As we turned into Main Street a big automobile was leaving the post-office. Mr. Black and his nice little wife—new people who are summering here—were in the tonneau. I hardly know how it came about, but in what seemed the twinkling of an eye Ellinor and I were in it, too. I did not understand where it was we were going, and when I tried to find out I swallowed so many buckets of air that I gave it up. But it was not of the slightest importance. All that had ever happened to me was of slight importance. I was having my first automobile ride. We seemed to winnow the air like birds: to dip and dart down and around the curves, to soar up the hills with the flash and swiftness of wings. A dozen miles from our village we raced up a stately avenue and ran under a porte-cochère—our flight at end.
The lady who came out to greet us was surrounded by dogs, big and little, aristocratic and plebeian, handsome and hideous. After greeting her, Mrs. Black drew me forward and said: “Edna, this is Caroline Howard, who adores every word you write. Edna is my sister, Miss Howard.”
I draw a long breath of happiness at thought of yesterday. I live it all over again. I feel sure it was no ordinary spark of liking that leaped between Edna Kennedy and me instantaneously and spontaneously. We had luncheon yesterday on a big wide veranda that overlooks a winding ribbon of a river from the view we had of it as calm and still as if frozen. After luncheon there was music: Geraldine Farrar in “Madam Butterfly”—and the story unfolded before me. I felt the anguish of that poor little waiting and trusting and praying wife. Tetrazzini in the mad scene from “Lucia,” and the flutelike voice going high and high and higher, till I bent forward in breathless suspense to drop back in my chair in content at that last marvellously dizzyingly high sweet bird note. Moved by a little burst of confidence I could not control, I told Edna Kennedy that I had never heard grand opera; that I had never been anywhere or seen anything. And then I told her of the thrilly little waves running up and down me that were fairly shouting it was the beginning and not the end of beautiful happenings to me—just as though I had walked through a wood and come to a beautiful palace, and only stepped up on the portico with my hand still on the doorknob. I told her about Robert Haralson, too: what friends we were when I was little, before we came to live in the mountains. I was dreadfully disappointed that she does not know him. She says few people know him. She says he is shy; that he lives in his work—that the first night of the big play that is making him so rich and famous he ran away from the theatre afraid of the call that authors get to come before the curtain. As we were leaving, Edna Kennedy gathered some magazines from the library table and gave them to me. “He is in them all,” she said. “Nobody in the literary and dramatic world is more in the public eye.”
I was very quiet coming home, and everything seemed little and mean and isolated and countrified when I got here. I went to my room immediately after supper. I said I was tired, but I was never less tired in my life. I read all the things the magazines said about Robert Haralson, and I looked long at the picture I found in one of them of my old-time boy friend. I have not treasured any sentimental memories of Bobby. I was little more than a child when I last saw him. It is true that the whole town teased Bobby about me—they called me his little sweetheart and accused him of robbing the cradle—but I have no treasured memories of him or of any man.
I am indifferent to men, as Dicky says. Always I have turned with distaste from the thought of marriage. In that I think I am different from most women. There have been two—such nice splendid fellows I knew in my college life—who have penetrated my wilderness more times than one. And I? I like them. Life with either would seem to hold much that it withholds now. I have tried to yield, but I cannot; the thought of the nearness of what should be sweet and sacred to a woman brings a wave of physical nausea. For that reason I don’t in the least understand what came over me last night as I gazed at a picture only dimly familiar to me. Ellinor’s words came back throbbing with their loneliness and hunger. I knew them to be true. I saw myself at forty rushing through breakfast and running the mile to school, pottering about the flowers, mending the clothes—day after day, month after month, year after year spent in dull monotony—and my youth rolled away—my life.
I did a strange thing—I, trained to chain my emotions as we chain wild beasts, in frantic haste I wrote to Bobby. It was not much of a letter—just:
“Bobby, I wonder if the years have swept from your brain cells all memory of the little girl who used to live next door? She’ll never get to New York, never! There’s a wall of mountains that she can’t scale. But if ever you come to Marsville, whistle across the fence, won’t you? The little girl’s got one of your stories treasured in her desk without knowing until some one’s letter gave away the secret of its authorship. Big congratulations, Bobby!”
I went down to the yard and waked old Harris and paid him to walk to the railroad station, three miles across the gap, and mail it. Now it is late Sunday afternoon and it has been gone almost a whole day. But of course I will never have an answer to it. I am sure Mr. Robert Haralson keeps a female secretary who will scan it coldly and throw it in the waste basket.
September 27th.
Wednesday.
I can’t see how it got here in this marvellously short time, but I have Bobby’s answer: