by May Sarton
“Now what on earth are you getting at?” Charles asked, carefully tamping the tobacco down in his pipe. Sally found herself always watching his neat way of doing things, as if one could read in the way he folded up his tobacco pouch the very essence of the man.
“Well”—she forced herself to make the point—“I mean this life here. It flows along. You go out with Cammaert. Aunt Violet does the flowers. There is the house always to be thinking of—but what does it all mean?” she said almost crossly, because it was an effort to say it at all.
“You know,” he lounged comfortably beside her, not at all disturbed, “I’ve never asked myself that question. You see, I was forced to retire rather younger than is usual by the Burma business—and well—here we are.” He looked over at her with a kindly half-amused look, as if she were a child, Sally thought.
“What does the house mean then? What is it all about, this tradition, this big house set down in the midst of the country? Surely the life such things represent doesn’t exist any more? Does it?” The more she tried to pin down what had been in her mind, the more baffled she felt. Miss Park and Vassar seemed infinitely remote, though she begged them inwardly to come to her aid. “You said yourself you didn’t much like it.” She was ashamed of herself for this lapse into what Miss Park would call an Ad Hominem argument.
“Did I?” Charles sat up, indignant. “Whenever did I say that?”
“Oh,” Sally pulled up a piece of grass and looked at it, “the other day when we were walking down the drive. You said not to tell Violet.”
The antagonism he felt excited Charles. For someone so young Sally had an amazing power of disconcerting him, and he jabbed back like a very young man.
“What about your fiance? What’s going to be the meaning of your life and his, eh?” He said it sharply as one parries a real thrust.
“I hate you.” Sally turned her face away to hide the tears which she would not, would not allow to fall, and tearing up another tuft of grass, “You’re mean.”
“You’ve got to take as good as you give.”
There was now a silence. If Sally had wanted to break the spell, she had succeeded beautifully. Her fists were clenched in her pockets. She would have liked to hit Charles.
“I love him,” she said through the tears which now would not be forced back. “Leave me alone.”
Charles was not a man whom tears irritated. Violet never cried; he had little experience of tears, and he was very much upset now. He reached over to put his hand on the small tear-stained fist. “You do make it hard for us, you know—”
“I know,” she was sobbing now, great ugly sobs, “I can’t h—h—help it.”
When Violet looked up she saw a blur which seemed to be Charles and Sally embracing. The eternity of the afternoon split open to exactly half past three, for for some reason she looked at her watch. She became exactly fifty-two years old, and the sharpness of her suffering exactly matched the happiness she had experienced a moment before. But it’s not possible, she thought, wishing for once that she did wear glasses.
A few seconds later she realized that Sally was in tears and that Charles had been comforting her, that was all. But the initial shock had been too great and she could not get it out of her consciousness like some vivid dream which colors the whole of a day, and even affects one’s attitude to people who have appeared in it quite unlike their real selves.
“It’s really too hot,” she said, coming up to where they sat. “We’d better get back to the house.” She was annoyed with herself for feeling embarrassed.
“Come along, old girl.” Charles got up with amazing lightness and pulled Sally to her feet by her two wrists, then turned to Violet and met her clear gaze unabashed. “We’ve done rather well as a matter of fact,” he said. Violet saw that he meant the strawberries, as he held out the two pails.
“Look!” She showed her nearly full basket and triumphed.
The procession formed itself again, Charles taking the lead, Violet following him, and Sally, disheveled, ashamed of herself, straggling behind, a cigarette hanging from her lips. Because she had cried, Charles would feel he had some real relationship with her now. Especially as she had to admit that it had been a comfort to lean against his shoulder, an immense comfort. This, she knew, was even more dangerous. For she could handle what he might think of her, she could withdraw. But she could not handle what she might feel herself. She had not said what she meant about the house. It had sprung out of a desire to attack, to break the spell, but now she felt it had been after all a real question, a major question. She was walking slowly, absorbed in these thoughts, looking down at the grass and the buttercups. She hardly noticed how far behind she was. When she lifted her head she saw Uncle Charles and Aunt Violet now from a great distance as if they were children, sauntering along, absorbed in the pleasures of the moment, impervious to imminent war, to the fall of empires, as children are, entirely enclosed in their private life, it seemed. What did Charles think about Burma? Had he been angry when he was driven out, or only sad because the teak, as he had explained to her, was a complicated business and the Burmese did not have the trained people to take over? Was he really as detached, as magnanimous as he seemed?
Uncle Charles took the basket from his wife’s arm. They feel nothing passionately except themselves, Sally decided. They have no convictions. They are useless people like the people in Chekhov, she decided, relieved to have defined them and so, in a sense, got rid of them as presences who had the power of putting her in the wrong continually, of treating her as a wayward child.
At least Ian earns his living—part of the time, she thought, walking quickly now, her head high. Yes, she thought, Ian earns as much as five hundred a week when he has a job. Yes.
She caught up with them, just as they had crossed the stream, and turned to wait for her. Sally stood looking across as if what flowed between them here was more than the shallow brook, time itself, a wholly different vision of life, and there could be no crossing over. Charles wondered why she was standing there like a little stubborn foal, staring as if she saw something she might shy at.
“Come along,” he said, “and be careful of the stones—they’re slippery,” for he was still feeling solicitous.
Obediently, for it did not matter, she sat down and took off her shoes and socks, this time without hurrying, as if she were in command. How different from her clumsiness and panic on the way over! She rolled her socks neatly into her shoes, held them in one hand by the strings and her pail in the other. She felt graceful and at ease and enjoyed the delicious coolness of the water flowing over her bare feet.
She would have liked to stay there and paddle about, and with something of this in her mind, perhaps to tell them to go along, she lifted her head. It happened that her eyes met Aunt Violet’s and for the second time the clear blue gaze touched her, reached down to the most secret part of herself.
This time Violet knew very well what she was doing. She was looking, with a sense of Sally’s reality as a person and not just a child, and judging her as one judges a real antagonist. It was a powerful collision.
And then, as if they had been playing that game where the players lock hands and try to throw each other off balance, the locked glance slipped as Sally grasped wildly into the air and fell plunk into the water, the pail of strawberries emptied out and bobbing away. It took Charles half a second to run in and lift her out, still clinging to her shoes which she had managed to keep clear of the water.
“You do fall down rather a lot,” Charles said, smiling broadly at the dripping little figure which looked so angrily and fiercely at him.
“Don’t tease her, Charles.” Violet could afford to be magnanimous.
“As long as I did fall you should have let me enjoy lying in the brook. It felt lovely,” Sally said harshly. “You would come and pull me out. You would have to do that.” She ran off down the path ahead of them in her bare feet, the shoes bobbing up and down clumsily in her hand.
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br /> When they got back to the house, Sally had disappeared. There was no sound, Violet noticed, as she stopped on the landing wondering if she could go up to Sally’s room, and deciding against it. Charles had been rather miffed at being treated so roughly.
She felt tired as if she were on the brink of a journey she did not want at all to make. Or was it only the journey back into the angular present from the gentle flow of the past? She felt without reasoning that the afternoon had had an imminent quality, like one of those immensely placid summer days that are called weather breeders.
And then she remembered that some nice dull acquaintances from a domain twenty miles away were coming to tea. It would be a good thing, perhaps, if Sally for once conformed and changed into a dress. Later she would go up and tell her so. Later, not now. Now she would lie down on the great bed and close her eyes, and not think of anything. But is there a cake? Violet thought, slipping into a dressing gown.
Sally was sitting in the embrasure of the window, her arms clasped round her knees. She was shivering. Always the house felt cold when one came in from out of doors, and even her sweater pulled up round her chin did not stop the shiver. But she sat there, looking out at the grove of oaks and the familiar sweep of the hill as she had looked at them from the window of the library the day she had talked to Aunt Violet when she was arranging the flowers. The landscape which she refused usually to look at, which was simply there, part of all that she would not accept, nor feel, rested her now. It was queerly consoling. It set a bound, a rim to the intense loneliness, whereas the house always seemed like a shell, a huge, silent shell which threatened to engulf her because she had no way to fill it, because she would have no part of the life inside it, such as it was.
I am suffering from something, she thought, but I do not know what it is. Her anger against Charles, her passionate tears, her passionate assertion of her love for Ian—none of it seemed real. What seemed real was Aunt Violet alone in the far end of the pasture, Aunt Violet staring at her with so deep a judging look at the brook. I’ve been wounded, but I don’t know where, she thought. Where? she asked herself, getting up quickly and staring into the mirror. Her own eyes looked bold and opaque to her now. There was no look in them at all. So what had Aunt Violet seen which made the black pupils open like a shutter in the clear blue iris? It was as if she had taken a photograph of a secret. Sally felt exposed, a little frightened. I have given something away, she thought, but I don’t know what it is.
Very slowly she began a letter to Ian as if this might help. “I am becoming so stupid here for lack of any real life, because I miss you so terribly all the time, that today I cried and also fell into a brook when we came back from picking strawberries—” but what would Ian know of picking strawberries? How could she possibly communicate with him? Or tell him? She had got no further, but was still sitting on the edge of the bed, sucking her pen in a rather childish hypnotized way when Aunt Violet knocked.
“May I come in for a moment?” Violet was dismayed by the foreign look of her room which, she thought, resembled a limbo, clothes flung down on the floor, roses faded in their glass. “My dear child, I must get you some fresh flowers. Doesn’t Maire ever tidy up for you? I must speak to her…” She stood with the wet jeans in her hand, plainly upset.
Sally had not moved. She sat on the edge of the bed, looking at her aunt with amusement and pleasure.
“Don’t speak to Maire,” she said finally while Aunt Violet fidgeted about, throwing the roses into the waste-basket with her free hand. “It’s my fault, Aunt Violet—and do put down those horrible jeans.”
Aunt Violet fended off the hand ready to take them from her. “I’ll put them to dry in the kitchen. I came up because,” she hesitated, spoke almost breathlessly as if she were afraid of a rebuff, “I thought you might like to change for tea. There are some people coming.”
“What people?” Sally backed away against the chest of drawers.
“Oh, just the Desmonds. They have a place twenty miles away. They’re rather dull, as a matter of fact. Charles will talk horses with them, and you and I,” she said with an air of complicity, “will look as pretty as possible. They will eat a great deal—Good Heavens, I must go down and see about food!—They will ask to be shown the house.” Violet had not meant to draw quite such a cruel portrait, but now she was enjoying herself, and enjoying Sally’s softened air. “Do be a good child and help,” she ended, drinking from Sally’s eyes the wine of admiration, of respect, of love which could make her beauty shine even now. She could feel the aura she had missed like a tangible luminosity around her. And it did not matter very much to Violet, it never had, from whom this light came, as long as it came from someone, as long as she was not without it.
“All right”—Sally sounded as if she were granting half a kingdom to a Queen—“I’ll put on a dress.”
And Violet’s smile then, so unexpectedly radiant, was worth half Sally’s kingdom. She went off, moving lightly across the ballroom, as if she were suddenly ten years younger. The only thing she had wanted, at times rather desperately, from Sally, was recognition. Now, slightly ashamed of herself, she felt, I exist again. What a queer thing!
Sally dressed, conscious of this new desire to please which was driving her beyond all her resolutions. I’ll be pretty, she thought grimly, if it kills me. And then, quite suddenly, she laughed. After all, why not yield to charm as long as one didn’t believe in it, as long as she could hang on to her defined conception of her aunt as a useless person with no purpose?
Why not give people what they wanted? Mightn’t this be an even better way of keeping oneself intact? And how much pleasanter and easier life would become! I’ve been a fool, she thought, a silly little fool.
She had deliberately waited until she heard the car drive up, so she came down the main flight of stairs as the Desmonds were entering the great hall from the terrace. They were four: a tweedy gentleman in a suit like Bernard Shaw’s with rolled woolen socks to the knee; a dowdy woman with a surprised look dressed in a Liberty print with a choker of amber beads which did not match the pinks and yellows of the dress; and two awkward, red-faced, very pretty girls in gray flannel suits. They brought with them an atmosphere which Sally felt at once as wholly different from her uncle’s and aunt’s and—she decided—saner. Or was it only duller? They shook hands with no apparent interest in her, except for Mr. Desmond’s fleeting look of astonishment, and concentrated at once upon the house as if it were a thoroughbred horse whose points must be completely appreciated before they could settle down.
“Yes—quite—I see,” Mr. Desmond nodded as Charles pointed out the cornices, the ceiling, and no one but Sally seemed to notice or care that the wallpaper was peeling off along one wall and hanging down in strips. They commented upon the Victorian additions. They stood, a compact group, and surveyed the staircase, Mrs. Desmond pursing her lips appreciatively. Then they turned to the wall of portraits.
Angus Desmond froze into attention like a pointing dog and then beat his temple with one finger, as if he could pin down a memory hidden there, as he adumbrated Violet’s comments, with curious facts of his own, about Sarah St. Leger. “Outside the pattern, eh, Mrs. Gordon?” and passing on to a rather dim face, he paused, “Oh yes, oh yes—the sister of my great-grand-father’s first wife, isn’t it? What was her name now?” the impatient finger tapped his temple again, “Elisabeth? Caroline? No, what am I saying? Charlotte, of course. Charlotte Dene—” and he looked at the face on the wall as if he had remembered her as a child, though she had died before he was born, “of a fall from a horse,” he remembered. “It was rather mysterious, eh? Rumors, tales—” he added, and fell into somber reflection, upon, perhaps, the difficulties of historical accuracy in a country in which the simplest fact quickly grew from mouth to mouth into fantastic mythical splendor, violence or crime.
He then turned suddenly and looked Sally up and down as if he were measuring hers against the faces on the wall. “You can still see i
t, eh?” he said, smiling his pleasure as he bent towards Violet, “something in the eyes, that Dene look, a bit eccentric, what? There’s a will there, not quite the usual thing…”
Sally blushed. She felt that her lipstick was out of place, that her severely cut yellow dress was too smart, that she was fatally outside the picture. And for the first time she looked up at the portraits of her ancestors on the wall with immense curiosity. What part of her came down from these, and what from ancestors of her father’s? How were they intermingled?
The whole group moved now through the closed doors of the drawing room where, for some reason, Sally had not yet been. She stood on the threshold after they had passed through. In one corner an empty pedestal was covered with dust. Against the wall there were two long mirrors with delicate gilded frames and beneath them a sofa covered by a torn sheet. Otherwise the great high room was empty. The others had turned the corner and were out of sight. She heard something about the dining room,
“Victorian, of course. We don’t know what to do with it,” Violet was saying.
Still she stood on the threshold while the past flowed round her like an air current, assailed her nerves like a draught, not warm and enfolding like Violet’s experience of it in the field, but frightening, dilapidated, inescapable, a weight. Why had that Charlotte Dene fallen from her horse? What did Mr. Desmond mean by “eccentric”? Were her people not like other people? Was there madness here? Is that what Charles feels about the house, she wondered?
“What are you doing there?” Charles asked, coming towards her purposefully across the long empty floor. “I must say, you’re looking very charming, Sally,” he said, taking one of her hands and kissing it, as if such a gesture were the most natural he could imagine. “Come and see the dining room. There’s gloom for you,” he added and chuckled.
“But I don’t want gloom,” she said, walking very slowly and carefully after him as if he were tracing a path for her through walls of water, through crushing walls of some sort. “It frightens me here.”