CHAPTER XVIII
IT was when Reba Jerome no longer required her marriage as an escape that it swooped down upon her as a possible yoke and restriction. When Aunt Augusta returned from Machias, she assumed toward Reba, a "do-as-you-please," "I-wash-my-hands-of-you" manner, which left Reba wonderfully free. Again established in the little oblong room up among flat, pebble-strewn roofs, the city, with all its hidden ecstasies and buried treasures again hers, Reba's marriage, which a few weeks ago had been balm and soothing salve, became a nettle—a tiny sliver, beneath her flesh, reminding her of its presence now and again with a little sharp, surprising, needle-like prick.
She had married the strange man of the sea for freedom, and freedom was hers without him! The sailor's gold ring, hidden, here in Boston, in a deep corner of the top tray of her hump-backed trunk (Mamie had such seeing eyes) became a symbol of vague foreboding and alarm. Back again in the inspiring atmosphere of class-rooms, reaching out to untried joys, Miss Katherine Park once more her high and shimmering ideal, the sailor—stoop-shouldered, shuffling, ill-at-ease, hiding his big red hands in his baggy coat-pockets, fell across Reba's shining path like a shadow.
"But never mind, never mind," she told herself, shutting her eyes tight to the shadow. "No use crossing bridges." There were three years yet in which she might stretch her untried wings and fly.
She returned to her place in the various classes at the Alliance, with a dogged determination to make the most of each precious day; in spite of forebodings, to sample every interest and harmless pleasure that the city had to offer, even if the query, "Should a married woman go adventuring?" did prod her every now and then. Life had never seemed so rich, so full of possibilities as it did to Reba that Indian summer when she returned to Boston. The Indian summer of her own life enveloped her in its glowing warmth, the very consciousness of the brevity of the rare season of postponed youth, making her live each day with intensity.
It was an arousing and awakening period for everybody, for it was the fall of 1914 during the first October of the Great War that Reba came back to the city groping again for a broader outlook and a clearer vision.
In Ridgefield the war had seemed a far-away, remote thing to Reba, incomprehensible, as all foreign affairs had always seemed to her. The minister at the Ridgefield Congregational Church had made several references to it, and in his long prayer, every Sunday morning since August first, had asked that the rulers of Europe might be wisely guided in their disturbed affairs. But those disturbed affairs had not concerned Reba. A difference of opinion way over there across the Atlantic Ocean couldn't hurt her any more than one of those awful earthquakes one reads about every so often burying some unheard-of community on the other side of the globe. The sealed-up pools of dark, still water lying here and there among the quiet hills of Ridgefield, Massachusetts, were scarcely rippled by the cannon-boom and bomb-fire of the early weeks of the European War. Reba, like many of her isolated New England sisters that summer, sitting late afternoons in their low rockers, their sewing laid aside a moment while they read of the far-away tramping of armies across neutral Belgium (few of the horrors of that march had filtered through then), of the menacing advance upon Paris, of the battle of the Marne, felt no shock or alarm.
Why, Reba had never heard of Marne! Where was it, anyway? Didn't know how to pronounce it. Nor Joffre either—town or man, whichever it was. It would come out all right somehow, she guessed, as, with a little listless sigh, she lay aside the local newspaper and resumed her desultory sewing. Things usually did.
It surprised Reba to hear the city buzz of the war, like a disturbed beehive. She heard it discussed everywhere—on street-cars, in elevators, restaurants, from behind ribbon-counters, in the subway. It might have been a catastrophe taking place around the next corner, in a spot familiar to them all. Reba was secretly ashamed of her placid attitude, and before she had been a week in Boston stole away to the public library to study maps and boundaries, and inform herself upon the confused early details of this thing over there, which to her wonderment was reaching out its long arm and actually touching her!
It was Miss Park who made Reba really feel the war. Miss Park was like one inspired that fall. She made the struggle over there an intimate thing to all the girls and women who attended her Monday-night talks in the Alliance's parlors. She made personalities pulsing and alive for Reba out of those distant countries, which a few weeks ago had been mere names in a history-book to her—irregular, pastel-shaded shapes on a geography map, which Miss Billings used to make her bound and name the chief exports of. It was Miss Park who made out of England something big and strong, like an older brother, sternly protective of the weak and persecuted; of France something inspiring and lovable—like a younger brother perhaps—fun-loving but ready at the first call, smiling but steady in the face of terrific odds; of Belgium, little Belgium, something bleeding, suffering, in distress—a child lost, a child blinded, a child with both hands cut off! Oh, Reba shuddered, felt the horror at last. She, Rebecca Jerome, admired, loved and pitied vague masses of people she had never seen!
Aunt Augusta scornfully remarked at the end of Reba's fourth Sunday-letter home (she wrote, as before, persistently every week), "Reba's putting on great airs—presuming to get heated up over this war-business. She knows about as much about it, I guess, as a cat! There'll be no living with that girl. She thinks she's being pretty smart, I suppose, with her exclamation-points about Belgium and France!"
But even though Reba did use an exclamation-point or two when she wrote home about the war, it did not obliterate her interest in her own personal pursuit. She was still consumed with eagerness for her own small adventure. Reba Jerome developed no sudden quixotism, no extravagant passion to throw herself into the world-struggle. Her interest in the war was really a very timid interest. But the effect of it was as good for the growth of her soul as the breaking-up and working-over of caked earth around the roots of a growing plant.
In spite of the fact that nature had finished with Reba's stature, contour, and features long since, still some sort of late loveliness bloomed upon her during that first fall of hers in Boston.
"Like green apples, picked and put down in a dark cellar before they're ripe," said Katherine Park to Louise Bartholomew one day. "Take them out in December and leave them in the sun a little while and they'll mellow up."
Whether it was the effect of the gymnasium classes, or the swimming lessons, or the dancing, or all three together, there developed in Reba a certain ease and grace of motion that had been lacking from the restrained, self-conscious carriage of a year ago. The same trace of freedom, too, became obvious, though less so, in her speech and manner.
Her clothes more than anything showed defiance of the old subjection. Not that they became bold or surprising. They didn't, happily. They suited the retiring nature of her temperament perfectly. This was not the result of any innate sense of harmony in Reba. It was simply because she lacked sufficient self-confidence to rely upon her own judgment. She shrank from approaching the sophisticated clerks in the shops, and feared that this late craving of hers for pretty things might lead her into making ridiculous selections, which it probably would have done. So instead she put herself into the hands of a single expert and trusted herself implicitly to her, scarcely inquiring the prices of the lovely pastel-shaded materials she recommended. Reba adopted the dressmaker whom Miss Park suggested with as little question as she did her idol's dentist, doctor, hair-dresser, and bank.
The dressmaker this second time was not, however, Madame Boulangeat. The war had detained the Madame indefinitely in France. ("To my disgust," the clergyman's inquisitive little mother had exclaimed one rainy October day, after a fruitless journey to Madame's closed shop. "I'll never find out about that mysterious little bride now, I suppose, unless I go and look her up in some horrid office, and that is so conspicuous. Robert writes that the groom is talkative about everything except his bride's identity.")
Physical exercise and artistic raiment did do a lot, of course, to bring out Reba's hidden charms; but the knowledge that she was succeeding in her peculiar enterprise, in spite of appalling obstacles—such as age (she was twenty-six now) and disapproval (Aunt Augusta still sniffed) and marriage finally—filled her with a flaming courage that would have beautified her, even if she had kept on tightly pompadouring every morning and crimping on hairpins every night.
Reba had received only three messages from Nathan up to the time of her unexpected return to Boston. These had been postcards, and had been addressed to Mr. James Perkins, President of the Ridgefield Trust Company.
Before their separation Reba had told the sailor to address all communications to Mr. Perkins, for ever since her first call upon the bank-president, Mr. Perkins had shown a disposition to champion her; had written her conniving letters of instruction, unknown to her father, explaining how to make out checks, and properly balance amounts. Reba had not confided her marriage to Mr. Perkins, but she had presumed upon his partisanship to the extent of intrusting him with a blushing confession of the existence of a correspondent whom she didn't wish her family to know about. And he had winked an understanding eye at her, and assured her three times over that she could trust him not to let the cat out of the bag.
The three postcards from Nathan addressed to Mr. James Perkins had been unsigned and non-committal. The first, a picture of the Singer tower, mailed in New York, had remarked briefly, "This is a fine city." The second, from Savannah, "Stopping here for an extra cargo." And the third, which depicted an alligator, a bunch of bananas, and a small negro boy in rags, had been as impersonal as its predecessors. "This is what grows down here," it had said.
It had not been until Reba had received the sailor's first letter that she realized how vital their marriage was to him. And that, unfortunately, was not until after it had lost its particular significance for her. Nathaniel Cawthorne's first letter to his bride filled her with fears that required all the new courage that she possessed, to stifle, crush down deep in her heart, and calmly continue on her way.
This letter had not reached her until she had been installed for over a month at the Alliance. Mr. Perkins had forwarded it to her from Ridgefield, inclosing it first in one of the bank's official envelopes. It had required four cents in postage, for Nathan had buried his letter to Reba inside three envelopes. The outside envelope was addressed to Mr. James Perkins, the second to Miss Rebecca Jerome, with "Private" in one corner, and the third to Mrs. Nathaniel Cawthorne. What with the bank-envelope to open in addition, when Reba finally drew forth the thin double sheet of note-paper on the inside with Nathan's writing on it, it reminded her of the tiny kernel of solid wood at the center of a certain Chinese wooden egg, which she was allowed to play with Sunday afternoons when she was a child—a marvelous toy containing a diminishing series of brightly-striped wooden shells, fitting nicely, one inside the other.
"My dear Rebecca," Nathan began. "This is the second letter I ever wrote to a young lady, and the first one was to you, too, that night after that time at the movies." Reba glanced inside the folded notepaper. It was quite a long letter. What would it all be about?
"I hope," it went on, "you will excuse all mistakes and blots and bad writing."
There wasn't a single blot, and the writing was neat and uniform. Reba could see that, in order to keep his lines straight, he had first ruled the note-paper in pencil and afterward erased the marks.
"I am well," it informed her, "and I hope you are well too. I hope this finds your mother better. I hope my postcards reached you. New York is certainly a fine city."
Beneath this sentence there appeared two unerased pencil lines and beneath them, in purple ink (he had started out in black), began a new paragraph, well indented.
"I began this," he explained, "a week ago, but stopped because I didn't know what would please you most for me to write. Perhaps you'd like to know about the books Mr. Barton told me to get. I got them in Savannah, and am reading them outloud to him, so I'll get to pronounce words the way the man who wears your ring should. Rebecca, there never was any piece of gold meant so much as that to me. That college money under the shed didn't mean so much. I showed it to Mr. Barton. He's a fine fellow. We talk a lot. He tells me how to make myself more worthy of wearing your ring. Rebecca, it doesn't seem true—all that's happened between you and me. Nights when I lie in my dark hole below, smelling strong of kerosene oil from a smoky lantern, and creaking as the old 'Ellen T.' rises and falls, and listen to the snores of two big greasy Portuguese next to me, I just think you and your pretty white kid gloves aren't true, and then I feel around on the ribbon round my neck till I find the ring, and then I know it has really happened, and that we really have said good-by like married people do. And holding your ring like that I get to thinking of you. But not there. I take you out, Rebecca, where it's clean and sweet, underneath the stars, where we can be alone, like at the movies. Sometimes you're in your white ruffles, like when we played checkers, and sometimes you've got your gloves off and you're in your bare hands, like that time at the movies, and sometimes I see your little slender ankles, gray and velvety and delicate like a deer's up in the Maine woods. And I see your hat off, and your uncovered forehead, and it just seems as if I couldn't stand it any more. And I get up and walk and walk, and wish I was like Mr. Barton for you, with an education like his, and money like his, and a purple automobile to let you ride in like his, and just church-like thoughts like his, when I get to thinking of you at night, Rebecca."
Another ruled pencil line interrupted the letter here. Reba was glad. It gave her a chance to rest a second and get her breath. She was glad, too, that the letter continued in black ink. There was something about the very color of the purple sentences that was disturbing.
"I began this a month ago," it went on, "but I was afraid it might not please you, and I want to please you. But it's like this, we made a port unexpected, and I've got a sudden chance to send a letter ashore, in a hurry, to catch a boat going north, so I hope you'll excuse all mistakes in spelling and grammar, and different ink. The black ink was Mr. Barton's fountain pen, and the purple was some I got from the first mate, late one night when I got to thinking of you about midnight. Please excuse my putting Mrs. Cawthorne on the envelope, if it offends you. I didn't think any one would see it, and I want you to know I think of you like that sometimes, if you don't object. "And hoping this finds you well, I remain
Reba read this letter three times in all, and afterward sat long in her chair staring fixedly out the window at a merrily spinning chimney-pot, while the dim, vague specter of her marriage swooped round about her.
Who was this strange man, anyhow, who signed himself as her husband, Nathaniel Cawthorne? And what would he do to this life of hers that had become of late such a precious possession? He had not seemed strange, nor menacing either, in Ridgefield. But here—here—oh, what would Miss Katherine Park think if she guessed that she was married? What would Miss Katherine Park think of this Nathaniel Cawthorne who wore her ring around his neck in that black dirty hole at night, and thought purple-inked thoughts of her?
Reba pushed the letter into the front of her waist at last where no one could see it, and went into the darkening streets. She walked for a long while, an hour or so perhaps, and before returning venturesomely passed by the filet-lace-covered door in the Back Bay, as if to prove to herself that it could not harm her, that she was not afraid. Inside the house, no doubt, was the little fluttering bird-like lady who shared her secret, and possibly the young minister himself who had legalized her marriage had returned by this time (she had no idea at what port he intended leaving the sailor's boat) and was sitting upstairs in that pretty upper room where she, less than a year ago, had sat herself, warmed by the conviction that the step she had just taken had been both wise and courageous. Oh, well! Never mind! She flung up her head defiantly.
"It was only a few words," she said to herself. "I won't let a few words spoil my life. I will live, now I've got the chance. I just will. The burdens Cousin Pattie couldn't get rid of she put in a pack on her back, like Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, and went right along."
And back in her room again, Reba buried the envelope bearing the title of Mrs. Cawthorne deep in her trunk along with the postcards, and the gold ring, and the bit of currant-cake in the borrowed wedding-cake box, and sat down and wrote to Nathan on her pale blue note-paper.
She had written to him punctually every month since he had left her. A pack of her blue envelopes awaited him in San Francisco. Reba's letters were neat little models of propriety. Even her early notes to her seaman husband, when she had felt such gratitude and appreciation, were stilted and impersonal. Reba had never been taught how to set her thoughts free on paper. The note she wrote in answer to Nathan's letter made scant reference to his intimate thoughts of her. It was in a brief postscript after she had signed her name as usual, "So good-by. Rebecca," that she suggested that they keep their marriage a secret, not only from the world, but from themselves, until they were a little better acquainted—that is, if he thought well of it. It seemed so funny, she said, to be called Mrs. Cawthorne by him, when nobody knew anything about it around here.
It was in December when Reba wrote the note telling Nathan of her return to Boston and adding the shy suggestion at the end. All winter no message of any sort came from him. It was early spring when finally a postcard announced the safe though, owing to various mishaps, the delayed arrival of the "Ellen T. Robinson" in San Francisco.
The postcard was followed a week later by a reply to Reba's postscript. Nathaniel Cawthorne, sensitive to the slightest suggestion from the delicate creature who had stooped to him, had replied, "I savvy about its being a secret between you and me, as well as between us and the world. All right, if that's the way you'd like it. I guess I catch on, and you won't have cause to remind me again, I hope." Then to prove to her how sincere was his intention, "San Francisco is a fine city," he went on; and the rest of the letter, even to the, "So good-by. Nathan," was so like Reba's own blue notes in everything but color and handwriting that at the end of it she whispered to herself softly, hopefully, "Oh, perhaps it will be all right, after all. With him always following the sea, and me always here. So many miles between! He must be as far as the South Sea Islands by now! So far off! Oh, perhaps we can keep it a secret for years and years—longer than just three. Perhaps for always, if we both want to!" suddenly it flashed across her.