The Locusts' Years

by Mary H. Fee

“Why unhappiness?” Charlotte asked in vain for the reason; but the fact stood stronger than any “why’s,” that there had been, in all her life, some fundamental outrage of human sentiment. It had existed in that strange paternal attitude of her father’s; it had lived on in that perfunctory kindness of the nuns who had found her an antipathetic and incomprehensible child; and it had grown and intensified in the curious, prying interest developed in those who had governed her later years. That any such a condition could exist by a series of fortuitous events was out of the question. There had to be cause running through it all. Yet search her heart and mind as she would, she found there no wells of bitterness or evil thought or envy or malice to justify relations so peculiar as had finally established themselves between her and human society.

The solution of the question came to her suddenly, when, on a particularly dreary day, she had been trying to discipline herself and to keep her thoughts from running on her own troubles. She had spent two hours trying to read the story, written by a great modern author, of three precocious school-boys. She had been a great admirer of the author, and, up to that time, had found fascination in his pages; but the three boys were little to her taste. As she mused sadly, a flash of insight came, and another; and, little by little, she saw clearly what had so long puzzled her.

The precocious child is abnormal, and inspires in his fellow men that blind instinct to worry and torment which runs all through the animal world. She had been a precocious child, made uncanny by perceptions of the hidden currents and causes of life at a time when she should have been gurgling over its toys. As she recalled her sensitiveness to impressions, her powers of reading what was passing in others’ minds, and the singular growth of self-concealment and self-control that had grown out of them, it seemed to her that her keen brain had been her lifelong curse. Little by little, she went back to her convent days and tried to put herself in the place of the good sisters who had taught her. How distressing it must have been to them to feel the dumb interrogation that was always so strong under outward obedience! If she could have been unconscious of her father’s mental state and could have made a happy child’s claim upon his affections, would he not in time have come to love her? If, when she was a lonely orphan, living on her cousin’s sufferance, she had been able to reveal to her relatives the suffering that she really underwent in the strange ostracism which she had built up for herself, would not pity have conquered their selfishness? She drew a long, pained sigh, as she thought of what a difference might have been made in her life by a little less brain and a little more moral courage.

She was lying in her steamer chair on the veranda of her house at the time; and by her side, on a taboret, stood a glass of water. She picked it up and smiled over it. It was full of microbes (dead, of course, for Americans drink no unboiled water in the Philippines), and she knew it, and cared little, for she could not see them. But had she possessed an eye with the magnifying power of a strong microscope, she could not have tasted the water for the sight of the dead organisms would have made it unpalatable. She began to wonder what would be the effect on society, if there were let loose upon it a body of persons with microscopic eyes. They would shrink and exclaim and turn faint at dishes that the epicure delights in. How they would upset dinners and spoil little suppers and picnic luncheons! How eagerly would their society be avoided, and how soon their name become anathema!

But though physically the microscopic eye does not yet exist, the mental and spiritual microscopic eye does exist, and it has about the same distressing effect upon its human brethren who do not possess it as the other sort might have. She had had the microscopic eye—nothing could blind her to facts—and her starts and shrinkings had made her antipathetic to most of the persons with whom she had come in contact. It had remained for Martin, the indomitably ignorant, to be blind to her mental attitude, to assume her a normal woman of the world in which he found her. What of gratitude did she not owe him?

The thought pricked her to her feet, set her to restless pacings of the floor. Whatever of gratitude she owed him, she was preparing ingratitude in the course she was still bent upon pursuing. Never had she appreciated the stubborn inheritance of her own will till she measured herself against it in this struggle. Whatever the conscience and the intelligence might say, her will said “No” as often as she contemplated forgiving Martin and going back to her life with him. The feeling which had been warm in her heart for him so long was dead—killed by his own brutal words, buried in her own shame and self-reproach. She saw with unutterable sadness, that there was no hope of its resuscitation. But did that break the tie that she had of her own volition forged? Could not that same will of hers which resisted so bitterly be schooled to duty and to right? For against a year’s tenderness and kindness, where was the justice of weighing the utterances of a single hour of pain and disappointment? The one ought not to balance the other. She had no right to think so for an instant. Alas, though, one did balance the other, outweighed it many times!

Her marriage had been all wrong. But had she been less conscious of the fact on the day she married him than on the day when she vainly struggled to convince herself that she ought to go on living with him? Marriage can not be for love alone any more than it can be for selfish material interest alone. In its appeal to human emotion and in its relation to the family it may be, as the church calls it, a sacrament; but marriage as a lifelong partnership must have its material side. Love must enter in; but no healthy marriage can exist, unless there be equally the consciousness of a good bargain, of a legitimate exchange of values, added to the affection which sanctifies it. Well, Collingwood had played fairly. It was she who had entered into the alliance, knowing its weakness, knowing herself.

But did she know herself? What more that was disappointing and agonizing was she to learn of herself? What was even then struggling in her breast? Was there some secret hope holding itself in concealment behind her oft repeated thought that life was ended for her? Did some hidden ambition prompt her to take the step that she believed came from self-respect? She had learned only too well her capacity for self-deception. She had advanced step by step along the path by which she had come to the church door with Martin Collingwood, denying every motive which, in the end, had proved itself the stronger. Was it possible that she was turning blindly, as women naturally turn, to a second man to lift her from the wreck to which she had brought her life with the first? Again she faced that truth which she had long before discovered, that too passionate a denial constitutes an assertion; and while every atom of her intelligence bade her distrust her own sophistry, every throb of a strong emotional nature bade her turn from the conclusions of her reason.

In these hours of agonizing inquisition when her soul seemed literally torn in two, she contemplated with added despair, the loss of her early religious faith. It did not come back to her in the least. No impulse for prayer seized her. The conviction that the world is made up of blind forces, and that there is no help outside of ourselves was very strong in her. She might pray and pray, but when she arose from her knees, the elements of struggle would be there still, tearing at her, filling her soul with pain. Prayer would not bring sleep to her aching eyeballs in the night, it would not silence the cry in her heart, it would not keep the thronging thoughts from her weary brain. Time alone could do that. Give her time—she smiled bitterly—and change of circumstances, and she might put the experiences of the last three years behind her, put even the man who had ruled her life and thought for a year (and a happy year) behind her.

Of course she wrestled with the temptations which must present themselves to the intelligent mind which has had the ways of the world set before it. Intelligence said that nothing mattered except the material. She could be good or bad, noble or contemptible, so long as she played her game well and kept on good terms with that thing we call the world. Little the world cares what we do or what we are, said intelligence; the question with it is how much power do we own in this vale of tears. Intelligence told her that with the backing of her family and the successful use of her own powers, and with Judge Barton’s political influence, they two might make a very comfortable place for themselves in this material universe. She felt dangerously sure of the Judge. The knowledge had come to her (how she knew not) that all she needed to insure her an absolute dominion over the man’s soul was a little less moral fastidiousness, a little more worldliness. Indeed, a strange confidence in her own powers of attraction was working itself out of all the miserable situation. She realized how completely she had under-estimated her own charm. Less conscience, less good taste, more charity (which is a much misused term in these days, signifying lack of all social and moral tradition), in fact, a general elimination of the best qualities of her nature would constitute a humanizing process which would work decidedly to her material advantage. But she was not willing to submit herself to the process. She wanted her own way, and she wanted to remain her ideal self. More and more clearly she saw the unreasonableness of her demand.