The Heart's Country

by Mary Heaton Vorse

We had our room together, and I felt like a stranger in a house of mourning. I knew that there was no comfort that I could give her at all. She hadn’t even tears with which to refresh herself, and all she said to me was: “Roberta, I’ve been stripped bare of leaves to-night.” This was a true enough picture of her. She had been a blooming flower, and now it was as if the frost of some inexorable and unseen winter had touched her and she was bare of leaves and blossoms.

I suppose I was the only one among all those who loved her who did not urge Ellen to reflect on her decision. There was so little to tell when it came to it. Ellen’s reason was so little one of the usual causes for which an engagement may be dissolved, with the approval of a girl’s elders. Here was Ellen who had stood by Roger gayly, without even, apparently, a proper understanding of his dissipation; who had endured from him neglect, who had learned to school herself so that she was able to ignore his temperamental interests in other women; she, who had been without any end in her affections, gave the appearance to the outside world of having suddenly, for no reason, come to an end of her love.

In our town there was scant belief that Ellen had jilted Roger. Why do such a thing? “Aren’t they all as poor as church mice, and isn’t Roger as likely a young man as one would wish to see?” They clamored around me inquisitively.

There is no time when the human race shows itself in such beauty and in such heartless sordidness as in the time of grief. Then it is that the world we know turns strange faces upon us, and mean, low-lived men will show the gentle chivalry that one would expect only of angels, and delicate women, of chaste and gracious lives, will develop, before one’s eyes, hideous and ghoulish curiosity. Any one who has been through the death of those whom they love knows this, and still more it is true in the other disasters of life, where there is no ceremonial of grief. Death has dignity. Its august finality stops many a wagging tongue and many an unkind word. But oh, the other griefs of the spirit! One is shielded by no mourning; there is no protecting tradition to fold its arms about one; and one’s poor, shivering soul is left naked on the highway, afraid of the heartless curiosity of prying eyes.

The curious world has no mercy for a girl jilted by her lover. There is no sanctity to all this suffering, no privacy allowable, not a day’s respite from the inquisitive natures and prattling tongues. One must count one’s self very fortunate if one is allowed to care for the most bleeding of one’s wounds with a certain degree of decent privacy. And in our little town privacy was what was impossible for Ellen. I was for a while the center of the storm, for, to Roger, Ellen had been inexplicable; he had not been able to believe what had happened and came storming down after us.

“I can’t see him,” Ellen told me. “There’s no place anywhere in him to explain anything. You’ll see when you try and talk to him.”

I begged her, out of kindness, to see him once because he was terribly torn by what had happened. He told me that the sure foundations of life had rocked under his feet, and when I repeated this to Ellen, she shook her head.

“It’s not that,—he can’t bear that what’s been so his creature should defy him. He’s never had life say no to him before.” She said this without bitterness, and more as an older woman might of a boy she has brought up.

“Why won’t you see him,” I pleaded with her, “just for one moment?”

“I don’t dare to,” she told me. “Every habit I have says yes to him; every strand of my body cries out to him; it’s as if he had never been and I had died; and yet our bodies go on living and caring for each other. He doesn’t need me any more than he needs any one else. He needs no person, Roberta. Love and encouragement and companionship: the world is full of it for him. Yet I need him and shall need him always, to the end of my days.”