It was with her mind utterly made up as to what course to take that she went to her ordeal. She was going to offer herself a little, white offering before the altar of the fetish which decrees that we shall keep our promises. Herding her to this doom were all the cruel things which we teach our young girls. In New England in my day we did not joke about engagements. In her innocence, having given her lover her mouth to be kissed and her hand to be held, and having promised to be his, she had definitely decided that in the sight of God she was his, and so she dressed herself in her best that she might please him.
I suppose that had I made up my mind to do what Ellen did at that age, I should have gone through to the iniquitous end, shut my eyes and quieted my rebellious spirit with sophistries. I should have done according to whichever part of the strange anomalous teaching which we give young girls that I believed in most. Had I believed most that it is the crime of crimes to marry without love, I should have frankly made up my mind to break the engagement, but had I believed that one may love but once, and that an engagement is a marriage of the spirit, and that in giving this I had given so much to one man that I had nothing left for any other,—it is strange, but this is still taught to girls to-day,—I should have traveled that terrible road. For girls as young as Ellen have to find their way around through a world that is hung with a cobweb of lies, which is put there to screen us from the real world. The suffering that the unlearning of these lies has given to girls of our class from all time is greater than the suffering through which we must pass to come to a wider religious belief.
Ellen might make up her mind as to what to do, but she lived by instincts. She writes about it:—
“I couldn’t. All day I pretended to myself that I was glad he was coming, and that as soon as I saw him everything would be all right, but it is a terrible, awful thing. He cares. He put his arms out toward me and said: ‘Ellen, oh, Ellen!’ All I could say—I was so cruel, so stupid—was, ‘Don’t, don’t’; and I meant I didn’t want him to touch me. And then he said, and it was worse because he has grown much older looking, ‘I don’t understand. What’s the matter, Ellen?’ I said, ‘I can’t marry you; I don’t love you.’ He said: ‘Why, what have I done?’ What could I tell him? It was just that he was he and I was I, and that’s no reason, and yet it is the only reason in the world that you can’t change, and that’s why you love people and that’s why you don’t love them. We both stood and just stared at each other. While I looked at him all the color went out of his face and it grew gray. ‘When did it happen, Ellen?’ he said. ‘I don’t know,’ I told him; ‘it just went out.’ ‘You might have told me.’ ‘I meant never to tell you,’ I said; and then his color all came back to his face and this was worse than before. ‘You meant to marry me just the same? Then you do care for me; it’s just an idea you’ve gotten; it’s just because we have been apart so long. Let’s just go on just as you meant to, Ellen, if there is no one else.’ He opened his arms as if he wanted to hide me from myself in them, but I don’t know what happened to me. I just said, ‘No-no-no-no,’ and ran out of the room, and out of the house up into the orchard. I didn’t notice, but threw myself down under the tree and cried and cried. I don’t know how long I was there, but I heard my mother saying: ‘Ellen, Ellen,’ and the sound of her footsteps coming toward me, but I couldn’t stop sobbing so that she wouldn’t find me like that. She heard me and came to me and said, ‘Why, Ellen darling! Child, it is as wet as a river here.’ She felt my dress and at first it seemed to me that it must be wet with my tears, but it was just the grass. ‘What is it, Ellen?’ she said to me, and I told her that we had been engaged and that I had just seen Edward, and told him that I didn’t want to marry him; and she just folded me in her arms and said, ‘Why, darling, you needn’t’; and she comforted me, and I felt all safe from everything and just like a very little girl. Not many people can feel like that with their mothers, but I don’t think unless you can that your mother’s a mother to you really. I couldn’t go on feeling safe and rested forever. I’ve broken faith with myself. I can’t count on myself any more. It’s a terrible thing not to be able to count on people you love, but it’s worse not to be able to count on yourself. I couldn’t do what I thought was right; how do I know I will be able to keep from doing what’s wrong? I think I will try and give up being good, because most of the things people think are good I don’t understand why. I might have saved myself all that suffering and been happy and low-minded, comfortable and contented, and I think I will be from now on.”
I well remember this epoch in Ellen’s life; she must have been between eighteen and nineteen when she gave up hope of herself and went out to be comfortable, low-minded, and happy, for she told me about this spiritual change in her. It was a crisis with Ellen, a spiritual crisis as important as the time in a boy’s life when he makes a breach in the “Thou Shalt Nots” that have guarded him around, and surrenders himself to the heady wine of living and says to himself: “I am a sinner; now let’s see what there is in sin.”
Just about the time Ellen broke her engagement, a boy named Landry lay heavily on my conscience. At this time, also, Ellen was engaged and yet was unhappy, and yet all I knew about Ellen was that there was something weighing heavily on her mind, and all she knew about me was my outward principles in this matter and none of my inward storm and stress. I can remember very well the never-ending conversations we had at this time. I suppose all young girls who are not on terms of familiarity with their own souls thus cloak their real feelings from each other. For there is happily nothing more usual than that shivering, shrinking, spiritual modesty which can tell of no event in life that implicates another human being. Later the weaker women outgrow it shamefully, or the finer ones among us replace it with a beautiful frankness. There are some happy girls who have been so simply brought up that they have never felt the need for the ambiguities of life as Ellen and myself did. The facts of the case were these: Released from the torturing thought of Edward Graham, the breath of life blew through Ellen in a storm, while I was being discreetly courted by George Landry. I had never had a tumultuous suitor, on account of my being matter-of-fact in my attitude toward the boys I knew or instinctively withdrawing myself from any sentimental approach. But now this sentimentally inclined youth had called on me and shown a recurring disposition to try and hold my hand when we were alone together. We read a great deal of poetry also and with deep emphasis. Thus does Satan trick the unwary. I, Roberta, the straightforward; I, the hater of philandering, and who sincerely felt that a self-respecting woman should be proposed to only by a man she would willingly accept as her husband, read verses far-gazing at distant horizons and with gentle underscorings whose audacity set my heart to beating. That I had gone into this slow-moving and decorous little flight of sentiment seemed so contrary to my ideals that I felt I must give up my friend and his poetry-reading and forego the heart-throbbing performance of having my hand gently captured and as gently withdrawing it again, both of us apparently blankly unaware of the actions of our respective hands. Ellen and I would discuss our affairs in ambiguities like this:—
“There’s a doom threatening me,” Ellen would confess.
“A doom?” asked I, impressed by the sinister darkness of the word.
“Fate has tangled up my life,” Ellen averred. “I have been deceived in myself, and now that I know what I am, I don’t care.”
“What sort of fate?” I then made bold to ask.