The Turnbulls

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  A stout woman was hired by the day to keep the small house in neat order, and always left at six o’clock. The landlord, once calling to ascertain if the plumbing was in good order, had greatly admired the furnishings of the house. They were spare and elegant, the floors polished and bare, and while nothing was expensive or elaborate, the house had acquired a haughty and genteel atmosphere.

  Nor were the neighbours curious. Even the fact that they rarely saw Mrs. Johnson did not excite them. When they did see her, she drifted so quietly in and out, and was so nebulous of appearance, that they came to the vague conclusion that when they did not see her for days she must, in reality, have been there all the time. They made no overtures to her. Her despondency and melancholy caused them to shrink from any contact with her, and so they “left her to her sorrows.”

  Once or twice they had seen a gentleman enter the house, but they were so little interested in Mrs. Johnson that they paid him no heed. He was a “brother,” they had gathered. Or perhaps a lawyer. Disinterested opinion was divided on the subject.

  Mrs. Johnson had lived in the house for over fiften years now, and she might have been a ghost for all her neighbours. In the summer a small garden was tended by an old man, the father of the maid, but the garden was as neutral and orderly as Mrs. Johnson herself. Occasionally a tradesman came. No one had observed that the postman came only on rare occasions, and then with a single letter.

  Had any one cared to notice, he would have discovered that he saw Mrs. Johnson only on those days when her “brother” or “lawyer” came later.

  John frequently said to himself that in that discreet white house he found the only peace and contentment and rest he had ever known. Here he could talk with freedom, he told himself, confident of love and sympathy and subtle understanding. The quiet hand in his, the quiet eyes fixed on his own, the slow smile, were all means to escape, to recuperation and strength. He had told himself these things for over fifteen years.

  It is strange, then, that his nameless anxiety, his ravaged emotions, his weariness and hidden despair, increased rather than decreased during the days following each visit to the lady of the secluded house. He thought all this the result of his discontent that he could not live with that lady entirely, and openly, without his furtive coming and going.

  Sometimes he would sit with her in the loveseat before the fire, watching the long rosy flames licking the black bricks, and he would talk with her of their mutual childhood and memories in England. They would laugh a little, sigh a little, look at each other deeply. Sometimes they did not talk at all, only holding hands. Later they would go upstairs to the cool white bedroom above, and all lights would wink out silently and the house would be one with its dark neighbours.

  He was never indiscreet. Cloaked in dark garments, his hat pulled well over his eyes, not carrying his cane, he would usually arrive at twilight. He had been nervous at first, not for his own sake, but for the lady’s. However, he soon discovered that no one was interested. He too, arrived on foot, leaving his carriage some four streets away, and dismissing it.

  So, he lived two lives: one of hot and aching misery and hatred, and the other, he believed, of peace and contentment and refreshment.

  Sometimes he had dinner with the lady. She prepared the finest delicacies with her own hands, and they would dine before the fire, quite alone in the house. She had excellent taste in wine and cordials, and for one who drank sparingly of these she was strangely lavish and insistent with them for her guest. There was an immediate large whiskey for him upon his arrival, to banish the dark tautness of his face and the taciturn restlessness in his eyes.

  He would hurry eagerly to that house, leaving directly from the office. Sometimes she informed him that she could be with him only for an hour or two, and not long after his own departure she would steal away, unseen, to be gone for days. It was only once a month or so, that she remained overnight, and he with her.

  It was spring again, now, and the sky was heliotrope over trees filled with pale green fog, and robins sang their silver threnodies in the wet branches. Spring always struck with unbearable poignancy on John’s corroded heart. Then he could hardly control his restlessness and gloom, his urgent despair. The lady had an anxious time with him in the spring.

  Sometimes she would muse that this explosive and bitterly violent man with the sombre eyes and gloomy mouth was not the hot and exigent young man she had known in England. Then he had been generous and warm, if violent, and all his faults were excessive but lovable. He had been ignorant and ingenuous, candid and open of heart, wishing only to be liked and included. A great bounding puppy of a youth, wistful for affection, and most frightfully lonely. His generosity and high humour had had a touching air about them. Hatred was a thing unknown to him. When he saw it in the faces of others for him, and their contempt, he was only angrily bewildered. He who hated no one could not understand why any one should hate him. Even his laughter at others had never been cruel or malicious, and was followed immediately by contrite compassion or lavish gifts.

  The lady was not perplexed at this change in the man she loved. She only regretted that he had been so absurdly ingenuous, that upon contact with the realities of a world of men he had reacted with such bitterness, such hatred, such vengefulness and malignity. It was all so extravagant to her. She had known from earliest childhood the true character of the world, and it had not disconcerted or saddened her. But John was a full grown man before he had known, and his reaction had been both excessive and murderous, quite out of reason, importance or proportion.

  She could not help but feel that he was weak. She had always known he was weak, she told herself. Weakness was always violent in its reactions, never calm or considered.

  The lady never considered that perhaps it is only the intrinsically pure of heart and simple of faith and truthful of soul who can become truly malignant and savage when confronted by a world composed mainly of men who are cruel, faithless, voracious and full of treachery. Those who are born disingenuous and cynical are never surprised. Neither have they known dreams and heroic passions.

  Had any of this evenly faintly dawned upon her, she would have stated incisively that such men are weaklings, infuriated with reality when it is presented to them. Above all things, she detested weakness.

  But she did not find John’s “weakness” any deterrent to her love for him. In fact, she loved him the more for it. It was his “weakness” that put him so abjectly in her power, and there was in this lady a quite unfeminine passion for power. At all times, she must control any situation; others must be subjected to her, if only subjectively. If they would not be so subject, she ignored them, or detested them. She must be in authority at all costs. Anything else was a threat to her security.

  Unlike John, her other life was not a confused and vicious and hateful dream to her. She operated in it quite competently, the cool and perfect wife and mother, the calm advisor and authority, the smiling and elegant hostess. She even enjoyed her other life. Too, this life with John was not an escape to peace and rest for her. It was a glorious diversion. It reaffirmed her egotism, her superiority, her control of all situations. Had she been deprived of it, she would have felt not only grief and desolation, but a destruction of her personality.

  John, of course, guessed none of this. Like all who are intrinsically simple of heart, he believed that what he felt was shared by others. He believed that the lady found her other life as dreary and onerous and full of hatred as he found his own. She did not enlighten him. She was so much more subtle and intelligent than he. And, though she did not know it, she, Eugenia Bollister, was so much more base.

  If John had changed, so had she. Or rather, in her case, her hidden and intrinsic qualities had been enhanced. Her pride and hauteur had increased enormously. Her coldness and selfishness had become monumental. Yet, (and this is not paradoxical) her integrity was more unshakable than ever. She had come to America to be with John, to regain him again. That was part of her in
tegrity.

  They rarely, if ever, mentioned their families to each other. But sometimes John would fix a strange hard look upon her, scrutinizing and resentful, and she uneasily wondered of whom he was thinking, of whom he was reminded by her presence. Not that appalling coarse creature he had married, that servant, that abominable milkmaid! Was it his father? But he never spoke of his father without aching tenderness and sadness. However, she saw there was recognition in his look, and anger.

  On this spring evening, so lovely and silent except for the robins, she had prepared a dainty and delicious meal. Tulips stood in a crystal vase on the table, whose stiff white damask held, in its folds, the rosy light of the fire. Her delicate china waited, gleaming as polished ivory. The heavy silver winked in the candlelight and firelight.

  The key in the lock made her rise with that sudden blooming smile which made her pale calm face vivid with beauty. Once in the house, she always discarded her dun garments, and now she was arrayed in violet silk, pearls about her throat, her smooth brown hair shining with hidden bronze tints. Though she was past thirty now, she seemed a gracious lady in her early twenties. There was no line in the small quiet face with its round firm chin, and no weariness in those large and brilliant gray eyes. Her figure was still slight and perfect. She was all elegance, all hauteur, all composure.

  John came in with his usual hasty and abrupt tread, throwing his coat and hat and gloves upon a chair, and advancing to her with outstretched hands. He smiled. Whenever he entered, she always gave a quick sharp glance, hidden under her dark lashes. How ravaged he was, how exhausted, yet how burning! He was hardly thirty-six, yet his temples were streaked with growing whiteness, and he was steadily growing thinner. This thinness was enhanced by his broad shoulders and his height. His black curls still grew thickly on his large round head, his manner was still hasty and exigent and seeking. But each time she saw him more tormented, more haggard, more consumed by the poison in himself. To all others he was pitiless and cruel and implacable. To her, he was the humble lover, the hesitant waiter upon her favours. She smiled contentedly, and with deep and sincere love.

  He seized, rather than took her, in his arms. He bent his head and buried his face in her slim white neck. He was intoxicated by her rose scent, as delicate and fragile as herself. There was hunger in his grasping, and a frantic voracity. “Genie,” he murmured, over and over.

  Then he took her hands and held her off from him, delighted, as always, with her familiarity, her freshness and beauty. She smiled at, him tenderly, but without his own passion.

  She said: ‘‘I’m so sorry, love, but I can only stay three hours.”.

  His face darkened, his hands tightened on hers. “But, it has been three weeks since I saw you. I thought tonight—”

  Her expression became even more tender. “We have three hours,” she reminded him with gentle serenity. “I could not help the three weeks.”

  There was a little silence. Then releasing her hands she moved to the table, gave it a last thoughtful glance, then left the room. John watched her go, his look darkening steadily. He sat down in the chair placed for him, then, as if stung by his chronic restlessness, he stood up, turned his back to the fire, and glowered before him. His preoccupied eye roved over the little room with its glimmering floors, its graceful chairs in the shadowy corners, its small but excellent Japanese prints on the white walls. Despite his anger, he began to relax. Three hours. Not much after a wretched three weeks. But it would have to do. When Eugenia returned with a covered silver dish in each hand, he was smiling.

  They ate to the accompaniment of flickering candlelight and the dropping of bright coals. There was a lessening of the sick tension in John. He talked with amazing tranquillity, while Eugenia listened, intent and smiling. Everything she did was perfect and full of grace, whether it was the turning of her head, or the prosaic lifting of the cover of a dish to spoon out its steaming contents. John, as always, drank heavily. It seemed a necessity for him. Eugenia, understanding the cause, considered it weakness. Her dear John was so absurd. Her smile became even more soft.

  They did not speak or think of their other lives. Nor was their conversation intellectual in the least. They said the smallest and silliest of things, and laughed, and covered the silences with long and passionate looks at each other. When they had finished the meal, they sat before the fire, hand in hand.

  Then Eugenia said, gravely, and hot looking at him: “I shall have to go to England in May, dear John. My son,” and she hesitated briefly, “is finished with his school and I am to bring him home. He expects me to be there, to see him receive his honours.”

  John stiffened. He sat up and glared at her. “And how long?”

  “Two months, at most,” she said. She fixed her gray eyes upon him. That cool direct glance never failed to quell him before, make him submissive. But it failed now. His own dark eye sparkled with fury.

  “You go alone?” he asked.

  “No.”

  John clenched his teeth. He dropped her hand and stared at the fire.

  “Two months is not too long,” she said, as if he were a child. “I go by steamboat. I am so sorry. But I cannot refuse to go, you see. I am fond of my son.”

  John did not answer. His tight profile became more grim:

  “I shall be so glad to see England again,” continued Eugenia, and in spite of herself her voice became somewhat richer. “It is nearly seventeen years. A very long time to be away from home. I want to see my mother’s grave, too.”

  She put her hand on his tense and unresponsive arm. “You have never been home, John. Don’t you ever long for England? You have lived here so long, too.”

  Now he spoke through lips like iron: “I have never lived anywhere.”

  Suddenly she shivered. “I have never lived anywhere,” he had said. She saw that it was true. All these years in America had meant nothing to him. How most horrible. She had many hours of enjoyment and pleasure in America, even away from him. She had become part of this country, and her longing for England only came to her occasionally. But John had not even been aware of America, except as a shifting background to his sick dream of hatred and vengefulness. He might have lived in China or Afghanistan for all this country had been to him. Nor did he suffer nostalgia for England, she knew. He lived suspended in space. The idea seemed gruesome and terrible to her. It was death in life. He had existed in a capsule.

  She was overwhelmed with pity. And with impatience. “But you have done so much here,” she urged, her hand pressing his arm. “You are one of the richest men in New York.”

  “I have never lived anywhere,” he repeated, as if to himself. And then he looked about the room. “Except here, for a few hours, perhaps.”

  But, to her mingled indignation and compassion, she saw that not even this was true. She, too, had been a dream to him.

  “Oh, how could you ever endure it?” she cried, and there was an impatient anger in her voice. Then it seemed incredible to her. As usual, he was dramatizing himself. He could not have borne all these years, if he was telling the truth. He could not have gone on, doing the things he had done, if he had been engulfed in a perpetual nightmare. “Haven’t you enjoyed anything, John? Your success? Your position? Your triumph over everything?”

  He turned slowly and stared at her. Then all at once he began to laugh. It was a wild and dreary laugh. She moved a little away from him. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

  “But that is so silly,” she said, and became more firmly convinced that he was subconsciously acting. “You must have enjoyed something. Your new home on Fifth Avenue is considered priceless. You must have taken some interest in it, or you would not have cared whether you had it or not.”

  John seemed about to speak. Then he closed his livid lips. How could he put into words, how could he tell her, that even that fine new mansion was only an expression of his hatred, so universal, so all-embracing, and so mingled with revenge? He had no eloquent words. He could n
ot tell her.

  She said, almost repellently: “And you do have three lovely daughters.”

  He still did not answer. She looked away from him. “There is another difficulty, too. In the natural course of events, our children will meet. They met once. I sent Anthony to England for nearly four years after that. But there will be no more running away. He must eventually have to return home from college, even during the holidays. What then?”

  He was still silent. He seemed suddenly broken and exhausted. He put his hands over his face, and she knew he neither cared about nor heard what she had said.

  She was repulsed rather than touched by his foolishness. She said serenely, as if he had answered her question: “Perhaps you are right. If our children meet, it will do no harm, though it might cause a slight embarrassment under certain circumstances. However, it is not worth one’s worry just yet.”

  She gazed at him expectantly. He had dropped his hands; they hung between his knees. He was staring emptily at the fire.

  Now her impatience rose up so strong in her that her eyes flashed like steel. She pressed her lips together, and sitting stiffly beside him felt nothing now but scorn and icy contempt for his weakness, for his self-deliverance to emotion, frenzy and extravagance. She thought of her life apart from him. She had made many agreeable friends, had adjusted herself admirably. Her lonely girlhood was forgotten. She realized that loneliness had been abnormal, and had set out to change her life. She was the acknowledged leader among many friends and admirers, and enjoyed this position of social power. She dominated the household of Richard Gorth, who was now excessively fond of her. No one disputed her word, not even Andrew, though she realized she had her way with him because he was perpetually amused by her. But in this vigorous country she enjoyed her life greatly, mistress of a large fortune in her own name. Cool, sensible, astute and selfish, she was adored by scores, as is usually the case with people of her temperament. Never had pure emotion ridden over her calmer decisions.