“I lived through months of learning to realize he was gone between the time he left and dinner. Mr. Sylvester was there, and for a time I had to put aside the selfishness of my own grief and I was glad to forget it in talking of one little thing after another, the way one does to stifle down the pain of the heart. I wanted to run after Roger and look at his face once more. I wanted to run after him and foolishly throw myself in front of the horse and say, ‘You can’t go.’ The part of me that talks was gay, because deeper than anything else was the wish in me to speed him joyfully and to have his last memory of me a gay and triumphant one. Time is a strange thing; all day it’s walked along like a funeral procession, and before this it has been going so fast that there has hardly been a chance to get a word in edgewise between the striking of the hours; and since Roger went it’s taken an eternity for it to strike the next quarter. I’ve tried to comfort myself by going up to Oscar’s Leap, but my heart was so heavy that I could hardly walk all of the beautiful, weary way. I don’t like myself for writing like this, for I have him and he really loves me. The more I see people and listen to the things they say, the more I am sure that very few people really love any one, and those who do love are seldom loved in return. It must be a terrible thing to love and feel one’s self unloved. Now I’m going to get ready for my mother’s wedding and then get ready for mine, and while my mind tells me I must be good, my heart cries out, ‘Oh! Why can’t I trade off the useless weeks at the other end of my life for the weeks that would mean so much now!’ As he went away from me, I felt as though I were never going to see him again, and, indeed, this Roger and this Ellen will never see each other again. It seems to me that before he comes again I shall be made old by waiting, the days crawl past so slow and leaden-footed. I’ve said good-bye to this most beautiful time when I’ve said good-bye to Roger.”
At first he wrote her very often, but briefly. She wrote to him, in the intimacy of the letters she did not intend to send:—
“Your dear letters mean, ‘I love you, Ellen; I think of you; my heart goes out to you.’ Once in a while they say, ‘I thirst for you,’ but they tell me nothing of all the many things that I hunger so to know. I’d like to be able to see your life and know what time you wake up, what time you go to your office, and how your office looks, and which way it is set toward the sun so I could imagine you moving around, and you don’t even answer my little, discreet questions. I would like to know the faces of all the people you meet often and how you amuse yourself. I wonder have you lost Ellen in your big and fearsome city. Roger, I have times when I’m afraid, and I don’t know of what—just fear, as though the inner heart of me rang, ‘Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong,’ where my mind has nothing to go on. Roger, I wait for each one of your letters as if I was afraid it wouldn’t come, and as if it were to be the last. I’m afraid. I don’t trust life as I did, and when I don’t trust life, I can’t find you; when I trust life, it’s as if when I shut my eyes I can put out my hand and touch you. But lately it is as though I wander around in the dark looking for you. I tell myself it’s foolish, but my heart won’t listen to the voice of reason. It is as though my confidence had been taken away from me, as though it had been a gift no one could touch with hands. My mother’s wedding doesn’t mean to me any more her happiness, but the day that you shall come back to me and give me back my confidence in life, and when I look on you again I shall know that everything is well in the world. I know that nothing has happened and that nothing can happen, but my heart knows differently.”
CHAPTER XX
During the winter Alec came home from college every Saturday, walking over the mountain each Saturday afternoon for fifteen miles, and going back Monday morning by a stage that started at some unearthly hour, and carried passengers over to the nearest town to us through which a railroad ran in those days.
Various boys of those he had around him would straggle down the road to meet him, so when he came into the town on cold winter nights it was with an escort of red-nosed, red-tippeted and booted youngsters.
This was before any of the new forms of education for boys had even so much as stirred in their sleep, and the town agreed in considering Alec’s friendship with the youngsters a waste of time on both sides: the parents of the boys saying that they had something better to do—in filling the wood-boxes for instance—than to tramp out and get their toes frozen off to meet Alec. Alec’s friends, on the other hand, wondered what he wanted with a “parcel of young ones.” It was only Ellen and myself who caught a glimpse of just what it was that Alec was accomplishing, when we also would walk out to meet him. Besides supplying them in his own person with a hero to worship, he drew them out and untangled their knotty minds for them; for the boy of ten and twelve was, in my girlhood, even more misunderstood and kicked about and generally at odds with life than he is now. Nothing was done to make his school days happier or the path of learning easier. Teachers, almost without exception, were the boys’ natural enemies. Almost all the communication boys had from older people in my day, besides religious instructions, were recommendations to get to work and to get to work quickly.
These snowy walks in the crisp air to meet Alec were the punctuation points of our lives, and the long, pleasant Saturday evenings that we spent together, with perhaps some of the other young people dropping in, were our greatest pleasure. I am sure Ellen’s house seemed to him the gayest place in the world, because we concentrated into those few hours on Saturday evening the gayety of the whole week, though Ellen did not have much time for “mulling,” as her aunt called it. Getting ready for her mother’s marriage meant not only the preparation of her clothes, but also the preparation of the whole Scudder house for its occupancy by Mr. Sylvester and Matilda, Flavilla, and Prudentia.
Ellen’s mood was not at all consistent with that of vague apprehension, and this warning note of her spirit she failed to listen to most of the time; as long as Roger’s letters came regularly, she lived in a shimmering world of imagination, writing to him all the things she dared, and then writing to him again all the things she was too timid to tell him. All the outward details of her life were constant and pressing enough, and very homely, most of them; while within she lived in a shimmering world of her own, her lovely garden inclosed of the spirit, into which she let no unkind breath blow; and so her love for Roger blossomed throughout the long months of the winter. Then toward Easter came her mother’s wedding, which meant to Ellen Roger’s return. The Resurrection and Roger’s return came all together in Ellen’s mind.