XIII
AT the close of a day late in November Emily Garwood came down the walk from the old house that had been her home so long, and at the gate paused for a backward glance of farewell. The oaks under which for so many years she had watched the coming and going of all she loved, were barren, save for the few bronzed leaves that clung with the tenacity of their species to the gnarled boughs. Other leaves, withered and yellow, that had succumbed to the common fate of things, strewed the ground everywhere. Here and there they had been pressed into wet mats by the cold autumnal rains; otherwise they rustled with the wind that ranged through the wide yard.
The night was falling swiftly, the darkness increasing by visible degrees as if with the gradual closing of some automatic shutter that was ultimately to exclude the light. Black shadows rose unexpectedly from the ground and silently enfolded objects Emily had known so long that they had become a part of her very life, so intimately associated with all its experiences that she realized her own affection for them but now, when she was leaving them. The old home, to her sensitive imagination, seemed to regard her out of its vacant, lifeless windows with a cold and distant stare, as if already it had begun to forget her.
And so she closed the gate softly, as if the clash of its latch might arouse memories that were making ready to pursue her out of the old homestead, drew more snugly into the hollow of her arm the bundle of odds and ends she had gathered up in her final inspection of its dismantled rooms, and hurried away along Sangamon Avenue. The atmosphere held in suspension many more autumnal rains, with such a chill besides that her little figure seemed to shrink with the cold, as it dissolved in the shadows and disappeared.
The day of the primaries had marked the fall of the last of Emily’s ideals, and she felt, with her old habit of fixing a formal duty for every occasion that she must recognize the change by some definite, decisive act. But as she gradually revolved the problem life had set for her, and one after another weighed all the common solutions that men and women consider at such times—perhaps because of sheer inability to grapple with such monstrous spiritual difficulties—she shrank from them, finding them all so sordid, so squalid, so inadequate to a nature like hers. And so she lived on from day to day, trying to reason it out, and failing in that, awaiting the next scene in her domestic tragedy.
But nothing happened. Life went on somehow as before. If at times she reproached herself with what seemed her indecision, she strove with all conscience to perform the little duties of each day, until the great duty could be revealed clearly to her, yet self-consciously wondering how it was that she could think of common things, and do common things, just as she had wondered, at the time her father died, how it was, for instance, that she could leave the solemn twilight of the chamber where she had just witnessed the mystery of death, and straightway go and eat her supper. She did not see that her spirit was thus unconsciously struggling to reassert itself; to identify itself anew with the common, the real; to be like all else about it, for it had not yet been given her to appreciate the love for the normal, the abhorrence of the exceptional, the passion for equality that nature reveals in her dealings with her children.
She was convinced that she must have some kind of reckoning with Jerome; something in a way forensic and legal, with all the conventional elements of trial, judgment and retribution or forgiveness; at times she even dramatized the forms and terms of this proceeding, which would atone for the past, and leave them where they had been before. But the auspicious moment never presented itself; she realized at last that it could not come; that the old ground had been lost, and lost forever; that there could be nothing like resumption; that they must begin, if at all, anew.
And so the summer had passed. She watched Jerome narrowly, noting every change in humor, in whim, in expression, thinking it possible that he might broach the subject that lay so near the hearts of both. At first, in a remorse that was evident, he had been showing for her a new consideration; a furtive consideration that was likely to exaggerate its tenderness at times. He had sent her flowers and brought her candy, like a lover, and if these silent appeals—while they touched her—did not altogether reassure her, they must abundantly have reassured him, for in the course of weeks he seemed to have forgotten all save his own defeat. One afternoon he had come home, silent and preoccupied, and had moodily chosen to sit alone, staring out the window, though seemingly oblivious to the wonder and beauty of the October day, dying, like the year, in serene and majestic dignity. His immovable figure, there in the gloom, gradually oppressed her, got on her nerves, and at last drew her irresistibly into the room where he was. She sat down quietly, without disturbing him, in the hope that he would speak. She looked at him long, but he did not speak, he did not move. Finally this attitude became insupportable, and she at length broke the stillness.
“What is it, Jerome?” she asked.
“What?” he said.
“What is the matter?”
“Nothing is the matter,” he answered in an aggrieved tone that altogether belied his words.
“But there is,” she insisted, quite in the old way. “You are blue.”
He was silent a moment longer, in an ugly reluctance to speak, and then,
“Well,” he said, savagely, “debts, if you want to know.”
She sighed. The old sordid struggle after all! He waited awhile longer, desiring her to coax him out of his mood, but she said nothing, and at last he was impelled to speak once more himself.
“I don’t know what we are going to do,” he said, “my creditors, now that I’ve been beaten, are making my office a rendezvous.”
He spoke bitterly, as debtors do. He had leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his palms, and he looked more gloomily than ever out of the window. The light was just sufficient to mark the outlines of his really fine head, while the shadows of evening softened the lines in his face, the harsh, unpleasant lines that a few years had drawn there. She studied his profile, her eye caressing his curls, the curls she remembered so well—remembered, because she had a troubled sense of thinking now of Jerome as in the past. She gazed until the changes wrought by the short years of their common life passed away, and she saw again the Jerome of old—her own, her lost ideal.... If he had only gone down in some glorious conflict, through some mighty sacrifice, some great devotion to principle! Why had he failed? Had she not tried to do all that a wife could to help and guide him? If he had married some other woman, some woman of courser fiber, who would not have tried to keep him continually up to such high ideals? She paused, some sudden shock smote her, she felt her face grow cold and pale. Another woman married to Jerome Garwood! She caught her breath, her face burned as the blood rushed back to her cheeks again, and then suddenly, impulsively, she spoke, as much to herself, it seemed, as to her husband:
“I do love you still, Jerome!”
Her heart beat with a new fierce joy. A revelation had come to her, a revelation that had solved her problem in an instant, a thing her reason had not been able to do in long months. She loved him still! There was the solution to her riddle of life! And this, this was the auspicious, the psychological moment, come at last! She waited in agony for him to speak, she leaned forward expectantly, and he half turned his head. Her eyes widened, almost flamed forth, as she felt, to meet his there in the darkness that had suddenly become all light for her. And then he laughed, a little laugh, that came harsh on the stillness, and he said:
“Why of course you do.”
Her eyes fell. He took it then, quite in the old matter of course way! She turned her face aside, sick with disappointment.
But the revelation of that passionate moment had not been lost. It was to her, sure and certain. She could not doubt it. That Jerome had taken it all as he had could make no difference now to her. For the revelation had solved her problem, made her duty clear, and that was enough. The results of the solution had not been those of her heart’s desire, but she could wait for that, for now she beheld the light of a new theory, a new ideal, that quickly glowed into an incandescence that illumined her whole soul. Loving Jerome still, she must live for him still, and this without any regard to what attitude he might take.
Her own happiness was of no importance; it must come, if at all, as a secondary and indirect result. The old ideal and the old ambition had been, after all, but selfish, and so had failed not only of realization, but of that nobler success that comes through failure in the high endeavors of life. She saw it all clearly now; when they had together dreamed of a career, it was not with the idea of being of real help to those about them, but merely of lifting themselves to some place that would distinguish them artificially from those about them. And in time, pondering on her relations to others in the world besides Jerome, she found that what was true of her relation to him was true of her relations to them; that her duty was to live for them as well as for him.
Here was at last a worthy plan of existence, an ideal, not of self, but service. It was simple when she put it to herself in this literal way, so very simple that it was almost trite, yet she had a conviction that it was none the less mightily true. She would not judge Jerome, but love him; she would not expose his faults, but cover them with a mantle of charity; a mantle so wide that it would cover as well all others groping through the world with their sins and their sufferings, their pitiable failures and their lamentable mistakes, and if, even by the slow and loving work of years, she could win Jerome in time to this new ideal that had arisen out of her darkness as the light of an autumn morning without clouds after long days of rain, then, indeed, could his talents worthily be devoted to the people he already thought he loved. Now she had found the faith in life so necessary to her existence. It was a new and better faith, and she could wait long and patiently, if need be, for its complete fulfilment.
Under the stimulus of this new-found faith in life, in an almost pathetic determination to be practical—since the sentimental seemed to be denied her—she decided first that their affairs be placed at once on a secure foundation. So with a touch of her father’s own uncompromising rigor in business matters, she relentlessly cast up all their accounts, and if she winced when the amount of Jerome’s debts stared her in the face, she nevertheless bravely set about paying them off, devoting to the purpose all her own income, now grown small with the periodical return of hard times. And then, last heroism of all, she resolved that they must give up their old home. Jerome demurred a little, but presently acquiesced.
He was interested anew in affairs, he had perhaps had revelations of his own, and if he did not have resolutions, he nevertheless had hopes. The campaign was on again, and, in a spirit of what he called party loyalty—as one who, winning or losing, honorably lives up to all the rules of the game—he was stumping the district, and making speeches for the ticket with as much of his old fire as if he had been on the ticket himself. Long before election his old self-satisfaction had returned, he was as full of splendid schemes as a bumblebee, and if his disinterestedness was not so apparent after election, when he felt that his chances of being appointed to a territorial judgeship were increasing more and more as the short session of Congress drew near, it may have been discovered in the fact that, as an alternative, he had revived his old project of going to Chicago to practise law. If he got the territorial judgeship, they would have to move West; in either event, he said, it did not matter much where they lived for the time being. He thought that if they went to Chicago he might go to Congress from some of the Chicago districts—it was not hard to get into politics there. But Emily only smiled.
She found through Morton, a tenant for the old home. She sent away the maids, even the nurse, for whom the children cried, and Jasper, who cried himself, until his very despair drove him to refuse to accept the discharge at all. And then she found a smaller house.
The last load of furniture had rumbled away in a covered van that afternoon; as the early twilight came she gave a final look into the empty corners of the old home, picking up little things that had been overlooked, and then, with an ache at the heart for its emptiness and loneliness, she bade it farewell. The moving had been an ordeal. She had had all the care of it, though Jerome’s mother had helped, but beyond this was the spiritual agony of coming across old things she had not seen for years, things of her childhood, things of her girlhood; the dress she had worn when first she met Jerome—he had told her to preserve it, though he did not know where it was—things, too, of her mother’s—a trying time for a soul already so heavily laden.
Now, hurrying along in the gloom of this November evening, she glanced at the big houses of the prosperous, and they repelled her with the flat austerity of their own provincial exclusiveness. As she advanced, these residences that had the effect of casting her off, gradually gave way to homes, rows of cottages, decreasing in size and importance; but as they grew smaller, Emily observed that they grew more companionable. Lights were beginning to show in their windows, the men were getting in from their work, and she could hear the homely sounds of evening chores.
By the time she reached the humbler street where she was henceforth to live, she felt a sympathy with these unambitious homes, finding a welcome, as it were, in the honest faces they presented in the dusk. She gave them back a brave little smile, reflecting her wish that she might find the peace they seemed to shelter. Pursued along those silent streets by the memories of the old home, she sought refuge in planning the furnishing of the new, mentally compressing the too abundant furniture into the smaller compass with which they must now content themselves.
And in her determination to begin anew, she simulated for the sake of her own courage the pride and joy of a bride’s anticipation in setting up housekeeping. Were they not really beginning after all? Had not the years since their marriage been years of make-shift and make-believe? Were not those years even now falling away behind her, while brighter ones rose before? In the spring she would have a little garden; she could imagine John Ethan and his little sister playing among the flowers that would riot there, their little heads bobbing in the yellow sunlight. At the thought of the children she quickened her steps.
The house at last came into sight, standing in a small yard with a low picket fence about it. Some boy was passing by, showing his neighborliness by rattling a stick along the palings. John Ethan must have known her step, light and hurried as it was, for as she turned in at the gate the door of the house opened, and he stood there in the light that came from behind him. He was waiting for her. He called to her to hurry, and she ran up the walk, caught him in her arms, and hugged his little body to her breast. The baby bad gone to sleep, too tired to await her mother’s coming. The grandmother was cooking supper amidst the disorder of the furniture and the boxes that had been crowded into the kitchen. As Emily held her boy to her breast, she felt the tears welling to her eyes, but she told herself that this was not the time for tears, for here began that new unselfish life in which she hoped at some far off distant day to find the peace and the happiness of which she had dreamed.
THE END
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VIGOROUS, ELEMENTAL, DRAMATIC
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Mr. Knight has created a real atmosphere for his men and women to breathe, and his men and women take deep breaths. They are alive, they are human, they are real.
He has a delightful story to tell and knows how to tell it. It is a story of human life, of possible people in possible situations, living out their little span of life in that state in which it has pleased God to call them.
The reader realizes at once that Mr. Knight is a man who served his seven years of apprenticeship before opening a shop on his own account.
The deftness and charm of his literary style, combined with the absorbing interest of the story, can not but prove a delight to every reader.
With a frontispiece by Harrison Fisher
12mo. Cloth. Price, $1.50
The Liverpool Mercury says:
“This is a book far removed from the ordinary mass of featureless fiction. There is no gainsaying the strength of characterization and the command of English language.”
The Bowen-Merrill Company, Indianapolis
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Minor changes have been made to regularize hyphenation and to correct typesetters’ errors.
The original printed edition of this book did not have a Table of Contents; one has been added to this electronic version for the reader's convenience.