Kitabı oku: «Rose of Dutcher's Coolly», sayfa 6

CHAPTER X
QUIET YEARS OF GROWTH

Outwardly her days were uneventful. She came and went quietly, and answered her teachers with certainty and precision. She was not communicative to her companions, and came to know but few of them during the first term. She watched the trees go sere and bare, and calculated on the progress of the farmwork. She wondered if the men were in the corn yet, or whether it were too cold a morning to plow. She studied the sky to see if there were signs of snow. She could not at once throw off her daily supervision of the weather and of farmwork.

Her father wrote only at long intervals. His chapped and stiffened hands managed the pen-stock but painfully. He wrote of the farm affairs, the yield of corn, the weight of the steers or hogs he had sold, and asked her how many turkeys he had best keep over.

Carl wrote once or twice and stopped. He was a still more reluctant correspondent. Carl meant little to her now. The Doctor's dominion was absolute, and yet there was a subtle change. She no longer blushed in his presence, and he seemed older and nearer to her, more like an uncle and adviser. The figure he had been, took its place beside that of William De Lisle. More substantial, but less sweet and mythical.

Her school life was not her entire intellectual life by any means. She had the power of absorbing and making use of every sight and sound about her. She saw a graceful action at table or in the drawing room, and her mind seized upon it and incorporated it. She did not imitate; she took something from every one, but from no one too much.

Her eyes lost their round nervous stare, but they searched, searched constantly, as was natural for a girl of her years and fine animal nature, but there was brain back of it all. The young men knew nothing of her searching eyes; indeed, they thought her cold, and a little contemptuous of them.

Meanwhile their elegance often alienated them from her. There were many types not far removed from Carl and Henry; farmer's boys with some touch of refinement and grace, but others had a subtle quality, which told of homes of refinement and luxury.

Two wonderful things had come to her. One was the knowledge that she was beautiful, which she came to understand was the burning desire of all women; and again that she was master of things which had scared her. She could wear lovely dresses unconsciously, and sit at table with ease, and walk before her classmates without tremor. She felt power in her heart, as well as in her fist.

Her winter was a quiet one. She came and went between her classes and her home at Dr. Thatcher's. She studied in her own room or recited to the Doctor when he was at leisure. He liked to have the girls come into his study when he was not too busy, and there he sat figuring on the probable effect of cocaine or atropine in a certain case, while the girls read or talked.

Those were wonderful hours to the country girl. She was a long way from the little cottage on the old coulé farm at such times. Dr. Thatcher felt the same beauty and power in the droop of the head which had attracted him first in the old school-house, only enriched and in nobler colorings here.

They went sleighing together, with shouting and laughter, as if the Doctor were a girl, too. They went skating, and once in awhile to some entertainment at the church. They were not theatre-going people, and the lectures and socials of the town and college made up their outings. It was the Doctor's merry interest in their doings which made young men so unnecessary to Rose as well as to Josephine.

Then came spring again; the southwest wind awoke, snow began to go, the grass showed here and there, and Rose's thoughts turned back toward the coulé. There were days when every drop of her blood called out for the hills and the country roads, the bleat of lambs, the odor of fields, and the hum of bees, but she kept on at work.

Something elemental stirred in her blood as the leaves came out. The young men took on added grace and power in her eyes. When they came before her in their athletic suits, lithe, clean-limbed, joyous, then her eyes dreamed and her heart beat till the blood choked her breathing.

O, the beautiful sky; O, the shine and shade of leaves! O, the splendor of young manhood! She fought down the dizziness which came to her. She smiled mechanically as they stood before her with frank, clean eyes and laughing lips, and so, slowly, brain reasserted itself over flesh, and she, too, grew frank and gay.

Then came the vacation. The partings, the bitter pain of leaving the young people she had learned to love, and, too, came the thought of home. The dear old coulé with its peaks and camel humps, and pappa John! He was waiting to see her there!

So the pain of leaving her mates was mingled with the joy of home-coming. She romped on the grass with the young lambs. She followed Pappa John about as of old, in the fields, while he wondered and marveled at her. She was so fine and white and lady-like.

She was fain to know all the news of the farm, and the neighborhood. She felt like kissing all the dear old ladies in the coulé. O, the old friends were the best after all! You could rest on them. They didn't care how you ate soup. They didn't keep you keyed up to company manners all the time.

She went back to her old dresses and cotton underwear, and went dirty as she liked, and got brown and iron-muscled again.

Carl met her on the road one day and bowed and drove on, with hurried action of the lines. He still bore her rejection of him fresh in mind. It is everlastingly to his credit, let it be said now, that he never made use of his youthful intimacy with her. He was a man, with all the honesty and sincerity and chivalry of a race of gentlemen in his head, slow-witted as he was.

CHAPTER XI
STUDY OF THE STARS

She came back each September with delight and exultation. It was not so much like going to the world's end now, and besides, her father seemed resigned to it. Back to the gleam of the lakes, the flaming sunsets, the moonlit nights filled with twang of guitars and floating harmony of fresh boyish voices, back to her girl-lovers and her books, back to the chalky odor of the recitation room.

It was so sweet to climb the circular stairway again. The booming roar of the feet did not disturb her now. The greetings of the Professors as they passed, made her eyes dim with pleasure. The spirit of the University had established dominion over her.

These were days without care, days of silent pleasant growth. A year of sweet gravity over books and wholesome laughter over games. She studied hard, but it was a quiet pleasure to study, for she had the power of concentration which gives mastery.

She was never behind, never fagged out with study. She had time for the splendor of nature and for the world of books. She read more and more each year because she felt lacking in literary knowledge. She read the books she ought to know – read them religiously. Occasionally it chanced the books were those she loved to read, but not often. Generally she had to bend to them as if they were lessons.

She read also Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, a volume or two each. Then one day in mid-winter it chanced she fell upon "Mosses from an Old Manse," and then all the other books waited. She read it while she walked home from the library. She read it after dinner and put it in her satchel as she went to recite. She finished it and secured the second volume; then came "Twice Told Tales," then "The Scarlet Letter," and the world of woman's sin opened to her.

She read that terrible book, rebelling against the dark picture, raging against the insatiable vengeance of the populace who condemned Hester as if she had opened the gates of hell in the path of every daughter of New England.

She could not understand, then nor thereafter, the ferocity of hate which went out against the poor defenseless woman. What had the woman done? She struggled over the problem. She felt in herself that terrible ceaseless urging. Her thoughts were not clear, they were still only raised figures in the web of organic thought, but she was accomplishing great conceptions.

She knew it was wrong, but why it was wrong troubled her. The law – yes, but what lay behind the law? The Mormon had one law, the Turks another. Why was this English law better than any other? Why were the animals freer than men? Their lives were good and healthy, they lived in the sunshine and were untroubled. Such were a few of the questions she grappled with.

God only knows the temptations which came to her. She had days when all the (so-called) unclean things she had ever seen, all the overheard words of men's coarse jests, came back like vultures to trouble her. Sometimes when she walked forth of a morning, the sun flamed across the grass with ineffable beauty. The whole earth was radiant; every sound was a song; every lithe youth moved like a god before her, and it was then that something deep in her, something drawn from generations of virtuous wives and mothers, saved her from the whirlpool of passion.

At such times she felt dimly the enormous difference between her nature and that of Josephine. Josephine's passion was that of a child – hers that of an imaginative and complex man.

She was silent after these days of gayety. She was not a chatterer at any time, but after these moods she was almost sullen once more, and she fell upon her lessons with renewed zeal, as a monk flagellates his rebellious flesh.

After these days of searching eyes she refused to look at any of her young male friends. She answered them crustily and turned away from them, but this did not serve to cure her nor to keep the young men away.

Always at such times William De Lisle's glorious presence drew near in the dusk, insubstantial and luminous as a cloud, and she set her teeth in fresh resolve to be wise and famous; to be worthy his look and his word of praise.

She had suitors constantly. Her dark haughty face, warm with blood, her erect and powerful figure excited admiration among the young men, and they courted her with the wholesome frankness of clean and vigorous manhood. The free and natural intercourse of the college kept the young people healthy as a home circle.

As the Doctor came to take a different place in her love, Rose became open to the advances of other men. Twice during the winter she felt the power of love touch her. In the first instance her eyes sought and found among her classmates a young man's physical beauty, and her imagination clothed him with power and mystery, and she looked for him each day, and life was less interesting and purposeful when he was not present.

She made no open advances, she scarcely needed to, for he also saw, and when he came to her and she flushed and trembled with weakness, it seemed as if her life had at last taken a fixed direction. For a few weeks the man was her ideal. She saw him before her constantly. She knew his smile, the lift of his eye-brows, the shape of his ears, the slope of his shoulders, the sound of his voice. She looked at him stealthily from her book. She contrived to sit where she could watch every motion. She walked down the street with him each day, half numb with her emotion.

But this ecstasy did not last. She felt eventually his shallowness and narrowness. He was vain and ungenerous. He grew sere and bare of grace and charm like the autumn elms, and at last he stood empty and characterless before her, and her eyes looked over and beyond him, into the blue sky again, and throughout it all she kept her place in her classes and no one was aware of her new ideal.

When she turned away from him he did not grow pale and lean. He grew a little vicious and said: "She is too cold and proud for my taste."

Her next suitor was a worthy young man who was studying law in the town. A fine, clean young fellow, who paid court to her with masterly address. He was older than she, and was a better scholar and brought to her less of the clotheshorse and more of the man than her freshly outgrown lover. Before spring began he had won great intimacy with her – almost an engagement.

He was adroit. He did not see her too much, and he came always at his best. He appealed to the most imaginative side of her nature. She glorified his calling as well as his person. He was less handsome than his predecessor, but he brought an ample and flowing phraseology, and a critical knowledge of farm-life as well as of town-life. Once he took her to the court-room to hear him plead.

He took her to the socials, and once to the theater. There was his mistake! The play made a most powerful impression upon her, more powerful than anything since the circus at Tyre.

It raised new and wordless ambitions. For the first time in her life she saw society dress on the stage. The play was one which pretended, at least, to show New York and London life. Therefore men in claw-hammer coats came and went, with strange accents and with cabalistic motions of hats and gloves, and women moved about with mystic swagger.

The heroine glowed like a precious stone in each act, now sapphire, now pearl, now ruby. She spoke in a thick, throaty murmur and her white shoulders shone like silver, and her wide childish eyes were like wells of light-diffusing liquid.

Rose gazed at her with unwearying eyes. Her bosom rose and fell as if she had been running, and she said in her heart: "I can do that! I could stand there and do that!"

Then the theme of the play filled her with strange new thoughts. These people lived out before her a condition which she had read about but which had never been discussed in her presence. A husband discovers his wife to have been a lover and mother in her girlhood, and in a tempest of self-righteous passion flings her to the ground in scorn and horror.

She clings to his feet (in approved stage fashion), pleading for mercy: "I was so young!"

He would not listen. "Go! – or no, stay – I will go. I make the home over to you, but never look upon my face again."

While Rose burned with shame and indignation, the outraged woman on the stage grew white and stern.

"Who are you to condemn me so?" she asked in icy calm. "Are you the saint you profess to be? Will one offence contain your crime against me?"

"What do you mean?" thundered the man and husband.

"You know what I mean. In my weakness I was stained, ineffaceably; I admit it – but you, in your strength, have you not preyed upon weak women? The law allows you to escape disgrace – nature and law force me to suffer with mine."

Rose thought of Carl and his courtship with such a shudder as one feels in remembering a rescue from an abyss. A hundred great confusing questions floated by in her mind, like clouds in a mist of rain – formless, vast, trailing deeper shadow beneath them. The self-sufficient young lawyer beside her said as the curtain fell:

"There was nothing else for her husband to do but just fire her out."

Rose heard him but did not reply. She felt a sharp revulsion of feeling toward him for his coarse, hard tone. When he laid his hand on her she shook it off, and when he asked a question of her she did not reply. He was annoyed also, and so they waited for the curtain to rise on the final act.

The wife was sick and dying. The dramatist had not the courage to work out his theme. He killed the wife, so that the husband should not appear to condone and take her to wife again. She died while he, magnanimously, forgave her.

As they walked home, with fatuous insistence her lover talked with Rose about the case. He took the man's side. He hinted at the reason – presuming upon their intimacy. Men outgrow such experiences, he said; women do not. They are either one thing or the other – either pure as angels or black as devils.

Rose closed her lips tight, and her eyes flamed with indignant protest, but she said nothing in reply. In her heart she knew it was a lie. A woman can set her foot above her dead self as well as a man.

When he tried to kiss her good-bye she pushed him aside and left him without a word. He, too, was a bare and broken ideal. Her heart went back again to William De Lisle, as the young eagle goes back to the sun-warmed cliff to rest and dream, with eyes to the sun.

That night put her girlhood far from her. She grew five years older in the weeks which followed. Her mind took up irresistibly one insoluble problem after another and wrestled with it in silence. Josie's chatter went on around her like the sound of the swallows in the eaves of the old barn at home.

Her mind was like a piece of inconceivably intricate machinery, full of latent and complicated motion. A word, a touch, and it set to work, and out of its working some fine inner heat and glow changed the whole mental and physical equilibrium of her nature, and she became something else, finer, more mysterious, and more alluring – though this she did not realize.

Thereafter the young man of her acquaintance did not draw her. Her eyes had been raised to higher altitudes. She fell upon her books with terrible industry, in the hope that they would throw some light on her problems and ambitions.

There was nothing she did not think of during these character-forming days. The beauty and peace of love, the physical joy of it; the problem of marriage, the terror of birth – all the things girls are supposed not to think of, and which such girls as Rose must irresistibly think of, came to her, tormenting her, shaking her to the inmost center of her nature, and through it all she seemed quite the hearty young school girl she was, for this thought was wholesome and natural, not morbid in any degree.

She was a child in the presence of the Doctor, but a woman with her suitors. The Doctor helped her very much, but in the most trying moments of her life (and no man can realize these moments) some hidden force rose up to dominate the merely animal forces within. Some organic magnificent inheritance of moral purity.

She was saved by forces within, not by laws without. Opportunities to sin always offer in every life. Virtue is not negative, it is positive; it is a decoration won by fighting, resisting. This sweet and terrible attraction of men and women towards each other is as natural and as moral as the law of gravity, and as inexorable. Its perversion produces trouble. Love must be good and fine and according to nature, else why did it give such joy and beauty?

Natural as was this thought, she hid it from her associates. Most women die with it unacknowledged, even to their own spoken thought. She would have been helped by talk with the Doctor, or at least with his wife. But there was a growing barrier between Mrs. Thatcher and herself, and the Doctor did not seem the same good friend. She felt a change coming in the whole household.

When she went home at the close of her second year, she had a feeling that she would never again return to the old sweet companionship with Dr. Thatcher. He was too busy now, apparently, to give her the time he once seemed so glad to give. He never asked her to ride with him now. She was troubled by it and concluded they were tired of her, and so she, too, grew cold and reserved.

The day she left, the Doctor, after he had driven Rose to the train, called his wife into the office.

"Sit down a moment, wife, I want to talk with you." He faced her bravely. "I guess we'd better arrange for Rose to go to one of the chapter-houses next year. There's no need to beat around the bush – she takes up too much of my thought, and you know it and I know it."

It drew blood to say that. It took manhood to look his wife in the eyes then, but he did it.

"It isn't her fault, and it isn't yours – it isn't mine, as a matter of justice. Rose is just what she's always been, a good, sweet girl – I wouldn't have her see anything but friendly interest in my eyes for half my heart – I'm afraid she will, so – I guess – "

He was talking through set teeth. "I wish you'd tell her we can't offer her a home; I can't do it."

He rose and went to his wife. "My dear, don't cry – you've watched this thing come on in brave silence – not every wife would have kept silence so long. It won't break up our comradeship, will it, dear? We've jogged along so peacefully these fifteen years – we ought to overlook a little thing like this!" He smiled a little, then he stooped and put his arm about her.

"Come, give me a kiss, and let's adopt no more handsome girls till I'm sixty-five."

She rose and lifted her sad face to his. "It's my fault, if I – "

He kissed her and said: "No more of that! You're my faithful wife. What helps the matter materially is this – Rose thinks of me as a sober old settler now."

This ended it so far as any outward showing ever defined his feeling, but the presence of the girl never left him. At night, as he sat at his desk at the hour which almost always used to bring Rose down from her room to discuss her lessons with him, he grew sad and lonely. "If I had a child," he said to himself, "I could bear it more easily."

When Rose returned, she went into one of the co-operative boarding-houses, and slowly drifted away from the Doctor and his family. She never quite knew why. It puzzled her for a time, and then she forgot it – in the fashion of youth.