XXXVII In the “Personal” Column
I
Early Thursday morning, David was on the point of going out to the Marksley Addition to estimate the fire loss, when he stopped at sight of Judith, entering her own gate. He crossed the parched grass of the wide lawn and joined her. Once before he had hinted that his wife’s mind might be failing—that the shock of Eileen’s tragedy and the consequent relief of her propitious marriage might have unsettled her mother’s reason. He had talked to Dr. Schubert about it, but had elicited no sympathy for his theory. The physician did not believe for a moment that Sylvia—in spite of the evidential letter to her father—had refused to open the door or to answer the telephone. Sylvia was entirely absorbed in herself, but she was not a fool. He was rather taken with the belief that Lavinia had been playing some sort of prank on her family. A born play-actor, she grew weary of the burden of actuality, and sought relief—excitement—in a world of make-believe. This time she had miscalculated, and found things hard to explain.
“He said one thing that went against the grain, Judith, even from Dr. Schubert. He said that when we make a lifelong practice of petty deception, we don’t gain the facility we gain by any other constant exercise; but instead, we grow reckless, until we are unable to know truth from falsehood. Then we overreach ourselves. I accept the fact—but I don’t like to think that Vine would deliberately—lie to me. She doesn’t always see things in their true relations. But that she would make up a lie ... I can’t believe that.”
“Certainly you can’t, father.”
Through the sheer curtains of her bedroom window Lavinia watched them—Lavinia who through five days of shifting from one detail to another had maintained the mystery of her fruitless visit. What were they saying? She strained her keen ears, to catch only a muffled note of solicitude. Now the postman loomed in sight. The ubiquitous postman! If he had not delivered that letter.... In her rage, she began to abuse the postman for her wretchedness, the collapse of her iridescent bubble of happiness. He was putting into David’s hand some letters and a paper, the Bromfield Sentinel. She had forgotten that this was Thursday. She saw her husband open the crude little sheet and glance at the Personal Column, where he so often found news of a friend he had not seen since his wedding day. A long agony of waiting ... and David thrust the paper into Judith’s hand and walked rapidly away, a strange look on his transparent face.
II
What had he seen in the column of village gossip? Lavinia was conscious that a hornets’ nest had been rent asunder, above her head. A hundred furious possibilities buzzed in her ears. Stumbling in wild agitation to the deep closet of her room, she took a leather-bound volume from her Gladstone, where it had lain since her return from Detroit. Without opening it, she fled in a panic to Vine Cottage—burst into the breakfast-room, with a fine show of indignation, and flung the book on the table.
“There! I’m done with that thing. Browning’s a fool!”
“I’m sorry you have found him unprofitable. He isn’t easy reading.”
“I have as much sense as you or Mrs. Henderson. You made me believe he told the truth. I hate a liar. I never told a lie in my life.”
“I didn’t ask you to take the volume,” Judith said pointedly.
“No, but you made me believe there was something in it—something that was an improvement on the Bible....”
Her daughter-in-law took up the offender and carried it to the library. When she returned, there was a precipitate relapse into a chair. Lavinia had improved the interval to look for the Sentinel. It was not in the room. A bitter tirade poured from her purple lips. There was no use in people trying to shirk responsibility. David had always done it. So had Larimore. They continually placed her in untenable situations and then left her to bear the consequences alone. She had had to rear the family single-handed, to take all the responsibility for their moral and financial welfare. If it had not been for her, they might have been criminals or tramps. David had never concerned himself for her ... or them.
“Mother, I can’t listen to such outrageous injustice. I have never seen a more considerate husband than father is to you. Even Lary, with all his tenderness, and his perfect comradeship, has his eyes on himself most of the time. Father never thinks of himself. His whole heart is given to you and his children.”
“Yes, and he hangs over me until he drives me to distraction. I’ll tell him where I have been—if he doesn’t stop following me about—as if I hadn’t a right to go where I please.”
III
Lavinia’s usual solvent, a flood of tears, failed her. Dry-eyed she left the room, forgetting to ask for the paper, which had been the real object of her call. Judith returned to the library and took down the volume of Browning. In some unfathomable way it was responsible for the distressing situation. As she turned the pages, pencil marks caught her eye. A line, a word or two, in some instances an entire stanza had been underscored. They were, without exception, love passages. Well over towards the back, a sheet of note paper came to view, covered with Lavinia’s tight, precise writing. If Browning would change the subject, just when you thought you had grasped his meaning ... at least, you could fling your net over the elusive concept and carry it away—isolate it from the confusing wealth of context.
But no! This was more than random copying. Widely separated passages had been woven together into a kind of confession of faith ... like lemon jelly in a mould. Judith, as she read, forgot that she was looking into another woman’s soul, forgot Lavinia, in the fascination of following the curious windings of Lavinia’s mind.
“Come back with me to the first of all. Let us lean and love it over again. Let us now forget and now recall, and gather what we let fall. Each life’s incomplete, you see. I follow where I am led, knowing so well the leader’s hand. Oh, woman, wooed, not wed! When we loved each other, lived and loved the same, till an evening came when a shaft from the devil’s bow pierced to our ingle-glow, and the friends were friend and foe. Never fear but there’s provision of the devils to quench knowledge, lest we walk the earth in rapture—making those who catch God’s secret just so much more prize their capture. The true end, sole and single, we stop here for is this love-way with some other soul to mingle. How is it under our control to love or not to love? Heart, shall we live or die? The rest ... settle by and by.”
Judith laid the sheet in its place and returned the volume to the bookcase. Yes, David was right. But what a weird obsession! Lavinia, out of the pregnant depths of her misery, had fashioned a lover to her liking, a phantom lover, to be communed with in secret. Had she gone to Detroit, not to visit Sylvia, but to seek some fantastic realization of her yearning for the perfect romance? Why had she come home, shattered and undone. A real man ... the man she met in the Pullman when she was returning from Bromfield—the man who had fallen in love with her?
She paused beside the table where, an hour ago, she had laid the Bromfield paper. She looked at it with vacant eyes, striving to clarify her turbid thoughts. Gradually, out of the emptiness, words came up to her, the words that David had read, at the head of the “personal” column.
“Our distinguished citizen, Mr. Calvin Stone, has just returned from a ten days’ business trip to Chicago.”
The room with its delicate furnishings faded, as when the lights are suddenly turned off. Judith stared, her heart leaping in unrhythmic cadence, her eyes following the monstrous panorama that unrolled before her. Long ago she had gone to a little cinema theatre with Lary and the girls, where black dots had danced on a white screen. Black dots were dancing now, on the white screen of her memory.
A dozen disjointed fragments of conversation; an old story her grandmother had told her, of a secret wedding in Rochester; Lavinia’s greedy interest in the story, in all that pertained to Calvin and Lettie Stone; her determination to revisit Bromfield the summer following Mrs. Stone’s death; the miracle of her regeneration when she returned home; the yellow pallor on her face when she put the question: “Do people ever really get over things?” The dots had woven themselves into a succession of preliminary shapes, and all at once the picture was complete. Lavinia’s secret lay bare before her daughter-in-law’s gaze.
IV
Outside on the street there was commotion. Judith was aroused from her torpor of pain by Lavinia Trench’s voice, strident and hysterical:
“Carry him into the west room. You can’t take him upstairs on that stretcher. What has happened to him? Why didn’t you telephone me? David, are you alive?”
David had fallen from the roof of the Marksley house. No one knew what had caused the accident. He was standing on a wide ledge, that ought to have been secure. One of the workmen saw him stagger, reel backward and come crashing down. It was fortunate that he did not strike the stone pavement. That would have been fatal. He was apparently only stunned by the fall.
Judith followed the curious crowd into the house and bent above the stricken man, while his wife ran panting up the stairs to prepare his bed. He opened his eyes and his lips fashioned inarticulate words.
“The paper,” she saw rather than heard, “the paper ... burn it. I saw—in a flash—that blinded me—and I fell....”