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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "And Now Tomorrow," Rachel Field crafts a poignant narrative steeped in themes of love, resilience, and the quest for identity amidst adversity. The story unfolds through the eyes of a young woman grappling with unexpected challenges that reshape her understanding of self and belonging. Field's prose is imbued with lyrical beauty and emotional depth, reflecting her masterful command of language reminiscent of early 20th-century American literature, where personal struggle often mirrors broader societal issues. Rich in symbolism, the novel invites readers to traverse the complexities of human relationships and the transformative power of hope. Rachel Field, an esteemed American author and playwright, was known for her keen insights into the human psyche, as well as her deep empathy for her characters. Her own experiences, including a multifaceted career in writing and her engagement with the shifting cultural landscapes of her time, undoubtedly influenced her narrative approach in this novel. Field's work often explores the interplay between individual aspirations and collective challenges, reflecting her belief in the interconnectedness of human experiences. Readers seeking a richly drawn, emotive story that delves into the essence of what it means to overcome adversity will find "And Now Tomorrow" a compelling and unforgettable read. Field's ability to weave profound life lessons into her narrative promises to resonate with anyone who has faced their own 'tomorrow' with trepidation and hope. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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And Now Tomorrow
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a world where voices collide and go silent, the measure of tomorrow is set by how we learn to listen. Rachel Field’s And Now Tomorrow turns that idea into a compelling human drama, tracing the cost of pride and the redemptive possibilities of understanding. Set against an industrial community whose rhythms are shaped by factory whistles and family legacies, the novel explores how private setbacks reverberate through public life. Without sensationalism, Field asks what happens when communication fails—between classes, neighbors, and loved ones—and how empathy can recalibrate what seems fixed. The result is a nuanced portrait of resilience at the threshold between past certainties and uncertain futures.
Published in the early 1940s, And Now Tomorrow is best described as a literary novel with strong social and romantic currents, rooted in the textures of an American mill town. Field, already widely read for works such as All This, and Heaven Too, brings her practiced eye for character and community to a setting marked by inheritance, labor, and reputation. The historical backdrop, situated in the first half of the twentieth century, lends the story a sense of transition: old hierarchies meeting new urgencies. Readers encounter a world where personal fate is inseparable from civic responsibility, and where regional detail grounds questions of equity, obligation, and change.
The novel’s premise centers on a young woman from a mill-owning family whose life is abruptly altered by a sudden loss of hearing after illness. Returning to her hometown, she faces a community that remembers her privilege even as she confronts a newly circumscribed world of sound and speech. Her path crosses with a determined physician from the working side of town, a figure whose commitment to cure and whose own history intensify the story’s moral stakes. This meeting—professional, fraught, and potentially transformative—sets the stage for conflicts over loyalty, pride, and the possibility of mutual regard without foreclosing outcomes.
Field’s storytelling balances intimate interiority with the wider social field, delivering prose that feels attentive rather than ornate and that privileges observation over spectacle. Scenes move fluidly from the hush of domestic rooms to the din of factory life, registering how different spaces shape thought, dignity, and desire. The mood is steady, compassionate, and sometimes austere, with a quiet confidence in everyday courage. Dialogue reveals standpoint as much as feeling, while description situates bodies and class positions with unsentimental clarity. Readers will find a measured, absorbing pace—one that invites reflection on what lies between words, and how silence can hold grief, tenacity, and the hope of renewal.
At its heart, the book weighs the ethics of privilege against the claims of community. It considers disability not as melodrama but as a reorientation of relationships, asking how access, accommodation, and patience might alter what counts as connection. Class tension and labor identity form a persistent undertow, raising questions about stewardship, accountability, and the narratives families tell about their own importance. Science and care intersect in the figure of medical research, testing whether progress can coexist with humility. Throughout, Field tracks the ways love and loyalty are negotiated under pressure, and how the habits of a town—its rituals, grudges, and generosities—shape the futures available to its people.
Contemporary readers may hear resonances with current conversations about inequality, public health, and the importance of listening across difference. The novel’s focus on communication—spoken, unspoken, and technologically mediated—invites reflection on whose voices are amplified and whose are overlooked. Its portrait of a community grappling with change underscores the costs of insularity and the power of principled attention to others’ needs. Without prescribing easy answers, Field suggests that genuine understanding requires both structural adjustments and personal reckoning. In this way, And Now Tomorrow feels timely: a reminder that social fabric is woven from small acts of recognition as much as from policy, ambition, or tradition.
Approached as a character-driven social drama, And Now Tomorrow offers a rich, absorbing experience for readers who value moral complexity and emotional restraint. It rewards patience, attunement, and a willingness to inhabit ambiguity, yet it remains accessible through its clear scenes and grounded stakes. As an introduction to Field’s vision, this novel foregrounds the dignity of work, the fragility of status, and the possibility of repair—never guaranteed, always earned. To read it is to enter a world where tomorrow depends on how we speak, how we listen, and how we shoulder what we owe one another. The pages that follow make that claim both vivid and humane.
Synopsis
Rachel Field’s And Now Tomorrow opens in a New England mill town dominated by the Blair family’s textile business. Emily Blair, the younger daughter, grows up amid privilege and a strong sense of duty to the enterprise that sustains the community. She is engaged to Jeff, a socially appropriate match whose future seems aligned with the family’s expectations. The narrative establishes the rhythms of town and mill, the codes that govern social life, and the ties binding workers and owners. Against this backdrop of inherited obligation, the novel sets the stage for a rupture that will reshape Emily’s identity and relationships.
A sudden illness—spinal meningitis—leaves Emily profoundly deaf, severing her from the world she once navigated with ease. The loss forces a return home and a new regimen of lip reading, gestures, and strategic silence. Conversations become effortful; parties and public gatherings turn fraught. Emily’s engagement strains under the pressure of altered prospects, while her family struggles to balance protection with expectation. The novel details practical adjustments and emotional dislocations, portraying how deafness reorders social standing, narrows options, and tests the assumptions of privilege. Emily’s pride and poise remain, but the ground under her daily life has shifted.
Enter Dr. Merek Vance, a brilliant, self-made physician from the same town whose upbringing contrasts sharply with Emily’s. He carries old grievances toward the Blairs’ industrial power even as he pursues research on post-meningitic deafness. Emily seeks his help, but class differences and personal history make their early encounters brittle. Professional caution meets her urgency for a cure. They agree to attempt experimental treatments under strict protocols, with measured expectations and clear risks. Their collaboration begins as a wary partnership, defined by clinical aims and the refusal to promise miracles, yet it brings them into close, consequential contact.
As appointments proceed, the story widens from clinics and drawing rooms to the factories, streets, and wards of the town. Emily’s altered hearing sharpens her attention to what she can see: worn faces at the looms, crowded tenements, and the hospital’s relentless pace. Volunteering and visits expose her to lives previously held at a distance, including patients whom Merek treats with resourceful pragmatism. She encounters perspectives that complicate a simple narrative of benevolent ownership. The mill’s paternal traditions look different beside layoffs and illness. Emily’s understanding of responsibility evolves from inheritance to engagement with the community’s real conditions.
Field threads these discoveries through scenes of social life where silence can humiliate or isolate. Receptions, charity events, and family gatherings reveal how easily meaning slips away when words are missed. Misunderstandings multiply, and the engagement with Jeff becomes a test of patience and foresight. He remains attentive, yet practical about careers, status, and the demands of medicine and marriage. The Blairs, mindful of reputation, counsel composure. Emily answers by honing lip reading, demanding frankness, and insisting on usefulness over display. The narrative keeps close to her viewpoint, noting how attention, not sound, now orders experience and shapes her choices.
The Blair mills face economic pressure and rising discontent among workers, placing the family business in a difficult position. Management debates wages, safety, and modernization, while rumors of labor action stir. Emily, drawn into decisions she once observed from the margins, tries to mediate competing claims. Meetings with foremen, visits to the weaving rooms, and conversations with longtime employees contrast ledger lines with human costs. The crisis tests the old paternal model and the town’s patience. In parallel, it tests Emily’s readiness to lead, asking whether fairness can be reconciled with the imperatives of profit and tradition.
The medical thread tightens. Merek and his colleagues assess incremental changes and disappointments, weighing whether bolder intervention is warranted. Questions of timing, dosage, and potential harm drive careful debate. Emily agrees to risk procedures that might alter her condition, understanding that outcomes are uncertain. The treatments demand trust, endurance, and strict discipline. Professional boundaries and personal histories complicate interactions, but the focus remains on method and measurable results. Field depicts clinical work as painstaking rather than miraculous, emphasizing steps, setbacks, and the moral weight of experimenting when hope and desperation intersect.
Personal stakes rise as family and town histories surface. Old accidents and grievances linked to mill life complicate loyalties, challenging the Blairs’ narrative of stewardship. Jeff and Emily confront the difference between affection sustained by habit and commitment tested by change. A sister’s choices and friendships add pressure and contrast, while community gossip shadows private decisions. These tensions force Emily to define what she owes to family, workers, and herself. The converging strands—medical risk, industrial responsibility, and emotional candor—set the stage for decisions that will shape her future without promising easy reconciliation.
In its closing movement, the novel brings the medical and social conflicts to decisive moments that demand action. A treatment reaches a critical point as the mill’s course requires a public stance. Emily meets both challenges with steadier purpose, tempered by what she has learned about listening without sound and seeing beyond class. Field concludes on a note of forward motion rather than finality, withholding simple resolutions while affirming the possibility of change. And Now Tomorrow ultimately presents a portrait of a woman redefining privilege as obligation and agency, and a community tested by the costs of care, work, and belonging.
Historical Context
Rachel Field’s And Now Tomorrow is set in a fictional New England mill town during the interwar years, when the textile economy and entrenched class hierarchies shaped daily life. The town’s riverfront brick mills, workers’ boardinghouses, and owners’ hilltop mansions evoke communities such as Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire. Company influence extends into schools, hospitals, and charities, reflecting the paternalism long associated with mill ownership. Ethnic neighborhoods, church-centered social life, and periodic labor disputes define the civic landscape. Economic contractions and medical uncertainty frame the plot, while the heroine’s deafness places the story just before antibiotics transformed outcomes for bacterial infections in the late 1930s–1940s.
The novel’s industrial backdrop is rooted in the rise and evolution of New England’s textile economy, which began with the Waltham-Lowell system in the 1810s–1820s and matured across mill cities like Lowell (founded 1820s) and Lawrence (chartered 1853). Early mills recruited native-born farm women, but by the late nineteenth century waves of immigrants—Irish (1840s–1850s), French Canadians (1870s–1910s), Italians and Poles—formed the core labor force. Owners (often the “Boston Associates”) coupled strict shop-floor discipline with civic philanthropy, fostering a paternalistic order that persisted into the twentieth century. The system strained under mechanization, wage cuts, and long hours, prompting notable unrest: the 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence demanded higher wages and humane conditions; a broader New England textile strike followed in 1922. Amid this, colossal firms like Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester, New Hampshire—once the world’s largest textile operation—symbolized both industrial might and fragility; the company collapsed into receivership in the mid-1930s after years of declining profits. By the interwar period, electric power, scientific management, and speed-ups altered work rhythms, while mill villages and ethnic parishes maintained community cohesion. Field’s depiction of an owner-dominated town, philanthropic committees, and a work force divided by shop rules and status mirrors this history. The novel’s tensions over wages, loyalty, and pride reflect how paternalism could both bind and embitter a community. Its attention to the social rituals of owners and operatives—dances, church drives, hospital boards—captures the intimate interdependence and conflict that characterized New England mill life from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s.
The Great Depression (1929–1939) reshaped industrial towns across the Northeast. After the 1929 stock market crash, U.S. unemployment peaked near 25 percent in 1933, and textile demand contracted sharply. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal introduced the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933, whose Section 7(a) recognized workers’ rights to organize, then the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) in 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 setting minimum wages and maximum hours. The novel’s disputes over pay scales, hours, and shop-floor authority echo this legal transition, as management and labor navigate new federal protections that emboldened organizing and formalized collective bargaining.
The 1934 U.S. General Textile Strike, among the largest industrial actions of the era, mobilized roughly 400,000 workers from September 1–23 across New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Carolinas. Triggered by grievances over wage cuts, the “stretch-out” (increased machine assignments), and speed-ups, the strike saw National Guard deployments, arrests, and several fatalities, notably in the South. Although it ended without major immediate gains, it galvanized unionization efforts that later flourished under the 1935 Wagner Act. The novel’s portrayal of charged mass meetings, picket lines, and fractured loyalties within a mill town resonates with the fear and urgency that surrounded 1934’s confrontations.
Public health advances in bacterial meningitis and hearing loss provide a crucial medical context. Simon Flexner at the Rockefeller Institute developed an antimeningococcal serum in the 1906–1913 period, reducing mortality when administered early, though access and effectiveness varied. Sulfonamide drugs, adopted after 1937, further lowered meningococcal deaths; penicillin’s broader availability by 1943–1944 revolutionized treatment. Yet post-meningitic deafness often remained irreversible due to cochlear damage. Vacuum-tube hearing aids expanded in the 1930s, and urban hospitals opened otology clinics, but stigma and limited options persisted. The novel’s focus on a physician pursuing therapies and a protagonist negotiating deafness reflects interwar hopes—and limits—of biomedical progress.
The transformation of women’s civic and economic roles after the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) undergirds the book’s social dynamics. By 1930, women made up roughly a quarter of the U.S. labor force, with rising college attendance and participation in professional and philanthropic leadership. Women’s clubs, hospital boards, and settlement work expanded female influence in public life, even as professional ceilings and pay inequities endured. In this milieu, a woman’s engagement with mill governance and community welfare in the novel reflects interwar expectations that elite women steward local institutions, while also confronting persistent gendered pressures regarding marriage, authority, and the legitimacy of female decision-making in business affairs.
Interwar New England faced deindustrialization as cotton textiles migrated to the South, where nonunion labor, proximity to cotton, and lower wages—often 20–30 percent less—undercut northern producers. North Carolina became the nation’s leading spindle state by the 1920s. The “stretch-out” and speed-ups provoked conflict, notably the 1929 Loray Mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, where violence led to deaths, including labor activist Ella May Wiggins. Northern icons such as Amoskeag faltered by the mid-1930s. The novel’s anxiety over competitiveness, pressure to cut costs, and the specter of shutdowns mirrors this structural shift, illuminating the precariousness of owner prestige and worker livelihoods alike.
Field’s novel operates as a critique of interwar American capitalism’s paternalism and its uneven distribution of risk, dignity, and care. By juxtaposing a socially prominent family’s authority with workers’ vulnerability—and by foregrounding disability in a society calibrated to hearing and hierarchy—the book exposes class barriers, gendered expectations, and the moral ambiguities of philanthropy tied to profit. Its mill-town politics interrogate the legitimacy of owners’ control over civic institutions, while its medical storyline challenges faith in status and money to secure certainty. The result is an indictment of complacent privilege and a sober appraisal of how structural inequality warps community, opportunity, and belonging.
And Now Tomorrow
CHAPTER ONE
It was years since I had set foot in the ell storeroom. But yesterday Aunt Em sent me there on an errand, and the souvenirs I came upon have disturbed me ever since, teasing my mind with memories that persist like fragments of old tunes.
There is a fascination in places that hold our past in safe keeping. We are drawn to them, often against our will. For the past is a shadow grown greater than its substance, and shadows have power to mock and betray us to the end of our days. I knew it yesterday in that hour I spent in the storeroom's dusty dullness, half dreading, half courting the pangs which each well remembered object brought.
So we sigh, perhaps, at the mute and stringless guitar with its knot of yellow ribbon bleached pale as a dandelion gone to seed. So we smile at the tarnished medal that set the heart pounding under the dress folds where it was once pinned. So we tremble or flush again at the flimsy favors and dance programs with their little dangling pencils and scribbled names.
"Now who was he?" we ask ourselves, puzzling over some illegible name. "I must have liked him very much to save him the first and the last dance."
And the old photographs in albums and boxes! It takes fortitude to meet the direct gaze of a child whose face is one's own in innocent embryo. It is hard to believe that the shy young woman with the sealskin muff is one's mother at nineteen beside a thin, merry-eyed young man whose features bear a faint resemblance to one's father. Their youth and gaiety are caught fast on this bit of cardboard all these years after that winter day when they sat for their pictures at the Junction photographer's. Here am I, a child of two between them, and here again at four with my arms about year-old Janice and the clipped French poodle Bon-Bon pressing close to my knees. That was the summer I first remember the big lawns and trees and high-ceilinged rooms of Peace-Pipe and all the curious New England relatives who peered at us. They asked questions that must be answered politely in English, not the French which Bon-Bon and I understood most easily. He and I still look bewildered in the picture, but Janice is completely at ease in her embroidered Paris dress and bonnet. Yes, there we are--Bon-Bon who has been still for years now under the thorn tree at the foot of the garden; Janice whose round baby eyes give no hint of the defiance I was to see there at our last meeting, and I, who will never again fit into those slippers with crossed straps or face a camera or the world with so steadfast a look.
Once when I was a child Father told me of a great scientist who could take a single bone in his hands and from that reconstruct the whole skeleton of the animal to which it had belonged. I wondered, standing alone in that jumble of possessions, among dangling clothes, old books, and discarded furniture, whether there might be anyone wise enough to reconstruct from these remnants the likeness of a family. Yet perhaps out of such very clutter some pattern does emerge if one has the insight to ferret out the faults and virtues, the hopes and shortcomings, the loves and loyalties of one such household. Merek Vance would have the wisdom and patience to do that if anyone could. But Merek Vance is three thousand miles away and busy with research of a very different sort. Besides, he would only smile and shrug in the way I know so well, and say that the ell storeroom and its contents are my problem.
He knows that I do not like problems, that I have sometimes lacked courage to accept the challenge of those that belong peculiarly to me. I shunned problems whether they took the form of choosing between a sleigh-ride party and a trip to Boston, or happened to be inside an arithmetic book and concerned men papering imaginary rooms or digging wells that required an exact knowledge of yards and feet and fractions. The same inner panic seized me yesterday when I opened a worn algebra and met those dread specters of my schooldays, a and b and their mysterious companion x that for me always remained an unknown quantity. Well, I know now that this unknown quantity is something to be reckoned with outside the covers of an algebra. I have learned that it can rise up out of nowhere to change the sum total of our lives.
There were plenty of old schoolbooks on the storeroom shelves, books with Janice's name and mine on thumb-marked fly leaves. In one I had written in a prim vertical hand the familiar jargon:
September 19th, 1921
I must have been fourteen when I penned that, barely a dozen years ago. Yet "heaven" is a word I seldom write or take for granted nowadays. In this year 1933 I am not so confident of my dwelling place or my destination.
Another book that bore my name was a Latin grammar, with penciled jottings on margins and exercises on folded sheets of paper. I used to be rather good at Latin, though it never occurred to me then that truth or meaning might lie behind the phrases I labored to translate. But as I pored over the pages again they began to take on life and significance. Once, I realized, people had used this tongue to speak to one another, to write words warm with affection or heavy with despair. A phrase held me as I turned the pages: "Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit." My lips repeated the words. I wrestled with their meaning as one struggles to move the key in some rusty lock. At last I had it: "Perhaps it will be pleasant to remember even these things." I knew then that it was not some whim of chance that had sent me to the storeroom, that had guided my hand to that book and my eye to that particular phrase.
In the life of each of us, I told myself, there comes a time when we must pause to look back and see by what straight or twisting ways we have arrived at the place where we find ourselves. Instinct is not enough, and even hope is not enough. We must have eyes to see where we missed this turn or that, and where we struggled through dark thickets that threatened to confound us. I know that I have arrived at such a time.
Some day, it may be, I shall tie a handkerchief round my hair and take a broom and duster and set to work clearing out the storeroom. But I must take stock of myself before I am ready for that. I rebelled against returning to this house and the querulous wants of a tired old woman and a middle-aged man with time heavy on their hands. But I am rebellious no longer. Old times, old feelings, old hurts, old loves, and old losses must be sorted and weighed and put in order as well as outworn mementoes. We cannot simply close the door upon them and forget what lies behind it. We cannot let bitterness gather there like a layer of dust.
I fumble awkwardly for words as I sit here at this desk where I have so often dashed off schoolgirl essays full of glib phrases; where I have penned letters marred with self-pity and despair. I am done with all that now. Once I considered myself a very important person in my own world. Now I know that I matter less perhaps in the scheme of things than the tireless, pollen-dusted bee; than the mole, delving in darkness; than the inchworm that measures its infinitesimal length on a grass-blade.
I don't pretend to know what I believe beyond this--that nothing which lives and breathes and has its appointed course under the sun can be altogether insignificant. Some trace remains of what we have been, of what we tried to be, even as the star-shaped petals of the apple blossom lie hidden at its core; even as the seed a bird scatters in flight may grow into the tree which shall later shelter other birds. And so, those whose names I write here--Aunt Em, Uncle Wallace, Janice, Harry, Old Jo and young Jo Kelly, Maggie, Dr. Weeks, Merek Vance, and I--all of us are changed in some measure, each because of the others. Our flesh and blood, our nerves and veins and senses have responded under this old roof to forces and currents that we shall never be able to explain. We are scattered now, and what we did and what we said will be forgotten soon. It will fade into the unreality of old photographs, like those I stared at yesterday in the storeroom.
I shall begin with the river because without it there would have been no busy Blairstown, with its bridges above and below the falls; there would have been no mills and no bleacheries, no pulsing machinery, no smoking chimneys gaunt against the winter sky or thrusting their darkened tops through summer's dominant green. There would be no reason for trains between Boston and Portland to stop at the brick station with its black-lettered sign above the familiar trademark of the Indian War Bonnet and Pipe and the words that encircle them: "Peace-Pipe Industries."
No one thought it an ironical name until lately. Four generations of American households have known the pipe and feathers and the legend they carry on sheets and pillowcases and towels the country over: "Peace-Pipe for Quality." It was Great-grandfather Blair who made famous those four words and the product of his mill. But it was a hundred years before his time that the first Blair had made his peace with the Wawickett Indians. Their name alone has survived them in the bright, rushing waters of the river where they fished and paddled their canoes.
More than anything else in Blairstown; more even than this big stone house that rose on the foundations of the first unpretentious family farm, the river is bound up with my childhood. I cannot remember my first sight of it, for I was less than two when Father and Mother brought me back from France to be displayed to my New England relatives. Father used to swear that even then the river had a queer power over me. He would stand on the bridges and lift me up in his arms, and I would stare, spellbound, at the torrent of shining water that fell endlessly, and at the fierce steaming, churning whiteness of the rapids below. In other summers when we returned and Janice was the baby to be held aloft, I would stand peering through gaps in the stonework, never tiring of the liquid drama that went on without beginning or end.
Father was amused and tolerant of my passion for the river, and Aunt Em openly gloated over my preference, but Mother did not seem altogether pleased. She died before I was seven, and so she must always remain for me a dim figure in rustling skirts, with a voice that kept unpredictable accents and cadences because she had learned to speak first in Polish. If we children happened to be with her when we crossed the bridges, she always hurried us over, ignoring my pleas for "just one more little look." Only once I remember prevailing upon her to pause there, and I have never forgotten the occasion. She stayed so quiet at my side that her silence at last made me curious. Though I was young to notice such things, I was struck by the expression of her face as I peered up into it. She was not looking either at me or at the seething water. Instead she stayed still as stone staring over at the mills and the chimneys and the small brick and wood houses where the mill hands and their families lived. Her eyes had grown dark in the soft, pale oval of her face. They held a remoteness that chilled me.
"Mama!" I tugged at her hand. "Don't look over there at the ugly side."
My words brought her eyes back to me, and she answered in her slow, rich voice that blurred softly where words met.
"So you feel shame for that already, my little Emily! But don't worry. You are safe on your side of the river. You're all Blair."
I was to hear that last remark many times afterward. But as often as it has been said, I can never hear it without thinking of that day on the bridge when my early complacency met its first shock. There we stood together, hand in hand, yet we had hurt each other. The river, shining in the summer sun, and the smoky bulk of the mills with those small crowded houses and yards full of washing, were somehow all part of what had come between us.
Often and often I think of it, until sometimes the Wawickett River becomes more than a hurrying stream that has furnished the power for Peace-Pipe Industries[1] and brought prosperity to our family. It has become a symbol to me, as it must have been to my mother that day. For in spite of its bridges the river did then and does now mark the boundary between secure and precarious living; between the humble and the proud. Some may cross from one side to the other as my mother did; as young Jo Kelly was to do years after. And there are a few, like me, who stand on the span of its bridges, knowing that we belong to both--troubled and uncertain because we cannot renounce all of one side for all of the other.
CHAPTER TWO
"Always do what's expected of you, Emily," Father used to say, watching me with eyes narrowed in a habit acquired by years of painting. "I never learned the trick, but it saves a lot of trouble in the end."
No, Father never did what was expected of him, but perhaps it wasn't altogether his fault. Everyone expected almost too much of Father, and he was born wanting to please everyone he met. He made people happy too easily; and by the same token he disappointed them, because no one can please everybody all the time. He was the oldest of those three Blairs, the handsome, clever one of the family. Aunt Em came next to him--tall, and serious and distinguished-looking even before she was full-grown. She had inherited the Blair shrewdness for business, along with the Blair stubborn streak and the Blair energy. It's a pity that her passion for activity couldn't have been directed as successfully as the Wawickett River's forces had been harnessed into power for the mills. Uncle Wallace came last in order of age and importance, a position he has maintained ever since.
Always he has been referred to as "the other Blair brother." He has never seemed to resent this. I think it's all he ever wanted to be. A pleasant, uncommunicative man, contented with the mill routine, occasional business trips, his golf, and his collections of stamps, Uncle Wallace has fitted himself into the scheme of life to which he was born better than any of us. He hasn't Aunt Em's will to fight against the current. He asked little of life and has paid the penalty of those who ask that; for even that little has been taken away from him.
But with Father it was different always. His good looks and gifts marked him from boyhood. Yet he managed, miraculously, not to be spoiled, and he was never taken in by himself. Therein lay his salvation. It was also the reason why he never became a first-rate artist. Tolerant of others' work, he was ruthless when it came to judging his own. And so his vigor and friendship poured out in all directions, enriching those whose genius bore the fruit he was often the first to recognize. In the memoirs of his contemporaries, painters, writers, and musicians living in those more leisurely years of the early 1900's, Father's name slips in and out like some comforting and casual tune. I like to come upon it and know that he mattered more than the canvases that bear his name in the corner and that will never bring a price worth mentioning.
"Want to come in the studio and play being a model?"
Those were words I loved to hear, and I always sprang to answer the invitation. Father had a flair for catching likeness. The best things he painted are portraits of Mother and of us as children. I never tired of sitting for him in the high, littered studios he made so completely his own, whether he inhabited them for a year or a month. I can see his big left thumb hooked into the hole of the palette where he had squeezed brilliant daubs of vermilion and cobalt and burnt sienna. His right hand held the long brushes with a strength and delicacy I shall never forget. He seldom talked when he painted, but he used to hum in deep, contented monotony like bees in an apple orchard in May. That pleasant rumble is bound up in my mind with Father and his studio. It will always be part of the smell of turpentine and linseed oil and the tobacco in the pipe he smoked; part of the image of a tall man with eyes as blue as his paint-spattered smock.
Janice can barely recall the studio days, though she says she remembers the afternoon receptions and evening gatherings when we would be carried from bed in our nightgowns to be displayed to the guests. I was never the success that Janice used to be on these occasions, though I was much more dependable when plates of refreshments were entrusted to our passing. Janice needed no encouragement to dance in her white nightgown and red slippers. She was always applauded; and no wonder, for she was a captivating sprite with her fair hair tumbled on her shoulders and falling into her eyes that shone as dark and bright as blackberries. She was the despair of those who tried to catch her on canvas, for she was changeable as quicksilver. I was considered quaint and paintable with my solemn blue eyes and brown straight bangs.
"That one," people would remark, "is her grandfather Blair all over again. Too bad she couldn't have been a boy to carry on the family name as well as the family features."
Once again Father had failed in what was expected of him. Having married a Polish girl worker in the mills and having abandoned the family business, at least he might have provided a son instead of two daughters. But he didn't seem to mind, and from the day I was brought back to wear the Blair christening robe and be called by her name, Aunt Em accepted the marriage and Mother.
"You couldn't wonder he fell for her," Maggie told me once when I questioned her about that match which had been the talk of the county. "When a Polack[2] girl's beautiful she puts the come-hither on a man once and for all."
"The come-hither, Maggie?" I persisted, for I was still very young and curious. "What's that?"
"You'll know right enough some day."
That was all I could ever get out of Maggie on the subject, but I know now how it must have been that day when my father saw my mother sliding down a long patch of ice by the mill gates. The story has taken on the quality of a legend all these years afterward. It was closing time, and the workers were thronging out in the November dusk, chattering and jostling one another as I have seen them so often at that hour, a human torrent of youth and animal high spirits. Skirts were longer in those days, and there were shawls and braids and thick coils of hair instead of berets and bright scarfs over permanently waved, bobbed heads. But the effect must have been much the same then as now. Father had been out of college for several years, and the mill routine had been growing more and more irksome. His heart wasn't in the business. Besides, he was already set on his painting. In the mill workers he saw living models that he longed to put on canvas. I don't mean that he was indifferent to some Polish or Lithuanian girl's good looks, any more than the other men in the office. But he had an artist's eye for line and color as well as masculine appreciation of a curved body, full lips, or trim ankles.
It was fate, or destiny, or just plain good luck that singled Mother out from the rest that winter day. The closing whistle had blown, and Father stood by a window watching the girls hurrying through the mill yard. Ice had formed round one of the exhaust pipes. There was a smooth frozen stretch below it. Suddenly a girl broke away from the rest and took it in one long, graceful slide. It was the most simple, spontaneous response that he had ever seen, he said afterward. Though he couldn't see her face for the gathering twilight, he couldn't forget the free sure motion of her body, with arms held out to keep the balance true, or the way her warm breath streamed out in the dullness under a red knitted shawl that wrapped her head like the crest on a woodpecker.
That was how it began--strange and improbable enough to be the climax of some old-fashioned romance in paper covers. Father must have been born a romantic, but he must have had his share of the Blair persistence to carry the courtship through. Certainly Mother gave him very small encouragement. She had scruples against accepting attentions from the mill owner's obviously admiring son. Lots of girls had set their caps for Father, and he was well aware of that. It made him cautious at picnics and dances and house parties. Perhaps it made him all the more vulnerable to this girl with her foreign name and speech and her self-guarded beauty. Even more than the heavy coils of light brown hair, the soft oval face and wide-set dark eyes, it was this quality of personal dignity in her that must have stirred and held him.
Well, in love there's no choosing, and Father and Mother were ready for love and each other. I shall never know when they first answered the summons; when they first guessed what had taken possession of their separate lives, drawing them so surely and inexorably together. I shall never be able to conjure up what passed between them during the months when each struggled to keep an impossible freedom. But I can picture how it may have been as they met, day after day, while the building vibrated about them and the mill machinery throbbed like a gigantic pulse. It must have seemed almost a magnified echo of their own pulses and the beating of their two quickened hearts. Yes, that is how I like to think it may have been--shuttles weaving, bobbins twisting, threads like millions of humming harp strings, fine-spun about them. And so they became part of the pattern of life, which may not vary its design, though the two who give themselves to its making are always new.
Afterward, when Aunt Em had accepted the marriage, she made rather a point of stressing Mother's background. Polish, yes, but far from the ordinary run of mill girls. Helena Jeretska came of good stock. Her father had been a music teacher, and her mother had had a fair education. Both had died in a typhoid epidemic shortly after landing in Boston, and another immigrant family of quite a different type had taken the child and brought her up with their own. Somehow they had drifted to Blairstown and the mills. Mother had gone to work there at seventeen.
"Oh, yes," I can almost hear Aunt Em saying, "she's quite pretty, almost beautiful in a different sort of way. I think Elliott expects to spend his life painting her. Well, naturally, it's hard to have him go so far away, but Paris is the place for artists. It's not as if the business had ever been congenial to him, and Wallace and I can do our part. Peace-Pipe Mills have always been family-run, and I trust they always will be."
It never took Aunt Em long to recover from any shock. I wasn't born till two years after she met that one, but I've seen her take a good many since. I know the set of her head and lips and the old rallying phrases she summons for times of need. Only lately have I known her to admit defeat, and she has never accepted it. Even now with her once active body stiff and restricted of motion, I can tell that she believes in the power of her own will to accomplish the inevitable. I am reminded of a picture in an old history book--King Canute sitting in state with salt waves breaking about his feet, commanding the tide to turn back.
Aunt Em will resist the encroaching tides of change right up to her last breath, and I love her for it. For all the difference in our ages she is younger than I in some respects. She has not learned what I am only just now beginning to understand--that no matter how hard and faithfully we may try we can never compensate another for some lack in his or her life.
In my own case this sense of obligation came about naturally through the circumstances that followed Mother's tragic death the summer I was seven. She had been fatally injured in a motor accident that spring in Paris, and Father moved in a daze of despair during those days when doctors and nurses fought hopelessly to keep her alive. Father was like a stranger to Janice and me for a long time. His new black coat didn't smell comfortingly of paint and tobacco, and we were glad when men came to crate the canvases and pack furniture and when our things were put in trunks and sent to the ship that would take us back to America. We missed Mama, but our minds were full of the thought of Peace-Pipe. We longed to see how our big brown poodle, Bon-Bon, looked after a winter without us. We wanted to be back before the lilacs were past blooming and in plenty of time to pick wild strawberries in the meadows on the outskirts of town. Father seemed to care little for important things like that, though he was very indulgent of us on the crossing.
One occasion on the voyage I recall with peculiar distinctness. It was the night of the captain's dinner, and Father had promised that I might sit up later than my usual bedtime to watch the people in evening dress go down to the dining saloon. I was ready long before the dinner hour, and to quiet my impatience Father took me on deck. We sat very close together watching the last fiery shreds of cloud dim as the steamer throbbed on tirelessly through darkening water. It was exciting as if Father and I had escaped to some far and secret place. The tones of his deep voice when he spoke to me out of the dimness were all part of that night, giving emphasis to his words.
He had been speaking of Peace-Pipe and Aunt Em when suddenly his tone changed.
"This summer won't be like the others," he said. "You and Janice are going to be Aunt Em's little girls from now on."
I must have trembled or crept closer, for he added quickly:
"Of course you'll always belong most to me, but you mustn't ever let Aunt Em think that. She needs you, and you'll try hard to make her happy, won't you?"
So I promised, filled with a pleasant glow of responsibility. Yet it seemed a queer thing to me then, as it does to me now, that anyone should have to try hard for happiness.
CHAPTER THREE
There is one day I recollect most clearly from that summer of our return, because it was my seventh birthday and because it was my first meeting with Harry Collins.
From its start the early August day was mine. I ran out barefoot into a world of dew and opening flowers; of robins making little watery calls and splashing at the rim of the lily pool. I measured my seven-year-old height against the vigorous green of hollyhocks by the fence; but, stretch as I might, I could not reach the lowest pink rosette. By the side door a huge old snowball bush bent double under its load of green and white. I crept beneath and felt the cool shock of dew upon me from shaken branches. Myriads of bees were filling it with sound. As I crouched there in the morning stillness they seemed louder and more insistent than I have ever heard them since. That tireless sound made me think of the water going over the Falls; like the throbbing mill machinery when it came distantly from across the river.
Butterflies and birds were everywhere as well as bees. Droning or darting or drifting, they passed me on invisible currents of air. I was aware of them wherever I moved. There was an intensity to their busyness that made me a little in awe of them. They went about their work as if the world were coming to an end at sunset. I think something of the fierce urgency of their frail bodies must have been imparted to my young self that day to make me remember the shape and color and sound of each moment as I do these years afterward.
The trumpet vine that covered the side porch is gone now, but I can still see the miraculous spinning of a hummingbird above it. I knew that its wings were a rainbow whirl because they revolved so fast, yet they gave an illusion of stillness, and the long bill seemed held fast to the magnet of a trumpet flower. I stood there, elated and alone, with my bare feet rooted to wet earth. Some vigorous, sweet essence of summer and sun flowed through me in that moment of breathless watching.
"Happy birthday, Em'ly," Janice called down from an upper window, and the spell was shattered.
Then breakfast, with waffles and honey and packages to open, claimed me. Father had gone to Boston, but he had promised to be back on an afternoon train in time for my party. I knew there would be more presents in his arms, and meantime there were plenty to keep me busy--a new doll and carriage and a boat with sails that could really put to sea in the waters of the lily pool. I much preferred it to the blue enamel locket that had belonged to Aunt Em when she was a little girl, but, remembering my promise to Father, I tried to let her think that was my favorite present.
Uncle Wallace let us walk to the bridge with him, and when we returned Old Jo Kelly and young Jo, his grandson, were waiting to wish me happy birthday. They lived in quarters over the stable. Old Jo had been gardener on the place as long as Father could remember. He had a bouquet of flowers for me, and young Jo had brought three alley marbles and a tin soldier.
"You can play he's captain," he suggested when he saw the new boat. "He don't stand very good alone, but you can lash him to the mast."
We wanted young Jo to play with the new boat, but he went off to help his grandfather haul fertilizer. They worked side by side, those two, the best of cronies for all the sixty-odd years' difference between them. Young Jo's parents had died when he was a baby, and he had always lived with his grandfather.
Even then there was something to be reckoned with about young Jo Kelly. Gay and good-natured though he was for the most part, he could summon up furies that were terrifying to behold. I have seen his blue eyes darken and his lips turn white when he pleaded with his grandfather not to set traps for the moles that were ruining our lawns. His hands were clever at unfastening traps. If rabbits or squirrels or mice could have given testimonials, then young Jo Kelly's name would surely have been blessed. Aunt Em, I remember, once had a long conversation with him on the subject of ridding the place of English sparrows. He listened quietly through her explanation that they were noisy, dirty pests who drove the songbirds away. But her arguments left him unconvinced.
"Sparrows are just as human as any other kind of bird," he told her firmly, and for once Aunt Em had no answer.
My party began on the stroke of four when the Parker twins[3], Nancy and Joan, appeared, bringing their cousin who had arrived that morning. His name was Harry Collins, and he was older than the rest of us by several years. I can see him now as he looked coming up our drive in his white sailor suit with a twin on either side in pink and blue dresses. The sun made his sandy hair look redder than it really was, and he walked easily with an air of being on very good terms with the world. The twins carried gifts, conspicuously displayed, but he came empty-handed.
"Hello," he called when they were within hailing distance, and I saw that his eyes were hazel with gold flecks that matched the freckles on his nose. "How old are you?" he demanded pleasantly.
"Seven today," I explained.
"Seven's nice," he encouraged me. "Wait till you get to be ten."
"Are you ten?" I ventured.
"Well, practically," he amended.
"Not till after Christmas," the twins chorused. "You only have a right to say you're going-on ten."
"'Practically' means the same thing," he insisted, and once more he smiled at me.
When Harry Collins smiled one seldom questioned his statements. He turned a not very expert handspring on the grass while we four little girls watched admiringly. If he made a mistake he somehow convinced you that it had been intentional, merely a delightful variation from the usual pattern.
We were joined just then by Jim and Lolly Wood from across the Square, and by the time I had opened their presents young Jo Kelly had appeared from the back garden, more scrubbed and combed than I had ever seen him.
"Who's the kid?" Harry Collins eyed Jo critically.
I felt uncertain just how to explain him. Young Jo Kelly, we had always taken for granted without classification. Yet I knew that he did not usually rate parties.
"Oh, he lives down there," I answered evasively, pointing vaguely in the direction of the garden.
I was glad that Maggie and Aunt Em appeared just then to supervise a hunt for presents hidden in the shrubbery. After that we played hide-and-seek, and it was then that I found the injured chipmunk under the big hemlock.
Bon-Bon, our French poodle, really made the discovery. I heard his excited barks, and by the time I reached him the tawny ball of fur with dark and light stripes was electric with fright. My first impulse was to pick it up, but Bon-Bon's behavior made me hesitate. I seized him by the collar instead, and it took all my strength to hold him back. The others ran up, attracted by the barkings and my cries. Harry Collins reached us first and bent over the chipmunk, which had begun to make terrified chitterings and to bare sharp little teeth.
