| CHAPTER V. OF A FIGHT AGAINST LOVE
Something tremendous had happened to Jane, something incomprehensible which at first seemed to humiliate and then to exalt her.
What disturbed her most deeply was that she could not tell when it had begun; had she betrayed Arthur for this? No. Or at least, if she had, she had done so without being aware of the fact. She had put an end to the entanglement with him from the desire, from the need which would not be denied to be honest and to be fair to him. She had not known at the time; she could not have known. And yet...For, by the very reason that she suddenly found herself inwardly unbalanced, she had, by a sort of inference from analogy, as soon as it was done, been enabled to cast a divining glance into Arthur's soul. She had seen his side, had understood his unstruggling compliance with her wish to be indisputably free; she had struggled and defended herself; she had cried in the solitude of her room in the parental house, in the helpless revolt at the confusing complications of life which set snares to men and women into which they walked, unaware of the difficulties in which they involved themselves.
The point was that, so far, she hardly knew what had happened to her. Had anyone charged her with having jilted Arthur because she was in love with another, she would have indignantly contradicted, throwing the very idea far from her; and with subjective truth. For in her only half conscious expectation of that enormous experience in store for her which she had interglimpsed even before she had returned from the east, she had viewed love as a supremely conscious choosing; as a bestowal of the palm on some man picked serenely from among all other men, almost by way of reward for exceeding virtues clearly recognised and sovereignly detailed in her mind.
Instead, what had happened to her had primarily had nothing whatever to do with her mind, her analytic intellect, her discerning reason. Mind, intellect, reason -even after the fact of the thing had been recognised - were flooded and drowned by things incomprehensible which
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seemed deeper, more fundamental, more compelling than any insight. The whole world and all things in it and the pertinency of these things seemed changed. Her own, inner centre of gravity seemed shifted. What were studies, what were ambitions as compared with this? She felt as if she had been living on a soil of life the very nature of which had been unknown to her.
The experience was so stupendous that she could not understand that everybody did not see at a glance that she was fundamentally changed; that she had been ignorant and had become knowing; as if she had eaten from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. She could not understand that her brothers still winked at her when they "baited" her father or teased her mother; or that her father still went his round of inspection every morning and did not see that all that was irrelevant now; or that her mother still considered it worth her while to see to it that there were "balanced" meals prepared at proper hours and that the table was set the way she wanted it set.
In her room upstairs, she looked at herself in the mirror, smiling almost sadly at finding her own, wonted features there in the image reflected by the glass. Often she sought solitude to sit down and think it all out, coolly, analytically; and she never succeeded. When she thought of Arthur, she now wished he might see her; he, with his insight sharpened, would understand from the change in her smile what had happened to her; and he would forgive her and bless her; for he would know that she could not have done otherwise. She awoke, in the morning, with the realisation that she re-entered a world aglow; and she went to sleep, at night, wrapped in the consciousness that she and the purpose of this world were at one.
She would go about in the parental house and try to busy herself, in order to dull the feeling of exuberant triumph which seemed to bear her aloft; and in the midst of the most trivial occupation something suddenly flashed up before her mental vision; and she stood, gripping the back of a chair or the rail at the foot of her bed, closing
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her eyes, and feeling a sob consolidating in her throat.
The strange thing about it all consisted in the seeming irrelevancy of what she saw, heard, felt; though most of these mirrorings of her soul were visual.
Thus, for awhile, she merely needed to close her eyes, and she saw a certain scene.
When she had first seen it, in actual reality, she had been upstairs in her room the window of which overlooked the yard of her father's farm. It had been shortly after she had gone to Stockton to enter upon her new duties. There she had stood, veiled by the curtains, looking down into that yard, strangely agitated, shaken all through her body and soul by she knew not what.
A man was crossing the yard, going towards the stable where her brothers were brushing down a horse. The man, quite unconscious of the fact that he was being watched, was a different being from the one he was when he stood in her presence. He was not on guard, not in the least keyed up to any endeavour to please as he invariably was when he knew that her eye was on him. And all the greater was his power over her.
He was wearing a light jacket made of soft cloth, without a vest over his shirt. On his head he had a cap which was sitting awry. His hands were in the pockets of his trousers. He was sauntering along, letting himself go in perfect nonchalance. He seemed utterly indifferent to the fact that there was such a being as Jane Atkinson in existence. But to her he transformed the whole of her world.
She watched his jaunty, careless step as if she were a sculptress bent upon catching the inflection of every line; she noted the daring angle of his cap, and she felt herself softening in an incomprehensible tenderness. The breath of a breeze pressed the clinging coat against his back; and at the sight of the play of his shoulder-blades under the cloth tears dimmed her eyes.--
When, at last, she could no longer hide from herself, no longer
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deny just what it was that had happened to her, she sat in her chair and stared unseeingly in front of her. She was in love, hopelessly, tragically in love. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw some physical detail which was a symbol of something else: the angle of the cap, the careless step, the play of the muscles over his back; it all meant a mastery of life, an unconscious sovereignty, an heroic attitude, the gesture of a born victor in life's issues. She longed to cherish this man as a mother cherishes her child; there was much in her love which was maternal.
Yet often, during this period when she was wrestling with what still appeared to her, at moments at least, as her weakness somewhat later it seemed to her as if she had been wrestling with God - she seemed suddenly to look into an abyss. This love which had come to her, and which seemed to attach itself to apparently physical things, upset all her expectations: it annihilated the world of intellectual and spiritual aspirations from which she had come. It would not make her happy. But, she asked herself one day, is happiness the end of life? The end of life was the fulfilment of our destinies. The moth would rush into the light even if it knew that the light would burn its wings.
Then she passed into a new stage of her experience. This man who had come into her life and whom she had chosen - for she acknowledged at last to herself that that was what she had done - must be all she had in her boldest dreams of ideal perfection exacted. She idealised, she etherealised him. For one thing, the little she knew of his antecedents showed her that he, too, had had her aspirations, her ambition of education, knowledge, universal reactions. It was true, he had turned aside and gone into "business". Well, "business", then, was raised to higher planes through him. It was a man's duty to conquer a place in the world for himself. There was no room for a generation of nothing but teachers or doctors or judges or preachers. The world's work had to be done; and men had to do it. He was the more to be
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admired: a business man who loved the finest things life has to offer, who read the great books of the world and thought its great thoughts. It must be so because she had chosen him; it could not be otherwise; besides, he was Arthur's brother; he was what Arthur might perhaps have been.
Within a few weeks she came to the point where she made, to herself, the unreserved avowal that she belonged to him; absolutely, without stipulations, on his own terms.
Already there seemed, by that time, to be a perfect understanding between them. She had met him at Stockton; when he met her in the streets, he greeted her as he might greet any casual acquaintance; but, as he looked at her, there sprang a spark from his eyes which made the blood tingle through her veins for the rest of the day.
Socially, she belonged to the world of professional men: a doctor and a lawyer were friends of her father; the homes of both these men were cultured homes, the centres where the few "intellectuals" of the city met. He, probably through the senior partner of the firm to which he belonged, a man who also was a lawyer, found out where she went and gained admission. He was received on a footing of equality, exclusive though these circles were. So, during the early fall, they saw each other in a social way. All things seemed to point in the same direction; and she accepted them till the tumult of her heart was stilled.
Then, just before the onset of winter, he declared himself.
Every Friday her father drove in to fetch her for the week-end. He waited, at four o'clock, at the gate of the school-yard, sitting in his carriage which was loaded with wraps; for it was a three-hour drive to the farm. One day, when she issued from the door of the school building, she saw him in conversation with Jim who, apparently, had happened to pass and had seen him. When she reached the curb, she was just in time to hear her father's invitation to him to accompany them. He, raising his hat to her, accepted provided that he could have five minutes to
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get ready in. During the whole of the drive he sat on the little folding seat in front of them, so near her that he could feel the warmth of her body through the robes.
On Saturday night he mentioned that he had met his brother and spoken to him; by the tone in which he spoke of Arthur's household he conveyed, in the most delicate way, the reason why he did not visit there; he would have liked, of course, to see more of Arthur; but unfortunately he was not welcome to Miss Marlowe.
The next day was cool and misty, one of those days when, no matter where you are, you seem to be alone with your heart. In the evening, Mr. Atkinson was going to drive them back to the city, after supper. He himself had some business there and was going to stay over till Monday. Thus, unexpectedly, a half day was added to the freedom vouch-safed. Jim asked her, shortly after dinner, to accompany him in a walk. As they went along, first following the road leading north, then over heath-like hills, it seemed to her as if she were carrying her heart like a burning lamp through a world already dormant. They hardly spoke. On her lips hovered a strange, unconscious smile.
They had strolled they did not know where. A delicious lassitude pervaded her limbs from the vigorous exercise. The air was crisp enough to make her cheeks glow though there was not the slightest breath of a wind. They came to a knoll jutting over the river, dotted here and there with dwarfed and grotesquely twisted tress, mostly moss-oaks, which were only dimly seen through the mist, like ghosts or presences from another world. The valley before them was filled with a milky opacity. In all this coolness they alone were glowing.
Suddenly, right on the dome of the knoll, where the turf consisted of matted Life Everlasting, he stopped and looked at her. His gesture - as if he were overflowing with what cannot be expressed - seemed to say all that she felt. What he said was a single word. "Jane!"
And she was in his arms. His touch seemed to rob her of all separate existence; she seemed to be caught up in a cosmic whirl. A quarter
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of an hour went by. Then, arm in arm, they turned back. In her eyes were tears which she shook away, laughing softly. "No," she said. "I am not crying. I can't help myself. It is too much, too much!"
They went on and on, without paying any attention to where they were, following a winding path through half open bush. Jane had the strange feeling as if this were a fulfilment of dreams dreamt in a by-gone life.
Dusk was rising when she recognised a fence, a slough beyond, to her left. They were at the extreme west end of her father's farm.
Suddenly she felt as if she were a little girl again, full of mischief, triumphant in overflowing vitality; and, following her impulse, she slipped away from him, through the fence, and to the other side of the slough; before he, in climbing through the fence, had had time to get his bearings. For a second, as the water separated them, she was tempted merely to stand and to cry out to heaven in a carol of triumph. But the next moment the sense of even momentary separation from him gripped her with a feeling of aloneness, almost of disaster; and when she did cry out, her voice was a call to him, a whisper of longing and love. A few minutes later she was in his arms once more, calling for, and, at the same time, defending herself against, his caresses.
A week intervened before she saw him again. In the city she avoided going out, using press of work as a pretext for declining invitations. When, on Friday, she had joined her father, she asked him to leave town by an unusual route, again using a pretext. She suspected that Jim would be waiting somewhere along the street which they usually followed. She could not have said whether this was perversity or a legitimate desire to put their love to the proof by depriving both him and herself of the longed-for opportunity to see each other. Yet, during the whole drive, she felt, incomprehensibly, that she was not so much going home as to a rendez-vous with her lover.
And indeed, they had hardly been at home for an hour when, through
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the early night which had fallen meanwhile, the hum of a car sounded from the entrance of the yard across to the house.
Her father rose, saying, "I wonder! Should that be Jim?"
And her mother shot a quick glance at her.
She stood and looked from one to the other, smiling. Then, suddenly, she raised her arms and put them, first about her father's, then her mother's head, laughing and crying at the same time. Thus they knew.
Week-end after week-end followed. Snow having fallen, her father used the cutter when he came for her on Friday night. Henceforth they mostly picked him up in town; but sometimes, business demanding his presence in the city, he did not come till Saturday night, hiring a team to take him out. Life went like a dream; the life of lovers; it has all been told.
Their talk when they were alone together, especially on Sunday afternoons, when they took long, strenuous walks through the wintry woods, was that of all lovers since the world began - of lovers who are superlatively happy, happier that it had ever seemed possible for human beings to be. Jane's old ambitions were forgotten, swept away into the limbo of incomprehensible things by this enormous experience of her common humanity which yet, of course, seemed so exceptional and unique.
One Sunday when they had spent the whole afternoon in the woods without saying a word and at last, arm in arm, re-entered the yard, Jane whispered, "Dearest, do you know what I love most about our few hours together? Your ability to be silent and yet to convey it all, all!" What that "all" consisted in, did not require elucidation.
Another Sunday, the sun shining brightly over the landscape that glittered with fresh-fallen snow, Jane seemed to be in a communicative mood. "Dearest," she said over and over again, "I cannot understand it; I cannot fathom it. How is it possible that this should have happened to me?" And she began to question him. "Who, do you think,
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fell in love first, you or I?"- "Just when, for the first time, did you look at me in this way?"- "Oh," she answered her own questionings, "it must have been simultaneous. I am sure it was at first sight."- "Don't mind me, dear," she said, "I know I am silly. I am like a little girl again, like a child."
After Christmas - Jim had given her a magnificent solitaire ring for a present; and the twins had been home, teasing her, she taking it all with a smile as in years past she had taken her academic triumphs - the future was beginning to be discussed seriously. Mrs. Atkinson who seemed to consider the match as a personal victory over her husband - he having conveyed without saying it in so many words that he was not opposing it merely because he wished to see "his girl" happy - made several trips into Stockton where Jim took her about to look at houses which were for sale. Mr. Atkinson went to Winnipeg; he was going to give his daughter her furniture for a wedding present. The date of the ceremony was fixed for the first of July; for Jane insisted on completing her year at the school. The matter of the house was much discussed; and finally, Jane's father offering to loan part of the purchase price on a mortgage, Jim bought a large house recently erected, one of the proudest dwellings ever built in the little city, on Albert avenue, the best residential street. This house was considered a bargain at the price asked; for the contractor who had built it as a speculation had gone into bankruptcy when it had just been finished.
It was a two story building of red brick, with a huge, pale-green roof sheltering it as with a hood. The large lawn which surrounded it held a few large trees and was itself closed in by still small, newly-planted hedges of caragana; along the street, the premises were bordered by a wrought-iron fence with an ornamental gate between posts of rustic stone. What was particularly pleasing was the complete absence of pretensions.
Inside, when Jane entered her future home for the first time as a
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queen may enter her realm, she found an enormously large hall with a huge fire-place done, like the gate-posts, in rustic stone. The oak floors had just been laid, "filled", and waxed. Behind this large hall, there were three connecting rooms, one of them, the east room, reasonably small, the other two reasonably large. Beyond the west room lay pantry and kitchen. Two stairways led to the upper floor: a wide, balustraded flight from the huge hall, a narrow one, enclosed by walls, from the corridor connecting west room and kitchen. The second story held three large bed-rooms and, besides linen closet and bath-room, ample servants' quarters. The whole house was full of air and light.
New plannings began. Mr. Atkinson had fixed a maximum sum to be expended on furnishings. So it was decided to equip only one of the bed-rooms completely and one so it would just do for a guest room. For the size of the downstairs apartment demanded a great deal more furniture than the average home. During the Easter holidays Jane accompanied her father to Winnipeg where he wanted to pick the floor covering for the huge hall.
With a dancing step she walked over rug after rug as an obsequious salesman displayed his wares in the large show-room of a wholesale establishment. Her father had limited its cost to four hundred dollars. Jane could not decide. But suddenly she caught sight of a small rug, pearl-grey, with a pale-green border. "Have you nothing like that in the size we want?" she asked. The salesman had; two helpers spread out a rug which elicited a cry of rapture. Mr. Atkinson, asked for the price. It was twelve hundred dollars. "Oh," she cried, "I am sorry, father!" They left without having come to a decision. It went repeatedly the same way with other things
They returned home. But when the rug which her father finally ordered appeared in the house, it was the huge thing in pearl-grey. The maximum sum first fixed upon was exceeded several times before the task was finished.
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On Jim's representations, it was decided that, after the ceremony, the couple was to go straight to the house. Early summer was the most strenuous season in his business; he could not afford a honeymoon. They would take a trip in winter instead.
Meanwhile, at the house, Mrs. Halliwell, a seamstress from Fisher Landing, had been busy sewing. In that, too, no cost was spared. Here, of course, Mrs. Atkinson had all things her own way. She knew that her husband had made careful enquiries about Jim's first venture in business; he had been greatly impressed by what he had heard. The country all about Stockton was rapidly being settled; the city itself was bound to grow; and all growth of country and city was going to pour tribute into the coffers of Carter, Forrest, and McKay. Mr. Carter, the senior partner, was the leading lawyer of Stockton, a middle-aged, level-headed man. Mr. Atkinson had been given to understand that the money which Jim had put into the firm had, by the senior partner, been considered a mere trifle. What he had wanted was Jim's organising and sales ability; the banker whom Jane's father consulted was of the opinion that Mr. Carter would have been willing to engage young Mr. Forrest as an employee of the firm, at a salary of not less than ten thousand dollars. In securing the partnership, it was said, Jim had played an exceedingly adroit game. Jim was considered a rising man in Stockton. Thus, Mrs. Atkinson felt, they, the parents could not hold back when it was a question of establishing the young people right. For the banker who was her husband's chief source of information had not made a secret of the fact that Jim's position in the business world would be still further strengthened by his proposed alliance with Miss Atkinson.
Thus spring and early summer had come around. The date of the wedding approached; by the middle of June the house was ready to receive its prospective occupants. Everything, so far, had seemed to proceed under the happiest prognostications. To all outward appearances it continued to do so.
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Years later this period in Jane's life formed the topic of one of her most serious and most common meditations. It had been at this time that the great catastrophe which was to come into her life had begun. Nobody knew anything about it; she hardly knew anything of it herself. Things went forward as if obeying the impulse given by some secret spring; the secret spring being convention and age-old tradition which prescribed what had to be done under the circumstances. And yet, the things that were being done and in the doing of which Jane took part, serenely it seemed, had lost their happy meaning for her. All through the winter and the early spring she had first felt as if she were standing on life's eminence of love, ready at any moment to take to the wings of her soul; then, as if she were being rushed along life's lanes in a turmoil of happy and anticipatory excitement. Now, two weeks before that anticipation of a perfect happiness was to be fulfilled, she seemed suddenly to pause and to question things.
When she had become a middle-aged matron who had a grown-up son, she witnessed one day a horse-race. One of the entries for the steeple-chase - a mare so beautiful that Jane stood speechless with admiration of the glory of her forms - was her favourite; in the timid way of an aging woman who has lived most of her life in a sort of provincial retirement she even risked money on that mare. She felt so profoundly convinced that this animal, quivering in all her muscles, could not but win the day. And indeed, when the race was started, the beautiful mare led the field over three quarters of the course; and she did it easily, triumphantly as it were. Then, at the last hurdle, right in front of the grand-stand, she balked. The obstacle was by no means one of the hardest that had to be taken; but the beautiful creature simply refused to attempt the leap. For a moment all was confusion in the field. All over the grand-stand excited crowds rose to their feet. Jane experienced a feeling of disaster which reminded her of certain things she had gone through in her own life; and forever after a memory picture remained of a horse wildly
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throwing its head and veering; of a slackened bridle-rein looping behind that head; of a rider, bewildered, reeling in the saddle; of a whip raised; of her own cry of protest, mingled with dismayed sympathy for the beast; and then, of a supreme disaster as horses and riders crashed in a pulsating coil while she herself rose and fled in order not to see any more.
That scene became to her, at least in its first part, a symbol of what had happened to her just before her marriage. Like the horse she had wanted to balk at the last hurdle. Unlike the horse, she had not done so but gone on and taken the leap. For, unlike the horse, she had, at the first inkling of her reluctance, realised what it would mean: she had anticipated the dismay of her father and mother; she had understood what a material loss it would involve if that completely furnished house were not to be used for the purpose for which it had been fitted; she had seen the curious looks to which she would have been exposed from her Stockton friends, yes, from her colleagues at the school. She had felt entrapped and unable to extricate herself. From childhood on there had been a reserve between her and her mother; she had been her father's child; she had, in a thousand trifling things, daily but secretly sided with him; she had admired him for the patient, cheerful way in which he had borne with his overbearing wife whom she had criticised. To her mother she could not go; her father she could not hurt. Besides, the things that had made her "balk" had been intangible, hardly clear to herself at the time, hardly more than a vague troubling of her soul which she could not possibly have explained. And it had all come very suddenly.
Later, when she was a matron, with two children of her own, one of whom was hers, the boy, the other her husband's, the girl, she understood and analysed it all; and it was clear as daylight to her. But she saw that she could not have acted otherwise than she had done. She had taken the hurdle and gone through with the thing upon which she had been embarked. All things
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about her had been going in one direction; they had taken her along; towards the fulfilment of her destiny; she could not possibly have turned back. Painstakingly, at that time, perhaps to justify herself, she reconstructed just what had happened to her; she had, then, all the data which were necessary to understand it; and she did understand it, though she never succeeded in reviving within herself all the strands of feeling that had entered into her revolt. She could still occasionally feel it in a sudden tightening of all the muscles in her body; she could unexpectedly see it as in a second sight; but she could no longer understand what it had meant to her in suffering agony of soul.
It had all begun with a subtle change in Jim. The moment that change had become dimly perceptible to her, she had begun to call him, in her thoughts, to herself, by his name, thereby coordinating him with other mortals to be distinguished from whom he needed a tag. In the past, he had been "he", nameless - "the" man whom by a great good fortune she had met.
Several things had entered into that change.
For one thing, he betrayed by some undefinable shadings of demeanour a certain satisfaction - by and by almost a truculence - at his conquest. Perhaps it was natural enough. She, Jane, was a striking figure; many men had coveted her; she had had to resort to the expedient of a fictitious engagement in order to keep them at a distance. Yet there were things which jarred upon her sensibility.
One Saturday they were going along Fairview Avenue in Stockton, the chief business street where they had attended to some minor purchases. Stockton was a small enough place for almost everybody to know so prominent a figure as Jim Forrest had become within a year's time. His engagement had been announced, with laudatory comments, in the local paper; the picture of the bride had recently appeared in its society columns, furnished by her mother. She knew that, in certain circles, the match had almost been considered sensational.
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Her father was the wealthiest farmer of the district tributary to Stockton. Everybody who knew Jim knew who the lady by his side must be.
They passed the corner of Tenth Street where recently one of the great banks had erected a branch, a sumptuous building the pretensions of which were symbolised by its Corinthian peristyle. As it happened, Mr. Moffat, the manager, was coming down the steps. Jim hailed the quiet, middle-aged, square-headed man who tried to slip by with a furtive tipping of his hat. He introduced him to Jane, thereby intimating that Jane was his future wife.
Now, if behind this trifling incident - which was only one among a hundred - there had been no other motive but one of business, it would have been, to Jane, no more than a trifle; she knew that his marriage with her consolidated Jim's position as a business man. She might have regretted the complication of material interests; but she was content to take the world as it was. The banker acknowledged the introduction with perfect good breeding as a privilege. He was punctiliously polite to Jim; but he was not cordial. Jim was a patron of the bank; the bank made money out of his activities. There was an ever so slight difference in Mr. Moffat's attitude to her, Jane. In her he greeted something which he did not greet in Jim. Since this was not the first time that something of the sort had happened, she was acutely sensitive to such shadings.
But, as she glanced at Jim while the three of them stood at the corner of the street, exchanging such trivialities as are appropriate on such occasions, she became, for the first time, conscious of quite another, a very disquieting ingredient in the change which had come over him. He was displaying her to another man! His peculiar smile, compounded of legitimate pride and plain conceit, with something undefinable mixed in, drove home to her the fact, for the first time, that the relationship into which she was about to enter was in some mysterious way a sexual one, involving intimacies of a kind to which she had
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not, so far, given even the remotest thought.
It was a revelation to her.
Shortly after, they met her parents and, together, went to the huge new railway hotel to have dinner. That disturbing note of Jim's pride in her, the sexual note, was at once submerged. But its momentary betrayal was fateful in as much as it caused her to watch for its re-emergence; she began to be critical of Jim in a new way.
There were other things. When Jim, on a similar occasion, asked her to have a look at his office, they met Mr. Carter, the lawyer, an enormous, heavy-set man with a grey moustache. She knew Mr. Carter, having met him as well as his older brother socially; but as it happened, she had never before seen Jim and him together. Now she became aware of a slight note of deference in Jim's manner of addressing this man who was a financial power in the city. It was ever so slight; it was almost disguised by a superficial jauntiness, by a "hail-fellow-well-met" greeting; but it was there. Jim, after all, was not so positively sure of himself; he was carefully calculating his steps; he was not, as she would so far have assumed had she thought of it, a law unto himself. She was such a law unto herself; instinctively she felt that all genuine, high-born beings are; and that Jim was not.
These were the principal ingredients in her forebodings, her sudden hesitancies about her future. Only one of them, the second, touched her intimately. As she looked back upon it later on, she saw that at the time she had been sexually unawakened, yes, ignorant with regard to the simplest facts of sex. She knew it even at the time, though, of course, she could not then estimate the extent of her ignorance. As she saw it in after years, her education in the realities of life - at least a woman's life - had begun on that day of Mr. Moffat's introduction to her, precisely two weeks before the date of the wedding. From then on, it proceeded with catastrophic swiftness.
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In fact, the very next day, Sunday, when Jim asked her to walk with him, they went along the fields to the west and thence, through a gate provided there for convenience in threshing time, out on the bush trail which skirted the western edge of the two neighbouring farms. There, as he had often done before, Jim placed his arm about her waist. Was it that he had become bolder or that she had become more clear-sighted or more suspicious? At any rate, she thought that she noticed a new shading in his attitude, a new ardency, different from the one she had always noticed. The strange thing was that she knew even then how little she would have objected to it a few months, a few weeks ago; whereas now it repelled her. He pressed her to him; his hand seemed to be endowed with the power of transmitting new, disquieting, distasteful things. For a moment she submitted with a sort of watchful curiosity, intensely on her guard; then, with a troubled face, she disengaged herself. If she had actually been able to formulate to herself the whole profundity of her suspicions, she would have said, as she said later, that his unquiet hand had begun to explore her body. She also saw, later on, that a few months before she had not distinguished between what, in her love, might be physical, what spiritual. Now, this dualism was extremely disturbing.
In retrospection she also saw that still more revealing than the subtle restlessness of that hand had been his reaction to her denial of herself. He resented it; and his resentment was tinged with a peculiar impatience, a desire, new and incomprehensible to her at the time, to break through barriers the nature of which she did not understand. Yes, even then, a terrible thought had adumbrated itself in her, at once suppressed. She had suddenly understood the meaning of a certain word which she had, not so long ago, looked up in the dictionary: the word "lewd". He seemed to be shaken by things unknown to her; his lips seemed to tremble. And more than by anything else she was troubled by the very fact that he should know where she was ignorant.
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On another occasion, when they met in the house of Dr. Henderson at Stockton - the old Dr. Henderson, father of the famous surgeon whom she was to know more intimately later on - she was wearing an evening frock which she disliked because it was distinctly décolleté; but her father had given it to her when they had been together in Winnipeg, and so she wore it. It was black, gorgeously set with little plaques of jet, revealing her magnificent forms. After a rather formal supper, the rugs had been taken up in the drawing room; and the young people had improvised a dance, two of them providing the music. Jim, impeccable in white shirt front and open vest, led her, when about eleven o'clock a cup of tea was served, into the hall where she gaily sat down on a step of the huge, oaken stairway. Cup in hand, he stood in front of her and looked down. She could not really lay hold of anything to object to; and yet, instinctively, she did object to his attitude. With one hand he was holding his saucer at the height of his tie; with the other, he raised the cup to his lips; and over the edge of the cup his eyes seemed to devour her. Much later she said to herself that, at that moment, he had mentally undressed her. At once, though she did not understand what was going on in her, she felt that uncomfortable disquietude which had become so familiar to her of late. She shivered and withdrew within herself, sitting rigid and cold, fully aware of the fact that a critical observer might have called her ungracious.
That night, when she reached her room, she cried. She felt unhappy, profoundly so; and yet she saw no way, she did not even search for a way to extricate herself. She felt caught in a trap from which there was no escape. A few streets away stood that magnificent house fully equipped by a fond father. Invitations had by that time been issued for her wedding which was to take place within a week. The very people whose guest she had been that night had been invited and had that very night smilingly referred to the approaching event.
She would not even explicitly avow to herself that she was unhappy.
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What could she have said? How could she have explained her predicament? Could she say that she, at her age, no longer a giddy girl, had rashly rushed into an engagement without being aware what it meant? She also knew that her parents had known, at least dimly, of her entanglement with Arthur. If she withdrew now, could she escape the reproach of being a jilt? There was Ann, too, her college chum, now become Mrs. Aikins wife of Dr. Aikins in this very city. When she had met her again, Ann had naturally presumed that the engagement of which Jane had spoken in Toronto was the engagement to her present fiancé...But she did not even want to escape; she merely arrived at the conclusion that her lot was not happiness but unhappiness; that life itself was not a glorious, incomparable adventure but a matter of disheartening necessities and, at best, compromises.
And there was nobody whom she could take into her confidence. She knew that, at the present stage, her mother would imperiously silence her. She would tell her to wait and learn from life. She would tell her that her own marriage, too, had not kept all its early promise; that she, too, had had to submit to sufferings, under the forms of conjugal amenities. Her Father? She knew that, though she had inherited the main outlines of her physique from her mother, she owed her whole outlook on life and the main features of her mentality to him. For that very reason she could not trouble him with her perplexities. Besides, there was the - in the light of her dawning knowledge - unfortunate circumstance that he, with whom all her sympathies had been so far, was divided from her innermost being by the accident of his sex. Yes, she had dimly felt, during the last half year or so, that he took a special comfort in the thought, she being his favourite child, of her looking forward to a very heaven on earth; he had looked upon his own existence as being largely justified by the very fact of her perfect happiness.
Yet, one day, at home, when school had already closed and the wedding was only three days away, a brief scene was enacted between her
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and her father which might have led to a rescue had she not shrunk from it herself.
Her mother had gone to see Mrs. Wortleby; the boys were in the field, cultivating the summerfallow; Mrs. Hall was in the kitchen; Mrs. Halliwell, in the sewing room, working at the wedding gown of the bride-to-be. Jane had been reclining in an easy-chair in the parlor, trying to read, yet too preoccupied to gather any meaning from the pages which she turned. Her father entered the house and, a moment later, the room; seeing her absorbed, he walked up and down as if himself lost in thought.
Suddenly Jane, dropping the book to her knees, looked at him with tears in her eyes, an expression of profound misery in her face.
He saw it, stood arrested, and stared at her through his glasses. She divined that he understood. "My dear, dear girl," he stammered.
She rose, dropping the book to the floor, and buried her face on his shoulder, sobbing. He stood absolutely still, holding her enfolded. Thus they remained for a minute or so.
Then she raised her head and kissed him on the dry papery skin of his forehead. She realised what an abyss he had been looking into. She fought her sobs down, determined to deceive him for his sake.
"Never mind, father!" Through her tears she smiled into his eyes. "I am silly, that is all."
He could not but show relief. "Are you sure, child?"
"Yes, yes, you mustn't think of this any more."
Henceforward, during the last few days, she gathered all her courage and showed him a consistently smooth brow.
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