A Prologue to Love

  Startled, Beth swallowed the hard lump in her throat and smiled. “To buy the ring?” she asked coquettishly.

  “The ring?” repeated Caroline, frowning. “Oh, the ring. No, we didn’t speak of that. It’s a little soon. No. This is business.”

  The boy brought the paper and the groceries then, and Beth, hearing the news, cried. Caroline sat at the splintered table with a dull expression. She had never seen old Thomas; he had no reality for her.

  “Oh, poor Tom!” Beth wept. “Poor, poor Tom! How terrible for him! Of course his father was very old. But still, how awful!” She stood up briskly, tying on her apron, her face dripping with tears. “As soon as I have cleared up, Carrie, we’ll go to the village to give Tom our condolences.”

  Caroline shrank. She was incapable of relating anyone outside her immediate sphere with herself. All warm impulsiveness, all natural human sympathy toward mere acquaintances or strangers could not be felt by her. Humanity at large had no meaning, no actual reality. She was like one born blind, or made blind in childhood, who was only disturbed by any discussion of color or form or appearance.

  “He’ll be waiting for us,” said Beth. “There’ll be many people there, to be sure, for everyone loves Tom and loved old Thomas, but he’ll only want to see us, really.”

  Caroline shrank even more. She thought of the day following her father’s death in Switzerland, of the swarms of his associates who had come to the hotel, of Montague, who had easily and smoothly made all arrangements, of the curious faces turned to her, of the words of sympathy that made her stunned darkness even darker. She had sat in that darkness, alone, a stranger in a strange land, and had wanted only silence.

  “Oh, Beth. I can’t go to see Tom! All those people!”

  “What did you say?” asked Beth. “Not go to see Tom — now? Don’t you understand? His father is dead, Carrie! Just as your father died!”

  “This is entirely different!” exclaimed Caroline, infuriated by Beth’s lack of understanding. “Tom’s father and my father — this is entirely different!”

  “Different? What did you say?” asked Beth, her hands on her apron strings. “How different?”

  But Caroline could not explain. She sat stolidly and sullenly in her chair and compressed her large pale lips.

  Beth carefully folded her apron with her worn hands. She put it on her chair. Then she tried again. “Tom loved his father, just as you loved yours. He’ll need comforting; he’ll want our sympathy.”

  “Why?” Caroline demanded. “He’ll want to be let alone, just as I did.” It was shocking to her that Tom, who loved her, should love his father also. Thomas Sheldon had not been John Ames, who could move governments. He had been only an old man, unimportant and faceless. So she repeated now with deep annoyance, “This is entirely different.”

  Beth sat down heavily. “Carrie,” she said, “I don’t think you have any human feelings, have you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Caroline. “Certainly I have human feelings. Beth, you just don’t understand.”

  All the warmth and sweetness which had comforted her during the night had gone. All the shy joy she had experienced had been destroyed by this old man’s dying, an old man of whom she had never spoken and whose existence had never reached her conscious thoughts. More and more exasperated, she considered Beth, whose lined face was very white and whose fixed eyes made her uncomfortable. Then something stirred in her impatiently. Something was expected of her, and she always winced from the expectations of others.

  “I never knew Mr. Sheldon,” she said, trying to be patient with this old foolish woman. “Tom knows that; he’ll understand why I can’t go to him. He’ll want to be alone. I’ll write him a note,” she added with a clumsy animation which she hoped would appease Beth. Tom could not feel the same sorrow for his father which she had felt for hers. The very idea was affronting and stupid. Beth was frightening her. She stared at the older woman with mistrust. She added sulkily, “Perhaps you can buy some flowers in the village.”

  But Beth was crying, her plump shoulders shaking, her face in her hands. It was as if she were crying for her own dead, and Caroline was overwhelmingly bewildered. How could Beth cry for an old man she had never known?

  She stood up, disturbed by Beth’s weeping, and put her hands on Beth’s shoulders, more to silence her than to comfort her. Then Beth looked up, her tired face bloated with emotion, and she saw Caroline fully and with terrible perception.

  “Oh, Carrie, my child. Oh, Carrie, God help you.”

  While Beth, still weeping, hastily dusted the hopelessly dusty house and prepared to leave to visit Tom, Caroline slowly went to her arid room, which smelled of grit and mustiness and dank bedding. She was accustomed to wait for Beth to straighten this ancient and ugly room as a matter of course. But now, with inept hands, she did it herself, moved by an uneasiness as well as a growing feeling of resentment. She opened the grimy window and looked down at the shingle and the morning sea and the fishing boats on the radiant and heaving horizon. The clean salt air, sharp and pure, blew on her face. Caroline’s feeling of uneasiness grew. Only in very early childhood had any sympathy for others, except her father, stirred or agitated her. Once Beth had touched the periphery of her consciousness with love and solicitude. But that was long ago. Since that time she had lived in a world whose tight little circle had revolved about John Ames. All her deep impulses had been stifled and blunted. She had been like a young and tender tree, growing between two narrow walls, which found its growth circumscribed and increasingly narrowing as its little branches grew, and increasingly stunted, so that eventually it had no contact with anything but the crippling walls and stone and never was able to bend its deformed branches to embrace anything outside itself and could never send its roots down to a common pool of life.

  Nevertheless, though she did not know why, she had a shadowy sensation that in some way she had failed Beth and Tom. Her spirit was like a fossilized seed whose vital element had been killed.

  As she looked down at the blue tide rising on the shingle she thought, “Everything has been spoiled.” She had taken Tom fiercely into her life, out of her awful need. For the first time she had been able to look at the death of her father, not as a calamity which had utterly destroyed her, but as an event, still agonizing but now bearable. Tom was utterly hers, once she had seized him. She was angry that the death of an unimportant old man should concern him, for it showed her that Tom was not entirely hers but could actually be wounded by something which had nothing to do with her.

  A little girl, a stranger, ran barefoot along the shingle. This portion of the beach belonged to Caroline and was private. Her first impulse was to call down to the girl to go away. But the little girl touched the rising scallops of foam with bare toes and squealed, and her hair was a blowing golden vapor in the wind. With sudden shock Caroline thought of possible children she might have. She had always feared and hated children. Normal children had not understood her at school and had derided, mocked, and tormented her for her silences, her inability to communicate, and her wretched clothing.

  But she, Caroline, would have children. John Ames had spoken of them; they would be his heirs and Caroline’s. He had spoken without warmth or expectation, but only as one speaks of an unpleasant reality. Caroline leaned on the window sill and stared at the child. She would have children; they would be hers and her father’s, as well as Tom’s. For an instant or two the deformed tree which was herself felt new wind on its branches, its feeble dusty leaves. The child ran away; Caroline followed her with anxious, questioning eyes.

  She sat down. She remembered that mothers loved their children. Her father had said with a disagreeable smile that this love was only an extension of egotism, that mothers and fathers loved their children only because of selfishness.

  Caroline shook her head as if to shake some baffling thoughts from it. After a little she brought out her secretary, a shabby leather case full of paper and envelopes. S
he put a bottle of ink on the chair nearest hers and dipped her pen in it. For the first time in her life she was about to write a note of comfort, and she did not know how to begin. She wrote in small sharp letters: “Dear Tom.” Then she stopped. What should she say? That she was sorry about his father’s death? But she was not; she only resented it as a bitter intrusion in her own affairs. She chewed the end of the pen and frowned. Suddenly she got up, carrying her secretary, and climbed to the attic and found the portrait of her grandfather. She looked down at the gentle and accepting eyes, and the rushing sense of release came to her again. Sitting on a trunk in that dim, webbed half twilight of the attic, she wrote rapidly: “I’m sorry about your father. Beth will bring you this note. I must go to New York tomorrow. I’d hoped you would go with me, but I understand that the funeral will prevent you. I will have to manage alone. I will return the next day.” She reread the note. It did not satisfy her; even her deformed spirit understood its coldness, but she did not know what else to say. So she signed her name. Then all at once, under her name, she wrote, “Dear Tom!”

  She went downstairs to find Beth, still crying quietly and bonneted and shawled, pulling on black cotton gloves. Caroline dropped the note on the kitchen table. She was very uncomfortable, and because she was uncomfortable she was vexed. She fished in her black serge pocket for her purse, unsnapped it, and put a one-dollar bill on the note. She said surlily, “The market sells flowers. This dollar will buy a lot of them.”

  Beth looked at the note and the money, still weeping. Her impulse was to embrace Caroline and again attempt to reach her. But though Beth was a simple woman she realized it was all too late. There was only the hope that Tom could do that. Beth, without speaking, left the old, leaning house, and Caroline was alone.

  She walked through the hideous rooms, hearing the squeaking of her footsteps. She went outside and looked at the rise of the ground far beyond the house, now overgrown with tall sea grass and brambles soughing in a lonely wind. She was overpoweringly restless. She walked to the shingle and looked far out at the incandescent sea and the bulk of Marblehead lifting its grassy top and stone and little white houses to the sun. A large ship pushed along the horizon, and Caroline thought of her father and was again bereft. Tell me what to do, she said to his ghost.

  Tom’s house was filled with sad-faced villagers, for he and his father were loved and respected. Every small hot room was crowded; his father’s coffin, plain pine covered with a sleazy black silk cloth, lay in the parlor, and Thomas Sheldon slept in it peacefully, flowers surrounding him. The scent of them choked the air. When Beth arrived Tom showed her his father in silence. His face was haggard and lined, but he smiled at her a little, then led her outside.

  She gave Tom Caroline’s note. She was very surprised when he did not comment on it or Caroline’s absence. He stood beside Beth in the hot sun on the little porch and he reread Caroline’s note. It did not sound cold and stiff to him, nor selfish. He saw that the sharp writing had wavered a little here and there. He read the impulsive exclamation under her name.

  “She wouldn’t come,” said Beth, sighing. “She’s very strange, Tom. I suppose you should know that.”

  “Would you ask a woman with broken legs to walk?” said Tom. “Would you ask a blind person to see? Would you ask a deaf girl to hear?”

  He put his hand on Beth’s fat shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Beth. It’s all right, really it is. Are you coming for the funeral tomorrow?”

  “Oh yes, dear Tom.”

  “But Carrie will be going to New York alone, then. Isn’t that dangerous for a young woman?”

  “Nothing is dangerous for Carrie,” said Beth with some bitterness. “She can handle anything.”

  “I don’t know; maybe I don’t agree with that,” said Tom. He looked beyond the village to the hill where the poor cemetery stood.

  Beth cried again. “Oh, Tom, I don’t know! I don’t know what happened, but all at once I kind of got a glimpse of the real Carrie, and it was awful. I mean everything about Carrie was terrible. Why couldn’t that hateful man have died when she was a little girl? It would have been better for her!

  Chapter 5

  Caroline left the next morning for New York on the seven-thirty milk train. It would be a long and gritty ride, full of discomfort. She settled herself on the lumpy black leatherette seat and put the basket lunch Beth had packed for her beside her. It was covered with a white napkin. The train had lurched along only a few miles when the folds of the napkin were befouled by the black soot belching through the open window. The heat wafted along the crowded coach, and the passengers coughed when clouds of smoke and steam rolled in.

  Caroline sat stolidly in her black mourning dress, with the black shawl Beth had knitted for her over her shoulders. A two-dollar black bonnet, severe and plain and draped with a wisp of mourning veil, perched on top of her coronet of braids. She opened a ledger on her lap, removed her black gloves, and studied the figures of Broome and Company to refresh her memory. Her dark face misted with sweat, and grit clung to the area between her large nose and her heavy mouth. Her short neck became damp; her broad shoulders dampened under her clothing. Her expression became brooding and thoughtful and intent. She even forgot Tom in her concentration. Her feet, in thick boots buttoned and severe, rested on her purse, protecting it.

  Caroline was thinking of old, depraved Maggie Broome. Her fear of Maggie had long passed. Maggie needed her as she had needed John Ames. Caroline smiled grimly. She possessed fifty-one percent of the Broome stock. There would be no mocking airs and graces from old Maggie this time, no jeerings, no raucous laughter, no winks and grins, taunts and elbow-nudgings. The letter Caroline had received from her a short time ago had been flighty and vainglorious, but under the scrawl and under the words Caroline had detected uncertainty and even some anxiety. I can ruin her, thought Caroline. I can sell out the stock; it’s low now; I can throw it on the market. If the stock were thrown on the market, the other shares would immediately fall and Maggie’s income would be greatly decreased. Caroline let herself feel the pleasure, then shook her head. It would not be practical. Her father had taught her that a sensible man, no matter how goaded, never took petty revenge if it meant a loss for himself. When talking to Tom, Caroline had cried that she wanted nothing more to do with the Maggie Broomes, that she was withdrawing from her kind. But Caroline did not think of this now. There was too much money involved. There were future heirs to be considered, just as her father had considered his own daughter.

  Caroline thought of her cousin Timothy, junior law partner of Tandy, Harkness and Swift. In the past Caroline had shrunk from the thought of Timothy, but now she gave him all her attention. He was her age. Cynthia did not like her son, and her son did not like his mother. Caroline had not been particularly interested before. Now, suddenly, she was deeply interested. She thought of Cynthia, the polished, the idle, the parasitic, the frivolous woman who had unaccountably seduced John Ames. Extravagant, wicked woman, thought Caroline, feeling again a savage clench in her heart.

  Nothing, thought Caroline, would so disconcert Cynthia Winslow as some good fortune coming to her son. Never for a moment did Caroline understand that a mother might not like her children but that she could still love them. Cynthia’s frank aversion, openly and laughingly expressed many times, had convinced the young Caroline that Cynthia wished no good for her son and that she detested him.

  She was hot, dirty, and tired when she arrived in New York. She was driven in a hack to the Gentlewoman’s Pension in the lower Thirties where she always stayed when alone. The French conceit did not extend beyond the name, for the pension was owned by two middle-aged spinsters, sisters, of indubitably Anglo-Saxon origin, who spoke no French at all. They had bought four elderly three-story brownstone houses, had connected them, had established a deplorably tasteless but clean dining room for their guests, and had bullied a staff of young girls and middle-aged women into keeping their establishment immaculate. They had
a permanent clientele of old ladies and spinsters like themselves and accommodated transients like Caroline, who was deeply reverenced. She expressed the ‘tone’ of the place; on this humid day it smelled of hot wool carpets, laundry soap, polish, and gas. There was always a large front room available for her, looking out on the narrow, quiet street and showing a glimpse of a religious seminary across the road enmeshed in tall old trees. Few carriages or other vehicles disturbed the heated quiet, the silence of brick and stone.

  Caroline bathed from the large china bowl and dried her hands on plain linen towels. One of the spinsters brought her tea and hot muffins and strawberry jam, inquired about her health, murmured her sympathy. Caroline listlessly drank a little tea and ate a muffin, washed her hands again, picked up her ledger and purse, and went out to the hack, which had returned for her. She was driven to Tandy, Harkness and Swift on hectic Broadway, but she did not look at the brawling city seething under its burning blue roof. She had the power of absolute concentration.