O Genteel Lady!/Chapter 14

by Esther Louise Forbes

Chapter XIV

Hymen Vincit Omnia

1

It was Ripley's eccentric friend, Thoreau, who said he had found, south on Cape Cod, farther down than the trains ran, a sandy paradise, permeated by the sea, stranger than much of Europe, and inhabited by men who resembled old sails come to life, women with profiles like sharp W's. 'You stand there on the Cape.' Mr. Thoreau had said, 'and put all America behind you.' The idea of a walking trip upon the Cape with a female companion seemed to the philosophical recluse an idle venture. Much better, he thought, make the trip alone, and then return to Boston and matrimony. Why marry first and drag a woman over the dunes? But it was on this latter course Ripley decided. He had seen his Lanice on Bodmin and knew that its solitary strangeness would delight her.

'I never knew a woman yet,' said Thoreau, 'who would eat a bad breakfast and get sand in her shoes merely for a sight of the grandeurs of nature. And when on the Cape you will have eels and beans and doughnuts and tea three times a day.'

'But we intend to go.'

Thoreau looked pityingly on this intelligent man whom he believed love had demented and shrugged his spare shoulders. But he willingly laid out an itinerary. 'You take a train to Orleans,' he explained, 'and from there on progress by coach. This stage is a narrow one and the three seats really hold but two each. The driver, however, always waits until he has nine passengers without taking the dimensions of any. Then, after several ineffectual slams while you time your inspirations and expirations to help, he gets the door shut.'

 

Years after, it seemed to the two Ripleys that they had seen the Cape hand in hand. True, the lady's slippers filled with sand, the food was all but poisonous, and the natives smelled much of the fish with which they dealt. Ribs of whales were woven in fences. In places even the baby-carriages were fitted with runners so as to cope with sand. The houses were few and far and the land was desolate. They went beyond the domain of the horse to a far shore where the only commerce was by water. Everywhere was the sea and the sight of its wastes and its richness. The ribs of wrecks antedating the Revolution lay in the sand. The white wings of the fishing fleet flashed like gulls on the horizon. To east and west, and finally to the north, was only the sea. The wind was cold and alive over the wastes of sand.

'Are you as happy, Lanice, as you look?'

'Oh, so much happier! My face is too long and my hair is too dark and straight to show half what I really feel. I wish I had a red face like an apple and little yellow curls, and then perhaps you could tell merely by looking at me how happy I am.'

'Haven't you paddled about in that cold water long enough? Come and sit beside me on this dune.' And he unfurled the big, plum-colored umbrella that had so far theoretically protected the lady's complexion.

2

She wore an odd green dress of glazed chintz speckled over with minute yellow blossoms. Barefooted and bareheaded she climbed the sand and spread her full skirts beside her husband.

'Are you happy, too? Your beard has grown so shaggy it is almost impossible to see what you are really thinking. Isn't this much nicer than a trip to Niagara?'

'We can come here again next summer if you like, or perhaps go over to Paris.'

'Next year, and the next year, and the year after that and the year after that! Can you imagine that this is going on forever?'

'This sense of security, completeness, this finality is, I think, marriage. You never felt so at peace with the world before, did you?'

'No,' she answered, and felt a slight, unaccountable dread for the peace she had gained and unreasonable regret for the sometimes unhappy freedom she had lost. 'I will have a great many children,' she thought, 'and move in the best intellectual circles in Concord, Cambridge, and Boston. I will study Italian and aid Sears with his translation of Dante, and hire some one to darn my stockings and go over and help those poor poverty-stricken Alcotts.'

'I feel from now on,' she said aloud, 'that life will be very correct and very certain. And I feel as if you really understand me as no one else ever has. I am like a—glass person, almost. And you know everything, even "what is best," like those unpleasant papas Miss Bigley and I used to put in our stories. You know everything, almost everything I have ever done or thought, and everything I ever will be...' Both thought guiltily as she spoke of the sombre young man from Arabia.

'Lanice,' he said, 'once you wanted to tell me something, and I was afraid to hear. But now, no matter what you say, no matter what the truth is, I promise it will make no difference. Because,' he added stubbornly, 'you are you, and nothing else matters.'

'And I love you,' said Lanice rather tigerishly, for marriage had increased a hundred fold her feeling for him, 'and he...is nothing now...nothing. Would you understand how little he is to me if I told you that for years in Amherst I was really in love with Rochester? "Jane Eyre" was considered a sinful book, but Mamma used to read it. She would try to hide it from me in a dilatory way; I mean, just lay a handkerchief over it, or put it upside down in the bookcase, so of course I read it. Well, at fifteen I loved Rochester. I could not believe he was dead, or rather had never lived. I used to plan how some day I would meet him, and how much more he'd love me than Jane. And later I loved Captain Jones, but now one seems as unreal as the other, and the girl who was so...foolishly infatuated is not me—some one else—not Mrs. Sears Ripley of Concord.' She turned her face in against his shoulder. 'Do you want me to tell you now?'

'Yes, but with your face so out of sight, how can I tell whether or not you are telling me the exact truth?' Professor Ripley long ago had discovered that Lanice could, very politely, prevaricate on occasion.

If she told him that Anthony Jones had carelessly possessed and abandoned her, would he ever trust her again? And this belief, she knew, would always hurt him, always ache far down like an incurable open wound deep in his consciousness. He would forgive her and would love her, but she loved him too much to wish to cause him pain. If she told him that Anthony's wild courtship had stopped short of actual possession, he would, she believed, feel too overwhelming a sense of his own right over her. She would never again have any little secret spot, either in her soul or her past, into which she could retreat. Through the most intricate films and fibres of her being he would gaze with clear, comprehending eyes.

'If I had found him at Winchester, then I would have...sinned in body as well as soul. But I was too late. Before God, I must be as guilty, however, as if what I really in my wicked heart...had hoped...' Ripley unaccountably began to laugh.

'Your only wickedness has been in not telling me before,' he exclaimed, 'but of course I always knew. Who but a woman, and a very good one, would consider herself as guilty of a mental crime as of a physical one? Lanice, look at me.'

He held her delicate chin between his thumb and forefinger and tipped it back so he could gaze into the inscrutable black lacquer of her eyes. Before he stopped to ponder the expression of her face, he fell to kissing it, and when he looked at her again was only conscious of the love and tenderness that suffused it.

3

The March wind staggered about the Concord house, striking at doors, shaking shutters. By its sound you knew that it smelt of melting earth and sticky buds. Inside was a dingy, not unpleasant taint of coke burning in the Franklin grate, and a lingering fragrance of dinner. Bending near the stove for warmth, the gas-lamp at her elbow, sat Mrs. Sears Ripley, crocheting just such baby socks she once had recommended for infants in the pages of 'Hearth and Home.'

Ticking clocks, reptilian hiss of fire, and without, the scampering wind.

She abandoned herself in a yawn, flinging out her long arms, shutting her eyes. Her wool work slipped to the carpet. The clocks ticked. The fire hissed. She leaned forward to pick up the sock, but instead huddled up over the fire, her elbows on her knees, her forehead in her hands.

'I am tired,' she said, 'or sleepy,' and thought of the horsehair sofa out of sight at the back of the room beyond the radiance of the gas-lamp. Sears was above in his study working on Dante. He would finish canto twelve to-night, and she would finish the sock. How deathly still is a house in spring when the wind nuzzles the doors, begging to get in. She raised her violet-shadowed eyes reproachfully towards the rattling panes beyond the nimbus of the couch. 'You wouldn't like it, wind,' she said, 'if I should open a window and let you in. Go a long way off, out to sea, or down on the Cape. Concord is not the place for you.' But the wind snuffed like a hound.

The inertia of her body was at the moment too great to allow her to pick up the dropped crocheting or cross the room to the sofa. She yawned again and stretched herself from finger tip to toe-tip, as cats yawn and stretch. Her head sank. She was happy and almost asleep. The wind, the ticking clocks, the hot noises of the fire lulled her. 'Double crochet, seam two and purl two...women knitting antimacassars against the Judgment Day. But it is not now what my fingers do, but my body.'

Sometimes it seemed strange to her that there was a live animal growing within her, something insistent that would eventually want to come into life of its own and would not care if it killed her in the process. She did not believe that she would care very much to-night if it did. She was so hypnotized, so sunk in life, she knew no fear of death. She felt no love for the 'little new soul' which the minister had told her God had entrusted to her, but its presence gave her satisfaction, a sense of well-being. Her life should be its life. The things that had hurt and delighted her should in turn hurt and delight the 'little soul.' And in turn this soul would bear or beget more souls who in turn would learn the realities of existence. She thought of Roger and the wind of human experience. She moved with a heavy twist.

Once she would have gotten up to let in the begging wind; now she felt that merely existing and letting this new life spring from her was enough. Footsteps paced the ceiling. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven; then back again, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one; and he was under his student lamp with Dante before him. She dozed.

The ticking of the French clock upon the mantel and the grandfather clock upon the stair...the ticking of her Swiss watch at her belt, and upstairs the ticking of Sears's big gold Gorham in his waistcoat pocket. One, two, three...a pause. A door opened and shut. His feet upon the stairs and he was beside her. She really heard his watch at last just above her ear, but was too sleepy to turn her head.

'Yes, dear?'

'I thought I would stop for a breathing spell. It must be past your bedtime.'

'Yes, far past.'

He moved restlessly about the room, and Lanice was dully annoyed because he seemed to have something on his mind.

'It is dark in here, Lanice.'

'I know; I like it dark.'

'And your fire is almost out.'

He seated himself upon the arm of her chair, but she moved, so he sat finally in the chair with her in his arms.

'Lanice,' he said, 'you are sure you are happy?'

'Yes.'

'You do not regret what you have given up?'

'I'll never have as nice a figure again.'

'No, no. I don't mean trifles like that. But you are a talented woman.'

She felt by the stiffness of his body that something worried him, and that he was about to speak of it.

'Ah, Lanice. This afternoon I went to your lower desk drawer to find, if I could, a map of Italy, and I found—instead—these.'

She opened her eyes listlessly and saw that he held in his thick hand the four stories that she had written in such delicious frenzy at Porlock Weir.

'Did you read them, Sears?'

'Yes.'

'You didn't like them?'

'No; they are hideous. How could you think up such things?'

'You always mistrust fiction.'

'I know, dear. It seems so exaggerated, so unimportant.'

'Well.' She knew that he realized that he held in his hand that part of her nature which he never had possessed, that part which had responded to Anthony. He was afraid of these dark, passionate, and powerful stories about satyrs gambling on the mud flats of Sjjalem, picking up mussels and throwing down the shells, and mortal women who loved devils and bore monsters, and little boys driven into ecstasy by the nymphs in the birch trees by the brook.

'Think how terrible the shock would be if your child should grow up and find these stories, and realize that her mother wrote them.'

Lanice moved slightly within his arms. At some future day she might care, but now she did not. Why didn't he tell her to destroy her files of 'Hearth and Home'? Those were the stories that disgraced her.

'But they've never been published; she'll never find them.'

'Oh, my dear. This afternoon, at your desk, I had a premonition of this child, your daughter with all your loveliness, a little girl of fifteen, coming as I did to your desk, finding these stories and reading them.'

'That was why they shocked you so, my dear. You read them, not from your point of view, but from that of a fifteen-year-old child. Truly, Sears, is that a fair basis for literature?'

'I know, but your daughter...'

He amazed her sometimes with his absorption in this child which, in due time, she should bear him. It was already a person to him, and from the first he had been sure of its sex. Either his enslavement to his wife made him desire to see her reincarnate in the next generation, or, being a man of habit, he expected first a daughter and then a son because this had been Prunella's conduct.

'What do you want me to do, Sears?'

'Nothing, my love, but I hope that you will wish to...'

Her face was pressed against his ear, and her eyes were shut. She felt him glance up and towards the fire.

'Burn them?'

'Yes.'

But still she paused a moment; inertia, and the pleasure of inertia came over her.

'I am too sleepy to-night. I'm not quite myself. Let me wait until to-morrow, and then I'll know what I really want to do.'

He said nothing, and she listened to his watch ticking within his pocket, to the shambling wind outside. She moved her head a little and listened to the beating of his heart, deep buried beneath the waistcoat she had embroidered and the fine shirts she had made him, deep within its heavy cage of ribs, through which sometime the worms would crawl...She started up a little wildly at the thought and turned towards him her goblin smile. Wantonly she took the manuscript and flung it upon the glowing coals.

'But it will not burn,' said Sears, 'unless it is crumpled up.'

She lay back upon him, closed her eyes, feeling the twists of his body as he managed both to hold her and the poker. The heat sprang up and scorched her slightly. She opened her eyes. The room suddenly was bright. She saw the sofa and the window she had not opened. The gas-lamp looked sickly and green in comparison to the sturdy orange flame. The room sank back into comparative darkness.

'You are almost asleep, my dear.'

'Yes, almost.'

'I'll carry you up to bed.'

But they still waited until the woman slept in her husband's arms, then he reached out and thriftily turned off the gas, picked up his burden in his strong arms, and, looking rather like a fairy bear with a captive sleeping princess, creaked up the stairs on heavy tiptoe.