School life had closed. College life had not opened. What could she do? What, indeed, could her mother do, even if she had wished to fulfill her daughter’s hope? Aunt Esther and Aunt Ella, strong in unaccustomed agreement, put their feet down, a solid four, of quadrupedal firmness, in final refusal. As they paid Esther Ella’s bills, and her mother’s, there was no shadow of a chance, unless she ran away and “put herself through college,” which seemed beyond any reasonable determination.
A whole year went by, one of those endless, priceless years of girlhood without anything happening, a year that seemed to the quiet girl, with the patient mouth and the smoldering eyes, equal to any ten. She read within the lines allowed her. She played decorous ladies’ tennis with the Dacy girls next door. She visited, solemnly, in the family carriage, with her mother or one of her aunts, sitting quietly in dim parlors and making artificial conversation. She had her church work, and found some faint resource in that, but her “vocation” no longer called.
Every year for two weeks in August they all went solemnly to the White Mountains to a small old-fashioned hotel in a little-frequented valley. The rest of the year was spent in the cumbrous routine of the big old house, where three house servants and a “man,” who came by the day, did the work, where Mrs. Challis “managed” and both the old ladies interfered, and where there was no single glimmer of interest or occupation, amusement or hope, for a young girl.
Then Morgan Widfield came.
The Dacy girls next door had a cousin in town who went to Harvard; the cousin had a friend who visited him. Both came to call on the Dacy girls — and Esther Ella happened to be there. Mr. Widfield played a set of tennis with Esther Ella as partner, and a warm color lit her quiet face. They won, he praised her playing, and the dreamy eyes waked up in merry flashes.
He said good-bye to her last. He held her hand a shade longer than was necessary — how a girl’s mind weighs and measures these tiny things. That night the garden seemed a wilderness of fragrant mystery; a slim, young moon rode proudly, triumphing over swift hosts of flying clouds; there was a stir and a glimmer to life after all.
The Dacys saw a good deal of their cousin and his friend, and Mrs. Dacy, whose motherly heart had a warm though conventional corner for the lonely girl next door, and whose daughters were, one engaged, and the other flatly refusing to be, saw to it that Esther Ella was counted in as often as possible.
Mrs. Challis observed keenly and with satisfaction. Having learned much wisdom in her precarious position, she presently animadverted upon young men in general and Morgan Widfield in particular, so that both the aunts became interested. They solemnly called on Mrs. Dacy and made due inquiries; they solemnly arranged a tea party, and invited Mrs. Dacy, both the Dacy girls, the young man one of them was engaged to, the Dacy cousin, and Morgan Widfield.
Old mahogany, old silver, old china and old glass shone brightly; the menu of that old-fashioned “supper” involved neither meat nor vegetables and therefore no acrimony; the conversation ran light and merry among so many young people; and Esther Ella glowed and sparkled with gentle happiness till both her aged relatives nodded sagely and concluded that the child was really growing up.
Other mothers in the always undermanned and overwomanned town gave little parties too. There were small picnics and excursions, visits to vaunted hills, and rowing trips, where young men showed bare, brown arms and sturdy necks, and young women unfurled rose-lined parasols behind fetching hats, and trailed rosy fingertips in the water.
Young Widfield was a general favorite, but so, to her surprise, was Esther Ella, now. Her quiet beauty was illuminated from within, her habitual repression was lifted, and she flashed and sparkled as wittily as any of them. Her talk was richer, too, from its wide background of books and years of dreaming. She became, in a modest local sense, a belle. Before she knew what was happening to her Julius Dacy proposed, and to her startled little cry: “Oh, no! I am so sorry — but I couldn’t!” he demanded sharply: “Is there another man?”
“You have no right to ask,” she told him, but she knew that there was another man, who had not asked her, who was even now bending low beside the minister’s daughter.
She turned cold again, cold and still, quiet of mouth and eye, going home early from that picnic with Olive Dacy, the determinedly single one. She could eat no supper, found enough of a headache to excuse her stealing away early, and from the closeness of her little room slipped softly into the fragrant dusk of the wide garden. Down at the very end was a tiny summerhouse, shadowed with heavy vines, and there, leaning across the little table, she laid her head on her white arms and sobbed as if life had closed on her forever.
A movement in the vines and bushes against the Dacy wall, a jar on the gravel — someone had jumped down. Before she could catch her breath to cry out she heard the one voice in the world close beside her.
“I thought it was you,” he said. “I heard someone — you’re not crying — not crying when I love you so! Oh, Esther — will you marry me?”
“How can you love anybody with such a horrid name?” she asked him by and by.
“It’s a lovely name,” he said. “Esther Ella — Estella — Stella — my Star!” And the load of a lifetime rolled away with his words.
“Oh!” she breathed later. “I’ve been so long — alone! So miserably alone! There wasn’t — anybody.”
“I was coming,” he assured her. “I was coming as quick as I could — are you glad to see me?”
“I feel as if I’d just got home!” she told him.
And then he put his arms around her, both arms, and held her close, and said:
“My little girl!”
CHAPTER 2
It was characteristic of Esther Ella Challis that she had never herself sought to alter the clumsy name bestowed upon her by ruthless relatives. She scorned such pretense as she scorned artificial aids to beauty. No powders, creams and perfumes were on her toilet table; in reality she never had a toilet table; the top of a high old “bureau,” with its two little drawers and limited center space, sufficed her. Her mother had always despised nicknames, and passed on to her the same attitude. But when Morgan Widfield rechristened her as “his star,” the girl’s whole soul went out to him in exquisite gratitude.
That he knew! And he understood! This was what overwhelmed her.
There is no deeper longing in the heart of youth than that for appreciation. It is not approval only that young people desire, though that is balm to their souls, but recognition — to be known for what they are. They will stand harsh criticism, severe condemnation if discerning and intimate, better than neglect and indifference.
As we grow older and lose so many of our delicate distinctions, learning to curl up what are left and hide them safely, we no longer seek so earnestly for that unattainable pleasure — full understanding.
As a matter of fact, Morgan had never given a thought to the girl’s feeling as to what she was called. He had been greatly attracted to her on their first meeting, and when he learned her name the consolidation of syllables was pleasantly obvious. He had called her “Stella” in his own heart from the first, not because he thought she would like it, but because he did.
He was a fine, vigorous, unimaginative young male, healthy and clean of body and mind, already making good in his business, which was leather. His people were from the South, a large family, cheery and kind. He loved them all, but his main interests were naturally those of his business. Aside from all the efforts, hopes, cares and ambitions of his working life, however, he had always kept a fair place in his heart for wife and home.
When he found Stella that place was filled. He delighted in her grave and quiet beauty, in the delicate radiance that glanced about her when she was vividly happy, in the quality of her mind, as far as he could test it.
Now this fair Stella of his adoration, little as he or anyone else suspected it, and in spite of all her honesty, had a “hidden vice.” Not to her mother, her minister, o
r her nearest girlfriend, Olive Dacy, had Esther Ella ever confided her secret sin. To her lover she longed to confess, but dared not. She made tentative approaches, asking him if he had read In the Days of the Comet.
“No,” said Morgan, shortly, “and I don’t want to. I don’t care at all for that pseudoscientific nonsense, and I hope you don’t. Besides — some of his books are unfit to read. I hope you agree with me — dear?” he added, noting the shadow that clouded her white forehead.
“I hope I shall agree with you always,” she said, and slipped from the works of this author to the discussion of others less likely to offend. Especially they talked of poetry by the hour, and read poetry to each other with an appreciation that was more than literary. He brought her gifts of verse as well as flowers, small, richly bound books, works, many of which, for all those hidden misdemeanors, she had never seen.
This was Stella’s sin. In spite of her rigid upbringing, in spite of her decorously perfect education and strictly revised associates, in spite even of her own delicate and steely conscience, she was a reader of forbidden books. This by no means refers to books under the ban of libraries — such she had never seen — but to an eager omnivorous reading of all she could reach in the well-governed public library of the town and in the bookcases of her friends. Her young mind was filled with a far more catholic range of literature than her mother and teachers knew. She had held to this indulgence defiantly, with some of the demand for freedom of thought which had brought her ancestors to this land, and with, perhaps, some of the extra enjoyment which belongs to forbidden fruit.
From this wide, unknown land within she now came forth, eager and happy, to greet her lover and share her inner life with him. But before they had gone far together she found that his inner world was different indeed from hers. It was not only that his college training had familiarized him with sterner work, and a fuller classical knowledge, but that his home background, the big library he grew up in, had made him more familiar with the great men of the nineteenth and even the eighteenth century than with the uneasy heterodox thinkers of today. On the other hand, he knew the practical affairs of his time, the movements of business and politics, with a fullness which seemed to the girl almost omniscient. It is easy to attribute vast wisdom to one who speaks easily on subjects of which the hearer knows nothing.
Over the happy intimacies of lovers a special angel watches. Each longs to please the other, and every subtle instinct urges forward the thought, word, action that meets agreement, and draws back into temporary oblivion whatever makes for difference. It is not dishonesty. There is no faintest wish to deceive. With voluminous soul-searchings each seeks to exhibit the inmost, the utmost, to the other, and yet only succeeds in bringing forward what the other wishes to see. This is a beautiful provision of nature for the furtherance of the immediate end.
They were very happy. There was no opposition to their marriage. Mrs. Challis, severe and concentrated mother though she was, could not disapprove of this irreproachable young man. Mrs. Widfield, genial and diffuse in her rich maternity, took the girl to her heart, and Stella, with a queer sense of disloyalty, felt as if she were an orphan who had found a home.
The aunts experienced an absorbing interest in the affair. It was a long time since they had had a wedding to prepare for, and discuss. In the first days of Mr. Widfield’s visible attentions, they had made it their business to look up his family, and had deputed a prosperous nephew to report as to his business. Both proved desirable. The good ladies then devoted themselves to the matter of the trousseau and the wedding gifts, and prepared for it with a voluminosity as to linen, and a heaviness as to silver, of an almost pre-Victorian savor. The whole Livingstone connection seemed suddenly aware that the “little Challis girl” had grown up and was about to be a credit to them.
“She is marrying very well,” they said, “one of the Maryland Widfields — his mother was a Royal of Virginia — very nice people indeed.”
Wherefore the linen and the silver increased, with clocks, bronzes, jewels, and other treasures, which accumulated in the long, dark Livingstone drawing room to an appalling degree.
Stella looked them over almost with terror. She had never occupied her mind with dreams of housekeeping, and never had any to do in reality. Now her blossoming hopes were all for a small, sweet home, intimate, dainty, utterly hers and his. This incursion of other persons’ tastes and opulences upon her own first home jarred subtly. She was grateful, too; it seemed strangely sweet to have so many persons care for her — persons she had scarcely known, some she had never met. It all became part of the undulating, rosy atmosphere in which her old life, so long and cold and dark as it looked, disappeared to a vanishing point as rapidly as the track behind the observation car.
Morgan was having his share of new sensations, too. The whole sweet reverence of man for woman made him her loving slave. The whole long habit of conquest and possession made him her loving master. New hopes, new ambitions, tendernesses, a sense of overwhelming consecration, astonished him as they spread wide within. Life looked new to him, too, beautiful and holy. He despised his own lower moments, and was fully honest when he vowed he was not worthy to touch her velvet-bowed slipper.
And she bowed her smooth head with overflowing eyes, and said: “My King!”
Nevertheless there were times when Stella felt a little sense of loneliness and hunger in some corner of her mind that he did not seem to see. She even mustered courage as their wedding loomed nearer to disburden her conscience of its one guilt.
“Dear,” she said, “I’m not quite what you think me. I have to tell you something. It is very hard.”
He lifted his head for a flashing moment and looked at her, then laughed lovingly.
“Tell me the worst!” he said. “Your worst is better than my best!”
She refused to be so comforted, and laboriously explained that she had not confined herself to the range of reading allowed, but had read everything she could reach — even books of which he disapproved.
“Such as—” he suggested evenly.
She named her most appalling list, and he drew her to him and kissed her fondly.
“You dear!” he said. “You precious little silver-souled child! Just because I don’t care for those fellows is no reason you shouldn’t read them if you want to. You haven’t been feeling badly over that, have you?”
That she had, made it all the sweeter to be so shriven and absolved.
The girl approached her marriage with ambitions so luminously high as to be beyond human attainment, but that she did not know.
She would so live, she vowed in the still moonlight, kneeling by her window with the warm night wind stirring her soft hair, that he should never have cause to blame her. She would never criticize him, never say a word unjust or unkind, never oppose him in anything that was right. And he would never ask of her anything that was not right — that she knew. She would be faithful in thought, in feeling, in the last extreme of delicate reticence. No other man existed in her world. She would so love him, so serve him, so surround him with comfort and tenderest care, with companionship and sympathy and unfailing love, that when they were old together, he should say: “My wife — you have always made me happy!”
The tears ran over, the happy tears of deep, unutterable love.
Vaguely, behind all this, in deeps within deeps, glowed the high hope of motherhood.
They were married in October.
A wedding journey is a strange preamble to married life. Some long-surviving instinct of a nuptial flight, some impulse dating from the time of “marriage by capture” must actuate us in this custom. We will not speak of those sad little journeys in which the road to heaven plunges suddenly, and irrevocably downward, or even of those wherein the heaven-kissing hills turn out to be an endless, flat, hard plain, not overflowery — the kind so well portrayed in an old Punch picture, where the dreary pair sit on the dreary beach and the bored lady says:
“I wish some
friend would happen along.” To which the bored gentleman replies: “Yes, or even an enemy!”
The happier a wedding journey is, the less it prepares for the practical life to follow. The girl is taken from the surroundings to which she has always been accustomed, and enters upon a strange world — steamships, railroad trains, hotels, a whirling change of scene, of which she knows nothing, and in which he takes every care of her. He is her guardian, champion, “guide, companion, and friend.” He devotes himself to her; her will is law; his time, strength, his interest and attention are hers. They two are together, unutterably happy, and the rest of the world is merely a place of amusement and observation.
Then they go to housekeeping.
How can a girl from Springfield, Massachusetts, choose a home in New York City? She knows nothing of the social values, or even the mere topographical conveniences. She would never dream of the difference one block makes to the average New Yorker — one block from that necessary evil, “the L,” or the unnecessarily evil “subway.”
Morgan had chosen; Morgan’s mother and sisters had furnished — largely with wedding presents, and had even engaged the maids, colored, of course — they had never had any others.
So with love and good cheer, with all the necessary and usual adjuncts of married life, Stella Widfield began housekeeping.
She was just twenty.
Since Morgan had come — and she had known him six months — he had never been long away from her. In all the wistful, hopeful, fearful days before he spoke, she had thought of him almost continually, having, for that matter, no other business. Since they were engaged he had been with her almost daily, and on that dreamlike flight by sea and land he had been wholly hers.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 70
