CHAPTER XXIII
THE BREAK
Marley went to Lavinia the next morning, and told her as they sat there on the veranda in the spring sunlight. She looked at him with distress in her wide blue eyes.
“When?” she asked.
“To-night!”
“Tonight? Oh Glenn!”
Her eyes had filled with tears, and she was winking hard to keep them back.
“To-night.”
She repeated the word over and over again.
“And to think,” she managed to say at last, “to think that the last night I should have been away from you! How can I ever forgive myself!”
Her lip trembled, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. She drew out her handkerchief and said:
“Let’s go in.”
All that day Marley went about faltering over his preparations. Wade Powell was the only one of the few who were interested in him that was enthusiastic over his going, and he praised and congratulated him, and pierced his already sore heart by declaring that he had known all along it was what Marley would be compelled to do. He would give him a letter to his old friend, Judge Johnson, he said; the judge would be a great man for him to know, and Powell sat down at once, with more energy and enterprise than Marley had ever known him to show, and began to elaborate his letter of introduction.
Marley dreaded saying good-by; he wished to shirk it as to Powell as he intended to shirk it in the cases of his few friends; he was to return to the office a last time in the afternoon to get the letter; and then he would bid Powell good-by. He had the day before him, but that thought could give him no comfort. He would see Lavinia again in the afternoon; he would see her once more, for the last time, in the evening, and in the meantime he would see his father and his mother, and his home; he had still two meals to eat with them, but it was as if he had already gone; there was no reality in his presence there among them; the blow that fate had decreed had fallen, and all that was to be was then actually in being; all about him the men and women of Macochee were pursuing their ordinary occupations just as if he were not so soon to go away and be of this scene no more; a few hours, and another day, and they would be going on with their concerns just the same, and he would have disappeared out of their lives and out of their memories.
He looked at everything that had been associated with his life, and everything called up some memory,—the little office where he had tried to study law, the Court House, and the blind goddess of justice holding aloft her scales, the familiar Square, the cloaked cavalryman on the monument, every tree, every fence, every brick in the sidewalk somehow called out to him—and he was leaving them all. He looked up and down Main Street, wide and ugly, littered with refuse, ragged with its graceless signs; he thought of the people who had gossiped about him, the people whom he had hated, but now he could not find in his heart the satisfaction he had expected in leaving them. He felt tenderly, almost affectionately, toward them all. But it was worse at home. He wandered about the house, looking at every piece of furniture, at every trinket; he went into the woodshed, and the old ax, the old saw, everything he had known for years, wrung his heart; he went to the barn, he looked at the muddy buggy in which he had driven so often with his father; he reproached himself because he had not kept the buggy cleaner for him; he went into the stall and patted the flank of Dolly, finally he put his arms about her warm neck, laid his face against it, and the tears rolled down his cheeks.
One of the preachers that were always dropping in on them was there to dinner, and in the blessing he invoked on the temporalities, as he called them, he prayed with professional unction for the son who was about to leave the old roof-tree, and this made the ordeal harder for them all. Doctor Marley spoke to the preacher of little things that he was to do within the next few days and Marley wondered how he could mention them, for they were to be done at a time when he would be there no more. Because he conceived of life, as all must conceive of it, solely in its relation to himself, he could not imagine life going on in Macochee without him.
The afternoon wore on, he passed his hour with Lavinia; they were to meet then but once again; he returned home, his mother had packed his trunk; it was waiting. He was tender with his mother, and he wondered now, with a wild regret, why he had not always been tender with her; he was tender now with all things; a tenderness suffused his whole being; it seemed as if it might dissolve in tears.
Still he shrank back; there was one thing more to do; he was to go up-town and get his ticket, and the letter to Judge Johnson, and bid Wade Powell good-by. A wild hope leaped in his heart; perhaps—but no, it was irrevocable now. He went, and got his letter, but Powell refused to bid him good-by; he said he would be at the train to see him off. He bought his ticket and went home. Old man Downing had been there with his dray and hauled away his trunk; it was settled. He could only wait and watch the minutes tick by.
It seemed to Marley that all things that evening conspired to accentuate all that he was leaving behind, and to make the grief of parting more poignant. His mother, who was then in that domestic exigency described by the ladies of Macochee as being without a girl, had prepared an unusually elaborate supper, and while there was no formal observance of the fact, it was eaten, so far as any of them could eat that evening, under a sense of its significance as a parting ceremonial. They talked, or tried to talk, indifferently of commonplace things, and Doctor Marley even sought to add merriment to their feast by a jocularity that was unusual with him. Marley, who knew his father so well, could easily detect the heavy heart that lay under his father’s jokes, and he suffered a keener misery from the pathos of it. Then he would catch his mother looking at him, her eyes deep and sad, and it seemed to him that his heart must burst.
Marley’s train was to leave at eleven o’clock; he had arranged to go to Lavinia’s and remain with her until ten o’clock; then he was to stop in at his home for his last good-by. Those last two hours with Lavinia were an ordeal; into the first hour they tried to crowd a thousand things they felt they must say, and a thousand things they could only suggest; when the clock struck nine, they looked at each other in anguish; they did little after that but mentally count the minutes. The clock ticked loudly, aggressively, until in the soul of each, unconfessed, there was a desire to hasten the moments they felt they would like to stay; the agony was almost beyond endurance; it exhausted them, beat them down, and rendered them powerless to speak. Finally the clock struck the half-hour; they could only sit and look at each other now; at a quarter of ten they began their good-bys.
At ten o’clock Mrs. Blair, Connie and Chad came into the room solemnly, and bade Marley farewell; the judge himself came in after them, his glasses in his hand and the magazine he had been reading, which, as Marley thought with that pang of things going on without him, he would in a few moments be reading again as calmly as ever. He took Marley’s hand, and wished him success; for the first time he spoke gently, almost affectionately to him, and although Marley tried to bear himself stoically, the judge’s farewell touched him more than all the others.
The shameless children would have liked to remain and see the tragedy to its close, but Mrs. Blair drew them from the room with her. The last moment had come, and Marley held Lavinia in his arms; at last he tore himself from her, and it was over. He looked back from out the darkness; Lavinia was still standing in the doorway; he saw her slender, girlish figure outlined against the hall light behind her; somehow he knew that she was bravely smiling through her tears. She stood there until his footfall sounded loud in the spring night, then the light went out, the door closed as he had heard it close so often, and she was gone.
He saw the light in his father’s study as he approached his home, and there came again that torturing sense: the sermon his father then was working on would be preached when he was far away; his mother, as he knew by the light in the sitting-room window, was waiting for him; she had waited there so many nights, and now she was waiting for the last time. She rose at his step, and took him to her arms the minute he entered the door.
“Be brave, dear,” he said, stroking her gray hair; “be brave.” He was trying so hard to be brave himself, and she was crying. He had not often seen her cry. She could not speak for many minutes; she could only pat him on the shoulder where her head lay.
“Remember, my precious boy,” she managed to say at last, “that there’s a strong Arm to lean upon.”
He saw that she was turning now to the great faith that had sustained her in every trial of a life that had known so many trials; and the tears came to his own eyes. He would have left her for a moment but she followed him. He had an impulse he could not resist to torture himself by going over the house again; he went into the dining-room which in the darkness wore an air of waiting for the breakfast they would eat when he was gone; he went to the kitchen and took a drink of water, from the old habit he was now breaking; then he went up stairs and looked into his own room, at the neatly made bed where he was to sleep no more; at last he stood at the door of the study.
He could catch the odor of his father’s cigar, just as he had in standing there so many times before; he pushed the door open and felt the familiar hot, close, smoke-laden atmosphere which his father seemed to find so congenial to his studies. Doctor Marley took off his spectacles and pushed his manuscript aside, and Marley felt that he never would forget that picture of the gray head bent in its earnest labors over that worn and littered desk; it was photographed for all time on his memory. His words with his father had always been few; there were no more now.
“Well, father,” he said, “I’ve come to say good-by.”
His father pushed back his chair and turned about. He half-rose, then sank back again and took his son’s hand.
“Good-by, Glenn,” he said. “You’ll write?”
“Yes.”
“Write often. We’ll want to hear.”
“Yes, write often,” the doctor said. “And take care of yourself.”
“I will, father.”
“Wait a moment.” Doctor Marley was fumbling in his pocket. He drew forth a few dollars.
“Here, Glenn,” he said. “I wish it could be more.”
There was nothing more to do, or say. They went down stairs; Marley’s bag was waiting for him in the hall. He kissed his mother again and then again; he shook his father’s hand, and then he went.
“Write often,” his father called out to him, as he went down the walk. It was all the old man could say.
The door closed, as the door of the Blairs’ had closed. Inside Doctor Marley looked at his wife a moment.
“Well,” he said, “he’s gone.”
Mrs. Marley made no answer.
“I suppose,” he said, “I ought to have gone to the train with him.”
Then he toiled up the stairs to his study and the sermon he was to preach when Glenn was gone.
Marley walked rapidly down Market Street toward the depot; in the dark houses that suddenly had taken on a new significance to him, people were sleeping, people who would awake the next morning in Macochee. He could not escape the torture of this thought; his mind revolved constantly about the mystery of his being still in Macochee, still within calling distance, almost, of Lavinia, of his father and mother, of all he loved in life, when in reality they had in an instant become as inaccessible to him as though the long miles of his exile already separated them.
Twenty minutes later, Lavinia, in her room, Mrs. Marley, at her prayers, and Doctor Marley sitting in deep absorption at his desk, heard the sonorous whistle of a locomotive sound ominously over the dark and quiet town.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE GATES OF THE CITY
It was a relief to Marley when morning came and released him from the reclining chair that had held his form so rigidly all the night. He had not taken a sleeper because he felt himself too poor, and he had somewhere got the false impression that comfort was to be had in the chair car. He had stretched himself in the cruel rack when the porter came through and turned the lights down to the dismal point of gloom, but he had not slept; all through the night the trainmen constantly passed through the car talking with each other in low tones; the train, too, made long, inexplicable stops; he could hear the escape of the weary engine, through his window he could see the lights of some strange town; and then the trainmen would run by outside, swinging their lanterns in the darkness, and calling to each other, and Marley would fear that something had happened, or else was about to happen, which was worse.
Finally the train would creak on again, as if it were necessary to proceed slowly and cautiously through vague dangers of the night. Through his window he could see the glint of rails, the two yards of gleaming steel that traveled always abreast of him. Toward morning Marley wearily fell asleep, and then the sorrow and heart-ache of his parting from Lavinia and his home distorted themselves in fearful dreams.
When he awoke at last, and looked out on the ugly prairie that had nothing to break its monotony but a few scraggly scrub-oak bushes, and some clumps of stunted trees, the dawn was descending from the gray sky. The car presented a squalid, hideous sight; all about him were stretched the bodies of sleeping passengers, flaccid, inert, having cast aside in utter weariness all sense of decency and shame; the men had pulled off their boots, and sprawled on the chairs, their stockinged feet prominently in view; women lay with open mouths, their faces begrimed, their hair in slovenly disarray.
The baby that had been crying in the early part of the night had finally gone to sleep while nursing, and its tired mother slept with it at her breast. The Jewish drummer across the aisle was sleeping in shirt-sleeves; his head had rolled from the little rest on the back of his chair and now lolled off his shoulder, his sallow face turned toward Marley was greasy with perspiration; his closed eyes filled out their blue hemispherical lids, and his cheeks puffed with his intermittent snoring. At times his snoring grew so loud and so troubled that it seemed as if he must choke; he would reach a torturing climax, then suddenly the thick red lips beneath his black mustache would open, his sallow cheeks would collapse, and relief would come.
Marley wished the passengers would wake up and end the indecencies they had tried to hide earlier in the night. Glancing up and down the long car he could recognize none of them as having been there when he had boarded the car at Macochee; those who had got on with him had gone short distances, and then got off, breaking the last tie that bound him to his home. He found it impossible now to conceive of the car as having been in Macochee so short a time before.
Presently he saw an old lady sitting up in the remote end of the car; she was winding her thin wisp of gray hair in a little knob at the back of her head. Then, feeling that he might bestir himself, Marley got up and went forward; he washed his face, and tried to escape the discomfort of clothes he had worn all the night by readjusting them. The train was evidently approaching the city; now and then he saw a building, lonely and out of place: on the hideous sand-dunes, as if it waited for the city, in the growth it boasted, to catch up with it.
The train ran on; it had reached an ever-widening web of tracks; it passed long lines of freight-cars, stock-cars from the west, empty gondolas that had come with coal from the Hocking Valley; a switch tower swept by, its bell jangling peevishly in alarm; long processions of working-men trooped with their dinner-pails between the tracks. The train stopped, finally, still far from its destination. The air in the car was foul from the feculence of all those bodies that had lain in it through the night, and Marley went out on the platform. He could hear the engine wheezing—the only sound to break the silence of the dawn. The cool morning air was grateful to Marley, though it was not the air of the spring they were already having in Macochee. He risked getting down off the platform and looked ahead. Beyond the long train, coated with its black cinders, he saw Chicago, dim through the morning light, lying dark, mysterious and grim under its pall of smoke. He shuddered and went back into the car. After a while the train creaked and strained and pulled on again.
The passengers had begun to stir, and now were hastening to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the world; the woman with the baby fastened her dress, the drummer put on his collar and coat, the men drew on their boots, but it was long before they felt themselves presentable again. The women could achieve but half a toilet, and though they were all concerned about their hair, they could not make themselves tidy.
The train was running swiftly, now that it was in the city, where it seemed it should have run more slowly; the newsboy came in with the morning papers, followed by the baggage agent with his jingling bunch of brass checks. The porter doffed his white jacket and donned his blue, and waited now for the end of his labors, so near at hand. He made no pretense of brushing his passengers, for those in his charge were plainly not of the kind with tips to bestow.
As the train rushed over unknown streets, Marley caught visions of the crowds blockaded by the crossing gates, street-cars already filled with people, empty trucks going after the great loads under which they would groan all the day; and people, people, people, ready for the new day of toil that had come to the earth.
At last the train drew up under the black shed of the Union Station, and Marley stood with the passengers that huddled at the door of the car. He went out and down; he joined the crowd that passed through the big iron gates into the station; and then he turned and glanced back for one last look at the train that had brought him; only a few hours before it had been in Macochee; a few hours more and it would be there again. In leaving the train he felt that he was breaking the last tie that bound him to Macochee, and he would have liked to linger and gaze on it. But a man in a blue uniform, with the official surliness, ordered him not to hold back the crowd. He climbed the steps, went out into Canal Street, ran the gantlet of the cabmen, and was caught up in the crowd and swept across the bridge into Madison Street.
He was in Chicago, and here among these thousands of people, each hurrying along through the sordid crowd to his own task, here in this hideous, cruel city, he must make a place for himself, and gain the foothold from which he could fight his battle for existence in the world.
CHAPTER XXV
LETTERS HOME
“How does she seem since he went away?” asked Judge Blair of his wife two days after Marley had gone. He spoke in his usual habit of deference to his wife’s observation, though his own opportunities for observing Lavinia might have been considered as great as hers.
“I haven’t noticed any difference in her,” said Mrs. Blair, and then she added a qualifying and significant “yet.”
“Well,” observed the judge, “I presume it’s too early. Has she heard from him?”
“She had a letter this morning; that is, I suppose it was from him; she ran to meet the postman, and then went up stairs.”
“You didn’t mention it to her?”
Mrs. Blair looked at her husband in surprise, and he hastened to make amends by acquiescing in the propriety of her conduct, when he said:
“Oh, of course not.”
He seemed to drop the subject then, but that it remained uppermost in his mind was shown later, when he said:
“I think she will be weaned away from him after a while, don’t you? That is—if he stays long enough.”
Mrs. Blair was not so hopeful; perhaps, too, in her romantic ideal of devotion, she did not wish Lavinia to be weaned away. But she avoided a direct answer by the suggestion:
“Perhaps he will be weaned away from her.”
This possibility had not occurred to the judge.
“Why, the idea!” he said resentfully. “Do you think him capable of such baseness?”
Mrs. Blair laughed.
“Would you like to think of your daughter as fickle, and forgetting a young man who was eating his heart out for her far away in a big city?”
A condition of such mild romantic sorrow might have attracted Mrs. Blair in the abstract, but it could not of course appeal to her when it came thus personally. As for the judge, he dismissed the problem, as he had so many times before, with the remark:
“Well, we can only wait and see.”
The letter which Lavinia received from Marley had been written the day he reached Chicago. It was a long letter, conceived largely in a facetious spirit, and he had labored over it far into the night in the little room of the boarding-house he had found in Ohio Street.
“I chose Ohio Street,” he wrote, “because its name reminded me of home. Ohio Street may once have been the street of the well-born, but it has degenerated and it is now the abode of a long row of boarding—places, one of which houses me. My room is a little corner eyrie in the second story, back, and from its one window I get an admirable view of the garbage dump, the atmosphere and certain intensely red bricks which go to make the wall of the house next door. And my landlady, ah, I should have to be a Balzac to describe my landlady! She wears large, vociferous ear-rings, and she says ‘y-e-e-a-a-s’ for yes; just kind o’ rolls it off her tongue as if she didn’t care whether it ever got off or not. She is truly a beauteous lady, given much to a scarlet hue of her nasal appendage; also, her molar system is unduly prominent, too much to the fore, as it were. As for form or figure, I’m afraid I couldn’t say with truth that she goes in for the sinuous, far from it; she leans more to the elephantine style of feminine architecture. And she has a way of reaching out that is very attractive; probably because of the necessity of reaching for room rent. She bears the air of one bent on no earthly thing, of a continual soaring in quest of the unexpected; there is about her the charm of the intangible, the unknowable.
“The boarding-house itself isn’t so bad; I get my room and two meals for three-fifty a week; my noon luncheons I have to take down-town. They have dinner here, you know, in the evening. I haven’t seen much of the people in the boarding-house; the men are mostly clerks, and the women have bleached hair. They all looked at me when I went into the dining-room this evening. There is one young man who sits at my table who is in truth a very unwise and immature youth. He is given greatly to the use of words of awful and bizarre make-up. For instance, he said something about the jokes they get off in the shows here about Irishmen, but instead of saying jokes, he said ‘traversities’! What do you think of that?”
Marley had already described his journey to Chicago in terms similar to those in which he described his boarding-house; of Chicago itself he said:
“It seems that ages ago when the gods, or maybe the demons, were making over plans and specifications of the infernal region, Chicago was mentioned and considered by the committee. When it came to a vote for choice of sites the place that won had only three more votes than Chicago. They didn’t locate the brimstone plant here, and from what I can learn Chicago was a candidate for both the plant and the honor. It was a mistake on somebody’s part, as Chicago is certainly an ideal place for it.”
But the letter discussed mostly the things of Macochee, where Marley’s spirit still dwelt. The passages Lavinia most liked, of course, were those in which he declared his love for her; it was the first love-letter she had ever received, and this tender experience went far to compensate her for the loneliness she felt in his absence.
It grew upon her after she had read her letter many times, that it would be a kindness to take it over and read to Mrs. Marley those parts, at least, that were not personal. It was a hard thing for Lavinia to do; she had a fear of Mrs. Marley; but she felt more and more the kindness of it, and so in the morning she set out. Lavinia was surprised and a little disappointed, when Mrs. Marley told her that she too had received in the same mail a letter from Glenn. It somehow took away from her own act, the more when Mrs. Marley calmly passed her letter over for Lavinia to read.
Lavinia, who had not been able to resist a pang that Marley had written his mother quite as promptly as he had written her, found some consolation in the fact that his letter to his mother was not nearly so long as his letter to her, and it contained, too, the same information; in some instances, identical phrases, as letters do that are written at the same time. She felt that she should be happy in them both, and she wished she could determine which of the letters had been written first. After she had read Mrs. Marley’s letter, she could not speak for a moment; the letter closed with a description of the sensations it gave Marley to open his trunk and come across the Bible his mother had packed in it. But she controlled herself, and when she had finished reading parts of her own letter to Mrs. Marley, she said:
“Well, he seems to be in good spirits, doesn’t he? He writes so amusingly of everything.”
Mrs. Marley looked up at Lavinia with a curious smile.
“Why, don’t you see?” she said.
“What?” asked Lavinia, glancing in alarm at the two letters which she still held in her lap.
“Why, the poor boy is dying of homesickness; that’s what makes him write in that mocking vein.”
“Do you think that is so?” Lavinia leaned forward.
“Why, I know it,” replied Mrs. Marley, with a little laugh. “He’s just like his father.”
For a moment Lavinia felt a satisfaction in Marley’s loneliness, but she denied the satisfaction when she said:
“He’ll get over it, after a while.”
“Not for a long while, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Marley. “Not until some one can be with him.”
Lavinia blushed, and before she knew it Mrs. Marley had bent over and kissed her cheek.
“He has a long hard battle before him, my dear,” she said, “in a great cruel city. We must help him all we can.”
Lavinia hesitated a moment, then she put her arms about Mrs. Marley and drew her down for the kiss which sealed their friendship.
They sat and talked of Marley for a long time, and at last when Lavinia rose to go, she held out to Mrs. Marley the letter her son had written her. She looked at it a moment before handing it to Mrs. Marley.
“Would you like to keep it?” Mrs. Marley asked.
“May I?”
“If you wish. But you must come often; I shall be lonely now, you know, and you must bring his letters and read parts of them. He’ll be writing so many more to you than he will to me.”
Lavinia received a letter from Marley every day; it was not long before Clemmons, the postman, smiled significantly when, each morning at the sound of his whistle, she ran to meet him at the door. And Lavinia wrote to Marley as regularly herself, sitting at the little desk in her room every night long after the house was dark and still.
The judge could find no hope in the observations Mrs. Blair reported to him.
“She seems to have developed a new idea of constancy,” said Mrs. Blair. “She will not allow herself to do a thing, or go to a single place; she will hardly accept any pleasure because he isn’t here to share it. I believe she tries not to have a thought that is not of him. She is almost fanatical about it.”
“Oh dear!” said the judge. “I thought the nightly calls were a severe strain, but they can not compare to the strain of nightly letters.”
“He writes excellent letters, however,” Mrs. Blair said. “I wish you could read the one he wrote his mother. A boy who writes like that to his mother—”
“How did you get to see a letter he wrote his mother?” interrupted the judge.
“Lavinia showed it to me.”
“Has she been over there?”
“Yes. Why?”
The judge shook his head gravely, as if the situation were now hopeless, indeed.