“As soon as I can manage it. I can’t bear to have Lena living as she does now; and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t cut it short.”
“No reason at all. I don’t wonder you feel so. Good-by, both of you.”
Dick saw her to the door and Madeline walked out with her usual deliberate serenity.
She found her way home with bottled-up emotions, as a hurt child holds in the cry until he gets to the spot where mother’s breast waits for the inarticulate sobs. Everything she had done and said seemed to have been the act of some far-away self, that had hardly any connection with the real Madeline. The earth danced around her and she was incapable of real thought. And yet the well-trained, automatic body that was her outer shell conducted itself with reason. It even stopped in the living-room to kiss her mother; it apparently skimmed a new copy of Life; it convoyed her slowly up stairs to her own room, where it shut and locked her door. But here her real self resumed control, as she threw herself into an easy chair by the window and stared out at the desolation of December where dead leaves went whirling in elfin eddying clouds.
For a few moments she let the solar system rock and reel around her, and watched everything she had thought stable go up in smoke. Then upon the world, swirling and pounding meaninglessly, there came an intense quiet. She knew that the outer world was as serene as ever; but a great throbbing pain within showed her that it was only her own little atom of self that was revolutionized. Nature was not upset. There was still order for her to hold fast to. For the first time she began to analyze herself and her emotions.
She could not say that she had planned her future, but it had seemed so natural and inevitable that she had accepted it without planning, almost without thought. Dick and she had belonged to each other ever since they could remember. At ten they had been outspoken lovers, and ever since there had been that intimate comradeship that seemed to her to imply the unspoken relation, behind, above, below. All this she had taken for granted, like mother-love and her own dawning womanhood. And now Dick, the chief corner-stone of her edifice, was torn away, and the whole airy structure toppled and dissolved.
“I’ve been assuming all this,” she said to herself, “and marriage isn’t a thing to take for granted. Shouldn’t I have resented it if Dick had appropriated me as though I belonged to him and had lost my freedom of choice? I’ve been unfair to him. And now—if I should never marry—there are surely plenty of good things left in the world. But are there?”
Madeline had always been characterized by those who knew her as lovely and placid. And why not? What else should life draw out of a girl of normal nature, surrounded by protecting love, given the good things of life as by right, shielded from the knowledge of evil, never facing a problem more exciting than those of Euclid. But now something began to stir in the unknown depths of her nature. For the first time in her life she had had a blow. There rose before her a vision of endless maidenhood. She saw herself as she had seen other women—uninteresting women, she had thought them. Now they seemed to her like tragedies—women whose lives did not count, either to themselves or to the world, middle-aged, somber, unrelated. To be childless, to eat and dress and wear the semblance of womanhood, even to play a little part in society, and yet to be but half a woman! To be no link in the generations! This was unendurable. The first demand of every soul is for life, and yet life is life only when it is part of the future. To live oneself one must live in others. All the mother hidden in the depths of her rose and cried out against any destiny that shut her out from the great stream of humanity.
“I shall be a side-eddy in the current. I shall grow stagnant and slimy and lead nowhere. And the rushing waters will go leaping and laughing past.”
She got up and moved restlessly up and down the room. She looked again out of the window at the sober end of the winter day. In the tree branches that clattered outside, her eyes fell on an empty nest.