Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life

"Hold still, Jenny Blair, or I can't measure you. What are you mumbling?"

"Oh, nothing, Mamma, but I do hate trying on. I was just making-believe."

"Well, you make-believe entirely too much. That may be one reason you are so stringy and peaked. If you would only stop moping for a while, you might put some flesh on your bones. Have you had your glass of milk after lunch?"

Jenny Blair nodded. "Joseph Crocker gave me a currant bun to eat with it. I was out there when the carpenters stopped to rest, and Aunt Isabella brought them some coffee."

Mrs. Archbald glanced quickly at Etta and then looked away again. "They must have almost finished that work on the stable," she said slowly.

"Oh, they have, Mamma, but I'll be so sorry. I like old Mr. Crocker and Joseph better than—than anybody."

"Well, run away now, and finish your chapter before you go out to skate."

Slipping away quickly, Jenny Blair ran back through the folding doors and sank down on the rug by the French window. Hopefully, she opened her book at the place where Jo and Amy very nearly, but not quite, make a scene. Dejectedly, since nothing happened, she shut the book again and turned her eyes to the garden. An inner stillness pervaded her, and through this stillness, she became aware presently of the faint stirring, of the slow pulse of time—or was it eternity? But when did time end and eternity begin? Nobody knew, not even her grandfather. She had asked him, "When is time?" and he had answered, "Now." Then she had asked, "When is eternity?" and he had answered, "For ever." He didn't know, he said, what time was like, but she knew—she had always known. She had only to shut her eyes very tight and repeat the word, and she saw that time was flat and round and yellow, but eternity was long and pale and narrow and shaped exactly like a pod of green peas. But when she tried to make her grandfather understand, he laughed and told her not to let her fancy run away or she would never be able to catch it again. "They are like that, Grandfather. I see them," she had insisted; and her mother, who was always repeating herself, had said tartly, "Don't be silly, Jenny Blair. You see entirely too much."

About her the old house stirred and murmured and creaked with a life of its own; and beyond the house there was the world in which factories boomed, steam whistles blew, bad smells sprang up on the wind, and the new red touring cars buzzed through the streets. In the library voices flowed on and stopped and flowed on again, like a brook over pebbles. Beyond the French window, the blows of a hammer rang out, clear as a bell, from the stable where old Mr. Crocker and his son Joseph were repairing the roof. Across the hall, in the back drawing-room, Aunt Isabella was revenging herself on the piano for her broken engagement. In the midst of a vehement passage, she would break off in anguish, pause, with suspended hands, while the piano waited and shivered, and crash down into a discord. Whenever the torrent of false notes splintered about Jenny Blair's ears, she would cower down into the past, down into another room, with blue water and yellow ships on the wall, down into another age when she was having supper while her mother played to her in the firelight.

Like a soap-bubble blown from the bowl of a pipe, the scene wavered for an instant, and then floated outward and upward on Aunt Isabella's wild music. Blue water and yellow ships; the rusty glimmer of firelight; the fresh taste of bread and milk in her mouth; the sound of her mother's playing, which rippled on and on until it was shattered at last by a scream and the steady tramp, tramp, tramp, of feet on the staircase,--all these memories hung, imprisoned and alive, in that globe of air, while Aunt Isabella's discord trembled and moaned and sank, dying, far away in the stillness.

"Oh, Isabella, how can you?" Aunt Etta wailed. "You are spoiling the piano."

A stool was pushed back on a velvet carpet; there was the sound of irregular footsteps in the hall; and Isabella appeared, dark, scornful, with a wine-red colour burning in her cheeks and lips. "I don't care," she answered defiantly. "I want to spoil something."

"Not the piano," Mrs. Archbald implored. "And before Jenny Blair too."

Jenny Blair did not mind, as she hastened to assure her mother, but, without a pause, Aunt Isabella had flown through the French window, and down into the garden where the Crockers were working. In her beauty and anger she was magnificent. Nothing, not even the royal air with which Mrs. Birdsong swept up the aisle in church and sank rustling on her knees, had ever made such delicious thrills flicker up and down Jenny Blair's spine. It might not be conduct, she told herself, but it was splendid. With her genuine gift for imitation, she decided that she would try her best to have a broken engagement, when she grew up, and to be passionate and defiant while she struck false notes on the piano.

"There are times," remarked Etta, who appeared to invite disaster, "when I almost think she is out of her head."

"Be careful." Mrs. Archbald was pursing her lips. "Jenny Blair understands more than you think. But a shock like that," she added, with commiseration, "is enough to unbalance any woman. And, after all, Isabella was not really to blame."

"Not really," Etta assented. "Not for the accident to the horse anyway. But you must admit, Cora," she added primly, "that Thomas Lunsford had reason on his side when he insisted that an engaged girl ought not to go out in a buggy with another young man. I can never understand how Isabella could be so deeply in love with Thomas, and yet carry on her flirtation with Robert Cantrell."

"She is high-spirited," Mrs. Archbald replied in a subdued tone, "but nobody will ever make me believe she has any harm in her. Of course, I can't help feeling that there is some excuse for the way Thomas acted, though, I must confess, I did not expect him to take Isabella at her word when she offered to release him. If I'd dreamed he could behave that way, I should have advised her just to go to bed and stay there until the scandal blew over. That is what Amy Cross did, and everything turned out right in the end."

"I begged her to go to bed," Etta rejoined, "but you can't do anything with a headstrong girl like Isabella. 'You may be as innocent as a babe,' I reminded her, 'but you must acknowledge that staying out in the woods until daybreak did not look well.' After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances."

Since this was the very last thing that Mrs. Archbald, being a reasonable woman, would have expected of men, she merely nodded, with a look of secretive wisdom, while she whispered, "Don't speak too plainly, or Jenny Blair might catch on. I have a feeling that she is trying to hear."

Etta shook her head. "She seems perfectly absorbed in her book,"--which only proved, as Jenny Blair, who was listening with all her ears, reflected scornfully, how little grown-up people really know about children. They imagined that she suspected nothing of the broken engagement, though she was skipping rope on the front pavement a year before when Aunt Isabella, her hat worn very high and her waist pinched in very tight, had started off in a buggy drawn by a sober horse but driven by a spirited young man. She suspected, also, that the accident might never have happened if the buggy of last year had been one of the new motor cars which were considered so dangerous. The high hat, of course, would have suffered (for motoring, in its early years, could be enjoyed by a lady only at the price of a spoiled appearance), but if Aunt Isabella had selected a young man with a touring car, she might have discouraged his advances with the help of goggles and gauntlet gloves and a bonnet and veil, to say nothing of a severe linen dust-coat.

This, naturally, was what Mamma would have called Aunt Isabella's "first mistake"; and her second mistake occurred, as Aunt Etta made perfectly clear, when she consented to drive with a sober horse and a spirited young man, instead of safely reversing the order. If only she had chosen a spirited horse and a sober young man, how much happier she would have been the next morning! For the dreadful part was that she had stayed away until daybreak. Something had happened. Far out in the country, where there were no trains and no travellers, something had happened, and both the sober horse and the spirited young man had apparently lived up to their characters.