Fidelity: A Novel

by Susan Glaspell

CHAPTER TWELVE

Everyone who talked about it—and that meant all who knew anything about it—blamed Deane Franklin for not stopping Ruth. Perhaps the reason he did not try to defend himself was simply that he could not hope to show how simple was his acceptance of the fact that it would have been impossible to stop her. To understand that, one would have to have seen. Oh, to be sure, he could have put obstacles in her way, tightened it around her, but anything he might have done would only have gone to making it harder for Ruth to get away; it would not have kept her from going. And after all, he himself saw it as, if not the thing she should do, the thing—it being what it was then—she could not help doing. But one would have to have seen Ruth's face, would need to have been with her in those days to understand that.

As to warning her family, as he was so blamed by them and by all the town for not doing, that would have seemed to him just one of those things he could have thrown in her way. He did feel that he must try to talk to her of what it was going to mean to her people; he saw that she saw, that it had cruel power to make her suffer—and no power to stop her. Nothing could have stopped her; she was like a maddened thing—desperate, ruthless, indomitable. She would have fought the world; she would have let the whole world suffer. Love's fear possessed her utterly. He had had the feeling all along that it was rushing on to disaster. He stood back from it now with something like awe: a force not for him to control.

And he, with it from within, was the only one who did not condemn Stuart Williams for letting Ruth go. A man, and older than she, they scorned him for letting an infatuated girl throw her life away like that. And it was not only that he saw that the man was sick and broken; it was that he saw that Stuart, just as Ruth, had gone in love beyond his power to control love, that he was mastered, not master, now. And in those last days, at least, it was Ruth who dominated him. There was something terrible in the simplicity with which she saw that she had to go; she never once admitted it to the things that were to be argued about. He talked to her, they both tried to talk to her, about the danger of getting tuberculosis. When he began on that she laughed in his face—and he could not blame her. As if that could keep her! And as she laughed her tortured eyes seemed mockingly to put to him—"What difference would it make?"

When, after it all came out, he did not join the outraged town in the outcry against Ruth, when it further transpired that he had known about her going and had not tried to stop it, he was so much blamed that it even hurt his practice. There were women who said they would not countenance a young physician who had the ideas of life he must have. His own people were incensed at what they called the shameful advantage Ruth had taken of him, holding that she, as an evil woman, had exerted an influence over him that made him do what was against his own nature. As to the Hollands, there had been a stormy hour with Mr. Holland and Cyrus, and a far worse half hour with Mrs. Holland, when her utterly stricken face seemed to stiffen in his throat the things he wanted to say for Ruth, things that might have helped Ruth's mother. And then he was told that the Hollands were through, not alone with Ruth, but with him.

But he was called there two years later when Mrs. Holland was dying. She had been begging for him. That moved him deeply because of what in itself it told of her long yearning for Ruth. After that there were a number of years when he was not inside that gate. Cyrus did not speak to him and the father might as well not have done so. He was amazed, then, when Mr. Holland finally came to him about his own health. "I've come to you, Deane," he said, "because I think you're the best doctor in town now—and I need help." And then he added, and after that first talk this was the closest to speaking of it they ever came: "And I guess you didn't understand, Deane; didn't see it right. You were young—and you're a queer one, anyway."

Perhaps the reason he was never able to do better in explaining himself, or in defending Ruth, was simply because in his own thinking about it there were never arguments, or thoughts upon conduct, but always just that memory of Ruth's face as he had seen it in revealing moments.

Everyone saw something that Ruth should have done differently. In the weeks they spent upon it they found, if not that they would be able to forgive her, at least that they could think of her with less horror had she done this, had she not done that. But Ruth lived through that week seeing little beyond the one thing that she must get through it. She was driven; she had to go ahead, bearing things somehow, getting through them. She had a strange power to steel herself, to keep things, for the most part, from really getting through to her. She could not go ahead if she began letting things in. She sealed herself over and drove ahead with the singleness of purpose, the exclusions, of any tormented thing. It was all terrible, but it was as if she were frozen at the heart to all save the one thing.

She stayed through the week because it was the time of Edith Lawrence's wedding and she was to be maid-of-honor. "I'll have to stay till after Edith's wedding," she said to Deane and Stuart. Then on her way home from Deane's office she saw that she could not go on with her part in Edith's wedding. That she could see clearly enough despite the thing driving her on past things she should be seeing. What would she say to Edith?—how get that over?

Someone was giving a party for Edith that night; every day now things were being given for her. She must not go to them. How could she go? It would be absurd to expect that of herself. She would have to tell Edith that she could not be her bridesmaid. What a terrible thing Edith would think that was! She would have to give a reason—a big reason. What would she tell her?—that she had been called away?—but where? Should she tell her the truth? Could she? Edith would find it almost unbelievable. It was almost unbelievable to herself that her life could be permeated by a thing Edith knew nothing about. It was another of the things she would have said, had she known her story only through hearing it, would not be possible. But it was with Edith as it was with her own family—simply that such a thing would never occur to her. She winced in thinking of it that way. A number of times she had been right on the edge of a thing it seemed would surely be disclosing, but it strangely happened she had never quite gone over that edge. For one thing, Edith had been away from Freeport a good deal in those three years. Mrs. Lawrence had opposed Edith's marrying so young, and had taken her to Europe for one year, and in the last year they had spent part of the time in California. In the last couple of months, since Edith's return from the West, she had spoken of Ruth's not seeming like herself, of fearing she was not well. She had several times hurt Edith's feelings by refusing, for no apparent reason, to do things with her. But she had always been able to make that up afterwards and in these plans for the wedding she and Edith had been drawn close again.