This Side of Innocence

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  Dorothea reflected that men were fools, and this ancient conclusion of millions of women before her seemed to her a fresh revelation that ought to be taught women-children in their cradles. Men are obtuse, she cried to herself. A youthful cheek, a soft treacherous laugh, a slender ankle or the flirt of a curl have power to reduce them to driveling idiots and to set them gamboling like drunken goats in strange pastures. But always it is to women like me that they return temporarily, to be soothed and comforted, and always it is from women like me that they run at the first bending of a little distant finger.

  Her hands, even in the dim twilight busy with her knitting, paused. She stared before her fixedly, and her face flushed hotly. She had just reached a most improper and indelicate conclusion. For men’s sake, women like herself ought to be slyly determined and grim. They ought to go forth to these men boldly, and say to them: “You are a fool. I am the woman for you, and I am obstinately set on marrying you. You may flee from me, but I will follow. I shall be your shadow. I shall haunt you implacably. Until you succumb; until you surrender. And the day will come when you will thank me, and know me, and we shall be happy together.”

  What an indecorous thought! But one must accept it, in the name of common sense, and in the name of the welfare of these lumbering but beloved imbeciles. She thought: Even if he is released from that woman, he will stumble about miserably, until he comes upon another like her, and I shall lose him again. No! This time I shall succeed, if I have to face him down immodestly and announce that he must marry me.

  Her heart was misbehaving with such intensity that her breath was short, and the dark heat increased in her face. Alfred, of course, was completely unconscious of his cousin’s thoughts. He knew only that it was soothing and kind to be here with her in the twilight, and that the uncertain lines of her figure gave him comfort in his present anxiety and pain. Dear Dorothea! She was always there, his sister and his friend, utterly without sex for him, and that was so consoling!

  He had been telling her of his successes in New York, and the edifying conversations he had had with Mr. Regan, who was so excessively civil and thoughtful. But even as his voice warmed, there was an abstracted note in it which Dorothea’s acuteness easily discerned. She knew he was thinking of that woman, and in the growing darkness her lips pressed themselves together.

  To her, as to all women of her generation, divorce was abhorrent, a shameful thing not to be spoken of even in whispers by genteel females. Yet now, in her new determination, she contemplated it with almost savage resolution. Marriages like these were crimes against society. They were crimes against the stupid men themselves, committed ignorantly and blindly. Now she regarded divorce for Alfred calmly, even exultantly. It was her opportunity; she would take it. She waited only for the proper moment, and she knew it would come very soon. She thought: Divorced men and women can rarely marry again. Fiddlesticks! What absurdity! As well refuse one who has recovered from a dangerous disease or a great wound! Of course, there will be unpleasantnesses, and scandals, and much raising of hands. But sensible people do not allow the opinions of strangers to guide them in their lives.

  These revolutionary thoughts did not excite her as they might have done in the near past. They only exhilarated her, made her pose her head quite grimly and click her needles with renewed vim. And now her heart was beating with a kind of wild and unrestrained happiness. It was necessary to endure only a few short months of disagreeable events and disturbances, and these were a small price to pay for a whole lifetime of contentment and fulfilment.

  The influence of the dream of her mother was still powerful upon her, and helped keep in check her chronic hostility towards her brother. She felt around her the strong walls of the house where she had been born. She and Alfred would make their lives here, with Philip. Jerome and that abominable woman would live elsewhere. She, Dorothea, did not care. Jerome would find it quite impossible to live in this community, because of public opinion, even if the divorce were consummated with great delicacy and private reticence. A divorced woman was always a pariah. Undoubtedly, they would leave Riversend, and that would hurt her father. Well, that must be expected and accepted. She, Dorothea, would do nothing to injure Jerome, or disgrace him. She sighed.

  Alfred heard her sigh. He had long since ceased to speak. The twilight deepened. He cleared his throat. Dorothea thought: Now he will speak of her, and I must be ready.

  She heard him shift in his chair. “I am calling Dr. Hawley in tomorrow, to see Amalie,” he said.

  Dorothea’s needles clicked louder.

  “She is in a most deplorable condition,” he continued anxiously. “Much worse than when I left her. At that time, I had my hopes that—” He paused, catching himself hastily. He had been at the point of mentioning a matter it was not decorous to discuss with an unmarried female.

  Dorothea inhaled determinedly. “You mean, do you not, Alfred, that you hoped Amalie was going to have a baby?”

  Alfred was overcome with, embarrassment. He gave his cousin an apologetic but reproving glance. She did not see it, however, because of the increasing dusk, and though she felt it she ignored it.

  Alfred coughed. “You might call it that,” he admitted remotely.

  He added, when Dorothea remained silent: “But she tells me that—that my hopes were, unfortunately, unfounded. She has visited Dr. Hawley, and he has given her a tonic. But I may as well confess to you, Dorothea, that I find her appearance, alarming. She has lost much flesh and her color is very bad,” His voice was measured, but Dorothea heard his urgent anxiety. “Do you not agree with me?”

  Dorothea dropped her knitting into her lap. She looked before her. Then she said, very quietly: “Amalie appears to me to be suffering from some great unhappiness.”

  Alfred moved quickly. Dorothea felt him turn fully to her. “Unhappiness!” he exclaimed, and there was a break, repudiating and angry, in his voice. “Why should she be unhappy? I have given her whatever she has desired. I—I love her very much. There is nothing I would not do for her.”

  Dorothea felt the taste of bitter salt in her mouth. She picked up her knitting again. “Sometimes that is not enough,” she murmured with apparent composure.

  “Not enough! What else can I do? I would give my life for her, Dorothea!”

  Dorothea’s heart burned, and tears moistened her eyelids.

  “That is not always enough,” she said. “Amalie did not love you when she married you, Alfred. You knew that and spoke of it freely. Perhaps she still does not love you.”

  You fool! she cried inwardly. Why do you waste your life on such a creature, when I am at your hand, loving you, asking nothing more than to serve you, to dedicate myself to you! Yet you sit beside me and talk of “love” for that abominable woman, and pain me more than I can endure!

  Alfred was saying, hoarsely but with pathetic insistence: “You are wrong, Dorothea. Amalie does love me. We were very close, after Uncle William’s illness. We understood each other. She begged me not to leave her, when I had to go to New York. I could not take her—because of my unfounded hopes. You do not understand how it is between a man and his wife, Dorothea. My wife,” he added, with such a desperate yearning in his words that Dorothea could not prevent herself from tossing aside her knitting and clasping her hands together in a kind of anguished convulsion.

  She said, quickly and with involuntary force: “Alfred, I know Amalie is unhappy. You ought not to have married her. Please forgive me for speaking so freely, but you are my cousin, my adopted brother, and if there cannot be truth between us, there can be no truth between any others. She is much younger than you, Alfred. She thought she wanted what you represented. But she does not want it now. She is perishing of grief, because she feels she is—is wronging you. But she desires to be free.”

  Alfred did not speak, but she sensed the confused violence and misery in him, his sudden hatred for her, his bewilderment. She felt him closing his mind against what she had been saying, and denying it, in
his wild sorrow. So she leaned towards him and laid her hand on his sleeve:

  “I know you have believed that matters were not felicitous between Amalie and me, Alfred. You were right, in a measure. But that is because I always knew that Amalie was wrong for you, exceedingly wrong, and that you are wrong for her.”

  He drew away from her, but with her new prescience she was not offended. She knew his gesture was the instinctive recoil of a hurt organism.

  “Has she told you of this?” he asked, his voice muffled. “She has confided in you?”

  Dorothea hesitated. Then she sighed, over and over. “Not in actual words. But in a certain manner. In certain gestures. In a certain way of walking—speaking—”

  She thought of what she had seen through Jerome’s window, over two months ago, and the memory was like the sudden unspringing of a fire in her mind.

  “Nebulous!” cried Alfred. “She is only lonely.”

  But not for you, thought Dorothea, mournfully.

  She sat back in her chair. “Perhaps,” she said. “But I am afraid it is not loneliness for you.”

  He laughed harshly. “For whom, then? Her old life, her old friends, her old insecurity and poverty?”

  “Perhaps.”

  There was silence between them, then, for a long time. Now Alfred stood up and began to walk slowlv back and forth over the terrace. He blotted out the pale moonlight as he passed before Dorothea, for the round argent moon was rising over the copse of pines. Dorothea was, all at once, quite ill. Strength left her hands; they fell flaccidly on the abandoned knitting. Her gray skirts fluttered about her ankles in a new soft wind. But she was aware only of this disconsolate and bewildered man pacing back and forth before her.

  “Why don’t you ask her whether she wishes to leave you?” she said, almost inaudibly.

  He stopped in front of her, abruptly.

  “What are you saying, Dorothea! Are you insane?”

  She tried to see his expression, but she could discern only the pale suffusion of his large face.

  “I cannot bear to see you so unhappy,” she said, and her voice was low and wretchedly pleading. “I—I am fond of you, Alfred. I remember how contented we all were, in this house, before—she—came. Now there is nothing but anxiety and doubt and discord. It is not that I resent her position in my home. I do not. I have done my best for her. But I know that she has brought unhappiness here, with her, and in herself, and to you. Think, Alfred, and you cannot deny it.”

  But his own anguish and his secret acknowledgment of the truth in Dorothea’s words excited him, made him frantic.

  “You have always hated Amalie! I knew that from the beginning. I saw your hatred in your eyes, Dorothea, from the first moment I brought her here, before we were married! How can you be so base, so mean? If my darling is unhappy, it is because you have made her so!”

  Dorothea was stupefied at these cruel and hasty accusations, and her pain flared up savagely. She rose to her feet. She faced him fully.

  “You are unjust, Alfred, and in your heart you know it. It Is true that I was never reconciled to her coming to my father’s house—”

  “I knew it!” he exclaimed. “It was always ‘my father’s house.’ You resented my presence here, but endured it. But you could no longer conceal your resentment when I brought a new mistress within the walls you considered your own!”

  She stretched out her hand and caught his arm. “Alfred! How can you speak so! So unkindly, so unjustly! You know your words are false; you know that I—we—have had nothing but love for you. This is your home, Alfred. You are my adopted brother, the adopted son of my father, who loves you. But you brought a stranger to this house, Alfred. Had it been anyone else I should have been reconciled, I should have been glad, for your sake. If she had made you happy. But Amalie has not made you happy. Long before you left for New York you appeared worn and uncertain and anxious. She was not one you could understand. You felt her strangeness. It is not your fault. In a way, it is not even hers. The marriage itself was a folly.”

  He tried to stiffen himself against her, but her voice, soft, imploring, urgent with some secret suffering, stirred him in spite of himself. He drew awav from her but gently.

  “Perhaps I was unjust, and too harsh, Dorothea, and I am sorry. But you are wrong about Amalie and me. We love each other. It is true that she had a very odd and unusual life before marrying me, but it was a life she was willing to abandon. Perhaps I have been too absorbed in business, and she has been lonely.”

  He paused. Then, in a quickened tone, he continued: “I have neglected her. I will tell her that in September we shall visit New York. She is a female of much sensibility, and of an ardent temperament, and this quiet house on the hilltop has been too intense a contrast with her eventful former life.

  “Dorothea, my dear, I have asked nothing more of you than that you be kind to Amalie. Perhaps she has not responded, or has misunderstood you, and misinterpreted your reserve—”

  Dorothea, in spite of the gathering darkness, looked at him in profound despair and intense agony. She clenched her hands at her sides to prevent them from seizing him; she pressed her lips together to prevent her voice from crying out to him her whole reckless longing and love. Tears blinded her; the milky moonlight became a pearly mist. It was some time before she could speak.

  Then she said: “Alfred, Alfred, I—am so sorry—for you.”

  But he had recovered some of his cheerful assurance. “Dear Dorothea, do not speak so tragically. You have no reason to be sorry. I am very happy, indeed. I am beginning to believe that my anxiety for Amalie is unwarranted. You tell me it has been very hot here, and as I said before, it has been lonely for her. But you did say that Jerome and Uncle William and Philip will return on Friday? How lively the house will be then! And Jerome’s marriage to Sally in September—we can plan on all manner of festivities.”

  “I do not believe that Jerome will marry Sally,” she muttered, completely weakened by her own emotion, and turning away.

  “What?” He stared at her as she sat down. “What are you saying, Dorothea?”

  She shivered, as if the wind had become cold. Alfred came to her chair.

  “What are you saying, Dorothea? This is incredible!”

  She turned her head away from him. “I believe Jerome is wiser than you, Alfred. I believe he is coming to the conclusion that he and Sally would not be happy together.”

  “Incredible! Did he tell you this?” Alfred’s voice was stern and censorious. “Has the girl jilted him? Speak, Dorothea!”

  She was frightened, and detested herself for her lack of self-control. “I do not know, Alfred. Jerome, however, seems restless. Perhaps he will go away—He has not visited Sally very often recently.”

  “‘Go away’?” Alfred repeated. For a moment his pulses quickened, and he felt a sense of heat about his throat. But he severely repressed his natural reaction to the thought of Jerome’s leaving. “How can he go away? He has given his word to Sally. Has she jilted him?”

  But Dorothea’s weakness had increased almost to prostration. She exclaimed: “Alfred, do not ask me more! It may be only my imagination. I do not know! I only know I am very tired.”

  She got up again, looked about her as if blinded.

  “Certainly it is your imagination, Dorothea. I am really surprised at you. Jerome was always restless. But the wedding plans are all made, and I know that there has been no change whatsoever. Why, I saw General Tayntor this morning, on the way home. He was very civil, even jovial, and spoke of the wedding. My dear cousin, you must not let female instability of temperament overcome you.”

  Dorothea felt a swift and passionate scorn for him which momentarily swallowed up her sorrow and fear. She cried: “Oh, Alfred, do not be so obtuse! You have been away for two months, and there have been currents you have not been here to discern!”

  She bit her lip then, and drew in a deep, sharp breath.

  “What are you trying to say, Dorothea?�
� Alfred came closer to her, spoke more quietly but insistently.

  “I do not know what I am saying!” she said wildly.

  “I can see that.” He was very stern. Then he softened. “You are tired, Dorothea. You, too, perhaps, have been lonely. It has been too much for both of you.”

  He took another step towards her. “I know your kind heart, Dorothea. You have been anxious about Amalie. But do not worry. I will send one of the stableboys to Dr. Hawley tonight, to ask him to come in tomorrow morning.”

  But she caught up her knitting, paused as if confused and stunned, then left him. He watched her go. He saw the door close behind her. He sat down and gazed unseeingly at the moonlit slope before him.

  All at once he was prickling with uneasiness and depression. His head began to ache. He thought: There is really no satisfaction at all in living.

  The thought, revolutionary, alien to his nature, frightened him, made him sit up rigidly in his chair. He looked about him in bewilderment, touched by a peculiar atmosphere of tumult and of sinister, unsaid things. How very odd of Dorothea! He had not thought it of her.

  He rubbed his aching forehead. The wind whispered, moved, lifted, all about him. His depression increased. Then, quite suddenly, there seemed a shift in plane, and everything about him took on a sort of unfamiliarity, a tenuousness, a remoteness. He was a stranger to melancholy, but now he felt it beating heavily in his blood. The moonlit slope seemed to retreat, became as vague as mist. The walls behind him were frail as cloud. Even the scent of the earth had no memory for him. It was as if he dreamed.