Ceremony of the Innocent

  Since May had become afflicted with arthritis—“I can’t send the poor thing off,” Mrs. Eccles would say to her admiring friends—the burden of keeping the house clean and in order was left to Ellen. May sometimes painfully crept downstairs to prepare dinner and to teach her niece the art of cooking and to adjure her to be grateful for the “lovely rooms we have,” and to honor and respect Mrs. Eccles at all times. Did not Mrs. Eccles insist on Ellen attending church every Sunday, and did she not insist on Ellen studying a chapter of the Bible daily? Yes. Did she not leave pamphlets of a very evangelistic kind on their tables regularly? Yes. She was anxious for their salvation; she worried about their immortal souls. Mrs. Eccles was an accomplished pianist and played many hymns on Sunday and insisted on May and Ellen standing in the doorway of her parlor while she performed and sang in a very trembling voice full of sensibility. Too, they knelt on the threshold every night while Mrs. Eccles knelt in her parlor and implored God to bless her household, “and all therein.” “All” also included her four cats, to whom she was passionately devoted, as she was a childless widow.

  May found this overwhelmingly kind. “Compared with Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Eccles is a saint, an angel, Ellen. We should thank God hourly for our good fortune.” Sometimes she was a little uneasy with Ellen this past year or so, for Ellen would make no comment. This was partly due to Ellen’s chronic exhaustion. Her only recreation was an hour or two off a week to walk in the very pretty little park near the house, and to listen furtively to Mrs. Eccles playing a sonata in her parlor. She would creep near the door of the immense and crowded room to saturate her spirit with the resonant sounds, and she would remember what Thoreau had said about music, its tranquillity which bound together the past and the present and the future, and translated the soul into peaceful ecstasy. Sometimes at night, when May was asleep—after her nightly cup of hot camomile tea for her pains—Ellen would silently slip down the stairs into the library with a lighted candle, there to browse over the excellent library the late Mr. James Eccles had gathered. She would shield her light of the candle with her palm and enter a different world of grandeur and nobility.

  Otherwise, the seventeen-year-old girl had no other recreation, no other outlet for her rising passions and vague longings and the sorrow that was now her constant misery. Once Mrs. Eccles had said to her with kind severity, “You know, my dear, I do not permit my dependents to have followers—not, of course that you with your—ah, appearance—would ever attract followers, and for that you should be thankful. But do keep it in mind.” Ellen had finally discovered that “followers” meant young men, and she had colored and had said vehemently, “You need never worry about that, ma’am!” Mrs. Eccles had smiled with satisfaction. She feared losing Ellen, who was the best housemaid she had ever employed, but she also remembered that “inferiors” had base natures and were inclined to produce offspring without “the benefit of clergy,” and were congenitally “flighty.” “I guard the modesty and decorum and morals of my dependents as I guard my own,” she would proclaim to her friends. “My Ellen is only a young servant, but I have impressed on her that she must do nothing demeaning to her person, and that always Duty comes before Pleasure, and Christian living before self-indulgence.” She also had another fear: That her friends, observing Ellen and her deftness and grace in serving and her instant obedience, would entice the girl away from her house. So one day she said to Ellen, “My dear, I love you as my very own daughter, and I think you know that, and I should like to warn you not to be led astray by false promises on the part of—others—and lured into the worship of filthy lucre. You know that the Bible warns us not to put Mammon before God.” This had puzzled Ellen, and she had replied only with a slight shrug, a new habit of hers which vexed Mrs. Eccles. Ellen had investigated that phrase in the Bible, and she had laughed a little to herself. She had inwardly commented that Mrs. Eccles served Mammon assiduously, and then had regretted the improper reflection. But often she found it hard to “love and trust” Mrs. Eccles.

  Ellen’s dreams, all distressful and full of anguished yearning, centered on the memory of Jeremy Porter. This was in spite of the fact that May, at least once a week, impressed on her niece that she had indeed escaped a fate worse than death in Mrs. Porter’s household, and that only God had rescued her out of His boundless love and mercy. “Such men are like the beasts of prey the Bible talks about, and Satan, looking for who they can devour, Ellen. What a bad man he is, what a scoundrel, a man without a conscience, to attempt to—well, you know what I mean.”

  Only in the past two years had Ellen come to understand what May had hinted, and still hinted, and she had been ashamed. However, her shame did not decrease her hunger, sometimes too painful to endure, for the sight of Jeremy, or to hear any news of him. The memory of those few moments in the Porter kitchen, which grew more vivid every day, was enough to make her moan in her pillow. Now she knew the meaning of the garden of her fantasies, and for whom she had been waiting as she walked among mist-wreathed trees and the lusty scent of roses, with a flower in her hand. But all that was gone; there was nothing for her, except her memory and work. Sometimes, consumed by an amorphous passion she did not understand, but which was rising more powerfully in her every day, she felt a sharp if wordless rebellion and agony. She always repented this. God had ordained her lot; she must be content. This thought never stopped her tears. On several occasions lately she had had rapturously licentious dreams of Jeremy—though the dreams, due to her innocence, never became specific—and she had twisted on her narrow bed in hot ecstasy. On waking, and panting and covered with sweat, she would get out of bed and kneel beside it, praying for forgiveness, and then would bathe her palpitating throat and reddened face with cold water. Such dreams were wicked, though she could not control them. However, she never prayed that she would be delivered from them. Had she been more sophisticated she would have wondered why.

  Francis Porter, who was his aunt’s particular favorite, and whom she loved as her son—she had made him her heir—came at least once a month over the weekend to visit Mrs. Eccles and to see how-Ellen was progressing. He was very kind and sweet and gentle with her; he would praise May’s cooking and the expert way in which Ellen cooked also, and the polished cleanliness of the house. He was never too condescending, and was genuinely fond of Ellen. It was not for some time that he realized he was in love with her. Thus far, he had not reached this disturbing conclusion. He only knew that he felt warm and comforted when he saw her, that he delighted in her appearance and would follow her with his eyes, and that when she left a room it felt colder and dimmer than when she was present. Last Christmas he had bought her a pair of black kid gloves, the first she had ever owned, and she had been overwhelmed by his thought-fulness. But she was becoming timid with him, not only remembering that night in Mrs. Porter’s house, but seeing also that he became more austere, more abstracted, and tighter of fair face and brow, each time he visited his aunt. Sometimes his speech was abrupt, and a resentful expression would make his open features lowering. He often appeared secretive and suspicious, something which only Ellen discerned, and this would baffle her.

  Mrs. Eccles always teased him about his bachelor state. “After all, dear one, you are twenty-six now, and you should think of a suitable wife, with your expectations. No young lady has caught your fancy yet?” Often Francis would think this might be desirable—if the young lady had a fortune of her own. Then he could employ Ellen himself, to be his housekeeper. Aunt Hortense would not begrudge him this. The thought of Ellen in his house often came to him when he was in Wheatfield, and he would smile at the girl radiantly and the recent cloudiness would leave his face and he was a handsome blond young man all glowing and gracious and even affectionate in his manner when he encountered Ellen. May Watson frankly adored him; he would invariably ask about her health, commiserate with her over her pains, and compliment her on the soundness of her rearing of her niece. She would thank him fervently, over and over again, for what he had
done for her and Ellen, which invariably heightened his self-esteem and made him expansive.

  He had forgotten that he had once thought Ellen’s face noble and aristocratic. If the thought ever intruded into his mind now he shook it away, for it was not credible to him that a girl of her station could be anything but what she obviously was: a menial. To him, servants were not “labor.” They were not part of “the toiling masses struggling to be free.” This fine distinction never failed to make his father stare at him with a smile of mingled disbelief and satire. Francis was still intrinsically kind, as Walter would admit, if inconsistent. He was very much like his aunt, Hortense Eccles, who gave willingly enough to the Missions, and had a genuine concern for Ellen though she never considered that the girl was of human flesh and driven to the point of collapse many times in her service.

  Walter would often think that his son’s concept of “labor” was puerile. He had never really seen “labor.” He had never met a workingman. The father had some hopes that when Francis was admitted to the bar and encountered others outside his class he would “come to his senses.” But his humbler clients were only poor: clerks, tellers in banks, shopkeepers, owners of butcher and grocery stores. They were not “labor.” They were petite bourgeoisie, and so he had a disdain for them, as if they were not flesh and blood and full of misery.

  Wan, shriveled, and stricken with unremitting pain, May lay on her bed and looked at her niece reprovingly. “Are you going out again, Ellen?”

  “Aunt May, I haven’t been out of this house for a week. It is only for two hours. I just have to go out, to breathe, to think a little, to be alone.”

  “Ellen, you are a very strange girl. Sometimes I can’t understand you.” She had a terrible thought. She sat up in bed, uttered a faint moan, and cried, “You aren’t meeting somebody outside, are you—all this gallivanting?”

  “Aunt May, I know nobody in Wheatfield, nobody. You know that. I hurry home from church on Sundays, and no one speaks to me.” Ellen smiled, and the rare dimple in her cheek flashed. “Are you comfortable? I won’t be long.”

  May fell back on her bed and sighed deeply. “You know Mrs. Eccles wouldn’t stand for you having a follower, Ellen. I hope you don’t talk to strangers in the park.”

  “No, Auntie.”

  “It don’t seem right to me, Ellen, for you to leave the house. There must be something for you to do here. Did you polish all the silver today?”

  “Of course. I do that every Thursday.”

  “Well, if you see Mrs. Eccles, ask her if it’s all right for you to go out.” She sighed again. “There’s nothing too good for her. Look what she has done for us. You’ve got fifty dollars saved, in the bank, and I have a hundred. Due to Mrs. Eccles.”

  Ellen went slowly down the stairs, dressed in a “decent” brown wool dress, a black coat which was ill-fitting, as it had once belonged to Mrs. Eccles, a battered wide black hat on her coiled and burnished hair, Francis’ gloves on her hands. She wore a new pair of black-buttoned shoes, cheap but stylish. She looked, as May called it, “respectable,” and she also superficially looked what she was, a servant. But a close scrutiny of her face and her coloring, the perfection of her features in spite of her broad cheeks, often startled passersby and those who came wearily to the little park nearby for momentary refreshment.

  The house was warm and very quiet, except for the distant clank of the furnace and the booming echoes in the big rooms. Mrs. Eccles sat at her desk in the library, facing the door, and frowned as she went over her accounts. She was alarmed at the cost of food since the Philippine War. Butter—twelve cents a pound! Milk—seven cents a quart! A roast of beef—seventy-five cents! Outrageous. She smoothed her sleek brown pompadour in exasperation. These prices were enough to bankrupt even the rich. Her plump cheeks were quite pink with indignation. She pulled at the second of her chins, and thought. There was a pile of gold coins on the desk at which she sat, and to cheer herself she touched them with tenderness. She was glad that winter was approaching; she would no longer have to pay her gardener and handyman ten dollars a week. There was the snow shoveling, of course, but there was always a little boy from the poor section of the town to do that for twenty-five cents. When I was young, she thought, they were glad to do it for a meal.

  Ellen tried to slip past the door without being seen. Then Mrs. Eccles spoke to her. “Out again, Ellen?”

  Ellen paused. “Just for an hour or so, Mrs. Eccles. You know I do that every Thursday. I like to sit in the park, and winter will soon be here and the park will be full of snow.”

  Mrs. Eccles frowned again. “Did you study a chapter in the Bible, Ellen?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I do that every day, when I first get up.”

  Mrs. Eccles leaned back in her chair and looked severe. “Ellen, I didn’t like the way you roasted the chicken last night. Not the way May does it, with a touch of tarragon and thyme. I thought by now you’d be equal to May, in cooking.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ellen, feeling that now very familiar stab of guilt and embarrassment. “I thought you said last week, ma’am, that you didn’t care for those herbs too much.”

  “May’s very subtle in her seasoning. There’s a difference. Did you put more coal in the furnace?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Eccles. Half an hour ago.”

  “And did you give the cats their afternoon cream?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Ellen looked anxiously through the far window. The blue shine of October was dimming a little. It would soon be dark.

  “Very well. You may go, Ellen. But do be discreet. Keep your eyes down, like a proper girl. Never look at people directly. It’s bold, for one of your station.”

  Ellen pulled open the heavy oaken doors and walked out into the blessed cool and spicy air of an October afternoon. There was a fragrance of leaves burning, mingled with the acrid odor of fresh horse manure. A few carriages moved sedately over the cobbled stones of the streets, filled with ladies in furs and gloves and with plumed hats, their knees covered with warm robes of wool or fur. From somewhere came the exciting scents of boiling ketchup and grape jam and roasting meat. The sky was an intense blue, with here and there a mounting white cloud. It looked cold and distant, for all its color. The street was lined with big houses similar to Mrs. Eccles’, the windows polished and richly draped, the knockers bright as gold. Trees lined the walk, scarlet and yellow and russet brown, contrasting with the occasional sharp green of a fir tree. The lawns were a more vivid emerald than in summer, due to the recent heavy rains, and seemed almost artificial. The last salvia and red calla lilies burned closely in flower beds. A slight keen wind blew, and the drying leaves on the trees crackled and a drift of them raced before Ellen in swirls, as if they were still alive.

  The air was chill on Ellen’s cheeks, and she moved with briskness, her long legs gliding and sure. She saw, in the distance, the hazy blue of a leaf fire rising up in the shining air, and heard a child shout. She came to the little park, which was enclosed in an iron fence, and she walked through the gates. Here were narrow paths of gravel winding through the trees, and a scattering of wooden benches. The park was patronized mostly by nursemaids with their charges in perambulators, covered with rich plaid blankets. In the center was a large rose bed, but only a hopeful bud or two shivered among the fading leaves and the bent stems. It would soon be winter. A squirrel ran before Ellen, raced halfway up a tree, and looked eagerly at her for nuts. She had purloined a few from the kitchen and she threw them on the ground and the squirrel, chittering, hurled himself down and snatched at them, sitting up on his haunches as he cracked a nut and ate it. A thin dappling of light came through the trees and moved over Ellen as she went on.

  She found a bench. She saw she was almost alone in the park, except for a woman walking her dog and two women, obviously servants, who sat on a bench and furtively cackled together. No one noticed Ellen as she sat down on her bench, and placed her cheap imitation-leather purse on her knee. The wind blew a little strong
er and tendrils of her flaming hair came loose and curled about her cheeks and forehead. She settled her black hat more firmly on the coiled mass. All May’s concoctions of black-walnut shells boiled in water could not dim the luster and glow of that hair, nor all the rice powder obliterate the apricot stain on cheek and mouth.

  Ellen sat, conscious of her weariness. She had risen as usual at five, was in the kitchen at six, or before. She never climbed up to her bed until long after ten at night. The heat of the furnace never rose to those cold bedrooms which she and May occupied, and the blankets, if adequate, were coarse and dark, the harsh linen prickly. So Ellen always hastened through her prayers, shivering in her flannel nightgown, and then crept under the blankets, there to lie for a long time gazing through the high narrow window which boasted no curtains and no draperies. When she finally fell asleep it was only to dream distressfully, and to awaken fitfully several times.

  She had no hope for anything. She could grow old and wrinkled and wan in service, until she was no longer of use. Then, with her meager savings she would go to the “poor farm,” or perhaps, if she was lucky, she would supervise children in another strange house, or do needlework or mending in some cold upper back room for a pittance, her body arthritic, her hands crooked with labor, her feet forever chilled and aching with corns and bunions, her back bent with years of toil, her skin furrowed and parched, her hair white.

  She was accustomed to desolation now, and melancholy haunted her always. But it was deeper today, as the year died, and it was like a heavy battering pain in her heart.

  For what was I born, and why was I born? she asked herself. There seems to be no reason, no answer. Aunt May says we are all born to suffer meekly, for it is the will of God, and we live only to please God; we cannot aspire to heaven if we neglect the duty He has assigned to us. But, dear God! I don’t want any heaven! I want a little joy, today, tomorrow, a little wonder, a little anticipation, a little hope. I want to see something of this beautiful world, to be free, if only for a short time, to be idle so I can think, to laugh, to sing, to be young as I was never young. For a brief while, before I die, I should like my own fire and my own bed and my own walls. I know I can never be like the girls who come with their mothers to call on Mrs. Eccles—the beautiful girls in their pretty summer frocks all lace and silk, and their furs in the winter, and their carriages, and their happy laughter, and the pearls at their ears and their throats. I know I shall never wear their flowered hats in the summer, their plumes in the winter, their fur-lined gloves, their lustrous muffs, their dainty shoes. I was not born to that; I was born to be a drudge, and so I must not envy, not for an instant, those girls my own age, so carefree, and with such pleasant futures.