The Cinder Buggy (5 page)

“Is it?” said Esther.

They could get nothing more out of her. She declined to be argued with and smiled at them from a great distance. Her smile was impassable.

Several times after that Aaron tried to involve her in their conversations, at dinner, or in the drawing room where she sat apart with her needlework, but never again with any success. She would look at him with a bothered expression, and either recognize his effort by no other sign or slowly shake her head. This he took for disapproval and thereafter ignored her, as the others did, except now and then to scrutinize her in a surreptitious manner. When she surprised him at that she returned his gaze with distant, impersonal curiosity, until he was the first to turn away.

A change took place gradually in the partners’ relations with the Mitchell menage. Aaron’s visits were no less recurring, but Enoch’s became more frequent and regular. It was the only household in New Damascus in which he felt wholly at ease with himself and properly esteemed. He seldom went anywhere else. Very soon the women people were saying they knew what the attraction was. A certain expectation began to crystallize. Enoch became aware of it, not knowing how. Mitchell cultivated it adroitly. Since his offer to invest capital in the business of Gib and Breakspeare had been declined the idea of marrying Esther to one of the firm took possession of his thoughts. His preference was for Enoch because more securely through him than through Aaron would the Mitchell chariot be hitched to the star of iron. He talked of both of them to Esther, with an air of being impartial, as if giving her his intimate, unguarded impressions. As he understood women, their minds worked on these matters in a contrary manner. To disparage Aaron might be prejudicial to his ends. He never did that. Nevertheless, Enoch came off by every comparison as much the superior person. Esther listened attentively and said nothing.

“Do you ever think of getting married?” he asked her. “I sometimes wonder.”

“No,” she said. “I never have. Why do you ask it?”

“But you may,” he said.

“Have you some one in view for me?” In her voice was a certain elusive tone, unresolved between doubt and irony, that he knew and hated. It made him uneasy. Sometimes it made him feel small.

“Seriously, I have,” he replied. “That is to say, I have hoped you might become interested that way in Enoch Gib. You know what I think of him. He will be a great man in this country if nothing happens.”

“Does it much concern your happiness?” she asked. There was that tone again.

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” he said. “I am thinking of your future. It would give me a sense of great comfort.”

This was at dinner’s end one evening when they were alone. As he talked, with his eyes down, he traced a figure on the table cloth with a spoon, making it deeper and deeper as his unease increased. He felt all the time that she was regarding him with a wide, impenetrable expression.

“Oh,” she said, after an interval of silence.

He started and looked at her furtively. She was regarding him freely. There was in her expression the the trace of an ambigious, amused smile. He blushed and rose from the table.

Expectations increased. More marriages take place under the tyranny of expectation than Heaven imagines. New Damascus society became tensely expectant.

Enoch proposed, as Esther expected, with an air of bestowing himself where he was sure to be appreciated. She took some time about it and then accepted him.

Aaron was apparently the only person in New Damascus who had not foreseen it. He was deeply astonished. Why? It was not an improbable consummation. Yet it seemed to him strange and unnatural.

He first heard of it at dinner with the Mitchells. Enoch was present. Mitchell announced it as if Aaron were a large party of friends. He responded as such. There was a false note in his felicitations. He was aware of it; so was Esther. But in trying to cancel the impression he made it worse. Enoch was protected as by wool with a sense of proprietorship and self-satisfaction. Mitchell was insensitive.

Esther kept looking at Aaron. There was a troubled, startled expression in her eyes. He misread it for distaste. He had long imagined she disliked him. Several times that evening she was brief with him, almost curt, and this had never happened before.

His visits to the Mitchell house thereafter were formal and less frequent. Enoch’s manner of making himself paramount affected him disagreeably. And Esther’s behaviour perplexed him. She was at one time much more friendly than he expected and at another so deliberately indifferent that he could only conclude that she meant to estrange him.

Yet now a fatality began to operate. By a law of coincidence that we do not understand, and may not exist, they began to meet outside the household, purely, as it seemed in each case, by accident,—in unexpected places, on the street again and again, once at night in a crowd at an open air Punch and Judy show in which neither of them was at all interested, once in Philadelphia where he was transacting business and she was shopping with her maid, and once in a memorable way on a path through the woods to Throne Rock, a natural seat on the mountain summit from which the view of the valley was exciting.

It was a Sunday afternoon in early May. He was going; she was returning. They were at first surprised, then embarrassed, and became absurdly self-conscious. She wore a wide-brim hat, pulled down on both sides and tied under her chin. She was hot and tired; her color was high. Her dress was torn. He noticed it.

“I was after these,” she said, catching his glance. She held out a bunch of dogwood blossoms, with a gesture to share them. He admired them and there was nothing else to say. So they stood, she looking at him and holding out the dogwood flowers, he looking fixedly at them, until her arm dropped and she turned to go on. He let her go and went his way up the path. But he looked back. She had stopped and was seated on a fallen tree trunk. He returned. She did not look up.

“I’d like to give you a farewell party,” he said. “Will you come?”

“A farewell party?”

“There ought to be a better name for it,” he said. “A sour grape party, then. I’ve always wanted to give you a dinner at the mansion. Will you come?”

“Yes,” she said.

And again there was nothing else to say. She rose and he walked with her toward the town.

“If Enoch won’t mind,” he said.

“Why should he mind?” she asked.

“Perhaps he won’t,” said Aaron.

This thought, as to whether Enoch should mind, had far and separate projections in each of their minds and kept them silent until at the natural parting of their ways she turned to face him and held out her hand. It was a gesture of dismissal. He bowed and left her.

The dinner party took place just two weeks before her wedding day. It was perhaps too elaborate. It contained every preparable element of success. Aaron did his best to save it, and yet nobody enjoyed it. Esther was visibly depressed. Enoch sulked. The guests rallied them until it was seen to be hopeless and then let them alone. They simply could not react with gaiety.

Aaron as host had special rights in the guest of honor and took them. Enoch grew steadily worse. Opinion upon him was divided. Some thought it was the natural gloom of his nature and were full of foreboding for Esther. Others said they did believe the man was jealous.

After a dance Esther and Aaron walked on the terrace.

“Forgive me,” she said. “I have spoiled the party.”

“No,” he said. “It’s my fault. I knew better. Yet I couldn’t resist it. And it is in a sense a farewell party.”

“What does that mean?”

“After your wedding I may not see you again for a long time. I’m only waiting on Enoch’s account. Then I shall be going to Europe for a year, perhaps more.”

“On business?”

“Y-e-s,” he answered slowly.

They took several more turns without speaking.

“What are your plans?” he asked.

“None that I know of,” she said.

She had stopped. He saw that her gaze was directed at Enoch’s ancestral iron-stone house below. The fitful glare of the blast furnaces, lower down, lighted its sombre nakedness and gave it a relentless, sinister aspect. The windows, which were small and unsoftened by copings, were like cruel, ferocious eyes in a powerful, short-haired, suspicious animal.

“Shall you live there?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, giving him a frowning, startled look, as if he had surprised her at a disadvantage. She added: “Enoch took me through it yesterday. The room where he was born,—that will be mine. The room where his father died is just as it was then. He thinks we shouldn’t touch it.”

She shivered. He asked her if she was cold. She wasn’t, but on the next turn past the door she turned and they went in.

Enoch’s idea of marriage was inherited. You take a wife from the church to the ancestral abode and become jointly responsible with God for her past, present, future and hereafter, for her body, her mind, her way with the neighbors, for everything about her save the separate flame of her individuality. That is vanity. The house is yours, therefore she must accept it. It was yours before she had any rights in it, therefore she must get used to it, as she must get used to you. And why not? If Aaron married would he not take his wife to the Woolwine Mansion just as it was? Well, what was Aaron’s was like Aaron and what was Enoch’s was like Enoch, and what a woman married was what she got.

Enoch rode home with Esther that night in her father’s carriage. Mitchell had gone home earlier and sent the carriage back. As they were passing the ironstone house—fatally then—Enoch asked:

“What do you and Aaron find to talk about?”

“Nothing,” she said.

That was literally the truth. It was with extreme difficulty that they found anything to say to each other. Never had they carried on an intimate, self-revealing conversation. There was too much constraint on both sides. But Enoch could hardly believe that Aaron was under any circumstances inarticulate, like himself. Or was it that he knew instinctively if what Esther said was true there lay in that very truth a deep significance?

Her answer made him seethingly angry. An ungovernable feeling rose up in him spirally. It was as an adder stinging him in the dark. He could not seize it, for he knew not what or where it was. He could not escape from it. The pain was horrible.

Esther knew nothing of these violent emotions. She had no more intuition of him than he had of her. That sense by which natures attuned exchange thoughts without words was impossible between them. Between Esther and Aaron it already existed: it always had. But it was unacknowledged.

Enoch passed three days without seeing Esther, hoping she might send for him. On the fourth day he went to dinner and she treated him as if nothing were the matter. She hardly knew there was. That made it much worse. Then he flourished the wound by pretending heroically to conceal it. That method will work only provided the woman cares and loves the child in her man. Esther did not care. She refused to discover the hurt. The man’s last recourse is to injure the woman, to ease himself by hurting her. Enoch became oppressive. He began to mention the things that should be rendered unto Cassar, categorically, gratuitously; he revealed the laws of Gib; he appointed how the concavities of her life should correspond to the convexities of his; he spoke of penalties, forfeits and consequences, and of the ancient legal principle that ignorance of the statutes is no defence provided the statutes have been duly published. She listened with wide-open eyes. He believed he inspired her with admiration for the stern stuff he was made of, and thus blindly sought his fate.

So his hurt was revenged but in no wise healed.

On the eve of their wedding day, at dinner, Aaron’s name was pronounced. The invisible circumstances were tragic. Enoch happened at that instant to be regarding Esther with a sensation that was new to him and very disturbing. He knew not what to do with it. Suddenly he had been seized with a great longing for her, a yearning of the heart toward the fact of her being that was savage, tender and desolate. He wondered that Esther and her father both were not aware of this singular and dramatic occurrence. It shook him like an earth tremor. An impulse to speak, to shout, to cry out words of fantastic meaning, to rise and touch her, became almost uncontrollable,—almost. It occurred to him for the first time, like a blow, that he had never discovered her nature, her true self. He had not tried. The importance of doing so, the possibility of it, had not been thought of. But he would. He would begin all over again to get acquainted with her.

In that moment he loved her.

And it was then,—just then,—that he heard the sound of Aaron’s name. He could not say which one of them uttered it. The sound was all he knew. Instantly the hideous, stinging adder upraised from his depths and began striking at the walls of his breast. Vividly, steroptically, as a series of pictures, there flashed across his mental vision every situation in which he had seen Aaron and Esther together.

He had been able to control the impulse of love to vent its untimely ecstasy; his rage he could not govern.

To Esther’s and her father’s amazement he began, with no apparent provocation whatever, to utter against Aaron defamations of an extreme and irrevocable character. His manner contradicted the violence of his feelings. It was self-possessed, one would almost say restrained; that was his way under stress of emotional excitement. At no point did he become incoherent. His words were chilled and came to him easily. One might have thought he was thinking out loud, very earnestly, in solitude. On his face was that singular Gib expression, never witnessed before in the Mitchell household,—the mouth contortion one mistook for a smile. So far as Esther and Mitchell could see the performance was gratuitous and premeditated. It had gone far before they realized that his state was one of passion. But that discovery had no mitigating value. They made no effort to stop him. He spoke of things that are supposed to be unmentionable, and of his private intentions, and closed abruptly with the declaration that Aaron should never be received in his house as a guest.