As I went over the scrawled journals and through the packages of letters, the land of memory blossomed for me and the tears that came to my eyes thawed the ice of many years. Ellen herself had forgotten her youth; she may not have remembered that in the bottom of an old trunk she had left for me things which she could not bear to destroy—for there they found them after her death with a letter addressed to me. As I read on, it was as though I had before me the broken pieces of her heart, and as I looked, my own childhood and even my girlhood lived again.
I had often looked for my girlhood and had never found it. Those years when women are in the making—that land of glamour—are the hardest thing of all for grown-up people to understand. Nothing stays fixed there, all the emotions are at their point of effervescence and their charm is their evanescence. The very power of early youth is in the violence of its changes; it is the era of chaos in the souls of people; when they are in the making; when the crust is only forming, and the fire may break forth at any moment; and when what seems most secure and fixed trembles under the feet and disappears in some new-made gulf of the emotions. Then, too, in our youth they teach us such cruel things, we spend ourselves in trying to keep alive such spent fires, and no one tells us that it is anything but noble to live under the destructive tyranny of love. We have to find our way alone—
The thought came to me that I would try to write a sort of story of my friend. And yet, although I had before me the picture of a heart in the making, I have taken up my pen and laid it down again because it is not a story which “marches.” Its victories and defeats went on in the quiet of Ellen’s heart, but I have learned that this silent making and marring of the hearts of women means the fate of all men forever.
I fancy that women will have another bar of judgment and that the question asked us there will be: “Have you loved well? Were you small and grudging and niggardly? Did you make of love a sorry barter, or did you give with such a gesture as spring makes when it walks blossoming across the land?” I do not think that old age often repents the generosities of its youth; perhaps it is my own too careful sowing that makes me wish to write the life of my friend, who asked only to spend herself and her own sweetness with both reckless hands.
CHAPTER I
Ellen and her mother drove in a “shay” to take possession of the old Scudder house, which had been vacant long enough to have a deserted and haunted look. It was far back from the street and was sentineled on either side by an uncompromising fir tree. Great vans, of the kind used in that early day to move furniture from one town to another, disgorged their contents on the young spring grass, and though Mildred Dilloway and Janie Acres and I walked to the village store and back on a half-dozen errands, we saw nothing of the new little girl that day; but there remains in my mind the memory of her little mother, a youthful, black-clad figure, moving helplessly, and it seemed at random, among her household effects that squatted so forlornly in the front yard and then started on their processional walk to the house, impelled by the puissant force of Miss Sarah Grant.
Ellen’s account of this time is as follows:—
“We are going to live by ourselves, though we can’t afford it, because we are ourselves, mamma says, and will really give less trouble this way, though my aunt and uncle think not. ‘I want you to win your aunt and uncle,’ she said to me. It will be so much easier for me to win them if they don’t know me too well. That is one of her reasons for not living in the house with them. ‘They would find us so slack that we should become a thorn in their flesh.’ ‘Couldn’t we stop being slack?’ I said. Mamma looked at me, and after a long time she said, ‘You and I, Ellen, will always be slack inside. Material things don’t interest us.’ My mother doesn’t know me. I like some material things, like ploughing. I said to her: ‘Wouldn’t they be a thorn in our flesh?’ She tried not to smile, and said quite sternly: ‘Ellen, you must never think of your dear aunt and uncle in that way.’ If it is so, why shouldn’t I think so, I wonder? As soon as I saw them I knew what mother meant. They are very nice and I love them, but they have never leaned over the gate to talk to peddlers. A lost dog wouldn’t be happy in their home. We have never had any dogs but lost ones. And Aunt Sarah didn’t like Faro’s name or his ways. I like Aunt Sarah. She says just what she feels like saying. Mother doesn’t. Mother says the things she wants to feel like saying. I annoyed my Aunt Sarah by forgetting to come home to help, and mother said, ‘Oh, dear, why did you need to go and read the Bible to that woman next door when we were moving in, and I wanted your aunt to have a high opinion of you?’ I said, ‘She had the rheumatism.’ Aunt Sarah said, ‘Does she read with her knee; and how came you there anyway, Ellen?’ I said, ‘By the back door, because I like back doors and I hate going in front doors.’ Aunt Sarah looked at me very sharply and said, ‘That child of yours, Emily, is just such a child as I should expect you to have, reading the Bible to strangers who have the rheumatism when a pair of willing hands would have been useful at home.’ The way she looked at me, I knew deep inside she didn’t really mind, so I suddenly kissed her. Later mother said, ‘Mercy! I would never have dared to kiss your Aunt Sarah like that.’ I told her I knew Aunt Sarah wanted me to. ‘How can you tell?’ asked mother; but I always know things like that. It makes me feel rather vain, and vanity is a sin. My Uncle Ephraim is like a picture and so is the big house they live in. I had a moment that mamma called ‘flesh-pottish’ and longed to live there. ‘That’s just it, Ellen,’ she said. ‘They are like pictures, and you and I would be sure to injure their lovely surfaces. We are not violent, but so careless.’”
After this arduous day I remember Miss Sarah popped down in my grandmother’s sitting-room. Said she: “I’m all out of breath.” My grandmother waited for further information. “I’ve been settling,” Miss Sarah informed her with that frankness that kept all the older ladies in town in a state of twittering expectation. “I’ve been settling my do-less sister and her do-less child.” She spoke in some exasperation.