Leave Her to Heaven

by Ben Ames Williams

  ‘Well, I knew a lot of people had found — comfort in it; and I needed comfort, so I decided to give it a try.’ He added honestly: ‘It did me good, too; or at least it made me feel better. I kept remembering how many people before me had reverently studied those pages. I even read the history of the Book. It takes me a year or two or three to write a novel, but it took seventeen hundred years to write the Bible. Scores of men collaborated in writing it, and hundreds of other men gave their whole lives to copying it and checking the copies for errors. They were called scribes, and their job was to make the copies, and then they counted every letter in every book, and how many times each letter occurred. That was so they’d be sure to catch any mistakes. A book that has been treasured as faithfully as that, for hundreds of years before the first printing press came along, is bound to have meat in it.’

  Listening, seeing the earnestness in his eyes, the quick eagerness in his tones, she knew surely and deeply that she loved him and would always love him; and she smiled in proud tenderness and he saw her smile and asked: ‘What is it?’

  ‘I was just — being glad for you,’ she evaded.

  He chuckled. ‘That’s a favorite trick of yours,’ he remembered. ‘Being glad for other people.’ Her heart lifted its beat, and he said comfortably: ‘You’re pretty swell, you know.’ She waited, half-breathless — wondering if he too had seen the flash of truth; but he began to put his manuscript away. ‘I’d keep you up all night if you let me,’ he confessed. ‘You’ll have to learn to send me home!’

  They had, that second winter after Ellen’s death, many such hours together, and the pleasure they thus found insulated them against the world in which they lived. He usually declined the invitations that came his way, and she kept her time free for him. If he had put off an insistent hostess by pleading a previous engagement — only to take Ruth into the country for an afternoon of skiing — they avoided being seen, dining afterward at some little frequented inn; and their hours together assumed a clandestine quality at which they laughed like amused conspirators.

  When spring began to come, they planned to have many picnic suppers, to drive down to remote beaches on the shore or to hidden lakes he knew, with steaks or chops to broil over an open fire; but for a while the weather served them ill. Not till the day before Easter did the signs promise a settled fine day for the morrow. Saturday evening he called her on the phone.

  ‘I tried to get you this afternoon,’ he said. ‘How about Humarock tomorrow? We’ll cook our dinner on the beach. If it’s as warm as it is today, we might even swim.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Dick.’

  ‘Can’t make it?’ There was disappointment in his tone.

  ‘I — like to go to church on Easter Sunday,’ she explained. As a matter of fact she went regularly; but this winter, whenever he proposed a Sunday expedition, she had agreed, making no objection.

  ‘That’s right; it is Easter, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He hesitated, and she thought afterward she might have willed his next word. ‘See here,’ he challenged, ‘is there any rule against my going with you?’

  Her hand pressed her throat in a quick happy gesture. ‘Why no, I don’t think so,’ she said gravely. ‘Churches don’t have many rules, you know.’

  ‘What time?’ he asked, and she told him. ‘I’ll pick you up,’ he promised, and chuckled. ‘I haven’t been to church since 1 was a boy in Sunday school.’

  ‘Then it’s high time you did go!’ she said lightly, but she turned away from the telephone in a quick gladness so great she found it hard to breathe.

  – VI –

  That picnic on the beach was only postponed. Ruth was happy in doing with him whatever he chose to do, and there were long afternoons of quiet talk, and still dusky evenings when they sat late by the cooling embers of the fire over which he had cooked their supper, their low tones murmuring under the stars. They drove sometimes for mile on mile, abandoning the traffic routes for unfrequented roads. Often, having no destination in mind, they let chance decide their course, taking the first left turning and then the first right at random, until perhaps they came to a dead-end road and had to retrace their way. Whenever they discovered any particularly attractive spot, whoever was driving at the time claimed — and had — credit for that discovery. Thus Ruth could boast of ‘My place in Lincoln,’ or of ‘My place down back of Sudbury,’ or of ‘My place by the river out in Sherborn,’ and Harland had an equal score.

  One such place, for no obvious reason, held for each of them an equal attraction. In Lincoln — Ruth was at the wheel that day — chance led them to follow a road which eventually lost its firm-surfaced respectability and degenerated into sandy ruts, descending at an easy grade through oak scrub and scattered pines to come out at last upon the border of a grassy bog through which the river meandered. Here the road ended, but a blue heron feeding in the shallows heard their voices and rose to fly heavily away, and they watched it follow the stream’s course for a while and then settle in again; and Ruth said:

  ‘Why don’t we have supper here? I like this place.’

  ‘So do I,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know just why.’

  ‘It reminds me of the lovely intervales along that river where we — and Ellen — went fishing.’

  ‘We might be just as far from civilization as we were there,’ he agreed. ‘Except for this road — and it’s not much of a road — there’s no sign of human beings anywhere.’

  They alighted from the car and walked to the riverside, and a fish that was almost certainly a trout — Harland thought it was a big brown — sucked down a struggling fly. ‘Next time I’ll bring my rod,’ he said. ‘If that fellow shows again, I’ll give him a try.’

  Back near the car they found a grassed slope shaded by small oaks, and sprawled there for an hour or two, Harland talking of his work and Ruth listening and offering some comment now and then. At sunset he built a small safe fire, and after their cooking was done the fire became a smudge to banish mosquitoes, and they stayed beside it till full dark, reluctant to end this quiet hour. When it was time to depart and they were in the car, Harland before starting the engine looked at her smilingly:

  ‘You’re good company, Ruth,’ he said.

  ‘So are you,’ she assured him, happily content.

  ‘We get along, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ she assented. ‘We get along.’

  Turning homeward, they drove in silence till they came back to travelled ways again, and Ruth found this silence deeply exciting, like being in a warm, still, friendly darkness with the sense of a well-loved presence near. It was, she suspected, like being married and waking in the night and knowing your dear husband was asleep beside you, and thinking of the strength in him, and the gentleness, and of his steady, friendly love for you; and she smiled at herself for the thought, yet treasured it, all the same.

  The next time they met, Harland was disturbed about his book. She had felt in him for some weeks an increasing dissatisfaction with what he was doing; but now that feeling found words. ‘I think the real trouble is with me,’ he confessed. ‘I’m — changing, Ruth, in some way not yet clear; changing from day to day. I realized it today when I went back to begin revising what I’ve done thus far, before going on to write the last hundred pages. If I were writing the first part today, I wouldn’t write it the way it stands.’ She said nothing, and he went on: ‘I’m afraid the job is a patchwork. When I began it, I was a cocksure, arrogant youngster — and I thought myself ever so sophisticated and wise. Then after Ellen and I were married I was tremendously stimulated, saw — or thought I saw — deeper into my characters: and I rewrote a lot, and changed a lot. And now this last winter — after leaving it untouched for months — I’ve revised it again; but the result is like the product of those story conferences in Hollywood. At least three different authors have collaborated on this job. All of them were me; but they were three different men, just the same. The boy who began this boo
k might have finished it and been satisfied with it; or Ellen’s husband might have finished it. But I don’t believe I can. I’m about ready to junk the whole thing.’ And he asked helplessly: ‘What’s happened to me?’ He laughed. ‘The world’s beginning to seem to me a pretty fine place, full of fine people. When I read what I’ve written, I don’t believe a damned word of it.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re tired, stale.’ Her pulse was firm with pride.

  ‘Tired?’ He laughed again. ‘Why, I never felt so well in my life. Not only physically, but mentally and spiritually too. And I’m not stale either. I’m anxious to finish this book because there’s another one in me all ready to be written and I’m eager to get at it. It will be the sort of book you want me to write; just a straightforward story about simple, average, normal men and women. I think I can see them as brave and beautiful, and make the reader see them so. But damn it, I’ve got to finish this job first.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, watching him happily.

  He grinned. Well — I’ll be damned if I know,’ he said. ‘Except that I hate being licked.’

  ‘If you don’t want to finish it, that’s not being licked. Sometimes it takes more bravery to accept defeat than to fight on to victory — especially if it’s to a victory that should never be won.’

  He smiled and touched her hand. ‘You’re swell,’ he said. ‘You’ve a philosophy that can meet just about any problem.’

  ‘Why don’t you lay the book aside?’ she suggested. ‘Get Leick and go away fishing for a month, then come back and read it again and see how it strikes you.’

  He nodded. ‘I may do that,’ he said. He added thoughtfully: ‘You know, some day I want to go back to that river where the fire so nearly caught us; but I’ll wait till the forest has had time to grow again.’

  She had suggested that he go away, but she was glad he did not do so. He stayed in Boston and they went instead, once and then again, to that road’s end by the river in Lincoln; and he tried to cajole the big trout into taking a fly, and never succeeded and did not greatly care. The third time, they were sitting in the moonlit dark beside their smudge fire when another car came down the road and saw theirs and backed and turned and drove away again, and they heard a boy’s voice and a girl’s laughter; and when the car was gone he said in a puzzled wonder:

  ‘Now there’s a sample of the change in me, Ruth. Once I’d have been contemptuous of them and of their cheap flirtation. Now I’m remembering that they’re lovers, and that what they do is a part of their search for beauty.’

  She nodded understandingly, and the green grass which he had put smotheringly on the fire dried and threw up a little flame; and in its light she saw his eyes turn to her and hold hers, and her heart beat hard.

  ‘Ruth,’ he asked at last, in grave inquiry: ‘Do you suppose I’m in love with you?’

  For a long time, minutes on end, she did not reply, not trusting her voice, feeling herself tremble inwardly with great happiness, knowing — yet still not quite believing — that the moment for which for weeks now she had prayed was thus simply come upon them. She did not speak, yet her eyes met his, and he waited for her answer. His question, even though she had dreamed of the moment when this word would be spoken between them, had surprised her, as a lightning flash surprises, and with an equal illumination. In that sudden brightness, just as in the lightning’s instant glare the visible world is all revealed, she saw clearly many things not hitherto clearly seen or comprehended but now completely clear; and in the long silence which followed his word, just as after the flash in the heavens the eye retains for a while a perfect picture of all that was so briefly seen, so did her clear vision persist. When she answered him it was steadily and honestly.

  ‘I think so, Dick, yes,’ she said. ‘I hope so, because I love you.’

  There was a pulse beat in the silence, and the flame burned brightly and then died, so that half-dark came between them. He plucked grass and laid it on the embers and darkness was complete, and in that dark he spoke at last, his question like a thought finding words:

  ‘What is it to love a woman?’ After an instant he went on: ‘Did I love Ellen? I knew, one night at the fishing lodge in New Mexico, that she would marry me if I wished, but I decided I did not want to marry her. Then she and I went through that adventure in the canyon together, and there were moments when I thought we’d never win clear; and something woke in me. It wasn’t just — appetite. It was more permanent than that. I wanted to possess her, not for a moment but forever; wanted her to be — as the word goes — mine. By the time we reached the ranch, that feeling was beginning to evaporate; but then, suddenly, we were married and — she was everything I wanted, all compacted into one small, lovely body.’

  Ruth thought he had forgotten she was here beside him as he went on. ‘She made me feel tremendous,’ he said. ‘Omnipotent and omniscient and enormously full of potentialities. We were congenial as two people equally intoxicated are congenial, each stimulated by the other. We never had a quarrel, you know; not in the usual sense of the word. It’s true we — parted; but even that seemed normal in our relationship.’ He was silent and she thought there was hesitation in him, as though he considered saying something which presently he decided not to say; for he went on: ‘But Ruth, I don’t feel about you the way I did about her.’

  She said at once: ‘I know.’ Gladness filled her.

  ‘If I loved her, then I certainly don’t love you.’ The flame blazed up again and she saw his sober countenance. ’I’m happy with you, completely so,’ he said. ‘With you I feel — good. Virtuous. And I like that. With you, I like people. With her, you know, other people didn’t count. It was always Ellen who filled my world. But you — being with you — just sharpens my appreciation of other people, of places and scenes and things. Everything is more beautiful or more interesting when I see it with you. Is that — loving you?’

  ‘Love’s just a word,’ she suggested. ‘Perhaps it’s harder than most words to define.’

  ‘I know. You can’t get all the connotations. Love means to each one what he has called love in his thoughts. I would have said I loved Ellen. But loving her was an end in itself. Loving you — if I love you — is only a beginning.’ He spoke quietly. ‘Forgive me, but I want to make you understand. If I embraced Ellen, that embrace was everything, complete in itself. But if I ever hold you in my arms, to do so will be a part of something a great deal bigger than ourselves; no more than an incident in a great plan. My love for Ellen ended in loving her. My love for you would be only one aspect of our life together, important only because it promised the babies we would have some day.’ And he said in a low tone: ‘You’d be my wife. Ellen was never quite that, Ruth.’

  The flames still burned between them as she spoke. ‘We will be happy, Dick.’

  ‘Do you want to marry me?’

  She said, like a ritual, gravely: ‘I want to be always with you, living together, doing what life asks of us together. I want the duties, and the responsibilities, and the tasks; I want the successes and the joys, the griefs and the gladnesses; I want to receive all from you, and to give all to you. I want us to be one person, my dear. If that’s marriage, yes, I want to marry you.’

  He rose and with his foot scuffed out the little fire, thoughtfully pressing the embers till the last spark was extinguished, taking the coffee pot to the riverside to fill it with water and returning to pour the water on the already cooling brands. Ruth too rose and stood waiting in the shadowed dark, till at last he came to her and faced her for a silent moment and then took her in his arms.

  Her blood quickened then to meet the quickening of his, and after an instant she laughed in breathless happiness, and then her laughter ended in a whispering rapture, and when at last their lips parted, he said huskily and reverently:

  ‘Oh thank God! Thank God!’

  ‘I thank you too, God,’ said Ruth softly, and their lips and their hearts gave thanks together.

  – VII –
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br />   They were married a few days later, in the vestry of the church where since Easter Sunday Harland had more than once joined Ruth in attendance. There were no wedding guests. When this question came to be considered, Harland left the decision to Ruth.

  ‘There aren’t more than half a dozen people I’d ask, unless we had a mob,’ he confessed. ‘But we’ll do the thing in style if you say the word.’

  ‘If I asked six people I’d have to ask sixty,’ she reflected. ‘And if I asked two I’d have to ask six.’ It was simpler, they decided, to go quietly together and alone to the minister. ‘After all,’ Ruth reminded him, ‘we’re the chiefly interested parties.’ And she said: ‘It’s curious, I suppose, that you and I haven’t any intimate friends. As long as Mother was alive, I didn’t go out much; but I’ve been in circulation for two years now. Of course, I know dozens of girls — and men too; but I’ve been a sort of lone wolf!’ Her eyes met his. ‘Even while you were away, Dick, I think I must have been absorbed in you.’

  ‘Did you suspect it?’

  ‘No, honestly I didn’t. Looking back now, I can see that I began to love you that day before the great fire. Remember, when we went exploring in the woods? I was happy with you that day. It was a gay, light happiness, like bubbles in wine held up against the sun, and I’d never felt that way before. But I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t feel it again till the day you came home.’ She smiled. ‘You’d kissed me before, in just the same way, but when you kissed me that day you came home, it was not just because I was Ellen’s sister. It was because I was me.’

  He nodded. ‘I felt the same way, that day by the river; but I’d felt something like it before.’ He added in a thoughtful tone: ‘I remember a night in New Mexico, the night Ellen stayed up in the mountains till morning. We were sitting on the veranda — Mrs. Robie and I — and you came in the darkness to tell us not to worry. I felt it then, felt the friendliness and strength in you, and I liked the way you walked.’ He asked her seriously: ‘Do you suppose I was in love with you then, and all the time afterward?’