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Life and Gabriella by Ellen Glasgow

E >> Ellen Glasgow >> Life and Gabriella




An unspeakable loathing swept over her; his very touch seemed
contamination; and while she turned toward the gate, she knew that
every fibre of her flesh, every quiver of her nerves, revolted against
the thing she was doing. But something stronger than her flesh or her
nerves--the vein of iron in her soul--decided the issue.

"Come in with me, and I'll take care of you," she said. "There is the
step. Don't stumble. Here, steady yourself with the umbrella. We are
almost there now." Her voice was cold and hard; but the words were those
she might have used to Archibald had she been leading him in out of the
storm.

Still whimpering and stumbling, George clung to her with his desperate
clutch, while she dragged him up the short walk, which was deep in snow,
to the six steps, which appeared to her to reach upward into eternity.
As she approached the house, a light shone out suddenly in one of the
windows and a sense of safety, of perfect security descended upon her,
for she knew that it was the red glimmer of O'Hara's fire. With the
sensation, she heard again her mother's voice speaking above the storm:
"Gabriella, we'll send immediately for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn!" So, in
the old days of her childhood, Cousin Jimmy had brought her this feeling
of relief in the midst of distress.

Opening the door with her latchkey, she dragged George into the hall,
where her thankful eyes fell on O'Hara's overcoat, from which the water
was, still dripping. For an instant she was tempted to call to him; then
checking the impulse, she went on to the staircase, which she ascended
with difficulty because George's legs seemed to give way when he tried
to lift them to a step. At last, after what she felt to be an eternity,
they reached the upper floor, and she pushed her burden into
Archibald's room, where he fell like a log on the hearthrug. The sound
of his fall shook the house, and when Miss Polly came running in, with a
cry of alarm, Gabriella almost expected to see O'Hara behind her. But
O'Hara did not come, and before the seamstress could recover from the
palpitations the shock had produced, George was on his feet again, and
was staring blankly, as if fascinated, at the reflection of the electric
light in the mirror.

"It's George," Gabriella explained in a harsh voice. "I found him in the
street. He was looking for me, and I couldn't leave him to freeze. I
think he's either drunk or ill. I don't know which it is, but it sounds
like pneumonia."

"God have mercy!" exclaimed Miss Polly, which was quite as lucid as she
ever became in a crisis. Her face had turned blue, she was trembling
with terror, and the violence of her palpitations almost exceeded the
painful sounds in George's chest. "If there was only a man we could send
for," she wailed hysterically. "Oh, Gabriella, if there was only a man!"

"Well, there's the doctor," replied Gabriella shortly. "You'd better
telephone for him at once. Get the nearest one. I think his name is
McFarland."

"And a nurse? You'll want a nurse, won't you?"

"I'll want anything I can get, and I'll want it quickly. There, hurry,
while I find a bathrobe of Archibald's. He's wet through--soaking wet.
He must have been out all day in the storm."

Miss Polly vanished into the dimness of the hall, and after a few
minutes Gabriella heard her fluttering voice demanding a telephone
number as if she were still supplicating the Deity.

"Take off your wet clothes while I get you a drink and some hot
blankets!" said Gabriella when she had found one of Archibald's
bathrobes in the closet. It occurred to her that George was really
incapable of undressing himself, but she felt that she would rather die
than touch him again. The loathing which had overpowered her outside in
the storm became stronger in the close air of the house. "I can't touch
him. I don't care what happens I can't touch him," she told herself,
while she placed the flannel robe on the rug, and hurried back to the
kitchen. Her whole body was benumbed and chilled, not from cold, but
from disgust, yet her mind was almost unnaturally active, and she found
herself thinking over and over again: "So this is the man I loved, this
is the man I married instead of Arthur!"

When she came back with a cup of broth and some hot blankets, she found
George in the flannel gown of Archibald's, with his wet clothes on the
floor at his feet, from which he had forgotten to remove his shoes. He
drank the soup greedily, while Miss Polly lighted the wood-fire she had
laid in the open grate.

"The heat's comin' up all right in the radiator," she said, "but I
thought a blaze might make him more comfortable."

"Yes, it's better," replied Gabriella sternly, while she stooped to
unlace George's boots. There was no compassion in her heart, and it
seemed to her, while she struggled with the wet lacing, that the fumes
of whiskey spread contagion and disease over the room. She was not only
hard and bitter--she felt that she loathed him with unspeakable
loathing.

"I declare, Gabriella, I believe he has gone deranged!" Miss Polly
cried out sharply, dropping the poker and starting to her feet in an
erratic impulse of flight.

With the flannel gown clutched tightly to his chest, where the dull
rattling sounds went on unceasingly, George was staring in fascinated
intensity at the reflection of the electric light in the mirror. Then
suddenly, with a scream of terror, he lifted the poker Miss Polly had
dropped, and flung it over Gabriella's head in the direction of the
dressing-table. At the noise of breaking glass, Gabriella rose from her
knees, and said in the hard, quiet voice she had used ever since the
first shock of the meeting:

"If you are afraid, lock yourself in your room, Miss Polly. I am going
downstairs for Mr. O'Hara."

Without waiting for a response, she ran out into the hall and down the
staircase, while her eyes clung to the comforting glimmer of light under
the drawing-room door. As her feet touched the lowest step, the door
opened quickly, and O'Hara stood on the threshold.




CHAPTER VIII

THE TEST


"I knew something was wrong," he said, emerging, big and efficient, from
the firelight, "and I was just coming up." Before she could answer she
felt his warm grasp on her hands, and it seemed to her suddenly that it
was not only her hands he enfolded, but her agonized and suffering mind.

"There's a man up there--" she faltered helplessly. "I was once married
to him long ago--oh, long ago. Just now I found him in the street and he
seems to be out of his mind. We are frightened."

But he seemed not to hear her, not to demand an explanation, not even to
wait to discover what she wanted. Already his long stride was
outstripping her on the staircase, and while she followed more slowly,
pausing now and then to take breath, she realized thankfully that the
situation had passed completely away from her power of command. As Miss
Polly's strength to hers, so was her strength to O'Hara's.

Faint, despairing moans issued from Archibald's room as she reached the
landing; and going inside, she saw George wrestling feebly with O'Hara,
who held him with one hand while with the other he waved authoritative
directions to Miss Polly.

"Get the bed ready for him, with plenty of hot blankets. He's about at
the end of his rope now. It's a jag, but it's more than a jag, too. If
I'm not mistaken he's in for a case of pneumonia."

Miss Polly, hovering timidly at a safe distance, held out the blankets
and the hot water bottles, while O'Hara carried George across the room
to the bed, and then covered him warmly. When he turned to glance about
his gaze fell on Gabriella, and he remarked bluntly: "You'd better get
out. You aren't wanted."

"But I am obliged to be here. It is my business, not yours," she
replied, while a sensation of sickness passed over her.

For a moment he regarded her stubbornly, "Well, I don't know whose
business it was a minute ago," he rejoined, "but it's mine now. I am
boss of this particular hell, and you're going to keep out of it. I
guess I know more about D.T. than you and Miss Polly put together would
know in a thousand years."

She was very humble. In the sweetness of her relief, of her security,
she would have submitted cheerfully not only to slang, but to downright
profanity. It was one of those unforgettable instants when character,
she understood, was more effective than culture. Even Arthur would have
appeared at a disadvantage beside O'Hara at that moment.

"I think I ought to help you," she insisted.

"Well, I think you oughtn't. Out you go! I guess I know what I'm up
against."

Before she could protest, before she could even resist, he had pushed
her out into the hail, and while she still hesitated there at the head
of the staircase, the door opened far enough to allow the huddled figure
of Miss Polly to creep through the crack. Then the key turned in the
lock; and O'Hara's voice was heard pacifying George as he might have
pacified a child or a lunatic. After a few minutes the shrieks stopped
suddenly; the door was unlocked again for a minute, and there floated
out the reassuring words:

"Don't stand out there any longer. It's as right as right. I've got him
buffaloed!"

"What does he mean?" inquired Gabriella helplessly of the seamstress.

"I don't know, but I reckon it's all right," responded Miss Polly. "He
seems to know just what to do, and anyhow the doctor'll be here in a
minute. It seems funny to give him whiskey, don't it, but that was the
first thing Mr. O'Hara thought of."

"I suppose his heart was weak. He looked as if he were dying," answered
Gabriella. "He asked for more whiskey, didn't he?"

"Yes; I'm goin' right straight to get it. Oh, Gabriella, ain't a man a
real solid comfort sometimes?"

Without replying to this ejaculation, Gabriella went after the whiskey,
and when she came back with the bottle in her hand, she found the doctor
on the landing outside the locked door. He was a stranger to her, and
she had scarcely begun her explanation when O'Hara called him into the
room.

"The sooner you take a look at him the better." Everything was taken out
of her hands--everything, even her explanation of George's presence in
her apartment.

As there was nothing more for her to do, she went back to the
sitting-room, where a fire burned brightly, and began to talk to Miss
Polly.

"I don't know what I should have done if he hadn't been here," she
said.

"Who? Mr. O'Hara? Well, it certainly was providential, honey, when you
come to think of it."

The door of Archibald's room opened and shut, and the doctor came down
the hall to the telephone. They heard him order medicines from a chemist
near-by; and then, after a minute, he took up the receiver, and spoke to
a nurse at the hospital. At first he gave merely the ordinary
directions, but at the end of the conversation he said sharply in answer
to a question: "No, there's no need of a restraining sheet. He's too far
gone to be violent. It is only a matter of hours."

His voice stopped, and Gabriella went out to him. "Will you tell me what
you think, Doctor?" she asked.

"Is he your husband?" He had a blank, secretive face, with light eyes,
and a hard mouth--so different, she thought from the poetic face of Dr.
French.

"I divorced him ten years ago."

He looked at her searchingly. "Well, he may last until morning, but it
is doubtful. His heart has given out."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"No. Morphine is the only thing. We are going to try camphorated oil,
but there is hardly a chance--not a chance." He turned to go back into
the room, then stopped, and added in the same tone of professional
stoicism: "The nurse will be here in half an hour, and I shall wait till
she comes."

When Gabriella went back to the sitting-room, Miss Polly was weeping. "I
followed you and heard what he said. Oh, Gabriella, ain't life too
awful!"

"I'll be glad when the nurse comes," answered Gabriella with impatience.
Emotionally she felt as if she had turned to stone, and she had little
inclination to explore the trite and tangled paths of Miss Polly's
philosophy.

The nurse, a stout, blond woman in spectacles, arrived on the stroke of
the half-hour, and after talking with her a few minutes, the doctor took
up his bag and came to tell Gabriella that he would return about
daybreak. "I've given instructions to the nurse, and Mr. O'Hara will sit
up in case he is needed, but there is nothing to do except keep the
patient perfectly quiet and give the hypodermics. It is too late to try
anything else."

"May I go in there?"

"Well, you can't do any good, but you may go in if you'd rather."

Then he went, as if glad of his release, and after Gabriella had
prevailed upon Miss Folly to go to bed, she changed her street dress for
a tea-gown, and threw herself on a couch before the fire in the
sitting-room. An overpowering fatigue weighed her down; the yellow
firelight had become an anodyne to her nerves; and after a few minutes
in which she thought confusedly of O'Hara and Cousin Jimmy, she let
herself fall asleep.

When she awoke a man was replenishing the fire, and as she struggled
drowsily back into consciousness, she realized that he was not Cousin
Jimmy, but O'Hara, and that he was placing the lumps of coal very softly
in the fear of awaking her.

"Hallo, there!" he exclaimed when he turned with the scuttle still in
his hand; "so you're awake, are you?"

She started up. "I've been asleep!" she exclaimed in surprise.

"You looked like a kid when I came in," he responded cheerfully, and she
reflected that even the presence of death could not shadow his jubilant
spirit. "I went back to the kitchen to make some coffee for the nurse
and myself, and I thought you might like a cup. It's first-rate coffee,
if I do say it. Two lumps and a little cream, I guess that's the way. I
rummaged in the icebox, and found a bottle of cream hidden away at the
back. That was right, wasn't it?"

A strange, an almost uncanny feeling of reminiscence, of vague yet
profound familiarity, was stealing over her. It all seemed to have
happened before, somewhere, somehow--the slow awakening to the large
dark form in the yellow firelight, O'Hara's sudden turning to look at
her, his exuberance, his sanguine magnetism, and even the cup of coffee
he made and brought to her side. She felt that it was the most natural
thing in the world to awake and find him there and to drink his coffee.

"It's good," she answered; "I had no dinner, and I am very hungry."

"I thought you'd be. That's why I brought a snack with it." He was
cutting a chicken sandwich on the tray he had placed under the green
shaded light, and after a minute he brought it to her and held the cup
while she ate. A nurse could not have been gentler about the little
things she needed; yet she knew that he was rough, off-hand,
careless--she could imagine that he might become almost brutal if he
were crossed in his purpose. She had believed him to be so simple; but
he was in reality, she saw, a mass of complexities, of actions and
reactions, of intricacies and involutions of character.

"I don't know what I should have done if you hadn't been here," she said
gratefully while she ate the sandwich and he sat beside her holding her
cup. "But I'm so unused to being taken care of," she added with a
trembling little laugh, "that I don't quite know how to behave."

"Oh, you would have got on all right," he rejoined carelessly; "but I'm
glad all the same that I was here."

She motioned toward the hall. "Has there been any change?"

"No, there won't be until morning. He'll last that long, I think. We're
giving him a hypodermic every four hours, but it really ain't any good,
you know. It is merely professional." For a minute he was silent,
watching her gravely; then recovering his casual manner, he added: "I
shouldn't let it upset me if I were you. Things happen that way, and
we've got to take them standing."

She shook her head. "I'm not upset. I'm not feeling it in the least.
Somehow, I can't even realize that I ever knew him. If you told me it
was all a dream, I should believe you."

"Well, you're a plucky sort. I could tell that the first minute I saw
you."

"It's not pluck. I don't feel things, that's all. I suppose I'm hard,
but I can't help it."

"Hard things come useful sometimes; they don't break."

"Yes, I suppose if I'd been soft, I should have broken long ago," she
replied almost bitterly.

After putting the plate and cup aside, he sat down by the table, and
gazed at her attentively for a long moment. "Well, you look as soft as a
white rose anyhow," he remarked with a curiously impersonal air of
criticism.

A rosy glow flooded her face. It was so long since any man had commented
upon her appearance that she felt painfully shy and displeased.

"All the same I've had a hard life," she returned with passionate
earnestness. "I married when I was twenty, and seven years later my
husband left me for another woman."

"The one in there?"

She shuddered, "Yes, the one in there."

"The darn fool!" he exclaimed briefly.

"There was a divorce, and then I had my two children to support and
educate. Because I had a natural talent for dressmaking, I turned to
that, and in the end I succeeded. But for ten years I never heard a word
of the man I married--until--I met him downstairs--in the street."

"And you brought him in?"

"What else could I do? He was dying."

"Do you know what he was doing out there?"

"He was looking for me, I think. He thought. I would take him in."

"Well, it's strange how things work out," was his comment after a pause.
"There's something in it somewhere that we can't see. It's impossible to
reason it out or explain it, but life has a way of jerking you up at
times and making you stand still and think. I know I'm putting it badly,
but I can't talk--I never could. Words, don't mean much to me, and yet I
know--I know--" He hesitated, and she watched his thought struggle
obscurely for expression. "I know you can't slip away from things and be
a quitter, no matter how hard you try. Life pulls you back again and
again till you've learned to play the game squarely."

He was gazing into the fire with a look that was strangely spiritual on
his face, which was half in shadow, half in the transfiguring glow of
the flames. For the second time she became acutely aware of the hidden
subtleties beneath his apparent simplicity.

"I've felt that myself often enough," he resumed presently in a low
voice. "I've been pulled up by something inside of me when I was
plunging ahead with the bit in my teeth, and it's been just exactly as
if this something said: 'Go steady or you'll run amuck and bu'st up the
whole blooming show.' You can't talk about it. It sounds like plain
foolishness when you put it into words, but when it comes to you, no
matter where you are, you have to stand still and listen."

"And is it only when you are running amuck that you hear it?" she asked.

"No, there've been other times--a few of them. Once or twice I've had it
come to me up in the Rockies when there didn't seem more than a few feet
between me and the sky, and then there was a time out on the prairie
when I was lost and thought I'd never get to the end of those darned
miles of blankness. Well, I've had a funny road to travel when I look
back at it."

"Tell me about some of the women you knew in the West." An insatiable
curiosity to hear the truth about his marriage seized her; but no sooner
had she yielded to it than she felt an impulsive regret. What right had
she to pry into the hidden sanctities of his past?

A frown contracted his forehead, but he said merely: "Oh, there wasn't
much about that," and she felt curiously baffled and resentful. "I think
I'll go and take a look in there," he added, rising and walking softly
in the direction of the room at the end of the hall.

He was gone so long that Gabriella, crushing down the revolt of her
nerves, went to the door, and opening it very gently, looked cautiously
into the room. The window was wide open to the night, where the snow was
still falling, and beside the candlestand at the head of the bed the
nurse was filling a hypodermic syringe from a teaspoon. By the open
window O'Hara stood inhaling the frosty air; and Gabriella crossed the
floor so silently that he did not notice her presence until he turned to
watch the nurse give the injection.

Then he said in a whisper: "You'd better go out. You can't do any good."
But she made an impatient gesture of dissent, and stopping between the
bed and the wall, waited while the nurse bared George's arm and inserted
the point of the needle. He was lying so motionless that she thought at
first that he was already dead; but presently he stirred faintly, a
shiver ran through the thin arm on the sheet, and a low, half-strangled
moan escaped from his lips. Had she come upon him in a hospital ward,
she knew that she should not have recognized him. He was not the man she
had once loved; he was not the father of her children; he was only a
stranger who was dying in her house. She could feel nothing while she
looked down at him. When she tried to remember her young love she could
recall but a shadow. That, too, was dead; that, too, had not left even a
memory.

As she bent there above him she made an effort to remember what he had
once been, to recall his face as she had first seen it, to revive the
burning radiance of that summer when they had been lovers. But a gray
veil of forgetfulness wrapped the past; and her mind, when she tried to
bring back the emotions of seventeen years ago, became vacant. For so
long she had stoically put the thought of that past out of her life,
that when she returned to it now, she found that only ashes remained.
Then a swift stab of pity pierced her heart like a blade, and she saw
again, not George her lover, not George her husband, but the photograph
Mrs. Fowler had shown her of the boy in velvet clothes with the wealth
of curls over his lace collar. So it was that boy who lay dying like a
stranger in the bed of his son!

She turned hurriedly and went out without speaking, without looking back
when she opened the door.

"If one could only understand it," she said aloud as she entered the
sitting-room; and then, with a start of surprise, she realized that
O'Hara had followed her. "You walked so softly I didn't hear you," she
explained.

"The rugs are thick, and I have on slippers. My boots were soaking when
I came in, and I'd just taken them off when you called."

They sat down again in front of the fire; and while she stared silently
at the flames, with her chin on her hand and her elbow on the arm of the
chair, he burst out so unexpectedly that she caught her breath in a
gasp:

"You didn't know that I was married, too, did you?" His words, and even
more than his words, his voice, filled with suppressed emotion, awoke
her from her reverie in which she had been dreaming of Arthur.

She smiled evasively, remembering her promise to Mrs. Squires.

He hesitated again, and then spoke with an effort. "Well, it was hell!"
he said grimly.

"I know"--she was very gentle, full of understanding and sympathy--"but
you went through it bravely."

"I stuck to her." His hand clenched while he answered. Then, after a
pause in which she watched him struggle against some savage instinct for
secrecy, he added quietly: "If she were alive to-day, I'd be sticking to
her still."

"You must have loved her." It was all she could think of to say, and yet
the words sounded trite and canting as soon as she had uttered them.

Lifting his head quickly, he made a contemptuous gesture of dissent.
"No, it wasn't that. I never loved her, except, perhaps, just at the
first. But there's something that comes before love, I guess. I don't
know what it is, but there's something. It may be just plain doggedness,
but after I married her there wasn't anything on top this earth that
could have made me give up and let go. As soon as I found what I was up
against--it was morphine--I knew I'd either got to fight it out or be a
quitter, and I've never been a quitter. Until she got so bad she had to
be shut up I kept a home for her out there in Colorado, and I lived with
her in hell as long as she wasn't too bad to be out of a hospital. Then
I brought her on here and we found a private place down on Long Island
where she stayed till she died--"

"And you still saw her?"

"Except when I was out West, and that's where I was most of the time,
you know. My work was out there, and there's nothing like hell behind
you to keep you running. I made piles of money those years. That's all
I ever cared for about money--just making it. I'd fight the devil to get
it, but after I've once got it, I'll give it to the first fool who comes
begging. But the getting of it is great."

"How long did it last?"

"My marriage? Going on eighteen years. She was down on Long Island for
the last ten of them."

"Then you lived with her eight. Was she always--always-"

"Took it before I ever married her, and I found it out in a month. She
wasn't so much to blame as you might think," he pursued thoughtfully.
"You see she had a tough time of it, and she was little and weak, and
everything was against her. She came out West first to teach school, and
then she got mixed up with some skunk of a man who pretended to marry
her when he had a wife living in Chicago, and after that I guess she
went on taking a dope just to keep up her spirits and ease the pain of
some spinal trouble she'd had since she was a child. There was nothing
bad in her--she was just weak--and I began to feel sorry for her, and so
I did it. If I had it to do over again, I'm not so sure I'd act
differently. She was a poor little creature that didn't have any man to
look after her, and I was just muddling along anyway, thinking about
money. Heaven knows what would have become of her if I hadn't happened
along when I did."

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