Fidelity.

by Susan Glaspell.

CHAPTER ONE

It was hard to get back into the easy current of everyday talk. Cora Albright's question had too rudely pulled them out of it, disturbing the quiet flow of inconsequential things. Even when they had recovered and were safely flowing along on the fact that the new hotel was to cost two hundred thousand dollars, after they had moved with apparent serenity to lamentation over a neighbor who was sick in bed and without a cook, it was as if they were making a display of the ease with which they could move on those commonplace things, as if thus to deny the consciousness of whirlpools near by.

So they seemed to Dr. Deane Franklin, who, secured by the shadow of the porch vine, could smile to himself at the way he saw through them.

Though Deane Franklin's smile for seeing through people was not so much a smile as a queer little twist of the left side of his face, a s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up of it that half shut one eye and pulled his mouth out of shape, the same twist that used to make people call him a homely youngster. He was thinking that Cora's question, or at any rate her manner in asking it, would itself have told that she had lived away from Freeport for a number of years. She did not know that they did not talk about Ruth Holland any more, that certainly they did not speak of her in the tone of everyday things.

And yet, looking at it in any but the Freeport way, it was the most natural thing in the world that Cora should have asked what she did.

Mrs. Lawrence had asked if Mr. Holland--he was Ruth's father--was getting any better, and then Cora had turned to him with the inquiry: "Do you ever hear from Ruth?"

It was queer how it arrested them all. He saw Mrs. Lawrence's start and her quick look over to her daughter--now Edith Lawrence Blair, the Edith Lawrence who had been Ruth's dearest friend. It was Edith herself who had most interested him. She had been leaning to the far side of her big chair in order to escape the shaft of light from the porch lamp. But at Cora's question she made a quick turn that brought her directly into the light. It gave her startled face, so suddenly and sharply revealed, an unmasked aspect as she turned from Cora to him. And when he quietly answered: "Yes, I had a letter from Ruth this morning," her look of amazement, of sudden feeling, seemed for the instant caught there in the light. He got her quick look over to Amy--his bride, and then her conscious leaning back from the disclosing shaft into the shadow.

He himself had become suddenly conscious of Amy. They had been in California for their honeymoon, and had just returned to Freeport. Amy was not a Freeport girl, and was new to his old crowd, which the visit of Cora Albright was bringing together in various little reunions. She had been sitting over at the far side of the group, talking with Will Blair, Edith's husband. Now they too had stopped talking.

"She wanted to know about her father," he added.

No one said anything. That irritated him. It seemed that Edith or her mother, now that Cora had opened it up, might make some little attempt at the common decencies of such a situation, might ask if Ruth would come home if her father died, speak of her as if she were a human being.

Cora did not appear to get from their silence that she was violating Freeport custom. "Her mother died just about a year after Ruth--left, didn't she?" she pursued.

"About that," he tersely answered.

"Died of a broken heart," murmured Mrs. Lawrence.

"She died of pneumonia," was his retort, a little sharp for a young man to an older woman.

Her slight wordless murmur seemed to comment on his failure to see. She turned to Cora with a tolerant, gently-spoken, "I think Deane would have to admit that there was little force left for fighting pneumonia.

Certainly it was a broken life!"--that last was less gently said.

Exasperation showed in his shifting of position.

"It needn't have been," he muttered stubbornly.

"Deane--Deane!" she murmured, as if in reproach for something of long standing. There was a silence in which the whole thing was alive there for those of them who knew. Cora and Edith, sitting close together, did not turn to one another. He wondered if they were thinking of the countless times Ruth had been on that porch with them in the years they were all growing up together. Edith's face was turned away from the light now. Suddenly Cora demanded: "Well, there's no prospect at all of a divorce?"

Mrs. Lawrence rose and went over to Amy and opened a lively conversation as to whether she found her new maid satisfactory. It left him and Edith and Cora to themselves.

"No," he answered her question, "I guess not. Not that I know of."

"How terrible it all is!" Cora exclaimed, not without feeling; and then, following a pause, she and Edith were speaking of how unbecoming the new hats were, talking of the tea one of their old friends was giving for Cora next day.

He sat there thinking how it was usually those little things that closed in over Ruth. When the thought of her, feeling about her, broke through, it was soon covered over with--oh, discussion of how some one was wearing her hair, the health of some one's baby or merits of some one's cook.

He listened to their talk about the changes there had been in Freeport in the last ten or twelve years. They spoke of deaths, of marriages, of births; of people who had prospered and people who had gone to pieces; of the growth of the town, of new people, of people who had moved away.

In a word, they spoke of change. Edith would refer things to him and he occasionally joined in the talk, but he was thinking less of the incidents they spoke of than of how it was change they were talking about. This enumeration of changes gave him a sense of life as a continuous moving on, as a thing going swiftly by. Life had changed for all those people they were telling Cora about. It had changed for themselves too. He had continued to think of Edith and the others as girls. But they had moved on from that; they were moving on all the time. Why, they were over thirty! As a matter of fact they were women near the middle thirties. People talked so lightly of change, and yet change meant that life was swiftly sweeping one on.

He turned from that too somber thinking to Amy, watched her as she talked with Mrs. Lawrence. They too were talking of Freeport people and affairs, the older woman bringing Amy into the current of life there.

His heart warmed a little to Edith's mother for being so gracious to Amy, though, that did not keep him from marveling at how she could be both so warm and so hard--so loving within the circle of her approval, so unrelenting out beyond it.

Amy would make friends, he was thinking, lovingly proud. How could it be otherwise when she was so lovely and so charming? She looked so slim, so very young, in that white dress she was wearing. Well, and she was young, little older now than these girls had been when they really were "the girls." That bleak sense of life as going by fell away; here _was_ life--the beautiful life he was to have with Amy. He watched the breeze play with her hair and his whole heart warmed to her in the thought of the happiness she brought him, in his grat.i.tude for what love made of life. He forgot his resentment about Ruth, forgot the old bitterness and old hurt that had just been newly stirred in him. Life had been a lonely thing for a number of years after Ruth went away. He had Amy now--all was to be different.

They all stood at the head of the steps for a moment as he and Amy were bidding the others goodnight. They talked of the tea Edith was to give for Amy the following week--what Amy would wear--how many people there would be. "And let me pick you up and take you to the tea tomorrow,"

Edith was saying. "It will be small and informal--just Cora's old friends--and then you won't have so many strangers to meet next week."

He glowed with new liking of Edith, felt anew that sweetness in her nature that, after her turning from Ruth, had not been there for him.

Looking at her through this new friendliness he was thinking how beautifully she had developed. Edith was a mother now, she had two lovely children. She was larger than in her girlhood; she had indeed flowered, ripened. Edith was a sweet woman, he was thinking.

"I do think they're the kindest, most beautiful people!" Amy exclaimed warmly as they started slowly homeward through the fragrant softness of the May night.

CHAPTER TWO

He had known that Amy would ask, and wondered a little at her waiting so long. It was an hour later, as she sat before her dressing-table brushing her hair that she turned to him with a little laugh and asked: "Who is this mysterious Ruth?"

He sighed; he was tired and telling about Ruth seemed a large undertaking.

Amy colored and turned from him and picked up her brush. "Don't tell me if you don't want to," she said formally.

His hand went round her bared shoulder. "Dearest! Why, I want to, of course. It's just that it's a long story, and tonight I'm a little tired." As she did not respond to that he added: "This was a hard day at the office."

Amy went on brushing her hair; she did not suggest that he let it go until another time so he began, "Ruth was a girl who used to live here."

"I gathered that," she replied quietly.

Her tone made no opening for him. "I thought a great deal of her," he said after a moment.

"Yes, I gathered that too." She said it dryly, and smiled just a little.

He was more conscious than ever of being tired, of its being hard to tell about Ruth.

"I gathered," said Amy, still faintly smiling, though, her voice went a trifle higher, "that you thought more of her--" she hesitated, then amended--"think more of her--than the rest of them do."

He answered simply: "Yes, I believe that's so. Though Edith used to care a great deal for Ruth," he added meditatively.

"Well, what did she do?" Amy demanded impatiently. "What _is_ it?"

For a moment his cheek went down to her soft hair that was all around her, in a surge of love for its softness, a swift, deep grat.i.tude for her loveliness. He wanted to rest there, letting that, for the time, shut out all else, secure in new happiness and forgetting old hurts.

But he felt her waiting for what she wanted to know and so with an effort he began: "Why, you see, dear, Ruth--it was pretty tough for Ruth. Things didn't go right for her--not as they did for Cora and Edith and the girls of her crowd. She--" Something in the calm of Amy's waiting made it curiously hard to say, "Ruth couldn't marry the man she cared for."

"Why not!" she asked dispa.s.sionately.