WIND OF DESTINY
WIND OF DESTINY
August 5th.Saturday Morning.
I think from the day Dicky left us I have been waiting with bated breath for this letter. Ghost of our great, great, great-grandfather who lies in the old cemetery at Lexington, Virginia! Dicky has been answering a “Personal” in the New YorkHerald.
“Of course you won’t understand, Caroline,” she writes me. “There never was a day in your life when you would have understood. Books are people to you. You live placidly in that dull little mountain town, and when your time comes you’ll die there placidly. Had you been Eve the angel with the flaming sword would never have had the unpleasant duty of driving you out. You to tempt a man! You’re like that coldly beautiful statue Pygmalion fashioned. She waked to life, but you never will. I wonder why I tell you, Caroline. The probationers in this hospital—probably in all big city hospitals—are made to feel like the dirt under foot—if there was under foot any good honest earth-dirt. Every time her betters pass her she’s got to paste herself against the wall, and all the inmates of the hospitalare her betters. There are some nice young doctors—but it is against discipline for her to speak to them. If she does the older nurses punish her with extra work. Last night, after a hard day, I walked on the Avenue—we are just a block away—and one of the beautiful doors opened just like enchantment, thrown back by a liveried servant. An old, old man came out. Perhaps it would have been different if youth and beauty had floated out. All that was his seemed so wasted. It was just the youth in me, I suppose, that was so fierce at life and its injustices. The lights down the Avenue beckoned and beckoned. I wanted to follow them. The distance was swallowing the old man in his car. Just for once in my life I wanted a taste of the city at night; I wanted to forget the groans of the sick and dying. You’ve never been a prune, and a potato, and a slice of bread. Try it, Caroline. I, who used to be Henrietta Dickenson, am now one thousand four hundred prunes. I am one thousand and ninety-five potatoes. I spare you the slices of bread. If you think I exaggerate make the count yourself. Prunes four times a week—five of them to a saucer. Potatoes each meal—meals three per day. Potatoes, prunes, and bread—plain, common food—maybe that’s why I have done such a common thing.
“I turned off the Avenue. At a news stand I picked up theHerald. ‘You don’t want that. You want anevening paper,’ the boy said. Fate or the boy, I know not which, I took theHerald. The ‘ad’ I answered says the man is lonely; that he wants an attractive woman friend. The ‘ad’ was signed Telemachus. His letter fairly scintillated. I answered. He wrote again. Now he asks for a meeting. But the letter is oh, so chivalrous, so witty, so wonderful, Caroline. And there’s a reticence, an impersonal note in it that piques a woman’s fancy, stirs her imagination——
“I am leaving the hospital now. It is dusk—the time to meet the hero of one’s adventure. The place of meeting is not far away. It is only a few blocks down Madison from the hospital. I have stolen out in a gypsy dress that I wore at the hospital dance. I have thrown a long dark cloak about me. In the twilight I shall escape—not be snatched up and sent to Bellevue. Don’t worry, Caroline.”
Don’t worry! Since the day Dicky became our child (mother’s sister’s only child, a little wailing thing three days old and orphaned of her own mother) I have worried. Now my heart clutches with fear as it clutched the day, now a year past, when Dicky threw into our quiet midst the bomb of her determination to go away from us. Nineteen-year-old Dicky alone in the great city of New York. Our guarded and treasured lambkin thrown into the mouths of wolves.A trained nurse! Under discipline! Dicky, the free, gypsy child of our hearts.
We, poor dear old mammy and I, register Dicky’s emotions as faithfully as a trusted thermometer. That Dicky should have to rise with the sun, and, having risen, have to put her own room in order. That Dicky must be silent in the presence of her superiors. It sounds like the court of King James, anyway, and not free America—not that the court of any king would awe Dicky.
Once, before we came to live in the mountains, when Dicky was six, we paid a visit to grandmother. Dicky left a saucer of cottage cheese untasted at her plate. Next morning at breakfast it was there, at dinner, at tea. I saw when we went in to tea that the child’s endurance of the saucer of cheese had been reached, and my coward teeth chattered in terror—grandmother had attempted to discipline the child before—the result being that for three interminable days Dicky had appeared at meals, brought down in the arms of grandmother’s old coloured butler, robbed of her clothes and dressed in a royal defiance and a flannel nightgown. Dicky lifted the offending cheese daintily. She didn’t look at me or at grandmother. She spoke to old Benjamin, and she was as perfectly poised and dignified as a little duchess. “Take it away, please,” she said; “it’s spoiled.”
“Her mar’s dead, an’ yore mar’s dead,” mammysaid one morning as I hurried away to my school teaching; “if you an’ Mr. John can’t an’ won’t do nothin’ to save the child from ruin, mammy will.”
I came home the day of mammy’s disciplining of Dicky to find the child digging up the lawn. If we do live in the heart of the Blue Ridge hills I cling to a remembered civilization—the front yard is the lawn. Gypsy curls blowing, gypsy eyes flashing, Dicky with each tiny upflung spade of dirt was shrieking (she couldn’t have been more than seven), “Mr. Devil, Mr. Devil, can you hear? I’m going to keep on digging till I get close enough and you can hear. I want you to shovel mammy into your hot fire and burn her up.”
I picked Dicky up that day and kissed the anger out of her flaming little face, and a few minutes later I heard her say in the voice that makes us wax in Dicky’s hands, “I was just a little angry with you, Mammy, and I asked Mr. Devil to burn you up—but I’m not mad now, and I hope he won’t.”
Dicky went to New York. We knew that she would. That’s why John and I, dear faithful old mammy, too, were so helpless, our hearts contracting in fear.
August 13th.Sunday Night.
Scientists tell us that a change that is slow but complete takes place in the human body every seven years.They are wrong about the process. It happens in the twinkling of an eye—like that change in the far-off judgment day of which the Bible tells. I know. This very day it happened to me. This Sabbath morning I waked a healthy, happy, normal spinster behind whom lay, except for this anxiety Dicky gives, almost thirty barren-of-emotion years.
Breakfast was not ready when I came down, so I rushed up the lane. If we lived more pretentiously it would be the drive. Beyond lay the white road that leads up to Marsville and trails round the mountain and out to a wider life.
The hills that neighbour with the blue ether were shaking night-caps of trailing mist from their heads. The mountain world breathed deep of August—proclaimed it exultantly in its vivid summer green as yet untouched by change; in its full-eared, ripening corn, massed on the hills like troops of soldiers. The insect shrills were August noises as were the lazy little chirps of the birds that have forgotten their joyous outpourings of spring. I loved it all—even the crow circling majestically about the distant hills so far away that his raucous cry came musically—and all of it contented me. Quite forgetting my approaching thirtieth birthday I threw a kiss to that mountain on the skyline that is so like a camel with a humpy back. There’s always been a secret understanding between that mountainand me, I suppose it is left over from my young girlhood, I was only eighteen the first time I saw Camel Back, that some day he would dump all his treasures into my lap—treasures from all the lands of the East. Yesterday I got another editor’s check—Camel Back has always held me steady under my rejections, hence the salute. Down through the ages how the world would have laughed if the Egyptians had made their Sphinx a man—wise Egyptians. As I threw the kiss to my mountain the shadow of no man was on my heart, or had ever been, but I felt the thrill of life’s infinite mystery and promise—felt it and called it an editor’s check. At thirty a spinster woman may begin to run to fat, or she may show tendencies to shrivel, but I boldly declare, my knowledge dating back some dozen hours, that her heart is unwrinkled, ridiculously young, and scanning the horizon for Eastern treasures that the camels that hang in the skyline are to pour into her lap.
Back home, breakfast over, as John left the table he tossed a letter to me. It was Dicky’s letter for which I have waited a whole week. It is in answer to the dozen I have sent out to her—like wireless messages of distress.
In the yard, out beyond the shadow of the big white pines, drying my hair—the women of Marsville have no beauty parlour in which to ruin it with dry air—lyingfull length in the sun, my head pillowed on a cushion, pondering Dicky’s letter, reading it over and over, I was jarred out of my reverie by a poke in the ribs and the mountaineer’s, “Howdy.” I failed to respond, was poked in the ribs a second time, sprang up indignantly and glared into the dirty, smiling landscape that is the face of old Sallie Singleton. “I thought I knowed that old back,” her harsh voice said amiably. Old back, indeed. Unmindful of my lack of cordiality the floodgates opened and harsh verbal oceans submerged me. I tried to shut it out, but I could not. “Mis Golightly hadn’t let the fire go out on her hearth for nigh forty year, but she went over the mountain to visit her daughter that had her first baby. In hearing of the train she took homesick and hiked it back. Savannah Lou was old-like, as I knowed, and, as I knowed, her beau died. He was full of debts as a dog is full of fleas, and the Lord knowed what he was doing when He took him. She had a picter left stid o’ a man, and she was a sight happier with the picter then she’d a ben with the man. When he was courtin’ they’d set and set, and talk and talk. He never took her nowhere—not even as far as her nose. She set store by the picter. She’d had a picter man put whiskers on it. She’d allus knowed whiskers’d become him, but he was stubborn and wouldn’t grow ’em. She——”
But I had fled, running for my life—or was it tosave the life of old Sallie that I ran? In the twinkling of an eye the mysterious change had come. Sallie had poked in the back, the old back that she knowed, a contented spinster teacher. A horse whisked about in the shafts and made to go in a direction contrary to the one he was travelling might understand the bewilderment of the woman who fled from Sallie Singleton. I did not. We are strange creatures, blown upon by winds from the Invisible. We dwell forever in a little fenced-about cleared plot of ground that is our daily life and we are frightened if we but glimpse beyond the cleared land. I had looked over the fence, and I had seen a trackless region. In sudden panic I hated placid spinster teachers content to trudge their sober path through all the days allotted to them; in sudden terror age with its hideous potentialities of loneliness fell upon me. Age and old Sallie grown gray and dirtier but always with the Puck-like knowledge of the psychologic moment at which to torture me with the neighbourhood gossip. Age and John, dear, good John on one side of the fireplace winter nights roaring at me the advancement of his rheumatism and I on the other side roaring back the increasing feebleness of my digestion.
All day this spectre, this fear of the future, has held me by the throat. All day I have stumbled along in a maze of distorted thought—swept from all moorings ofcommon sense. Now I have come into the night, the big, silent, star-filled night to ask peace of it. Here under the giant pines that stand like sentinels to guard the peace of the old house I sit on the bench. How still and warm and sweet—a white, white August night, for the coming moon lights the sky. Above all nights I have loved these August nights—the clematis dropping from the upper porch airy and diaphanous as a bride’s veil, and there in the border, running parallel with the low, long, rambling, gray, gray old house the white phlox in masses neighbouring with the August lilies. Looking at the lilies I catch my breath in pain. In their faint, sweet breathings they say to me, “We live but for a day. Take warning. Youth flees, dies as we die.”
John comes to the hall door and peers out into the dimness of the shadowy pines. “Honey,” he calls, “are you out there? Good-night. I’m turning in.” I call back, “Good-night.”
Big and red the moon that is only a little past full pushes over the hill. The desire to taste the night, to drown my tumult in its peace seizes me. Out on the hilltop, alone face to face with the night, and unafraid, I am indeed swept from my moorings. There to the east, where the skyline is so sharply irregular, just where Camel Back marches eternally on the horizon, he makes me think of a city I have never seen. I want to usehis back as a stepping stone to the moon and look down on a play I have just been reading about. When the curtain lifts I want to see those real camels marching past, their background a sunrise in the desert.
The mountains I love, my beautiful, misty mountains, are a giant wall of earth to-night. I want to get over the wall. I want to sit in that theatre, and after the play I want to be swept along in the street with the surging crowd and go into a gorgeous, glittery place and eat delicious things I have never tasted, wearing the sort of dress I have never seen. I want to live. If but for one hour of life I want my youth. I could be part of that pulsing, beating life, part of that splendid friction—man’s mind stimulating man’s mind.
Back in my room, ready for bed, the light blown out, sitting at the window, I acknowledge to myself that the cause of all the day’s emotional upheaval has been Dicky’s letter. Dicky’s letter that reads:
“In my brave attire I went to meet the hero of my ‘Personal.’ He got cold feet, Caroline. He did not come. He sent a messenger boy. I had written my foolish heart out to him. I had told him the things I tell you. Yes, I know it is reckless to write like that to a man one never saw. Try being a prune and a potato and a slice of bread, though, before you condemn me.
“His letter is the dearest ever, Caroline. I have readit over and over. ‘Little gypsy child of nineteen, will you be just a little disappointed that the messenger boy is there and not I? Will you believe that I am going against my desire when I stay away? It isn’t fair to you that I meet you. It is not fair to the nice little girl homesick for her southland who has never as yet spoken to a man to whom she has not been introduced. The “ad” was just a wager between a man and me. My name will mean nothing to you, but I sign it.’
“The name was Robert Haralson, Caroline. And who can say why things happen as they do? Who can really tell why that door flung open on the Avenue to let an old man out should have stirred me to such rebellion that I who have been well raised by you and dear old mammy should have done such a madcap thing. The name did mean something to me—it brought vague memories—where had I known a Robert Haralson? And—queer world that it is—I got back to my room to find the answer to my question on the table. Mary Tate answered it. When you and good old John squeezed all the money you could out of the thin acres of land that we call home and sent me to school I met Mary. Perhaps you remember. But she was not a special chum. Soon she is coming on to New York for her first visit. She has just left Roseboro and there everybody is talking about Robert Haralson, known athome still as Bobby. Everybody is saying that he was the cleverest and the most popular lad that the town ever raised. A brilliant future was prophesied for him, but he got a wanderlust and went trailing off to the ends of the earth. Roseboro has just discovered that America’s most brilliant writer and playwright, to quote the papers, is none other than the man who as a little lad spilled the family wash—not the clean wash—in front of the Methodist Church as the congregation filed out from a revival service, and almost died of shyness. Roseboro, of course, is shaking congratulatory hands with itself that its prophecy has come true. Everywhere you go they talk of Bobby. Now he seems permanently to have settled in New York and to have found himself. Mary asks me if I have read, ‘Heart of the World.’ It came out anonymously, as did no end of brilliant stories. But as a playwright he can no longer hide behind his anonymity. Mary is coming to New York soon. She wants to meet him. She begs for my assistance. Her letter closes like this: ‘It can be done, Dicky. Gossip says further that shy Bobby Haralson loved one girl like mad. That girl was Caroline Howard.’
“Dear Caroline, I’ve fallen in love with Bobby’s fascinating letters. I’ve fallen in love with his chivalrous protection of me, with his, ‘Little gypsy girl of nineteen.’ Right this minute his card, name, and addresslie on my table—and I am lonesomer than I was before I answered the ‘ad’ but—I won’t do what it is in my mind to do. It is your Bobby Haralson.”
The clipping Dicky sent says that Mr. Haralson, who is justbeginningto be known as Mr. Haralson, is at present one of the most interesting men in American literature. That he has achieved distinction both in fiction and in drama. That it is difficult to say in which he holds the more prominent position, that when so many writers seem to have written themselves out, he never seems to write up to the full extent of his powers, that always there is that sense of power held in reserve.
Dicky sent a clipping from a Roseboro newspaper that tells the story of Bobby’s heroism on shipboard coming from one of the lands of the Far East. I remember that story. It was some years ago. In mid-sea the engines broke down, the boat sprung a leak, and the men were forced to bail the water from the boat. No ship came near, and one night a frightful storm swept the sea. With the boat at the mercy of the waves the firemen deserted the boilers. It was then that the blood of Bobby’s ancestors spoke in him; Old Governor Haralson, Bobby’s grandfather, was a leader of men, could sway them. And father told me that Bobby’s young father in a charge at the battle of Shilo was a figure he never forgot. He said the young Colonel as he swept into battle at the head of his men wore abeautiful, uplifted, unearthly sort of expression and that he, my father, had often heard him say he had never felt the sensation of fear on a battlefield. So I know just how Bobby Haralson loomed above the discouraged men that night, just how steady his voice was when he told them that the firemen had deserted their posts saying it was death to go down into the hold, but that he was going, and if they were men they would follow him. Wet and naked and blistered in the water that was waist-deep in the ship’s hold, death within and death without, with no hope of saving the ship, with no help possible had help been near, struggling to hold their places along the rope line they hauled the buckets of water up, gaining perceptibly then losing again, but sending a song up whether there was the gain of an inch of water or that much loss—a song that rose above the roar of the sea, hungry for what surely seemed its prey, and the hiss of the great boilers.
When we left Roseboro I was fourteen. Bobby must have been eighteen. A fence divided his house from ours. There was a side gate, for the families were intimate, but, mostly, he leaped it. Do I remember Bobby? I have not thought of him in years, but to-night some little door of the brain long closed opens and out of it comes my almost forgotten boy friend Bobby, like a ghost. Why, just that minute Isaw his little flashing smile. It came right through the moonlit window as a friendly hand reaches out to one on the street of a strange city.
It must be very late, but how wide awake I am. And how sweet the tuberoses there in the border under my window are. They seem to float in still pools of moonlight. As they pour their heavy fragrance over me the fancy comes, born of the silver, moon-flooded night, I suppose, that they are trying to tell me something.
Maybe they are. The tuberose has a personality, strong friends and stout enemies, like some people. There is nothing negative about it. The fancy persists. Ah, I have it! Another little brain door swings wide. But it wasn’t a tuberose. Bobby and the big boys, his friends, have been on a tramp, they are again standing under my window, they have waked me with the old familiar whistle. Mother has said I may have the magnolias Bobby wants to send up at midnight if I won’t speak to the boys, if the boys won’t speak to me, and she has let Bobby suspend a cord from my second-story window. I am fourteen years old again, and through the half-closed shutters I am tugging desperately at those magnolias. Suppressed giggles from the boys, suppressed giggles from me, too, and they ascend with slow majesty. Inside the window the secret of their heaviness is revealed. Candy—tons of it. Thedevil gets every inhabitant of Marsville who dances, but in spite of the devil I waltz merrily to my bed.
September 24th.Sunday.
Yesterday one of those seemingly unimportant happenings that change the current of a life came to me. I look up from the garden seat here among my flowers and my eyes journey from one accustomed sight to another. The long, low, rambling, gray old house drowsing in the mellow, low-lying sunshine, beyond it the path past the honeysuckle arbour that leads straight to the old-fashioned spring house, the colts in the pasture, the cattle at the bars—it is all so familiar that I smile at the words I have written. I am changed, not my life.
Yesterday I walked up to Marsville, a mile away, for the mail, as I mostly do Saturday mornings, and Ellinor Baxter joined me. Ellinor is not a native Marsvillian either. Back in the dim past she came for the health of one of her family. Ellinor has always had musical yearnings, quite a little talent, too. She is the village musician and music teacher, and this year she has an assistant. The assistant is fresh from a bigger life: last winter she studied in Boston, and she has a friend who is doing wonderful things in Grand Opera abroad. It makes Ellinor quite tragic. Yesterdaywhen we reached the edge of the wood, and the mountain world lay about us like a vast picture, Ellinor flung out her arms as if to embrace all the several hundred peaks in sight and cried out: “Oh, how I hate that wall of mountains! If we could sweep it away we’d get a view, Caroline. We’d see what the world is doing. It’s a prison wall. I can’t escape. It seems that some hand of iron holds me here. If I had only gone eight years ago when mother’s death gave me the freedom to go! Now I haven’t the youth to make a new life for myself. Why don’t you go? What holds you here?”
“John, dear, good old John, I suppose,” I answered slowly.
Ellinor Baxter laughed scornfully. “John would be a less spoiled citizen without you. You are wasting the best years of your life. Soon you will be thirty.”
“I am thirty. This is my birthday.” I said it defiantly, because, uttered, it sounded so very, very ancient.
Ellinor suddenly softened. “You look a young twenty-five. Some women begin to fade at twenty-five. Some mornings when you rush past to school you look eighteen——
“And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth oflustre.Hid i’ the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wildgrapecluster,Gush in golden-tinted plenty——”
“And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth oflustre.Hid i’ the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wildgrapecluster,Gush in golden-tinted plenty——”
“And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth oflustre.Hid i’ the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wildgrapecluster,Gush in golden-tinted plenty——”
“And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth of
lustre.
Hid i’ the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wildgrape
cluster,
Gush in golden-tinted plenty——”
“Ellinor!”
But Ellinor was in deadly earnest. Her eyes were full of tears. “Child,” she said, “get away from here. Love, marry, fulfil your destiny.”
For just a moment I stopped and shut my eyes, pretending that a brier had caught my skirt. With shut eyes I knew that deep in the emerald world about me the black gum flaunted its crimson leaves—emblem of change; that the corn in long, straight rows stood hardening in the ear; that the mountains, glistening chain on glistening chain, were shimmering in the morning light. Standing there, I saw more: October’s pageant; November’s dull, soft tones; the desolation and the grayness that is December mountains’ dim forms seen through curtains of rain; January’s white, white world—and then the surprise of a snowdrop, the warm, fragrant spring breath of the south wind shepherding flocks of snowy clouds.
“I love it all,” I said. And I spoke the truth. Since that August Sunday now a month past, since that earthquake upheaval, I have basked in peace. “I am busy. Most of the year I wake with just the thought of scrambling into my clothes, swallowing my breakfast, and getting to the schoolroom in time. When it is winter it is almost dark when I get home; when it is spring I have my flowers. And there’s always John’s clothes to mend and my own to make and——”
But with a gesture that was passionate Ellinor Baxter stopped me. “All this may satisfy at thirty, but it won’t feed a woman’s heart at forty. Then she feels the need of love—contact with a man’s broader life. The monotony, the emptiness of life as she lives it alone tortures at forty. I know, for I am thirty-eight. And if she finds this out at forty it is mostly too late. Men pass us by for fresher faces.”
I did not know this new Ellinor Baxter who had lifted her mask and given me a peep at the real woman behind it, but for the first time in my life I loved her.
As we turned into Main Street a big automobile was leaving the post-office. Mr. Black and his nice little wife—new people who are summering here—were in the tonneau. I hardly know how it came about, but in what seemed the twinkling of an eye Ellinor and I were in it, too. I did not understand where it was we were going, and when I tried to find out I swallowed so many buckets of air that I gave it up. But it was not of the slightest importance. All that had ever happened to me was of slight importance. I was having my first automobile ride. We seemed to winnow the air like birds: to dip and dart down and around the curves, to soar up the hills with the flash and swiftness of wings. A dozen miles from our village we raced up a stately avenue and ran under aporte-cochère—our flight at end.
The lady who came out to greet us was surrounded by dogs, big and little, aristocratic and plebeian, handsome and hideous. After greeting her, Mrs. Black drew me forward and said: “Edna, this is Caroline Howard, who adores every word you write. Edna is my sister, Miss Howard.”
I draw a long breath of happiness at thought of yesterday. I live it all over again. I feel sure it was no ordinary spark of liking that leaped between Edna Kennedy and me instantaneously and spontaneously. We had luncheon yesterday on a big wide veranda that overlooks a winding ribbon of a river from the view we had of it as calm and still as if frozen. After luncheon there was music: Geraldine Farrar in “Madam Butterfly”—and the story unfolded before me. I felt the anguish of that poor little waiting and trusting and praying wife. Tetrazzini in the mad scene from “Lucia,” and the flutelike voice going high and high and higher, till I bent forward in breathless suspense to drop back in my chair in content at that last marvellously dizzyingly high sweet bird note. Moved by a little burst of confidence I could not control, I told Edna Kennedy that I had never heard grand opera; that I had never been anywhere or seen anything. And then I told her of the thrilly little waves running up and down me that were fairly shouting it was the beginning and not the end of beautiful happenings to me—just asthough I had walked through a wood and come to a beautiful palace, and only stepped up on the portico with my hand still on the doorknob. I told her about Robert Haralson, too: what friends we were when I was little, before we came to live in the mountains. I was dreadfully disappointed that she does not know him. She says few people know him. She says he is shy; that he lives in his work—that the first night of the big play that is making him so rich and famous he ran away from the theatre afraid of the call that authors get to come before the curtain. As we were leaving, Edna Kennedy gathered some magazines from the library table and gave them to me. “He is in them all,” she said. “Nobody in the literary and dramatic world is more in the public eye.”
I was very quiet coming home, and everything seemed little and mean and isolated and countrified when I got here. I went to my room immediately after supper. I said I was tired, but I was never less tired in my life. I read all the things the magazines said about Robert Haralson, and I looked long at the picture I found in one of them of my old-time boy friend. I have not treasured any sentimental memories of Bobby. I was little more than a child when I last saw him. It is true that the whole town teased Bobby about me—they called me his little sweetheart and accused him of robbing the cradle—butI have no treasured memories of him or of any man.
I am indifferent to men, as Dicky says. Always I have turned with distaste from the thought of marriage. In that I think I am different from most women. There have been two—such nice splendid fellows I knew in my college life—who have penetrated my wilderness more times than one. And I? I like them. Life with either would seem to hold much that it withholds now. I have tried to yield, but I cannot; the thought of the nearness of what should be sweet and sacred to a woman brings a wave of physical nausea. For that reason I don’t in the least understand what came over me last night as I gazed at a picture only dimly familiar to me. Ellinor’s words came back throbbing with their loneliness and hunger. I knew them to be true. I saw myself at forty rushing through breakfast and running the mile to school, pottering about the flowers, mending the clothes—day after day, month after month, year after year spent in dull monotony—and my youth rolled away—my life.
I did a strange thing—I, trained to chain my emotions as we chain wild beasts, in frantic haste I wrote to Bobby. It was not much of a letter—just:
“Bobby, I wonder if the years have swept from your brain cells all memory of the little girl who used to live next door? She’ll never get to New York, never!There’s a wall of mountains that she can’t scale. But if ever you come to Marsville, whistle across the fence, won’t you? The little girl’s got one of your stories treasured in her desk without knowing until some one’s letter gave away the secret of its authorship. Big congratulations, Bobby!”
I went down to the yard and waked old Harris and paid him to walk to the railroad station, three miles across the gap, and mail it. Now it is late Sunday afternoon and it has been gone almost a whole day. But of course I will never have an answer to it. I am sure Mr. Robert Haralson keeps a female secretary who will scan it coldly and throw it in the waste basket.
September 27th.Wednesday.
I can’t see how it got here in this marvellously short time, but I have Bobby’s answer:
80 Waverly Place,September 25th.My Dear “Miss Carrie”:Just once, if I may—and then I will try to think of you as Caroline.I was gladder to get your little note than the biggest editor’s check I ever saw. Seems to me (after trying very hard) I do remember a small “sassy” girl that used to live next door.When you ask if I remember you, it reminds me of a story told of Congressman John Allen of Mississipi—(nevercould spell Mississip)—is that right? A lady approached him in Washington one day and held out her hand. “Now confess, Mr. Allen,” she said, “that you’ve forgotten all about me.”He had; he knew her face, but his memory wouldn’t serve him any further. But, with a low bow, he replied: “Madam, I’ve made it the business of my life to try to forget you.”See?—as we New Yorkers say.Well, well, how time does fly! as the little boy said when his teacher told him Rome was founded in 684B. C.I never expected anything so nice and jolly as to hear from you. It’s like finding a five-dollar bill in an old vest pocket.Isn’t it funny that I was thinking of you a little while last week? I had a map, looking all about on it trying to decide on somewhere to go for a few weeks to get away from the city. Mountains for me always! So my eye naturally ran down the Blue Ridge chain. Here’s the latest picture of the distinguished Mr. Haralson. Does it look anything like the moonstruck little shrimp that used to hang around and bother you so much? I can remember what an awkward, bashful, sentimental, ugly, uninteresting nuisance I was then. No wonder I couldn’t make any impression on you! I’ve improved a good deal since. In fact, it seems to me that the older I grow the better looking and more fascinating I become. Of course it doesn’t seem just right for me to say so, but if I didn’t tell you you mightn’t ever find it out.In those days I took life mighty seriously and sentimentally: that’s why I always went about looking like a monkey with the toothache; but in after years I learned that life is only a jolly good comedy for the most part, and I began to enjoy it. I believe I’m about five years younger than I was the last time you saw me—whenyou left the depot in Roseboro for Marsville. Ernest Cold rode up with you on the train; and I haven’t forgiven him for it yet.It’s mighty nice of you to say you would be able to stand seeing me again if I should come to Marsville. I shore would love to ride up and holler “Hello!” over the fence. Lemme see! Trip to Europe—automobiles—steam yacht—Rockefeller’s money—no, none of those things sound half as good. But lawsy me! I don’t know when I shall ever drap down your way.I’ve about decided to go up along the Maine coast fishing with an editor man. I live in a room or two as big as a barn on Waverly Place. I’m so lazy and cool and contented there all by myself with my books and things that I haven’t been away from town in two summers.Now, I’m not going to talk about myself any more. I’ve been in New York about four years, and I guess I’ve “made good,” for everything I write is engaged long before it is written.I’ve been puzzling over your signature. It’s the same old name you had when you wore your hair in a plait; and I have two very good reasons for thinking it ought to be different. One is that somebody wrote me several years ago that you had married; and the other is that it isn’t possible—it isn’tpossible—that the young men of our old state could be so unappreciative as to have let you escape. But if you are married, please, oh, please get a divorce at once, so you can be “Miss Carrie” again.I am trusting to your good nature to accept a little book of mine that came out last winter. You don’t have to read it, you know. It’s just the thing to prop the kitchen door when the wind is in the east.And, Miss Carrie, some day when you ain’t real busy won’t you sit at your desk where you keep those antiquated stories, and write to me? I’d be so pleased tohear something about what the years have done for you, and what you think about when the tree frogs begin to holler in the evenings. Got any tree frogs up there?Do this, and I’ll promise to say “Caroline” next time.Let me say once more how good it was to hear from you, and that I am, yours sincerely,Robert Haralson.
80 Waverly Place,September 25th.
My Dear “Miss Carrie”:
Just once, if I may—and then I will try to think of you as Caroline.
I was gladder to get your little note than the biggest editor’s check I ever saw. Seems to me (after trying very hard) I do remember a small “sassy” girl that used to live next door.
When you ask if I remember you, it reminds me of a story told of Congressman John Allen of Mississipi—(nevercould spell Mississip)—is that right? A lady approached him in Washington one day and held out her hand. “Now confess, Mr. Allen,” she said, “that you’ve forgotten all about me.”
He had; he knew her face, but his memory wouldn’t serve him any further. But, with a low bow, he replied: “Madam, I’ve made it the business of my life to try to forget you.”
See?—as we New Yorkers say.
Well, well, how time does fly! as the little boy said when his teacher told him Rome was founded in 684B. C.I never expected anything so nice and jolly as to hear from you. It’s like finding a five-dollar bill in an old vest pocket.
Isn’t it funny that I was thinking of you a little while last week? I had a map, looking all about on it trying to decide on somewhere to go for a few weeks to get away from the city. Mountains for me always! So my eye naturally ran down the Blue Ridge chain. Here’s the latest picture of the distinguished Mr. Haralson. Does it look anything like the moonstruck little shrimp that used to hang around and bother you so much? I can remember what an awkward, bashful, sentimental, ugly, uninteresting nuisance I was then. No wonder I couldn’t make any impression on you! I’ve improved a good deal since. In fact, it seems to me that the older I grow the better looking and more fascinating I become. Of course it doesn’t seem just right for me to say so, but if I didn’t tell you you mightn’t ever find it out.
In those days I took life mighty seriously and sentimentally: that’s why I always went about looking like a monkey with the toothache; but in after years I learned that life is only a jolly good comedy for the most part, and I began to enjoy it. I believe I’m about five years younger than I was the last time you saw me—whenyou left the depot in Roseboro for Marsville. Ernest Cold rode up with you on the train; and I haven’t forgiven him for it yet.
It’s mighty nice of you to say you would be able to stand seeing me again if I should come to Marsville. I shore would love to ride up and holler “Hello!” over the fence. Lemme see! Trip to Europe—automobiles—steam yacht—Rockefeller’s money—no, none of those things sound half as good. But lawsy me! I don’t know when I shall ever drap down your way.
I’ve about decided to go up along the Maine coast fishing with an editor man. I live in a room or two as big as a barn on Waverly Place. I’m so lazy and cool and contented there all by myself with my books and things that I haven’t been away from town in two summers.
Now, I’m not going to talk about myself any more. I’ve been in New York about four years, and I guess I’ve “made good,” for everything I write is engaged long before it is written.
I’ve been puzzling over your signature. It’s the same old name you had when you wore your hair in a plait; and I have two very good reasons for thinking it ought to be different. One is that somebody wrote me several years ago that you had married; and the other is that it isn’t possible—it isn’tpossible—that the young men of our old state could be so unappreciative as to have let you escape. But if you are married, please, oh, please get a divorce at once, so you can be “Miss Carrie” again.
I am trusting to your good nature to accept a little book of mine that came out last winter. You don’t have to read it, you know. It’s just the thing to prop the kitchen door when the wind is in the east.
And, Miss Carrie, some day when you ain’t real busy won’t you sit at your desk where you keep those antiquated stories, and write to me? I’d be so pleased tohear something about what the years have done for you, and what you think about when the tree frogs begin to holler in the evenings. Got any tree frogs up there?
Do this, and I’ll promise to say “Caroline” next time.
Let me say once more how good it was to hear from you, and that I am, yours sincerely,
Robert Haralson.
September 28th.
The picture and the book have come. The picture is splendid. It dominates my room.
Bobbywasawfully fond of me. Lots of things I had forgotten come back as I look at the picture—the night he was allowed by mother after some hours of hard begging to take me to Commencement at the Female Seminary in old Roseboro and sat with his arm stretched on the back of the bench. I did not think it would be nice of me to ask him to remove it, and my back aches right now again at thought of the rigidity of my spine through the long hours of that female evening. You would not be guilty of such a ruralism now, Mr. Cosmopolite.
I have written him. It is only polite to let him know that I appreciate the picture and the book.
October 2d.Monday Afternoon.
Bobby’s letter was here this afternoon when I got in from school. Wasn’t it marvellous that it could get here? My eyes went straight to the table and I feltkind of queer and quivery all over when I saw the big square envelope with the bold handwriting that looked as familiar as if I had been getting his letters all my life. Here is his letter:
New York, September 30th.My Dear Miss Carrie:Never thought you were going to stir up so much trouble when you did me that big favour of writing a “hello” to me across the mountains, did you? Well, please let me write this time, and if it’s too much, give me the teeny-weenyest bit of a hint, and I’ll turn my pen into a sword and cut it all out.Was it cheeky of you to write to me? My dear Miss Carrie, I don’t know exactly what the unpardonable sin is, but if you hadn’t written, I’d feel awfully anxious about your future.Right here let me assure you that I’m not one of these confirmed correspondents. Hand on my heart! I vow I haven’t written two pages at a time to anybody in years and years. My closest friends complain that I don’t even answer letters. But when I hear from—oh, you forbade that, didn’t you.Don’t chain up your impulses, dear friend; let ’em skallyhoot around. We don’t live more than nine times; and bottles and chains weren’t made for people to confine and tie up their good impulses with.So you shook your head when you read that I was thinking of you last week? All right. Couldn’t expect you to believe. But please turn to page 78 and page 131 of the book I sent you, and try to think whose eyes I attempted to describe. Since I saw you last I’ve seen only one pair of eyes like that; and they—well, they onlyresembled.Think I’m foolish? Oh, no, I’m not. One can have an ideal if one wants to. I’ve had one for—years. All I’ve had since have busted and gone up the flume. Please, Miss Carrie, lemme keep that one. I ain’t going to bother you about it. You say those old days are laid away between lavender scented sheets. I can understand that for you. Mine are not. They are fresh and fragrant, dewy and everlasting. I’m not going to insist upon your believing it—shake your head if you want to and give the sun a chance to brighten his rays. I’m superior to luck, fate, history, and time. If I choose to stand under a certain window yet in Roseboro and sigh for the unattainable, no one shall balk me. So, don’t you try to bulldoze me, Miss Caroline Howard. If my spirit elects to wander there, please you let it alone.Do you know that over there in the Ridge of blue and gold you are the most splendidly endowed of all the daughters of the gods? Why? Because my memory tells me that you have (to my memorial eye and mind) all that can be conferred of loveliness; and, according to your boast, you have a new and delectable way of fixing tomatoes. Now, I adore tomatters. I could die for ’em, I nearly have several times. You can’t imagine how interested I was in your tomato garden. In your tomato garden. Say—I believe you promulgated some nonsense in your letter about whether I stood under Fifth Avenue girls’ windows about midnight and sent up flowers and candies. Why, lemme tell you, Miss Carrie, I’ve seen ’em and talked to ’em, and had tea with ’em—and lemme tell you—I’d rather set (not sit) across a little table with you and have a tomatter between us with ice and——Say—I don’t agree with you about the nuts. Why, I never saw a tomatter in my life stuffed with nuts. Air they good? The ice sounds all right. And lemme tellyou—I think you’re wrong about the Mayonnaise dressing. I have such a respect for tomatters that I must challenge you. French dressing, with green peppers—so say I.And yet it is no more than Cosmic and Natural Justice that you should be woozy about the proper way to fix tomatters. Perfection has never been attained by mortals. (Now my memory is at work again.) If you could be as I remember you and an expert in tomatters, too, why there would be double perfection, and that’s an unknown quantity in mathematics. I prefer to retain my ideal; therefore the deduction is: your tomatters are off their trolley. Still, I’d like to try one. That’s constancy and faith. Will you keep one on ice for me, on the chance that good Fortune may allow me to drift down that way?I sent up yesterday and got the ChristmasLeslies. Why, I remembered that story, though I didn’t recognize the name. It was very sweet and tender. I can see that you like kids. I congratulate you heartily on your work; I hope you will find it profitable and a blessing. You have unquestioned sympathy and a deep and true “humanness.” You ought to come to New York, where you will bein medias res. There’s nothing like being on the ground. You get artistic ideas and associations here that would be invaluable to you. Writing is a bully game. You want to know the dealers. I studied that fact out, and came here. To-day I get five times more per word than when I came. Sister of the pen and stamped-envelope-for-return, I speak wisdom to you. And here is life. Beautiful are the mountains and the moon silvering their tops; but here one learns the value of each upon each. And the moonlight of the mind is the most beautiful. Here art teaches Nature to conform. You could expand and rise here. I do not advise you, butI speak with wisdom of the markets and the heart. Pardon me if I am scornful of the Mayonnaise, and am dubious about the nuts. I could overlook a stab at my heart with a poniard, but—the tomatter and I have been friends. Yet I could—may I try one the way you fix ’em?Wish I could have accepted your invitation to sail down on the big golden bubble of a moon, and drap under the cherry tree. Bet a dollar I’d have lit on the rake and the hoe you left there in the grass. Can’t you ever remember to put ’em behind the door in the woodhouse when you are scratching around in the garden? I haven’t ridden on the moon in a long time. It’s on the full now, and I’m afraid I’d slide off. When it gets to look like a slice of canteloupe again, so I can hold on to the ends, I’ll try to make that trip. Please spread an armful of hay and an old piece of carpet under the cherry tree so I won’t come down with such a jolt when I jump off. Then I’d say something like this:“Miss Howard, please excuse my intrusion into your section of real estate devoted to domestic agriculture; but the object of my somewhat precipitous descent is to ascertain the identity of a certain youthful and pulchritudinous being with whom at a considerably earlier period I sustained cognizance, and whose identification is relatively dependent upon a tonsorial arrangement in which her tresses retain the perpendicularity peculiar to juvenility at the time referred to.”And you would answer:“Sir, regretting the futility of your rather incomprehensible errand—which, had you been better versed in the more recent dictates of fashion, might have been advantageously and indefinitely postponed—I must inform you that none of the coiffures that are worn this summer allow any such primitive and adolescent arrangement of the capillary filaments as you refer to inyour preamble; and therefore, as far as the little girl whose hair was in a plait is concerned, there is nothing doing.”I’ll bet that’s what’d happen to me. And then I’d have to go down to the road and sit on the fence and wait a month to catch the moon back.Miss Carrie, please, please send me that picture of yourself that you mentioned, or another one. If your heart hadn’t been so hard and cruel you’d have enclosed it before instead of talking about it. How can you write those tender and kind little stories when really you are so unfeeling and stony hearted? You knew I wanted that picture. I’m going to tell all the editors I know that your work is a fraud—that you don’t feel it at all.No doubt there isn’t a single tear in your eye or the slightest thawing of your heart when I remind you that in another two weeks I shall be treading the pathless wilds of Maine. There in the dense tropical forest an infuriated porcupine may spring upon me from some lofty iceberg, or, becoming lost, I might perish in the snow of sunstroke. Think, Miss Carrie, what an ad it would be for you when the papers printed the news of a tourist found in the woods—an unknown man wearing tennis shoes and a woollen comforter, with 30 cents in his pocket, a frozen tomato in one hand, and a picture of the well-known and beautiful authoress C. H. in the other. It is no less than your duty to your publishers to try and get that ad. So, please send on the picture, will you?Sincerely yours,Robert Haralson.
New York, September 30th.
My Dear Miss Carrie:
Never thought you were going to stir up so much trouble when you did me that big favour of writing a “hello” to me across the mountains, did you? Well, please let me write this time, and if it’s too much, give me the teeny-weenyest bit of a hint, and I’ll turn my pen into a sword and cut it all out.
Was it cheeky of you to write to me? My dear Miss Carrie, I don’t know exactly what the unpardonable sin is, but if you hadn’t written, I’d feel awfully anxious about your future.
Right here let me assure you that I’m not one of these confirmed correspondents. Hand on my heart! I vow I haven’t written two pages at a time to anybody in years and years. My closest friends complain that I don’t even answer letters. But when I hear from—oh, you forbade that, didn’t you.
Don’t chain up your impulses, dear friend; let ’em skallyhoot around. We don’t live more than nine times; and bottles and chains weren’t made for people to confine and tie up their good impulses with.
So you shook your head when you read that I was thinking of you last week? All right. Couldn’t expect you to believe. But please turn to page 78 and page 131 of the book I sent you, and try to think whose eyes I attempted to describe. Since I saw you last I’ve seen only one pair of eyes like that; and they—well, they onlyresembled.
Think I’m foolish? Oh, no, I’m not. One can have an ideal if one wants to. I’ve had one for—years. All I’ve had since have busted and gone up the flume. Please, Miss Carrie, lemme keep that one. I ain’t going to bother you about it. You say those old days are laid away between lavender scented sheets. I can understand that for you. Mine are not. They are fresh and fragrant, dewy and everlasting. I’m not going to insist upon your believing it—shake your head if you want to and give the sun a chance to brighten his rays. I’m superior to luck, fate, history, and time. If I choose to stand under a certain window yet in Roseboro and sigh for the unattainable, no one shall balk me. So, don’t you try to bulldoze me, Miss Caroline Howard. If my spirit elects to wander there, please you let it alone.
Do you know that over there in the Ridge of blue and gold you are the most splendidly endowed of all the daughters of the gods? Why? Because my memory tells me that you have (to my memorial eye and mind) all that can be conferred of loveliness; and, according to your boast, you have a new and delectable way of fixing tomatoes. Now, I adore tomatters. I could die for ’em, I nearly have several times. You can’t imagine how interested I was in your tomato garden. In your tomato garden. Say—I believe you promulgated some nonsense in your letter about whether I stood under Fifth Avenue girls’ windows about midnight and sent up flowers and candies. Why, lemme tell you, Miss Carrie, I’ve seen ’em and talked to ’em, and had tea with ’em—and lemme tell you—I’d rather set (not sit) across a little table with you and have a tomatter between us with ice and——
Say—I don’t agree with you about the nuts. Why, I never saw a tomatter in my life stuffed with nuts. Air they good? The ice sounds all right. And lemme tellyou—I think you’re wrong about the Mayonnaise dressing. I have such a respect for tomatters that I must challenge you. French dressing, with green peppers—so say I.
And yet it is no more than Cosmic and Natural Justice that you should be woozy about the proper way to fix tomatters. Perfection has never been attained by mortals. (Now my memory is at work again.) If you could be as I remember you and an expert in tomatters, too, why there would be double perfection, and that’s an unknown quantity in mathematics. I prefer to retain my ideal; therefore the deduction is: your tomatters are off their trolley. Still, I’d like to try one. That’s constancy and faith. Will you keep one on ice for me, on the chance that good Fortune may allow me to drift down that way?
I sent up yesterday and got the ChristmasLeslies. Why, I remembered that story, though I didn’t recognize the name. It was very sweet and tender. I can see that you like kids. I congratulate you heartily on your work; I hope you will find it profitable and a blessing. You have unquestioned sympathy and a deep and true “humanness.” You ought to come to New York, where you will bein medias res. There’s nothing like being on the ground. You get artistic ideas and associations here that would be invaluable to you. Writing is a bully game. You want to know the dealers. I studied that fact out, and came here. To-day I get five times more per word than when I came. Sister of the pen and stamped-envelope-for-return, I speak wisdom to you. And here is life. Beautiful are the mountains and the moon silvering their tops; but here one learns the value of each upon each. And the moonlight of the mind is the most beautiful. Here art teaches Nature to conform. You could expand and rise here. I do not advise you, butI speak with wisdom of the markets and the heart. Pardon me if I am scornful of the Mayonnaise, and am dubious about the nuts. I could overlook a stab at my heart with a poniard, but—the tomatter and I have been friends. Yet I could—may I try one the way you fix ’em?
Wish I could have accepted your invitation to sail down on the big golden bubble of a moon, and drap under the cherry tree. Bet a dollar I’d have lit on the rake and the hoe you left there in the grass. Can’t you ever remember to put ’em behind the door in the woodhouse when you are scratching around in the garden? I haven’t ridden on the moon in a long time. It’s on the full now, and I’m afraid I’d slide off. When it gets to look like a slice of canteloupe again, so I can hold on to the ends, I’ll try to make that trip. Please spread an armful of hay and an old piece of carpet under the cherry tree so I won’t come down with such a jolt when I jump off. Then I’d say something like this:
“Miss Howard, please excuse my intrusion into your section of real estate devoted to domestic agriculture; but the object of my somewhat precipitous descent is to ascertain the identity of a certain youthful and pulchritudinous being with whom at a considerably earlier period I sustained cognizance, and whose identification is relatively dependent upon a tonsorial arrangement in which her tresses retain the perpendicularity peculiar to juvenility at the time referred to.”
And you would answer:
“Sir, regretting the futility of your rather incomprehensible errand—which, had you been better versed in the more recent dictates of fashion, might have been advantageously and indefinitely postponed—I must inform you that none of the coiffures that are worn this summer allow any such primitive and adolescent arrangement of the capillary filaments as you refer to inyour preamble; and therefore, as far as the little girl whose hair was in a plait is concerned, there is nothing doing.”
I’ll bet that’s what’d happen to me. And then I’d have to go down to the road and sit on the fence and wait a month to catch the moon back.
Miss Carrie, please, please send me that picture of yourself that you mentioned, or another one. If your heart hadn’t been so hard and cruel you’d have enclosed it before instead of talking about it. How can you write those tender and kind little stories when really you are so unfeeling and stony hearted? You knew I wanted that picture. I’m going to tell all the editors I know that your work is a fraud—that you don’t feel it at all.
No doubt there isn’t a single tear in your eye or the slightest thawing of your heart when I remind you that in another two weeks I shall be treading the pathless wilds of Maine. There in the dense tropical forest an infuriated porcupine may spring upon me from some lofty iceberg, or, becoming lost, I might perish in the snow of sunstroke. Think, Miss Carrie, what an ad it would be for you when the papers printed the news of a tourist found in the woods—an unknown man wearing tennis shoes and a woollen comforter, with 30 cents in his pocket, a frozen tomato in one hand, and a picture of the well-known and beautiful authoress C. H. in the other. It is no less than your duty to your publishers to try and get that ad. So, please send on the picture, will you?
Sincerely yours,
Robert Haralson.
Is it because I live here on the edge of the world, outside of its activity, that I read Bobby’s letter overand over? Is that the reason I search page 78 and page 131 of the book? The eyes of Bobby’s heroine are beautiful, and he says they are like mine. It was dear of him to remember the colour of my eyes through all these years. I couldn’t have told the colour of his eyes. And I fibbed when I said those old memories were laid away in lavender scented sheets. That’s the trouble with a spinster. She can be counted on to run to sentiment with or without encouragement.
Oh, dear, I’m so tired. I want life different—not just to go in and eat supper and look over the lessons for to-morrow and read something and go to bed, as I have done all the nights of the past twelve Octobers and am likely to continue for the next several dozen of them. I fibbed when I wrote Bobby I had memories. I haven’t. And I don’t want memories—memories that sigh of age. I want joys that dance with youth. I want to sit at a little table and look across—not at John.
October 6th.
Friday.
When I came home this afternoon there was my letter. I could have told Bobby that Marsville young women were hopelessly ancient at twenty-five, that nobody ever looked at them after they were thirty. Instead, I told him about the drummer who tried toflirt with me on the train. In my effort to get rid of him I moved all over the coach and finally took the last seat, to have him take the last seat opposite. I wrote Bobby that I thought of moving into the Pullman, but that the trip was short and my economic soul balked at the suggestion.
Bobbyanswers: