All girls are sure of two things: that they understand their men better than their very mothers do, and that they love them better as well; and every woman in the world, who is harrowing her soul over her little son that she is bringing up, may be sure that somewhere else in the world there is growing up a girl who is later on going to find any hardness or unkindness that she has left in his spirit. When she had known him six weeks, Ellen could have brought up Roger better than he had been. It was her first excuse for his willful idea. At first she didn’t take him seriously, but opposition was the food on which his will fed. His father said of him that there was almost nothing one couldn’t oppose him into. He thought out all the practical details. They could drive to the home of a minister he knew and be married at once and come back after two weeks.
“Oh! why,” Ellen wailed,—“why should we make them all unhappy when all you have to do is to work a month or two more?”
“Yes, and then a long engagement, and then a making of my way; I in Boston, Ellen, and you here.” It was a moment of terrible conflict for her. She wrote one of the letters to Roger she didn’t mean to send:—
“Oh, my dear! I told you this afternoon and I want to tell you again in this letter how sweet this little hour is to me. It seems to be the sunniest place in all of life. The world seems to me to stretch ahead wonderful and splendid, and the great storms of Heaven whirling through the sky, and the lightning and the clouds, and I can hear in my ears the roar of cities and the big tumult of seas, and here it is so sweet. Why hurry away from it? Here it is so safe. The days of one’s life when one is a girl and loves one’s man are so few. Oh, don’t hurry me away. Here is sunlight, and out there where you want to go it seems to me darkness. I’m a little girl, afraid of the setting sun. I was afraid of it and yet I couldn’t help looking at it in its awful splendor. I couldn’t take my eyes off from it, as little by little it dropped down behind the mountain, so wonderful and so inexorable. My heart chokes the same way when I think of running off in the night with you. Let’s stay here with our hands in each other’s and then quietly go out into life together without wrenching ourselves away from so many ties and without rending everything that links us to this life that we now live. Every bit of me, [she writes,] all my soul, all my heart and my mind, and all my body wants to go with him as he says, but oh! the needless hurt to them. When I said, ‘Oh! how could we take our happiness at some one else’s hurt?’ he said, ‘Listen, Ellen; the hurt is only temporary—just for a moment. Supposing we went to-morrow night and then we came back after two weeks married. My father, of course, will like you by and by—he just doesn’t want any one for me now; he wants me to go on working and I am working like a giant, and then we would be free to go where we want.’ Oh, it would be so easy! Nights I can’t sleep, and when I do I am always deciding and deciding over and over again. When I tell him to remember the talk that it will mean, he says to me: ‘Are you afraid?’ I tell him, ‘No, not for myself; but my mother will be left behind and there will be Mr. Sylvester and my aunt all to bear talk, so we shall be happy.’”
It seemed as if it was an unequal battle, all the forces of love, and Ellen’s own nature even, waging a conflict with her little, soft heart. She grew pale under the strain. I noticed it, but I didn’t know the cause, for here was something that naturally she didn’t tell me, being allied with the forces of order as I was. She would have given him anything that she had to give, from her life on, but she could not bear to deal him out some one else’s happiness with a careless hand. For his lack of understanding in this she writes:—
“He’s never known what it is to have a home or people that you really love about you, or to be part of things.”
He was clever in his arguments. Ellen writes:—
“He fairly argued my soul from my body. He said to me, ‘Ellen, it is not as though they didn’t want us to marry. It’s just better for us to go together right away. Why should we waste a blessed year of our lives?’ ‘How could I run the risk of being the cause of serious trouble between you and your father and mother?’ I said. ‘You’ll have to leave those things for me to judge,’ he answered. ‘How could I interfere with your work?’ He grew almost angry at me. Then he threw his arms around me in that way he has, as though he would fairly crush my life from me, and he said: ‘Ellen, Ellen, for my sake do it. I am not stable; I’m weak, and weak with violence. In you I found all the things that I haven’t, all the sweet and all the true things in life, the things that I’ve been just for a minute at a time, when I’ve been a good little boy. You don’t know me, Ellen. You’ve only seen the me that you made, but you can keep that if you want to. Don’t play with it, Ellen. It’s the most important thing in life for me to keep the me that you call out. I didn’t know I could be so happy in a quiet place. I’ve always asked of life more and more, more life all the time and life has meant action, adventure, and danger, and all at once I find in you more life than anywhere else, and I don’t want anything but you. Ellen, how can you continue this way to me for an idea, a foolish, bad idea, a taught idea? That’s where you’re not true, Ellen. If you were true, you would just put your hand in mine and walk away.’ ‘If there was no one in the world but you, I would put my hand in yours and do whatever you told me, but I’m not just I alone,’ I told him. ‘Well, I am just I, just I, and frankly in need of you—and in need of you right away. Ellen, this conflict with you is destroying me. By to-morrow night you must have decided.’ I feel as though I had been shaken by a great wind. When I hear him crying to me, it seems as though he were crying for the safety of his soul; and yet there must be something hard in me, because I know that being without me for a few months more or less will not destroy a hard thing like Roger, and all the time my foolish and weak heart likes to pretend that it believes that this is so. But yet, how can I get the strength to tell him to-morrow night that I won’t do what he wants me to? Oh! it is torture unspeakable to be ungenerous in any way to the one whom one loves. I can’t do it. I’ve got to go, not because I believe down deep in me any argument that he has given me,—I was strong as those against it,—but just because he wants me to, because I can’t help giving him whatever it is he asks.”
Thus goes the age-old cry. She writes to him:—
“Oh! my dear, why will you make me make you such a sad gift? Oh! my dearly beloved, must I give to you the peace of mind, even for a little while, of all those whom I have loved in the world; and yet, I know myself that when I give you this that I shall be glad of it. Now that I have decided, my heart sings aloud. Somehow all that they will suffer seems small to me and unimportant beside this great, sweeping gladness that I feel.... I feel the way that you feel, nothing matters except that we should be together. Every day that we spend apart is a day wasted—but I can’t think of the rest of it. It isn’t so hard—it isn’t so difficult, after all. We will come back and everything will be all right, although I feel when I say this as if it wasn’t I, and that what carried me along was the black current of a river on which I was floating, and that I had been floating on it for always, only thinking before that I could direct my poor, little boat. Now I know that it is something quite outside myself that’s swinging me on with the strength of this fast-rushing stream.”