Fetters of freedom

Part I THE TWO ARCHIBALDS f

Elizabeth Duncan’s path led over granite boulders, around fragrant clumps of bay and on through a prickly grove of pointed cedars to a grey barn which was leaning heavily on the ground. Though there was a sting of win¬ ter in the November rain that attacked her, she paused every few minutes to enjoy what she called the “slodginess” of things. She liked being alone with nothing in sight but the Connecticut hills and the distant sound that encompassed her like a silver crescent. She liked being alive and young, with no blank walls or margins shorten¬ ing her vision. But above all else she liked the unmeas¬ ured power within her which made accomplishment seem a certainty.

Two collie dogs followed dejectedly after. They were not as happy as their mistress, for their souls dwelt in the uncomfortable present. “Too bad you don’t carry umbrellas,” Elizabeth commiserated. “It isn’t much of a trick. You might try.”

Once in the barn, the collies, who for obvious reasons had been registered as the family of Sans Souci, and who were called San and Sanny for short, dashed off through the windy bay to the stanchion sheds, where they threat¬ ened a family of rats with loud barkings.

In one corner of the barn, the granary still stood 3 intact. By removing oat bins and by letting in windows on the southern side, Elizabeth had converted the store¬ house into an enviable and tranquil workroom, far away from the bothersome world. The one out was an iniquitous oil stove that kept her from perishing with cold. Three rusty steelyards still hung askew from wooden pins driven into a partition wall, while nailed-down pieces of zinc told of past contests with thieving rodents.

In this hulking mastodon of another age, Elizabeth had written “The Lily Pond,” a product of her disdainful inexperience, and now she had begun her second novel. The story progressed with the speed of a local freight train, for her days were mercilessly interrupted by the exciting letters of the two Archibalds. The mischief came from the fact, not that they were both interested in her, but that she was interesed in both of them. She ascribed her disloyalty, if she were disloyal, to an evil fate that had brought two men of such high distinction her way at the same time. And now she had conceived the idea that she had no right to give up either of them, for each brought into her life something she could not live without. The older of the two men, Archibald Satterlee, was already tied to the domestic wheel, but Archi¬ bald Slater had come to her with no entanglements and he had asked her to marry him. She had said yes. The engagement had lasted until now it loomed threateningly, for she saw her promise to him meant a promise to marry. It also meant that to his upright family and to her own precious Aunt Fan.

Having gone through the routine of opening the win¬ dows, lighting the villainous stove, and flipping an orange carriage duster over the top of her table, she began the fascinating business of reading her two Archibald letters. Satterlee wrote enchantingly. He had just the right sense of humor, a keen instinct for niceties of speech, a delicate fashion of interpreting the little happenings of which life is so exasperatingly made up. Slater’s letters were short, impassioned, demanding. Always, he had to be answered first. Today, she replied in part, “Christ¬ mas is too near. I am not prepared. June, possibly. Likely, not till another year.”

Pushing away from the table, Elizabeth stood for a space by the open window, letting the rain drive across her face. She dreamed of a world where human beings were as swift as their thoughts. Even her speedily running typewriter acted as ball and chains to her soul. Lately, she had thought much about Archibald Satterlee. But how could she help it? What strained virtue was there in damning back flooding glory? The last time they had been together, he had kissed her—and— She knew herself to be a dreadful person—not wicked, exactly, but horrid. Yet the two Archibalds satis¬ fied such different needs of her complex nature, she conceived the grotesque idea that she had a right to them both. Preposterous! At least, according to the code of ethics which had been superimposed upon her by a passing generation. The law did not permit two such friendships to come into a woman’s life at the same time; it scarcely tolerated them tandem.

With a fixed purpose to be impersonal, she finally began her second letter. “Do you care about Betelguese? I read somewhere that Betelguese is so large that if it were as near to us as the sun is, its orb would cover the entire visible expanse of the sky. Don’t you scorn pinning stars to facts? Stars are in the heavens to make the nights glorious. Why do we hack so furiously at the outer rim of the mysteries of God?”

Elizabeth lingered for a long time at the purple table, while the wind blew eerily through the open spaces of the barn, nagged the loose siding into chattering idiocy, and darkened the granary windows with sheets of water. She would have been glad to tell Satterlee about the storm. She wanted to tell him where she was, and what she was doing, and especially how she felt. She felt solitary and stranded, cut off from the world by God himself. Very faintly through the din, she could hear, now and then, the thump and squeal of a scuttling rat, followed by frenzied barkings of San and Sanny. She longed to write it down to him as it was and then to have him write it back to her in some beautiful, crystal¬ lized form, or simply make a sensible remark about her being alone in the abandoned barn and scold her, maybe, for wet feet.

When at last the day greyed to indistinctness, she put on her wet coat and billycock. Calling the collies, she set out for the village post office, nearly three miles dis¬ tant. Easily, with no impeding petticoats, she vaulted or stepped over slumbering stone walls, squashed through muddy roads, and down soggy lanes, where years before long lines of cows had ambled to and fro for their milk¬ ings and their fodder. She loved to think of the old herd with wide spreading horns and amiable manners. Almost, she could hear them lurch past her in the dark, switching their coarse tails and sludging deep into the sodden earth.

Blowmedown stood high on a windy hill, quite near to the Pinnacle, and not so very far from the old grey barn. It was a rambling stone house of varying altitudes. On the lower level was a flagged basement hall, flush with the ground and but dimly lighted by small casement windows. Opposite the broad house-door and sunk deep into a sturdily built partition-wall, loomed a cavernous fireplace where Aunt Fan still burned the backlog of tradition, hickory if she could get it, and for kindling, knots of pitch pine. When, two hours later, Elizabeth entered this sombre room, she found a supper table set for her close to a resinous fire and Aunt Fan, her precious, antique Greataunt Fan, delicately ensconced in a high-backed Sheraton chair which she adorned as exquisitely as her polished jade bowls adorned their teakwood stands.

“You are a darling,” Elizabeth breathed softly as she flew past her aunt and up a stone stairway to the real house and to her own room. “I’ll be down in three jerks of a lamb’s tail.”

With a not uncomprehending sympathy, Madame Duncan watched the Sittings of her grandniece. She knew the girl wrote books in the old grey barn, and got too wet and wandered too far over the hills; but still she would be glad to do the same if she weren’t clamped to Blowmedown by the fragility of her eighty-eight years. For Aunt Fan, who had courageously buried her own family of seven sons, and who in the Great War had lost the noblest of their descendants, could never escape feeling frisky or outgrow a passion of life planted deep in her race. Happily, the difference between this way and that had ceased to trouble her, and she was no longer worried by Elizabeth’s knickerbockers or by her psycho¬ analytic absurdities. She was satisfied to know that her grandniece was honest with herself and so with the world. It also seemed quite wonderful and considerably out of line that, just as she was being inundated by a tidal wave of loneliness, a trouble which threatens all old people, she should again have someone upon whom she could depend and who consulted her and not infre¬ quently followed her advice.

Elizabeth had once described her mother as changeable silk, shot with gold. She was like that, beautiful but not made for daily use, too conspicuous, too insistently gay. In the days of the war, there had been no place for her and she had died, bequeathing her daughter to Madame Duncan. Elizabeth had come to her, a stranger, and in the hill-country of her forefathers Madame Duncan had seen her adopt the customs of her own people till she fitted her environment as an acorn fits its cup.

A whine from Sanny and a beating of San’s active tail on the stone flagging meant that Elizabeth Duncan would soon join Aunt Fan. In another minute she appeared, in full evening attire. Her Delphinium blue skirt trailed here and there on the floor, while her damask slippers with sparkling buckles matched her blue stock¬ ings. There was not much waist to her gown, but about her neck she had flung a string of Whitby jet that, in its dull lustre, matched her hair and eyes. Thus punc¬ tiliously had Elizabeth frocked for Aunt Fan.

Madame Duncan, in pleased fashion, watched her grandniece as she drew her chair close to the fire and held her long nervous hands out over the coals. She seemed unusually tense. Beneath the sombre expression of her face lurked tragedy, or was it merely some new purpose that fanned the smouldering fires of her nature? Madame Duncan waited in patience. Usually Elizabeth was a cheerful companion, being like herself very happy to be alive and free. They sometimes talked to each other about this freedom of theirs. At last the silence was broken by the appearance of Loong Li who, with exquisite softness, placed a steaming steak in front of his mistress with the customary accessories of salad, cheese and oaten bread. While Elizabeth ate her way through this meal with the nicety and precision of a man, Aunt Fan, who two hours earlier had dined off Scotch broth and toast, resumed her knitting on a pink baby’s hood.

When supper was over and all that was left on the polished black table were two flickering candles, Madame Duncan surprised Elizabeth by saying, “Is it, my dear, because of any fear you may have of disconcerting me that you never smoke?”

“I suppose I really ought to,” Elizabeth replied, swiftly rising, as was her custom, to Aunt Fan’s line. “My generation does, mostly—even the best of it.” Eliza¬ beth paused for a minute while she drew San’s head across her knees. “I—I can’t be bothered. I have no prejudice, and it is no longer an act of emancipation. I sleep my body, I feed it, I bathe it, I polish its nails, exercise it, drink it, fill its^ teeth, and that is enough! I. ref use to smoke it. You see, if it should get the smoke complex, I should have to smoke it the rest of my life.”

Outside in the wet, a blind jerked its moorings and shut. Sanny growled in her sleep, then the gust sub¬ sided and Aunt Fan began to remove a pack of cards from a finely cut porphyry box. They would soon be playing their evening game of piquet.

“If you will excuse me for a minute,” Elizabeth said in a voice that trembled ever so slightly, “I will send a telegram to Arch. I mailed him a letter about— about something of importance, but I’ve changed my mind.”

And so again, Madame Duncan saw her niece mount the stone stairway. The door closed behind her, and she could not know what message Elizabeth sent forth in the fierce storm to her impatient lover.

Early the next morning Elizabeth Duncan woke in the dark. The wind was still high and the shutters on the house gave strange beatings and flutterings like trapped woodcock. Out in the hall a clock struck four times. She might still catch the Northern express bound for New York. When signalled, it stopped at the village station. Before weighing this old, fierce impulse to run away from things, she was out of bed and dressed. A short note for Aunt Fan’s breakfast tray and a second for Loong Li, she thought, sufficiently explained her departure.

Ten hours later, Elizabeth entered Archibald Slater’s private office in the Billings publishing house.

“You queer dear!” she exclaimed sharply, and then, “You are ruthless, like an armored tank. Arch!” she cried, “there is something fierce and terrifying about you.”

“Life is fierce and terrifying.”

“You are half savage.”

“Not just half. I had not yet taken time to answer this,” he added as he looked down at his secretary, where her night letter was still lying.

“Oh!” Elizabeth buried her hands boyishly in her pockets. “I thought you might like to see this,” she said as she dropped on top of the blue-pencilled envelope, something white and shining. “Oh, Arch! You are a snoring dormitory! It’s what I am going to wear Christ¬ mas Day to please you, sir!”

Archibald placed a shaking hand over the soft, shining fabric, glanced at Elizabeth and looked helplessly out the office window, where a flock of skyscrapers shot dizzily heavenward and effectually blocked his vision. Strange desires winged their way through his brain and left him inarticulate.

“I rushed around the shops about three hours this morning,” Elizabeth spoke quickly to cover his embar¬ rassment, “and I have done all that kind of shopping I’m going to do. Then I called on my publisher and Franks asked me to go to lunch with him and so I went. As long as he gave me the opportunity, I thought I’d explain that though ‘The Lily Pond’ isn’t much of a novel, he is quite wrong in his criticisms. And he said that invariably all authors whose books he published or rejected, told him that. The whole tribe of them were eternally explaining to him why and how and wherein he was mistaken. The brute!”

“But I have precisely the same experience.”

“Franks is a hateful person,” Elizabeth suppressed an inclination to quarrel. “Never could his commercial self write anything as beautiful as ‘The Lily Pond!’ He says no really nice woman can love two men at once. He says men can, but women can’t. I told him women could just as much as men and more frequently. The difference is women don’t marry two at once. They aren’t naturally bigamists, nor as apt to mess up their lives, being more tidy. Now I might love one man with one side of me and another with some other side and still-”

“Look here, Elizabeth, is this a confession?”

Arch still held delicately between his forefinger and thumb the sample of shimmering satin, but his eyes were blazing.

“No,” she said slowly, “only, you are an anchorite, and—and I—you know, Arch, I love glamour— enchantments. I have been kissed—I don’t like it—but I am afraid I might hurt you—give you a rotten deal.”

“That is my hazard.”

“You are born a generation too late for your own happiness,” Elizabeth ventured. “I am just a gob of clay waiting for the potter’s wheel. I don’t even know yet what he wants to do with me.” Again she looked at Archibald. His eyes of burnished steel made her shiver. “But you are splendid, untouched like a crusading knight.”

“Hell! Come on out on the Avenue and walk,” Arch interrupted, “where we can talk sense. We’ll get tea somewhere. I suppose you go back on the six o’clock?”

“You have a beautiful face, when you are angered,” Elizabeth said as she bent to rescue the bit of white satin which now lay crumpled on the rug.

Then she felt herself deliciously sinking to the ground floor in the express elevator, and then she was out in the crisp November air. Arch’s nerves were raw. There was a white heat about him, a pent-up something which she adored. It was exciting to be with him when he was in a temper and he always was in a temper. He hadn’t scolded her as he usually did, but he looked grim enough to kill things and austere as the granite rock on the Pinnacle. It seemed a bold thing to do, to love Arch, but to marry him-

“I shall like being Mrs. Archibald Slater,” Elizabeth risked, “for when I do belong to you, you will take good care of me. You are too true a New Englander to waste anything, even a wife. I love thrift.”

Archibald felt his nerves jump. In five weeks, on

Christmas Day, the twenty-fifth of December-. He

looked down at the free-swinging girl at his side. Men didn’t hold their wives so easily nowadays, and he —he was conscious of being old-fashioned.

“I hope,” he said abruptly, “you wrote ‘The Lily Pond’ according to some psychoanalytic theory and, darn it! that it’s not the expression of a fixed conviction.”

Then the warfare began. It raged unevenly, for Arch was the keener of the two and he had convinced himself that he was fighting for his life’s happiness. But as they were racing down the long cement platform of the Grand Central, he paused in the middle of laying down the laws of loyalty and common sense and laughed. Regardless of onrushing traffic, he dropped his hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder and kissed her. “You must know,” he said, “I am very happy about the twenty-fifth.”

It was ten o’clock when Elizabeth again found herself standing on the home platform. An electric light swinging from a dead maple tree marked the way to Woodis & Crosby’s garage. Here she climbed into her swift car, in which she had come to the village early that morning, and was soon churning up the muddy hill roads to Blowmedown. It was a happy thing to be home again, she felt, as she made her way steadily toward the twinkling lights on the Pinnacle. Aunt Fan would be waiting for her, and the collies and Loong Li. There

IS should always be a permanent some one in a house. It would have to be a no-longer-young person but one who was content to be a fixture. She remembered the lonely gilt and damask apartments in Paris and Vienna and St. Petersburg, when she had lived so many desolate years with her mother and was thankful for Aunt Fan. Then a startling thought came to her about the new home she and Arch were to make together— or she was to make for Arch.

“You are a disobedient person, to sit up so long past your bedtime,” Elizabeth said as she slipped into a low chair beside Madame Duncan. “Arch sent you some red roses. And, oh! I have bought out dear Monsieur Rachel. We are to be married, Christmas Day.”

“So soon? I scarcely see how it is possible.”

“I have done everything today that has to be done, except the license. That is Arch’s job. At one swoop, I ordered my frocks, hats, lingerie, boots and slippers, and my visiting cards. Mrs. Archibald Godkin Slater, Blowmedown, High Ridge, Connecticut, and you an¬ nounce us. You don’t mind announcing us, do you? ‘Mrs. Crashaw Duncan has the honor,’ etc. Your name, you know, is my hall-mark.”

Aunt Fan gripped the red roses in her lap and so avoided making little movements with her hands that betrayed nervousness. “I can’t quite adjust myself, h she apologized. “Possibly you will remain in town a fortnight for fittings. There will be fittings?”

“I don’t see the necessity,” Elizabeth spoke concisely, as if this were a contested point. “Monsieur Rachel has my dummy. My gowns will be all right. He measured with tears when he finally understood I would not go down to try on my wedding gown. It is to drop seven inches below my knees and my silk stockings come all the way up—not socks, I mean. And there is a train and a veil. Rachel fought for the veil,” she added conscientiously. “I wear it for you, Aunt Fan, and history and a little bit, maybe, for my New Englander. I have brought you samples of my pretty things, but you can’t see them until morning.”

Elizabeth balanced a pine knot on the iron firedogs and stirred the logs to a new brightness. “I won’t be bothered,” she declared as she deftly snapped a live coal back from the hearth rug into the flames. “I must be free to work between now and Christmas. I must finish writing my book. You are glad I am to marry Arch?” she asked, determinedly fixing her eyes on Aunt Fan’s anxious face.

Madame Duncan, repressing a sigh, receded into her chair till she looked weak and haggard. Her age brought a pang to Elizabeth’s heart. That was one of the facts she was not able to face: Aunt Fan’s extreme age.

Had any human soul probed the meaning of the word empty? To Elizabeth nothing was more fathomless. Death. That was quite a different affair. But the after¬ emptiness. She saw herself again in Paris in the gilt and silken apartment as it had been after her mother died, and bent her trembling face low over the fire.

“Archibald Slater belongs to an old family,” Madame Duncan spoke at last, but the words came slowly and with breaks between the sentences. “He has a noble, though harsh nature. I might say cruel. He is like his greatuncle, Thomas Godkin. Were you thinking of Arch when you used the expression ‘accidental cruelty’ in describing Gerould Greenleaf in ‘The Lily Pond’? Archibald is like Greenleaf, I fear. But if you value his good heart, and can think beyond his hardness, you may live happily with him. It will not be easy. I love the boy,” she added after a pause. “But you are both so—so undisciplined. Still colts out to pasture.”

“We are merely natural: that’s the way people are nowadays.”

Madame Duncan leaned forward and placed her hand, light as thistledown on her niece’s shoulder, but she remained silent.

“We had a bad time today,” Elizabeth continued. “Arch hates my book. Like you, he believes in repres¬ sions and despises the part about herd instincts, fails to understand mob rule. He accused me of believing all manner of things which I do not believe and of snow¬ balling the world with Freudian doctrines. Arch is rather old-fashioned; he has just heard of Freud when I have begun to forget him. Some day it may be inconvenient. In no way, for instance, could you call him an oppor¬ tunist.”

“There is one thing I am grateful for,” Madame Duncan said as she made vague preliminary motions which meant to Elizabeth that she was mustering her strength prepara¬ tory to going to her room, “you take Archibald’s name. There is that dear Alice Dawes who came to see us, so properly married with two little sons and a good husband, if a fool. But Miss Dawes! One never could explain.”

“Explanations are beastly,” Elizabeth acquiesced. “To avoid being bothered, I would sacrifice any minor conviction.”

Then in swift response to Aunt Fan’s, “My dear, will you?” Elizabeth rang a tiny bell which summoned Madame Duncan’s well seasoned maid. Her aunt was a bit stiff about certain things. She always, for instance, made the first motion, when she wished to retire. This formality Elizabeth had learned to respect, though with rebellion in her heart, for Aunt Fan expended her energy too freely and got too tired. Like a little child, she did not know bed was good for her. It was a return to cradle instincts, Elizabeth reasoned sorrowfully, while she made as easy as she could the straight and difficult path of her aunt’s choosing.

Elizabeth Duncan entered her own room that night with a feeling that she had not been quite true to its inherent integrity. Two years had dulled for her neither its charm nor the feeling of loyalty it evoked, nor the stern demand it made upon her soul. There was no place on the polished lowboy for rouge pot and lip salve, or for the expensive French perfumeries and exotic powders which her mother had taught her were neces¬ sities, but which she had discarded along with her whiteaproned Annette. Her stern old room belonged to the most ancient part of Blowmedown. There was a four-poster free of hangings in the centre and blue-green curtains at the openings. The floor and the ceiling wavered uncertainly, while a deep fireplace at one end let in, according to season, snow, rain, sunlight or wind. The room was like a grey shadow; a place for sleep.

On a cherry stand by her bed, Elizabeth discovered an unopened letter. It was not Wednesday, the day Archi¬ bald Satterlee’s letters always reached her, the day she called lucky. But the even, beautiful direction that made her own name seem so charming and filled her with happiness because she lived in a place with so delightful an address, was unmistakable. She tore open the envelope and read:

“You are free, dear lady. You who owe no hostage to fate can meet life with an Olympic calm, while we who have children must needs tremble at every wind that blows.”

The letter covered many sheets. Elizabeth placed it carefully back on the little table and hurried to take her nightly plunge in a tub of icy water. Finally she slipped glowing and excited into bed. But the calm beginning of Satterlee’s letter was no presage of its con¬ tents. When Elizabeth folded its pages with high decision and cast them from her, her heart was beating madly in response to its last words, “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

Archibald Slater was annoyed with Elizabeth, annoyed because of “The Lily Pond” and puzzled. The heroine who strode through the book in bluff, careless fashion was like Elizabeth and he was in some points the counterpart of Gerould Greenleaf, the man she mar¬ ried. When Greenleaf found he could not keep up with his wife’s adventurous pace, Edie cheerfully let him go with these words, “Ten years we have lived together! That is more than I ran for. We have been happy.”

And the man amended, “At first—but it has been more than three years since you have cared a damn.”

“There you are mistaken,” Edie denied. “I love you now quite as much as then, I appreciate you more and understand you better. It is you who are restless for a new experience. At first you will miss the habit of me, I am afraid. I do thousands of convenient little things for you that you do not notice. It is not your place to notice and I’d not like you if you did. If you need me when you beat your notes on modern esthetics into book form, let me know. I make no promise, but-”

“Hell! Edie, why did you marry me, anyhow?”

“Because you asked me to, implored me to, bullyragged me into it. I didn’t care. It did make you wild with happiness. You remember that?”

“Would you have gone with me anyway?”

“The marriage ceremony is to me nothing but an archaism.”

Archibald had not read beyond this sentence. It is just a girl’s silliness, he thought, and he was glad that Billings had rejected the manuscript. But now he began to realize that what he thought a notion might be a creed. “Hell!” he found himself stuttering very much after the fashion of Gerould Greenleaf.

There were many things to be decided upon before Christmas Day—things which he and Elizabeth should have settled when she was in town, instead of fighting all the way down the Avenue and into the man-rushed station. Where were they to live in that vague afterward which Elizabeth shot away from whenever he brought up the question? What time of day was the marriage to take place? And would Elizabeth be satisfied if he engaged the mumbling St. John St. John to do the job? That was the most natural way and so the kindest. He would like to give her red roses but he had a vague impression that brides never carried red. Anyhow he put it, he failed to visualize Elizabeth as a bride.

Arch, his nerves on edge by conflicting impulses, decided that whatever happened, Elizabeth should make the next move. When five days passed and no message came from her, he saw his decision had been foolish. Subduing his resentment, he jerked down on slips of paper and spiked on a file questions that could no longer be evaded. When he had a dozen of these, carefully tabulated, he took his seat in front of his high secre¬ tary and began to type angrily, for he was in no mood for pen and ink. He had come to the end of his second sheet when the night watchman brought him the familiar grey envelope with the High Ridge postmark.

“What do you suppose, what do you suppose?” Eliza¬ beth wrote. “I have just been appointed dog warden by the first selectman—possibly intended as a joke as I go about in knicks. But I have decided to accept the position and to make the best dog warden the town has ever had. The last one, whose term I am to complete, didn’t know any better than to muzzle collies and to chain up police dogs. There is a small remuneration connected with this office, so I may be able to give you maple sugar with your waffles. I make good waffles.”