CHAPTER ELEVEN
"So you are going to marry him." Martha picked up the toast that had burned while Jean talked and threw it on the fire.
In the bright sunshine she looked old. Her flesh was pale and flaccid, like the flesh of overworked people, or of the aged who have gone without sleep. Her hair was twisted in a tight knot, but stray, gray wisps escaped. Her throat was stringy and the chin muscles sagged.
Jean tried not to look at the discolored neck and the thin, worn hands. They stood for all that her mother had missed in life. It roused something in her sharper than pity, a kind of anger. With an effort she went round the table.
"Mummy, don't look like that." Jean knelt and put her arms about the rigid figure.
Martha did not move. It had come so suddenly, before she had found strength to meet it. She had disliked Franklin Herrick on sight and even this morning, at early service, had knelt long after the close of mass and prayed that he might be taken out of Jean's life.
And now Jean was going to marry him. To take him for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death parted them. She heard herself saying the words that had bound her for life to Jean's father. She had tried to do her duty, but death had come as a great release. She had done her best and had had the sacraments of the Church and prayer to help her. Jean had nothing. She was plunging blindly into this state, the greatest personal martyrdom ordained by God. And with Franklin Herrick. Martha could see no plan, no purpose in this thing and battled to hold firm her faith.
"Mummy dear, don't. Please don't look like that, as if something terrible had happened."
"Something terrible has happened, Jean. You are going to yoke yourself for life, think of it, for all the years God may demand you live on this earth, with a man who has no higher conception of life than an animal."
Jean's arms dropped to her sides and she pressed her lips tightly together.
"And he will lead you farther and farther away, Jean. He has a power over you that I would never have believed, never. Ever since you have known him you have been different. You're ready at his beck and call. Have you ever refused to go anywhere when he has asked you? Long ago you gave up church, but, still, you spent the day with some kind of respect. But now, how do you spend the day that God Himself put aside for His worship?"
"In the hills that He made." Jean almost prayed for strength to be patient.
"And your friends? Infidels and wasters and adulterers, by your own story. Oh, Jeany, Jeany, my baby."
Martha laid her head on the table and sobbed.
Jean rose. In spite of all her effort to do otherwise she could not help it. She felt a physical nausea at the sight of her mother's emotion. She tried to go nearer and could not. She could not comfort or touch that quivering figure.
"Let's not talk any more about it, mother. It will only make us both unhappy."
Martha struggled with her feeling as with an enemy and conquered. She rose, too, and for a moment they stood facing each other.
"There is some good purpose in it all, there must be and He will show me. Perhaps I have loved you too much and He has chosen this instead of death. You must have patience with me, Jean. He will show me. Till then I can only say blindly—Thy will be done."
Before the tremendous egotism of her mother's humility, Jean went slowly back to the table and sat down.
"When are you going to be married?" Martha dried her eyes and, crossing to the stove, brought the hot coffee and filled both their cups.
"Very soon," Jean answered wearily. "There's no reason to wait, and Franklin wants to get settled at some work."
Martha winced at the name.
The next moment the door opened and Tom and Elsie and Tommykins came in. Tom was even fatter and redder than usual and more offensively good-natured. He insisted on guessing what had happened, until Jean stopped the flow of his ridiculous suppositions with a brief:
"I am going to be married."
Elsie hugged her, and Jean gathered from the cataract of congratulations that Elsie had never expected her to marry, that marriage was the only thing in a woman's life, that it was one long martyrdom. You were to be pitied if you did and pitied if you didn't. Then Elsie dabbed at her eyes and they all sat down to the late Sunday morning breakfast.
Tom made broad jokes about some people's luck and "turning new leaves." He kept appealing for corroboration to Tommykins and going into spasms of laughter at his son's stare. He wanted to know whether Jean would be able to stand the family now that she was going to marry a highbrow and whether she and Herrick talked in prose or blank verse. He tried with genuine kindness and unfathomable stupidity to fill the silences that settled more and more heavily as breakfast drew to a close.
As soon as it was over and the things cleared away, Martha went upstairs for her Sunday rest. With all her heart Jean wished that she had not told Herrick not to come. She had meant to give this Sunday entirely to her mother, even to go to afternoon service with her. She had known that her marriage would be a blow and had sincerely wanted to ease it as much as possible. But Martha's reception of the news had frozen the suggestion on her lips. Now Jean faced a hot afternoon alone. Upstairs Elsie scolded at Tommykins who refused to be dressed in his Sunday clothes and the new baby helped her brother's efforts by wailing at the top of her lungs. From the hammock under the pine, where he was trying to read the papers, Tom called rough directions for managing the children and finally banged into the house to see that they were executed.
Jean put on her hat, took some paper on which to write to Pat and left the house. In the canyon back of the college grounds it was cool, and Jean lay on her back in a tangle of green, her hands clasped under her head, and wondered just where she would begin. She had so much to say, and yet when she focused it all, it came simply to this:
"I am going to marry Franklin Herrick whom I mentioned to you once. I have known him less than six months and will be married in three weeks."
Put that way, it sounded unreal, and she could hardly believe it herself. She said it aloud and still it seemed strange, as if she were speaking of some one else, not of herself. She wondered whether all women felt that way, and whether her mother had felt like that when she had married her father. What had her mother felt? Looking back, Jean wondered.
What had been the relationship between her father and mother? Certainly there had been no feeling of nearness between them, none of that spiritual contact so strong between herself and Herrick; that thing that made long hours of silence closer than words; that sense of knowing what he felt.
Jean thought of the first time Herrick had kissed her in the spicy darkness of the acacia and of the physical repulsion that had frightened her. And of the other night, when he had pleaded, "A real one, Jeany," and she had wondered what he meant.
How had her mother felt the first time her father had kissed her? Had she known what a "real kiss" was? When she thought about it directly, as she was doing now, she had no memories of her father's kissing her mother, or of their ever sitting hand in hand as she and Herrick sat often, watching the sun drop into the sea. She seemed to have no special memories of them together at all.
Suddenly Jean sat up. She had one. It came to her with the clarity of a photograph. She could see the streak of sunlight across the bare, scrubbed floor, the brightly polished stove, the box of geraniums in the window. She could smell the clean smell of the place and feel again the stillness.
It had been a Sunday, a warm, blue day, like to-day. All afternoon she had been in the garden trying to amuse herself and not succeeding. She could recall, so sharply that it made her smile, the desperate effort, and her final relinquishment of it. It was so useless to battle against Sunday. Besides the monotony of her own home, Jean had always felt the burden of the whole world, locked into the petrifying inaction of the Blessed Sabbath, and struggling to rest and enjoy it therein. This particular Sunday had been almost paralyzing in its peace, and Jean could see herself, a small figure in a checked dress and pebble-goat shoes, come shuffling along the gravel walk, scuffing her toes because she had always been told not to. But the unusual sound, at that hour in the afternoon, of her father's voice in the kitchen, stopped her at the door, and she stood peering through the wire screening. She saw her father come slowly across to her mother, who stood shrinking between the table and the sink. For months after that, Jean had smelled the dust in the screen and felt the rusty wire pressing the tip of her nose, whenever she thought of it. Her father had come close to her mother and stopped. His face was white and his lips trembled and Jean had been afraid he was going to cry.
"Marty, can't you forgive? Aren't you human at all?"
The words had bitten into Jean's memory because it was her father who was saying them in a queer voice and with a strange white face. Then he had come closer and tried to put his arms about her mother, but she had shrunk back with a sob that brought Jean at a bound into the kitchen. Her father's arms had dropped to his sides. The blood rushed into his face and for a moment he had stood with his mouth open. Then with a shrug he turned away and said in his natural voice:
"You'd better ask that God of yours for a little common sense."
At that Martha had unclasped Jean's protecting arms and gone quietly out of the room. A few moments later Jean heard the front door slam. For the first time in her life her father did not come back to supper. But, mixed with the tragedy of her mother's red eyelids and the silent supper, was a tingling excitement that something had happened on Sunday. It gave an elasticity to the rigid Sunday routine that for months had filled Jean with a pleasant sense of possibility.
Shortly after that her father had died. Strange relatives had appeared with an extraordinary attitude toward her mother, as if Martha had suddenly become unable to think for herself. They had bustled about whispering, and had tried to take direction of the funeral. But their efforts fell useless before Martha's quiet determination. A step-brother of the dead man's had become rather violent in his objection to a church-service. But the long brown coffin had been carried into the church nevertheless, and the priest had intoned the mass and incensed the coffin in spicy smoke that had made Jean cough. And afterwards, she and her mother had stood at the open grave, and when the priest said, "Dust to dust," and all the relatives Jean had never before seen sniveled or sobbed openly, Martha had held her hand tightly and Jean had heard her whisper, "Father, forgive."
For a year Jean and her mother had gone early every Sunday morning to church and Jean had prayed fervently that her father be forgiven. For what, exactly, she did not know, but she remembered now that she had linked it up to the Sunday that her mother had cried and her father had not come home to supper; and that she had not felt quite honest praying for her father to be forgiven. Living, he had never said a prayer nor gone to church with them. But dead, they had him at their mercy.
What had he done? Why had they prayed so earnestly that he be forgiven? Why did these two memories alone frame her father, when she tried to think what life had been to him and to her mother? What difference would it have made in her own life if there had been other memories?
In the quiet warmth of the brush, Jean shivered. It was wrong, wicked to bring children up like that. What did it matter that she had always had enough to eat and to wear and had gone to school, when the deepest memory she had of her parents was her mother shrinking from her father's touch, and the long brown coffin in the church to which her father had never gone of his own will. It seemed to Jean that she had been cheated and deprived of something that could never now be hers.
She pushed the hair back from her eyes.
"If I ever have children——"
Jean stopped. She could feel the blood creep up from her toes, scorching her. If she had a child it would be Herrick's. It might have Herrick's changing eyes and soft, full lips and the high, thin laugh. Jean had not thought of Herrick's thin voice for months.
She jumped up. She did not want children. She wanted to do her work in the world, and to help Herrick do his. There were too many people in the world already. She thought of Dr. Mary and the problems she struggled with, of Carmen and the puny, blind baby.
As Jean came into the kitchen Martha was getting supper. She looked rested and Jean knew that she had been praying. Jean's anger of the morning was gone, and as she looked at the small figure moving quickly about, rather envied her. Had there ever been an emotional crisis in her mother's life that had not been eased by preparing food for some one?
"Mummy," she asked suddenly, "do you remember once my coming into the kitchen, when we lived in the old Webster Street house, one Sunday and finding father trying to put his arms round you and—you wouldn't let him?"
As Jean asked it, she turned to take an apron from its peg and stood so, for her mother had stopped in the act of lighting the gas stove, let the match burn to her fingertips, scorch them, and go out.
"Yes—I remember," Martha answered after a long pause.
Jean waited.
"I think, dear, I'll warm the cold meat with a brown gravy. It makes it go farther."
And Martha Norris lit another match.
Three weeks later Jean and Herrick were married. They were married in church to please Martha and for the same reason made a pretense of eating afterwards the elaborate meal she had prepared. Tom was heavier and cruder than ever and Elsie more vapid. The new baby cried incessantly and Tommykins took occasion to outdo himself as a general nuisance. Jean was thoroughly glad that Pat had not been able to come, and always remembered her wedding dinner as the worst meal through which she had ever sat.