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Life and Gabriella by Ellen Glasgow

E >> Ellen Glasgow >> Life and Gabriella




He had done well, though not brilliantly, at college, for his mind, if
unoriginal, had never given anybody, not even his mother, the least bit
of trouble. For three years he had worked with admirable regularity in
the office of his uncle, Carter Peyton, one of the most distinguished
lawyers in the Virginia of his period, and it was generally felt that
young Arthur Peyton would have "a brilliant future." For the present,
however, he lived an uneventful life with his widowed mother in a
charming old house, surrounded by a walled garden, in Franklin Street.
Like the house, he was always in perfect order; and everything about
him, from his loosely fitting clothes and his immaculate linen to his
inherited conceptions of life, was arranged with such exquisite
precision that it was impossible to improve it in any way. He knew
exactly what he thought, and he knew also his reason, which was usually
a precedent in law or custom, for thinking as he did. His opinions,
which were both active and abundant, were all perfectly legitimate
descendants of tradition, and the phrase "nobody ever heard of such a
thing," was quite as convincing to him as to Mrs. Carr or to Cousin
Jimmy Wrenn.

"Gabriella, aren't you going?" he asked reproachfully as the girl
entered.

"Oh, Arthur, we've had such a dreadful day! Poor Jane has left Charley
for good and has come home, with all the children. We've been busy
dividing them among us, and we're going to turn the dining-room into a
nursery.

"Left Charley? That's bad, isn't it?" asked Arthur doubtfully.

"I feel so sorry for her, Arthur. It must be terrible to have love end
like that."

"But she isn't to blame. Everybody knows that she has forgiven him again
and again."

"Yes, everybody knows it," repeated Gabriella, as if she drew bitter
comfort from the knowledge, "and she says now that she will never, never
go back to him."

For the first time a shadow appeared in Arthur's clear eyes.

"Do you think she ought to make up her mind, darling, until she sees
whether or not he will reform? After all, she is his wife."

"That's what mother says, and yet I believe Charley is the only person
on earth mother really hates. Now Cousin Jimmy and I will do everything
we can to keep her away from him."

"I think I shouldn't meddle if I were you, dearest. She'll probably go
back to him in the end because of the children.

"But I am going to help her take care of the children," replied
Gabriella stanchly. "Of course, my life will be entirely different now,
Arthur," she added gently. "Everything is altered for me, too, since
yesterday. I have thought it all over for hours, and I am going to try
to get a place in Brandywine's store."

"In a store?" repeated Arthur slowly, and she saw the muscles of his
mouth tighten and grow rigid.

"Mother doesn't like the idea any more than you do, but what are we to
come to if we go on in the old aimless way? One can't make a living out
of plain sewing, and though, of course, Charley will be supposed to
provide for his children, he isn't exactly the sort one can count on.
Brandywine's, you see, is only a beginning. What I mean is that I am
obliged to learn how to support myself."

"But couldn't you work just as well in your home, darling?

"People don't pay anything for home work. You must see what I mean,
Arthur."

"Yes, I see," he replied tenderly; but after a moment's thought, he
went on again with the gentle obstinacy of a man whose thinking had all
been done for him before he was born. "I wish, though, that you would
try to hold out a little longer, working at home with your mother. In a
year or two we shall be able to marry."

"I couldn't," said Gabriella, shaking her head. "Don't urge me, Arthur."

"If you would only consent to live with mother, we might marry now," he
pursued, after a minute, as if he had not heard her.

"But it wouldn't be fair to her, and how could I ask her to take mother
and Jane and the children? No, I've thought it all out, dear, and I must
go to work."

"But I'll work for them, Gabriella. I'll do anything on earth rather
than see you ordered about by old Brandywine."

"He won't order me about," answered Gabriella cheerfully; "but mother
feels just as you do. She says I am going out of my class because I
won't stay at home and work buttonholes."

"You couldn't go out of your class," replied Arthur, with an instinctive
gallantry which even his distress could not overcome; "but I can't get
used to the thought of it, darling--I simply can't. You're so sacred to
me. There's something about the woman a man loves that's different from
every other woman, and the bare idea of your working in a shop sickens
me. I always think of you as apart from the workaday world. I always
think of you as a star shining serenely above the sordid struggle--"
Overwhelmed by the glowing train of his rhetoric, he broke down suddenly
and caught passionately at the cool hand of Gabriella.

As he looked at her slender finger, on which he had placed her
engagement ring two years before, it seemed to him that the situation
was becoming intolerable--that it was an affront not only to his ideal
of Gabriella, as something essentially starlike and remote, but to that
peculiar veneration for women which he always spoke and thought of as
"Southern." His ideal woman was gentle, clinging, so perfectly a "lady"
that she would have perished had she been put into a shop; and, though
he was aware that Gabriella was a girl of much character and
determination, his mind was so constructed that he was able, without
difficulty, to think of her as corresponding to this exalted type of her
sex. By the simple act of falling in love with her he had endowed her
with every virtue except the ones that she actually possessed.

"I know, I know," said Gabriella tenderly, for she saw that he suffered.
Her training had been a hard one, though she had got it at home, and in
a violent reaction from the sentimentality of her mother and Jane she
had become suspicious of any language that sounded "flowery" to her
sensitive ears. With her clear-sighted judgment, she knew perfectly well
that by no stretch of mind or metaphor could she be supposed to resemble
a star--that she was not shining, not remote, not even "ideal" in
Arthur's delicate sense of the word. She had known the horrors of
poverty, of that bitter genteel poverty which must keep up an appearance
at any cost; and she could never forget the grim days, after the death
of Uncle Beverly Blair, when they had shivered in fireless rooms and
gone for weeks without butter on their bread. For the one strong quality
in Mrs. Carr's character was the feeling she spoke of complacently,
though modestly, as "proper pride"; and this proper pride, which was
now resisting Gabriella's struggle for independence, had in the past
resisted quite as stubbornly the thought of an appeal to the ready
charity of her masculine relatives. To seek a man's advice had been from
her girlhood the primal impulse of Mrs. Carr's nature; but, until Fate
had starved her into sincerity, she had kept alive the ladylike fiction
that she was in need of moral, not material, assistance.

"Of course, if there were any other way, Arthur," said Gabriella,
remembering the earlier battles with her mother, and eager to compromise
when she could do so with dignity; "but how can I go on being dependent
on Cousin Jimmy and Uncle Meriweather. Neither of them is rich, and
Cousin Jimmy has a large family."

Of course she was reasonable. The most disagreeable thing about
Gabriella, Jane had once said, was her inveterate habit of being
reasonable. But then Jane, who was of an exquisite sensibility, felt
that Gabriella's reasonableness belonged to a distinctly lower order of
intelligence. When all was said, Gabriella saw clearly because she had a
practical mind, and a practical mind is usually engrossed with material
matters.

"I understand exactly how you feel, dear, but if only you could go on
just as you are for a few years longer," said Arthur, sticking to his
original idea with a tenacity which made it possible for him to argue
for hours and yet remain exactly where he had started. Though they
talked all night, though she convinced him according to all the laws and
principles of logic, she knew that he would still think precisely what
he had thought in the beginning, for his conviction was rooted, deeper
than reason, in the unconquerable prejudices which had passed from the
brain into the very blood of his race. He would probably say at the end:
"I admit all that you tell me, Gabriella, but my sentiment is against
it;" and this sentiment, overruling sense, would insist, with sublime
obstinacy, that Gabriella must not work in a shop. It would ignore,
after the exalted habit of sentiment, such merely sordid facts as
poverty and starvation (who ever heard of a woman of good family
starving in Virginia?), and, at last, if Gabriella were really in love
with Arthur, it would triumph over her finer judgment and reduce her to
submission. But while she watched him, in the very minute when, failing
for words, he caught her in his arms, she said to herself, suddenly
chilled and determined: "I must get it over to-night, and I've got to be
honest." The scent of the hyacinths floated to her again, but it seemed
to bring a cold wind, as if a draught had blown in through the closed
slats of the shutters.

"Everything has changed, Arthur," she said, "and I don't think I ought
to go on being engaged." Then because her words sounded insincere, she
added sternly: "Even if we could be married--and of course we can't
be--I--I don't feel that I should want to marry. I am not sure that I
love you enough to marry you."

It was all so unromantic, so unemotional, so utterly different from the
scene she had pictured when she imagined what "breaking her engagement"
would be like. Then she had always thought of herself as dissolving in
tears on the horsehair sofa, which had become sacred to the tragedy of
poor Jane; but, to her surprise, she did not feel now the faintest
inclination to cry. It ought to have been theatrical, but it wasn't--not
even when she took off her engagement ring, as she had read in novels
that girls did at the decisive instant, and laid it down on the table.
When she remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but
Arthur seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the
fire in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy
and brought it back to Gabriella.

"I'll never give you up," said Arthur stubbornly, and knowing his
character, she felt that he had spoken the truth. He could not give her
up even had he wished it, for, like a belief, she had passed from his
brain into the fibre of his being. She had become a habit to him, and
not love, but the inability to change, to cease thinking what he had
always thought, to break a fixed manner of life, would keep him faithful
to her in his heart.

"I'm sorry--oh, I'm sorry," she murmured, longing to have it over and to
return to Jane and the children. It occurred to her almost resentfully
that love was not always an unmixed delight.

"Is there any one else, Gabriella?" he asked with a sudden choking sound
in his voice. "I have sometimes thought--in the last four or five
months--that there might be--that you had changed--that--" He stopped
abruptly, and she answered him with a beautiful frankness which would
have horrified the imperishable, if desiccated, coquetry of her mother.

"There is some one else and there isn't," she replied simply. "I mean I
think of some one else very often--of some one who isn't in my life at
all--from whom I never hear--"

"Is it George Fowler?"

She bowed her head, and, though she did not blush, her eyes grew
radiant.

"And you have known him less than a year?"

Again she bowed her head without speaking. What was there, after all,
that she could say in justification of her behaviour?

A groan escaped him, smothered into a gentle murmur of protest. "And I
thought women were more constant than men!" he exclaimed with something
of the baffled and helpless feeling which had overtaken Uncle
Meriweather while he regarded Gabriella.

The generalization was not without interest for Gabriella.

"I thought so, too," she observed dispassionately. "I thought so, too,
and that is why it was such a dreadful surprise to me when it happened.
You yourself aren't more shocked and surprised than I was in the
beginning," she added.

"But you've got used to the thought, I suppose?"

"Well, one has to, you see. What else is there to do? I always
understood from mother"--she went on with the same eager interest, as if
she were stumbling upon new and important intellectual discoveries--"I
always understood that women never fell in love with men first--I mean
until they had had positive proof that their love would be returned. But
in this case that didn't seem to matter at all. Nothing mattered, and
the more I fought against it and tried to be true to my engagement, the
more I found myself being false. It's all very strange," she concluded,
"but that is just how it happened."

"And he knows nothing about it?"

"Oh, no. I told him I was engaged to you, and then he went away."

For an instant he was silent, and watching his face, so carefully
guarded and controlled by habit that it had the curious blank look of a
statue's, Gabriella could form no idea of the suppressed inarticulate
suffering in his heart.

"And if he came back would you marry him?" he asked.

Before replying she sat for a minute gazing down on her folded hands and
weighing each separate word of her answer.

"I should try not to, Arthur," she said at last, "but--but I am not sure
that I should be able to help it."

When at last he had said "good-bye" rather grimly, and gone out of the
door without looking back, she was conscious of an immense relief, of a
feeling that she could breathe freely again after an age of oppression.
There was a curious sense of unreality about the hour she had just
passed through, as if it belonged not to actual life, but to a play she
had been rehearsing. She had felt nothing. The breaking of her
engagement had failed utterly to move her.

After bolting the front door, she turned out the gas in the parlour,
pushed back the lump of coal in the grate in the hope of saving it for
the morrow, and went cautiously down the hall to her room. As she passed
her mother's door, a glimmer of light along the threshold made her pause
for a minute, and while she hesitated, an anxious voice floated out to
her:

"Gabriella, is that you?"

"Yes, Mother, do you want anything?"

"Jane has one of her heart attacks. I put her to bed in my room because
it is more comfortable than the dining-room. Don't you think you had
better go back and wake Marthy?"

"Is she ill? Let me come in," answered Gabriella, pushing open the door
and brushing by Mrs. Carr, who stood, shrunken and shivering, in a gray
flannel wrapper and felt slippers.

Though Jane's attacks were familiar occurrences, they never failed to
produce an immediate panic in the household. As a child of nine,
Gabriella remembered being aroused in the middle of a bitter night,
hastily wrapped in her mother's shawl and a blanket, and hurried up the
staircase to Jane, who had broken her engagement to Charley the evening
before. Jane, pale, angelic, palpitating, appeared to draw her last
breath as they entered, while the old doctor supported her in his arms,
and Marthy, in a frenzy of service, rattled the dead embers in the
grate. It had all been horribly vivid, and when Jane had murmured
Charley's name in a dying voice, they had stood, trembling and blue with
cold, around her bed, waiting for the end. But the end had not come, and
three months later Jane was married to Charley Gracey.

After that scene, Gabriella had associated Jane's attacks with a
freezing January night and a fireless grate (though the last but one had
occurred in mid-August), and she was relieved now to find a fire burning
in her mother's room and a kettle singing merrily on the fender. The
elder children, with their flannel petticoats pinned over their thin
little shoulders, were sitting straight and stiff on a box couch which
had been turned into a bed, and their strange little faces looked wan
and peaked in the firelight.

Jane was really ill, Gabriella decided, after a glance at her sister.
Nothing except acute suffering could have given her that ghastly pallor
or made her eyes sink so far back in her head. She lay quite motionless
on the far side of the big tester bed, staring straight up at the
ceiling with an expression which terrified Gabriella, though she had
seen it on her sister's face at least a dozen times before to-night.

"Has Arthur gone?" asked Mrs. Carr in a voice that sounded as if she
were running.

"Yes. Did you want him, mother?"

"I thought we might send him for the doctor and for Charley. Don't you
think Charley ought to be told of her condition? She has asked for the
children."

"Have you given her the digitalis?"

"I can't make her swallow it. There are the drops on the table by the
bed. My hands tremble so I had to measure them three times."

Taking the glass from the table, Gabriella bent over her sister and
implored her to swallow the drops, but, without appearing to hear her
voice, Jane still stared blankly upward, with the rigid, convulsed look
of a woman who has been stricken with dumbness. Her flaxen hair, damp
with camphor, which Mrs. Carr had wildly splashed on her forehead, clung
flat and close to her head, while the only pulse in her body seemed to
beat in irregular, spasmodic throbs in her throat.

"Don't go, mother. I'll wake Marthy," cried Gabriella, for Mrs. Carr,
inspired by the spirit of panic, was darting out of the door in her felt
slippers. Then, while the children, crying distractedly, rushed to
Jane's bedside, the girl ran out of the house and along the brick walk
to the kitchen and the room above it where Marthy lived the little life
she had apart from her work. In answer to Gabriella's call she emerged
entirely dressed from the darkness; and at the news of Jane's illness
she was seized with the spurious energy which visits her race in the
moment of tragedy. She offered at once to run for the doctor, and
suggested, without a hint from Gabriella, that she had better leave
word, on her way home, for Marse Charley.

"I knowed 'twuz comin' jez ez soon ez I lay eyes on 'er," she muttered,
for she was an old family servant. "Dar ain' no use 'n tryin' ter come
betweenst dem de good Lawd is done jine tergedder fur worse. A baid
husban'! Hi! Dar ain't un 'oman erlive, I reckon, dat 'ouldn't ruther
own a baid husban' den no husban' at all. You all is got to teck 'em de
way dey's made, en dar's moughty few un um dat is made right."

Still muttering, she stumbled down the walk and out of the gate, while
Gabriella returned to her mother's room and hurried the weeping children
into their shoes and stockings. Mrs. Carr, still in her flannel wrapper,
with her little flat gray curls screwed up on pins for the night, and
her thin ankles showing pathetically above her felt slippers, ran
nervously to and fro with mustard plasters and bottles of hot water
which she continually refilled from the kettle on the fender.
Occasionally she paused long enough to hold the camphor to Jane's nose
or to lift the quilt from the bottom of the bed and then put it
carefully back in the very spot where it had lain before she had touched
it. And because she was born to take two steps to every one that was
necessary, because she could not accomplish the simplest act without a
prodigious waste of energy and emotion, because she died twenty deaths
over the slightest anxiety, and, most of all, because she was the last
person on earth who ought to have been burdened with poverty and hard
work and an unhappily married daughter--because of all these things Mrs.
Carr wore herself to a shadow in the quarter of an hour they spent
waiting for the doctor and Charley Gracey.

Though she had brought Jane through at least a dozen "attacks," she
still lost her presence of mind as completely as on that January night
when, utterly distraught, she had hurried Gabriella to the first
death-bed scene of her sister; she still grew as forgetful of herself
and her own feelings, and, in obedience to some profound law of her
nature, she still as confidently "expected the worst." For Mrs. Carr's
philosophy, like Jane's, was of that active but dreary sort that thrives
best upon misery. Just as Jane, who had lost every illusion about
Charley, went on loving him in spite of it, so Mrs. Carr, having lost
her illusions about life, retained a kind of wistful fondness for the
thing that had wounded her.

The door-bell rang sharply, and Gabriella went to let in the doctor, a
brisk, authoritative young man of the new school, who had learned
everything there was to be known about medicine except the way to behave
in a sickroom, and who abhorred a bedside manner as heartily as if it
were calomel or castor oil. His name was Darrow, and he was the
assistant of old Dr. Walker, Mrs. Carr's family physician, who never
went out at night since he had passed his seventieth birthday.
Gabriella, who liked him because he was not anecdotal and gave small
doses of medicine, hastily led the way to her mother's room before she
ran back to meet Charley Gracey at the door of the dark parlour.

"You can't see her now. The doctor is with her," she whispered. "I'll
make a light in here and you can wait."

"Let me," said Charley, quite as pleasantly as if he were not a bad
husband, while he found a match and struck it on the sole of his foot.
Then, as the gas flared up, he exclaimed, with a low whistle, "By Jove,
you're a sight, Gabriella!"

"Well, it's your fault," replied Gabriella sharply, letting him see, as
she told herself, exactly what she thought of him. "You've made Jane so
ill we thought she was dying."

"I'm sorry for that," he said, suddenly smitten with gravity. "Is she
really so bad?"

His charming freckled face, with its irrepressible humour, grew almost
grotesquely solemn, while the habitual merriment faded slowly from his
light-gray eyes, leaving them empty of expression. He was a short,
rather thick-set man, not particularly good-looking, not particularly
clever, but possessing a singular, if unaccountable, charm. Everybody
liked Charley, though nobody respected him. He was a scamp, but a
lovable scamp, while Jane, with the best intentions in the world, had
managed to make every virtue unattractive. When people condemned him,
they said that he was "utterly unprincipled"; when they softened in
their judgment, they admitted that he had "the best heart in the world."

"I suppose it isn't any worse than other attacks," answered Gabriella,
"but you know what they are like."

"Yes, I know," replied Charley. "Oh, Lord, don't I?"

"She asked mother to send for you," continued Gabriella. "She wants you
to know that she has forgiven you."

"Has she?" said Charley, without elation. Turning away, he stared for a
minute or two at the engraving of the children feeding fish in a pond;
then, with his eyes still glued to the picture, he burst out
passionately: "Gabriella, I'd hoped she wouldn't this time!"

"If I were she," retorted Gabriella crushingly, "I would never speak to
you again until the day of my death."

"If she were you," rejoined Charley, with barefaced audacity, "I'd have
been a good husband. Why, I was simply starving to be a good husband
when I married Jane. It's my ideal in life. I'm all for the domestic
thing by nature. I was tired--positively dog-tired of the other kind. I
wanted a wife. I adored--I've always adored babies--"

"If that is true," returned Gabriella sternly, for she was not disposed
to soften to Charley, and in her heart she deeply resented what she
called Jane's "weakness," "if that is true why do you behave so
outrageously to Jane and the children? Why can't you be decent?"

"I could," answered Charley, with engaging lucidity, "if she were less
so. It's her infernal virtue I can't stand, Gabriella. No man could
stand it without taking to drink."

"But you knew she was that way. She was always trying to make people
better. It is her mission. Why, I remember one winter night before you
were married mother got me out of bed in the cold to come and hear Jane
forgive you beautifully about something."

"That was the first time, and it was very touching. I suppose the first
time always is touching. Of course, I didn't know she meant to keep it
up. No man could possibly have kept it up," said Charley, with
bitterness, "but she married me to reform me, and it is the only thing
she has really enjoyed about her marriage. She's a born reformer. I
haven't eaten a thing I cared about, nor drank a drop I wanted, nor used
a bad word I was fond of, since I married, without being nagged at about
it. She loved me for my vices, and yet she hasn't let me keep a single
one--not even the smallest--not even cigarettes. Nag! Good God! She's
nagged me to perfection ever since the day of our wedding when she made
me sign the pledge before she let me kiss her!"

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