Twilight Sleep

Miss Bruss, the perfect secretary, received Nona Manford at the
door of her mother's boudoir ("the office," Mrs. Manford's children
called it) with a gesture of the kindliest denial.

"She wants to, you know, dear—your mother always WANTS to see
you," pleaded Maisie Bruss, in a voice which seemed to be thinned
and sharpened by continuous telephoning. Miss Bruss, attached to
Mrs. Manford's service since shortly after the latter's second
marriage, had known Nona from her childhood, and was privileged,
even now that she was "out," to treat her with a certain benevolent
familiarity—benevolence being the note of the Manford household.

"But look at her list—just for this morning!" the secretary
continued, handing over a tall morocco–framed tablet, on which was
inscribed, in the colourless secretarial hand: "7.30 Mental
uplift. 7.45 Breakfast. 8. Psycho–analysis. 8.15 See cook.
8.30 Silent Meditation. 8.45 Facial massage. 9. Man with
Persian miniatures. 9.15 Correspondence. 9.30 Manicure. 9.45
Eurythmic exercises. 10. Hair waved. 10.15 Sit for bust. 10.30
Receive Mothers' Day deputation. 11. Dancing lesson. 11.30
Birth Control committee at Mrs.—"

"The manicure is there now, late as usual. That's what martyrizes
your mother; everybody's being so unpunctual. This New York life
is killing her."

"I'm not unpunctual," said Nona Manford, leaning in the doorway.

"No; and a miracle, too! The way you girls keep up your dancing
all night. You and Lita—what times you two do have!" Miss Bruss
was becoming almost maternal. "But just run your eye down that
list—. You see your mother didn't EXPECT to see you before lunch;
now did she?"

Nona shook her head. "No; but you might perhaps squeeze me in."

It was said in a friendly, a reasonable tone; on both sides the
matter was being examined with an evident desire for impartiality
and good–will. Nona was used to her mother's engagements; used to
being squeezed in between faith–healers, art–dealers, social
service workers and manicures. When Mrs. Manford did see her
children she was perfect to them; but in this killing New York
life, with its ever–multiplying duties and responsibilities, if her
family had been allowed to tumble in at all hours and devour her
time, her nervous system simply couldn't have stood it—and how
many duties would have been left undone!

Mrs. Manford's motto had always been: "There's a time for
everything." But there were moments when this optimistic view
failed her, and she began to think there wasn't. This morning, for
instance, as Miss Bruss pointed out, she had had to tell the new
French sculptor who had been all the rage in New York for the last
month that she wouldn't be able to sit to him for more than fifteen
minutes, on account of the Birth Control committee meeting at 11.30
at Mrs.—

Nona seldom assisted at these meetings, her own time being—through
force of habit rather than real inclination—so fully taken up with
exercise, athletics and the ceaseless rush from thrill to thrill
which was supposed to be the happy privilege of youth. But she had
had glimpses enough of the scene: of the audience of bright elderly
women, with snowy hair, eurythmic movements, and finely–wrinkled
over–massaged faces on which a smile of glassy benevolence sat like
their rimless pince–nez. They were all inexorably earnest,
aimlessly kind and fathomlessly pure; and all rather too well–
dressed, except the "prominent woman" of the occasion, who usually
wore dowdy clothes, and had steel–rimmed spectacles and straggling
wisps of hair. Whatever the question dealt with, these ladies
always seemed to be the same, and always advocated with equal zeal
Birth Control and unlimited maternity, free love or the return to
the traditions of the American home; and neither they nor Mrs.
Manford seemed aware that there was anything contradictory in these
doctrines. All they knew was that they were determined to force
certain persons to do things that those persons preferred not to
do. Nona, glancing down the serried list, recalled a saying of her
mother's former husband, Arthur Wyant: "Your mother and her
friends would like to teach the whole world how to say its prayers
and brush its teeth."

The girl had laughed, as she could never help laughing at Wyant's
sallies; but in reality she admired her mother's zeal, though she
sometimes wondered if it were not a little too promiscuous. Nona
was the daughter of Mrs. Manford's second marriage, and her own
father, Dexter Manford, who had had to make his way in the world,
had taught her to revere activity as a virtue in itself; his tone
in speaking of Pauline's zeal was very different from Wyant's. He
had been brought up to think there was a virtue in work per se,
even if it served no more useful purpose than the revolving of a
squirrel in a wheel. "Perhaps your mother tries to cover too much
ground; but it's very fine of her, you know—she never spares
herself."

"Nor us!" Nona sometimes felt tempted to add; but Manford's
admiration was contagious. Yes; Nona did admire her mother's
altruistic energy; but she knew well enough that neither she nor
her brother's wife Lita would ever follow such an example—she no
more than Lita. They belonged to another generation: to the
bewildered disenchanted young people who had grown up since the
Great War, whose energies were more spasmodic and less definitely
directed, and who, above all, wanted a more personal outlet for
them. "Bother earthquakes in Bolivia!" Lita had once whispered to
Nona, when Mrs. Manford had convoked the bright elderly women to
deal with a seismic disaster at the other end of the world, the
repetition of which these ladies somehow felt could be avoided if
they sent out a commission immediately to teach the Bolivians to do
something they didn't want to do—not to BELIEVE in earthquakes,
for instance.

The young people certainly felt no corresponding desire to set the
houses of others in order. Why shouldn't the Bolivians have
earthquakes if they chose to live in Bolivia? And why must Pauline
Manford lie awake over it in New York, and have to learn a new set
of Mahatma exercises to dispel the resulting wrinkles? "I suppose
if we feel like that it's really because we're too lazy to care,"
Nona reflected, with her incorrigible honesty.

She turned from Miss Bruss with a slight shrug. "Oh, well," she
murmured.

"You know, pet," Miss Bruss volunteered, "things always get worse
as the season goes on; and the last fortnight in February is the
worst of all, especially with Easter coming as early as it does
this year. I never COULD see why they picked out such an awkward
date for Easter: perhaps those Florida hotel people did it. Why,
your poor mother wasn't even able to see your father this morning
before he went down town, though she thinks it's ALL WRONG to let
him go off to his office like that, without finding time for a
quiet little chat first… Just a cheery word to put him in the
right mood for the day… Oh, by the way, my dear, I wonder if
you happen to have heard him say if he's dining at home tonight?
Because you know he never DOES remember to leave word about his
plans, and if he hasn't, I'd better telephone to the office to
remind him that it's the night of the big dinner for the Marchesa—"

"Well, I don't think father's dining at home," said the girl
indifferently.

"Not—not—not? Oh, my gracious!" clucked Miss Bruss, dashing
across the room to the telephone on her own private desk.

The engagement–list had slipped from her hands, and Nona Manford,
picking it up, ran her glance over it. She read: "4 P.M. See A.—
4.30 P.M. Musical: Torfried Lobb."

"4 P.M. See A." Nona had been almost sure it was Mrs. Manford's
day for going to see her divorced husband, Arthur Wyant, the
effaced mysterious person always designated on Mrs. Manford's lists
as "A," and hence known to her children as "Exhibit A." It was
rather a bore, for Nona had meant to go and see him herself at
about that hour, and she always timed her visits so that they
should not clash with Mrs. Manford's, not because the latter
disapproved of Nona's friendship with Arthur Wyant (she thought it
"beautiful" of the girl to show him so much kindness), but because
Wyant and Nona were agreed that on these occasions the presence of
the former Mrs. Wyant spoilt their fun. But there was nothing to
do about it. Mrs. Manford's plans were unchangeable. Even illness
and death barely caused a ripple in them. One might as well have
tried to bring down one of the Pyramids by poking it with a parasol
as attempt to disarrange the close mosaic of Mrs. Manford's
engagement–list. Mrs. Manford herself couldn't have done it; not
with the best will in the world; and Mrs. Manford's will, as her
children and all her household knew, WAS the best in the world.

Nona Manford moved away with a final shrug. She had wanted to
speak to her mother about something rather important; something she
had caught a startled glimpse of, the evening before, in the queer
little half–formed mind of her sister–in–law Lita, the wife of her
half–brother Jim Wyant—the Lita with whom, as Miss Bruss remarked,
she, Nona, danced away the nights. There was nobody on earth as
dear to Nona as that same Jim, her elder by six or seven years, and
who had been brother, comrade, guardian, almost father to her—her
own father, Dexter Manford, who was so clever, capable and kind,
being almost always too busy at the office, or too firmly
requisitioned by Mrs. Manford, when he was at home, to be able to
spare much time for his daughter.

Jim, bless him, always had time; no doubt that was what his mother
meant when she called him lazy—as lazy as his father, she had once
added, with one of her rare flashes of impatience. Nothing so
conduced to impatience in Mrs. Manford as the thought of anybody's
having the least fraction of unapportioned time and not immediately
planning to do something with it. If only they could have given it
to HER! And Jim, who loved and admired her (as all her family did)
was always conscientiously trying to fill his days, or to conceal
from her their occasional vacuity. But he had a way of not being
in a hurry, and this had been all to the good for little Nona, who
could always count on him to ride or walk with her, to slip off
with her to a concert or a "movie," or, more pleasantly still, just
to BE THERE—idling in the big untenanted library of Cedarledge,
the place in the country, or in his untidy study on the third floor
of the town house, and ready to answer questions, help her to look
up hard words in dictionaries, mend her golf–sticks, or get a thorn
out of her Sealyham's paw. Jim was wonderful with his hands: he
could repair clocks, start up mechanical toys, make fascinating
models of houses or gardens, apply a tourniquet, scramble eggs,
mimic his mother's visitors—preferably the "earnest" ones who held
forth about "causes" or "messages" in her gilded drawing–rooms—and
make delicious coloured maps of imaginary continents, concerning
which Nona wrote interminable stories. And of all these gifts he
had, alas, made no particular use as yet—except to enchant his
little half–sister.

It had been just the same, Nona knew, with his father: poor useless
"Exhibit A"! Mrs. Manford said it was their "old New York blood"—
she spoke of them with mingled contempt and pride, as if they were
the last of the Capetians, exhausted by a thousand years of
sovereignty. Her own red corpuscles were tinged with a more
plebeian dye. Her progenitors had mined in Pennsylvania and made
bicycles at Exploit, and now gave their name to one of the most
popular automobiles in the United States. Not that other
ingredients were lacking in her hereditary make–up: her mother was
said to have contributed southern gentility by being a Pascal of
Tallahassee. Mrs. Manford, in certain moods, spoke of "The Pascals
of Tallahassee" as if they accounted for all that was noblest in
her; but when she was exhorting Jim to action it was her father's
blood that she invoked. "After all, in spite of the Pascal
tradition, there is no shame in being in trade. My father's father
came over from Scotland with two sixpences in his pocket … " and
Mrs. Manford would glance with pardonable pride at the glorious
Gainsborough over the dining–room mantelpiece (which she sometimes
almost mistook for an ancestral portrait), and at her healthy
handsome family sitting about the dinner–table laden with Georgian
silver and orchids from her own hot–houses.

From the threshold, Nona called back to Miss Bruss: "Please tell
mother I shall probably be lunching with Jim and Lita—" but Miss
Bruss was passionately saying to an unseen interlocutor: "Oh, but
Mr. Rigley, but you MUST make Mr. Manford understand that Mrs.
Manford counts on him for dinner this evening… The dinner–
dance for the Marchesa, you know…"

The marriage of her half–brother had been Nona Manford's first real
sorrow. Not that she had disapproved of his choice: how could any
one take that funny irresponsible little Lita Cliffe seriously
enough to disapprove of her? The sisters–in–law were soon the best
of friends; if Nona had a fault to find with Lita, it was that she
didn't worship the incomparable Jim as blindly as his sister did.
But then Lita was made to be worshipped, not to worship; that was
manifest in the calm gaze of her long narrow nut–coloured eyes, in
the hieratic fixity of her lovely smile, in the very shape of her
hands, so slim yet dimpled, hands which had never grown up, and
which drooped from her wrists as if listlessly waiting to be
kissed, or lay like rare shells or upcurved magnolia–petals on the
cushions luxuriously piled about her indolent body.

The Jim Wyants had been married for nearly two years now; the baby
was six months old; the pair were beginning to be regarded as one
of the "old couples" of their set, one of the settled landmarks in
the matrimonial quicksands of New York. Nona's love for her
brother was too disinterested for her not to rejoice in this: above
all things she wanted her old Jim to be happy, and happy she was
sure he was—or had been until lately. The mere getting away from
Mrs. Manford's iron rule had been a greater relief than he himself
perhaps guessed. And then he was still the foremost of Lita's
worshippers; still enchanted by the childish whims, the
unpunctuality, the irresponsibility, which made life with her such
a thrillingly unsettled business after the clock–work routine of
his mother's perfect establishment.