“Oh, Ellen, Ellen! Now that you’re not going to be married, I suppose I shall never visit you and study music in Boston, and, Ellen, I had so make-believed it in my heart.”
During the summer there was little written in her journal except letters to Roger, which stopped abruptly with her determination to get over the aching want which she had for him. With the coming of winter there settled down over Ellen a limitless depression. She was very gentle, but she seemed lost in a mist of sadness. I cannot describe to what extent her spirit was dimmed. It seemed as though a strange, withering age had crept over her before her time. People noticed it, and word went abroad that Ellen Payne was “in a decline,” which was a word for almost everything that ailed one in those days, short of a broken leg. I remember her walking around at that time with poses of a very tired child, for all the hollow under her eyes and the troubled lines in her forehead. She would let her arms swing before her like a little girl that had outgrown her strength, and throw herself down into chairs as though she had held herself on her feet to the utmost limits of her endurance.
I ventured to ask her at last: “What’s the matter, Ellen?” For we had avoided, by common consent, talking of anything that might be wounding, and had put the past out of sight.
She looked at me with eyes that had the hurt look of a little girl.
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter,” she told me in answer. “I know well enough what’s the matter. There’s no meaning to life any more at all. The world goes on over there”—she waved her hand ever so slightly—“and I’m here on the outside, and what they do doesn’t mean anything at all, Roberta. If life goes on like this, maybe I’ll be lucky enough to die, and the worst of it is that the hope of dying is keeping me alive. I am afraid, Roberta, that when one has anything to live for, even if it’s dying, that one keeps on living. What it really means,” she added, “is that I’ve lost God, for I can’t pray any more.”
Since then I’ve known a great many women in mortal pain, and I truly believe that it is the nearness of death that keeps many a suffering soul alive. They are forever heartening themselves by looking through the black, mysterious door, where there is an end to pain and where one need not stay famished any more at life’s feast. Death walks consolingly so close; death is so easy and calls compassionately to these forsaken ones, saying, “Out here is rest—so near; if it gets much worse, you can come to me.” Wherever one looks there is the consoling possibility of death, and since death is so near and so easy, people, who have forgotten for a while the reason for living, go on just the same. For who, in the winter of the spirit, can again believe in spring?
At this time even the children seemed to turn away from Ellen and give her nothing. She had always meant laughter and gayety and the heightening of the lives of all of us around her, and Alec and I were the only two who remained faithful to her in this moment of desolation, because the others did not see Ellen in this docile, lifeless soul, who went around still called by the name of Ellen Payne; and this withdrawal of human sympathy was as unconscious as it was wounding. My sweet old grandmother, who had loved Ellen so, combined with old Mrs. Butler, whose hair Ellen had done for years,—since Alec had grown up,—would nod their heads together and say that Ellen Payne ought to stop those mopish ways and use more backbone.
That winter Ellen’s mother was ailing and coughed badly also, and for the first time in her life was a little querulous and complaining. I ignored as much as I could Ellen’s ill feelings, as she wished me to do, but I remember this tragic winter well. There were a very few entries in her journal, but not in this or in any other crisis of her life had she failed to clarify her mind by the written word. I find this:—
“I try as hard as I can to attach myself to the duties that crowd around me. Sometimes it just seems to me that I am going to succeed in being interested and then I am not. I think it must be like this in those strange northern countries, where the glow of dawn comes on the horizon, and, starved for light, one says, ‘Here is the dawn’; and even as one speaks the light pales and the dreadful twilight thickens around one.”
Towards spring—one of those soppy, wet springs, when it seems as though the green would never come—I could stand the silence no longer, and some word or look of hers that betrayed to me the desolate abasement of her spirit made me cry out:—