Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

“ Might not Harry's illness, indeed, have been sent to punish her for her neglect? A shudder of abhorrence passed through her as she remembered the fox-hunt, and her passion of jealousy. The roll of blue silk, lying upstairs in a closet in the third storey, appeared to her now not as a temptation to vanity, but as a reminder of the mortal sin which had almost cost her the life of her child. And suppose God had not stopped her in time—suppose she had gone to Atlantic City as Oliver had begged her to do? ”

“ A light burned in the window of the room which had been the parlour in the days when she lived there, and as she gazed at it, she almost expected to see the face of her mother, with its look of pathetic cheerfulness, smiling at her through the small greenish panes. And then the past in which Oliver had no part, the past which belonged to her and to her parents, that hallowed, unforgettable past of her childhood, which seemed bathed in love as in a flood of light—this past enveloped her as the magic of the moonbeams enveloped the house in which she had lived. ”

“ How can you say such an unkind thing to me?"
"You never do the things that I want you to. You know I'd like you to go out and enjoy yourself and have attention as other girls do."
"You are disappointed because I'm not a belle like Abby Goode or Jinny Pendleton," said Susan with the patience that is born of a basic sense of humour. "But I couldn't help that, could I?"
"Any girl in my day would have felt badly if she wasn't admired," pursued Mrs. Treadwell with the venom of the embittered weak, "but I don't believe you'd care a particle if a man never looked at you twice." ”

“ The word "success" (and what was success except another name for the universal Treadwell spirit?) invariably assumed the image of the dollar in the mind of Cyrus, while to Oliver, since his thinking was less carefully coördinated, it was without shape or symbol. Pacing the dusty floor, with the pale moonlight brooding like a flock of white birds over the garden, the young man would have defined the word as embracing all the lofty aspirations in the human soul. It was the hour when youth scaled the heights and wrested the divine fire from the heavens. ”

“ The awakening of her imagination—an event more tumultuous in its effects than the mere awakening of emotion—had changed not only her inner life, but the ordinary details of the world in which she lived. Because a young man, who differed in no appreciable manner from dozens of other young men, had gazed into her eyes for an instant, the whole universe was altered. What had been until to-day a vague, wind-driven longing for happiness, the reaching out of the dream toward the reality, had assumed suddenly a fixed and definite purpose. ”

“ To him, as well as to Gabriel and to the ploughmen and to the bluebirds flitting, like bits of fallen sky, along the "snake fences," Nature, the great healer, had brought her annual gift of the resurrection of hope.
"Cyrus means well," thought Gabriel, with a return of that natural self-confidence without which no man can exist happily and make a living. "He means well, but he takes a false view of life." And he added after a minute: "It's odd how the commercial spirit seems to suck a man dry when it once gets a hold on him." ”

“ With the casualness of a man's point of view towards an emotion, he would judge its importance, she felt, chiefly by the power it possessed of disturbing the course of his life. Unobservant, and ever ready to twist and decorate facts as she was, it had still been impossible for her to escape the truth that men are by nature incapable of a woman's characteristic passion for nursing sentiment. To struggle to keep a feeling alive for no better reason than that it was a feeling, would appear as wastefully extravagant to Oliver as to the unimaginative majority of his sex. ”

“ All her life she had looked forward to the coming of what she thought of vaguely as "happiness," and now that it was here, she felt that it put an end to the tremulous expectancy which had filled her girlhood with such wistful dreams. Marriage appeared to her (and indeed to Oliver, also) as a miraculous event, which would make not only herself, but every side of life, different for the future. After that there would be no vain longings, no spring restlessness, no hours of drab weariness, when the interests of living seemed to crumble from mere despondency. ”

“ Her happiness was of that invulnerable sort which builds its nest not in the luxuriant gardens of the emotions, but in the bare, rock-bound places of the spirit. Courage, humour, an adherence to conviction which is wedded to an utter inability to respect any opinion except one's own; loyalty which had sprung from a principle into a passion; a fortifying trust, less in the Power that rules the universe than in the peculiar virtues of the Episcopal prayer-book when bound in black; a capacity for self-sacrifice which had made the South a nation of political martyrs ”

“ If Oliver were here beside her—if he were standing close to her in that throbbing circle around the bed—she would still be separated from him by the immensity of that inner space which is not measured by physical distances. "No, even if he were here, he could not reach me," she said, and an instant later, with one of those piercing illuminations which visit even perfectly normal women in moments of great intensity, she thought quickly, "If every woman told the truth to herself, would she say that there is something in her which love has never reached?" ”

“ Why, you look as if you hadn't slept for a week. You are positively haggard."
"But I have to be up with Harry when he is ill. How in the world could I help it?"
"You know he kicks up these rows almost every night, and you humour every one of his whims as if it were the first one. Don't you ever get tired?"
"Of course I do, but I can't let my child suffer even if it is only from fear. You haven't any patience, Oliver. Don't you remember the time when you used to be afraid of things?"
"I was never afraid of the dark in my life. No sensible child is, if he is brought up properly." ”

“ As a man he may not have been impressive, but as a defeating force who could say that he had not attained his fulfilment? It was as if the instinct of patriarchal tyranny had entrenched itself in his person as in a last stronghold of the disappearing order. When he died many things would pass away out of Dinwiddie—not only the soul and body of Cyrus Treadwell, but the vanishing myth of the "strong man," the rule of the individual despot, the belief in the inalienable right of the father to demand blood sacrifices. ”

“ In the place where it had been there was a restless longing which seemed at one instant a part of the universal stirring of the spring, and became the next an importunate desire for the coming of the lover to whom she had been taught to look as to the fulfilment of her womanhood. At times this lover appeared to have no connection with Oliver Treadwell; then the memory of his eager and searching look would flush the world with a magic enchantment. ”

“ He felt at first merely a sense of physical revolt from the brutality of her self-revelation—from the nakedness to which she had stripped the horror of her marriage under the eyes of her daughter. Nothing, not even the natural impulse to screen one's soul from the gaze of the people with whom one lived, had prevented the appalling indignity of this exposure. The delusion that it is possible for a woman by mere virtue of being a woman to suffer in sweetness and silence, evaporated as he looked at her. ”

“ A sensation not unlike the one with which the rector had marched into his first battle, fortified and exhilarated her. The fighting blood of of her ancestors grew warm in her veins. New York developed suddenly from a mere spot on a map into a romance made into brick; and when a ray of sunlight pierced the heavy fog, and lay like a white wing aslant the few falling snowflakes, it seemed to her that the shadowy buildings lost their sinister aspect and softened into a haunting and mysterious beauty. Somewhere in that place of mystery and adventure Oliver was waiting for her! ”

“ This was how one marriage had ended—one marriage among many which had started out with passion and courage and the belief in happiness. Knowing but little of the April brevity of his uncle's mating impulse, he had mentally embroidered the bare instinct with some of the idealism in which his own emotion was clothed. His imagination pictured Cyrus and Belinda starting as light-hearted adventurers to sail the chartless seas of romance. What remained of their gallant ship to-day except a stark and battered hulk wrecked on the pitiless rocks of the actuality? ”

“ All the world over, wherever there are mothers—north, south, east, west—from the first baby that was born on the earth—they have every one suffered what I am suffering now—for it is the pang of motherhood! To escape it one must escape birth and escape the love that is greater than one's self." And she understood suddenly that suffering and love are inseparable, that when one loves another more than one's self, one has opened the gate by which anguish will enter. ”

“ Youth, with its ingenuous belief that love dwells in external circumstances, was protesting against the bland assumption of age that love creates its own peculiar circumstances out of itself. It was absurd, she knew, to imagine that her father's affection for her mother would alter because she haggled over the price of peas; yet the emotion with which she endowed Oliver Treadwell was so delicate and elusive that she felt that the sight of a soiled skirt and a perspiring face would blast it forever. ”

“ If the men once catch sight of you, you won't have a dance left."
"No—no, I want to watch a while," she said, with so strange an accent of irritation that he stared at her in surprise. The suspense in her heart hurt her like a drawn cord in throbbing flesh, and she felt angry with John Henry because he was so dull that he could not see how she suffered. In the distance, under the waving gilded leaves of the poplars, she saw Abby laughing up into a man's face, and she thought: "Can he possibly be in love with Abby? Some men are mad about her, but I know he isn't. ”

“ So little resistance did she offer to the purpose of Life that she seemed to have existed from the beginning merely as an exquisite medium for a single emotion. It was as if the dreams of all the dead women of her race, who had lived only in loving, were concentrated into a single shining centre of bliss—for the accumulated vibrations of centuries were in her soul when she trembled for the first time beneath the eyes of a lover. And yet all this blissful violence was powerless to change the most insignificant external fact in the universe. ”

“ As she lay in bed, with her loosened hair making a cloud over the pillows, and her eyes shining like blue flowers in the band of sunlight that fell through the dormer-window, she quivered to the early sweetness of honeysuckle as though it were the charmed sweetness of love of which she had dreamed in the night. She was only one of the many millions of women who were awaking at the same hour to the same miracle of Nature, yet she might have been the first woman seeking the first man through the vastness and the mystery of an uninhabited earth. ”

“ With the first sight of Margaret Oldcastle, as she looked into that smiling face, in which the inextinguishable youth was less a period of life than an attribute of spirit, she realized that she was fighting not a woman, but the very structure of life. The glamour of the footlights had contributed nothing to the flame-like personality of the actress. In her simple frock of brown woollen, with a wide collar of white lawn turned back from her splendid throat, she embodied not so much the fugitive charm of youth, as that burning vitality over which age has no power. ”

“ And this proof of Oliver's fame thrilled her as she had not been thrilled since the telegram had come announcing that Harry had won the scholarship which would take him to Oxford. The woman's power of sinking her ambition and even her identity into the activities of the man was deeply interwoven with all that was essential and permanent in her soul. Her keenest joys, as well as her sharpest sorrows, had never belonged to herself, but to others. It was doubtful, indeed, if, since the day of her marriage, she had been profoundly moved by any feeling which was centred merely in a personal desire. ”

“ On the mulberry tree near the crossing the broad bronze leaves swung back and forth in the wind, which sighed restlessly around the house and drove the naked tendrils of a summer vine against the green shutters at the window. The fire had gone down, and after she had made it up very softly, she bent over Harry again, as if she feared that he might have slipped out of her grasp while she had crossed the room.
"If he only lives, I will let everything else go. I will think of nothing except my children. It will make no difference to me if I do look ten years older than Abby does. ”

“ Pendleton's voice dropped softly into indistinctness.
"Oh, Jinny, if I'd only known you were coming!" said Susan. "Oliver wanted me to take him to see you, and when I couldn't, he went over to call on Abby."
So this was the end of her walk winged with expectancy! A disappointment as sharp as her joy had been pierced her through as she stood there smiling into Susan's discomfited face. With the tragic power of youth to create its own torment, she told herself that life could never be the same after this first taste of its bitterness. ”

“ Her eyes, very far apart and set in black lashes, were of a deep soft blue—the blue of wild hyacinths after rain. By her eyes, and by an old-world charm of personality which she exhaled like a perfume, it was easy to discern that she embodied the feminine ideal of the ages. To look at her was to think inevitably of love. For that end, obedient to the powers of Life, the centuries had formed and coloured her, as they had formed and coloured the wild rose with its whorl of delicate petals. ”

“ What could make her happier than the knowledge that she must surrender her will to his from the day of her wedding until the day of her death? She embraced her circumscribed lot with a passion which glorified its limitations. The single gift which the ages permitted her was the only one she desired. Her soul craved no adventure beyond the permissible adventure of being sought in marriage. Love was all that she asked of a universe that was overflowing with manifold aspects of life. ”

“ Gradually, while Oliver waited for Mrs. Peachey's return, he ceased to think of the furniture in his room; he ceased to think even of the way in which he should manage to do his work, and allowed his mind to dwell, almost with a feeling of ecstasy, on the memory of Virginia. He saw the mist of little curls on her temples, her blue eyes, with their good and gentle expression, and the look of radiant happiness which played like light over her features. The beauty of the night acted as a spur to his senses. He wanted companionship. He wanted the smile and the touch of a woman. ”

“ Her voice, which was vibrant as a harp, had captured the wistful magic of the spring—the softness of the winds, the sweetness of flowers, the mellow murmuring of the poplars.
She rose from the bench, moving softly as if she were under an enchantment which she feared to break by a gesture. An ecstasy as inarticulate as grief kept him silent, and it was into this silence that the voice of Abby floated, high, shrill, and dominant.
"Oh, Virginia, I've looked everywhere for you," she cried. "Mr. Carrington is simply dying to dance with you!" ”

“ I hoped so I could change Oliver, and maybe I can after we're married, mother."
"If he has given up the old spiritual standards, what has he in place of them?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, and she had suddenly a queer feeling as if little fine needles were pricking her skin.
"I don't know, but he seems to have a great deal, more than any of us," answered Virginia, and she added passionately, "He is good, mother."
"I never doubted it, darling, but he is young, and his character cannot be entirely formed at his age. A man must be very strong in order to be good without faith." ”

“ As with most women who are born for motherhood, that supreme fact had not only absorbed the emotional energy of her girlhood, but had consumed in its ecstatic flame even her ordinary capacities for enjoyment. While fatherhood left Oliver still a prey to dreams and disappointments, the more exclusive maternal passion rendered Virginia profoundly indifferent to every aspect of life except the intimate personal aspect of her marriage. She couldn't be happy—she couldn't even be at ease—while she remembered that the children were left to the honest, yet hardly tender, mercies of Marthy. ”

“ She heard again the wings of happiness rustling unseen about her, and she felt again the great hope which is the challenge that youth flings to destiny. Life rose before her, not as she had found it, but as she had once believed it to be. The days when little things had not filled her thoughts returned in the fugitive glow of her memory—for she, also, middle-aged, obese, cumbered with trivial cares, had had her dream of a love that would change and glorify the reality. The heritage of woman was hers as well as Virginia's. ”

“ A pain as sharp as if the teeth of a beast had fastened in her heart, pierced Virginia while she stood there, barring the door with her hands. Her peace, which had seemed indestructible a moment ago, was shattered by a sensation of violent anger—not against Abby, not against Oliver, not even against the gossiping old women of Dinwiddie—but against her own blindness, her own inconceivable folly! At the moment the civilization of centuries was stripped from her, and she was as simple and as primitive as a female of the jungle. ”

“ Until to-day Virginia had always believed that John Henry interested her, but now she wondered how she had ever spent so many hours listening to his talk about business. And with the thought her whole existence appeared to her as dull and commonplace as those hours. A single instant of experience seemed longer to her than all the years she had lived, and this instant had drained the colour and the sweetness from the rest of life. The shape of her universe had trembled suddenly and altered. Dimly she was beginning to realize that sensation, not time, is the true measure of life. ”

“ Tell me how I look."
"Lovely, darling. There won't be any one there sweeter than you are."
The maternal passion lit Mrs. Pendleton's eyes with splendour, and her worn face was illuminated as if a lamp had been held suddenly close to it. All day, in spite of a neuralgic pain in her temples, she had worked hard hemming the flounces for Virginia's dress, and into every stitch had gone something of the divine ecstasy of martyrdom. Her life centred so entirely in her affections that apart from love she could be hardly said to exist at all. ”

“ Then the two women smiled at each other in that freemasonry of motherhood of which no man is aware, and Virginia wondered why people had ever foolishly written of the "indifference of a crowd." The chill which had lain over her heart since her meeting with Oliver melted utterly in the glow with which she had embraced the baby at the crossing. With the feeling of his warm little body in her arms, everything had become suddenly right again. New York was no longer a dreadful city, and Oliver's failure appeared as brief as the passing pang of a toothache. ”

“ Left to herself, Virginia opened the worn copy of the prayer-book, which she kept at her bedside, and read the marriage service from beginning to end, as she had done every day since her engagement to Oliver. The words seemed to her, as they seemed to her mother, to be almost divine in their nobility and beauty. She was troubled by no doubt as to the inspired propriety of the canonical vision of woman. What could be more beautiful or more sacred than to be "given" to Oliver—to belong to him as utterly as she had belonged to her father? ”

“ Susan, happily married to John Henry, and blissfully expectant of motherhood, had replied, "but as far as I know, Oliver never had a light fancy for a woman in his life—not even before he was married. I used to tell him that it was because he expected too much. Physical beauty by itself never seemed to attract him—it was the angel in you that he first fell in love with."
A glow of pleasure flushed Virginia's sharpened features, mounting to the thin little curls on her forehead. ”

“ Above the Dinwiddie of Virginia's girlhood, rising sharply out of the smoothly blended level of personalities, there towered, as far back as she could remember, the grim and yet strangely living figure of Cyrus Treadwell. From the intimate social life of the town he had remained immovably detached; but from the beginning it had been impossible for that life to ignore him. Among a people knit by a common pulse, yet separated by a multitude of individual differences, he stood aloof and indispensable, like one of the gaunt iron bridges of his great railroad. ”

“ Rising from her chair, Miss Priscilla leaned over the railing of the porch, and gazed wistfully after the girls' vanishing figures.
"If there was ever a girl who looked as if she were cut out for happiness, it is Jinny Pendleton," she said aloud after a minute. A tear welled in her eye, and rolling over her cheek, dropped on her bosom. From some obscure corner of her memory, undevastated by war or by ruin, her own youth appeared to take the place of Virginia's. She saw herself, as she had seen the other an instant before, standing flushed and expectant before the untrodden road of the future. ”

“ She was so used to talking for the sake of the sound she made rather than the impression she produced that her silvery ripple had become almost as lacking in self-consciousness as the song of a canary.
But Virginia, walking so quietly at her side, was inhabiting at the moment a separate universe—a universe smelling of honeysuckle and filled with starry pathways to happiness. In this universe Aunt Ailsey and her peculiarities, her mother's innocent prattle, and the solid body of John Henry touching her arm, were all as remote and trivial as the night moths circling around the lamps. ”