Mary Stewart Cutting

“ Many a night I have worked until two o'clock in the morning that Erla's cheques might go to her regularly, and I hardly felt whether it was dawn or dark.
And I had in that time some of my most exquisite flashes of happiness; it was almost as if I had a premonition of what was to happen. I had always been fond of beautiful things, but I took a fresh joy in sunsets, in the shimmering of lights across the snow, in the swaying of green leaves, and white clouds in a blue sky—things that come in the way of everyone—full of a beauty that raises the strain of courage in one's heart. ”

“ CLYTIE COMES BACK IT WAS February, the before-dawn of the year, when vitality is at its lowest and the problems of existence seem as if they could never be solved; when even in the most loving households there are sagging times when there seems no real uplift obtainable, and that Heaven-sent, saving angel, a sense of humour, sits humped together on the doorstep with folded wings, unable to enter.
To-night, like the reverberation of a wheel after the impetus has been removed, the stress and habit of the long business day still clung to Joseph Langshaw in a certain tenseness of manner. ”

“ A hamper of fruit came for her at luncheon, almost unimaginably beautiful in its arrangement of white hothouse grapes and peaches, and strawberries as large as the peaches, and the contents of a box of flowers filled every available vase and jug and bowl in the house, as Dosia arranged them, with the help of Zaidee and Redge—the former winningly helpful, and the latter elfishly agile, his bare knees nut-brown from the sun of the spring-time, jumping on her back whenever she stooped over, to be seized in her arms and hugged when she recovered herself. ”

“ Most of the people he knew, more or less, but far down the table beyond the pink glow of the candles the profile of a stranger occasionally gleamed into view—the delicate, spirited profile of a girl, her small head set on a long throat that rose out of a gown cut slightly square at the neck. The outlines of her velvety black hair melted into the velvety black shadows beyond, but he could see the curve of the long lashes on her olive cheek, and the sweetly set, infantine corners of her mouth. ”

“ He went upstairs with a firm and even step, treading more lightly as he passed the nursery door where the baby was going to sleep under the charge of Katy, the nurse-maid, and entered the room where his wife lay on the lounge in a crimson dressing-gown, a flowered coverlet thrown over her feet, her dark hair lying in rings on the white pillow, and her large, dark eyes turned expectantly toward him. The comfort of the pretty, luxurious room, which gave no hint of this new poverty in its fittings, was eclipsed by the icy chill that was like an opaque atmosphere. ”

“ If she is trained she will make a great singer."
I shall never forget the words—it was like having a door opened into heaven. Music had always set me quivering with a sense of beauty that was almost too great to bear. After that all my dreams, all my talks to myself were of singing—in a wonderful, great hall, filled with rows on rows of people, a glittering crowd, with princes and princesses among them, and in that final intoxication of joy, when my voice should soar and soar far up above, carrying the souls of all that crowd with it, I would feel the meeting with something that was Divine. ”

“ But that night I awoke suddenly in the dark as if a cold hand had been laid on me—that panel in my mind had been drawn back and a troop of horrible, accusing thoughts poured forth and terrified me. I had deliberately stolen that bill—pretty Miss Nannie's tearful eyes wrenched my soul. I trembled and wept, myself, with horror at my deed, and vowed that I would give her back the money the first thing in the morning. ”

“ He took a swift look up and down the empty, lifeless street, laid out straight and stiff in the cold, faint glimmer of the dawn, and then his lips sought hers in deep, deep acknowledgment of the joy, and of the sorrow, to which all love is born—one of those moments stolen in its beautifulness from the life to come.
But his voice was tense again, as he set her down within her own doorway, and he looked at her with stern eyes of jealous care, from which she hid the woman’s smile of love at dear love’s unreason. ”

“ As long as she was alive here on earth must her spirit and her heart be passionately alive to those she loved. A torrent of love for them seemed to overflow her, touchingly eager and yearning and hopeful. Why this high note of tragedy that she had been sustaining? Suppose Farnham had bad news to-night, poor fellow—well, that was a lot better than his being ill! Suppose Lily—she winced then!—wanted to marry Rupert; there was really nothing wrong about him, so far as the mother knew; it was only her own dislike and prejudice. If Lily were glad, she would have to be! ”

“ She wore a plain white cotton frock, not an evening frock at all; but the slipper that showed under it was silver-buckled and bronze, like her hair. The first greetings over they sat regarding each other.
"Well!" she said, smiling.
"Well!" he returned. He put his hand in his pocket. "Here's my half of the shell."
She bent over to touch its tiny translucence with her finger tips. "Oh, I've lost mine—I'm so sorry! But it really doesn't matter, does it? I matched the thought. That counts the same, doesn't it?"
"It surely does," said Taunton, his twinkling, deep-set eyes scanning her face. ”

“ The walk had become an incessant, endless thing, dreadful as a journey through the inferno, but for the protecting, enfolding clasp of that guiding hand—a strong, clean touch, that subtly conveyed warmth to the blood and courage to the heart. With her palm pressed to that of this unseen friend, Dosia felt clearly that she could have walked blindfolded to the end of the world, sure that he knew the path and that it led to some unknown good. They seemed to grow as one in the unspoken comforting of trust. ”

“ It was a scene of almost impossible beauty, whose fibres caught at the hearts, in the exhilaration of the deep surrounding silence. Some of the men began to thrum hauntingly on guitars and mandolins, at the feet of the women, whose soft cheeks had a magic sheen upon them. The air was full of the resinous perfume of the crouching pines; Noël drew a long, long, long breath of it. Genevieve Deering’s presence seemed to give an added touch to this night of enchantment, as she sat back against the heaped-up pine boughs at the other end of the group. ”

“ In all brave and healthful natures there is a natural ardour of travel. Anticipation of the unusual waved, even if but for the moment, its wizard wand. The Rockies loomed largely in the conversation at dinner, while George and Mary clamoured loudly to go, too. Clytie's eyes followed her husband as if light dwelt in his presence. She couldn't have told that the idea of being sent away from him made her feel foolishly frightened, like a child being pushed off into the dark. But of course you would forget all that when you saw the Rockies. ”

“ I knew, that in myself, in spite of love and birth and death, and care and sorrow, and grinding work for all these years, I knew that in myself I was as young as that look in my eyes, as eager for expression as ever, as eager to live my own life as I dreamed it. Even if you're a mother, it's strange how much you keep on being your own self still. ”

“ Leverich or George Sutton and that chorus of onlookers was like passing through fire. One braces one’s self to withstand the pain of scenes of joy or sorrow revisited, to find that, after all, when the moment comes, there is little of that dreaded pain—it has been lived through and the climax passed in that previsioning which imagination made more intense, more harrowingly real, than the reality. ”

“ She was sitting up for him, as he knew by the light in the parlor window. He could see her through the half-closed blinds as she sat by the table, a magazine in her lap, her attitude, unknown to herself, betraying a listless depression. After all, is a woman glad to have all her aspirations and desires confined within four walls? She may love her cramped quarters, to be sure, but can she always forget that they are cramped? To what does a wife descend after the bright dreams of her girlhood! ”

“ Worthington, after a few minutes, went sound asleep, lurching as the car lurched, his wife, poor woman, pale enough as she sat with face averted from Mrs. Gibbons, her lips pressed tightly together, one hand holding mechanically to her raiment, and the other within her husband’s arm. Men sat with their heads on their sweet-hearts’ shoulders, in true early morning trolley-car fashion, and every inch of standing room was packed too thick for the eye to penetrate with a singing, drunken, cat-calling, indecent crowd, the last scum of a great city. ”

“ Everything—the grass, the sky, the world itself, has been changed for me. I feel that I live now to accomplish great things—for there’s a beauty in existence I never felt before.”
“Oh,” said Genevieve, her frank eyes alight, “I’ve felt that, too! Don’t you think you can tell when beautiful thoughts are near you? When people are in a room with you, you can know whether they’re bothered or discontented or happy without their speaking. Why couldn’t one feel something beautiful—like what you wrote? There’s so much more to living than what you see!”
“Have you learned that too?” asked Noël. ”

“ Atwood, at twenty, the time of her marriage, had been a warm-hearted, fervent, loquacious, impulsive child. At thirty-eight she was still in many ways the girl her husband had married; even to her looks, while he appeared much older than his real age, in reality but a couple of years ahead of hers. She was always longing to be a silent, noble, and finely-balanced character, quite oblivious of the fact that she suited him, a humorous but self-contained man, exactly as she was, and that he would have been very lonesome with anything more perfect. ”

“ Dosia, on the bed by Redge’s crib, went softly after a while into the other room, and saw that Lois at last slept, though she herself could not. Each time that she saw Girard he seemed more and more a stranger, so far removed was he from her dream of him; through all his softness, his gentleness, she felt the streak of hardness, if nobody else did—though Mr. Cater, she remembered now, had spoken of it too—that the fires of adversity had molded. Perhaps no man could have worked up from the cruel circumstances of his early days without that hardening streak to uphold him. ”

“ How hard we have to try sometimes! Even our daily repeated strengthening catch-words wear themselves out in course of time; we have to seek others to pump up the power of living into us.
There were always those chords on the piano that I could strike that might bring the sense of power back into me—and for every time in which I struggled out of the slough of despondency, I reached a still higher ground; I had visions. Oh, my fairy ring was still there, that feeling of that inner self in me leaped toward the light more exultingly than ever ”

“ The opera—had they ever gone to any opera before? How inconceivably beautiful and brilliant the house, the lights, the gay assemblage to the erstwhile dwellers of the suburbs! Together they scanned the emblazoned women in the boxes, and pointed out to each other those whom they recognized. And when Gounod’s delicious music stole into their hearts, and Mrs. Waring sat with her bride roses in one hand, and the other tucked secretly into Henry’s, under cover of her wrap, was ever any woman happier? Had ever any girl a lover more devoted or more bubbling over with fun? ”

“ If you could talk to the soul of a man like that as if he had the soul of an angel, and learn from him what you wanted to know—get his guidance—But Lois was before all things inviolably a wife, with the instinctive dignity of one. The sympathy between her and Eugene Larue was so deep that she feared sometimes that in some brief moment she might reveal in words, to be forever regretted afterwards, conditions which he knew without her telling. To be loved as Eugene Larue would love a woman! ”

“ No one could ever have looked less like a possible great singer than I!—a little country girl with a round face and a shabby black hat and jacket. But Mrs. Stanford had friends among great musicians; she took me to the greatest conductor of the day—I have never known any one so much a part of music as he, a man as kind as he was great—and made me sing for him. I was terribly afraid as I began, but as I went on I came suddenly into my other world: I stood with my feet in the fairy ring, singing up to the blue sky above me, and to the Power of which I was a part. ”

“ Can any human soul thrive in an atmosphere of doubt?
It was when this knowledge of further separation lay heaviest upon her, that word came to Milly one morning in the bright sunlight that Norton had been arrested for embezzlement and was in jail. Her heart stood still. This, then, was what she had been foreboding all along; the instantaneous conviction of his guilt was the cruel blow. Oh, the awful, awful wrench of the heart, when disgrace lays its hand on one we love! Death seems an honest, joyful thing in comparison. ”

“ To Dosia, sitting there by the little plot of tulips, the sun was the brilliant sun of July, and those scarlet tulips a garden wide and far-reaching, an endless vista of flowers, the blue sky an endless vault above her—high noon and midsummer, with that sweet-scented warmth at the busy heart of things, a circle of infinite life humming in the low grasses, in the almost windless, hardly stirring air. Warmth and color and life, at high noon, listening close to the heart of things. ”

“ He gazed past her solemnly and then taking off his hat to her, went on his way, leaving Milly overpowered with bewilderment.
What did it all mean? Who was right, and who was wrong? How did people drift apart after they were married? A new idea of the complexity of life came to her, the strange way in which human beings acted on each other, drawn, as by magnets, with the differing forces. Marriage to her had always presented a picture of growth in happiness, growth in goodness, a path upward together for lover and beloved. ”

“ It reflected her again, fresh and gleaming, low-bodiced, short-skirted, and a-tiptoe in her pearly slippers; and again in filmy, trailing petticoats, and half-covered neck, sitting like a pictured marchioness of old in front of the dressing-table, in the shine of the candles, while Mrs. Leverich’s maid piled the fair hair high on her small head. And every few minutes there was a knock at the door, and a maid brought in a box of flowers, great, delicious bunches of red and pink and white roses, and sweet peas and lilies, and violets tied with yards of lustrous satin ribbon. ”

“ Her tone had even greater insistence. “I know what it is—myself—to be with those who do not care. You are not as other people think you! You can be good and noble. You can”—her voice sank to a whisper—“resist temptation. If one prays—it helps; I know that.” Her voice rose steadily again, after a tremulous silence: “You can never say again that no one believes in you, for I believe in you.”
“And care?” asked Lawson.
His eyes glittered and his face worked with some unusual emotion.
“And care,” assented Dosia, with the same unwavering eyes and serious, childlike candor of tone. ”

“ As far as the eye could see there was no other human being anywhere. At eleven o’clock in a New England village, after the marketing is seen to and mail time over, all self-respecting persons are at home behind the bowed green blinds of the white houses by the roadside, or at work farther off in the fields. For Milly and Norton to be out in the garden now was to be quite alone, and when he put his arm around her and drew her down beside him on the stone wall among the roses, she only smiled confidingly up into his face, and flushed sweetly as he kissed her. ”

“ To be sure, the fairy prince had not arrived as yet—Bailey Girard, who had come to the house while she was still a stranger to it, had been half across the Continent since. It is one of the shabby jests that life is always playing us, that two who have met once as wayfarers on the same road, with the memory of that one meeting so curiously vivid and intimate that it seems as if the fate of the next turning must bring them within touch again, are yet kept out of sight or sound of each other for miles by the slight accidents of travel. ”

“ I think of a great, great many things I never tell. You and my brother Orrin, who have done everything and had everything, you think me silly and romantic, but I am wiser than you. It’s because you’ve forgotten. Why, there’s nothing but love that makes life worth living!” said young Kathleen, her voice thrilling through the room. “I shall never try to love only a little, no matter what happens, but as much, as much, as much, always, as God will let me, if I die for it myself!”
She went over to Helen and flung herself down on the floor beside her, and laid her head in Helen’s lap. ”

“ Others seem to exist by the continuance of that first faith alone—a sheer optimism that keeps the courage alive and keen enough to seize hold of the slightest driftwood of opportunity, binding this flotsam into a raft that takes them triumphantly out on the high tide. For all the long drag, the anxiety, the physical strain, the harassment, failure in itself seemed as inherently impossible to Justin as that he should be stricken blind or lose the use of his limbs. ”

“ And Dosia! She had never supposed that any girl could care for a man until he had shown that he cared for her—it was the unmaidenly, impossible thing. And now—how beautiful he was, how dear! A wistful smile trembled around her lips. All that had gone before with other men suddenly became as nothing, forgotten and out of mind, and she herself made clean by this purifying fire. Even if she never had anything more in her whole life, she had this—even if she never had anything more. ”

“ In these moments she caught glimpses of herself, not as this draggled, pain-gripped, hungry creature, the prey of frenzied, torturing moods, but as a wife tenderly beloved, a happy mother of little children, the mistress of comforts that her husband had won for her, the appointed dispenser of blessings; a wife tenderly beloved, the true owner of her husband’s heart, a woman whose work it was to grow daily in strength and grace, that she might be more and more his helper, his lover. ”

“ When two are separated, one must love enough to bridge the gulf—what matter which one? It seemed now as if there were so much that she might have given, as if all this torrent of love that nearly broke her heart might have been poured out and poured out at his feet—lavished on him, without regard to need or fitness or expense, as Mary lavished her precious box of spikenard on One she loved. ”