A Prologue To Love (11 page)

“My father was of an even better family than my mother’s or your mother’s. He was educated not only at Harvard but at Oxford, in England. He specialized in international law. He could have been a great man. Eventually he would have been a Supreme Court justice. The President knew him, and so did many more. But — he died. Quite suddenly, he died.”

Caroline thought: Poor Papa, he must have loved his father so much, and I never knew. She wanted to go to him and put her arms about him and console him, but she had never kissed him in her life except at Christmas, when he permitted it.

“My mother and I lived alone in the country, in a farmhouse near a village,” said John, as if he were reading aloud a page and not speaking of himself. “Your grandmother’s parents had expected a lot of my father; unfortunately he didn’t come up to expectations in spite of his prospects. He decided, when I was ten years old, to throw up a whole lifetime of work and study and to do something else.”

“What, Papa?”

John frowned. It was intolerable to listen to that meek and yearning voice, that innocent voice. He said, “It doesn’t matter now. It happened a long time ago. He never succeeded in what he wanted to do. My mother’s family wanted her to leave him and come home. She would not. When her father died he left his money to his nieces and nephews and not to his daughter. So she and I lived alone in that farmhouse.”

A house like this, thought Caroline with deep affection. A house with trees about it and a little brook. Papa must have loved it.

“I won’t go into details,” said John, “about my life and my mother’s when my father decided that what he had wasn’t enough for him and when he turned his back on all his friends and made us exiles. But from the time I was ten I knew what poverty was.”

He came back to his chair and looked at his daughter. “You’ve never known what it is to be poor, Caroline. Fools say that poverty is no crime. But it is. The world impresses that on you very severely. It treats you much worse when you’re poor than if you were a murderer or a madman. I know. And the poor are even more vicious toward the poor than the rich are; they never forgive you for being one of them. When you’re poor, your poverty-stricken neighbors are afraid that you’ll ask them to share what little they have with you. And when they refuse, or have to refuse, they hate you for making them uneasy. Do you understand?”

Caroline did not. But a confused picture rose before her, terrible and frightening, filled with hoarse and repudiating voices and the sound of slammed doors and the look of a desolate brick wall in winter. She nodded speechlessly.

“Money,” said John, “is the only thing that can stand between you and hate and persecution and hunger. It’s the only fortress a man has. People may talk stupidly about family and position and name. These are nothing if you are poor. For when you are poor you have no family and no position and no name. You’re wide open to the world and what it can do to you, and what it does do to you is the most contemptible thing imaginable. It takes your humanity from you. And it exploits you much worse than if you were an animal. But even worse than all these are the faces — ”

Caroline looked at him, affrighted.

Is it possible I’ve reached her? thought John Ames. He was pleased.

“The faces,” said John Ames. “You have no money. You go into a shop and try to buy food on credit, and the shopowner shouts at you as if you’re a mangy cat and drives you out and everyone who hears laughs. Do you know what it means to hear people laugh at you when you have no money? I’ve heard many ugly sounds in my life, but none as ugly as the laughter of those who hate you because you haven’t a penny to buy a loaf of bread or a piece of meat.”

His cold and controlled voice did not become emotional. He spoke like a schoolmaster, without emphasis, and each word was a stone thrown at his shrinking daughter.

“There’s nothing as hideous,” he went on quietly, “as the faces that look at you when you’re ragged and cold and hungry and homeless. They’re all black open mouths, laughing, jeering, hating. You have no status. You have no place. You’re fit only for a kick or a blow. I’ve gone through all that, Caroline.”

Again Caroline nodded. She looked down at her clenched hands knotted together in her woolen lap.

“I’m not blaming the world,” said John Ames. “When it treats a man like a dog, it is because he’s become less than a dog for having no money. He deserves his punishment. It’s despicable to be poor.”

Caroline had never known what it was to hate. But the world of men had treated her father with hatred and derision. There was a convulsion of emotion in her, a withdrawing and yet an attack. She felt very sick; nausea clawed at her stomach. Then terror took her again, and she looked about the room. We’re poor! she cried inwardly.

John Ames looked at the violation of innocence which he had committed, and he was satisfied.

“I want you to understand these things,” he said almost gently. “I want to make it impossible for you ever to have to suffer as I suffered.”

Caroline raised her head as at the sound of a reprieve. There was some money, then, to stand between her and the world, the enemy of all who are poor. “Yes, Papa?” she whispered. “We’re not poor, Papa, not really terribly poor?”

“No,” he said, smiling slightly. “Not terribly poor. And that’s why I had to talk to you tonight, so it won’t happen to you.”

Her father loved her. She had never doubted it, she said to herself with a huge inner melting. She began to cry, her big shoulders heaving. John frowned.

“Stop it, Caroline. I haven’t time for childishness. Stop it, I said. What? Haven’t you a handkerchief? What a careless girl you are. Here take mine.”

Caroline held the soft smooth linen to her face and smelled the delicate fragrance of the lavender bags Beth put in her father’s chest of drawers. It was the most comforting perfume in the world to the girl; she would never smell it again without a wrench of longing and tenderness and love. For the first time she was conscious of the sweetness of good linen, its reassurance, its promise of safety.

John watched her as she pressed the handkerchief to her eyes and moved her full wet cheeks against it. He shifted his long and elegant legs uneasily and for an instant he thought of his mother. Only once had he ever seen her stern; it was strange that her remembered face, rising before his recollection, was stern now, almost forbidding.

“Caroline, even the Bible warns that the poor, the blind, the childless, and the lepers shall be counted as dead. And the poor are all that, for their very children come to hate them for their misery, and they have no eyes to see anything of the beauty your poets talk about there” — and he pointed to the silent books dying on the walls — “and they’re lepers as far as their lovely fellow men are concerned. You’ve lived an isolated life here and in Lyme, and it’s my fault, and now I am correcting it.” He did not add that it was only when Cynthia had insisted that the girl be better educated for her position, in order that she would be able to manage the money which would inevitably be hers in time, that he had even considered giving Caroline a good education. “After all,” Cynthia had said to him, “the girl is my sister’s child, and she is very intelligent; don’t be such a monstrous person, John.”

Caroline as a child, through neglect, through some innocence, he was determined to destroy, for it was the innocence of his father which had led to so much anguish. Ugly women, he had discovered, were very sharp about the world, and he respected nothing more than intelligence. If the greater share of what he had and what he would have in the future were to pass to Caroline, she would have to know at what a cost it had been bought.

“Yes, Papa,” said Caroline. The old obedience was still there, but now he detected resolution as well as fear in her voice.

“My mother,” said John in a flat tone, “died of starvation. Do you hear, Caroline? My mother died of starvation.”

It was many years ago, but he could feel the lightness of his dead mother’s body in his arms, and when Caroline looked at him with fresh horror she saw that he was very pale and that his eyes gleamed in the dull lamplight. She thought, What if Papa died like that — of starvation? And she glanced about her quickly in terror, as if an enemy had entered the cold and bitter room. Like an answer to her emotions, the wind rose in an autumnal thunder and crashed against the windows, which rattled like old bones.

John went on so quietly that Caroline had to strain to hear: “When she died I was alone with her in a farmhouse, in the winter, with only a small fire in her bedroom. There wasn’t anything to eat in the house; there wasn’t any money for food. I was more than a year younger than you, Caroline. After she died she was buried in what they called the poor corner of the churchyard; grave, hearse, and minister cost twenty dollars. My father” — and he stopped a moment — “returned home two days later. He had been trying to get some money. He climbed the hill in the snow; he dropped dead in it before he could reach the house.”

Caroline, always so insulated by neglect, gazed at her father, aghast. Her tears began again, and again the soft luxury of the handkerchief soothed her and promised her that she was safe. She knew that Beth was poor, and old Jim. But she had not visualized poverty as utter despair, starvation, and absolute cold.

“Oh, Papa!” she cried. “I don’t want to be like that! I’d rather die.”

“You won’t be like that, Caroline,” said John. “And I’m telling you these things so that one day, when you inherit what I have, you’ll be able to guard it well and increase it, and you’ll never spend a penny but what is absolutely necessary. Never a penny, Caroline. Each penny is a brick in the wall that’ll keep you safe from the world, safe from everything.”

“How did you get a little money, Papa?” She leaned eagerly toward him to hear, and he saw that the innocence was gone at last and he knew it would never return. He tapped his hand on the arm of the chair.

“I’ll tell you, my dear.” He had never called her that before, and she was one warm bubble of joy to hear it. “I’ll be brief just now; you’ll probably hear all about it when you’re older — from others. When I left the village for a larger town I worked hard. I was fourteen, and a big strong boy. Binghamton, Albany, New York. I could forget my degradation, the degradation of poverty, and the wretched shame of it, when I went away. For you see, I was determined never to be poor again. I was determined to get money.

“I did every kind of work you can imagine. I sailed on clippers; I worked in hotels and in private mansions. But I never took a job among middle-class people. The money wasn’t there. I put myself in the way of rich men; I preferred to earn as much as three dollars less a week among the rich than among just the middle-class and provincial, and I can assure you now that the rich knew the value of every penny they have, whether they earned it themselves or inherited it. When a rich man spends, unless he’s an absolute fool, he makes sure that he’ll get his money’s worth, and more. And — I found friends. It takes intelligence to make money, and to keep it if you’ve inherited it, and I never worked for fools. They had nothing to teach me.”

He stood up. “Tell Beth to call the rig for me. I have just five minutes to reach the Boston train for New York. Someday I’ll tell you the rest of the story. You are too young now to understand it, and I have no time to try to make you understand.”

Caroline blew her nose and stood up also. There was an atavistic smell in the room now. She did not know this acrid pungency was the smell of her own new fear and the smell of her father’s old fear. But it affected her tremendously. She was never free of it again.

She went toward the door, but her father called her back. She stood before him, large and square, and he looked down into her reddened eyes. He saw her fright and the two little white lines about her big red mouth. He never knew why he bent his head and kissed her and then patted her shoulder. She suddenly flung her strong arms about his neck and kissed him over and over, as if protecting him fiercely; he stiffened. Then the door closed behind her.

“What is wrong with you, Carrie?” asked Beth in a worried voice as she helped the girl pack her meager belongings. She glanced at the heavy profile and was alarmed to see a new sullenness there. “You know how wonderful it’ll be for you to go to Miss Stockington’s, where you should have gone a long time ago. So don’t pout.”

Caroline carefully folded a long and yellowish flannel nightgown, as rough as sand, and placed it in her tin trunk. She said absently, “I’m not pouting, Beth.” She picked up the flannelette drawers which Beth had made for her; the bulky top was fitted with tapes, but Beth had ruffled the ends of the legs prettily where they met the knees. Caroline’s large hand smoothed the ruffle; the edges had been embroidered in a gay pattern of red and blue cross-stitch. “Beth, are you poor?” asked Caroline with abruptness.

The question startled Beth, and she looked up in the gray barrenness of Caroline’s room. October wind and rain marched past the windows. Beth was about to answer, then she stared thoughtfully at the girl, her eyes puckered. Simple, but astute, she felt something dangerous and alien in the room, something that had never been there before. “Well, no, not really. I save almost all my wages, and I have a pension, and the government’s just increased it.” Then, as her alarm sharpened, it suddenly drifted away. She smiled at Caroline, and easy tears came to her eyes; the girl was worried about her because she loved her. She put her scarred hand on the girl’s arm.

“I didn’t think it would mean anything to you, dear,” she said, “but poor old Kate left me all she had after her simple funeral expenses. I never told you. You never cared about money; you never even thought of it.”

Caroline did not smile. It was only the grayness of the day which gave her face a somber hardness, thought Beth. Caroline said, “I didn’t know. Was it much?”

Again Beth’s eyes wrinkled, and uneasiness returned to her. “Why — considerable. I thought she’d leave it to her sister’s children in England, but she left it to me. Why?”

“Perhaps she thought you’d save it or use it sensibly. Kate was very saving, Beth.”

Beth folded a knitted skirt very slowly. “I didn’t mean that, Carrie. When I asked you why, I meant why did you ask.”

But Caroline did not know herself. She only knew that since last night she had been afraid and that the fear was beginning to shape and solidify in her heart, like iron. “I’m glad you’re not poor, anyway,” she muttered. She looked about the room vaguely. “It must be terrible to be poor.”

Beth did not know what made her say sharply, “I don’t know that it’s so terrible. My own family was always poor. There were ten of us, and the farm wasn’t too good. Papa always had a very hard time grubbing up enough for us to eat and fill the silo for the horses and cows. But we were awful happy. Awful happy.”

“How could you be happy without money, Beth?”

Beth sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at her scarred palms. She felt a little sick as well as utterly baffled. What had happened to Carrie? Earnestly she lifted her eyes and gazed at the girl.

“My papa used to say that money helped everywhere,” she said, “whether it was when a new baby was born, or the cows got sick, or there was scarlet fever and we had to have the doctor, or whether anyone died. It was like grease on an axle wheel, Papa would say; it made the going smoother. Papa wasn’t one of those silly people who pretend that money doesn’t mean anything; he knew what it was to need it, you can be sure of that. But what he meant was that money made things roll better. Why, there was a family down the road with a good farm, a real rich farm, four times as big as ours, and there were only three big healthy boys — they went to school with our mess of children and they’d never speak. They never got sick. Mrs. Schiller always had a fine silk dress on Sundays, and India shawls — that pretty Paisley pattern, you know, Carrie — and a fur cape in winter. They had a surrey, too, all shiny and fringed, and it could seat all five of them and room to spare, and a horse kept just to pull it. They’d jingle up to church in fine style, and we’d pull in behind them in one of the farm wagons and all over hay.