Mary Heaton Vorse

If the world has little pity for a jilted girl, how shall it have much understanding for any one who suffers after having voluntarily sent her lover away, especially when it was her obvious duty to her family to marry? So her world was not very kind to Ellen at a moment when she most needed their kindness. We do not often understand the sicknesses of the spirit; now we mete out to them the criminal indulgence that a foolish woman does to a wayward child, and now we treat them with bruising harshness.

During the summer matters were not so bad, because every one rather expected that Ellen would come to herself. My grandmother used to question me seriously if I were encouraging Ellen.

Even Mr. and Mrs. Sylvester, most unworldly people,—more unworldly, I think, than any one I have ever known,—had seen the children “enjoying advantages” through Ellen, for Ellen and Roger had planned a thousand things.

Matilda had wept openly when Ellen had returned, and said:—

“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:—

“Ellen, isn’t there anything on earth that you want?”

“I think I would like to see Alec,” she answered.

It seemed to me a foolish wish, for Alec was in his first school and far away, and his visits to us had been spasmodic and brief, and shared, of course, with Elizabeth Greenough, though during the summer he had been home and spent a good deal of time with Ellen, and she had accepted his kindness as she always had, very much as the air one breathes, or as she accepted my friendship—as one of the certain things among the deep uncertainties of life.

I wrote to Alec what Ellen had said, without a hope in the world that he could come. It seemed the sort of thing that only love accomplishes, and he had seemed to me perfectly contented with his engagement, making his visits to the home of his young lady with the regularity of a lover, or of a clock. But almost sooner than seemed possible he came. When Ellen saw him tears came to her eyes. For it is just at these moments, when one is thirsting for help and sympathy, that we seem to lose the way to the hearts of others, and this is natural enough, for there is a terrible egotism in certain phases of grief. The eyes of the spirit are turned inward and we cease to give, and after a while, as with Ellen, grief becomes a habit and we slip along smoothly enough in the deepening and dolorous grooves of sorrow. It is easier to do this where the outside life is monotonous, and to us, in our little town, our own point of view and our own spirits furnished whatever diversity there was. One day went along after another and one never met a new face on the street, and it was with a true instinct for help that Ellen cried out:—

“I envy men who can go out in the world and forget. It must be easier to forget among those who have never seen your face or ever heard what has happened to you, and here everything brings me back to the thoughts that I try in so futile a fashion to put out of my mind.”

Alec’s unexpected arrival had been the only thing that had happened through the long winter and spring. I waited with anxiety for the end of their interview.

“Well,” I asked Alec, “how did you find her?”

And he answered:—

“She just wants to know how one manages to live when the meaning of life is dead and I told her that that wasn’t what she needed, but that she needed to go and search for the meaning of life, and you know, Roberta, a person who really seeks for that can always find it. I’ve a plan that I’m going to try. Ellen has promised to do everything I tell her, and keep her to it, even if it seems childish to you.”

A day or two after Alec left, there knocked at the Sylvesters’ back door a sturdy boy of twelve; a shock of wild black hair blew across his forehead, and funny, humorous blue eyes gleamed under straight black brows. For the rest, he was freckled past belief. As Ellen opened the door for him, he choked in a spasm of embarrassment, then the words came, with a rush. He had a deep voice for his age.

“I’ve come to git Ellen Payne,” he boomed.

When Ellen, who had opened the door for him, said:—

“Why, I’m Ellen Payne and what do you want?” he flushed furiously and muttered:—

“He said you was a girl.”

“Well,” responded Ellen, with more briskness than she had shown for some time, “I’m a girl.”

“No,” replied the boy, “you’re a grown-up woman, tall ’s ever you’ll be.”

“Did you say you had come to get me?” suggested Ellen.

“He said you was to come with me.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Ellen.

“Git mayflowers in a place you don’t know,” said the boy. “There’s no such place,” said Ellen. “I know every cranny of this place in my sleep.”

“Well, I know it as if I’d made it,” retorted the boy.

By the time Ellen came back ready to walk, a wave of shyness engulfed the boy; he was as uncommunicative as the Pyramids. He was deeply embarrassed by his companion, but he forgot now and then enough to go ahead, shouting his joy at the return of spring, and then his gayety would fall as a flag at half-mast when he saw Ellen after him. She came home wet and very tired, to listen to the prophecy of her Aunt Sarah that “no good would come of this weltering around in the wet, and that it was just like one of Alec’s unpractical thoughts.”

While Miss Sarah loved Alec, his character annoyed her, winding as it did around a devious road and springing upon you new view-points, as a supposedly quiet road might discover unexpected and romantic vistas of country. Especially his attitude toward the boys was annoying to those who found difficulty in having wood-piles replenished and the “chores” done. “You’d think boys were something,” my grandmother used to explain with some heat, “besides trying, rascally, little scallywags; but the older you grow, Roberta, the more you’ll find truth in what I say, and that is, that boys were put in this world by the Lord for women to exercise their patience over.”

Tyke Bascom didn’t come again for two days. This time Ellen penetrated through the shyness enough to find that he was a boy who lived over the mountain-road in a little clearing, called Foster’s Corners, which had a sawmill and four houses.

“That’s a long ways,” said Ellen.

“Not so long when you’re used to it,” he replied. “It might be long for a woman.”

In his walks over the mountain, Alec had always stopped at the house and, being fatal to small boys, Tyke had enrolled in the company of Alec’s friends. All that Tyke knew, it turned out, he had been taught by Alec, as he sat there resting on his way home.

For the next two weeks Tyke Bascom came for Ellen, but irregularly. Sometimes he would come each day, for two or three days, and once three days went past, three days when Ellen watched for him. It had been a long time since she had been out in the open air; it had been a long time since she had gone back to the places she had known as a little girl, when she was in that deep and almost mystic communion with all life and growth around her, and when the mountain and the river, and the small mountain streams were like personalities to her. Only the very pure in heart and children have this intimate sense of oneness with the world, and Ellen and Alec had lain for hours, under cover, and watched to see a fox sneak past. They knew a marsh where the blue heron lived, and when she was little, Ellen had talked about the birds, squirrels, and chipmunks as intimately as though they were people.

Now all this forgotten lore came back to her from out-of-the-way places in her mind. When I was a girl, it was only too easy for people to forget such things, for in my day, no sooner did one grow up than the customs of young ladyhood demanded that one should spend most of one’s time in the house. Even skating was denied women, and Ellen’s love of the outdoors met with a steady stream of disapproval from every one, including Roger. The only people who had not frowned on her were her mother and Mr. Sylvester, who held the heretical theory that it was good even for a woman to know the works of the Lord, even though a close and intimate knowledge was bad for smoothness of hair and neatness of frock.

More than that, there was a desire awakened in Ellen’s mind, of conquering this wild and morose child, who had given his heart so unreservedly to Alec.

She asked him,—

“Do you like going out with me, Tyke?”

“No ’m,” he said, “not especially.”

“But”—she told him—“you don’t need to come if you don’t want to.”

He flushed all over and said, “I didn’t mean that. Don’t you see, Alec told me to, so I don’t mind at all, ’cause it’s for him.”

“Now I realize,” she wrote, “that whenever I’ve sat down anywhere children have always come around me. Until the last year or two I’ve known all the little boys; there’s never been a time when some of Alec’s youngsters haven’t been perched in our yard, and now comes along this boy who takes me out with him as he would carry a package for Alec.”

There was nothing for it, she must make him her own. I think it was the first desire she had had in a year’s time, except the desire for the ultimate peace. She wooed him first out of his shyness, and as I would see them talking together I would see all the mannerisms of the Ellen I had known, of whom Aunt Sarah said, “She seemed about to burst into flame.” All her forgotten shy guiles that had led her before into the inaccessible hearts of boys woke up one by one. I don’t know how far she went back on the road to childhood, in these rambles, or how much she remembered of the golden time when Alec and she played truant together by the hills and brooks.

One day Tyke appeared with this command:

“You got to come up to my house, he says; ma needs help, she’s sick. He sent you this.”

He gave her a note from Alec which read:—

“Dear Ellen: It was always easier for you to do housework out of your house than in.”

That was all. “Ma’s sick; she’s got a new baby.”

So every day Ellen trudged over the mountain-road and back. No sooner was Mrs. Bascom beginning to be up and around again, and Ellen still going to see her and the baby, than Mrs. Sylvester hurt her foot a little and was kept in her chair, so more than ever fell to Ellen. She wrote:—