Leave Her to Heaven (30 page)

That picnic on the beach was only postponed. Ruth was happy in doing with him whatever he chose to do, and there were long afternoons of quiet talk, and still dusky evenings when they sat late by the cooling embers of the fire over which he had cooked their supper, their low tones murmuring under the stars. They drove sometimes for mile on mile, abandoning the traffic routes for unfrequented roads. Often, having no destination in mind, they let chance decide their course, taking the first left turning and then the first right at random, until perhaps they came to a dead-end road and had to retrace their way. Whenever they discovered any particularly attractive spot, whoever was driving at the time claimed — and had — credit for that discovery. Thus Ruth could boast of ‘My place in Lincoln,' or of ‘My place down back of Sudbury,' or of ‘My place by the river out in Sherborn,' and Harland had an equal score.

One such place, for no obvious reason, held for each of them an equal attraction. In Lincoln — Ruth was at the wheel that day — chance led them to follow a road which eventually lost its firm-surfaced respectability and degenerated into sandy ruts, descending at an easy grade through oak scrub and scattered pines to come out at last upon the border of a grassy bog through which the river meandered. Here the road ended, but a blue heron feeding in the shallows heard their voices and rose to fly heavily away, and they watched it follow the stream's course for a while and then settle in again; and Ruth said:

‘Why don't we have supper here? I like this place.'

‘So do I,' he admitted. ‘I don't know just why.'

‘It reminds me of the lovely intervales along that river where we — and Ellen — went fishing.'

‘We might be just as far from civilization as we were there,' he agreed. ‘Except for this road — and it's not much of a road — there's no sign of human beings anywhere.'

They alighted from the car and walked to the riverside, and a fish that was almost certainly a trout — Harland thought it was
a big brown — sucked down a struggling fly. ‘Next time I'll bring my rod,' he said. ‘If that fellow shows again, I'll give him a try.'

Back near the car they found a grassed slope shaded by small oaks, and sprawled there for an hour or two, Harland talking of his work and Ruth listening and offering some comment now and then. At sunset he built a small safe fire, and after their cooking was done the fire became a smudge to banish mosquitoes, and they stayed beside it till full dark, reluctant to end this quiet hour. When it was time to depart and they were in the car, Harland before starting the engine looked at her smilingly:

‘You're good company, Ruth,' he said.

‘So are you,' she assured him, happily content.

‘We get along, don't we?'

‘Yes,' she assented. ‘We get along.'

Turning homeward, they drove in silence till they came back to travelled ways again, and Ruth found this silence deeply exciting, like being in a warm, still, friendly darkness with the sense of a well-loved presence near. It was, she suspected, like being married and waking in the night and knowing your dear husband was asleep beside you, and thinking of the strength in him, and the gentleness, and of his steady, friendly love for you; and she smiled at herself for the thought, yet treasured it, all the same.

The next time they met, Harland was disturbed about his book. She had felt in him for some weeks an increasing dissatisfaction with what he was doing; but now that feeling found words. ‘I think the real trouble is with me,' he confessed. ‘I'm — changing, Ruth, in some way not yet clear; changing from day to day. I realized it today when I went back to begin revising what I've done thus far, before going on to write the last hundred pages. If I were writing the first part today, I wouldn't write it the way it stands.' She said nothing, and he went on: ‘I'm afraid the job is a patchwork. When I began it, I was a cocksure, arrogant youngster — and I thought myself ever so sophisticated and wise. Then after Ellen and I were married I was tremendously stimulated, saw — or thought I saw — deeper into my characters:
and I rewrote a lot, and changed a lot. And now this last winter — after leaving it untouched for months — I've revised it again; but the result is like the product of those story conferences in Hollywood. At least three different authors have collaborated on this job. All of them were me; but they were three different men, just the same. The boy who began this book might have finished it and been satisfied with it; or Ellen's husband might have finished it. But I don't believe I can. I'm about ready to junk the whole thing.' And he asked helplessly: ‘What's happened to me?' He laughed. ‘The world's beginning to seem to me a pretty fine place, full of fine people. When I read what I've written, I don't believe a damned word of it.'

‘Perhaps you're tired, stale.' Her pulse was firm with pride.

‘Tired?' He laughed again. ‘Why, I never felt so well in my life. Not only physically, but mentally and spiritually too. And I'm not stale either. I'm anxious to finish this book because there's another one in me all ready to be written and I'm eager to get at it. It will be the sort of book you want me to write; just a straightforward story about simple, average, normal men and women. I think I can see them as brave and beautiful, and make the reader see them so. But damn it, I've got to finish this job first.'

‘Why?' she asked, watching him happily.

He grinned. Well — I'll be damned if I know,' he said. ‘Except that I hate being licked.'

‘If you don't want to finish it, that's not being licked. Sometimes it takes more bravery to accept defeat than to fight on to victory — especially if it's to a victory that should never be won.'

He smiled and touched her hand. ‘You're swell,' he said. ‘You've a philosophy that can meet just about any problem.'

‘Why don't you lay the book aside?' she suggested. ‘Get Leick and go away fishing for a month, then come back and read it again and see how it strikes you.'

He nodded. ‘I may do that,' he said. He added thoughtfully: ‘You know, some day I want to go back to that river where the fire so nearly caught us; but I'll wait till the forest has had time to grow again.'

She had suggested that he go away, but she was glad he did not do so. He stayed in Boston and they went instead, once and then again, to that road's end by the river in Lincoln; and he tried to cajole the big trout into taking a fly, and never succeeded and did not greatly care. The third time, they were sitting in the moonlit dark beside their smudge fire when another car came down the road and saw theirs and backed and turned and drove away again, and they heard a boy's voice and a girl's laughter; and when the car was gone he said in a puzzled wonder:

‘Now there's a sample of the change in me, Ruth. Once I'd have been contemptuous of them and of their cheap flirtation. Now I'm remembering that they're lovers, and that what they do is a part of their search for beauty.'

She nodded understandingly, and the green grass which he had put smotheringly on the fire dried and threw up a little flame; and in its light she saw his eyes turn to her and hold hers, and her heart beat hard.

‘Ruth,' he asked at last, in grave inquiry: ‘Do you suppose I'm in love with you?'

For a long time, minutes on end, she did not reply, not trusting her voice, feeling herself tremble inwardly with great happiness, knowing — yet still not quite believing — that the moment for which for weeks now she had prayed was thus simply come upon them. She did not speak, yet her eyes met his, and he waited for her answer. His question, even though she had dreamed of the moment when this word would be spoken between them, had surprised her, as a lightning flash surprises, and with an equal illumination. In that sudden brightness, just as in the lightning's instant glare the visible world is all revealed, she saw clearly many things not hitherto clearly seen or comprehended but now completely clear; and in the long silence which followed his word, just as after the flash in the heavens the eye retains for a while a perfect picture of all that was so briefly seen, so did her clear vision persist. When she answered him it was steadily and honestly.

‘I think so, Dick, yes,' she said. ‘I hope so, because I love you.'

There was a pulse beat in the silence, and the flame burned
brightly and then died, so that half-dark came between them. He plucked grass and laid it on the embers and darkness was complete, and in that dark he spoke at last, his question like a thought finding words:

‘What is it to love a woman?' After an instant he went on: ‘Did I love Ellen? I knew, one night at the fishing lodge in New Mexico, that she would marry me if I wished, but I decided I did not want to marry her. Then she and I went through that adventure in the canyon together, and there were moments when I thought we'd never win clear; and something woke in me. It wasn't just — appetite. It was more permanent than that. I wanted to possess her, not for a moment but forever; wanted her to be — as the word goes — mine. By the time we reached the ranch, that feeling was beginning to evaporate; but then, suddenly, we were married and — she was everything I wanted, all compacted into one small, lovely body.'

Ruth thought he had forgotten she was here beside him as he went on. ‘She made me feel tremendous,' he said. ‘Omnipotent and omniscient and enormously full of potentialities. We were congenial as two people equally intoxicated are congenial, each stimulated by the other. We never had a quarrel, you know; not in the usual sense of the word. It's true we — parted; but even that seemed normal in our relationship.' He was silent and she thought there was hesitation in him, as though he considered saying something which presently he decided not to say; for he went on: ‘But Ruth, I don't feel about you the way I did about her.'

She said at once: ‘I know.' Gladness filled her.

‘If I loved her, then I certainly don't love you.' The flame blazed up again and she saw his sober countenance. 'I'm happy with you, completely so,' he said. ‘With you I feel — good. Virtuous. And I like that. With you, I like people. With her, you know, other people didn't count. It was always Ellen who filled my world. But you — being with you — just sharpens my appreciation of other people, of places and scenes and things. Everything is more beautiful or more interesting when I see it with you. Is that — loving you?'

‘Love's just a word,' she suggested. ‘Perhaps it's harder than most words to define.'

‘I know. You can't get all the connotations. Love means to each one what he has called love in his thoughts. I would have said I loved Ellen. But loving her was an end in itself. Loving you — if I love you — is only a beginning.' He spoke quietly. ‘Forgive me, but I want to make you understand. If I embraced Ellen, that embrace was everything, complete in itself. But if I ever hold you in my arms, to do so will be a part of something a great deal bigger than ourselves; no more than an incident in a great plan. My love for Ellen ended in loving her. My love for you would be only one aspect of our life together, important only because it promised the babies we would have some day.' And he said in a low tone: ‘You'd be my wife. Ellen was never quite that, Ruth.'

The flames still burned between them as she spoke. ‘We will be happy, Dick.'

‘Do you want to marry me?'

She said, like a ritual, gravely: ‘I want to be always with you, living together, doing what life asks of us together. I want the duties, and the responsibilities, and the tasks; I want the successes and the joys, the griefs and the gladnesses; I want to receive all from you, and to give all to you. I want us to be one person, my dear. If that's marriage, yes, I want to marry you.'

He rose and with his foot scuffed out the little fire, thoughtfully pressing the embers till the last spark was extinguished, taking the coffee pot to the riverside to fill it with water and returning to pour the water on the already cooling brands. Ruth too rose and stood waiting in the shadowed dark, till at last he came to her and faced her for a silent moment and then took her in his arms.

Her blood quickened then to meet the quickening of his, and after an instant she laughed in breathless happiness, and then her laughter ended in a whispering rapture, and when at last their lips parted, he said huskily and reverently:

‘Oh thank God! Thank God!'

‘I thank you too, God,' said Ruth softly, and their lips and their hearts gave thanks together.

They were married a few days later, in the vestry of the church where since Easter Sunday Harland had more than once joined Ruth in attendance. There were no wedding guests. When this question came to be considered, Harland left the decision to Ruth.

‘There aren't more than half a dozen people I'd ask, unless we had a mob,' he confessed. ‘But we'll do the thing in style if you say the word.'

‘If I asked six people I'd have to ask sixty,' she reflected. ‘And if I asked two I'd have to ask six.' It was simpler, they decided, to go quietly together and alone to the minister. ‘After all,' Ruth reminded him, ‘we're the chiefly interested parties.' And she said: ‘It's curious, I suppose, that you and I haven't any intimate friends. As long as Mother was alive, I didn't go out much; but I've been in circulation for two years now. Of course, I know dozens of girls — and men too; but I've been a sort of lone wolf!' Her eyes met his. ‘Even while you were away, Dick, I think I must have been absorbed in you.'

‘Did you suspect it?'

‘No, honestly I didn't. Looking back now, I can see that I began to love you that day before the great fire. Remember, when we went exploring in the woods? I was happy with you that day. It was a gay, light happiness, like bubbles in wine held up against the sun, and I'd never felt that way before. But I didn't know what it meant, and I didn't feel it again till the day you came home.' She smiled. ‘You'd kissed me before, in just the same way, but when you kissed me that day you came home, it was not just because I was Ellen's sister. It was because I was me.'

He nodded. ‘I felt the same way, that day by the river; but I'd felt something like it before.' He added in a thoughtful
tone: ‘I remember a night in New Mexico, the night Ellen stayed up in the mountains till morning. We were sitting on the veranda — Mrs. Robie and I — and you came in the darkness to tell us not to worry. I felt it then, felt the friendliness and strength in you, and I liked the way you walked.' He asked her seriously: ‘Do you suppose I was in love with you then, and all the time afterward?'

‘I know what you're thinking,' she confessed. ‘But neither of us ever betrayed Ellen in even the smallest thought.'

‘She accused me once of being in love with you.'

‘She accused me of loving you,' Ruth assented. ‘But it wasn't true of either of us, Dick. She was wrong. If she were still alive — we'd never have come to love each other now.' She touched his hand, clasped it strongly, full of a high pride.

He spcke again of that day beside the river and they relived it, remembering each incident. ‘We'll go back there, some day,' he said at last. ‘After the young green has had a chance to hide the waste left by the fire; next year, perhaps, or the year after.' His eyes lighted. ‘We might buy that land and build a home there, as we planned that day.'

‘That would be fine,' she agreed. ‘You like solitudes — and with you I'd never feel solitary.' The thought pleased her, and she spoke more eagerly. ‘And we'd be too busy to be lonely, anyway; you working in the morning, and me — and you in the afternoons — busy with our farming and our flowers.'

‘And our dogs and horses,' he amended. ‘We'll keep a dozen dogs, and a horse apiece, and some sheep and cows.'

She said doubtfully: ‘That sounds sort of — permanent! Or would we take them in every spring and out every fall? We'd need a regular Noah's ark to carry them up the river.'

‘And the animals would go aboard two by two!' He laughed. ‘I suppose we'll have to keep the menagerie in bounds. Unless we could get a farmer to stay there the year round and take care of them.'

‘Would Leick?'

‘I don't know. I've never reached the bottom of Leick's
resources; never yet wanted anything he couldn't do.' And he said: ‘See here, this thing is getting hold of me. Suppose we go up there this summer and have the place surveyed, see what shape it's in, maybe even buy the land and build a temporary camp there anyway.'

‘What about the book?'

He said grimly: ‘I'm near a dead end on that. After we're married, we'll take the car and go wandering for a couple of weeks — unless there's something you'd rather do?'

‘No, I like just wandering with you.'

‘Then I'll come back and take another look at it, and if it still seems as empty as it does now, I'll give it up.' He grinned. ‘I like my next idea better anyway.'

‘You've put so much work on this one.'

He chuckled. ‘I know. I'm a thrifty soul, too. But I've learned a lot, stewing and fussing over it. I've had my money's worth out of it in experience.'

So they were married and departed, leaving no forwarding address; and the fortnight Harland had planned extended itself. At first they drove leisurely westward, avoiding resorts and cities, never hurrying, stopping to admire every pleasing prospect, lingering in talk with farmers by the roadside and with housewives from whom they begged a drink of water and with merchants where they made purchases and with the keepers of the small hotels where they preferred to stay. Since these lodgings were often unattractive, Harland bought sleeping bags and cooking dishes, and they acquired provisions at need, and when the nights were fine they were apt to find some contenting spot and sleep in the open air. The byroads which they followed led them sweetly on, and each day was an adventure, and the world was friendly and serene; and Ruth one night, clinging to him in a soft swift passion, cried:

‘Oh Dick, Dick, I've never guessed two people could be as happy as we are; as happy as you and I.' And, begging for reassurance, she asked: ‘Will it last, my dearest? Will it always be like this?'

He said, confident and proud: ‘Of course. Why not?'

‘I hate going back to the everyday world again.'

‘There'll never be an everyday world for you and me. There'll always be new wonders to see and to admire.'

On Sundays — this was at her suggestion, but he willingly agreed — they often sought out some small village church and joined the congregation which sat stiff and uncomfortable in unaccustomed ‘Sunday clothes,' the men smelling faintly of moth balls, their womenfolk, before the services began, nodding and smiling and whispering, and gathering afterward in chattering groups outside the church doors.

‘Why is it I enjoy these churches?' Harland asked one day as they drove away. ‘That preacher was just a boy, and his Adam's apple fascinated me, and his sermon was nothing but a collection of familiar quotations. But I liked it.'

‘I don't think it's what you get out of church,' she suggested.

‘It's what you take into it. But — especially in these little churches — I'm always conscious of the congregations which have sat there in the past, the old people now buried in the churchyards. I feel them around me in the pews; and I picture their strong, kindly, simple, decent faces. The world is so darned full of nice, ordinary people, Dick, doing their daily jobs. They may be tricky or cruel or something during the week, but they turn to church on Sunday.'

‘Why do they do it?'

‘It must give them something they want, something they can't put into words. Probably in church they feel themselves in a great communion with millions of others like themselves, all over the world.'

‘Then why don't more people go to church?'

‘I think perhaps it's because they're in-betweens, either too intelligent or else not intelligent enough. I think the little people and the big ones are alike very simple. It's the in-betweens who have lost their simplicity. Cars and radios and rapid communication have enlarged their world — and made it thin and diffuse. There are so many things in their world, and
so many ideas in their minds, that they're forever pulled this way and that, have no rock of simple conviction on which they can stand firm. They hear statements made one day and denied the next, so they learn disbelief rather than belief, and fall into the pit of believing nothing. But in the old little world where your farthest horizon was only a day's horse and buggy ride away, the church was the center, and the minister was the fountain of truth, and your life instead of being diffused and confusing was concentrated and simple and comforting.'

He said smilingly: ‘Such ministers as we've been hearing certainly weren't fountains of eternal truth! And yet if you just let go and relax and submit, you come out of their churches feeling rested and — well, as though you'd made friends with something fine.'

They had, during these weeks together, long hours of contenting talk; and even though they seldom drove great distances in any one day, they went as far west as Wisconsin before turning homeward. The weather was hot, so they swung northward into Canada, and eastward and then south into Maine. From Skowhegan they wired Mrs. Huston to expect them; and Harland telegraphed to Leick — he had written him before they set out, bidding him make plans — that by the first of August they would be ready to go back to the river to undertake that project of creating a home in the wilderness which now more and more clearly took shape in their minds.

When they arrived at the house on Chestnut Street, Harland swept Ruth up in his arms and carried her across the threshold. Mrs. Huston showed him a pile of unopened letters on his desk, and Ruth promised to help him answer them tomorrow.

‘I'm going to be your secretary, you know,' she reminded him. ‘We'll turn them off in no time.'

But those letters would wait long for answers. Mrs. Huston reported that Quinton had telephoned that morning.

‘I said I expected you home in time for dinner,' she explained, ‘and he said he'd come this evening to see you.' Harland started to protest and she said: ‘I told him you wouldn't want to see
anyone your first night at home, but he said this couldn't wait. He said it was important.'

Ruth saw that Harland was puzzled and disturbed. ‘Wonder what that's all about?' he asked her.

‘I don't know.' She too was perplexed, full of a reasonless concern.

Harland laughed. ‘Oh well, let him come. He won't stay long,' he said.