Edith Wharton - SSC 09

by Human Nature (v2. 1)

  He put his hand out. “Barbara—don’t! Barbara—I implore you!”

  She turned the electric ray on the sheet of paper, which detached itself from the shadows with the solidity of a graven tablet. Slowly she read out, in a cool measured voice, almost as though she were parodying his poor phrases: “‘November tenth…. You will probably feel as I do’ (no—don’t snatch! Ambrose, I forbid you!) ‘You will probably feel, as I do, that after what has happened you and I can never’—” She broke off and raised her eyes to Trenham’s. “‘After what has happened’? I don’t understand. What do you mean? What has happened, Ambrose—between you and me?”

  He had retreated a few steps, and stood leaning against the side of the motor. “I didn’t say ‘between you and me.’“

  “What did you say?” She turned the light once more on the fatal page. “‘You and I can never wish to meet again.’” Her hand sank, and she stood facing him in silence.

  Feeling her gaze fixed on him, he muttered miserably: “I asked you not to read the thing.”

  “But if it was meant for me why do you want me not to read it?”

  “Can’t you see? It doesn’t mean anything. I was raving mad when I wrote it. …”

  “But you wrote it only a few hours ago. It’s dated today.

  How can you have changed so in a few hours? And you say: ‘After what has happened.’ That must mean something. What does it mean? What has happened?”

  He thought he would go mad indeed if she repeated the word again. “Oh, don’t—!” he exclaimed.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Say it over and over—’what has happened?’ Can’t you understand that just at first—”

  He broke off, and she prompted him: “Just at first—?”

  “I couldn’t bear the horror alone. Like a miserable coward I let myself think you were partly responsible—I wanted to think so, you understand….”

  Her face seemed to grow white and wavering in the shadows. “What do you mean? Responsible for what?”

  He straightened his shoulders and said slowly: “Responsible for her death. I was too weak to carry it alone.”

  “Her death?” There was a silence that seemed to make the shadowy place darker. He could hardly see her face now, she was so far off. “How could I be responsible?” she broke off, and then began again: “Are you—trying to tell me—that it wasn’t an accident?”

  “No—it wasn’t an accident.”

  “She—”

  “Well, can’t you guess?” he stammered, panting.

  “You mean—she killed herself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because of us?”

  He could not speak, and after a moment she hurried on: “But what makes you think so? What proof have you? Did she tell any one? Did she leave a message—a letter?”

  He summoned his voice to his dry throat. “No; nothing.”

  “Well, then—?”

  “She’d told me beforehand; she’d warned me—”

  “Warned you?”

  “That if I went on seeing you … and I did go on seeing you … She warned me again and again. Do you understand now?” he exclaimed, twisting round on her fiercely, like an animal turning on its torturer.

  There was an interval of silence—endless it seemed to him. She did not speak or move; but suddenly he heard a low sobbing sound. She was weeping, weeping like a frightened child…. Well, of all the unexpected turns of fate! A moment ago he had seemed to feel her strength flowing into his cold veins, had thought to himself: “I shall never again be alone with my horror—” and now the horror had spread from him to her, and he felt her inwardly recoiling as though she shuddered away from the contagion.

  “Oh, how dreadful, how dreadful—” She began to cry again, like a child swept by a fresh gust of misery as the last subsides.

  “Why dreadful?” he burst out, unnerved by the continuance of her soft unremitting sobs. “You must have known she didn’t like it—didn’t you?”

  Through her lament a whisper issued: “I never dreamed she knew. …”

  “You mean to say you thought we’d deceived her? All those months? In a one-horse place where everybody is on the watch to see what everybody else is doing? Likely, isn’t it? My God—”

  “I never dreamed … I never dreamed …” she reiterated.

  His exasperation broke out again. “Well, now you begin to see what I’ve suffered—”

  “Suffered? You suffered?” She uttered a low sound of derision. “I see what she must have suffered—what we both of us must have made her suffer.”

  “Ah, at least you say ‘both of us’!”

  She made no answer, and through her silence he felt again that she was inwardly shrinking, averting herself from him. What! His accomplice deserting him? She acknowledged that she was his accomplice—she said “both of us”—and yet she was drawing back from him, flying from him, leaving him alone! Ah, no—she shouldn’t escape as easily as that, she shouldn’t leave him; he couldn’t face that sense of being alone again. “Barbara!” he cried out, as if the actual distance between them had already doubled.

  She still remained silent, and he hurried on, almost cringingly: “Don’t think I blame you, child—don’t think …”

  “Oh, what does it matter, when I blame myself?” she wailed out, her face in her hands.

  “Blame yourself? What folly! When you say you didn’t know—”

  “Of course I didn’t know! How can you imagine—? But this dreadful thing has happened; and you knew it might happen … you knew it all along … all the while it was in the back of your mind … the days when we used to meet here … and the days when we went to Ditson … oh, that horrible room at Ditson! All that time she was sitting at home alone, knowing everything, and hating me as if I’d been her murderess. …”

  “Good God, Barbara! Don’t you suppose I blame myself?”

  “But if you blamed yourself how could you go on, how could you let me think she didn’t care?”

  “I didn’t suppose she did,” he muttered sullenly.

  “But you say she told you—she warned you! Over and over again she warned you.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to believe her—and so I didn’t. When a man’s infatuated … Don’t you see it’s hard enough to bear without all this? Haven’t you any pity for me, Barbara?”

  “Pity?” she repeated slowly. “The only pity I feel is for her—for what she must have gone through, day after day, week after week, sitting there all alone and knowing … imagining exactly what you were saying to me … the way you kissed me … and watching the clock, and counting the hours … and then having you come back, and explain, and pretend—I suppose you did pretend? … and all the while secretly knowing you were lying, and yet longing to believe you … and having warned you, and seeing that her warnings made no difference … that you didn’t care if she died or not … that you were doing all you could to kill her … that you were probably counting the days till she was dead!” Her passionate apostrophe broke down in a sob, and again she stood weeping like an inconsolable child.

  Trenham was struck silent. It was true. He had never been really able to enter into poor Milly’s imaginings, the matter of her lonely musings; and here was this girl to whom, in a flash, that solitary mind lay bare. Yes; that must have been the way Milly felt—he knew it now—and the way poor Barbara herself would feel if he ever betrayed her. Ah, but he was never going to betray her—the thought was monstrous! Never for a moment would he cease to love her. This catastrophe had bound them together as a happy wooing could never have done. It was her love for him, her fear for their future, that was shaking her to the soul, giving her this unnatural power to enter into Milly’s mind. If only he could find words to reassure her, now, at once. But he could not think of any.

  “Barbara—Barbara,” he kept on repeating, as if her name were a sort of incantation.

  “Oh, think of it—those lonely endless hours! I wonder if you ever did think of
them before? When you used to go home after one of our meetings, did you remember each time what she’d told you, and begin to wonder, as you got near the house, if she’d done it that day!”

  “Barbara—”

  “Perhaps you did—perhaps you were even vexed with her for being so slow about it. Were you?”

  “Oh, Barbara—Barbara …”

  “And when the day came at last, were you surprised? Had you got so impatient waiting that you’d begun to believe she’d never do it? Were there days when you went almost mad at having to wait so long for your freedom? It was the way I used to feel when I was rushing for the train to Ditson, and father would call me at the last minute to write letters for him, or mother to replace her on some charity committee; there were days when I could have killed them, almost, for interfering with me, making me miss one of our precious hours together. Killed them, I say! Don’t you suppose I know how murderers feel? How you feel—for you’re a murderer, you know! And now you come here, when the earth’s hardly covered her, and try to kiss me, and ask me to marry you—and think, I suppose, that by doing so you’re covering up her memory more securely, you’re pounding down the earth on her a little harder. …”

  She broke off, as if her own words terrified her, and hid her eyes from the vision they called up.

  Trenham stood without moving. He had gathered up the letters, and they lay in a neat pile on the floor between himself and her, because there seemed no other place to put them. He said to himself (reflecting how many million men must have said the same thing at such moments): “After this she’ll calm down, and by tomorrow she’ll be telling me how sorry she is….” But the reflection did not seem to help him. She might forget—but he would not. He had forgotten too easily before; he had an idea that his future would be burdened with long arrears of remembrance. Just as the girl described Milly, so he would see her in the years to come. He would have to pay the interest on his oblivion; and it would not help much to have Barbara pay it with him. The job was probably one that would have to be accomplished alone. At last words shaped themselves without his knowing it. “I’d better go,” he said.

  Unconsciously he had expected an answer; an appeal; a protest, perhaps. But none came. He moved away a few steps in the direction of the door. As he did so he heard Barbara break into a laugh, and the sound, so unnatural in that place, and at that moment, brought him abruptly to a halt.

  “Yes—?” he said, half turning, as though she had called him.

  “And I sent a wreath—I sent her a wreath! It’s on her grave now—it hasn’t even had time to fade!”

  “Oh—” he gasped, as if she had struck him across the face. They stood forlornly confronting each other. Her last words seemed to have created an icy void between them. Within himself a voice whispered: “She can’t find anything worse than that.” But he saw by the faint twitch of her lips that she was groping, groping—

  “And the worst of it is,” she broke out, “that if I didn’t go away, and we were to drag on here together, after a time I might even drift into forgiving you.”

  Yes; she was right; that was certainly the worst of it. Human imagination could not go beyond that, he thought. He moved away again stiffly.

  “Well, you are going away, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Yes; I’m going.”

  He walked back slowly through the dark deserted streets. His brain, reeling with the shock of the encounter, gradually cleared, and looked about on the new world within itself. At first the inside of his head was like a deserted house out of which all the furniture has been moved, down to the last familiar encumbrances. It was empty, absolutely empty. But gradually a small speck of consciousness appeared in the dreary void, like a mouse scurrying across bare floors. He stopped on a street corner to say to himself: “But after all nothing is changed—absolutely nothing. I went there to tell her that we should probably never want to see each other again; and she agreed with me. She agreed with me—that’s all.”

  It was a relief, almost, to have even that little thought stirring about in the resonant void of his brain. He walked on more quickly, reflecting, as he reached his own corner: “In a minute it’s going to rain.” He smiled a little at his unconscious precaution in hurrying home to escape the rain. “Jane will begin to fret—she’ll be sure to notice that I didn’t take my umbrella.” And his cold heart felt a faint warmth at the thought that some one in the huge hostile world would really care whether he had taken his umbrella or not. “But probably she’s in bed and asleep,” he mused, despondently.

  On his door-step he paused and began to grope for his latch-key. He felt impatiently in one pocket after another—but the key was not to be found. He had an idea that he had left it lying on his study table when he came in after—after what? Why, that very morning, after the funeral! He had flung the key down among his papers—and Jane would never notice that it was there. She would never think of looking; she had been bidden often enough on no account to meddle with the things on his desk. And besides she would take for granted that he had the key in his pocket. And here he stood, in the middle of the night, locked out of his own house—

  A sudden exasperation possessed him. He was aware that he must have lost all sense of proportion, all perspective, for he felt as baffled and as angry as when Barbara’s furious words had beaten down on him. Yes; it made him just as unhappy to find himself locked out of his house—he could have sat down on the door-step and cried. And here was the rain beginning….

  He put his hand to the bell; but did the front door bell ring in the far-off attic where the maids were lodged? And was there the least chance of the faint tinkle from the pantry mounting two flights, and penetrating to their sleep-muffled ears? Utterly improbable, he knew. And if he couldn’t make them hear he would have to spend the night at a hotel—the night of his wife’s funeral! And the next morning all Kingsborough would know of it, from the President of the University to the boy who delivered the milk….

  But his hand had hardly touched the bell when he felt a vibration of life in the house. First there was a faint flash of light through the transom above the front door; then, scarcely distinguishable from the noises of the night, a step sounded far off: it grew louder on the hall floor, and after an interval that seemed endless the door was flung open by a Jane still irreproachably capped and aproned.

  “Why, Jane—I didn’t think you’d be awake! I forgot my key. …”

  “I know, sir. I found it. I was waiting.” She took his wet coat from him. “Dear, dear! And you hadn’t your umbrella.”

  He stepped into his own hall, and heard her close and bar the door behind him. He liked to listen to that familiar slipping of the bolts and clink of the chain. He liked to think that she minded about his not having his umbrella. It was his own house, after all—and this friendly hand was shutting him safely into it. The dreadful sense of loneliness melted a little at the old reassuring touch of habit.

  “Thank you, Jane; sorry I kept you up,” he muttered, nodding to her as he went upstairs.

  (Woman’s Home companion 60, January/February 1933)

  

  A Glimpse.

  I.

  As John Kilvert got out of the motor at the Fusina landing-stage, and followed his neat suit-cases on board the evening boat for Venice, he growled to himself inconsequently: “Always on wheels! When what I really want is to walk—”

  To walk? How absurd! Would he even have known how to, any longer? In youth he had excelled in the manly exercises then fashionable: lawn tennis, racquets, golf and the rest. He had even managed, till well over forty, to combine the more violent of these with his busy life of affairs in New York, and since then, with devout regularity and some success, had conformed to the national ritual of golf. But the muscles used for a mere walk were probably long since atrophied; and, indeed, so little did this modest form of exercise enter into the possibilities of his life that in his sudden outburst he had used the word metaphorically, meaning that all a
t once his existence seemed to him too cushioned, smooth and painless—he didn’t know why.

  Perhaps it was the lucky accident of finding himself on board the wrong boat—the unfashionable boat; an accident caused by the chauffeur’s having mistaken a turn soon after they left Padua, missed the newly opened “autostrada,” and slipped through reed-grown byways to the Fusina water-side. It was a hot Sunday afternoon in September, and a throng of dull and dingy-looking holiday-makers were streaming across the gang-plank onto the dirty deck, and setting down with fretful babies, withered flowers, and baskets stuffed with provisions from the mainland on the narrow uncomfortable bench along the rail. Perhaps it was that—at any rate the discomfort did not annoy John Kilvert; on the contrary, it gave him a vague glow of satisfaction. Camping for an hour on this populous garlicky boat would be almost the equivalent of walking from Padua to Fusina instead of gliding there in the commodious Fiat he had hired at Milan. And to begin with, why had he hired it? Why hadn’t the train been good enough for him? What was the matter with him, anyhow? … He hadn’t meant to include Venice in his holiday that summer. He had settled down in Paris to do some systematic sightseeing in the Ile-de-France: French church architecture was his hobby, he had collected a library on the subject, and liked going on archaeological trips (also in a commodious motor, with a pause for lunch at the most reputed restaurants) in company with a shy shabby French archaeologist who could guide and explain, and save him the labour of reading all the books he bought. But he concealed his archaeological interests from most of his American friends because they belonged to a cosmopolitan group who thought that motors were made for speeding, not sight-seeing, and that Paris existed merely to launch new fashions, new plays and new restaurants, for rich and easily bored Americans. John Kilvert, at fifty-five, had accepted this point of view with the weary tolerance which had long since replaced indignation in his moral make-up.

  And now, after all, his plans had been upset by a telegram from Sara Roseneath, insisting that he should come to Venice at once to help her about her fancy-dress for the great historical ball which was to be given at the Ducal Palace (an unheard-of event, looming in cosmopolitan society far higher than declarations of war, or peace treaties). And he had started.