put her on her guard against life's prevailing hypocrisy. Her mother's utter loneliness suggested the solitude of the soul which only living for others could alleviate. Continually on trial before those whom she knew, her mother was like all men and women before God sitting in judgment. It was easy to conceive a half-divine Spirit, all malice, in the image of her father; and to love so cold and enigmatic a mother confidently was in itself a sort of mysticism. It was but a short step to that of the Protestant faith: the lonely effort to distinguish every false appearance from its hidden reality and the entire world of this world from the immortal universe; the hopeless effort to discover how to be free of the one and serve only the other.
In the month of June of her sixteenth year, in the presence of everyone she knew, she was baptized by immersion in the Anne River during a Free Will Baptist revival.
Her father offered a long, vain prayer at the water's edge. The people of the congregation, otherwise merely those who detested her mother, drew closer like a crowd of saints—hard, loving faces all scarred with shadows under the willows, in the summer sunshine. She took three steps forward on the spongy bank. Then the first touch of the cold current seemed to burn her bare feet, and the minister's aims hurt her a little as they bent her backward. For a moment she believed that she was drowning, infinitely far be neath the suffocating, bitter, heavy, noisy water, though the Anne River was shallow.
Later she cried uncontrollably in her mother's arms; but when she recovered from the shock of the ceremony, she found that she was happy and felt that she needed her mother less than before. By the river water, by the pure shame and excitement, an ignorant girl had been made responsible to God—lonesomely so, without an intermediary—for a grown woman's life. She was as jealous of that responsibility as if it were pure love; not even her mother should share it. This was formally the end of childhood. But she believed that she could keep its happiness as long as she kept its purity. Happiness was a duty as well as a miracle.
Meanwhile her mother's melancholy increased, and after her baptism Marianne regarded it with a new, anxious independence. Her mother was as pure as a child. But did not virtue lead to happiness? What was it, then, which ruled her, and took away her illusions, and led her on from one defiance to another, the days of her life leading nowhere? If she imitated. her mother, where would she be led? She was afraid to follow further, even in imagination.
In her nineteenth year she had a strange dream. There was a tall hedge of exceedingly dark foliage, and suddenly the thick leaves were drawn apart like a curtain. Her mother entered between them, very quick and stately, as if upon a stage or into a circus (though Marianne had never been to the theater and had seen only the outside of a circus tent). The dream went on; she grew more and more frightened. Her mother rode an iron-gray horse, seated upon a woman's saddle, her full skirts folded and wrinkled in a great heap behind her, wearing a small hat with a red veil, holding in her hands a bow and arrow. She rode out of the woods and down along the river in which Marianne had been baptized, and splashed into the water; and wherever she went, all those who were not pure of heart fell down and disappeared—not because she wished them harm, but because neither their joy nor their sadness could be compared with her sadness. And although she came out of the forest as a sort of Diana—Diana dressed as women did dress in Marianne's girlhood—Marianne understood that she had been driven there like a hunted animal, and had merely disguised herself as a huntress in order to escape.
That dream so minutely painted, that hour of sleep drawn tight like a piece of canvas, hung for months, a bright, heavy picture, over the bed in which she slept. It drifted out of itself into other dreams, mingling with their lack of meaning, and troubled her for days at a time.
Thereafter she loved her mother without trying to draw any conclusions. Virtue did lead to happiness. . . . In her mother's life, childlike purity had led only to an old woman's despair (for she was already growing old); but that life was exceptional and not for her to try to understand. Such an extremity of sadness was a wild thing, dangerous even to see. It was as if God had permitted a heathen disaster to take place, perhaps merely to show His mystery, perhaps to teach His angels a lesson; there was nothing in it for human beings, at least for Marianne, to learn.
And thereafter she would no sooner have thought of going to her mother for advice than of kneeling in the woods before an Indian mound, or whispering her troubles to a spring of cold water, like a savage. Thus, uneasily, her thought ran ahead of her from day to day toward the future, very softly, very fatally, coming between her and her mother, until her twentieth year, when she met with the accident of love.
One evening in the spring of that year, outside the Hope's Corner schoolhouse, Ralph Tower, without warning, lifted both her hands and took her lips between his lips—for one second that was long. They were standing in the dark on the trodden ground under a honey locust in bloom which poured its fragrance. down upon their heads. Marianne felt a painful astonishment a strange emotion, because the astonishment was recognition and the pain seemed to be a privilege.
"I'm sorry," Ralph muttered, and ran and stumbled back to the bright schoolhouse, where a party was in progress.
He had left her all alone. Luxuriously the locust shook out its flowers in dead-white clusters. There was no warmth in the blood which ran up and down her veins. She stood there, trembling, and did not cry.
Then she realized that even as a little girl she had been pleased by this boy who was now a man, and that suddenly she had been made a woman. Her modesty had prevented her from counting the number of recollections which had linked her to him with that prolonged attentiveness which is the innocent heart's way of hoping. If she had counted them, she would have been afraid to come out alone with him in the dark. Now it was too late, but she could not keep from doing so, nevertheless.
The people in the schoolhouse (her mother, her father, perhaps even Ralph—all that family sang) began an old song, Farmer in the Dell. As automatically as an echo, her mind repeated the words after them, though she could hear only the tune. But instead of going inside, she crept into her father's carriage in the shed until her mother came out to find her and they went home.
No one had ever touched her before. Her mother had taught her that she should never be kissed except by the man who loved her, whom she loved, and whom she would be permitted by marriage to love as long as she lived; to her sober spirit this had seemed very natural. For another month she was confident in the future—that is, in their eventual love, betrothal, and marriage; but her confidence steadily diminished.
But Ralph said nothing about it, indeed avoided every opportunity to see her alone; and whenever they happened to meet, some sort of fear was evident from his expression. She read its meaning: fear of what she had been led to expect, fear of consequences. . . .
She tried to believe that she misunderstood it; she tried to endure her final conviction that she had not. She did not complain to her mother; she tried not to do so even in whispers to herself. She could make no effort, neither ask for an explanation nor undertake even the humblest tentative of intimacy. This was a woman's weakness; but by protecting her from further humiliation, it counted as strength, and she resented it as strength; for she thought that she would like to pay her humiliation the compliment of illness or even death.
She had nothing to look forward to, so she looked back at her lost innocence, the reverse of a promised land, exaggerating its perfection and its peace. So swiftly, so gently, so thoroughly, her happiness had been undone. . . .As a flying seed will debauch a whole meadow with flowers, one kiss, one caress not even wished for, had spoiled her peace of mind, even her good health. For there were rhythms in her body to which she stumbled impatiently when she went out to walk alone. There was fever in her forehead, and an abnormal snowy freshness on her lips and tongue. Her pillow was full of faces which were terribly alike, and when finally she fell asleep, her own hands touched her and woke her up, seeming to be the young farmer's hand which had taken them that night against her will, and locked them both easily in its palm, and let them go again too soon, also against her will. Her will was weak and wasted itself upon opposite wishes. . . .
When she had explained why she had hid in the carriage outside the schoolhouse, her mother had said, "Now you must forget all about it."
She envied the simplicity of this attitude, ready now to pay its price in sorrow, since there was sorrow in any case. But if the episode had actually been repeated, as it was in several misty dreams during the summer, she would have kept her own counsel. She was no longer a young girl over whom a mother may watch, but more a woman than her mother, who had left a part of womanhood behind her when she lost her confidence in others, her readiness to weep, her hope. Marianne had hope, though nothing to hope for; and tears often refreshed her as her mother was never refreshed by anything.
Meanwhile, the midsummer peonies broke into bloom, and their stems broke down under the weight upon the shabby lawns. Her mother's little peacock opened its feathers and fanned itself nervously, and before it rained fluttered upon the gables, whimpering in a clear, disagreeable voice. The sun rose in what had been the dead of night, wearing upon the horizon a bright humidity like a mask of hot iron and pearls. . . .
And perpetually she saw in imagination the strong, homely young farmer's face, visibly, invisibly, beside everything which her small world contained, as if it were a tear in the corner of her eye. What had she done to deserve this misery—sickness and magic mixed? Had she ever wished for love? Never—not in a single daydream, not for one lonely moment of unwilling aloofness among other girls in love. Ralph alone was to blame.
She thought that it was her Christian training which enabled her to forgive him, but found forgiveness all too easy, being merely a disguise of love. Until she stopped forgiving him—that is, stopped loving him—he would continue to hurt her; there would be continually more for which he would have to be forgiven. So, because she loved him, she ought to do penance for the wrong he had done, by hating him. She could not even keep clear in her mind these duties of disappointed love, much less accomplish any of them.
There were other sources of bewilderment. For one whose eyelids droop and whose eyes ache, the world itself seems to be shrunken and inflamed; so the atmosphere of her home grew even more sinister than it had been when, but for its unhappiness, she would have been happy. It would not be difficult, now that she knew the sickness love produced, to keep her virtue perfect; but with her heart so stripped of its indifference, so stimulated as if by a drug, she began to fear for her faith, dreading the influence upon it of her mother's loveless irony, her father's piety and lies.
So she resolved to leave home as soon as possible. In the autumn she went away to a teachers' college, and soon after Christmas accepted a vacant position in a Sheboygan school. She should have been happy there. Her slight beauty ripened with a delicate solemnity; she had inherited her mother's good taste in dress and gestures and ways of speech, which emphasized her gentle virtues; and she was loved by everyone. Loneliness had been a child's palace and stronghold, but since it had been broken into by the young farmer, the image of whose briefly passionate face she could not put out, she was afraid to stay in it. So she made friends with Evangeline Gay, a woman ten years older than she who had a small independent income and lived with a brother and his wife; and later accepted the attentions of a suitor named Paul Fairchild, the son of the Episcopalian bishop of Sheboygan.
Having prepared himself for the law and then lived in England with his mother's relatives, Paul Fairchild had come back to Wisconsin to rest after an illness. He was idle, romantic, and not quite candid; the sort of young man who seems to be a bachelor as soon as boyhood is over, very likely to be passionately in love, but unlikely to attach much importance to the fact.
Marianne took pleasure in his politeness and his culture. Hoping it was true, she wrote to her mother that if he continued to deserve her respect, she might learn to love him and be willing to consider becoming his wife.
Her father got up in the night, took the letter from the pocket inside her mother's skirt as he often did, read it, replaced it, and the next morning began to announce to his friends and his enemies, "My daughter is engaged to the Episcopalian bishop's son."
Bishop Fairchild was a famous man; his son, who had lived in his father's diocese only a few months at a time, had aroused everyone's curiosity. Emphasized by Ira Duff's extravagant way of speech, the news traveled quickly and widely.
Late one afternoon Paul Fairchild came into Marianne's schoolroom and said, "Your father says that we're engaged. So much the better. I love you."
Shocked and confused, ashamed of having written anything to her mother before he had spoken, Marianne did not deny it, did not protest, and was scarcely aware of his discourtesy. But, pressing her hands against his shoulders, she did avoid his kiss.
"Please go now. I have work to do. I must—" She lost her voice. She sat down at the desk. Her cold fingers fluttered the sheets of paper on which her pupils had written themes; on the first page she read, in a small boy's determined hand, "The Stars." She saw, far off at the left, the winter sun going down, divided into squares by the window.
"Please go. I must work," she repeated; and then her body sagged against the table—she had fainted away. Her head fell forward and lay on the pile of themes as if it were a pillow.
The young man caught her shoulders so that she did not slip out of the chair, and stood there in stupid astonishment, unable for a moment to rouse himself from his emotions of a lover. Out of a great white jug marked Water drops fell in threes to the pail below with the rhythm of a waltz. But he could not move to put water on her face without letting her fall. . . .
In the school yard several pupils drew near; one of them was crying; one spoke loudly in a sneering voice. The young man was embarrassed; if they should come in. . . .He judged by the sound of their voices that they were old enough to understand, to misunderstand.
He lifted Marianne in his arms and put her down on a bench. Then he took one of her hands to kiss it, but at that moment her heavy, weak eyelids opened. "The Stars," she said. "Oh, what is it? What has happened?"
The young man smiled and looked ashamed.
"I am all right now." She drank a glass of water eagerly, as if it were from thirst that she was suffering. "Please go."
But he did not move. Then she saw his troubled. eyes running to the windows and the door, and understood him better; so she added: "You must. I asked Evangeline Gay to come here for me."
He left her alone, seeming glad of an excuse.
It was a poor excuse, for she had asked no one to come. She dragged herself back through the snow to the house where she lived, and with ice-cold hands laid herself in her bed as if she were a dead body.
She felt little resentment toward her father or either of her lovers. What had happened was more odious than human conduct could be; it was like an illness, like the progress of an illness from the forefinger to the ring finger, from the arm to the breast, and so on. . . . An illness which would not even kill her; but her self-respect was dead—worn out, suffocated, filthily bandaged, and still sore, though it was dead.
If life was like this, was she duty bound to live? If her soul was immortal and could be so compromised, would it do any good to die? Marriage sprung like a trap beneath her driven feet; God the father as dishonest as her father, tricking her with accidents.
For a moment, in her sorrow, she destroyed her God. Horrified by the involuntary evil of her thought, she beat her forehead with her fists, closed her eyes, and wished that she might never have to open the latter again as long as she should be obliged to live. For a moment she had destroyed God; but because she loved Him, she created Him again.
So she determined to accept it all: the consequences of her mother's betrayal, her father's lying, Ralph's neglect, and Paul Fairchild's love. Crumpled up on the bed, stone-cold in the cold, red light of the sunset which poured through the window, she fought intelligently to keep her soul from falling down to hell. For if she rejected what God permitted, she believed, it would fall and change as it fell, as certain angels had done, into a dead-alive thing whose eternity was all one such afternoon. . . .
But could she, with courage and intelligence, hold herself at a certain altitude above all evil, including death—as the wings of a bird hold it for a moment in the air after a bullet has lodged in its heart, opened its heart? Could such a moment last as long as her life? She spread out in imagination her youth and her bravery as if they were wings. Suddenly she felt that she was ready—that is, ready to marry Paul Fairchild. And he should not discover what was in her heart; Ralph should not either, nor, perhaps, should God. She would lie to them faithfully by the way she would live; she would love them all three equally.
Something like a soothing drug was running in her veins where the blood had seemed to cease to run. Her landlady knocked at the door and called her to supper; she did not answer.
She lay there without answering until she heard a familiar whistling. Then she rose and slipped carefully along the wall toward the window until she could see into the street where Paul Fairchild was gazing up over the hedge with a bunch of yellow roses in his hand. Hiding behind a half-closed shutter, Marianne tried to like his vague, intelligent face and at this distance, unknown to him, to enjoy the roses. He whistled again; she did not show herself at the window. To-morrow she would be ready for him. . . .She studied his anxiety and discontent, and watched him go away.
That night she wrote a letter to her mother to announce her engagement definitely, phrasing it in such a way as to put her father in the right without asking what had happened to betray her. The night was as long as a lifetime. In effect, so strong was her imagination, it was a lifetime—that of Paul Fairchild's wife. She was by nature and training too just to think that the future would be uniformly unhappy; but a definite distaste was occasioned by her anticipation of certain pleasures and rewards which ought to fulfill, but would surely fail to fulfill, her dearest hopes. Nevertheless, she was content with her decision—above all, proud of it. Her loneliness, if she did not marry, would be a perpetual reproach to Ralph for the wrong he had done her; and altogether womanly in her passion, she believed that she did not want him to have to give it a moment's thought. Now that she had given him up, she could say proudly to herself as often as she liked that she loved him, which helped her endure the humiliating fact that he had never loved her. And when, just before the dawn, she said her prayers, bowing before God's pride, she gave thanks as well for her own, saying that it was the spirit of God in her heart. Her mother, under different circumstances, had said as much.
Marianne's engagement to Paul Fairchild lasted all that summer. She became the governess of a banker's children in order not to have to return to Hope's Corner. Her mother believed that she wanted to be with her future husband, and referred to her happiness in every letter with an unhappy woman's skepticism and envy.
But by autumn Marianne had given up hope of every sort of happiness. Her thought was all anger, and it trembled upon her lips in sentences already formed; so she began to have to look forward shamefully to the time when she would be saying things as spiteful as those for which her mother was famous. All her life she had seen what marriage could be at its worst—hers would be as bad; even her good qualities would play an evil role, as her mother's had done. Her life, more and more like her mother's, more and more. thoroughly spoiled. . . .An unkind fate having set to work to spoil it, she herself had added the finishing touch by promising to marry.
Every day she told herself that she ought formally to break her promise. But Paul loved her; he would be crafty as he had been in the beginning; she was tired—increasingly tired since that night in the spring when with such difficulty she had made up her mind to do what was still undone. So tired that the events of the past and finally those of the present merely haunted her, as life haunts one upon a sick bed who may be alive and may be dead, who cannot tell. . . . Day by day the future tiptoed carefully across the present into the past without waking her from this nightmare of being about to marry a man whom she did not love in the least.
Often she did not think of him as her future husband, and he did not always try to usurp a husband's privileges. Then she found him an agreeable companion, distracting her attention even from their relationship, consoling her even for distress which he alone had caused.
But by the autumn she was entirely disillusioned as to his character. He was weak, indolent, naturally irreligious, naturally libertine. He gave her no opportunity to know his father, the bishop, never spoke of his mother, and expressed no desire to visit her parents. He seemed unwilling to wait for God's blessing upon their union, and meanwhile did not help her to fix a date for the marriage.
Patiently, tactfully, with that deliberate pretense of innocence which is the youngest and purest form of cynicism, she avoided his caresses. Often she tried to persuade herself of an emotion which even then it was her duty to feel, or tried to believe that she would. love him in time, in due time. On these occasions she realized that she would never marry him, and was bitterly ashamed of herself for not telling him so.
During the summer he found two gaited horses which he could rent, and taught Marianne to ride. On a gray horse, in a broadcloth dress turned into a riding habit, she looked exactly as her mother had looked in the dream two years before, and often thought of the resemblance. One afternoon late in October they rode out along the bluffs over Lake Michigan, and came to a wooded hill surrounded by a fence, and could not find a gate. So they dismounted, tied the horses, and made their way up through the woods toward a little cliff which they had seen from the road, in order to look down from it upon the lake.
The ironwoods made a pallid, artificial evening, in which Marianne observed an ugly expression on Paul's face: a repeated look sideways, a crude, unspoken syllable in one corner of his mouth, a stiff wrinkle from one temple to the other across his forehead. . . . He walked a step or two behind, stared hard at her, and stumbled. Glancing back over her shoulder, Marianne watched this expression with eager, unsympathetic interest, seeing suddenly that his love, if it were provoked, might provoke her hate, and so set her free. They came out under the harder stare of the whole sky in the clearing on top of the hill.
Among the rocks they found a grassy hollow shaped like a large armchair. They were above the horizon like a thin-lipped shell and above a dripping cloud which lay in it; above the lake covered with tight indentations and ribbons of foam which were continually being tied and torn; above a fish hawk which co tinually went down and made mistakes at the surface of the water.
But suddenly Paul cried, "This is nonsense!" and began to pleat her skirt with his nervous hands. She frowned and shrank away from him. "Don't. I don't understand—"
"I love you," he stammered. "I want you to love me. Of course you don't." He was panting between his words. "You sit there like an old woman. Sit and admire naturel"
The fish hawk dropped again, plunging into one of the indentations and breaking a great cord of foam. Paul's hands were fighting with her left hand. "Paul," she said, “you do not wish to offend me. You don't know what you are doing. I am afraid of you. Get up. We must go back. If you love me, you don't want to hurt me. Wait—"
"Wait. . . . No. If you love me—now. Don't talk religion to me. I've heard nothing else all my life and it hasn't made me any happier or better. Now. We are engaged. It is enough."
Marianne knew then that she had a right to hate him. "We were engaged. We were, until today. I break my engagement now. Let me go. I tell you, I will not marry you." She hated him because he smiled.
"You'd better not," he said. "You'd better not. Listen. Two girls promised to marry me before. They weren't so good as you are. Everybody knew; nobody has paid any attention to them since. I hated them. If you don't marry me, people will think—they always do, anyway. You can't always do what you like—I love you too much." He was smiling, but his eyes were full of tears.
The sweat sprang in the palms of Marianne's hands. He had come closer and closer to her. She tried to say to herself that he was out of his mind and not to blame. She struck him full in the face. At that moment she was glad, for she knew that they were done with each other at last; having had to defend herself, she would not even be able to pity him again.
He sprang to his feet and stumbled a little way off under the trees. He was pacing up and down and beating the ground with a stick like a desperate child.
Then Marianne got up and ran down through the woods. He did not see her in time, and she reached the fence before he did. When she untied her horse, its panic told her what to do: she struck it across its nose with the reins; it galloped away. Then she mounted Paul's horse fearlessly, shamelessly as well—having to sit astride because of the saddle, her skirts pulled up almost to her knee. He tried to follow her a little way on foot; she left him behind.
At the edge of the town she tied the horse to another fence. No one who knew her saw her come home.
She lay across the bed with her feet and one hand hanging toward the floor; a sort of sick paralysis held her there. When Paul Fairchild had tried to hold her on the hilltop, she had said to herself, "This kiss will not hurt me as much as the other did." She had been mistaken; she was going to be ill.
Her landlady came up to her room.
"I am not well," she explained. "I felt bad; I fainted away."
"Shall I send for the doctor?"
"No. I feel better. I got too tired riding. It will be over in a few minutes. Ask Evangeline Gay to come."
Evangeline Gay stood at the foot of the bed. The girl's eyes and mouth were empty of emotion—they told her anxious friend nothing; but her nervous hands, along the ruffle of the pillow and up and down the pleats of her riding habit, like those of a deaf mute, spelled out an extreme distress. She had a slight fever and a greatly accelerated pulse.
"You poor child," Evangeline said, "whatever is the matter, it has gone on long enough. You're going to give up your school. I'm going to take you home. If you're not strong enough to talk me out of it, you're weak enough to do as I think best."
Marianne obeyed orders in order not to have to talk. Furthermore, she was ill and would not dare to get well in Sheboygan, for Paul Fairchild would be there. at the foot of the bed as soon as she could be seen. He came the next morning, but Evangeline had instructed the people of the house to send him away. At noon they set out together for Marianne's home.
Mrs. Duff met them with a horse and buggy at the Aaronsville station. As they passed the Hope's Corner schoolhouse, Marianne slipped out of the seat and hid her drawn face in Evangeline's lap. The mother, who was driving, scarcely glanced at her, but stared fiercely over the playground, among the monuments and trees of the cemetery, and across the withered cornfields, as if to discover there who or what it was that had made her daughter ill.
It was a false illness, a mere excuse for her distress of which she could give no other explanation. So except for that moment under the honey locusts which leaned out from the school grounds, Marianne was able to control it until they reached home. But when at last she lay in her own bed, a fever declared itself with great force. It seemed to be a breathing, solid body like that of a human being; it curled up beside her on the same pillow, and slipped over and rested on her breast. She slept under its weight, and there, weeping softly even in her sleep, she was as happy as she expected ever to be again.
Evangeline was introduced to the father, a handsome man with curls in his beard and large eyes that resembled lumps of some kind of blue stone. "I hope our girl hasn't been led into temptation off there away from her folks and home influences," he said. "People's tongues will be wagging—"
"You would do well," his wife interrupted, "not to speak evil of her yourself."
The two women waited for him to leave them alone. Then the mother cried, "What ever has happened?"
"I don't know."
"Is it the fault of that man she means to marry?"
"She said nothing against him." There was a pause, neither knowing what the other expected of her. "I must go back to Sheboygan in the morning," Evangeline added. "She will be all right. She needed rest."
The proud woman begged her to stay. "Marianne enjoys perfect health—it is one of the few things I am proud of. There is some mystery about this. And I am afraid that she will never tell me what the matter is. She had grounds for believing that I would disapprove of any man she meant to marry. You see, my own marriage, though my husband and I are God-fearing and resigned, is not all that it should be." She made this confession without a sign of embarrassment. "But Marianne will not be afraid to tell you her romantic notions, because you have never been married."
Ira Duff came into the room. "You understand," he said mournfully, "my wife is fittingly upset, for it was she who encouraged Marianne to leave home. against my will, and hid from me this engagement to the bishop's son as long as she could."
His wife laughed softly. "As long as I could wasn't very long, for you're as good as any pickpocket to ferret out my letters, and better than a town crier to make our secrets the talk of the whole country."
Evangeline was afraid to leave her friend alone in such a house.
The village doctor came, failed to identify an actual illness or to find a satisfactory explanation of the symptoms there were, and prescribed rest and one or two innocuous remedies, glancing meanwhile with dull suspicion at Mrs. Duff, as if she were the cause of it all.
Evangeline established herself in the bedroom to watch. Marianne slept and pretended to sleep. Often her face was languid and haughty—the face of a middle-aged woman strong enough to die of an exceptional weakness, without explanations, mutely. Evangeline said to Mrs. Duff: "It is a sickness. I am not a doctor. She has nothing to tell. I had better go back to Sheboygan and ask no questions."
But Marianne smiled half-heartedly one morning, and asked to have some flowers and one of her mother's potted plants brought up to her room. She said that she was hungry, though she scarcely touched the tray when it came.
The next day was the Sabbath. The Free Will Baptists of Hope's Corner had united with the Presbyterians of Aaronsville, and the minister had another congregation to preach to in the morning; so services. were held at three o'clock. Marianne's cousin, Clara Peters, a grim woman who had married beneath her, came to spend the afternoon, and Evangeline went to church with Mr. and Mrs. Duff. They got home just before supper and found Marianne alone.
"Poor Clara discouraged me," she explained, "and I sent her off to her mean husband."
After the evening meal she asked for the Bible with the largest print, and held it up resolutely toward the lamp until her mother left the room. Then she said to her friend, "You were late coming back from church. Whom did you see? Where did you go?"
"We went home with the Towers. Your mother wanted to visit that old bachelor who has been sick, Mr. Leander. He was all wrapped up in crazy quilts. He said—"
But Marianne had turned pale; it was as if a heavy white net had been thrown suddenly over her face, in which her bright eyes seemed to have been caught and lay burning, lay very still; in which her mouth strug. gled and finally lay still.
And her friend remembered how, in the uncomfortable pew, Mrs. Duff had lifted the cape of her coat and whispered behind it: "Do you see the young man sitting with his folks in the first row by the window? They are the Towers, the finest people in the country. I thought a few years back that Marianne had lost her heart to that young Ralph, the one of their sons who is here. Nothing came of it, of course, and anyway I guess the Towers wouldn't care to be connected by marriage with my husband. . . ."
Now, at the mention of them, Marianne's face turned white and lay still as if it had been caught in a net. A net of misery, excitement, and hopelessness and hope interwoven. . . . The spinster put out her hand quickly as if to catch hold of a thread by which it might be undone, and said at once, conscious of her cruelty: "Marianne, I must go back home. And you know, I shall have to see Paul Fairchild. What shall I tell him?"
The girl lifted her head from the pillow. "I have nothing to say to him. I shall not see him again."
"What did he do to you?"
"It doesn't matter. I don't care what he does. I never cared what he did. I'm sorry," the girl whispered.
The older woman whispered as well: "Then there is another—some other—then that other one is . . . The one you do love."
Marianne turned scarlet. "No, I—haven't any right. . . . How do you. . . . He-"
Then for a few minutes there was nothing for her friend to do but watch a pitiful spectacle: the girl tossing on the bed in a sort of infant agony, and stuffing the bedclothes in her mouth, and beating the pillows.
Evangeline heard Mrs. Duff come swiftly up the staircase. But she stopped in the corridor, where she must have been able to hear the girl's stifled weeping. She stood still outside the door, and then tiptoed downstairs again, intelligently obliging Evangeline to be a mother to her child because she was a spinster and did not know too much about marriage.
The girl grew quiet. Evangeline bathed her flushed face and said: "You'd better talk to me. Now, before you stop crying. Before you get mysterious and desperate again."
Then she stopped crying. Suddenly she sat up in bed, and in a monotonous tone of voice, slowly but without faltering, as if she were remembering not the facts, but words and phrases with which she had often told it before—to herself alone—recited, painstakingly recited, the story of her disappointment. The sentences began with "Even when I was a child, when we were in school together, though I didn't know," or "Mother brought me up so innocently, I thought," or "I was ashamed," or "It broke my heart. . . . " They ended with "It was too late," or "He didn't care and I had no right to think he did," or "He didn't mean anything by it—it was all in my imagination."
Evangeline muttered to herself: "It wasn't. It won't be. Not if—" She was astonished; for suddenly there had come together in her mind all Ralph Tower's gestures, phrases, and expressions, that afternoon. She examined them and compared them with what she was being told; at last she had no doubt about their meaning. Inquiries about her happiness, her health, her marriage; a resentful silence for several minutes after every answer; the sound, when he did speak, of a lump in his throat; embarrassed glances at his parents to be sure they were not listening; his eyebrows contracted, half hiding his small eyes. Anxiety, wounded vanity, jealousy. . . .
Meanwhile, as if she were merely telling a story, a story which had to be told to the end, its bitter end, Marianne went on from her brief, humiliating encounter with one lover to her humiliating relations with the other. “I wrote my mother about Paul Fairchild, and she let my father think I had promised to marry him, and he told everybody."
"She didn't, by the way," Evangeline said. "Your father got the letter out of her pocket—she told me."
"Oh," the girl cried, and was silent for a moment, and seemed to be staring back at her girlhood compromised, her broken heart rebroken, her strength. worn out—six miserable months which might have been avoided. Then, less with the patience of a desperate girl than with that of a story teller, she tried to go on where, she had been interrupted. "You see, Paul Fairchild—"
"Don't tell me about Paul Fairchild," Evangeline interrupted again. "He doesn't matter—you said so yourself."
The girl said no more and lay staring humbly at nothing.
Her friend went over to the window. It was late at night. There were some cattle moving in the dark in the orchard. A great, aged moon was coming up over the country with a great quantity of amber. The turkeys in the apple trees were awake.
Evangeline made up her mind what ought to be done for Marianne, what she could do. Perhaps she was merely going to make a fool of herself, not even for herself, and accomplish no more. She shed a few tears and wiped them away.
Then she sat down again, and told Marianne exactly what Ralph Tower had said, and how he had looked when he said it, and what she thought about it. At last she used the word love.
Marianne, shivering, held her breath.
"You two need a go-between. Your mother will be of no use. After I'm gone there won't be anybody to manage things for you but God, and whether He will or not is a question. You don't know what this young man's intentions are. So I'm going to see him and find out. Your mother ought to have done so. According to her, it was your father's fault that she couldn't, because her own marriage is unhappy. I am an old maid," she added dryly, "and I believe in love. So to-morrow, bright and early, I'm going to have an other word or two with this young man."
Marianne clung to her like a child and begged her not to. Evangeline paid little attention, thinking of the task she had set herself, and how she had better go about it. At last Marianne whispered, "Don't tell mother, if you are going."
Evangeline slipped out of the house the next morning soon after sunrise, and an hour and a half later came back, tired, grim, and satisfied. Mrs. Duff was waiting in the garden. "Where have you been?" she asked. "I saw you start out, but I thought best not to bother you."
"I've been to the Towers'," Evangeline said. "It is all right. Will you drive me to the station this afternoon? For I'm not needed here any more."
"So that is it. The Lord preserve us," the mother said solemnly. "There is not a human being on this earth I have ever loved but my daughter. And I have no faith—miserable woman that I am."
Then Evangeline wept, and turned aside among the currant bushes. Mrs. Duff hurried indoors, calling, "I-ra! I-ra!"
A little later, going through the hall to the staircase, Evangeline heard Ira Duff's resonant, false voice rising and falling in a heavy rhythm, and saw them, the sharp-tongued wife and her hated husband, kneeling side by side in front of the sitting-room sofa, their backs very straight, their eyes closed, like a bride and groom before an invisible pastor.
"You've been crying," Marianne said, and tears which, according to what her friend had to say, would be those of joy or of sorrow, came to her eyes.
"You cry yourself, to your heart's content," Evangeline replied. "You might as well cry now, for if God is good you'll have no cause to for many a day." She spoke with a blunt, mechanical joyousness. "I waited by the side of the road until he came along on his way to the cheese factory, and then I waited for him under a tree until he got back and came there."
Marianne's tears ran down across her face, without expression, still patient; she did not succeed in speaking.
Evangeline went on hurriedly but with difficulty, trying not to emphasize her words: "I have one question to ask you. Tell me. In so many words. That man—I mean Paul Fairchild—he never took, he didn't take—I don't want to know, it's the man you're going to marry. Nothing wrong happened? That's not why you're so miserable, is it? That's not why you're sick—"
"Stop," the girl cried huskily. She had lifted herself in the bed upon her elbows. Her eyes were fixed; her voice was hard, hurt, and full of joy. "I am a good girl. He kissed me once. They, they both—did, once."
Evangeline was ashamed of herself, of Ralph Tower, of men; so she went on with the cruel monologue which had begun as a question. "Men always ask that—good men, Christians. They are hard, hard. I guess it's their right and duty. Don't blame him. I'll have to see him again and tell him, before he asks—"
"Stop, Evangeline," the girl repeated. "I don't blame him. I deserve it, because. . . . Don't ever speak of it again." She closed her eyes and whispered, "But why didn't he tell me—all this time? Oh, why, then . . ."
Therefore, dutifully, Evangeline gave a circumstantial account of the meeting. "You know," she had begun by saying, "you have broken that girl's heart." Because she was a spinster, she had tried to put him in the wrong. She had failed, because he had always been in love, and because of Marianne's engagement to the bishop's son who had a bad reputation, and the suspicions it had aroused.
The slight, strong man had spoken laboriously, like a giant for whom human speech is petty and difficult. He had made up his mind when a little boy to marry Marianne. He had been ashamed of having kissed her. They had been too young to marry then. He had been afraid of himself, of his own nature; self-control had always been hard for him. So he had avoided her, until the time when, safely and honorably, he could ask her to be his wife. Then she had gone away; he had believed that she had forgotten or had never cared. Then she had become engaged.
In his small hazel eyes there had been a look of instinctive suspicion, the suspicion of ultimate unhappiness which was natural to him. He had torn up leaves by the handful with his calloused hands, and at last had blushed under his dull sunburn. Then he had spoken soberly of his other suspicion and had asked the question which Evangeline had not dared to answer on her own responsibility. Then he had stood up, turned his back on her, swung round, asked her pardon, and muttered: "Good-by. I must get back to work."
Evangeline, having nothing more to tell, smoothed Marianne's forehead with her finger tips. "You had better stop crying now," she concluded. "God is good. You will be happy.”
The girl leaped out of bed and fell to her knees. Evangeline left her alone. When she returned with the mother they found her half dressed, and with great difficulty persuaded her to go back to bed. After the noonday meal Evangeline said good-by.
Marianne was glad that her friend was going away. She herself had to go on to a rendezvous which no friend could keep with her, in a gleaming, uniform solitude, a sort of wilderness—that of being loved. Innocent and not ignorant, she trembled a little at the prospect. Not knowing why, she kept remembering that Ralph was the best hunter in that part of Wisconsin. She felt a jealousy of no one and a nostalgia for no particular place. She kept remembering the kiss which had now been justified. These things embarrassed her in Evangeline's presence; it was a blessing, she thought, that her mother did not believe in love and therefore would not pay any unusual attention to her. She scarcely paid attention to Evangeline saying good-by.
Mrs. Duff took Evangeline to the station by the road which went past the Tower farm, and when they saw Ralph plowing in the stubble field, the spinster got out and trudged across the furrows until she met him. "I'm going home," she said. "Go to see her. She is waiting. It is all right. She is as pure as the snow. What fools we were . . . Good-by."
The young man's body, like that of a giant, though small, sagged against the plow handles. He hid his great hands behind his back as if he ought to be ashamed of them. He said: "Thank you. Good-by."
"Glory be to God, that's all right!" Evangeline said as she climbed back into the buggy.
"The glory of God is made of our troubles," the older woman answered resolutely.
Late that afternoon Ralph came to see Marianne. He sat by the bed and could say nothing; his dark mouth covered with dust quivered instead. He kissed her hands and hurried away.
There was no courtship. Another man had wooed her for him. God had wooed her with His errors, His intoxicating tenderness, His intrigue. Evangeline, who would never have a chance to speak for herself, had spoken for her; the spirit of God, Marianne thought, in the person of an old maid. . . .
She grew strong quickly, realizing that she had not actually been ill. She saw Ralph every day or two, and made friends with his father, who, to his mother's astonishment, was pleasant and communicative in her company. With genuine enthusiasm Mrs. Tower accepted Marianne as her son's future wife and the mother of her grandchildren to be born; but they never knew how to be intimate friends. Marianne's own mother, in her pride in the alliance, was happier than she had been for years. When the tragic news of Leander's death in Oklahoma came, she said regretfully, "Now he will never know about the marriage. . . ."
Marianne herself was not impatient for it to take place. Having tasted the bitterness of man's passion (its contagious unrest, its deliberate neglect, its suspicion) before the sweet, she was glad to wait until she stopped fearing vaguely that it might be altogether bitter. The passage of time would obliterate the humiliation of her other engagement and hush the gossip about it. Meanwhile a separate home was being prepared for them at one end of the Tower house, where Leander had lived. So the wedding was postponed until the following September.
Evangeline Gay and James Tower were their witnesses. Ralph's face—brilliant with intelligence of an unintelligible emotion, tragic to his elders who were present, humble and sunburned—was like that of a young wild animal being baptized. They stood up in one corner of the parlor before a mass of asters and autumn leaves. In the midst of the ceremony Marianne remembered her baptism in the Anne River, thinking that the arms of the man who was at that moment becoming her husband, those arms close beside her, very tight in the broadcloth sleeves, were even stronger than the minister's had been; that the flood in which she was to be submerged this time was not cold, and would be scented with straw of the stacks outside the window, with sheepfolds, linen, and candle wax.
Unlike that of Cana, water was not changed into wine for this marriage. There was but a frugal supper and little festivity. And swiftly the wine of passion itself changed for her into the pure water of Christian married life.