Chapter VI: Part 6

The youngest, Evan, was a wistful, freckled stripling with a quick temper. The path of an unlucky life seemed to have been blazed ahead of this boy by his peculiar spirit which no one understood, and people began to say that he would come to a bad end. He loved no one but his uncle, and it was certain that he and his father would never be at peace. He kept threatening to run away from home, and Ralph at least knew that sooner or later he would.

Ralph wanted to go to a school in Milwaukee and become a veterinary surgeon, having a passion for animals, dreaming of race horses, and prize bulls, and dogs worth as much as a whole farm. But he was obviously the one who would never go anywhere, who would have to make sacrifices, and learn to be patient with their father as he grew old and arbitrary. His brothers were going to leave the country, but he would have to turn back among the still only half-cultivated hills, to go on being what they had all been as ignorant children, what their forefathers had been: a child of nature. He was strong, obedient, and moody, resenting what the future might do, as if, mysteriously, at the age of eighteen, the past had already done its worst.

In the autumn of 1895 Jim, the lucky one, went off alone to a little college town to learn how to preach virtue and pious progress and the fear of God: a rudely handsome young man, anxious, awkward, and eager to please. The allowance which he received from home was inadequate, though it looked so generous to his puritan father, so magical to his brothers; but his pleasant face made it easy to find employment in the afternoons and evenings; he was used to harder work, and study was child’s play.

He had many talents, and for four years he was pleasantly occupied by small, gratifying successes. There were boating parties, Sunday night suppers, and picnics; embarrassed, idealistic friendships; and a series of best girls with rigid waists, pompous hats, and exciting flounces. He took part in the brutal wedge-football of the period, winning as a trophy a turtlenecked sweater adorned with a great scarlet A. His hair parted in the middle and falling over each ear in a loose, blond wave, he won an oratorical contest with a speech called “Macbeth and Iago, or Intellect and Ambition.” He developed a fine bass voice, and traveled all over the Middle West with a male quartet. He was photographed again and again, usually in profile, and clippings from small-town newspapers were sent back to the farm, where they were read aloud with astonishment.

Though none of his friends were irreligious, culture seemed to be more highly regarded than mere religion. He experienced some things and thought about many others of which his father at least would have disapproved. He was being prepared for life, not precisely, he felt, for the ministry; for a glorious destiny, perhaps, but perhaps it would seem inglorious to his loving, narrow-minded family; and he began to think uneasily of the hard-working men on the farm and their expectations.

The Spanish-American War broke out, and one day his mother wrote that Evan, having nothing to look forward to at home, had joined the army. America had been at peace since before Jim was born, and he thought of war as if it were death itself, and pictured the island in the south as a military graveyard, full of soldiers and flowers. At any rate, reckless Evan would be the sort of soldier who has no future; he might as well be dead. The family had grown smaller by one. Ralph would do what their father had done before him--work the land and care for the old people; there was no one but Jim left to do what their father had wanted to do. Their father’s life had been a long, impatient prophecy, a prophecy of success at last for one of the Towers, which Jim alone bore the burden of having to fulfill. So he felt many tired, fanatic eyes upon him--not only his father’s, but those of the other aging pioneers who had conquered an empire in which no one had yet become famous, and his envious brothers’ eyes, especially Ralph’s. Dreaming of family councils around his bed during which it was decided that he had wasted his opportunities, Jim began to feel that, like an heir apparent, he had no right to dream, nor to make plans or friends, nor even to marry, except as it furthered the ambitions which his family had, and which he was obliged to represent.

There was a girl named Irene Geiger who, among others, wanted to marry him. She also had a beautiful singing voice, and intended to prepare herself for grand opera. They sang together. Her father, a wealthy brewer of German birth, said with great feeling: “Young fellow, you certainly sing fine. You must get your voice trained.”

Jim dreamed of changing the direction of his life, knowing that if he married this cheerful, ambitious girl, her father would give him every opportunity, sparing no expense. He told himself that his family expected of him fame, having passed their lives in obscurity, and prosperity which they might share, having for generations lived and died in poverty; that he stood on the brilliant threshold of an unexpected life, of a career more brilliant than the ministry; and finally that music as well was a divine persuasion, like argument and prayer. He pictured himself in a satin suit and the blaze of footlights, singing as easily as a meadow lark, while the large bouquets of admirers who had forgotten all their troubles fell on the stage around him. He was at once listener and singer, and a flood that was both light and sound troubled him and then made him forget his trouble. A sort of excitement poured also from that imaginary stage into his mind, even into his body, so that when he held Irene’s hand he fancied that he loved her as the heroes of music loved their heroines; for a moment he forgot not only the imaginary audience, but the actual audience of father, mother, and brother, anxiously watching his life.

Would not his father and brother be ill at ease in that future audience, with their Sunday coats glossy at the elbows, their celluloid collars slipping up around their strong, red throats, their hands hardened by hammers and shovels and harnesses? At the thought of them, Jim felt lonesome and cold, though he stood with his sweetheart under the chestnuts on the campus, and though those chestnuts were in bloom; and he remembered how, when he was a six-year-old boy, walking home alone in a winter twilight through the woods, having found a handmade whistle in his pocket, he had blown on it as loudly as he could, in order to forget that he might get lost and freeze to death; perhaps that was what music was for....

Irene was very much in love, and often embarrassed him by forcing her way into his heart, as a woman might throw open a door and rustle into a room where a young man--his heavy head in his hands, his forehead wrinkled, his eyes half closed--broods upon his limited resources, and his ambitions, and the opposition to them which may arise. But his new ambitions were hers as well, and she held in her generous hands resources which seemed to him scarcely limited at all. So at last he made up his mind to marry her.

At the end of May, chaperoned by her cousin, a sturdy German spinster, he took her to Hope’s Corner to be seen by his parents, taking with him as well for their approval his new plans for the future, about which he had not dared to write a letter. As they drew near the farm he thought of the old-fashioned morality of which it was an unbroken stronghold, and began to study the bright, overdressed girl beside him with anxiety, almost with disapprobation; and he wished that Evan were there, so that by contrast he might seem to his father an obedient son--that his uncle Leander were there to defend him, as he always defended the young against the old.

After Evan had gone away to war, Leander had fallen ill, and upon his recovery had announced that he was going to California. “A sick spell at my time of life shows the way the wind is blowing. I want to see Tim again before I die.” Knowing that he overestimated his strength, and hoping that he still had a long time to live, the family had discouraged him; but a little before Jim’s visit he had set out alone.

So Jim would have to speak for himself; and in imagination, he heard himself stuttering, or saw himself unable to say anything at all.

In the evening, after the preliminary greetings had been accomplished by his parents with a noncommittal, awkward, but faultless courtesy, the German girl, eager and unabashed, sat down on the organ stool, and sang, “_I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls_.” Jim sang, and joined her in one or two duets. Then she played the prelude of a passionate aria; the old cabinet organ rattled as her vigorous tread filled the bellows with air, as her capable hands pulled out stop after stop; and when she pressed open the swell-box, her skirt spread out over her knees like a great satin bagpipe. But Jim whispered that this piece would not please the family, and they sang instead a two-part anthem. Irene looked appealingly, as it were over the series of strong, high notes, toward his parents, and gazed at Ralph as a woman in love does gaze at a young man who may become her brother-in-law--gazed, in fact, a moment longer than she ought to have done.

The stern father, though proud of Jim’s talent and his own understanding of music, listened suspiciously. Little Flora wept with pleasure. Their mother said, “Now that--that is singing I can appreciate. I wish Evan and Leander were here to enjoy it.”

Then Flora was sent to bed. Ralph took a lamp, escorted the two ladies, who pretended to be tired, to their room, and returned. Jim was standing dramatically in front of the organ, as if he were going to sing again--without accompaniment this time.

“Pa--ma--” he said, “I want to marry Irene.”

Ralph blushed. Jim looked at his mother, and she looked at her husband for permission to congratulate her son, but his face was inexpressive; his twisted hands, one on each knee, did not move.

The silence was miserable. Jim ran his forefinger around his collar. “I want to be a singer. I guess I’ll give concerts, with her. I can do that better, better than be a minister.”

At last the father answered. “No. It’s not right. I won’t have it. We’ve spent too much on your schooling--”

“It won’t cost you a cent,” Jim pleaded. “Irene’s father is well off. I’ll be trained with her.”

“How did he make all this money?” his father inquired scornfully.

“He’s a ... He was a--brewer,” the young man admitted.

“There you are. A brewer!” his father snapped. “I tell you, it’s enough to make a man lose heart!”

Jim’s mother said, “Now, Henry, if he’s set his mind on it--”

“No, sir. I didn’t bring up my son to be a good-for-nothing singer.”

There followed another sharp silence.

Jim bit his lips, cried, “I’m a grown man,” and strode out of the room.

Presently Ralph said, “Good night, pa and ma,” and followed his brother.

The mother rose. “Well, Henry, they’ll have to get married sooner or later. And live their own lives. We can’t stop them.”

“Say no more about it,” he replied.

She went into the kitchen, set the batter for the breakfast pancakes on the stove to rise, and began to prepare for the night.

Henry Tower noticed that he had been left alone. After a time he pulled open the top drawer of a bureau, took out his flutes and his fife, unwrapped their flannel coverings, and lifted them one by one to his lips. He gazed into the finger holes, which had looked up at him all during the last war like a row of small, expressionless eyes. His favorite son a good-for-nothing singer.... He was glad that Evan, the least obedient, was a soldier; war was bad, but better than disgraceful behavior. He blew very softly into the flutes, not only so that no one in the house should know what he was doing--that part of him which loved music playing so softly that the part of him which hated it could not hear; as, of two people lying side by side, the one who is sleepless whistles a little in the night. He knew what no one else had discovered, that he was growing deaf. His rheumatic hands closed on the flutes as if he meant to break them, and he walked across to the window as if he meant to throw them away.

His wife opened the bedroom door. She saw him put away the instruments and wished that she had not, knowing that when his weakness had been exposed he never gave in to it. She sighed, for her husband, for her son--whichever would have to give up in the end. The Towers would have to settle their differences between them; she could not take sides.

Meanwhile, in the room over their heads, the boys were undressing slowly. Jim sat in his nightshirt, staring angrily at an eagle woven in the rag rug with its wings outspread; it was clear from his expression that he meant to go against his father’s will.

Ralph threw his shirt and trousers on a chair, and removed them at once, lest the odor of the stables be transferred to his brother’s college clothes. “You can’t do it,” he said without any introduction. “Can’t marry her, Jim.”

Jim looked up hopelessly. He expected sympathy and encouragement from everyone as young or younger than he, but they were all against him; Ralph on his father’s side.... “Pa’s too old-fashioned,” he muttered. “Unreasonable. Things are changing.”

“I’m not talking about pa. Getting married doesn’t change much.”

“What do you mean, then?”

In the silent room both brothers breathed heavily, and the lamp gulped on the table as the kerosene went up the wick, and they could hear the blows of a horse’s hoofs in the stall, like those of a fist on a great wooden opponent.

“Well ...” Ralph began gloomily--“Well, when I took her to her room, that old maid went ahead. Your girl held my hand. She kissed me.” Knowing his own passions, he expected to see an angry movement or a change of color, but Jim only prodded the rag eagle with one foot.

“You know,” Ralph went on, “I’m going to get married pretty soon. Marianne Duff. Her engagement to that bishop’s boy turned out to be nothing. We love each other. She wouldn’t do what your girl did. I couldn’t have such a thing happen.”

Jim stared in astonishment at his brother, his brother’s excited eyes, his large earth-colored hands working to turn back the cuffs of the nightshirt. Jealousy, the jealousy that a man ought to feel, that he ought to feel and did not.... He asked himself if he really loved Irene.

“Besides,” Ralph insisted, “you hadn’t ought to be a singer. Pa’s made sacrifices. Only one of us boys could have a chance. I gave up wanting to be a veterinary so you could be a minister--we all want you to. You sing well enough already. Singing doesn’t count--it’s not much of a man’s job.”

Jim’s dream of a career changed. Everyone left the great hall in which he had wanted to sing, that is, everyone he loved; just a few supercilious strangers would be there, to make fun of the country boy--no one who loved him. Suddenly he felt that it was a lonesome business to have his good luck and be educated. Apparently, in a measure, it would satisfy Ralph to have his lucky brother preaching the gospel. Apparently music was a private, even a selfish pleasure, whereas religion comforted everyone. It was a lonesome business to be selfish.

Ralph had nothing to add. He knelt on his side of the bed to say his prayers, forcing Jim to his knees, though there was not a whisper of thanksgiving in his heart and he did not know what to ask for. Looking strangely weary and deaf, Ralph said his prayers proudly, with his eyes only half shut, as at the end of a serious council the head of a family prays for them all. Jim felt like a boy who has heard the last words of a father or grandfather, and is afraid to try to get along without a blessing. Ralph was younger than himself, but it takes youth and strength to represent an authority as immortally old as that seemed to be. Over the patchwork quilt--of serviceable materials that had worn well, in dull colors that did not fade--Ralph’s dark head, as he whispered almost perfunctorily to himself and God, nodded slightly as if he were giving his consent to something and refusing something else. Refusing Jim’s new ambitions; refusing, incidentally, the girl who was not worthy of being his sister-in-law....

Then Jim thought that only a man who is nobody’s son and brother can do what he likes--he had been a son and brother before he knew what music was. He had seemed for a few months to be an exception to the family rule of disappointment; there were to be no exceptions. His dream of a career, the career of the dream itself, was over. Whether he liked it or not, it would be a lifework in itself to recompense them for the opportunities they had given him; whatever he wanted to represent, from now on he would have to represent their ideals. Perhaps, he thought, that is all it means to be a servant of God.

As a servant of God he felt exceedingly humble, so humble in fact that he did not feel ashamed--not of having disappointed them, nor of being about to disappoint Irene, nor of the likelihood of disappointing himself all the rest of his life. Ralph, though younger, was more of a man than he; as he stood up, Jim saw how his body was one hard, thick knot from head to foot, which would never be untied. Love in Ralph’s heart was the passion which he had pretended to feel, which he might pretend to feel again, and perhaps never would. Ralph, at the end of a hard day’s work, said his prayers with a sober passion, as he ought to be able to do and was not. Ralph, as if by inheritance or by instinct, had in his heart love, and religion, and obedience.

He himself, James Arthur Tower, had only his talents. A mouthpiece, to sing only when the joy of others required song, which was not often; to pray, whether he had anything to pray for or not, out loud, for others, because he had a gift of speech.... Just as Ralph rose from his knees, Jim thought of his prayer, the prayer of all such men as he: that he might make use of other people’s passion, in his life--he would have need of it; and that those who loved him should have no reason to be ashamed of him; and that he might never be found out. His will had been broken, and he felt as if he did not have a heart of his own to break. Ralph blew out the lamp, and the two brothers slipped into bed.

Next morning the postman, Leander’s successor, brought the news of Leander’s death. He had had a stroke of paralysis on his journey west, had been taken from the train to a hospital in Oklahoma, and after lying unconscious for three days, had passed away. The letter came from the Catholic priest who had buried him.

In the sorrow and confusion of that morning Jim’s trouble was almost forgotten. He could not wait for it to be remembered, having to return to college with his guests. His father took leave of him with these words: “Well, Jim, we know best. You’ll get over it.”

Jim gazed at Ralph; Ralph stared impassively at him.

“You’ve got a duty in this world,” their father added. “You’ve got to bear witness for the Lord. Remember that.”

Irene overheard, and did not altogether misinterpret their glances, in which there was evidence of mourning for something beside the old bachelor’s death--mourning in which she, though a stranger, had a part.

As they went back in the little slow train, the German aunt who believed that a prompt marriage must have been arranged, peering into their gloomy faces, congratulated herself aloud on the fact that she was an old maid.

Jim never told Irene that the visit had failed, that his father and brother were stronger than he; she did not need to be told. A flood of tears seemed to run into her heart whenever she thought of it, whenever she sang; but all her friends and even she herself observed that it gave her voice a new beauty, which encouraged her to go on with her career alone.

Jim worked all summer as the college president’s secretary, entered a theological seminary in the autumn, and at the end of September went home to be the best man at his brother’s marriage to Marianne Duff.

10. His Mother’s Girlhood and Marriage

Ira and Ursula Duff, Alwyn’s maternal grandparents, were unhappily married; moral fanaticism and the extraordinary strength of both their characters had made of this common situation a bizarre tragedy. He was despotic and malicious, but she had succeeded, by intelligent malice and courage, in living in harmony with him, if not in peace. He was consistently insincere; she was too haughty to hide her resentment or explain it, and in general bore all the blame. Even their two sons, when as adolescents they ran away from home, muttered that it was their mother who was a demon.

She was a woman of singular beauty; her regular features wore a scarcely perceptible grimace of disdain; her protuberant eyes were piercing and sad. As she uttered the most cruel opinions very audibly, very mildly, there was never a trace of emotion in her melodious voice. All those who had anything to hide, even from themselves, had reason to fear or detest her; and her husband made friends with them on that basis. Accused by resentful neighbors and relatives of being unworthy of affection, she was too candid in her own defense; which not only offended the few admirers of her virtue and intelligence who accused her of nothing, but exposed her anew to her husband’s skillful vindictiveness.

So it was in an atmosphere of anger and idealism that Alwyn’s mother grew up, devoutly sheltered from immorality and irreligion, cruelly exposed to still more cruel passions: a lonely little girl singing old hymns and memorizing long rhymed prayers in the shadow of a woman’s disaster, watching intently with large, gray-green eyes, but asking no questions.

As a child of eight Marianne saw that her mother had no friends, clung to her as if to hide the fact that no one else had the courage to love her, and began to receive in consequence all the tenderness of which that supposedly hard heart was capable.

At the age of twelve she had to admit that her mother was in fact proud and mercilessly outspoken, and had to learn not to try to defend her, even against schoolmates who had heard that she was a sort of witch.

When her brothers left home, Marianne would have hated them for their injustice and lack of respect, had not the Gospels which her mother read aloud to her every afternoon expressly forbidden hate. Before she was fourteen she realized that her father had fostered their resentment; that her mother’s unpopularity as a whole was his work; that he was a sort of sorcerer, unctuous and loquacious, who had shut her up behind an impenetrable wall of his deceit, his pathos, his private unkindness and public saintliness, where she was growing old angrily, like an innocent prisoner in a mysterious jail.

Then, as ignorant people fear death and happy people, pain, Marianne feared the further effects of his malice. What was to protect her when her turn to be its victim came? At fifteen she prayed every night and morning that he might grow gentle by a sudden disenchantment; but later she imagined that there were pure spirits who may not change, and thereafter pitied him, more or less as the devil has always been pitied by devout women.

His hypocrisy put her on her guard against life’s prevailing hypocrisy. Her mother’s utter loneliness suggested the solitude of the soul which only living for others could alleviate. Continually on trial before those whom she knew, her mother was like all men and women before God sitting in judgment. It was easy to conceive a half-divine Spirit, all malice, in the image of her father; and to love so cold and enigmatic a mother confidently was in itself a sort of mysticism. It was but a short step to that of the Protestant faith: the lonely effort to distinguish every false appearance from its hidden reality and the entire world of this world from the immortal universe; the hopeless effort to discover how to be free of the one and serve only the other.

In the month of June of her sixteenth year, in the presence of everyone she knew, she was baptized by immersion in the Anne River during a Free Will Baptist revival.

Her father offered a long, vain prayer at the water’s edge. The people of the congregation, otherwise merely those who detested her mother, drew closer like a crowd of saints--hard, loving faces all scarred with shadows under the willows, in the summer sunshine. She took three steps forward on the spongy bank. Then the first touch of the cold current seemed to burn her bare feet, and the minister’s arms hurt her a little as they bent her backward. For a moment she believed that she was drowning, infinitely far beneath the suffocating, bitter, heavy, noisy water, though the Anne River was shallow.

Later she cried uncontrollably in her mother’s arms; but when she recovered from the shock of the ceremony, she found that she was happy and felt that she needed her mother less than before. By the river water, by the pure shame and excitement, an ignorant girl had been made responsible to God--lonesomely so, without an intermediary--for a grown woman’s life. She was as jealous of that responsibility as if it were pure love; not even her mother should share it. This was formally the end of childhood. But she believed that she could keep its happiness as long as she kept its purity. Happiness was a duty as well as a miracle....

Meanwhile her mother’s melancholy increased, and after her baptism Marianne regarded it with a new, anxious independence. Her mother was as pure as a child. But did not virtue lead to happiness? What was it, then, which ruled her, and took away her illusions, and led her on from one defiance to another, the days of her life leading nowhere? If she imitated her mother, where would she be led? She was afraid to follow further, even in imagination.

In her nineteenth year she had a strange dream. There was a tall hedge of exceedingly dark foliage, and suddenly the thick leaves were drawn apart like a curtain. Her mother entered between them, very quick and stately, as if upon a stage or into a circus (though Marianne had never been to the theater and had seen only the outside of a circus tent). The dream went on; she grew more and more frightened. Her mother rode an iron-gray horse, seated upon a woman’s saddle, her full skirts folded and wrinkled in a great heap behind her, wearing a small hat with a red veil, holding in her hands a bow and arrow. She rode out of the woods and down along the river in which Marianne had been baptized, and splashed into the water; and wherever she went, all those who were not pure of heart fell down and disappeared--not because she wished them harm, but because neither their joy nor their sadness could be compared with her sadness. And although she came out of the forest as a sort of Diana--Diana dressed as women did dress in Marianne’s girlhood--Marianne understood that she had been driven there like a hunted animal, and had merely disguised herself as a huntress in order to escape.

That dream so minutely painted, that hour of sleep drawn tight like a piece of canvas, hung for months, a bright, heavy picture, over the bed in which she slept. It drifted out of itself into other dreams, mingling with their lack of meaning, and troubled her for days at a time.

Thereafter she loved her mother without trying to draw any conclusions. Virtue did lead to happiness.... In her mother’s life, childlike purity had led only to an old woman’s despair (for she was already growing old); but that life was exceptional and not for her to try to understand. Such an extremity of sadness was a wild thing, dangerous even to see. It was as if God had permitted a heathen disaster to take place, perhaps merely to show His mystery, perhaps to teach His angels a lesson; there was nothing in it for human beings, at least for Marianne, to learn....

And thereafter she would no sooner have thought of going to her mother for advice than of kneeling in the woods before an Indian mound, or whispering her troubles to a spring of cold water, like a savage. Thus, uneasily, her thought ran ahead of her from day to day toward the future, very softly, very fatally, coming between her and her mother, until her twentieth year, when she met with the accident of love.

One evening in the spring of that year, outside the Hope’s Corner schoolhouse, Ralph Tower, without warning, lifted both her hands and took her lips between his lips--for one second that was long. They were standing in the dark on the trodden ground under a honey locust in bloom which poured its fragrance down upon their heads. Marianne felt a painful astonishment--a strange emotion, because the astonishment was recognition and the pain seemed to be a privilege.

“I’m sorry,” Ralph muttered, and ran and stumbled back to the bright schoolhouse, where a party was in progress.

He had left her all alone. Luxuriously the locust shook out its flowers in dead-white clusters. There was no warmth in the blood which ran up and down her veins. She stood there, trembling, and did not cry.

Then she realized that even as a little girl she had been pleased by this boy who was now a man, and that suddenly she had been made a woman. Her modesty had prevented her from counting the number of recollections which had linked her to him with that prolonged attentiveness which is the innocent heart’s way of hoping. If she had counted them, she would have been afraid to come out alone with him in the dark. Now it was too late, but she could not keep from doing so, nevertheless.

The people in the schoolhouse (her mother, her father, perhaps even Ralph--all that family sang) began an old song, _Farmer in the Dell_. As automatically as an echo, her mind repeated the words after them, though she could hear only the tune. But instead of going inside, she crept into her father’s carriage in the shed until her mother came out to find her and they went home.

No one had ever touched her before. Her mother had taught her that she should never be kissed except by the man who loved her, whom she loved, and whom she would be permitted by marriage to love as long as she lived; to her sober spirit this had seemed very natural. For another month she was confident in the future--that is, in their eventual love, betrothal, and marriage; but her confidence steadily diminished.

But Ralph said nothing about it, indeed avoided every opportunity to see her alone; and whenever they happened to meet, some sort of fear was evident from his expression. She read its meaning: fear of what she had been led to expect, fear of consequences.... She tried to believe that she misunderstood it; she tried to endure her final conviction that she had not. She did not complain to her mother; she tried not to do so even in whispers to herself.

She could make no effort, neither ask for an explanation nor undertake even the humblest tentative of intimacy. This was a woman’s weakness; but by protecting her from further humiliation, it counted as strength, and she resented it as strength; for she thought that she would like to pay her humiliation the compliment of illness or even death.

She had nothing to look forward to, so she looked back at her lost innocence, the reverse of a promised land, exaggerating its perfection and its peace. So swiftly, so gently, so thoroughly, her happiness had been undone.... As a flying seed will debauch a whole meadow with flowers, one kiss, one caress not even wished for, had spoiled her peace of mind, even her good health. For there were rhythms in her body to which she stumbled impatiently when she went out to walk alone. There was fever in her forehead, and an abnormal snowy freshness on her lips and tongue. Her pillow was full of faces which were terribly alike, and when finally she fell asleep, her own hands touched her and woke her up, seeming to be the young farmer’s hand which had taken them that night against her will, and locked them both easily in its palm, and let them go again too soon, also against her will. Her will was weak and wasted itself upon opposite wishes....

When she had explained why she had hid in the carriage outside the schoolhouse, her mother had said, “Now you must forget all about it.”

She envied the simplicity of this attitude, ready now to pay its price in sorrow, since there was sorrow in any case. But if the episode had actually been repeated, as it was in several misty dreams during the summer, she would have kept her own counsel. She was no longer a young girl over whom a mother may watch, but more a woman than her mother, who had left a part of womanhood behind her when she lost her confidence in others, her readiness to weep, her hope. Marianne had hope, though nothing to hope for; and tears often refreshed her as her mother was never refreshed by anything.

Meanwhile, the midsummer peonies broke into bloom, and their stems broke down under the weight upon the shabby lawns. Her mother’s little peacock opened its feathers and fanned itself nervously, and before it rained fluttered upon the gables, whimpering in a clear, disagreeable voice. The sun rose in what had been the dead of night, wearing upon the horizon a bright humidity like a mask of hot iron and pearls....

And perpetually she saw in imagination the strong, homely young farmer’s face, visibly, invisibly, beside everything which her small world contained, as if it were a tear in the corner of her eye.

What had she done to deserve this misery--sickness and magic mixed? Had she ever wished for love? Never--not in a single daydream, not for one lonely moment of unwilling aloofness among other girls in love. Ralph alone was to blame.

She thought that it was her Christian training which enabled her to forgive him, but found forgiveness all too easy, being merely a disguise of love. Until she stopped forgiving him--that is, stopped loving him--he would continue to hurt her; there would be continually more for which he would have to be forgiven. So, because she loved him, she ought to do penance for the wrong he had done, by hating him.... She could not even keep clear in her mind these duties of disappointed love, much less accomplish any of them.

There were other sources of bewilderment. For one whose eyelids droop and whose eyes ache, the world itself seems to be shrunken and inflamed; so the atmosphere of her home grew even more sinister than it had been when, but for its unhappiness, she would have been happy. It would not be difficult, now that she knew the sickness love produced, to keep her virtue perfect; but with her heart so stripped of its indifference, so stimulated as if by a drug, she began to fear for her faith, dreading the influence upon it of her mother’s loveless irony, her father’s piety and lies.

So she resolved to leave home as soon as possible. In the autumn she went away to a teachers’ college, and soon after Christmas accepted a vacant position in a Sheboygan school. She should have been happy there. Her slight beauty ripened with a delicate solemnity; she had inherited her mother’s good taste in dress and gestures and ways of speech, which emphasized her gentle virtues; and she was loved by everyone. Loneliness had been a child’s palace and stronghold, but since it had been broken into by the young farmer, the image of whose briefly passionate face she could not put out, she was afraid to stay in it. So she made friends with Evangeline Gay, a woman ten years older than she who had a small independent income and lived with a brother and his wife; and later accepted the attentions of a suitor named Paul Fairchild, the son of the Episcopalian bishop of Sheboygan.

Having prepared himself for the law and then lived in England with his mother’s relatives, Paul Fairchild had come back to Wisconsin to rest after an illness. He was idle, romantic, and not quite candid; the sort of young man who seems to be a bachelor as soon as boyhood is over, very likely to be passionately in love, but unlikely to attach much importance to the fact.

Marianne took pleasure in his politeness and his culture. Hoping it was true, she wrote to her mother that if he continued to deserve her respect, she might learn to love him and be willing to consider becoming his wife.

Her father got up in the night, took the letter from the pocket inside her mother’s skirt as he often did, read it, replaced it, and the next morning began to announce to his friends and his enemies, “My daughter is engaged to the Episcopalian bishop’s son.”

Bishop Fairchild was a famous man; his son, who had lived in his father’s diocese only a few months at a time, had aroused everyone’s curiosity. Emphasized by Ira Duff’s extravagant way of speech, the news traveled quickly and widely.

Late one afternoon Paul Fairchild came into Marianne’s schoolroom and said, “Your father says that we’re engaged. So much the better. I love you.”

Shocked and confused, ashamed of having written anything to her mother before he had spoken, Marianne did not deny it, did not protest, and was scarcely aware of his discourtesy. But, pressing her hands against his shoulders, she did avoid his kiss.

“Please go now. I have work to do. I must--” She lost her voice. She sat down at the desk. Her cold fingers fluttered the sheets of paper on which her pupils had written themes; on the first page she read, in a small boy’s determined hand, “The Stars.” She saw, far off at the left, the winter sun going down, divided into squares by the window.

“Please go. I must work,” she repeated; and then her body sagged against the table--she had fainted away. Her head fell forward and lay on the pile of themes as if it were a pillow.

The young man caught her shoulders so that she did not slip out of the chair, and stood there in stupid astonishment, unable for a moment to rouse himself from his emotions of a lover. Out of a great white jug marked _Water_ drops fell in threes to the pail below with the rhythm of a waltz. But he could not move to put water on her face without letting her fall....

In the school yard several pupils drew near; one of them was crying; one spoke loudly in a sneering voice. The young man was embarrassed; if they should come in.... He judged by the sound of their voices that they were old enough to understand, to misunderstand.

He lifted Marianne in his arms and put her down on a bench. Then he took one of her hands to kiss it, but at that moment her heavy, weak eyelids opened. “The Stars,” she said. “Oh, what is it? What has happened?”

The young man smiled and looked ashamed.

“I am all right now.” She drank a glass of water eagerly, as if it were from thirst that she was suffering. “Please go.”

But he did not move. Then she saw his troubled eyes running to the windows and the door, and understood him better; so she added: “You must. I asked Evangeline Gay to come here for me.”

He left her alone, seeming glad of an excuse.

It was a poor excuse, for she had asked no one to come. She dragged herself back through the snow to the house where she lived, and with ice-cold hands laid herself in her bed as if she were a dead body.

She felt little resentment toward her father or either of her lovers. What had happened was more odious than human conduct could be; it was like an illness, like the progress of an illness from the forefinger to the ring finger, from the arm to the breast, and so on.... An illness which would not even kill her; but her self-respect was dead--worn out, suffocated, filthily bandaged, and still sore, though it was dead.

If life was like this, was she duty bound to live? If her soul was immortal and could be so compromised, would it do any good to die? Marriage sprung like a trap beneath her driven feet; God the father as dishonest as her father, tricking her with accidents....

For a moment, in her sorrow, she destroyed her God. Horrified by the involuntary evil of her thought, she beat her forehead with her fists, closed her eyes, and wished that she might never have to open the latter again as long as she should be obliged to live. For a moment she had destroyed God; but because she loved Him, she created Him again.

So she determined to accept it all: the consequences of her mother’s betrayal, her father’s lying, Ralph’s neglect, and Paul Fairchild’s love. Crumpled up on the bed, stone-cold in the cold, red light of the sunset which poured through the window, she fought intelligently to keep her soul from falling down to hell. For if she rejected what God permitted, she believed, it would fall and change as it fell, as certain angels had done, into a dead-alive thing whose eternity was all one such afternoon....

But could she, with courage and intelligence, hold herself at a certain altitude above all evil, including death--as the wings of a bird hold it for a moment in the air after a bullet has lodged in its heart, opened its heart? Could such a moment last as long as her life? She spread out in imagination her youth and her bravery as if they were wings. Suddenly she felt that she was ready--that is, ready to marry Paul Fairchild. And he should not discover what was in her heart; Ralph should not either, nor, perhaps, should God.... She would lie to them faithfully by the way she would live; she would love them all three equally.

Something like a soothing drug was running in her veins where the blood had seemed to cease to run. Her landlady knocked at the door and called her to supper; she did not answer.

She lay there without answering until she heard a familiar whistling. Then she rose and slipped carefully along the wall toward the window until she could see into the street where Paul Fairchild was gazing up over the hedge with a bunch of yellow roses in his hand. Hiding behind a half-closed shutter, Marianne tried to like his vague, intelligent face and at this distance, unknown to him, to enjoy the roses. He whistled again; she did not show herself at the window. To-morrow she would be ready for him.... She studied his anxiety and discontent, and watched him go away.

That night she wrote a letter to her mother to announce her engagement definitely, phrasing it in such a way as to put her father in the right without asking what had happened to betray her.

The night was as long as a lifetime. In effect, so strong was her imagination, it was a lifetime--that of Paul Fairchild’s wife. She was by nature and training too just to think that the future would be uniformly unhappy; but a definite distaste was occasioned by her anticipation of certain pleasures and rewards which ought to fulfill, but would surely fail to fulfill, her dearest hopes....

Nevertheless, she was content with her decision--above all, proud of it. Her loneliness, if she did not marry, would be a perpetual reproach to Ralph for the wrong he had done her; and altogether womanly in her passion, she believed that she did not want him to have to give it a moment’s thought. Now that she had given him up, she could say proudly to herself as often as she liked that she loved him, which helped her endure the humiliating fact that he had never loved her. And when, just before the dawn, she said her prayers, bowing before God’s pride, she gave thanks as well for her own, saying that it was the spirit of God in her heart. Her mother, under different circumstances, had said as much.

Marianne’s engagement to Paul Fairchild lasted all that summer. She became the governess of a banker’s children in order not to have to return to Hope’s Corner. Her mother believed that she wanted to be with her future husband, and referred to her happiness in every letter with an unhappy woman’s skepticism and envy.

But by autumn Marianne had given up hope of every sort of happiness. Her thought was all anger, and it trembled upon her lips in sentences already formed; so she began to have to look forward shamefully to the time when she would be saying things as spiteful as those for which her mother was famous. All her life she had seen what marriage could be at its worst--hers would be as bad; even her good qualities would play an evil rôle, as her mother’s had done. Her life, more and more like her mother’s, more and more thoroughly spoiled.... An unkind fate having set to work to spoil it, she herself had added the finishing touch by promising to marry.

Every day she told herself that she ought formally to break her promise. But Paul loved her; he would be crafty as he had been in the beginning; she was tired--increasingly tired since that night in the spring when with such difficulty she had made up her mind to do what was still undone. So tired that the events of the past and finally those of the present merely haunted her, as life haunts one upon a sick bed who may be alive and may be dead, who cannot tell.... Day by day the future tiptoed carefully across the present into the past without waking her from this nightmare of being about to marry a man whom she did not love in the least.

Often she did not think of him as her future husband, and he did not always try to usurp a husband’s privileges. Then she found him an agreeable companion, distracting her attention even from their relationship, consoling her even for distress which he alone had caused.

But by the autumn she was entirely disillusioned as to his character. He was weak, indolent, naturally irreligious, naturally libertine. He gave her no opportunity to know his father, the bishop, never spoke of his mother, and expressed no desire to visit her parents. He seemed unwilling to wait for God’s blessing upon their union, and meanwhile did not help her to fix a date for the marriage.

Patiently, tactfully, with that deliberate pretense of innocence which is the youngest and purest form of cynicism, she avoided his caresses. Often she tried to persuade herself of an emotion which even then it was her duty to feel, or tried to believe that she would love him in time, in due time. On these occasions she realized that she would never marry him, and was bitterly ashamed of herself for not telling him so.

During the summer he found two gaited horses which he could rent, and taught Marianne to ride. On a gray horse, in a broadcloth dress turned into a riding habit, she looked exactly as her mother had looked in the dream two years before, and often thought of the resemblance. One afternoon late in October they rode out along the bluffs over Lake Michigan, and came to a wooded hill surrounded by a fence, and could not find a gate. So they dismounted, tied the horses, and made their way up through the woods toward a little cliff which they had seen from the road, in order to look down from it upon the lake.

The ironwoods made a pallid, artificial evening, in which Marianne observed an ugly expression on Paul’s face: a repeated look sideways, a crude, unspoken syllable in one corner of his mouth, a stiff wrinkle from one temple to the other across his forehead.... He walked a step or two behind, stared hard at her, and stumbled. Glancing back over her shoulder, Marianne watched this expression with eager, unsympathetic interest, seeing suddenly that his love, if it were provoked, might provoke her hate, and so set her free. They came out under the harder stare of the whole sky in the clearing on top of the hill.

Among the rocks they found a grassy hollow shaped like a large armchair. They were above the horizon like a thin-lipped shell and above a dripping cloud which lay in it; above the lake covered with tight indentations and ribbons of foam which were continually being tied and torn; above a fish hawk which continually went down and made mistakes at the surface of the water.

But suddenly Paul cried, “This is nonsense!” and began to pleat her skirt with his nervous hands.

She frowned and shrank away from him. “Don’t. I don’t understand--”

“I love you,” he stammered. “I want you to love me. Of course you don’t.” He was panting between his words. “You sit there like an old woman. Sit and admire nature!”

The fish hawk dropped again, plunging into one of the indentations and breaking a great cord of foam. Paul’s hands were fighting with her left hand. “Paul,” she said, “you do not wish to offend me. You don’t know what you are doing. I am afraid of you. Get up. We must go back. If you love me, you don’t want to hurt me. Wait--”

“Wait.... No. If you love me--now. Don’t talk religion to me. I’ve heard nothing else all my life and it hasn’t made me any happier or better. Now. We are engaged. It is enough.”

Marianne knew then that she had a right to hate him. “We were engaged. We were, until to-day. I break my engagement now. Let me go. I tell you, I will not marry you.” She hated him because he smiled.

“You’d better not,” he said. “You’d better not. Listen. Two girls promised to marry me before. They weren’t so good as you are. Everybody knew; nobody has paid any attention to them since. I hated them. If you don’t marry me, people will think--they always do, anyway. You can’t always do what you like--I love you too much.” He was smiling, but his eyes were full of tears.

The sweat sprang in the palms of Marianne’s hands. He had come closer and closer to her. She tried to say to herself that he was out of his mind and not to blame. She struck him full in the face. At that moment she was glad, for she knew that they were done with each other at last; having had to defend herself, she would not even be able to pity him again.

He sprang to his feet and stumbled a little way off under the trees. He was pacing up and down and beating the ground with a stick like a desperate child.