The Three Stages of Clarinda Thorbald

by William T. Hamilton

They listened to the laughter emphasized by the wines. The crowd milled about. The young danced to the music. The old sat immovable in the chairs, breathing heavily like constrictors. They smiled, these overfed, and whispered among themselves; they criticised, and in their meager hearts their filled stomachs gave charity.

Gradually the hands of the clock, at the head of the stairs, moved towards the hour of departure. Unheeding time went on its inexorable way—irrepressible, grinding, persistent. It ground these minions with malicious certitude. It grinned at the futility of the people, the futility of the father, of the groom, the bridesmaids, the flowers, and the players of the music behind the palms.

It knew, this inexorable time, that the flowers massed upon the tables and hung in festoons from every point of vantage, the tables, the chairs, even the lights, it would smother in its unending advance. The people who laughed, who drank the wines and smoothed each other with unmeaning unction, it would in its own good process take back and bury in itself.

Clarinda knew nothing of time, and smiled at its progress. She smiled because she had never thought. Life to her was but opening up, and all of it was to be.

The man to whom she had been married came to her, and together they walked to the table that held the huge cake. Her heart turned from the things about her and went to him who cut the cake as if it were the Gordian knot. He cut this thing with the same strength he would cut his way to fame. Pride expanded her heart as she looked at him. Her father faded from her sight, and in his place came a new thing, a bigger thing, that resolved itself into youth, hope and ambition. She saw her mother float from place to place, and she too faded into the things that had been, and she had no place in the new condition.

Out of the complacency of her youth she looked at her mother’s tired face. Incompletely she saw her move from place to place. For some reason her spirit revolted against her as if she had done her an irreparable wrong, in bringing her into the world.

Clarinda left the crowd and went up the stairs by herself to dress for her departure. The man, the groom, youth to her youth, waited at the foot of the stairs, and talked rapidly with another man who twitted him. They laughed occasionally, and he smoked, this bridegroom, viciously, drawing the smoke from his cigarette deep down into his lungs, but the tobacco quieted him, and lent him assurance.

As he waited, he thought that from now on in the distant future all things should be his, the world, and success lay in the hollow of his hand. He would command. Life was no mystery, no uncertainty. It was plain and the hard road would be marched with ease.

For months before this wedding, in the still watches of the night, he had dreamed of the house he would build, and the things he would accumulate. He built this house, brick upon brick, just as he had dreamed, and he placed within its walls each piece of furniture as he would have it. In the aurora of it he placed Clarinda, for there was no futility rearing its head in front of him.

For a long time he stood with the other man at the foot of the staircase, waiting patiently, and presently from above came a sound, then he turned his eyes and above him stood Clarinda in all her lovely fragrance. Clarinda was ready, ready to go forth to give herself to him, and to take up life as it would come. A fearlessness, complete, enveloped her.