My mother, though she took on for the occasion an appropriate solemnity, was frankly5 relieved to have me so well disposed. Tommy had been brought up in the church, had no bad habits, and was earning a reasonable salary with Burton Brothers, Tailors and Outfitters.
There was nobody whose business it was to tell me that I did not love Tommy enough to marry him. I have often wondered, supposing a medium of communication had been established between my mother and me, if I had told her how much more that other kiss had meant to me than Tommy's mild osculation, she would have understood or made a fight for me? I am afraid she would only have seen in it evidence of an infatuation for an undesirable6 young man, one who smoked and drove rakishly about town in red neckties on Sunday morning. But in fact I liked Tommy immensely. The mating instinct was awake; all our world clapped us forward to the adventure.
If you ask what the inward monitor was about on this occasion, I will say that it is always and singularly inept7 at human estimates. If, often in search of companionship, its eye is removed from the Mark, to fix upon the personal environment, it is still unfurnished to divine behind which plain exterior8 lives another like itself! I took Tommy's community of interest for granted on the evidence of his loving me, though, indeed, after all these years I am not quite clear why he, why Forester and Pauline couldn't have walked in the way with me toward the Shining Destiny. I was not conscious of any private advantage; certainly so far as our beginnings were concerned, none showed, and I should have been glad of their company ... and here at the end I am walking in it alone.
About a month after my engagement, Henry Mills proposed to Pauline, and she began preparations to be married the following June. Tommy's salary not being thought to justify9 it so soon, the idea of my own marriage had not come very close to me until I began to help Pauline work initials on table linen10.
The chief difference between Pauline and me had been that she had lived all her life, so to speak, at home; nothing exigent to her social order had ever found her "out"; but Olivia seemed always to be at the top of the house or somewhere in the back garden, to whom the normal occasions presented themselves as a succession of cards under the door. I do not mean to say that I actually missed any of these appointed visitors, but all my early life comes back to me as a series of importunate11 callers whose names I was not sure of, and who distracted me frightfully from something vastly more pleasant and important that I wanted very much to do, without knowing very well what it was. But it was in the long afternoons when Pauline and I sat upstairs together sewing on our white things that I began to take notice of the relation of what happened to me to the things that went on inside, and to be intrigued12 away from the Vision by the possibility of turning it into facts of line and colour and suitability. It was the beginning of my realizing what came afterward13 to be such a bitter and engrossing14 need with me, the need of money.
Much that had struck inharmoniously on me in the furnishings of Taylorville, had identified itself so with the point of view there, that I had come to think of the one as being the natural and inevitable15 expression of the other; now, with the growing appreciation16 of a home of my own as a medium of self-realization, I accepted its possibility of limitation by the figure of my husband's income without being entirely17 daunted18 thereby19. For I was still of the young opinion that getting rich involved no more serious matter than setting about it. As I saw it then, Men's Tailoring and Outfitting20 did not appear an unlikely beginning; if Tommy had achieved the magnificence I planned for him, it wouldn't have been on the whole more remarkable21 than what has happened. What I had to reckon with later was the astonishing fact that Tommy liked plush furniture, and liked it red for choice.
I do not know why it should have taken me by surprise to find him in harmony with his bringing up; there was no reason for the case being otherwise except as I seemed to find one in his being fond of me. His mother's house was not unlike other Taylorvillian homes, more austerely22 kept; the blinds were always pulled down in the best room, and they never opened the piano except when there was company, or for the little girls to practise their music lessons. Mrs. Bettersworth was a large, fair woman with pale, prominent eyes, and pale hair pulled back from a corrugated23 forehead, and his sisters, who were all younger than Tommy, were exactly like her, their eyes if possible more protruded24, which you felt to be owing to their hair being braided very tightly in two braids as far apart as possible at the corners of their heads.
They treated me always with the greatest respect. If there had been anybody who could have thrown any light on the situation it would have been Mr. Bettersworth. He was a dry man, with what passed in Taylorville for an eccentric turn of mind. He had, for instance, been known to justify himself for putting Tommy to the Men's Outfitters rather than to his own business of building and contracting, on the ground that Tommy wanted the imagination for it. Just as if an imagination could be of use to anybody!
"So you are going to undertake to make Tommy happy?" he said to me on the occasion of my taking supper with the family as a formal acknowledgment of my engagement.
"Don't you think I can do it?" He was looking at me rather quizzically, and I really wished to know.
"Oh! I was wondering," he said, "what you would do with what you had left over." But it was years before I understood what he meant by that.
About the time I was bridesmaid for Pauline, Tommy had an advantageous25 offer that put our marriage almost immediately within reach. Burton Brothers was a branch house, one of a score with the Head at Chicago, to whom Tommy had so commended himself under the stimulus26 of being engaged, that on the establishment of a new store in Higgleston they offered him the sales department. There was also to be a working tailor and a superintendent27 visiting it regularly from Chicago, which its nearness to the metropolis28 allowed.
All that we knew of Higgleston was that it was a long settled farming community, which, having discovered itself at the junction29 of two railway lines that approached Chicago from the southeast, conceived itself to have arrived there by some native superiority, and awoke to the expectation of importance.
It lay, as respects Taylorville, no great distance beyond the flat horizon of the north, where the prairie broke into wooded land again, far enough north not to have been fanned by the hot blast of the war and the spiritual struggle that preceded it, and so to have missed the revitalizing processes that crowded the few succeeding years. Whatever difference there was between it and Taylorville besides population, was just the difference between a community that has fought whole-heartedly and one that stood looking on at the fight.
It was not far enough from Taylorville to have struck out anything new for itself in manners or furniture, but the necessity of going south two or three hours to change cars, and north again several hours more, set up an illusion of change which led to a disappointment in its want of variety. Tommy went out in July, and in a month wrote me that he would be able to come for me as soon as I was ready, and hoping it would not be long. If I had looked, as in the last hesitancies of girlhood I believe I did, for my mother to have raised an objection to my going so far from home, I found myself, instead, almost with the feeling of being pushed out of the nest. It seemed as if in hastening me out of the family she would be the sooner free to give herself without reproach to a new and extraordinary scheme of Forester's. What I guess now to have been in part the motive30, was that she already had been touched by the warning of that disorder31 which finally carried her off, which, with the curious futility32 of timid women, she hoped, by not mentioning, to postpone33.
For a long time now Forester had found himself in the situation of having grown beyond his virtues34. That assumption of mannishness which sat so prettily35 on his nonage was rendered inconspicuous by his majority. People who had forgotten that he had never had any boyhood, found nothing especially commendable36 in the mild soberness of twenty-three. I have a notion, too, that the happy circumstance of my marriage lit up for him some personal phases which he could hardly have regarded with complacence, for by this time he had passed, in his character of philanderer37, from being hopefully regarded as reclaimable38 to constancy, to a sort of public understudy in the practice of the affections. However it had come about, the young ladies who still took on Forester at intervals39, no longer looked on him so much as privileged but as eminently41 safe; and the number of girls in a given community who can be counted on for such a performance, is limited. That summer before I was married, after Belle42 Endsleigh had run away from home with a commercial traveller who disappointed the moral instance by making her a very good husband afterward, my brother found himself, as regards the young people's world, in a situation of uneasy detachment. And there was no doubt that the Coöperative, where he had been seven years, bored him excessively. It was then he conceived the idea of reinstating himself in the atmosphere of importance by setting himself up in business.
Adjacent to Niles's Ice Cream Parlours, there was a small stationery43 and news agency which might be bought and enlarged to creditable proportions. There was, I believe, actually nothing to be urged against this as a matter of business; the difficulty was that to accomplish it my mother would be obliged to hypothecate the whole of her small capital. What my mother really thought about her property was that she held it in trust for the family interest, and that, with the secret intimation of her end which I surmise44 must have reached her by this time, she believed to be served by Forester's plan. It was so much the general view that by marrying I took myself out of the family altogether, that I felt convinced that she meant, so soon as that was accomplished45, to undertake what, in the face of my protesting attitude, she had not the courage to begin. I remember how shocked she was at my telling her that this tying up of the two ends of life in a monetary46 obligation, would put her and Forester very much in the situation of a young man married to a middle-aged47 woman. I mention this here because the implication that grew out of it, of my marriage being looked forward to as a relief, had much to do with the failure out of my life at this juncture48, of informing intimacy49.
A great deal of necessary information had come my way through Pauline's marriage, through the comment set free by Belle Endsleigh's affair, through the natural awakening50 of my mind toward the intimations of books. Marriage I began to perceive as an engulfing51 personal experience. Until now I hadn't been able to think of it except as a means of providing pleasant companionship on the way toward that large and shining world for which I felt myself forever and unassailably fit. It began to exhibit now, through vistas52 that allured53, the aspect of a vast inhuman54 grin. Somewhere out of this prospect55 of sympathy and understanding, arose upon you the tremendous inundation56 of Life. Dimly beyond the point of Tommy's joyous57 possession of me, I was aware of an incalculable force by which the whole province of my being was assailed58, very different from the girlish prevision of motherhood which had floated with the fragrance59 of orris root from Aunt Alice's bureau drawer in the Allingham's spare room.
I don't say this is the way all girls feel about the approach of maternity60, but I saw it then like the wolf in the fairy tale, which as soon as its head was admitted, thrust in a shoulder and so came bodily into the room and devoured61 the protestant. Long afterward, when I was in a position to know something of the private experience of trapeze performers, I learned that they came to a point sometimes in mid-spring when the body apprised62 them of inadequacy63, a warning sure to be followed in no long time by disaster. I have thought sometimes that what reached me then was the advice of a body instinctively64 aware of being unequal to the demands about to be imposed upon it.
I hardly know now by what road I arrived at the certainty that some women, Pauline for instance, were able to face this looming65 terror of childbearing by making terms with it. Life, it appeared, waited at their doors with respect, modified the edge of its inevitableness to their convenience. If Pauline had been accessible—but she was living in Chicago with Henry Mills, going out a great deal, and writing me infrequent letters of bright complacency. It was only in the last frightened gasp66 I fixed67 upon my mother. You must imagine for yourself from what you know of nice girls thirty years ago, how inarticulate the whole business was; the most I can do is to have you understand my desperate need to know, to interpose between marriage and maternity never so slight an interval40 in which to collect myself and leave off shrinking.
About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was when the light failed. Something in the work we had been doing, putting the last touches to my wedding dress, led her to speak of her own, and of my father as a young man. The mention pricked68 me to notice what I recall now as characteristic of Taylorville women, that, with all she had been through, the war, her eight children, so many graves, there was still in her attitude, toward all these, a kind of untutored virginity. It made, my noticing it then and being touched by it, a sort of bridge by which it seemed for the moment she might be drawn69 over to my side. On the impulse I spoke70.
"Mother," I said, "I want to know?..."
It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right. Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended shock come over my mother's reminiscent softness, the nearly animal rage of terror with which the unknown, the unaccustomed, assailed her.
"Olivia! Olivia!" She stood up, her knitting rigid71 in her hands, the ball of it speeding away in the dusk of the floor on some private terror of its own. "Olivia, I'll not hear of such things! You are not to speak of them, do you understand! I'll have nothing to do with them!"
"I wanted to know," I said. "I thought you could tell me...."
I went over and stood by the window; a little dry snow was blowing—it was the first week in November—beginning to collect on the edges of the walks and along the fences; the landscape showed sketched72 in white on a background of neutral gray. I heard a movement in the room behind me; my mother came presently and stood looking out with me. She was very pale, scared but commiserating73. Somehow my question had glanced in striking the dying nerve of long since encountered dreads74 and pains. We faced them together there in the cold twilight75.
"I'm sorry, daughter"—she hesitated—"I can't help you. I don't know ... I never knew myself."
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1
disposition
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| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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mazes
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| 迷宫( maze的名词复数 )； 纷繁复杂的规则； 复杂难懂的细节； 迷宫图 | |
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augmenting
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| 使扩张 | |
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embarrassment
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| n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫 | |
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frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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undesirable
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| adj.不受欢迎的，不良的，不合意的，讨厌的；n.不受欢迎的人，不良分子 | |
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inept
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| adj.不恰当的，荒谬的，拙劣的 | |
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exterior
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| adj.外部的，外在的；表面的 | |
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justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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importunate
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| adj.强求的；纠缠不休的 | |
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intrigued
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| adj.好奇的，被迷住了的v.搞阴谋诡计(intrigue的过去式)；激起…的兴趣或好奇心；“intrigue”的过去式和过去分词 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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engrossing
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| adj.使人全神贯注的，引人入胜的v.使全神贯注( engross的现在分词 ) | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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daunted
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| 使（某人）气馁，威吓( daunt的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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thereby
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| adv.因此，从而 | |
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outfitting
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| v.装备，配置设备，供给服装( outfit的现在分词 ) | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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austerely
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| adv.严格地，朴质地 | |
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corrugated
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| adj.波纹的；缩成皱纹的；波纹面的；波纹状的v.（使某物）起皱褶(corrugate的过去式和过去分词) | |
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24
protruded
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| v.（使某物）伸出，（使某物）突出( protrude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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advantageous
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| adj.有利的；有帮助的 | |
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stimulus
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| n.刺激，刺激物，促进因素，引起兴奋的事物 | |
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superintendent
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| n.监督人，主管，总监；(英国)警务长 | |
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metropolis
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| n.首府；大城市 | |
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junction
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| n.连接，接合；交叉点，接合处，枢纽站 | |
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motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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disorder
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| n.紊乱，混乱；骚动，骚乱；疾病，失调 | |
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futility
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| n.无用 | |
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postpone
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| v.延期，推迟 | |
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virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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prettily
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| adv.优美地；可爱地 | |
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commendable
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| adj.值得称赞的 | |
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philanderer
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| n.爱和女人调情的男人，玩弄女性的男人 | |
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reclaimable
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| adj.可收回的，可教化的 | |
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39
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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eminently
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| adv.突出地；显著地；不寻常地 | |
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belle
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| n.靓女 | |
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stationery
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| n.文具；(配套的)信笺信封 | |
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surmise
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| v./n.猜想，推测 | |
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45
accomplished
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| adj.有才艺的；有造诣的；达到了的 | |
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46
monetary
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| adj.货币的，钱的；通货的；金融的；财政的 | |
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middle-aged
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| adj.中年的 | |
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juncture
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| n.时刻，关键时刻，紧要关头 | |
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intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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50
awakening
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| n.觉醒，醒悟 adj.觉醒中的；唤醒的 | |
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51
engulfing
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| adj.吞噬的v.吞没，包住( engulf的现在分词 ) | |
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52
vistas
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| 长条形景色( vista的名词复数 )； 回顾； 展望； （未来可能发生的）一系列情景 | |
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53
allured
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| 诱引，吸引( allure的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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54
inhuman
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| adj.残忍的，不人道的，无人性的 | |
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prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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56
inundation
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| n.the act or fact of overflowing | |
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57
joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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58
assailed
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| v.攻击( assail的过去式和过去分词 )；困扰；质问；毅然应对 | |
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59
fragrance
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| n.芬芳，香味，香气 | |
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maternity
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| n.母性，母道，妇产科病房；adj.孕妇的，母性的 | |
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61
devoured
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| 吞没( devour的过去式和过去分词 )； 耗尽； 津津有味地看； 狼吞虎咽地吃光 | |
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62
apprised
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| v.告知，通知( apprise的过去式和过去分词 )；评价 | |
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63
inadequacy
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| n.无法胜任，信心不足 | |
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64
instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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65
looming
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| n.上现蜃景（光通过低层大气发生异常折射形成的一种海市蜃楼）v.隐约出现，阴森地逼近( loom的现在分词 )；隐约出现，阴森地逼近 | |
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66
gasp
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| n.喘息，气喘；v.喘息；气吁吁他说 | |
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67
fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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68
pricked
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| 刺，扎，戳( prick的过去式和过去分词 )； 刺伤； 刺痛； 使剧痛 | |
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69
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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70
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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71
rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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72
sketched
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| v.草拟（sketch的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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73
commiserating
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| v.怜悯，同情( commiserate的现在分词 ) | |
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74
dreads
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| n.恐惧，畏惧( dread的名词复数 )；令人恐惧的事物v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的第三人称单数 ) | |
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75
twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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