Читать книгу Ellen Levis - Elsie Singmaster - Страница 5

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After Ellen had beaten her way with gasps for breath up the slope beyond the meeting-house, she slackened her pace. She began to doubt pursuit, and besides she could now trust to her power of swift locomotion. For a while she kept inside the fences on the grass borders from which a dash into the wheat would have been easy, but after she had gone half a mile she wormed her plump body between two spreading rails and took to the road.

The sense of escape from prison was not new; many times when church was over she had looked up and round at the arching sky and the waving trees and had danced her way out to Matthew's buggy, and sometimes, from behind the safe shelter of its curtain, she had made atrocious faces at the back of Millie König's sleek head.

Presently, her joy at having escaped was tempered. She did not like to have the brethren consider her wicked. But penitence weakened and finally faded entirely away, its departure hastened by reflections of a nature common to mankind. Millie had copied her sentences in school—it did not make much difference what Millie thought of her. Brother Herman was notorious for his keenness in trade and he had cheated her father when he sold him a horse. As for Grandfather—she was sorry to hurt his feelings, but Grandfather was old. It is very easy to be good, Ellen believed, when you are old.

Suddenly the full import of the morning's events was clear to her. She was free, but Matthew was in prison! As she walked on she began to cry again. Perhaps he would let his beard grow until he looked like Grandfather and Amos and like the pictures of Father Friedsam and Brother Jabez and all the worthies of the past. He would not belong to her; he would belong to all those grim and pious people. Most dreadful of all, he would belong to Millie. At this, she stopped short in the road, remembering Millie's possessing eyes.

Again she began to run, dashing through the little hollow made by the creek, where the odors of fresh earth and the intense sweetness of elder blossoms would at any other moment have made her loiter. The creek bounded her father's farm and, taking a short cut, she left the road and crossed a meadow and then ran along the edge of a field of corn until she came to a gate which let her into the yard.

The Levis house was one of the large, many-windowed brick houses common to the neighborhood. It was built solidly and its correctness of proportion gave it a comfortable beauty. The porch was not a part of the original structure, but had been added, as running water and other conveniences had been added within. Behind the house stood a large barn. The place had not the trim look of adjacent farms; there was a good deal of brush along the fences, the fences themselves needed rebuilding and the woodwork of the house needed paint. After looking carefully at the premises an observant person would have made up his mind that the owner was neither by taste nor by inclination a farmer.

The property had one glorious beauty, the thick and lofty grove of oak trees which stood behind and above the house and barn. They were a landmark for miles. In them hundreds of birds nested and squirrels played and scores of little creatures had their homes. In spring anemones and hepaticas were to be found beneath them and nowhere else in the immediate neighborhood; in summer they spread a thick canopy of shade, and in autumn they burned with a glowing red. In them in all seasons the wind spoke continuously, now in a whisper, now in thunderous diapason.

Dr. Levis sat on the porch of his house, his pipe in his hand, his tall, thin figure comfortably disposed in an old rocking-chair. He had long since got rid of his black beard, and he looked, if not younger in body, at least younger in spirit, than in the days of his friendship with Stephen Lanfair. This morning he had seen a few office patients and had paid the two visits which were all that were needed by his healthy clientèle, and he was now waiting comfortably until the rural mail carrier should leave his newspaper.

He received little mail besides his papers and magazines and an occasional printed notice from the University. A connection with one's Alma Mater soon lapses when one has formed no close friendships, and he had formed but one. He looked very sober when he thought of Stephen, not chiefly because Stephen had forgotten him—he was a boy with a boy's short-lived enthusiasms—but because Stephen had succeeded so well and he had succeeded so little. The possession of a fair practice, a productive farm and two fine children might be thought to represent a sufficient attainment, but there was in his heart a bitter sense of dissatisfaction and disappointment. He had been tricked, bewitched; forgetting his superiority and immunity to love he had married soon after leaving the University, and had thus fettered himself for life.

He heard the first thump of Ellen's small but heavy shoes on the porch steps and moving with the physician's swift response to sounds heard during sleep, he sat upright, his pipe slipping from his hand. Then, seeing that it was only Ellen come from church, he sank back and closed his eyes.

"Are you back? Come pick up Father's pipe and tell him about the sermon."

Rendered speechless by the consciousness of her misery and of her tear-streaked face, Ellen moved no farther, and hearing no advancing step and feeling no warm creature against his knee, Levis opened his eyes.

"Why, Ellen, dear, what's the matter? Why are you home so early? Where's Matthew? Come here quickly!"

Blinded afresh by tears, Ellen started toward her accustomed sanctuary.

"What a heavy Ellen it is! Is there anything the matter with Matthew?"

Ellen shook her head. There was nothing the matter with Matthew in the sense in which her father spoke, yet there was everything the matter with him.

Suddenly tears seemed an inadequate expression of her trouble. Her father's face, seen above hers, was pitying, yet a little amused. The woes of childhood were so small—he wondered whether it was a sick kitten or a lame horse that had stirred Ellen's tender heart.

"Now, Ellen, tell me what is the matter."

Ellen sat up and dried her eyes on her father's large, smooth handkerchief. She remembered—oh, blessed relief!—that of course her father could stop Matthew. Matthew was to go away to learn to be a physician; he could not be a Seventh-Day Baptist!

"I ran away from meeting," she confessed, feeling the first doubt of her course.

Levis's face was grave, but his eyes twinkled.

"Why?"

"It was so long and I got so tired looking at half a tree and a little grass, and at the brothers and sisters and Grandfather's white beard."

"Why, Ellen!" Levis frowned, not in anger, but so that he might concentrate both physical and mental vision upon his daughter.

Now Ellen revealed the heart of the trouble.

"Grandfather preached at Matthew and me!"

"Oh, he did!"

"Yes, and Matthew made a speech about believing in everything. He's going to be immersed, Father, and he will be at the Foot-washing. They wanted me to, but I ran away. I couldn't stand it."

"Why couldn't you stand it?"

Ellen laid her hands across her plump body.

"It makes me feel all tight here. And I couldn't bear to take off my shoes and stockings."

"No," answered Levis. "I should think you couldn't! Can you remember just what was said to you and Matthew?"

"Grandfather said we ought to come to the meeting and get into the cleansing flood. It was very dark and uncomfortable."

"And what did Matthew say?"

"He said he'd been thinking about these things for a long, long time and he thought it was all right. Then they sang about a shelter and they prayed over us. Grandfather said we were the children of a good sister."

Levis put Ellen off his knee and began to walk up and down the porch. He knew his own origin as little as he knew the origin of his unusual name, which the neighborhood turned into Lewis, but he believed himself to be entirely Anglo-Saxon and he hoped that his children were Anglo-Saxon rather than Teutonic. Left alone, Ellen ran after him and took his hand and walked with him, a quaint imitator of his step and carriage.

"Can't you stop him, Father?"

"We shall see."

"If you told me to stop it—that is, if I were doing it—you know I'd stop, don't you?"

"Yes, Ellen."

Ellen tightened her hand on the three fingers which it held.

"I'll never do what you don't want me to do."

Levis made no answer, but exchanged the three fingers for a whole hand. After a while he stopped walking long enough to light his pipe. At that moment a buggy turned into the lane, not the well-painted, swiftly moving rig of Matthew, but an older vehicle in which the housekeeper had driven to town to do her Saturday shopping. Levis provided ample transportation for all his family.

"She's coming, Father," said Ellen in a whisper.

Levis stepped off the porch, calling, "Home so soon, Manda?" and received a solemn nod from a large, white, and somewhat reproachful face. He went round the house and down to the spring house and up a slope into the woodland which was his pride. There he sat down on a fallen tree and bade Ellen sit on a stump opposite him. She smiled and blinked her reddened eyes. It was her favorite spot and she liked to have her father here with her.

Suddenly Levis leaned forward. Ellen's news shocked him into the recollection of important plans, sometimes dreamed of and smoked over, sometimes forgotten for long periods, sometimes recalled with a pang of self-reproach, and again forgotten. It was his fault that Matthew had impulsively committed himself to this foolishness—the separation from Grandfather Milhausen, which would be complete in the fall when Matthew went to school, should have been brought about long ago. Ellen showed more common sense, but he had neglected her also, and for all her protests she might hold some of these foolish ideas. He had meant long since to take her education in hand. Amos Milhausen's instruction was good as far as it went, but it was now inadequate. He began to her astonishment to ask queer questions.

"How many bones are there in the human body?"

"I don't know. I think Matthew knows."

"What is the shape of the earth?"

"Round like a ball and flattened at the poles."

"What are the poles?"

"I don't know."

"Why are the days shorter in winter?"

"I don't know. Matthew knows."

"Are you going to let Matthew do all your knowing?"

Tears came again into Ellen's eyes. Matthew had abandoned her.

"I'm at the head of my class," she boasted in feeble self-defense. "I can write good compositions and do any kind of examples and I'm excellent in geography."

"I should think it would be a very simple matter to stand at the head of your class!"

"It is," confessed Ellen. "I don't work hard at all."

But now Ellen worked very hard. In the next half-hour her father drew from her small head all the knowledge which it contained and tried to find a great deal more than had been put there. A few times, for sheer nervousness and shame, she cried. The amount of her knowledge seemed infinitesimal, the abyss of her ignorance unfathomable. It was all the more humiliating because when the catechization was over, her father started to the house without reproving her for her dullness. It was hard on one who had prided herself on her brains!

Matthew returned, driving slowly, a grave expression on his handsome face. Having unhitched his horse he came round to the porch where the flutter of a short skirt vanishing indoors did not escape him. He was deeply angry with the anger of a superior toward an inferior or an elder toward a child. He could not understand Ellen. For the first time in her life she had not been willing to go his way, and she had marred what would otherwise have been a perfect experience.

Hitherto he had not thought much about his father or his father's convictions, his father's neglect of church having been a condition with which he had always been familiar, but now it seemed unnecessary and wrong. Realizing in his new devotion that it was his duty to admonish his careless parent, he prayed for opportunity and strength.

The three Levises ate their dinner silently, the housekeeper sitting with them. She had, seen close at hand, an air of patient endurance under affliction. She had expected, according to custom, that the man of whose house and children she had taken such good care for so many years would marry her, though she had already been married twice and was somewhat older than he. She had even, being hopeful of Dr. Levis, discouraged the advances of a neighboring farmer. The short lives of her two husbands and the oaklike hardness of Levis made her lot a very disappointing one. Having just heard of the marriage of a friend, she was more than usually depressed, a condition which did not escape her master, to whom her mournful disposition and her extraordinary combinations of English and German were sources of deep and silent amusement. He could not always remember her expressions, but Ellen could repeat them at length. "Unsere number iss 1 long and 2 short and sis very hart zu's distinguishe," she would say into the telephone and be perfectly understood by the person at the other end. Or, "I sink it will give rain," or, "Ach, Ellen, what do you make, then!"

At another time, with amused recollection of Mrs. Gummidge, Levis would have rallied her back into cheerfulness, and, unconsciously, into some hope, but to-day his thoughts were upon his own affairs. He did not hear when she invited him to a second helping of potatoes, a piece of absent-mindedness which seemed insulting and which would furnish her material upon which to brood through the long afternoon.

When dinner was over, Matthew followed his father to the porch. Levis looked at him curiously. He had something to say to Matthew, but it seemed also that Matthew had something to say to him! Matthew took his seat in a rocking-chair, and another prayer for strength concluded, spoke.

"Father, Ellen behaved very badly in church."

"Ellen told me about it," said Levis.

"She ought to be punished."

"That is, she told me her side of it. Perhaps you'd better tell me yours."

"Well, Grandfather made a fine address about immersion. Then he said that since we children had such a good Christian mother, we, too, should be immersed and come into church. I said that I would. Then he spoke kindly to Ellen and she got up and ran out in a senseless way."

"Ellen was frightened."

"She's old enough not to be frightened. She has an immortal soul. She should have obeyed me. And you have an immortal soul, Father," said handsome Matthew. "Would you not become converted and be immersed? It is a very blessed condition."

In delivering this quotation from Grandfather, Matthew's voice had a slightly hollow ring, as though even he were aware that the situation had unusual aspects.

Levis rose and knocked the ashes from his pipe.

"Suppose you come into the office, Matthew," said he crisply. "It will be easier to talk there."

Within doors Levis walked up and down. He did not seem to belong here in this country office, with its simple fittings, its serviceable but unmodern appliances, its outlook on farmland; he belonged in a city where he could attend fifty instead of five patients in a day.

"Matthew," said he frowning, "until this morning, it never occurred to me that it would be necessary to speak to you as I am going to speak. But I've been overreached and deceived. I don't blame you; you too have been a victim. If you're old enough to take the stand which you took this morning, to describe the convictions of your heart before strangers, you're old enough to hear what I have to say.

"You have always had smooth sailing; you can't understand what it means to be without living kin, to be bound out, to suffer intentional or unintentional slights, to have always to overcome difficulties, to deny yourself a little more when you've already next to nothing, to be cold and hungry and miserable. I wouldn't wish you to know; I want never to think of the miseries of my youth. I've done my best to shield you from all hardships; but it won't hurt you to know that such hardships exist.

"Through it all, I was determined to be a physician, and that is what I succeeded in becoming—older than most men when I graduated, but eternally grateful.

"I came into this neighborhood to begin a practice, or rather to take a practice temporarily. I didn't expect to stay beyond a year, but I married here and your mother would not leave."

For a moment Levis paused and looked out at the fields and the woodland and the empty sky. Old conflicts in which he had lost, old miseries, old thwartings came back to him, and especially, painted against the woodland, a face, exquisite in line, delicate in coloring. The face before him resembled it in outline and in expression.

"After she died, I couldn't go away because of you and Ellen. I couldn't take you, neither could I leave you; so I stayed here. I've brought you up according to my best judgment, and I've made you good children.

"Before your mother died, I gave her a promise. She was concerned that you should be 'saved'"—Levis's voice laid a lightly scornful emphasis on the "saved." "She held the strict notions of the Seventh-Day Baptists, and I promised I'd do nothing to alienate you from her father and would let you go to church. It was foolish, but your grandfather promised to exact no religious vows from you. I felt that his promise was unnecessary. I didn't dream that children brought up in a household where English was spoken, with books at hand, would return to the fifteenth century!"

"The Gospel is the same now," said Matthew neatly.

"I agree with you. Everything is the same as it has been, always." Levis spoke with sarcasm. Then he went on—"You can have no deep conviction of sin. You have committed no great sin."

"You don't know my heart, Father!"

"I know you and your heart. I've had you under my eyes ever since you were born, and I know you're neither gross nor wicked. You can't be repentant except in a sentimental, superficial way; neither can you know that the doctrines of the Seventh-Day Baptists are right and others wrong. You know no others."

"I—" began Matthew.

"You're under my control, you're supported by me. You'll go to college in September as we planned and then to the Medical School, and when you're through you shall decide about the Seventh-Day Baptists. If your religion is what you think it is, delay will make no difference; it will rather strengthen you. This will be a test which you should welcome."

"I do welcome it, Father."

A slight contraction of the muscles changed the expression of Levis's face. Meekness—that was one of the weapons of Abraham Milhausen's daughter!

He felt an almost irresistible desire to pour out upon his boy all the heretical beliefs, all the unorthodox speculations which had for years filled his hours of meditation, to fortify him with skepticism against the foolish hopes built up by the Christian religion. He believed he had, like the Stoics, the possession of his own soul. Once he had expounded his convictions to the boy's mother and she had withdrawn herself physically and mentally until she died. But the world would take care of Matthew!

"You don't suppose that all wisdom is incarnate in Grandfather, do you, Matthew?"

"He's only a human being," answered Matthew, with the same trying neatness of response. "But even children can understand all that is necessary to be saved."

Levis rose.

"Well, my boy, when things begin to seem puzzling to you, your father may be able to help."

Matthew rose also. He was tired and he had many things to think of. He looked at his father with strong disapproval; he thought of Grandfather's saintliness and the pretty face of Millie König. His father lit a cigarette; it was as alienating an act as could have been committed.

"I think Ellen should be punished for disturbing the meeting," said he. "It shamed me for her."

"I'll attend to Ellen," promised Levis with a satisfying grimness.

But, having reached the doorway, Matthew suffered misgivings.

"You don't mean that I'm not to go to church at all?"

"Not to the Seventh-Day Baptist church."

"Not this evening!"

"Not at all," was the decisive answer.

Having opened his lips and closed them, Matthew withdrew, backwards, and went upstairs.