Ruth Holland stood at the window looking out at Colorado in January. The wide valley was buried under snow. It was late afternoon and the sun was passing behind the western mountains. From the window where she stood she could not see the western mountains, but the sunset colors had been thrown over to the eastern range, some fifty miles away. When she first came there, five years before, it had seemed strange to find the east lighted at sunset, more luminous than the west. The eastern range was a mighty one. Now there was snow down to its feet and there was no warmth in the colors that lighted it. They only seemed to reveal that the mountains were frozen. It would not have seemed possible for red—those mountains had been named Sangre de Cristo because they went red at sunset—to be so dazzling cold. The lighted snow brought out the contour of the mountains. They were wonderfully beautiful so, but the woman looking out at them was not thinking of them as beautiful. She was thinking of them as monuments of coldness. To her it was as if they had locked that valley in to merciless cold.
But it was not the sunset colors that really marked coming night for her. All through that winter something else had marked night, something she tried to keep from looking out at, but which she was not able to hold away from. She was looking at it now, looking off into the adjoining field where the sheep were huddling for the night.
They had begun their huddling some time before. With the first dimming of the light, the first wave of new cold that meant coming night, a few of them would get together; others would gather around them, then more and more. Now there was the struggle not to be left on the outside. The outer ones were pushing toward the center; they knew by other nights that this night would be frigid, that they could only keep alive by that warmth they could get from one another. Yet there were always some that must make that outer rim of the big circle, must be left there to the unbroken cold. She watched them; it had become a terrible thing for her to see, but she could not keep from looking. Many of those unprotected sheep had died that bitter winter; others would die before spring came. It was a cruel country, a country of cold.
That was their flock of sheep. They had been driven there the summer before from the lambing grounds in the mountains. The day they got there the lambs were exhausted from the long journey. One of them had dropped before the house and died right there beside the field it had come the long way to gain. Her efforts to revive it were useless; the little thing was worn out. They were all of them close to worn out. And now they had the winter to fight; night after night she watched them huddling there, the big pitiful mass of them out in the bitter cold. It was the way of the country to leave them so; the only way, the sheep men said, that sheep could be made to pay. They estimated that the loss by freezing was small compared with what would be the cost of shelter for droves that ran into thousands, into tens of thousands.
Ruth would wake at night and think of them huddled out there, would lie thinking of them as she drew the covers around herself, think of them when the wind drove against the house, and often, as tonight, when it was every instant growing colder, she wondered if what was before them filled them with terror. Sometimes she could not keep away and went nearer and looked at them; they were unbearably pitiful to her, their necks wrapped around each other's necks, trying to get from one another the only warmth there was for them, so helpless, so patient, they, play-loving creatures, gentle things, bearing these lives that men might finally use them for clothing and for food. There were times when the pathos of them was a thing she could not bear. They seemed to represent the whole cruelty of life, made real to her the terrible suffering of the world that winter of the war.
She watched the sheep until the quick dusk had fallen, and then stood thinking of them huddled over there in the frigid darkness. When she found that her face was wet and realized that she had sobbed aloud she turned from the window to the stove, drew a chair up close to it and put her feet on the fender. It was so bitterly cold that the room was warm only near the stove; over there by the window she had grown chilled. And as the heat enveloped her ankles she thought of the legs of those poor frightened things that had been the last comers and not able to get to the inside of the circle—that living outer rim which was left all exposed to the frigid January night in that high mountain valley. She could feel the cold cutting against their legs, could see their trembling and their vain, frantic efforts to get within the solidly packed mass. She was crying, and she said to herself, her fingers clenched down into her palm, "Stop that! Stop that!" She did not know what might not happen to her if she were unable to stop such thinking as that.
To try and force herself away from it she got up and lighted a lamp. She looked about on her desk for a magazine she had put there. She would make herself read something while waiting for Stuart. He had had to drive into town. He would be almost frozen when he got back from that two-mile drive. She paused in her search for the magazine and went into the kitchen to make sure that the fire there was going well. Then she put some potatoes in to bake; baked potatoes were hot things—they would be good after that drive. The heat from the oven poured out to her, and it swept her again to the thought of the living huddled mass out there in the frigid darkness. The wind beat against the house; it was beating against them. She bit her lip hard and again she said to herself—"No!"
She made some other preparations for supper. She had those things to do herself now. The Chinaman Ted had brought home with him in the fall had left in December. He had appeared before her ready for leaving and had calmly said, "Cold here, missis. And too all alone. Me go where more others are." She had said nothing at all in reply to him, in protest, too held by what he had said—"Cold here, and too all alone!" She had stood at the window and watched him going up the road toward town, going where "more others" were.
She went back now into their main room; it was both living and dining room these days, for since the extreme cold had fastened on them they had abandoned their two little upstairs bedrooms and taken for sleeping the room which in summer was used as living-room. That could be heated a little by leaving the door open, and it had seemed out of the question to go to bed in those upstairs rooms where the cold had been left untouched. Since they had been doing their own work all extra things had had to be cut down; an upstairs fire would mean more work, and it seemed there was already more work than Ruth could get done and have time for anything else. She was tired all the time these days; she would think during the day of the good time she was going to have with a book that evening, and then night would find her so tired she could scarcely keep awake, and she would huddle there before the fire, dreading the cold of the night.
Life had reduced itself to necessities; things had to be ruthlessly rearranged for meeting conditions. She loved her own room to sleep in. She needed it. But she had given that up because it was too cold, because she could not do any more work. There was something that made her cringe in the thought of their sharing a bed, not because of love of being together, but because of the necessity of fighting the cold. And it made crowded quarters downstairs. She began "picking up" the room now. Things were piled up on the sewing machine, on the reading table. It seemed impossible to keep them put away. She tried hard to keep the room an attractive place to sit in, but it was in disorder, uninviting, most of the time. Often, after doing the kitchen work, she would clean it all up with the idea of making it attractive to sit in, then would be too utterly tired to enjoy it. She lagged in putting things away now; she would stand holding them helplessly, not knowing where to put them; she got sick of it and just threw some of them into a closet, anything to get them out of sight for the time. She knew that was not the way to do, that it would make it harder another time. She felt like crying. It seemed things had got ahead of her, that she was swamped by them, and somehow she did not have the spirit, or the strength, to get a new start, make a new plan.
Finally she had the room looking a little less slovenly, not so sordid, and was about to sit down with her magazine. But the lamp was flickering, and then she remembered that she had not filled it that day. She picked the lamp up and slowly, drooping, started for the kitchen. She gave the can an angry little tilt and the oil overflowed on the table. She was biting her lips as she went about looking for a cloth to wipe it up. She heard sleigh bells and knew Stuart was coming. Hastily she washed the oil from her hands, she always hated herself when her hands smelled of kerosene, and began getting things ready for supper.
Stuart came hurrying and stamping in after putting the horse away, quickly banging the door shut and standing there pounding his feet and rubbing his stiffened hands.
"Fearfully cold?" she inquired, hurriedly getting out the box of codfish she was going to cream for their supper.
"Cold!" he scoffed, as if in scorn for the inadequacy of the word. After a minute he came up to the stove. "I was afraid," he said, holding his right hand in his left, "that it had got these fingers."
He took off his big bear-skin coat. A package he had taken from the pocket of it he threw over on the kitchen table. "Don't throw the bacon there, Stuart," hurriedly advised Ruth, busy with the cream sauce she was making, "I've just spilled oil there."
"Heavens!" he said irritably, shoving the bacon farther back.
His tone made Ruth's hand tremble. "If you think I'm so careless you might fill the lamps yourself," she said tremulously.
"Who said you were careless?" he muttered. He went in the other room and after a minute called out, as one trying to be pleasant, "What we going to have for supper?"
"Creamed codfish," she told him.
"For a little change!" he said, under his breath.
"I don't think that's very kind, Stuart," she called back, quiveringly. "It's not so simple a matter to have 'changes' here now."
"Oh, I know it," he said, wearily.
She brought the things in and they began the meal in silence. She had not taken time to lay the table properly. Things were not so placed as to make them attractive. Stuart tasted a piece of bread and then hastily put it aside, not concealing a grimace of distaste. "What's the matter?" Ruth asked sharply.
"I don't seem to care much for bread and oil," he said in a voice it was plainly an effort to make light.
Ruth's eyes filled. She picked up the plate of bread and took it to the kitchen. Stuart rose and went after her. "I'll get some more bread, Ruth," he said kindly. "Guess you're tired tonight, aren't you?"
She turned away from him and took a drink of water. Then she made a big effort for control and went to the dining-room. She asked some questions about town and they talked in a perfunctory way until supper was over.
He had brought papers and a couple of letters from town. Ruth was out in the kitchen doing the dishes when she heard a queer exclamation from him. "What is it, Stuart?" it made her ask quickly, going to the dining-room door with the cup she was wiping.
He gave her a strange look; and then suddenly he laughed. "Whatisit?" the laugh made her repeat in quick, sharp voice.
"Well, you'll never guess!" he said.
She frowned and stood there waiting.
"Marion's going to get a divorce." He looked at her as if he did not believe what he said.
Ruth put her hand out to the casement of the door. "Sheis?" she said dully.
He held up a legal looking paper. "Official notice," he said. Then suddenly he threw the thing over on the table and with a short hard laugh pulled his chair around to the fire. Ruth stood a moment looking at it lying there. Then she turned and went back to the dishes. When she returned to the living-room the paper still lay there on the table. She had some darning to do and she got out her things and sat down, chair turned to one side, not facing the legal looking document.
After a little while Stuart, who had been figuring in a memorandum book, yawned and said he guessed he'd go to bed. He shook down the fire, then got up and picked up the paper from the table, folded it and took it over to the big desk in the corner where his business things were. "Well, Ruth," he remarked, "this would have meant a good deal to us ten or twelve years ago, wouldn't it?"
She nodded, her head bent over the sock she was darning.
"Oh, well," he said, after a pause, "maybe it will help some even yet."
She made no answer.
"I suppose Marion wants to get married," he went on meditatively, after a moment adding bitterly, "Her wanting it is the only thing that would ever make her do it."
He went down cellar for coal, and after he had filled the stove began undressing before it. When ready for bed he sat there a little before the fire, as if taking in all the heat he could for the night. Ruth had finished her darning and was putting the things away. "Coming to bed?" he asked of her.
"Not right away," she said, her voice restrained.
"Better not try to sit up late, Ruth," he said kindly. "You need plenty of sleep. I notice you're often pretty tired at night."
She did not reply, putting things in the machine drawer. Her back was to him. "Well, Ruth," he said, in a voice genial but slightly ironic, "we can get married now."
She went on doing things and still did not speak.
"Better late than never," he said pleasantly, yawning.
He stood up, ready for going into the bedroom, but still hating to leave the fire, standing there with his back to it. "When shall we get married, Ruth?" he went on, in a slightly amused voice.
"Oh, I don't know, Stuart," she replied shortly from the kitchen.
"Have to plan it out," he said sleepily, yawning once more. Then he laughed, as if the idea more and more amused him. After that he murmured, in the voice of one mildly curious about a thing, "I wonder if Marionisgoing to get married?"
Ruth wanted to take a bath before she went to bed. Taking a bath was no easy matter under their circumstances. It was so much work and usually she was so tired that she would sometimes let it go longer than she would have supposed she would ever let bathing go. She was determined not to let it go tonight. She had the water on heating; she went down for the tub, went upstairs into her frigid room for the fresh things to put on in the morning. The room was so cold that there was a sort of horror about it. She went over to the window; the snow made the valley bright. Dimly she could see a massed thing—the huddled sheep. With a hard little laugh for the sob that shook her she hurried out of the room.
She took her bath before the fire in the living-room. Stuart had piled on one chair the clothes that he had taken off and would put on in the morning. She placed on another the things for herself. And suddenly she looked at those two chairs and the thing that she had been trying not to think about—that now they two could be married—seemed to sear her whole soul with mockery. She was rubbing some lotion on her red, chapped hands, hands defaced by work and cold. She had a picture of her hands as they used to be—back there in those years when to have been free to marry Stuart would have made life radiant. She sat a long time before the fire, not wanting to go to bed. She particularly wanted to go to bed alone that night. There seemed something shameful in that night sharing a bed as a matter of expediency. Stuart was snoring a little. She sat there, her face buried in her hands. The wind was beating against the house. It was beating against the sheep out there, too—it had a clean sweep against that outer rim of living things. She cried for a little while; and then, so utterly tired that it did not matter much, she went in the other room and crept into bed.
But at last the cold had let go of them. It was April, the snow had gone and the air promised that even to that valley spring would come. Ruth, out feeding the chickens, felt that spring nearness. She raised her face gratefully to the breeze. It had seemed almost unbelievable that the wind would ever again bring anything but blighting cold.
As she stood there, held by that first feel of spring, an automobile came along, slowed, and Stuart went running out of the house to meet it. It was his friend Stoddard, a real-estate man there. He had become friends with this man in the last few months. He had had little in friendships with men and this had brightened him amazingly. He had a new interest in business things, new hopes. It had seemed to make him younger, keener. He and Mr. Stoddard had a plan for going into Montana where the latter was interested in a land developing company, and going into business together. Stuart was alive with interest in it; it promised new things for him, a new chance. They would live in a town, and it would be business life, which he cared for as he had never come to care for ranching. He was beginning to talk to Ruth about moving, of selling off their stock and some of their things. He was eager to make the change.
She had gone in the house as the machine stopped, having seen that there were people in the car with Mr. Stoddard and not feeling presentably dressed. She went upstairs to do the work and as she glanced down from the upper window she saw Stuart in laughing conversation with a girl in the automobile. Something about it arrested her. He was standing to the far side of the machine so she could see his face. There was something in it she had not seen for a long time—that interest in women, an unmistakable pleasure in talking with an attractive girl. She stood there, a little back from the window, watching them. There was nothing at all wrong about it; nothing to resent, simply a little gay bantering with a girl. It was natural to him; it had been once, it could be again. His laugh came up to her. So he could still laugh like that; she had not heard him for a long time. He turned and started hurriedly for the house, the car waiting for him. He was smiling, his step was buoyant. "Ruth," he called up to her, and his voice too had the old buoyancy, "I'm going into town with Stoddard. We want to go over some things. He'll bring me back before night."
"All right, Stuart," she called back pleasantly.
She watched the car out of sight. Stuart, sitting in the front seat with his friend, had turned and was gayly talking with the women behind. When she first knew him, when she was still a little girl and used to see him around with his own set, he had been like that.
She did not want to stay in the house. That house had shut her in all winter. The road stretched invitingly away. About a mile down it there was a creek, willows grew there. Perhaps there she would find some real spring. Anyway she had an impulse to get out to the moving water. She had seemed locked in, everything had seemed locked in for so long.
As she was getting her coat she put into the pocket a letter she had received the day before from Deane Franklin. After she had sat a little while by the running water she took the letter out to reread, but did not at first open it. She was wishing Deane were sitting there with her. She would like to talk to him.
This letter was a gloomy one. It seemed that Deane too was locked in. Soon after Ted came back from Freeport in the fall she had got it out of him about the Franklins. She had sensed at once that there was something about Deane he did not want to tell her, and before he left for his own place she had it from him that the Franklins had indeed separated, and that the gossip of Freeport was that it was because of Mrs. Franklin's resentment of her. And that was one of the things had seemed to make it possible for the winter somehow totakeher; that was the thing had seemed to close the last door to her spirit, the last of those doors that had been thrown wide open when she left Annie's home in Freeport the spring before.
She had tried to write to Deane. She felt that she should write to him, but she had a feeling of powerlessness. Finally, only a little while before, she had brought herself to do it. She knew it was a poor letter, a halting, constrained thing, but it seemed the best she could do, and so finally, after a great deal of uncertainty, she sent it.
His reply made her feel that he realized how it had been, why she had been so long in writing, why the letter had been the stilted thing it was. It gave her a feeling that her friend had not withdrawn from her because of what she had brought down upon him, that that open channel between him and her was there as it had ever been. And though his letter did not make her happy, it loosened something in her to be able to feel that the way between her and Deane was not closed.
"Don't distress yourself, Ruth," she now reread, "or have it upon your spirit, where too much has lain heavy all these years. You want to know the truth, and the truth is that Amy did resent my feeling about you—about you and your situation—and that put us apart. But you see it was not in us to stay together, or we could not have been thus put apart. Love can't do it all, Ruth—not for long; I mean love that hasn't roots down in the spirit can't. And where there isn't that spiritual underneath, without a hinterland, love is pretty insecure.
"I could have held on to it a while longer, I suppose, by cutting clear loose from the thing really me. And I suppose I would have done it if I could—I did in fact make attempts at it—but that me-ness, I'm afraid, is most infernal strong in my miserable make-up. And somehow the withdrawal of one's self seems a lot to pay for even the happiness of love. There are some of us can't seem able to do it.
"So it's not you, Ruth; it's that it was like that, and that it came out through the controversy about you. Cast from your mind any feeling adding the wrecking of my happiness to your list of crimes.
"But, Ruth, I'mnothappy. I couldn't get along in happiness, and I don't get along without it. It's a paralyzing thing not to have happiness—or to lose it, rather. Does it ever seem to you that life is a pretty paralyzing thing? That little by little—a little here and a little there—itgetsus? We get harness-broke, you see. Seems to have gone that way with most of the people I know. Seems to be that way with me. Don't let it do it to you!
"Somehow I don't believe it will. I think that you, Ruth, would be a fine little prison-breaker. Might stand some show of being one myself if I were anywhere but in this town. There's something about it that hasgotme, Ruth. If it hadn't—I'd be getting out of it now.
"But of course I'm a pretty poor sort, not worth making a fight for, or it wouldn't be like this. And—for that matter—what's the difference? Lives aren't counting for much these days—men whoarethe right sort going down by the thousands, by the hundred of thousands, so what—for heaven's sake—does it matter about me?
"I wish I could see you!
"I'm glad for you about the divorce. I believe the case comes up this April term, so it may be all over by the time you get this letter. Pretty late in coming, and I suppose it must seem a good deal of a mockery—getting it now—but maybe it will help some for the future, make you feel more comfortable, and I'm awfully glad.
"Funny about it, isn't it? I wonder what made her do it! I was called there this winter, maid sick—miscarriage—and Mrs. Williams puzzled me. Didn't turn the girl out, awfully decent to her. I would have supposed she would have been quite the other way. And now this. Queer, don't you think?
"Write to me sometimes, Ruth. Sometimes write to me what you're thinking about. Maybe it will stir me up. Write to me to take a brace and get out of this town! If you went for me hard enough, called me all the insulting names you could think of, and told me a living dead man was the most cowardly and most disgusting object cluttering up the earth, you might get a rise out of me. You're the one could do it, if it can be done.
"One thing Idoknow—writing this has made me want like blazes to see you!
"Deane."
Ruth sat there in the arm of a low willow, her hands resting upon Deane's letter, her eyes closed, the faint breath of coming spring upon her face. She was tired and very sad. She was thinking of Deane's life, of her own life, of the way one seemed mocked. She wished that Deane were there; she could talk to him and she would like to talk. His letter moved something in her, something that had long seemed locked in stirred a little. Her feeling about life had seemed a thing frozen within her. Now the feeling that there was still this open channel between her and Deane was as a thawing, an outlet.
She thought of her last talk with Deane, of their walk together that day, almost a year before, when he came to see her at Annie's, the very day she was starting back West. She had felt anything but locked in that day. There was that triumphant sense of openness to life, the joy of new interest in it, of zest for it. And then she came back West, to Stuart, and somehow the radiance went, courage ebbed, it came to seem that life was all fixed, almost as if life, in the real sense, was over. That sense of having failed, having been inadequate to her own feeling, struck her down to a wretched powerlessness. And so routine, hard work, bitter cold, loneliness, that sense of the cruelty of life which the sternness of the country gave—those things had been able to take her; it was because something had gone dead in her.
She thought of that spiritual hinterland Deane talked about. She thought of her and Stuart. She grew very sad in the thinking. She wondered if it was her fault. However it was, it was true they no longer found the live things in one another. She had not been able to communicate to him the feeling with which she came back from Annie's. It was a lesser thing for trying to talk of it to him. She did not reach him; she knew that he only thought her a little absurd. After that she did not try to talk to him of what she felt. Life lessened; things were as they were; they too were as they were. It came to seem just a matter of following out what had been begun. And then that news of the divorce had come to mock her.
But she must do something for Deane. Deane must not go like that. She had brought pencil and writing tablet with her, thinking that perhaps out of doors, away from the house where she had seemed locked in all winter, she could write to him. She thought of things to say, things that should be said, but she did not seem to have any power to charge them with life. How could the dead rouse the dead? She sat there thinking of her and Deane, of how they had always been able to reach one another. And finally she began:
"Dear Deane,"You must find your way back to life."
"Dear Deane,
"You must find your way back to life."
She did not go on. She sat staring at what she had written. She read it over; she said it aloud. It surged in upon her, into shut places. She sat looking at it, frightened at what it was doing. Sat looking at it after it was all blurred by tears—looking down at the words she herself had written—"You must find your way back to life."
Ruth was very quiet through the next week. Stuart was preoccupied with the plans he was making for going to Montana; when he talked with her it was of that, of arrangements to be made for it, and his own absorption apparently kept him from taking note of her being more quiet than usual, or different. It was all working out very well. He had found a renter for the ranch, the prospects for the venture in Montana were good. They were to move within a month. And one night in late April when he came home from town he handed Ruth a long envelope, with a laughing, "Better late than never." Then he was soon deep in some papers.
Ruth was sorting a box of things; there were many things to be gone through preparatory to moving. She had put the paper announcing his divorce aside without comment; but she loitered over what she was doing. She was watching Stuart, thinking about him.
She was thinking with satisfaction that he looked well. He had thrown off the trouble that had brought about their departure from Freeport twelve years before. He was growing rather stout; his fair hair had gone somewhat gray and his face was lined, he had not the look of a young man. But he looked strong, alert. His new hopes had given him vigor, a new buoyancy. She sat there thinking of the years she had lived with him, of the wonder and the happiness she had known through him, of the hard things they had faced together. Her voice was gentle as she replied to his inquiry about what day of the month it was.
"I think," he said, "that we can get off by the fifteenth, don't you, Ruth?"
"Perhaps." Her voice shook a little, but he was following his own thoughts and did not notice. After a little he came and sat across the table from her. "And, Ruth, about this getting married business—" He broke off with a laugh. "Seems absurd, doesn't it?"
She nodded, fumbling with the things in the box, her head bent over them.
"Well, I was thinking we'd better stop somewhere along the way and attend to it. Can't do it here—don't want to there."
She lifted her hands from the box and laid them on the table that was between him and her. She looked over at him and said, quietly, in a voice that shook only a little: "I do not want to get married, Stuart."
He was filling his pipe and stopped abruptly, spilling the tobacco on the table. "What did you say?" he asked in the voice of one sure he must have heard wrong.
"I said," she repeated, "that I did not want to get married."
He stared at her, his face screwed up. Then it relaxed a little. "Oh, yes—yes, I know how you feel. It seems so absurd—after all this time—after all there has been. But we must attend to it, Ruth. It's right that we should—now that we can. God knows we wanted to bad enough—long ago. And it will make us feel better about going into a new place. We can face people better." He gathered up the tobacco he had spilled and put it in his pipe.
For a moment she did not speak. Then, "That wasn't what I meant, Stuart," she said, falteringly.
"Well, then, what in the worlddoyou mean?" he asked impatiently.
She did not at once say what she meant. Her eyes held him, they were so strangely steady. "Just why would we be getting married, Stuart?" she asked simply.
At first he could only stare at her, appeared to be waiting for her to throw light on what she had asked. When she did not do that he moved impatiently, as if resentful of being quizzed this way. "Why—why, because we can now. Because it's the thing to do. Because it will be expected of us," he concluded, with gathering impatience for this unnecessary explanation.
A faint smile traced itself about Ruth's mouth. It made her face very sad as she said: "I do not seem to be anxious to marry for any of those reasons, Stuart."
"Ruth, what are you driving at?" he demanded, thoroughly vexed at the way she had bewildered him.
"This is what I am driving at, Stuart," she began, a little more spiritedly. But then she stopped, as if dumb before it. She looked over at him as if hoping her eyes would tell it for her. But as he continued in that look of waiting, impatient bewilderment she sighed and turned a little away. "Don't you think, Stuart," she asked, her voice low, "that the future is rather too important a thing to be given up to ratifying the past?"
He pushed his chair back in impatience that was mounting to anger. "Just what do you mean?" he asked, stiffly.
She picked up the long envelope lying on the table between them. She held it in her hand a moment without speaking. For as she touched it she had a sense of what it would have meant to have held it in her hand twelve years before, over on the other side of their life together, a new sense of the irony and the pity of not having had it then—and having it now. She laid it down between them. "To me," she said, "this sets me free.
"Free to choose," she went on, as he only stared at her. There was a moment of looking at him out of eyes so full of feeling that they held back the feeling that had flushed his face. "And my choice," she said, with a strange steadiness, "is that I now go my way alone."
He spoke then; but it was only to stammer: "Why,—Ruth!" Helplessly he repeated: "Ruth!"
"But you see? You do see?" she cried. "If it hadnotbeen so much—so beautiful! Just because itwaswhat it was—" She choked and could not go on.
He came around and sat down beside her. The seriousness of his face, something she had touched in him, made it finer than it had been in those last years of routine. It was more as it used to be. His voice too seemed out of old days as he said: "Ruth, I don't know yet what you mean—why you're saying this?"
"I think you do, Stuart," she said simply. "Or I think you will, if you'll let yourself. It's simply that this—" she touched the envelope on the table before her—"that this finds us over on the other side of marriage. And this is what I mean!" she flamed. "I mean that the marriage between us was too real to go through the mockery this would make possible now!" She turned away because she was close to tears.
He sat there in silence. Then, "Have I done anything, Ruth?" he asked in the hesitating way of one at sea.
She shook her head without turning back to him.
"You apparently have got the impression," he went on, a faint touch of resentment creeping into his voice at having to make the declaration, "that I don't care any more. That—that isn't so," he said awkwardly and with a little rise of resentment.
Ruth had turned a little more toward him, but was looking down at her hands, working with them as if struggling for better control. "I have no—complaint on that score," she said very low.
"Things change," he went on, with a more open manner of defence. "The first kind of love doesn't last forever. It doesn't with anyone," he finished, rather sullenly.
"I know that, Stuart," she said quietly. "I know enough to know that. But I know this as well. I know that sometimes that first kind of love leaves a living thing to live by. I know that it does—sometimes. And I know that with us—it hasn't."
As if stung by that he got up and began walking angrily about the room. "You're talking nonsense! Why wouldn't we get married, I'd like to know, after all this time together? Wewillget married—that's all there is to it! A nice spectacle we would make of ourselves if we didn't! Have you thought of that?" he demanded. "Have you thought of what people would say?"
Again her lips traced that faint smile that showed the sadness of her face. "There was a time, Stuart," she said wearily, "when we were not governed by what people would say."
He frowned, but went on more mildly: "You've got the thing all twisted up, Ruth. You do that sometimes. You often have a queer way of looking at a thing; not the usual way—a—well, a sort of twisted way."
She got up. One hand was at her throat as if feeling some impediment there; the knuckles of her clenched hand were tapping the table. "A queer way of looking at things," she said in quick, sharp voice that was like the tapping of her knuckles. "Not the usual way. A—sort of twisted way. Perhaps. Perhaps that's true. Perhaps that was the way I had of looking at things twelve years ago—when I left them all behind and went with you. Perhaps that was what made me do it—that queer, twisted way of looking at things! But this much is true, Stuart, and this you have got to know is true. I went with you because I was as I was. I'm going my way alone now because I am as I am. And what you don't see is this,—that the thing that made me go with you then is the thing that makes me go my way alone now."
For a moment they stood there facing each other, her eyes forcing home what she had said. But she was trembling and suddenly, weakly, she sat down.
"Well, I simply can't understand it!" he cried petulantly and flung open the door and stood looking out.
"Look here, Ruth," he turned sharply to her after a little, "have you thought of the position this putsmein? Have you thought of the position you would putmein?" he contended hotly. "Do you know what people would say about me? You ought to know what they'd say! They'd sayIwas the one!—they'd sayIdidn't want to do it!"
There was a little catch something like a laugh as she replied: "Of course. They'll say men don't marry women of that sort, won't they?"
"Oh, you can't do this, Ruth," he went on quickly. "You see, it can't be done. I tell you it wouldn't be right! It just wouldn't beright—in any sense. Why can't you see that? Can't you see that we've got to vindicate the whole thing? That we've got to show them that itdoeslast! That's the vindication for it," he finished stoutly, "that it's the kind of a love that doesn't die!
"And I'd like to know where under the sun you'd go!" he demanded hotly, irritated at the slight smile his last words had brought.
"What I will do, Stuart, after leaving you, is for me to determine, isn't it?"
"A nice way to treat me!" he cried, and threw himself down on the couch, elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands. "After all these years—after all there has been—that's aniceway—" he choked.
She was quick to go over and sit beside him; she leaned a little against him, her hand on his arm, just as she had sat many times when he needed her, when she brought him comfort. The thought of all those times rose in her and brought tears to her eyes that had been burning dry a moment before. She felt the feeling this had whipped to life in him and was moved by it, and by an underlying feeling of the sadness of change. For his expostulations spoke of just that—change. She knew this for the last hurt she could help him through, that she must help him through this hurt brought him by this last thing she could do for him. Something about things being like that moved her deeply. She saw it all so clearly, and so sadly. It was not grief this brought him; this was not the frenzy or the anguish in the thought of losing her that there would have been in those other years. It was shock, rather—disturbance, and the forcing home to him that sense of change. He would have gone on without much taking stock, because, as he had said, it was the thing to do. Habit, a sense of fitness, rather than deep personal need, would have made him go on. And now it was his sense that it was gone, his resentment against that, his momentary feeling of being left desolate. She looked at his bowed head through tears. Gently she laid her hand on it. She thought of him as he stood before the automobile the other day lighting up in the gay talk with that girl. She knew, with a sudden wrench in her heart she knew it, that he would not be long desolate. She understood him too well for that. She knew that, hard as she seemed in that hour, she was doing for Stuart in leaving him the greatest thing she could now do for him. A tear fell to her hand in her clear knowing of that. There was deep sadness in knowing that, after all there had been, to leave the way cleared of herself was doing a greater thing than anything else she could do for him.
A sob shook her and he raised his face upon which there were tears and clutched her two wrists with his hands. "Ruth," he whispered, "it will come back. I feel that this has—has brought it back."
The look of old feeling had transformed his face. After barren days it was sweet to her. It tempted her, tempted her to shut her eyes to what she knew and sink into the sweetness of believing herself loving and loved again. Perhaps, for a little time, they could do it. To be deeply swayed by this common feeling, to go together in an emotion, was like dear days gone. But it was her very fidelity to those days gone that made her draw just a little away, and, tears running down her face, shake her head. She knew too well, and she had the courage of her knowing. This was something that had seeped up from old feeling; it had no life of its own. What they were sharing now was grief over a dead thing that had been theirs together. That grief, that sharing, left them tender. This was their moment—their moment for leaving it. They must leave it before it lay there between them both dead and unmourned, clogging life for them. She whispered to him: "Just because of all it has meant—let's leave it while we can leave it like this!"
The man who worked for them had gone ahead in the spring wagon with her trunk. She was waiting for Ted to hitch the other horse to the buggy and drive her in to the train. She was all ready and stood there looking about the house she was leaving. There were things in that room which they had had since their first years together—that couch, this chair, had come to them in Arizona in the days when they loved each other with a passion that made everything else in the world a pale thing before their love. She stood picking out things that they had had when love was flaming strong in them and it seemed they two fought together against the whole world. And as she stood there alone in their place in common that she was about to leave she was made sick by a sense of failure—that desolate sense of failure she had tried all along to beat down. That love had been theirs—and this was what it had come to. That wonder had been—and it ended in the misery of this leavetaking. She turned sharply around, opened the door and stood there in the doorway, her back to the place she was quitting, her pale stern face turned to the mountains—to that eastern range which she was going to cross. She tried to draw something from them, draw strength for the final conflict which she knew she would have with Ted while they drove in to town. She looked toward the barn-yard to see if he was most ready, and could not but smile a little at his grim, resolute face as he was checking up the horse. She could see so well that he was going to make the best of his time while driving her in to the train. And it seemed she had nothing left in her for combat; she would be glad to see the train that was to take her away.
Three days before Stuart had gone suddenly to Denver. He went with his friend Stoddard, regarding some of their arrangements for Montana. He had found only at the last minute that he would have to go, had hurriedly driven out from town to get his things and tell her he was going. He had been in the house only a few minutes and was all excitement about the unexpected trip. It was two days after their talk. After their moment of being swept together by the feeling of things gone he had, as if having to get a footing on everyday ground, ended the talk with saying: "I'll tell you, Ruth, you need a little change. We'll have to work it out." The next day they were both subdued, more gentle with each other than they had been of late, but they did not refer to the night before. After he had hurriedly kissed her good-by when leaving for Denver he had turned back and said, "And don't you worry—about things, Ruth. We'll get everything fixed up—and a little change—" He had hurried down to the machine without finishing it.
She had gone to the window and watched him disappear. He was sitting erect, alert, talking animatedly with his friend. She watched him as far as she could see him. She knew that she would not see him again.
And then she hitched up the horse and drove into town and telephoned Ted, who lived about fifty miles to the north. She told him that she was going East and asked him to come down the next day and see her.
She had known that Ted would not approve, would not understand, but she had not expected him to make the fight he had. It had taken every bit of her will, her force, to meet him. Worn now, and under the stress of the taking leave, at once too tired and too emotional, she wished that he would let it rest. But the grim line of his jaw told her that he had no such intention. She felt almost faint as they drove through the gate. She closed her eyes and did not open them for some time.
"You see, Ruth," Ted began gently, as if realizing that she was very worn, "you just don't realize how crazy the whole thing is. It's ridiculous for you to go to New York—alone! You've never been there," he said firmly.
"No. That is one reason for going," she answered, rather feebly.
"One reason for going!" he cried. "What'll you do when the train pulls in? Where'll yougo?"
"I don't know, Ted," she said patiently, "just where I will go. And I rather like that—not knowing where I will go. It's all new, you see. Nothing is mapped out."
"It's a fool thing!" he cried. "Don't you know that something will happen to you?"
She smiled a little, very wearily. "Lots of things have happened to me, Ted, and I've come through them somehow." After a moment she added, with more spirit: "There's just one thing might happen to me that I haven't the courage to face." He looked at her inquiringly. "Nothing happening," she said, with a little smile.
He turned impatiently and slapped the horse with the reins. "You seem to have lost your senses," he said sharply.
He drove along in silence for a little. Ruth looked at him and his face seemed hard. She thought of how close she and Ted had come, how good he had been, how much it had meant. She could not leave him like this. She must make the effort, must gather herself together and try and make Ted see. "Perhaps, Ted," she began tremulously, "you think I have taken leave of my senses because you haven't tried very hard to understand just what it is I feel." She smiled wanly as she added, "You've been so absorbed in your own disapproval, you know."
"Well, how can I be any other way?" he demanded. "Going away like this—for no reason—on a wild goose chase! Isn't Stuart good to you?" he asked abruptly.
"Yes, Ted," she answered, as if she were tired of saying it, "Stuart is good enough to me."
"I suppose things aren't—just as they used to be," he went on, a little doggedly. "Heavens!—they aren't with anybody! And what will people say?" he broke out with new force. "Think of what people in Freeport will say, Ruth. They'll say the whole thing was a failure, and that it was because you did wrong. They'll say, when the chance finally came, that Stuart didn't want to marry you." He colored but brought it out bluntly.
"I suppose they will," agreed Ruth.
"And if they knew the truth—or what I know, though heaven knows I'm balled up enough about what the truth really is!—they'd say it just shows again that you are different, not—something wrong," he finished bitterly.
She said nothing for a moment. "And is that what you think, Ted?" she asked, choking a little.
"I don't understand it, Ruth," he said, less aggressively. "I had thought you would be so glad of the chance to marry. I—" he hesitated but did not pursue that. He had never told her of going to see Mrs. Williams, of the effort he had made for her. "It seemed that now, when your chance came, you ought to show people that you do want to do the right thing. It surprises me a lot, Ruth, that you don't feel that way, and—Oh! I don't get it at all," he concluded abruptly.
Tears were very close when, after a little, she answered: "Well, Ted, maybe when you have less of life left you will understand better what it is I feel. Perhaps," she went on in answer to his look inquiry, "when the future has shrunk down to fewer years you'll see it as more important to get from it what you can."
They drove for a little time in silence. They had come in sight of the town and she had not won Ted; she was going away without his sympathy. And she was going away alone, more alone this time than she had been twelve years before.
She laid her hand on his arm, left it there while she was speaking. "Ted," she said, "it's like this. This has gone for me. It's all gone. It was wonderful—but it's gone. Some people, I know, could go on with the life love had made after love was gone. I am not one of those people—that's all. You speak of there being something discreditable in my going away just when I could marry. To me there would be something discreditable in going on. It would be—" she put her hand over her heart and said it very simply, "it would be unfaithful to something here." She choked a little and he turned away.
"But I don't see how you can bear, Ruth," he said after a moment, made gentle by her confidence, "to feel that it has—failed. I don't see how you can bear—after all you paid for it—to let it come to nothing."
"Don't say that, Ted!" she cried in a voice that told he had touched the sorest place. "Don't say that!" she repeated, a little wildly. "You don't know what you're talking about.Failed?A thing that glorified life for years—failed?"
Her voice broke, but it was more steadily she went on: "That's the very reason I'm going to New York—simply that it maynotcome to nothing. I'm going away from it for that very reason—that it may not come to nothing! That my life may not come to nothing. What I've had—what I've gone through—lives in me, Ted. It doesn't come to nothing if I—come to something!" She stopped abruptly with a choking little laugh.
Ted looked at her wonderingly; but the hardness had gone out of his look. "But what are you going to do, Ruth?" he asked gently.
"I don't know yet. I've got to find out."
"You must see that I can't help but worry about it," he went on. "Going so far away—to a place absolutely unknown to you—where I'm afraid it will be so much harder than you think."
She did not answer him, looking off to that eastern range she was going to cross, as if the mountains could help her to hold on to her own feeling against the doubts he was trying to throw around her.
"You see, Ruth," he went on, as if feeling his way, not wanting to hurt her, "what has been may make it hard to go on. You can't tell. You'll never know—never be sure. Old things may come up to spoil new ones for you. That's what I'm so afraid of. That's what it seems you aren't seeing. You would be so much—safer—to stay with Stuart."
She turned to him with a little laugh, her lashes wet. "Yes, Ted dear, I suppose I would. But I never did seem to stay where I was safest—did I?"
"Don't worry about me, Ted," she said just as they were coming into town. "I'm going to take some of father's money—yes, yes, I know it isn't a great deal, but enough for a little while, till I get my bearings—and I'm going to make things come alive for me again. I'm not through yet, that's all. I could have stayed with life gone dead; it would have been safer, as you say. But you see I'm not through yet, Ted—I guess that's the secret of it all. I want more life—more things from life. And I'm going to New York just because it will be so completely new—so completely beginning new—and because it's the center of so many living things. And it's such a wonderful time, Ted. It seems to me the war is going to make a new world—a whole new way of looking at things. It's as if a lot of old things, old ideas, had been melted, and were fluid now, and were to be shaped anew. That's the way it seems to me, and that makes me the more eager to get some things from life that I haven't had. I've been shut in with my own experience. If I stayed on here I'd be shut in with my own dead experiences. I want to go on! I can't stop here—that's all. And we have to find our way for going on. We must find our own way, Ted, even," she choked, "though what we see as the way may seem a wild goose chase to some one we love. I'll tell you why I'm going to New York," she flashed with sudden defiance. "I'm going because I want to!"
She laughed a little and he laughed with her. Then she went on more gently: "Because I want to. Just the thought of it has made life come alive for me—that's reason enough for going to the ends of the earth! I'm going toliveagain, Ted—not just go on with what living has left. I'm going to find some work to do. Yes Ican!" she cried passionately in response to his gesture "I suppose to you it seems just looking out for myself—seems unfaithful to Stuart. Well, it isn't—that's all I can say, and maybe some day you'll see that it wasn't. It isn't unfaithful to turn from a person you have nothing more to offer, for whom you no longer make life a living thing. It's more faithful to go. You'll see that some time, Ted. But be good to Stuart," she hastily added. "You stay with him till he can get off. I've made all the arrangements with Mrs. Baxter for packing up—sending on the things. It would be hard for him to do that, I know. And once away from here—new interests—life all new again—oh, no, Ted dear," she laughed a little chokingly, "don't worry about Stuart."
"I'm not worrying about Stuart," he muttered. "I'm worrying about you."
She squeezed his arm in affectionate gratitude for the love in the growling words. "Don'tworryabout me, Ted," she implored, "be glad with me! I'm alive again! It's so wonderful to be alive again. There's the future—a great, beautiful unknown. Itiswonderful, Ted," she said with insistence, as if she would banish his fears—and her own.
They had a few minutes to wait, and Ted ran over to the postoffice to get her mail for her—she was expecting a paper she wanted to read on the train. She tucked what he handed her into her bag and then when she heard the train coming she held on to Ted's arm, held it as if she could not bear letting it go. "It's all right," were her last words to him, smiling through tears.
She had been trying all along to hold her mind from the thought that they would pass through Freeport. Late the next afternoon, when she knew they were nearing it, she grew restless. It was then she remembered the paper in her bag—she had been in no mood for reading, too charged with her own feeling. She got it out now and found that with the paper was a letter. It was a letter from Deane Franklin.
She held it for a little while without opening it. It seemed so strange to have it just as she was nearing Freeport.
The letter was dated the week before. It read:
"Dear Ruth:
"I'm leaving Freeport tonight. I'm going to Europe—to volunteer my services as a doctor. Parker, whom I knew well at Hopkins, is right in the midst of it. He can work me in. And the need for doctors is going to go on for some time, I fancy; it won't end with the war.
"I'm happy in this decision, Ruth, and I know you'll be glad for me. It was your letter that got me—made me see myself and hate myself, made me know that I had to 'come out of it.' And then this idea came to me, and I wish I could tell you how different everything seemed as soon as I saw some reason for my existence. I'm ashamed of myself for not having seen it this way before. As if this were any time for a man who's had my training to sit around moping!
"Life is bigger than just ourselves. And isn't it curious how seeing that brings us back to ourselves?
"I'll enclose Parker's address. You can reach me in care of him. I want to hear from you.
"I can hardly wait to get there!
"Deane."
She managed to read the letter through with eyes only a little dimmed. But by the time she got to Parker's address she could not make it out. "I knew it!" she kept saying to herself triumphantly.
Deane had been too big not to save himself. Absorbed in thoughts of him she did not notice the country through which they were passing. She was startled by a jolt of the train, by the conductor saying, "Freeport!"
For several minutes the train waited there. She sat motionless through that time, Deane Franklin's letter clasped tight in her hand. Freeport! It claimed her:—what had been, what was behind her; those dead who lived in her, her own past that lived in her. Freeport.... It laid strong hold on her. She was held there in what had been. And then a great thing happened. The train jolted again—moved. It was moving—moving on.Shewas moving—moving on. And she knew then beyond the power of anyone's disapproval to break down that it was right she move on. She had a feeling of the whole flow of her life—and it was still moving—moving on. And because she felt she was moving on that sense of failure slipped from her. In secret she had been fighting that all along. Now she knew that love had not failed because love had transpired into life. What she had paid the great price for was not hers to the end. But what it had made of her was hers! Love could not fail if it left one richer than it had found one. Love had not failed—nothing had failed—and life was wonderful, limitless, a great adventure for which one must have great courage, glad faith. Let come what would come!—she was moving on.