Mary Heaton Vorse

“ I wonder have you lost Ellen in your big and fearsome city. Roger, I have times when I’m afraid, and I don’t know of what—just fear, as though the inner heart of me rang, ‘Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong,’ where my mind has nothing to go on. Roger, I wait for each one of your letters as if I was afraid it wouldn’t come, and as if it were to be the last. I’m [Pg 202] afraid. I don’t trust life as I did, and when I don’t trust life, I can’t find you; when I trust life, it’s as if when I shut my eyes I can put out my hand and touch you. ”

“ Ellen herself had forgotten her youth; she may not have remembered that in the bottom of an old trunk she had left for me things which she could not bear to destroy—for there they found them after her death with a letter addressed to me. As I read on, it was as though I had before me the broken pieces of her heart, and as I looked, my own childhood and even my girlhood lived again.
I had often looked for my girlhood and had never found it. Those years when women are in the making—that land of glamour—are the hardest thing of all for grown-up people to understand. ”

“ When I hear them tell all the little things she does against you, Alec, my heart weeps, for if she’s like that, I must watch you start out on a road of long disillusionment. It’s so hard to sit aside and watch sadness and even disgust grow in your eyes, that my heart is heavy, and with unshed tears. What will happen to you whose goodness has come out to meet the goodness in me all your life? Either your own goodness will burn up the you that loves her, or the you that loves her will eat and corrode the you I love. ”

“ The best friend I ever had, Roberta, had all the youth and love killed in her and went on living like a dry, little automaton of a woman, and is living yet. Instead of the things she might have had,—children and a husband and a home,—she has just her own dried-up body, which is like a little birch tree struck by lightning; and the thing she thinks of most in life is the noise that the sparrows make in her elm trees.”
[Pg 229] But I could not fear that a fate like that awaited my Ellen, for my memory of her then is a lovely frail thing, with a hand forever held out to Prudentia and Flavilla. ”

“ The final tragedy is not to be unloved, but to find out that one has loved nothing;—that within the shell of the body there is nothing to which we can give ourselves;—to have been cursed with the love of the shallow-hearted; and there is a deep torment, beyond the loss of death, which goes with the unknitting of two souls knit close together, strand by strand. Ellen could stand any cruelty that he gave to her and condone it, but she shivered back from this relentlessness that she had seen in Roger. ”

“ I fight forever with an unseen adversary. I don’t even know if this adversary has a face or if it is a set of circumstances in your life, and I have nothing to fight with but my bleeding love for you, and what good is that to you unless you happen to want it? What thing is so worthless as an undesired love? Yet you made it, Roger, and you are responsible for it. It is like having a child and then finding it troublesome, letting it starve to death, to create a love like mine for you and then kill it. Women who love should never doubt. ”

“ All through my life I shall remember Ellen’s face as it was through that long night, for it was the face of one who defies death and disaster; and what I mean only those who have brooded guardingly over the lives of those whom they love will understand. For there comes a moment in the lives of most women and some men when they seem to put their spirits, a tangible thing, between death and disaster and the beloved. ”

“ It had been a golden moment, I assure you,—a party that stood out;—and if ever the laughter of the Greeks was heard in that staid, old New England town it was when Ellen Payne stood aloft on the hassock, a squawking hen trembling indignantly on her wrist; and she at that moment looked both beautiful and absurd. Miss Sarah Grant saw nothing of all this.
“I am chagrined,” she said. “Have you no respect for life?” And she walked away heavily.
Ellen spent the afternoon gathering expiatory pond-lilies of which her aunt was as a rule fond. ”

“ This is what makes virtue so discouraging in an imperfect world. It was her naughtiness which advertised to the world of men, “I am a sweet and adorable person; I can make you laugh, and I can make you dream, and I have no fear.” Ellen now acted before strangers with the inspired foolishness which most of us keep for those best known to us. Even for them this mad spirit is not at our beck and call, but must wait for the time and place to bring it out. Youth, empty of such lovely, high-spirited, and drunken moments, must be very sad. ”

“ I know what she is, Roberta, a thousand times more than you. She’s the only alive person in the world, but since you put the words in my mouth, ‘In my own good time!’” He had completely recovered his good-tempered arrogance.
“I’d never stand from you what Ellen’s stood, and I hope she says good-bye to you now,” I cried.
It is easy for those not in love to place the limit to love’s endurance. It is fortunately not easy to keep these shallow promises to one’s self.
I am sorry that so much of what was most unlovely in Roger creeps into my story. ”

“ It’s all the difference between having one’s beloved brought home dead, who went out smiling, and having him die horribly inch by inch, before one’s eyes. It is better to have love killed than to have it tortured to death, and I would rather have had you say, in the midst of our deepest hour together, ‘Ellen, I’m going away and I shall never see you again,’ than wait as I do for you to tell me it’s finished. ”

“ It is as if I had been led by the hand, first, to you on the mountain, and now, to you here.’ And then he looked at me and said, ‘Ellen, you focused all my life for me that day on the mountain. I’ve spent two weeks clearing from my life worthless trash, all the débris that a man accumulates living as many years in the world as I have.’ And he has really lived in the world, ever since boys here are nothing but boys. ”

“ Then suddenly into this doldrums of the emotions burst Miss Grant. A flaming affection is hard to hide. It shines like a light behind a closed door,—let two people walk ever so carefully. Now the eyes of one follow the other and the look is a caress; now some one intercepts an exchange of glances, and that exchange means, to any one whose heart has beat fast for love, a promise of everlasting devotion; you see a girl’s hand steal to her fast-beating heart, or the young man waiting [Pg 174] for her with that aching impatience of the young.
So gossip had begun about Roger and Ellen. ”

“ Why aren’t you free, and why can’t you make Ellen care for you? Are you sure that Elizabeth cares for you?”
“It’s not for me to think things like that at all, Roberta,” he answered. “It would be a poor sort of love I’d bring to Ellen, wouldn’t it? I can’t take kindness from Elizabeth and wrap myself in the cloak of her sympathy when I need it and throw it away when the sun comes out, even had the unimaginable happened, and Ellen cared for me,—which she won’t. Some faiths one has to keep with one’s self.”
As for Ellen, she accepted Alec’s companionship as a matter of course. ”

“ All women know this pain of waiting; and when our time of waiting for a sweetheart is over, the sons we love go out into the world, and again we can do nothing but sit still and wait for news of the travelers, wait for the little, scant messages of love which their careless hands pen to us in some casual moment. The long days pass and the letters don’t come, and still we wait. We sit and wait for our children to be born, through the long months, with the black certainty of the birth that may be death staring us in the face. ”

“ It is a terrible thing when any one as sweet and as full of the desire to love people as Roger shouldn’t have been understood by his parents at home. His mother is very sweet, but she has never known how to get at him. All the mutinous things in Roger, and all the times when he wasn’t adjusted to life, should have been loved away and understood away. He said to me: ‘I’ve been good only since I have known you, Ellen, because no one has loved me before.’ People have loved me all my life, and Roger, who is so much fuller and better than I, has not had my chance. ”

“ I sat awake all night thinking of Roger in a flooding tenderness of love and understanding, and I realized that in all this time I’ve only just been learning the first painful paths on the road of love. Whatever one gives sorrowfully isn’t love, nor does love fear; it asks only to understand more and more. As long as one has fear, one thinks of one’s self; as long as one is sad, one thinks of one’s self. ”

“ At that time he fits into no scheme of things; there is no being on earth who arouses one’s sentiment less. As a sweetheart he is impossible; equally impossible is he as an object on which to lavish motherly feelings. For me, Alec was a mere plague; he lured Ellen from me into skylarkings in which I had no part, nor did I wish to have, having, by the New England training of that day, already had my childhood taken from me. It was not mystery that I had ever connected with Alec, but a baffling sense of humor and an intensity in the way he could turn hand-springs. ”

“ I told you this afternoon and I want to tell you again in this letter how sweet this little hour is to me. It seems to be the sunniest place in all of life. The world seems to me to stretch ahead wonderful and splendid, and the great storms of Heaven whirling through the sky, and the lightning and the clouds, and I can hear in my ears the roar of cities and the big tumult of seas, and here it is so sweet. Why hurry away from it? Here it is so safe. The days of one’s life when one is a girl and loves one’s man are so few. ”

“ Love has its base places and its hideous slaveries of the spirit, but yet there is a certain comfort in utter abandonment. Ellen was like a man who has feared bankruptcy and who breathes again when he has at last actually failed; she had nothing to lose any more in her [Pg 238] own spirit. She might lose Roger, but no other thing, for she now asked for nothing for herself. She had reached the lowest grade where one’s soul may live, when she knows there is nothing that one wouldn’t suffer at the hands of the beloved. Pride comes first—a blessed relief—between most women and such pain ”

“ I know that there I will be worse than I am now, with a thousand small things to do to somehow fill up the days. Something must have happened to him. I watch myself like some other person for fear I shall seem sad for a moment, for if I do it will look as though I am not pleased about my mother. Oh! I hope that I won’t hurt their joy in any way. I wonder how women live who have to wait long for news of those they love. I seem to move around in the world, but I really do nothing but wait. Each time I see my aunt I think that she will have news of him ”

“ When Ellen saw him tears came to her eyes. For it is just at these moments, when one is thirsting for help and sympathy, that we seem to lose the way to the hearts of others, and this is natural enough, for there is a terrible egotism in certain phases of grief. The eyes of the spirit are turned inward and we cease to give, and after a while, as with Ellen, grief becomes a habit and we slip along smoothly enough in the deepening and dolorous grooves of sorrow. ”

“ If the world has little pity for a jilted girl, how shall it have much understanding for any one who suffers after having voluntarily sent her lover away, especially when it was her obvious duty to her family to marry? So her world was not very kind to Ellen at a moment when she most needed their kindness. We do not often understand the sicknesses of the spirit; now we mete out to them the criminal indulgence that a foolish woman does to a wayward child, and now we treat them with bruising harshness. ”

“ He doesn’t need me any more than he needs any one else. He needs no person, Roberta. Love and encouragement and companionship: the world is [Pg 258] full of it for him. Yet I need him and shall need him always, to the end of my days.”
Often it is that in the disintegration of a deep and long-lived affection, it is the instinct of the body to shiver away first, before the mind knows what has happened, but it is more dangerous when, in the full splendor of love, the blow has fallen and instinct still clamors for the beloved’s companionship. ”

“ Love does not come at any one’s bidding, nor will it stay, and I would blame no one in this world for ceasing to love, least of all the one whom I love. But I could not endure from you a cowardly drifting away from me, I could not bear to see you fear to face bravely a moment of pain, nor could I bear the dishonorable shiftiness with which some men loosen the bonds between themselves and the women whom they have loved. ”

“ All girls are sure of two things: that they understand their men better than their very mothers do, and that they love them better as well; and every woman in the world, who is harrowing her soul over her little son that she is bringing up, may be sure that somewhere else in the world there is growing up a girl who is later on going to find any hardness or unkindness that she has left in his spirit. When she had known him six weeks, Ellen could have brought up Roger better than he had been. ”

“ Mrs. Payne’s wide-eyed, “Why shouldn’t she be? Ellen’s so sweet and pretty,” collapsed the older lady’s anger like a pricked balloon, as nothing else could have done. Ellen’s picture of her is this: “Aunt Sarah flopped down, she didn’t sit, and gathered her draperies around her like a wounded Roman matron.”
Roger, at Mrs. Payne’s words, again put his arm around Ellen and laughed aloud. He adored their unworldliness. The bad little boy in him vanished; so did the man of the world who cannot bear generosity in the beloved. ”

“ I’ve tried to comfort myself by going up to Oscar’s Leap, but my heart was so heavy that I could hardly walk all of the beautiful, weary way. I don’t like myself for writing like this, for I have him and he really loves me. The more I see people and listen to the things they say, the more I am sure that very few people really love any one, and those who do love are seldom loved in return. ”