A Prologue to Love

by Taylor Caldwell

  Slowly the unseeing eyes saw the thin and slatternly girl, saw her not as her servant, sly and treacherous and pilfering, but as a stranger, someone she did not know, someone who suffered and was afraid, whose young hands were already worn with work, whose young lips already drooped plaintively, whose attitude was already wary. The pain began to recede from Caroline’s breast and throat. She wanted to weep. She murmured hoarsely, “I thought — I thought I heard someone call me from your room. The room where an old friend — ”

  “What?” said Maizie eagerly. (She was already relating, in her mind, this incident in the large general store in the village, where customers loved to hear tales of the ‘old lady’ with all the money, and who would whoop in ugly and delighted laughter when the tale was done.)

  “I was asleep,” said Caroline, “and dreaming.” Why did the girl look at her with such a gleam in her eye, the gleam that shines in a dog’s eyes the moment it begins to lick its lips?

  “Oh,” said Maizie, disappointed. (But she could tell how the old lady had screamed and yelled and come running out of her room like Old Scratch was after her.)

  “It’s late,” Caroline mumbled. “The fire must be out downstairs. Put more coal on it. I’ll have my supper there.” She began to slide along the wall, for her legs were trembling and bending, and her body felt so weighty that she could hardly move it. She found the banister and went down into the darkness, and Maizie followed, muttering. Why, it wasn’t more than four, and the old lady didn’t eat until seven or later. Well, an early supper and the dishes would be over, and she could go back to her room and sleep again, early. It was wonderful to sleep.

  The house groaned and creaked like a ship in a great storm, and the gale roared about it like an enormous beast looking for an entry. It was very cold downstairs, the fire almost out. Shivering, Maizie knelt on the hearth and shoveled more coal onto the embers. Her dress, once a bit of cheap finery the color of cherries, glistened sleazily in the light of the one lamp she had lit, and it was dark with spots and dusty with grime. Her long hair, the color of bleached straw, was frizzed and bunched untidily all over her head; it resembled nothing more than a heap of lint. She had thin shoulders and a gaunt neck, though she was only in her mid-twenties, a large and crooked nose, a little dip of a chin, and big, watery blue eyes. Caroline, in her usual chair near the fire, saw all this, the big elbows, the slack and shapeless body, the line of thin thighs under the crude fabric of the imitation-silk dress, the ankles in black and mended stockings, the patched button boots, the chest without the soft curves of young womanhood, the fleshless waist.

  Caroline forgot herself, the memory of Beth’s voice, loud and clear and loving in Tom’s room, her own pain and her awareness of coming dissolution. She saw Maizie (and what was her surname?) and she saw her with a suffering clarity. The dirty hands — had they ever fondled anyone? Had that sullen profile ever smiled with innocent pleasure or joy? Had those petulant thin lips ever kissed? Did the girl know how piteous she was, how the very sight of her tormented her mistress and filled her with sorrow?

  “Maizie,” said Caroline, and her voice was still dwindled and feeble. “Have you ever thought of marrying?”

  Maizie gaped up at her from the hearth. The old lady had never, not once, ever spoken to her unnecessarily, had never indicated that she was alive, had never seemed to think ‘that a person got tired in this big old house with all the rooms and the dirt’.

  The girl, after that long gaping, turned back to the fire. “Well, yes,” she said sullenly in her whining voice. “But how, Miz Sheldon? A girl’s got to have a little money, don’t she? Especially when she got to give some of her wages to Ma, with the three kids still not grown, and everything costin’ so much all of a sudden, with that war. Wasn’t fair.”

  “Nothing is,” said Caroline. “For anyone. Didn’t you know that, Maizie?’’

  Maizie peeped at her slyly. Oho. Easy for her to say, with all that money! The rich folks was always talking that way. Like the minister. “All the best things in life are free.” You bet they wasn’t! How was a girl going to get married if she didn’t have the money to buy sheets and pillowcases and blankets and tablecloths and some ‘silver’ and a ‘tressoh’? Fellers didn’t get married these days if a girl didn’t have a few dollars in the bank, especially not around here in this godforsaken Lyme. They went and looked for Boston girls who had good jobs in the stores or way off in the textile mills, and they left Lyme and got theirselves jobs, too, and they never came back. Never.

  “What would you do if you had some money?” asked Caroline in that faint and difficult voice.

  The gleam came back into Maizie’s eyes, and she sat on her heels, and a wistful glow of daydreaming made her plain and colorless face almost pretty.

  “Why, Miz Sheldon, I’d give Ma half of it, and then I’d buy myself some nice things in Boston and then I’d stay in Boston and get a good job!”

  Caroline was silent. The gale became enormously imminent; it screamed in all the chimneys of the house. The windows were only gray blotches. Then Caroline said, “You could have gone to Boston before this, Maizie, and found some good work if you had wanted to do it; you had the choice, the free will.”

  Maizie stared, the glow going quickly from her sullen face.

  “Yes,” said Caroline, as if to herself, “you were born here, it is true. But you could have left; you could have made your life quite different. You had only to will it and then act on your will. It isn’t your circumstances, which you could not have helped, but what you did with your circumstances — your choice.”

  Is that so? Maizie said angrily in herself. You try bein’ born in a broken-down old house with a god-awful dad who didn’t give a damn about you, and wearin’ old clothes all the time and never havin’ a cent, and eatin’ cheap food and never goin’ anywhere, and nobody wantin’ you! You try it! You don’t know what it’s like, never havin’ a chance.

  So, thought Caroline, I have answered myself, too, and now I understand without any doubt at all. I was no better than this weak girl here, who is enraged at me and clattering coals on my fire. Then she was filled with pity again, and she did not know if she was pitying her young self or Maizie.

  “What you want for supper?” Maizie said. “All we got is some of that tapioca puddin’ from last night and some cold boiled meat and potatoes and cabbage and some bread and a little butter.”

  “I think I’ll just have some toast and a cup of tea,” said Caroline listlessly. She leaned back in the chair and listened to the wind and the crying in the chimneys and the mysterious sounds in the house. The coals caught, and a thin blaze of scarlet light touched Caroline’s face, and it appeared already dead, but very composed and stern.

  ‘Remember thy Creator in the days of your youth.’ Yes, Beth had read that once to her and, remembering, Caroline had also recalled Beth’s voice. (But how clear and strong and loving it had been in that recalling!) I had the opportunity to remember my Creator in the days of my own youth, thought Caroline, and Beth tried to help me, but I turned away in my self-willed ignorance, my dark stupidity, my fear. I repudiated it all, and it was my own choice and not another’s. And so I have come to these bereft days, searching in the darkness for what had been so purely bright in my youth and so greatly offered. If we do not accept it when we are young, with our young simplicity and trust, then we must look for it in the wilderness when we are old, and perhaps not find it then at all.

  She ate a mouthful of the burned toast Maizie brought her and drank a little of the tepid tea, and suddenly she was nauseated. She put the tray aside and crept heavily and wearily to Tom’s room again. She lit a lamp. It was utterly cold in here and lonely. Shuddering in the icy air, she took up the Bible again, looking in her own wilderness for the lost light.

  It evaded her. There was an ominous sensation in her chest, and she shifted restlessly. She remembered Maizie. She pushed herself to her feet and went into her study and wrote out a check for the girl. Fo
r five thousand dollars. Her surname? She had never paid the girl by check. Caroline closed her eyes in her weakness, leaning back in her chair in the orderly study which was gathering dust; her desk was heaped with mail and journals and magazines which she had not touched for days. Yes, it was, of course, Smith, so ordinary a name that it was hard to remember. Caroline added the surname, dated the check as of a week ago, and put it in an envelope. She placed the envelope in the middle of her desk, all alone. Then she said to herself: Why have I done this? Do I intend to give that girl this check tomorrow? Why have I done this? Am I losing my mind?

  But all at once her mind blurred. Her flesh was as cold as the air in the study, for no fire had been built in here for days. She crept back to Tom’s room and took up the Bible, and it opened on the 121st Psalm:

  ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. . . . The Lord is thy Keeper; the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. . . . The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil; He shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in, from this time forth, and even for evermore!’

  “Oh, God!” Caroline’s voice was a great cry in the room, of mingled anguish and joy and revelation and heart-shaking gratitude. She fell back upon the cold pillows of Tom’s bed and wept and sobbed and clutched the pillows to her breast.

  When she could cry no more she lay very still. The mighty and comforting and sonorous words were repeated in her mind in letters as bright as the sun. They grew larger, illuminating all the dark places, outshining them, revealing all things. Caroline fell asleep, smiling. Her breath went in and out, slowly, weakly. And then, finally, there was not even the sound of breathing in the room, but only the voice of sea and wind.

  Caroline was sitting on the boulder in the deep blue twilight of dawn, feeling and seeing the peace of the ocean. Sea grass whispered and rustled. The sea gulls cried. The wet shingle glimmered. She could smell the sea pines and the grass, and the water sang like a great organ. Something fluttered against her cheek, and she caught it. It was a slender scarlet ribbon, satin and vibrant, hanging from her hair.

  Then Tom was coming toward her along the gleaming shingle, with the wind lifting his crisp black hair and moving his shirt and blowing the smoke from the pipe in his mouth. Caroline could see his strong face, smiling. He lifted his hands to her, beckoning, and she jumped from the boulder and ran to him, and she was in his arms, crying and holding him and kissing his mouth.

  “I dreamed you were dead!” she cried. “Oh, Tom, I dreamed you were dead!”

  “Of course I wasn’t, darling Carrie,” he said, and she listened to his voice.

  “I had a most terrible dream!” she sobbed. “An awful dream. About us, about the whole world!”

  “Yes,” said Tom. “I know. It was very bad, wasn’t it? But it’s over for you now, Carrie. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of any more.”

  He took her hand and they walked together along the beach, just as the sun came up.