On the morning of her flight from the inn, after a night spent staring motionless into the darkness, Eleanor took the train to the town some dozen miles beyond Harmonville, where her old friend Bertha Stephens lived. To “Stevie,” to whom the duplicity of Maggie Lou had served to draw her very close in the ensuing year, she told a part of her story. It was through the influence of Mrs. Stephens, whose husband was on the board of directors of the Harmonville hospital, that Eleanor had been admitted there. She had resolutely put all her old life behind her. The plan to take up a course in stenography and enter an editorial office was to have been, as a matter of course, a part of her life closely associated with Peter. Losing him, there was nothing left of her dream of high adventure and conquest. There was merely the hurt desire to hide herself where she need never trouble him again, and where she could be independent and useful. Having no idea of 285 her own value to her guardians, or the integral tenderness in which she was held, she sincerely believed that her disappearance must have relieved them of much chagrin and embarrassment.
Her hospital training kept her mercifully busy. She had the temperament that finds a virtue in the day’s work, and a balm in its mere iterative quality. Her sympathy and intelligence made her a good nurse and her adaptability, combined with her loveliness, a general favorite.
She spent her days off at the Stephens’ home. Bertha Stephens had been the one girl that Peter had failed to write to, when he began to circulate his letters of inquiry. Her name had been set down in the little red book, but he remembered the trouble that Maggie Lou had precipitated, and arrived at the conclusion that the intimacy existing between Eleanor and Bertha had not survived it. Except that Carlo Stephens persisted in trying to make love to her, and Mrs. Stephens covertly encouraged his doing so, Eleanor found the Stephens’ home a very comforting haven. Bertha had developed into a full breasted, motherly looking girl, passionately interested in all vicarious love-affairs, though quickly intimidated at the 286 thought of having any of her own. She was devoted to Eleanor, and mothered her clumsily.
It was still to her diary that Eleanor turned for the relief and solace of self-expression.
“It is five months to-day,” she wrote, “since I came to the hospital. It seems like five years. I like it, but I feel like the little old woman on the King’s Highway. I doubt more every minute if this can be I. Sometimes I wonder what ‘being I’ consists of, anyway. I used to feel as if I were divided up into six parts as separate as protoplasmic cells, and that each one was looked out for by a different cooperative parent. I thought that I would truly be I when I got them all together, and looked out for them myself, but I find I am no more of an entity than I ever was. The puzzling question of ‘what am I?’ still persists, and I am farther away from the right answer than ever. Would a sound be a sound if there were no one to hear it? If the waves of vibration struck no human ear, would the sound be in existence at all? This is the problem propounded by one of the nurses yesterday. 287
“How much of us lives when we are entirely shut out of the consciousness of those whom we love? If there is no one to realize us day by day,—if all that love has made of us is taken away, what is left? Is there anything? I don’t know. I look in the glass, and see the same face,—Eleanor Hamlin, almost nineteen, with the same bow shaped eyebrows, and the same double ridge leading up from her nose to her mouth, making her look still very babyish. I pinch myself, and find that it hurts just the same as it used to six months ago, but there the resemblance to what I used to be, stops. I’m a young nurse now in hospital training, and very good at it, too, if I do say it as shouldn’t; but that’s all I am. Otherwise, I’m not anybody to anybody,—except a figure of romance to good old Stevie, who doesn’t count in this kind of reckoning. I take naturally to nursing they tell me. A nurse is a kind of maternal automaton. I’m glad I’m that, but there used to be a lot more of me than that. There ought to be some heart and brain and soul left over, but there doesn’t seem to be. Perhaps I am like the Princess in the fairy story whose 288 heart was an auk’s egg. Nobody had power to make her feel unless they reached it and squeezed it.
“I feel sometimes as if I were dead. I wish I could know whether Uncle Peter and Aunt Beulah were married yet. I wish I could know that. There is a woman in this hospital whose suitor married some one else, and she has nervous prostration, and melancholia. All she does all day is to moan and wring her hands and call out his name. The nurses are not very sympathetic. They seem to think that it is disgraceful to love a man so much that your whole life stops as soon as he goes out of it. What of Juliet and Ophelia and Francesca de Rimini? They loved so they could not tear their love out of their hearts without lacerating them forever. There is that kind of love in the world,—bigger than life itself. All the big tragedies of literature were made from it,—why haven’t people more sympathy for it? Why isn’t there more dignity about it in the eyes of the world?
“It is very unlucky to love, and to lose that which you cherish, but it is unluckier still never to know the meaning of love, or to find ‘Him 289 whom your soul loveth.’ I try to be kind to that poor forsaken woman. I am sorry for his sake that she calls out his name, but she seems to be in such torture of mind and body that she is unable to help it.