  Ellen wiped the memory of their misunderstanding completely from her mind. If she had cared for Roger before, now she burned her bridges behind her; she swamped herself in her devotion to him. He stayed in our town until late fall, and during these months he seemed to want no other thing than the companionship of Ellen. The hours that he spent in work every day were their tragedy. In her journal Ellen prattled of a time “when they should be married and she could be with him even when he was working.” “The world is full now,” she complained, “of closed doors and good-nights and good-byes.” All the diverse and many-sided problems of marriage resolved themselves, in her simple mind, into one single meaning, and that was the continual presence of Roger. She passed the hours away from him drowned in the thought of him. Though at that time she wrote Their engagement had been announced and Ellen was given the consideration which a good marriage brings one in a little village, a consideration which she didn’t even notice. Mildred Dilloway, in the mean time, had been—in “When I think of what a little fool I was at that time, I could beat my head against the door. If I could have but looked ahead a little, I would have had a little more sense. I needn’t have listened at all to Edward’s blitherings and been saved two years of discomfort. Edward himself told me about it. ‘Do not think, Ellen,’ he said, ‘that I’m unfaithful to the thought of you.’ ‘You couldn’t be,’ said I. ‘You’ll always be poetry to me, remember that,’ he told me. ‘I shall try to forget it,’ said I. I have never before wished to throw something at any one as I did then. It was easy to see that he was a little disappointed in himself that he could care for any one else after having made so great a fuss and mourned around so. I wish he would go away, because I hate to be forever reminded of the me that used to be. What if one should turn back into At that moment in her life she could not imagine any other separation from him than that caused by some disaster. She hadn’t even faced the necessity of his leaving her when winter came. She knew he was going away, but she didn’t realize it. They drifted along, making more of a drama all the time of the inevitable good-nights and the inevitable separations. As Ellen wrote: “People who are in love should be endowed; there isn’t time for anything else.” During this little perfect time life held its breath until Roger went away. The end came quite suddenly, with a peremptory letter from his father, who had a chance for him to enter a very well-known law office, under advantageous circumstances. While the shadow of separation was over them, it was like a cloud that “I lived through months of learning to realize he was gone between the time he left and dinner. Mr. Sylvester was there, and for a time I had to put aside the selfishness of my own grief and I was glad to forget it in talking of one little thing after another, the way one does to stifle down the pain of the heart. I wanted to run after Roger and look at his face once more. I wanted to run after him and foolishly throw myself in front of the horse and say, ‘You can’t go.’ The part of me that talks was gay, because deeper than anything else was the wish in me to speed him joyfully and to have his last memory of me a gay and triumphant one. Time is a strange thing; all day it’s walked along like a funeral procession, and before this it has been going so fast that there has hardly been a chance to get a word in edgewise between the striking of the hours; and since Roger went it’s taken an eternity “Your dear letters mean, ‘I love you, Ellen; I think of you; my heart goes out to you.’ Once in a while they say, ‘I thirst for you,’ but they tell me nothing of all the many things that I hunger so to know. I’d like to be able to see your life and know what time you wake up, what time you go to your office, and how your office looks, and which way it is set toward the sun so I could imagine you moving around, and you don’t even answer my little, discreet questions. I would like to know the faces of all the people you meet often and how you amuse yourself. I wonder have you lost Ellen in your big and fearsome city. Roger, I have times when I’m afraid, and I don’t know of what—just fear, as though the inner heart of me rang, ‘Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong,’ where my mind has nothing to go on. Roger, I wait for each one of your letters as if I was afraid it wouldn’t come, and as if it were to be the last. I’m |
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