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Virginia, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
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Book 2. The Reality - Chapter 1. Virginia Prepares For The Future |
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_ BOOK II. THE REALITY CHAPTER I. VIRGINIA PREPARES FOR THE FUTURE "Mother, I'm so happy! Oh! was there ever a girl so happy as I am?" "I was, dear, once." "When you married father? Yes, I know," said Virginia, but she said it without conviction. In her heart she did not believe that marrying her father--perfect old darling that he was!--could ever have caused any girl just the particular kind of ecstasy that she was feeling. She even doubted whether such stainless happiness had ever before visited a mortal upon this planet. It was not only wonderful, it was not only perfect, but it felt so absolutely new that she secretly cherished the belief that it had been invented by the universe especially for Oliver and herself. It was ridiculous to imagine that the many million pairs of lovers that were marrying every instant had each experienced a miracle like this, and yet left the earth pretty much as they had found it before they fell in love. It was a week before her wedding, and she stood in the centre of the spare room in the west wing, which had been turned over to Miss Willy Whitlow. The little seamstress knelt now at her feet, pinning up the hem of a black silk polonaise, and turning her head from time to time to ask Mrs. Pendleton if she was "getting the proper length." For a quarter of a century, no girl of Virginia's class had married in Dinwiddie without the crowning benediction of a black silk gown, and ever since the announcement of Virginia's betrothal her mother had cramped her small economies in order that she might buy "grosgrain" of the best quality. "Is that right, mother? Do you think I might curve it a little more in front?" asked the girl, holding her feet still with difficulty because she felt that she wanted to dance. "No, dear, I think it will stay in fashion longer if you don't shorten it. Then it will be easier to make over the more goods you leave in it." "It looks nice on me, doesn't it?" Standing there, with the stiff silk slipping away from her thin shoulders, and the dappled sunlight falling over her neck and arms through the tawny leaves of the paulownia tree in the garden, she was like a slim white lily unfolding softly out of its sheath. "Lovely, darling, and it will be so useful. I got the very best quality, and it ought to wear forever." "I made Mrs. William Goode one ten years ago, and she's still wearing it," remarked Miss Willy, speaking with an effort through a mouthful of pins. A machine, which had been whirring briskly by the side window, stopped suddenly, and the girl who sewed there--a sickly, sallow-faced creature of Virginia's age, who was hired by Mrs. Pendleton, partly out of charity because she supported an invalid father who had been crippled in the war, and partly because, having little strength and being an unskilled worker, her price was cheap--turned for an instant and stared wistfully at the black silk polonaise over the strip of organdie which she was hemming. All her life she had wanted a black silk dress, and though she knew that she should probably never have one, and should not have time to wear it if she ever had, she liked to linger over the thought of it, very much as Virginia lingered over the thought of her lover, or as little Miss Willy lingered over the thought of having a tombstone over her after she was dead. In the girl's face, where at first there had been only admiration, a change came gradually. A quiver, so faint that it was hardly more than a shadow, passed over her drawn features, and her gaze left the trailing yards of silk and wandered to the blue October sky over the swinging leaves of the paulownia. But instead of the radiant autumn weather at which she was looking, she still saw that black silk polonaise which she wanted as she wanted youth and pleasure, and which she knew that she should never have. "Everything is finished but this, isn't it, Miss Willy?" asked Virginia, and at the sound of her happy voice, that strange quiver passed again through the other girl's face. "Everything except that organdie and a couple of nightgowns." There was no quiver in Miss Willy's face, for from constant consideration of the poorhouse and the cemetery, she had come to regard the other problems of life, if not with indifference, at least with something approaching a mild contempt. Even love, when measured by poverty or by death, seemed to lose the impressiveness of its proportions. "And I'll have enough clothes to last me for years, shan't I, mother?" "I hope so, darling. Your father and I have done the best that we could for you." "You've been angels. Oh, how I shall hate to leave you!" "If only you weren't going away, Jinny!" Then she broke down, and dropping the tomato-shaped pin-cushion she had been holding, she slipped from the room, while Virginia thrust the polonaise into Miss Willy's hands and fled breathlessly after her. In the girl's room, with her head bowed on the top of the little bookcase, above those thin rows of fiction, Mrs. Pendleton was weeping almost wildly over the coming separation. She, who had not thought of herself for thirty years, had suddenly broken the constraint of the long habit. Yet it was characteristic of her, that even now her first feeling, when Virginia found her, should be one of shame that she had clouded for an instant the girl's happiness. "It is nothing, darling. I have a little headache, and--oh, Jinny! Jinny!----" "Mother, it won't be long. We are coming back to live just as soon as Oliver can get work. It isn't as if I were going for good, is it? And I'll write you every day--every single day. Mother, dearest, darling mother, I can't stay away from you----" Then Virginia wept, too, and Mrs. Pendleton, forgetting her own sorrow at sight of the girl's tears, began to comfort her. "Of course, you'll write and tell me everything. It will be almost as if I were with you." "And you love Oliver, don't you, mother?" "How could I help it, dear--only I can't quite get used to your calling your husband by his name, Jinny. It would have horrified your grandmother, and somehow it does seem lacking in respect. However, I suppose I'm old-fashioned." "But, mother, he laughs if I call him 'Mr. Treadwell.' He says it reminds him of his Aunt Belinda." "Perhaps he's right, darling. Anyway, he prefers it, and I fancy your grandfather wouldn't have liked to hear his wife address him so familiarly. Times have changed since my girlhood." "And Oliver has lived out in the world so much, mother." "Yes," said Mrs. Pendleton, but her voice was without enthusiasm. The "world" to her was a vague and sinister shape, which looked like a bubble, and exerted a malignant influence over those persons who lived beyond the borders of Virginia. Her imagination, which seldom wandered farther afield than the possibility of the rector or of Virginia falling ill, or the dreaded likelihood that her market bills would overrun her weekly allowance, was incapable of grasping a set of standards other than the one which was accepted in Dinwiddie. "Wherever you are, Jinny, I hope that you will never forget the ideas your father and I have tried to implant in you," she said. "I'll always try to be worthy of you, mother." "Your first duty now, of course, is to your husband. Remember, we have always taught you that a woman's strength lies in her gentleness. His will must be yours now, and wherever your ideas cross, it is your duty to give up, darling. It is the woman's part to sacrifice herself." "I know, mother, I know." "I have never forgotten this, dear, and my marriage has been very happy. Of course," she added, while her forehead wrinkled nervously, "there are not many men like your father." "Of course not, mother, but Oliver----" In Mrs. Pendleton's soft, anxious eyes the shadow darkened, as if for the first time she had grown suspicious of the traditional wisdom which she was imparting. But this suspicion was so new and young that it could not struggle for existence against the archaic roots of her inherited belief in the Pauline measure of her sex. It was characteristic of her--and indeed of most women of her generation--that she would have endured martyrdom in support of the consecrated doctrine of her inferiority to man. "Even in the matter of religion you ought to yield to him, darling," she said after a moment in which she had appealed to that orthodox arbiter, her conscience. "Your father and I were talking about what church you should go to, and I said that I supposed Oliver was a Presbyterian, like all of the Treadwells." "Oh, mother, I didn't tell you before because I hoped I could change him--but he doesn't go to any church--he says they all bore him equally. He has broken away from all the old ideas, you know. He is dreadfully--unsettled." The anxiety, which had been until then merely a shadow in Mrs. Pendleton's eyes, deepened into a positive pain. "Your father must have known, for he talked to him--but he wouldn't tell me," she said. "I made father promise not to. I hoped so I could change Oliver, and maybe I can after we're married, mother." "If he has given up the old spiritual standards, what has he in place of them?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, and she had suddenly a queer feeling as if little fine needles were pricking her skin. "I don't know, but he seems to have a great deal, more than any of us," answered Virginia, and she added passionately, "He is good, mother." "I never doubted it, darling, but he is young, and his character cannot be entirely formed at his age. A man must be very strong in order to be good without faith." "But he has faith, mother--of some kind." "I am not judging him, my child, and neither your father nor I would ever criticise your husband to you. Your happiness was set on him, and we can only pray from our hearts that he will prove worthy of your love. He is very lovable, and I am sure that he has fine, generous traits. Your father has been completely won over by him." "He likes me to be religious, mother. He says the church has cultivated the loveliest type of woman the world has ever seen." "Then by fulfilling that ideal you will please him best." "I shall try to be just what you have been to father--just as unselfish, just as devoted." "I have made many mistakes, Jinny, but I don't think I have ever failed in love--not in love, at least." Then the pain passed out of her eyes, and because it was impossible for her to look on any fact in life except through the transfiguring idealism with which the ages had endowed her, she became immediately convinced that everything, even the unsettling of Oliver's opinions, had been arranged for the best. This assurance was the more solacing because it was the result, not of external evidence, but of that instinctive decision of temperament which breeds the deepest conviction of all. "Love is the only thing that really matters, isn't it, mother?" "A pure and noble love, darling. It is a woman's life. God meant it so." "You are so good! If I can only be half as good as you are." "No, Jinny, I'm not really good. I have had many temptations--for I was born with a high temper, and it has taken me a lifetime to learn really to subdue it. I had--I have still an unfortunate pride. But for your father's daily example of humility and patience, I don't know how I could have supported the trials and afflictions we have known. Pray to be better than your mother, my child, if you want to become a perfect wife. What I am that seems good to you, your father has made me----" "And father says that he would have been a savage but for you." A tremor passed through Mrs. Pendleton's thin bosom, and bending over, she smoothed a fine darn in the skirt of her alpaca dress. "We have loved each other," she answered. "If you and Oliver love as much, you will be happy whatever comes to you." Then choking down the hard lump in her throat, she took up her leather key basket from the little table beside the bed, and moved slowly towards the door. "I must see about supper now, dear," she said in her usual voice of quiet cheerfulness. Left to herself, Virginia opened the worn copy of the prayer-book, which she kept at her bedside, and read the marriage service from beginning to end, as she had done every day since her engagement to Oliver. The words seemed to her, as they seemed to her mother, to be almost divine in their nobility and beauty. She was troubled by no doubt as to the inspired propriety of the canonical vision of woman. What could be more beautiful or more sacred than to be "given" to Oliver--to belong to him as utterly as she had belonged to her father? What could make her happier than the knowledge that she must surrender her will to his from the day of her wedding until the day of her death? She embraced her circumscribed lot with a passion which glorified its limitations. The single gift which the ages permitted her was the only one she desired. Her soul craved no adventure beyond the permissible adventure of being sought in marriage. Love was all that she asked of a universe that was overflowing with manifold aspects of life. Beyond the window the tawny leaves of the paulownia were swinging in the October sunshine, and so gay they seemed that it was impossible to imagine them insensible to the splendour of the Indian Summer. Under the half bared boughs, on the green grass in the yard, those that had already fallen sped on, like a flock of frightened brown birds, towards the white paling fence of the churchyard. While she sat there, with her prayer-book in her hand, and her eyes on the purple veil of the distance, it seemed to her that her joy was so complete that there was nothing left even to hope for. All her life she had looked forward to the coming of what she thought of vaguely as "happiness," and now that it was here, she felt that it put an end to the tremulous expectancy which had filled her girlhood with such wistful dreams. Marriage appeared to her (and indeed to Oliver, also) as a miraculous event, which would make not only herself, but every side of life, different for the future. After that there would be no vain longings, no spring restlessness, no hours of drab weariness, when the interests of living seemed to crumble from mere despondency. After that they would be always happy, always eager, always buoyantly alive. Leaving the marriage service, her thoughts brooded in a radiant stillness on the life of love which would begin for her on the day of her wedding. A strange light--the light that quivered like a golden wing over the autumn fields--shone, also, into the secret chambers of her soul, and illumined the things which had appeared merely dull and commonplace until to-day. Those innumerable little cares which fill the lives of most women were steeped in the magic glow of this miraculous charm. She thought of the daily excitement of marketing, of the perpetual romance of mending his clothes, of the glorified monotony of pouring his coffee, as an adventurer on sunrise seas might dream of the rosy islands of hidden treasure. And then, so perfectly did she conform in spirit to the classic ideal of her sex, her imagination ecstatically pictured her in the immemorial attitude of woman. She saw herself waiting--waiting happily--but always waiting. She imagined the thrilling expectancy of the morning waiting for him to come home to his dinner; the hushed expectancy of the evening waiting for him to come home to his supper; the blissful expectancy of hoping that he might be early; the painful expectancy of fearing that he might be late. And it seemed to her divinely right and beautiful that, while he should have a hundred other absorbing interests in his life, her whole existence should perpetually circle around this single centre of thought. One by one, she lived in anticipation all the exquisite details of their life together, and in imagining them, she overlooked all possible changes that the years might bring, as entirely as she ignored the subtle variations of temperament which produce in each individual that fluid quantity we call character. She thought of Oliver, as she thought of herself, as though the fact of marriage would crystallize him into a shape from which he would never alter or dissolve in the future. And with a reticence peculiar to her type, she never once permitted her mind to stray to her crowning beatitude--the hope of a child; for, with that sacred inconsistency possible only to fixed beliefs, though motherhood was supposed to comprise every desire, adventure, and activity in the life of woman, it was considered indelicate for her to dwell upon the thought of it until the condition had become too obvious for refinement to deny. The shadow of the church tower lengthened on the grass, and at the end of the cross street she saw Susan appear and stop for a minute to speak to Miss Priscilla, who was driving by in a small wagonette. Then the girl and the teacher parted, and ten minutes later there came Susan's imperative knock at Virginia's door. "Miss Willy told mother that your wedding dress was finished, Jinny, and I am dying to see it!" Going to the closet, which was built into one corner of the wall, Virginia unpinned a long white sheet scented with rose-leaves, and brought out a filmy mass of satin and lace. Her face as she looked down upon it was the face of girlhood incarnate. All her virginal dreams clustered there like doves quivering for flight. Its beauty was the beauty of fleeting things--of the wind in the apple blossoms at dawn, of the music of bees on an August afternoon. "Mother wouldn't let me be married in anything but satin," she said, with a catch in her voice. "I believe it is the first time in her life she was ever extravagant, but she felt so strongly about it that I had to give in and not have white muslin as I wanted to do." "And it's so lovely," said Susan. "I had no idea Miss Willy could do it. She's as proud, too, as if it were her own." "She took a pleasure in every stitch, she told me. Oh, Susan, I sometimes feel that I haven't any right to be so happy. I seem to have everything and other women to have nothing." For the first time Susan smiled, but it was a smile of understanding. "Perhaps they have more than you think, darling." "But there's Miss Willy--what has she ever got out of life?" "Well, I really believe she gets a kind of happiness out of saving up the money to pay for her tombstone. It's a funny thing, but the people who ought to be unhappy, somehow never are. It doesn't seem to be a matter of what you have, but of the way you are born. Now, according to us, Miss Willy ought to be miserable, but the truth is that she isn't a bit so. Mother saw her once skipping for pure joy in the spring." "But people who haven't things can't be as grateful to God as those who have. I feel that I'd like to spend every minute of my life on my knees thanking Him. I don't see how I can ever have a disappointed or a selfish thought again. I wonder if you can understand, you precious Susan, but I want to open my arms and take the whole world into them." "Jinny," said Susan suddenly, "don't spoil Oliver." "I couldn't--not if I tried every minute." "I don't know, dear. He is very lovable, he has fine generous traits, he has the making of a big man in him--but his character isn't formed yet, you must remember. So much of him is imagination that he will take longer than most men to grow up to his stature." "Oh, Susan!" exclaimed Virginia, and turned away. "Perhaps I oughtn't to have said it, Jinny--but, no, I ought to tell you just what I think, and I don't regret it." "Mother said the same thing to me," responded Virginia, looking as if she were on the point of tears; "but that is just because neither of you know him as I do." "He is a Treadwell and so am I, and the chief characteristic of every Treadwell is that he is going to get the thing he wants most. It doesn't make any difference whether it is money or love or fame, the thing he wants most he will get sooner or later. So all I mean is that you needn't spoil Oliver by giving him the universe before he wants it." "I can't give him the universe. I can only give him myself." Stooping over, Susan kissed her. "Happy, happy little Jinny!" "There are only two things that trouble me, dear--one is going away from mother and father, and the other is that you are not so happy as I am." "Some day I may get the thing I want like every other Treadwell." "Do you mean going to college?" "No," said Susan, "I don't mean that," and into her calm grey eyes a new light shone for an instant. A clairvoyance, deeper than knowledge, came to Virginia while she looked at her. "You darling!" she exclaimed. "I never suspected!" "There's nothing to suspect, Jinny. I was only joking." "Why, it never crossed my mind that you would think of him for a minute." "He hasn't thought of me for a minute yet." "The idea! He'd be wild about you in ten seconds if he ever thought----" "He was wild about you ten seconds ago, dear." "He never was. It was just his fancy. Why, you are made for each other." A laugh broke from Susan, but with that large and quiet candour which was characteristic of her, she did not seek to evade or deny Virginia's suspicion. That her friend should discover her feeling for John Henry seemed to her as natural as that she should be conscious of it herself--for they were intimate with that full and perfect intimacy which exists only between two women who trust each other. "There goes Miss Willy," said Susan, looking through the window to where the little dressmaker tripped down the stone steps to the street. "Mother wants to have early supper, so I must be running away." "Good-bye, darling. Oh, Susan, I never loved you as I do now. It will be all right--I trust and pray that it will! And, just think, you will walk out of church together at my wedding!" For a minute, standing on the threshold, Susan looked back at her with an expression of tender amusement in her eyes. "Don't imagine that I'm unhappy, dear," she said, "because I'm not--it isn't that kind--and, after all, even an unrequited affection may be simply an added interest in life, if we choose to take it that way." When she had gone, Virginia lingered over her wedding dress, while she wondered what the wise Susan could see in the simple John Henry? Was it possible that John Henry was not so simple, after all? Or did Susan, forsaking the ancient tradition of love, care about him merely because he was good? For a week the hours flew by with golden wings, and at last the most sacred day of her life dawned softly in a sunrise of rose and flame. When she looked back on it afterwards, there were three things which stood out unforgettably in her memory--the kiss that her mother gave her when she turned to leave her girlhood's room for the last time; the sound of her father's voice as he spoke her name at the altar; and the look in Oliver's eyes when she put her hand into his. All the rest was enveloped in a shining mist which floated, like her wedding veil, between the old life and the new. "It has been so perfect--so perfect--if I can only be worthy of this day and of you, Oliver," she said as the carriage started from the rectory gate to the station. "You angel!" he murmured ecstatically. Her eyes hung blissfully on his face for an instant, and then, moved by a sudden stab of reproach, she leaned from the window and looked back at her mother and father, who stood, with clasped hands, gazing after her over the white palings of the gate. _ |
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