Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life

"Is your sciatica troubling you again?" John asked, with sympathy, as he lighted a cigarette. "I had hoped you were rid of that for the summer."

"Worry brings it back, I believe; but my gout is worse at this minute. I had to come over in my old slippers," he added ruefully, as he glanced down at his right foot. "I see nothing ahead of me but a diet of bread and water." Then he asked abruptly, wondering if it could be the absence of Mrs. Birdsong that extinguished the brightness in the room and made even the flowered chintz look wilted, "I suppose you can't be sure yet?'

"Not perfectly sure, but the trouble was more serious than they thought it would be."

The General winced, "Poor girl, poor girl, she struggled too hard not to give up." For a moment, while he tried to distract his mind, he sat brooding in silence, with his eyes on the blue-and-white Willow plates on the top shelf of a rosewood bookcase. Why, he pondered, did women put china in such unsuitable places? No man would arrange a row of plates on end in a bookcase. Bare shelves would appear better to a masculine eye. "Well, I had my hands full—at least Cora had her hands full with George," he burst out at last; for he was very tired; his foot pained him; and the best years of his life, to which he had looked ahead so happily a little while before, were still far out of sight.

"I don't doubt it." John's tone was curt. "I sometimes think the whole trouble is too much George. George is not a restful person to live with. Nor, for that matter, is romantic love restful."

"She adores him, and she has always been his ideal, ever since she was a slip of a girl."

"That is a part, the larger part probably, of the trouble. Think what it must have cost her to keep up being an ideal for more than twenty years! You may talk about keeping up socially, but it doesn't touch the effort of keeping up emotionally. She must have known, too, in her heart, at least, that George wasn't worth it."

"You can't deny, after to-day, that he gives her the best that is in him. We ought not to ask more than that of any man."

"Perhaps not. But when the best in a man pulls one way and everything else pulls another way, the only end is catastrophe." He shook his head impatiently, while the light on his flaming crest and his sharply pointed features gave him the look of a crusader. His face held manliness and sincerity and rugged authority. To be sure, there were persons who distrusted his advanced, or as they insisted radical, opinions. Not only had he become a Socialist in an age when Socialism was still considered dangerous, but he held equally unsound views of suffrage, religion, and the scheme of things in general. The names they called him in conservative Queenborough were not meant to be flattering. However, names are only words in the end; and the old man, who had been called by many different names, though never by the right one, in his own youth, could no longer be frightened by labels. Even names with stings in their tails were only stinging words. "My generation felt about social injustice," he thought. "John's generation talks about social injustice; and perhaps, who knows, the next generation, or the generation after the next, may begin to act about social injustice." Not that it mattered to him now, for that throbbing had begun again in the joint of his toe.

"Tell George I came over," he said, rising heavily to his feet. "I suppose you will find him at the hospital."

"I don't know. She doesn't like to have him about when she is sick. Did you notice how unnatural she became the minute he entered the room?"

"I saw that she made an effort to seem bright and cheerful."

"The strain told every time. I watched her pulse, and finally I asked him to stay out of her room as much as he could."

"Well, it's hard on him too. After all, he doesn't want her to make an effort. He'd much rather she'd be natural. I believe he is perfectly sincere when he says it doesn't make the slightest difference to him how she looks."

"It's too late now to hammer that into her mind. He fell in love with her, as you say, because she was an ideal, and she has determined to remain his ideal until the end."

"Well, I hope George will keep his nerve, and, I may add, his capacity to feel anything. There is, I suspect, a limit to feeling for every human being. Some are able to stand more than others; but whenever the end of endurance is reached, each one takes his own way of escape. Well, give her my love, and tell her I'm ready to come whenever she wants me."

Walking with an effort that exasperated him, he left the house, descended the steps, and made his way slowly past the intervening front yards to the end of the block. At the door Jenny Blair met him, and he told himself, startled, that he had never seen her so lovely. "She looks as if she were in love," he thought shrewdly. "I wonder if she can have a secret fancy for John. You can't tell the way a woman feels by anything that she says."

"George was not there," he said, "but I was talking with John." He looked at her closely as he spoke, and it seemed to him, though his old eyes may have been mistaken, that her gaze faltered.

"Oh, were you?"

"She is still suffering a great deal from the ether; but he says everything has gone as well as they could expect."

"I am so glad. I know she will get well. She has so much to live for."

"Well, I hope she will always have that. Are you going out, my dear?"

"I promised Mrs. Birdsong I'd go over every day to see her canary. You remember Ariel? She keeps him upstairs in her bedroom, and she worries about leaving him when she is away. Servants are so careless. Is John there by himself?"

"He is going up to the hospital; but he said there was no hurry."

"After all, I think I'd just as well wait till to-morrow. I saw Berry give Ariel his bath and clean his cage this morning."

"Would you rather not see John alone, my dear? If you feel that way," he offered gallantly, "I'll crawl back with you, in spite of my toe."

"Oh, no." She laughed at the idea. "What difference does John make? But I can see Ariel just as well in the morning."

What did she mean? he wondered, as he followed her into the hall. Of what was she thinking? No matter. Whatever she thought now, she would probably think something entirely different to-morrow.

That night he slept brokenly and was wide awake with the dawn. As the sun rose, he lay motionless in bed and watched the elm branches mounting upward like the inner curve of a wave. Hours must pass before Robert would bring his early coffee, and he knew that he should not be able to drop back to sleep. Rising presently, he slipped into his dressing-gown and went over to the front window which looked down on the street. Though he still occupied the large corner room he had shared with his wife, there were days in summer when he wished for at least a single window that opened on the flower garden. True, there was a plot sown in grass, but too deeply shaded by trees, just below his side windows; but when he rose early, as he had fallen into the habit of doing, he preferred to sit in his wife's old chair with deep wings in the front corner. Erminia had been dead so long now that he had ceased to associate her with any particular chair. Though he thought of her frequently, and missed her presence more than he had ever enjoyed her company, her figure and even her features had faded gradually into a haze of tender regret.

Overhead, there was a pale aquamarine tinge in the sky, and long pulsations of light quivered up from the sunrise. On the earth, mist was dissolving; birds were cheeping; the rumour of life was awaking, now far off, now nearer, now in the house next door, now in Washington Street. As the light throbbed into his mind, he seemed to become, or to have been from the beginning, a part of the dawn, of the earth, of the universe. Girdled about by the security of age, he felt again that his best years might still be ahead of him. For the first time in his life, he might make the most of the spring; he might enjoy the summer splendour with a mind undivided by longing. His daughters, his daughter-in-law, Jenny Blair, his grandchildren, William—all these were dearer because they were no longer necessary. And dearer than all, though she, too, had ceased to be necessary, was Eva Birdsong. . . .