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Life and Gabriella by Ellen Glasgow

E >> Ellen Glasgow >> Life and Gabriella




At the foot of the long hill Arthur turned the car, and they flew back
between the dim fields where the croaking of frogs sounded louder in the
darkness. Ahead of them the lights of the car flitted like golden moths
over the dust of the road, and in the sky, beyond the thin veil of mist,
the stars were shining over the city. Spring, which possessed the earth,
bloomed in Gabriella's heart with a wonderful colour, a wonderful
fragrance. She was young again with the imperishable youth of magic, of
enchantment. To love, to hope, to strive, this was both romance and
adventure.

"Is it too late, then, Gabriella?" asked Arthur, after a long silence,
and in his voice there was the sound of suffering acquiescence.

"I'm afraid it is, dear Arthur," she answered softly, and they did not
speak again until the lights blazed over them, and they ran into
Monument Avenue. After all, it was too late. What could she have added
to the answer she had given him?

When they reached the house, he did not come in with her, and tears
stained her face while she went slowly up the steps, and stood beside
Jane's hydrangeas with her hand on the bell. Then, as the door opened
quickly, she saw her mother waiting, with an eager, expectant look, at
the door of the library, and heard her excited voice murmur: "Well,
dear?"

"We had a lovely drive, mother. Arthur is just as I remembered him,
except that he has grown so much older."

A disappointed expression crossed Mrs. Carr's face. "Is that all?" she
asked regretfully.

Gabriella laughed happily. "That is all--only I found out exactly what I
wanted to know."

For the rest of the week she devoted herself to her mother with a
solicitude which aroused in the brain of that melancholy lady serious
apprehensions of a hastening decline; and when her visit was over, she
packed her trunks, with girlish, delicious thrills of happiness, and
started back to New York.

"Do you really think I am failing so rapidly, Gabriella?" Mrs. Carr
inquired anxiously while they waited for the train on the platform of
the upper station.

"Failing? Why, no, mother. You look splendidly," Gabriella assured her,
a little surprised, a little startled. "Why should you ask me such a
thing?"

"Oh, nothing, dear. I had a fancy," murmured Mrs. Carr meekly; and then
as the train rushed into view, she kissed her daughter reproachfully,
and stood gazing after her until the last coach and the last white
jacket of the dining-car attendants vanished in the smoky sunshine of
the distance.

Through the long day, lying back in her chair, with her eyes on the
flying green landscape, Gabriella thought of the discovery she had made
while she was driving with Arthur. The restlessness, the uncertainty,
the vague yet poignant longing for an indefinite good, had passed out of
her happy and exultant heart. In obedience to the law of her nature,
which decreed that she should move swiftly and directly toward the end
of her destiny, she was returning to O'Hara as resolutely, as
unswervingly, as she had fled from him.

"It's strange how little I've ever understood, how little I've ever
known myself," she thought, staring vacantly at a severe spinster, with
crimped hair and a soured expression, who sat before the opposite
window. "I've gone on in the dark, making mistakes and discoveries from
the very beginning, undoing and doing over again, creating illusions and
then destroying them--always moving, always changing, always growing in
new directions. A year ago I'd have laughed at the idea that I could
love any man but Arthur--that of all men I could love Ben O'Hara; and
to-day I know that he is the future for me--that he is the beginning
again of my youth. A year ago I thought only how I might change him, how
I might make him over, and now I realize that I shall never change him,
that I shall never make him over, and that it doesn't really matter. It
isn't the vital thing. The vital thing is character, and I wouldn't
change that if I could. For the rest, I shall probably always wish him
different in some ways, just as I wish myself different. I'd like to
have him more like Arthur on the surface, just as I'd like to have
myself more like Fanny. I'd like to give him Arthur's manner just as I'd
like to give myself Fanny's complexion. But it isn't possible. He will
always be what he is now, and, after all, it is what he is--it is not
something else that I want--"

With a glimmer of the clairvoyant insight which had come to her on the
country road, she understood that O'Hara was for her an embodied symbol
of life--that she must either take him or leave him completely and
without reserve or evasion. He was not an ideal. In the love she felt
for him there was none of the sentimental glamour of her passion for
George. She saw his imperfections, but she saw that the man was bigger
than any attributes, that his faults were as nothing compared to the
abundance of his virtues, and that, perfect or imperfect, the tremendous
fact remained that she loved him.

In the opposite chair, the severe spinster had taken a strip of knitted
silk out of her bag, and was working industriously on a man's necktie of
blue and gray. From her intent and preoccupied look, from the nervous
twitching of her thin lips, the close peering of her near-sighted eyes,
through rimless glasses which she wore attached by a gold chain to her
hair, she might have found in the act of knitting a supreme consolation
for the inexorable denials of destiny. "I wonder if it satisfies her,
just knitting?" thought Gabriella. "Has she submitted like Arthur to
chance, to the way things happen when one no longer resists? Is she
really contented merely to knit, or is she knitting as a condemned
prisoner might knit while he is waiting for the scaffold?" And while she
watched the patient fingers, she added: "One must either conquer or be
conquered, and I will never be conquered."

It was eight o'clock when she reached New York, and as she drove the
short distance to West Twenty-third Street she began to wonder when she
should see O'Hara, and what she should say to him. In the end she
decided that she would wait for a chance meeting, that she would let it
happen when it would without moving a step or lifting a hand. Before
many days they would be obliged to meet in the yard or the hall, and
some obscure, consecrated tradition of sex, some secret strain of her
mother's ineradicable feminine instinct, opposed the direct and sensible
way. "As soon as I meet him--and in the end I shall surely meet
him--everything will be right," she thought, with her eyes on the
streets where the spring multitude of children were swarming. And from
this multitude of children, of young, ardent, and adventurous life,
there seemed to emanate a colossal and irresistible will--the will to
be, to live, to love, to create, and to conquer.

The taxicab turned swiftly into Twenty-third Street, and while it
stopped beside the pavement, she saw that Mrs. Squires was standing,
with her arms on the gate, staring into the street. As Gabriella
alighted, the woman came forward and said, with suppressed emotion,
while she wiped her eyes on the back of her hand: "You came just a
minute too late to say good-bye to Mr. O'Hara."

"Good-bye? But where has he gone?"

"He has gone to Washington to-night. To-morrow he is starting to the
West."

"When is he coming back? Did he tell you?"

At this Mrs. Squires broke down. "He ain't ever coming back, that's what
I'm crying for. He's given up his rooms, and his furniture all went to
the auction yesterday. He says he's going to live out in Colorado or
Wyoming for the rest of his life, and he didn't even tell me where I
could write to him. It's a great loss to me, Mrs. Carr. I'd got used to
him and his ways, and when you've once got used to a man, it ain't easy
to give him up."

She sobbed audibly as she finished; and it seemed to Gabriella that a
lifetime of experience passed in the instant while she stood there, with
her pulses drumming in her ears, her throat contracting until she
struggled for breath, and the lights of the city swimming in a nebulous
blur before her eyes. Yet in that instant, as in every crisis of her
life, she turned instinctively to action, to movement, to exertion,
however futile. While she walked across the pavement to the waiting cab,
for the crowning and ultimate choice of her life, she abandoned forever
the authority and guide of tradition. Tradition, she knew, bade her sit
and wait on destiny until she withered, like Arthur, to the vital core
of her nature; but something mightier than tradition, something which
she shared with the swarming multitude of children in the streets--the
will to live, to strive, and to conquer--this had risen superior to the
empty rules of the past. With her hand on the door of the taxicab, she
spoke rapidly to the driver: "Drive back to the station as fast as you
can, there is not a minute to lose."

When the cab started, she leaned forward, with her hands clasped on her
knees, and her eyes on the street, where the children were playing.
Because of the children, they drove very slowly, and once, when the
traffic held them up for a few minutes, she felt an impulse to scream.
Suppose she missed him, after all! Suppose she lost him in the station!
Suppose she never saw him again! And beside this possibly it seemed to
her that all the other suffering of her life--George's desertion, her
humiliation, her struggle to make a living for her children, the
loneliness of the long summers, her poverty and hunger and
self-denial--that all these things were merely superficial annoyances.
"If we don't go on, I shall die," she said aloud suddenly; "if we don't
go on, I shall die," and when at last the cab started again, she heard
the words like an undercurrent beneath the innumerable noises of the
street, "If we don't go on, I shall die."

The taxicab stopped; a porter ran forward to take her bag, and while she
thrust the money into the driver's hand, she heard her voice coolly and
calmly giving directions.

"I must catch the next train to Washington."

"Have you got your ticket, Miss?"

She stared back at him blankly. Though she saw his lips moving, it was
impossible for her to distinguish the words because she was still
hearing in a muffled undercurrent the roar of the streets.

"Have you got your ticket?" They were passing through the station now,
and he explained hurriedly: "You can't go through the gate without a
ticket."

She drew out her purse, and panic seized her afresh while she waited
before the window behind a bald-headed man who counted his change twice
before he would move aside, and let her step into his place. Then, when
the ticket was given to her, she turned and ran after the porter through
the gate and down the steps to the platform. As she ran, her eyes
wavered to the long platform, and the little groups gathered beside the
waiting train, which seemed to shake like a moving black and white
picture.

"Suppose I miss him, after all! Suppose I never see him again!" she
thought, and all that was young in her, all that was vital and alive,
strained forward as her feet touched the platform. Except for several
coloured porters and a woman holding a child by the hand, the place was
deserted. Then a man stepped quickly out of one of the last coaches, and
by his bigness and the red of his hair, she knew that it was O'Hara. At
the first sight of him the panic died suddenly in her heart, and the old
peace, the old sense of security and protection swept over her. Her
face, which had been lowered, was lifted like a flower that revives, and
her feet, which had stumbled, became the swift, flying feet of a girl.
It was as if both her spirit and her body sprang toward him.

At the sound of his name, he turned and stood motionless, as if hardly
believing his vision.

"I came back because I couldn't help it," she said.

But he was always hard to convince, and he waited now, still transfixed,
still incredulous.

"I came back because I wanted you more than anything else," she added.

"You came back to me?" he asked, slowly, as if doubting her.

"I came back to you. I wanted you," she repeated, and her voice did not
quaver, her eyes did not drop from his questioning gaze. It was all so
simple at last; it was all as natural as the joyous beating of her
heart.

"And you'll marry me now--to-night?"

It was the ultimate test, she knew, the test not only of her love for
O'Hara, but of her strength, her firmness, her courage, and of her
belief in life. The choice was hers that comes to all men and women
sooner or later--the choice between action and inaction, between
endeavour and relinquishment, between affirmation and denial, between
adventure and deliberation, between youth and age. One thought only made
her hesitate, and she almost whispered the words:

"But the children?"

He laughed softly. "Oh, the children are always there. We're not
quitters," and in a graver tone, he asked for the second time: "Will you
come with me now--to-night, Gabriella?"

At the repeated question she stretched out her hands, while she watched
the light break on his face.

"I'll come with you now--anywhere--toward the future," she answered.



THE END

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