("I'm not afraid of children," she said.
"What are you afraid of, then?"
She pondered. He had already noticed that it was her hands which indicated what she was thinking quite as much as her face and now he watched her as she cupped them, making them ready to recieve her thoughts.
"Not being able to see, I think," she said.
"Being blind, you mean?"
"No, not that. That would be perfectly hard but Homer managed it and our blind piano tuner is one of the serenest people I know. I mean...not seeing because you're obsessed by something that blots out the world. Some sort of mania or belief. Or Passion. That awful kind of love that makes leaves and birds and cherry blossom invisible because it's not the face of some man.")
Her name is Ellen Carr.
She's plain and wants to protect, help everyone during difficult times. She's beautiful, too, if you bother looking. She's skilled at anything anyone will teach her. Self-sacrificing her happiness to eventually marry a man....
("But Kendrick had sat up, in the grip of a terrible Panic: "You won't leave me, Ellen, will you? You won't go away and leave me alone? I've always been alone and I couldn't--"
He began to weep and Ellen, fighting a weariness so profound that she thought it must pull her down to the center of the Earth, managed to take him into her arms.
"No, Kendrick, I won't leave you alone, I promise. I'll never leave you alone.")
Named Kendrick, who loves her more than it is possible to love anymore alive. He worships her as a Goddess, even Ellen says so. Ellen was raised by strong-willed females who told her to be herself. She sets off for a school and becomes a sort of Governess; and meets... Marek. Admist the chaos, the hard work, the people who need her at every moment, who never let her rest, she falls in perhaps one of the greatest loves that's ever been written. Better than Buttercup and Westly, Romeo and Juliet, Ophelia and Hamlet, Ellen's love for Marek is so beautiful because it is real.
Because happy endings don't exist, but your heart knows right away that it can. It can exist, a happy ending--more than that, it has to.
(There was so much to do here--so terrifyingly much--but she knew that Marek, when he came, would help her. Which made Bennet's word when she had asked him who Marek was seem all the stranger.
"That's a good question, Ellen," the headmaster had said. "You could say that he works here as a grounds-man, and that would be true. Or that he teaches fencing to the older boys, and that would be true also, and that at the moment he is acting as chauffeur to Professor Steiner across the lake. But when you have said that, I don't know htat you have said very much. I think," and he had turned to her with his friendly smile, "You will have to find out for yourself--and when you do I would be very interested to hear what you discover.")
Marek; so unlike Kendrick and so many others who were hers for the asking, Marek with his ability to build and write music and inspire. Ellen works hard, falls in love. More people fall in love with Ellen, but she ignores it. She listens to the man who thinks that water is for the feet.
Ellen looses Marek. War, anger, hatred parts them, and they are brought back together by no happy ending, but sheer luck. They make it. Marek...is willing to come back for... Ellen. Ellen, who married Kendrick; who worshiped her, so she could have access to Crowthrope, which is a rich-in-land Manor that she uses as a war-time Sanctuary.... Ellen who sacrifices happiness after Marek vanishes when Pettlsdorf is destroyed.
Pettlsdorf... the place Marek was raised, which fascinates Ellen. Which she worships, despite the fact her dreams were encouraged when she was a child....she worships it... not for any inexplicable reason... but because it is his. Ellen needs nothing more than that...
And Kendrick can't stay with someone he loves so much. He barely even understands Marek, none of that matters to him because it's Ellen...someone good and true and pure and gentle-hearted with a smile that could melt the sun in his sky.
His worship and love gets him someone he can love really, someone who can love him, laughable though it is.
Marek and Ellen live happily. They go back to the city that was destroyed by the war and in that paragraph you realize how hard things have been, that even though these people live happily now they had to fight. More than that, you realize that their fight for life is finally what made their life worth something.
What life is worth something to us if we do not fight for it?
More than that....
When I close the book that's made Love to me, that's touched my life in a way that nothing (except, perhaps, the most obvious thing).... I realize.
Marek came back for Ellen.
I wonder if Marek would come back for Ellen again, in a different time. When things weren't suffering from war and when Marek isn't a hero, when Ellen isn't beautiful.
If he would, then I am Ellen; trapped among the war-time work, making my Sanctuary, petting my goats with a smile.
If he would not....
I am Ellen still.
I am good and gentle-hearted and pure and decent. One day I might even be beautiful.
But I know how she felt, my poor, poor Ellen Carr, during that war. I know how she felt every day; and oh, do I wish that I did not!
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