A Prologue To Love (29 page)

The boy who delivered their morning newspaper from Boston and their groceries from the village brought the news to Beth and Caroline, who were eating their usual uninspiring breakfast of oatmeal, milk, stewed apricots, and coffee.

When Caroline had come into the house the night before after leaving Tom, Beth had thought with sentimental joy: Why, how beautiful the child really is! She eagerly wished for confidences; a young woman in Beth’s world would have been full of shy bubblings. Though Beth had known the Ames family for so many years, she instinctively and stubbornly held to her conviction that, given the opportunity and the circumstances, Caroline would behave exactly as all other young ladies.

She was extremely let down and disappointed when Caroline only smiled at her awkwardly and said, “I’ve been talking to Tom. It’s very late, isn’t it? I’m sorry, Beth.” She had pumped some water into the sink and washed her hands.

“Why didn’t you bring Tom in?” asked Beth, hurt and perplexed.

“He had to go home; his father was waiting for him.” Caroline dried her hands on the coarse towel.

“Is that all?” cried Beth.

Caroline blinked at her. “All? I suppose so. What do you mean, Beth?”

“What did you and Tom talk about, for heaven’s sake, all that time?”

Caroline appeared taken aback, and her tone changed and became colder. “I think that’s my own business.” She paused. Beth’s depressed and searching expression surprised her, then vaguely touched her. “Oh,” she said, and then she colored. “We were talking about getting married. In about six months.”

At this point, in Beth’s uncomplicated world, a young lady would have blushed very deeply, run to her only friend, cried and stammered and laughed and murmured, held tightly in that friend’s arms. But Caroline was puzzled by Beth’s silence and stared at her. “Do you think that is too soon after — ?”

“Oh, Carrie!” exclaimed Beth. “I don’t understand you! You know how I love you and Tom, and now you’re getting married!”

“Yes?” said Caroline, more puzzled than ever. “What’s wrong, Beth?”

Beth slammed the skillet of pork chops on the kitchen table. “There’s nothing wrong!” she shouted. “Nothing at all but you, Carrie!”

Caroline was honestly astounded. “What have I done?”

“Nothing,” said Beth, then burst into tears. Caroline sat down and stared at her in total bewilderment. They ate their dinner in silence. Caroline, still silent, went up to her room, and Beth washed the ironware dishes, completely frustrated. And Caroline, in her room with the window overlooking the dark ocean, gave brief consideration to Beth. The poor thing was growing old; her words and manner tonight were very strange. Then she put Beth out of her mind and thought of Tom and smiled in the darkness. For at least half an hour she did not think of her father at all. When she did, she remembered the portrait of her grandfather. Years and death stood between her and David Ames. Yet never, even with Tom, had she felt such oneness of communication. “I must find some of his paintings and buy them,” she said aloud. “They belong to me.” She would hang them in her own room; she would never let others see them; they would be her own.

No one needs me, especially not Carrie, thought Beth in her bed. Here Carrie is going to marry Tom, and she didn’t think it would affect me at all or whether or not I’d be happy over it. I’m just a servant to her. After all these years!

The heavy silence of the next morning afflicted Beth, but Caroline, absorbed in her own plans, did not feel it. Tomorrow Tom would go with her to New York. They would conclude many things together. She said, “Beth, I’m going to New York tomorrow, and of course you’ll have to go with me, as Tom is going also.”

Startled, Beth swallowed the hard lump in her throat and smiled. “To buy the ring?” she asked coquettishly.

“The ring?” repeated Caroline, frowning. “Oh, the ring. No, we didn’t speak of that. It’s a little soon. No. This is business.”

The boy brought the paper and the groceries then, and Beth, hearing the news, cried. Caroline sat at the splintered table with a dull expression. She had never seen old Thomas; he had no reality for her.

“Oh, poor Tom!” Beth wept. “Poor, poor Tom! How terrible for him! Of course his father was very old. But still, how awful!” She stood up briskly, tying on her apron, her face dripping with tears. “As soon as I have cleared up, Carrie, we’ll go to the village to give Tom our condolences.”

Caroline shrank. She was incapable of relating anyone outside her immediate sphere with herself. All warm impulsiveness, all natural human sympathy toward mere acquaintances or strangers could not be felt by her. Humanity at large had no meaning, no actual reality. She was like one born blind, or made blind in childhood, who was only disturbed by any discussion of color or form or appearance.

“He’ll be waiting for us,” said Beth. “There’ll be many people there, to be sure, for everyone loves Tom and loved old Thomas, but he’ll only want to see us, really.”

Caroline shrank even more. She thought of the day following her father’s death in Switzerland, of the swarms of his associates who had come to the hotel, of Montague, who had easily and smoothly made all arrangements, of the curious faces turned to her, of the words of sympathy that made her stunned darkness even darker. She had sat in that darkness, alone, a stranger in a strange land, and had wanted only silence.

“Oh, Beth. I can’t go to see Tom! All those people!”

“What did you say?” asked Beth. “Not go to see Tom — now? Don’t you understand? His father is dead, Carrie! Just as your father died!”

“This is entirely different!” exclaimed Caroline, infuriated by Beth’s lack of understanding. “Tom’s father and my father — this is entirely different!”

“Different? What did you say?” asked Beth, her hands on her apron strings. “How different?”

But Caroline could not explain. She sat stolidly and sullenly in her chair and compressed her large pale lips.

Beth carefully folded her apron with her worn hands. She put it on her chair. Then she tried again. “Tom loved his father, just as you loved yours. He’ll need comforting; he’ll want our sympathy.”

“Why?” Caroline demanded. “He’ll want to be let alone, just as I did.” It was shocking to her that Tom, who loved her, should love his father also. Thomas Sheldon had not been John Ames, who could move governments. He had been only an old man, unimportant and faceless. So she repeated now with deep annoyance, “This is entirely different.”

Beth sat down heavily. “Carrie,” she said, “I don’t think you have any human feelings, have you?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Caroline. “Certainly I have human feelings. Beth, you just don’t understand.”

All the warmth and sweetness which had comforted her during the night had gone. All the shy joy she had experienced had been destroyed by this old man’s dying, an old man of whom she had never spoken and whose existence had never reached her conscious thoughts. More and more exasperated, she considered Beth, whose lined face was very white and whose fixed eyes made her uncomfortable. Then something stirred in her impatiently. Something was expected of her, and she always winced from the expectations of others.

“I never knew Mr. Sheldon,” she said, trying to be patient with this old foolish woman. “Tom knows that; he’ll understand why I can’t go to him. He’ll want to be alone. I’ll write him a note,” she added with a clumsy animation which she hoped would appease Beth. Tom could not feel the same sorrow for his father which she had felt for hers. The very idea was affronting and stupid. Beth was frightening her. She stared at the older woman with mistrust. She added sulkily, “Perhaps you can buy some flowers in the village.”

But Beth was crying, her plump shoulders shaking, her face in her hands. It was as if she were crying for her own dead, and Caroline was overwhelmingly bewildered. How could Beth cry for an old man she had never known?

She stood up, disturbed by Beth’s weeping, and put her hands on Beth’s shoulders, more to silence her than to comfort her. Then Beth looked up, her tired face bloated with emotion, and she saw Caroline fully and with terrible perception.

“Oh, Carrie, my child. Oh, Carrie, God help you.”

While Beth, still weeping, hastily dusted the hopelessly dusty house and prepared to leave to visit Tom, Caroline slowly went to her arid room, which smelled of grit and mustiness and dank bedding. She was accustomed to wait for Beth to straighten this ancient and ugly room as a matter of course. But now, with inept hands, she did it herself, moved by an uneasiness as well as a growing feeling of resentment. She opened the grimy window and looked down at the shingle and the morning sea and the fishing boats on the radiant and heaving horizon. The clean salt air, sharp and pure, blew on her face. Caroline’s feeling of uneasiness grew. Only in very early childhood had any sympathy for others, except her father, stirred or agitated her. Once Beth had touched the periphery of her consciousness with love and solicitude. But that was long ago. Since that time she had lived in a world whose tight little circle had revolved about John Ames. All her deep impulses had been stifled and blunted. She had been like a young and tender tree, growing between two narrow walls, which found its growth circumscribed and increasingly narrowing as its little branches grew, and increasingly stunted, so that eventually it had no contact with anything but the crippling walls and stone and never was able to bend its deformed branches to embrace anything outside itself and could never send its roots down to a common pool of life.

Nevertheless, though she did not know why, she had a shadowy sensation that in some way she had failed Beth and Tom. Her spirit was like a fossilized seed whose vital element had been killed.

As she looked down at the blue tide rising on the shingle she thought, “Everything has been spoiled.” She had taken Tom fiercely into her life, out of her awful need. For the first time she had been able to look at the death of her father, not as a calamity which had utterly destroyed her, but as an event, still agonizing but now bearable. Tom was utterly hers, once she had seized him. She was angry that the death of an unimportant old man should concern him, for it showed her that Tom was not entirely hers but could actually be wounded by something which had nothing to do with her.

A little girl, a stranger, ran barefoot along the shingle. This portion of the beach belonged to Caroline and was private. Her first impulse was to call down to the girl to go away. But the little girl touched the rising scallops of foam with bare toes and squealed, and her hair was a blowing golden vapor in the wind. With sudden shock Caroline thought of possible children she might have. She had always feared and hated children. Normal children had not understood her at school and had derided, mocked, and tormented her for her silences, her inability to communicate, and her wretched clothing.

But she, Caroline, would have children. John Ames had spoken of them; they would be his heirs and Caroline’s. He had spoken without warmth or expectation, but only as one speaks of an unpleasant reality. Caroline leaned on the window sill and stared at the child. She would have children; they would be hers and her father’s, as well as Tom’s. For an instant or two the deformed tree which was herself felt new wind on its branches, its feeble dusty leaves. The child ran away; Caroline followed her with anxious, questioning eyes.

She sat down. She remembered that mothers loved their children. Her father had said with a disagreeable smile that this love was only an extension of egotism, that mothers and fathers loved their children only because of selfishness.

Caroline shook her head as if to shake some baffling thoughts from it. After a little she brought out her secretary, a shabby leather case full of paper and envelopes. She put a bottle of ink on the chair nearest hers and dipped her pen in it. For the first time in her life she was about to write a note of comfort, and she did not know how to begin. She wrote in small sharp letters: “Dear Tom.” Then she stopped. What should she say? That she was sorry about his father’s death? But she was not; she only resented it as a bitter intrusion in her own affairs. She chewed the end of the pen and frowned. Suddenly she got up, carrying her secretary, and climbed to the attic and found the portrait of her grandfather. She looked down at the gentle and accepting eyes, and the rushing sense of release came to her again. Sitting on a trunk in that dim, webbed half twilight of the attic, she wrote rapidly: “I’m sorry about your father. Beth will bring you this note. I must go to New York tomorrow. I’d hoped you would go with me, but I understand that the funeral will prevent you. I will have to manage alone. I will return the next day.” She reread the note. It did not satisfy her; even her deformed spirit understood its coldness, but she did not know what else to say. So she signed her name. Then all at once, under her name, she wrote, “Dear Tom!”