Twilight Sleep (16 page)

"Of course," she again assented. "But supposing Lita asks to speak
to me?"

"Well, let her speak—listen to what she has to say…" He
stopped, and then added, in a rough unsteady voice: "Only don't be
hard on her. You won't, will you? No matter what rot she talks.
The child's never had half a chance."

"How could you think I should, Dexter?"

"No; no; I don't." He stood up, and sent a slow unseeing gaze
about the room. The gaze took in his wife, and rested on her long
enough to make her feel that she was no more to him—mauve tea–
gown, Chinese amethysts, touch of rouge and silver sandals—than a
sheet of glass through which he was staring: staring at what? She
had never before felt so inexistent.

"Well—I'm dog–tired—down and out," he said with one of his sudden
jerks, shaking his shoulders and turning toward the door. He did
not remember to say goodnight to her: how should he have, when she
was no longer there for him?

After the door had closed, Pauline in her turn looked slowly about
the room. It was as if she were taking stock of the havoc wrought
by an earthquake; but nothing about her showed any sign of disorder
except the armchair her husband had pushed back, the rug his
movement had displaced.

With instinctive precision she straightened the rug, and rolled the
armchair back into its proper corner. Then she went up to a mirror
and attentively scrutinized herself. The light was unbecoming,
perhaps … the shade of the adjacent wall–candle had slipped out
of place. She readjusted it … yes, that was better! But of
course, at nearly midnight—and after such a day!—a woman was
bound to look a little drawn. Automatically her lips shaped the
familiar: "Pauline, don't worry: there's nothing in the world to
worry about." But the rouge had vanished from the lips, their thin
line looked blue and arid. She turned from the unpleasing sight,
putting out one light after another on the way to her dressing–
room.

As she bent to extinguish the last lamp its light struck a tall
framed photograph: Lita's latest portrait. Lita had the gift of
posing—the lines she fell into always had an unconscious
eloquence. And that little round face, as sleek as the inside of a
shell; the slanting eyes, the budding mouth … men, no doubt,
would think it all enchanting.

Pauline, with slow steps, went on into the big shining dressing–
room, and to the bathroom beyond, all ablaze with white tiling and
silvered taps and tubes. It was the hour of her evening uplift
exercises, the final relaxing of body and soul before she slept.
Sternly she addressed herself to relaxation.

What was the sense of it all?

Nona, sitting up in bed two days after her nocturnal visit to the
Housetop, swept the interval with a desolate eye. She had made her
great, her final, refusal. She had sacrificed herself, sacrificed
Heuston, to the stupid ideal of an obstinate woman who managed to
impress people by dressing up her egotism in formulas of
philanthropy and piety. Because Aggie was forever going to church,
and bossing the committees of Old Women's Homes and Rest–cures for
Consumptives, she was allowed a license of cruelty which would have
damned the frivolous.

Destroying two lives to preserve her own ideal of purity! It was
like the horrible ailing old men in history books, who used to
bathe in human blood to restore their vitality. Every one agreed
that there was nothing such a clever sensitive fellow as Stanley
Heuston mightn't have made of his life if he'd married a different
kind of woman. As it was, he had just drifted: tried the law,
dabbled in literary reviewing, taken a turn at municipal politics,
another at scientific farming, and dropped one experiment after
another to sink, at thirty–five, into a disillusioned idler who
killed time with cards and drink and motor–speeding. She didn't
believe he ever opened a book nowadays: he was living on the
dwindling capital of his early enthusiasms. But, as for what
people called his "fastness," she knew it was merely the inevitable
opposition to Aggie's virtues. And it wasn't as if there had been
children. Nona always ached for the bewildered progeny suddenly
bundled from one home to another when their parents embarked on a
new conjugal experiment; she could never have bought her happiness
by a massacre of innocents. But to be sacrificed to a sterile
union—as sterile spiritually as physically—to miss youth and love
because of Agnes Heuston's notion of her duty to the elderly
clergyman she called God!

That woman he said he was going off with… Nona had pretended
she didn't know, had opened incredulous eyes at the announcement.
But of course she knew; everybody knew; it was Cleo Merrick. She
had been "after him" for the last two years, she hadn't a rag of
reputation to lose, and would jump at the idea of a few jolly weeks
with a man like Heuston, even if he got away from her afterward.
But he wouldn't—of course he never would! Poor Stan—Cleo
Merrick's noise, her cheek, her vulgarity: how warm and life–giving
they would seem as a change from the frigidarium he called home!
She would hold him by her very cheapness: her recklessness would
seem like generosity, her glitter like heat. Ah—how Nona could
have shown him the difference! She shut her eyes and felt his lips
on her lids; and her lids became lips. Wherever he touched her, a
mouth blossomed… Did he know that? Had he never guessed?

She jumped out of bed, ran into her dressing–room, began to bathe
and dress with feverish haste. She wouldn't telephone him—Aggie
had long ears. She wouldn't send a "special delivery"—Aggie had
sharp eyes. She would just summon him by a telegram: a safe
anonymous telegram. She would dash out of the house and get it off
herself, without even waiting for her cup of coffee to be brought.

"Come and see me any time today. I was too stupid the other
night." Yes; he would understand that. She needn't even sign
it…

On the threshold of her room, the telegram crumpled in her hand,
the telephone bell arrested her. Stanley, surely; he must have
felt the same need that she had! She fumbled uncertainly with the
receiver; the tears were running down her cheeks. She had waited
too long; she had exacted the impossible of herself. "Yes—yes?
It's you, darling?" She laughed it out through her weeping.

"What's that? It's Jim. That you, Nona?" a quiet voice came back.
When had Jim's voice ever been anything but quiet?

"Oh, Jim, dear!" She gulped down tears and laughter. "Yes—what
is it? How awfully early you are!"

"Hope I didn't wake you? Can I drop in on my way down town?"

"Of course. When? How soon?"

"Now. In two minutes. I've got to be at the office before nine."

"All right. In two minutes. Come straight up."

She hung up the receiver, and thrust the telegram aside. No time
to rush out with it now. She would see Jim first, and send off her
message when he left. Now that her decision was taken she felt
tranquil and able to wait. But anxiety about Jim rose and swelled
in her again. She reproached herself for having given him so
little thought for the last two days. Since her parting from Stan
on the doorstep in the rainy night everything but her fate and his
had grown remote and almost indifferent to her. Well; it was
natural enough—only perhaps she had better not be so glib about
Aggie Heuston's selfishness! Of course everybody who was in love
was selfish; and Aggie, according to her lights, was in love. Her
love was bleak and cramped, like everything about her; a sort of
fleshless bony affair, like the repulsive plates in anatomical
manuals. But in reality those barren arms were stretched toward
Stanley, though she imagined they were lifted to God… What a
hideous mystery life was! And yet Pauline and her friends
persisted in regarding it as a Sunday school picnic, with lemonade
and sponge cake as its supreme rewards…

Here was Jim at her sitting–room door. Nona held out her arms, and
slanted a glance at him as he bent his cheek to her kiss. Was the
cheek rather sallower than usual? Well, that didn't mean much: he
and she were always a yellow pair when they were worried!

"What's up, old man? No—this armchair's more comfortable. Had
your coffee?"

He let her change the armchair, but declined the coffee. He had
breakfasted before starting, he said—but she knew Lita's
household, and didn't believe him.

"Anything wrong with Exhibit A?"

"Wrong? No. That is…" She had put the question at random, in
the vague hope of gaining time before Lita's name was introduced;
and now she had the sense of having unwittingly touched on another
problem.

"That is—well, he's nervous and fidgety again: you've noticed?"

"I've noticed."

"Imagining things—. What a complicated world our ancestors lived
in, didn't they?"

"Well, I don't know. Mother's world always seems to me alarmingly
simple."

He considered. "Yes—that's pioneering and motor–building, I
suppose. It's the old New York blood that's so clogged with
taboos. Poor father always wants me to behave like a Knight of the
Round Table."

Nona lifted her eyebrows with an effort of memory. "How did they
behave?"

"They were always hitting some other fellow over the head."

She felt a little catch in her throat. "Who—particularly—does he
want you to hit over the head?"

"Oh, we haven't got as far as that yet. It's just the general
principle. Anybody who looks too hard at Lita."

"You WOULD have to be hitting about! Everybody looks hard at Lita.
How in the world can she help it?"

"That's what I tell him. But he says I haven't got the feelings of
a gentleman. Guts, he means, I suppose." He leaned back, crossing
his arms wearily behind his back, his sallow face with heavy–lidded
eyes tilted to the ceiling. "Do you suppose Lita feels that too?"
he suddenly flung at his sister.

"That you ought to break people's heads for her? She'd be the
first to laugh at you!"

"So I told him. But he says women despise a man who isn't
jealous."

Nona sat silent, instinctively turning her eyes from his troubled
face. "Why should you be jealous?" she asked at length.

He shifted his position, stretched his arms along his knees, and
brought his eyes down to a level with hers. There was something
pathetic, she thought, in such youthful blueness blurred with
uncomprehended pain.

"I suppose it's never got much to do with reasons," he said, very
low.

"No; that's why it's so silly—and ungenerous."

"It doesn't matter what it is. She doesn't care a hang if I'm
jealous or if I'm not. She doesn't care anything about me. I've
simply ceased to exist for her."

"Well, then you can't be in her way."

"It seems I am, though. Because I DO exist, for the world; and as
the boy's father. And the mere idea gets on her nerves."

Nona laughed a little bitterly. "She wants a good deal of elbow–
room, doesn't she? And how does she propose to eliminate you?"

"Oh, that's easy. Divorce."

There was a silence between the two. This was how it sounded—that
simple reasonable request—on the lips of the other partner, the
partner who still had a stake in the affair! Lately she seemed to
have forgotten that side of the question; but how hideously it
grimaced at her now, behind the lines of this boyish face wrung
with a man's misery!

"Old Jim—it hurts such a lot?"

He jerked away from her outstretched hand. "Hurt? A fellow can
stand being hurt. It can't hurt more than feeling her chained to
me. But if she goes—what does she go to?"

Ah—that was it! Through the scorch and cloud of his own suffering
he had seen it, it was the centre of his pain. Nona glanced down
absently at her slim young hands—so helpless and inexperienced
looking. All these tangled cross–threads of life, inextricably and
fatally interwoven; how were a girl's hands to unravel them?

"I suppose she's talked to you—told you her ideas?" he asked.

Nona nodded.

"Well, what's to be done: can you tell me?"

"She mustn't go—we mustn't let her."

"But if she stays—stays hating me?"

"Oh, Jim, not HATING—!"

"You know well enough that she gets to hate anything that doesn't
amuse her."

"But there's the baby. The baby still amuses her."

He looked at her, surprised. "Ah, that's what father says: he
calls the baby, poor old chap, my hostage. What rot! As if I'd
take her baby from her—and just because she cares for it. If I
don't know how to keep her, I don't see that I've got any right to
keep her child."

That was the new idea of marriage, the view of Nona's
contemporaries; it had been her own a few hours since. Now, seeing
it in operation, she wondered if it still were. It was one thing
to theorize on the detachability of human beings, another to watch
them torn apart by the bleeding roots. This botanist who had
recently discovered that plants were susceptible to pain, and that
transplanting was a major operation—might he not, if he turned his
attention to modern men and women, find the same thing to be still
true of a few of them?

"Oh Jim, how I wish you didn't care so!" The words slipped out
unawares: they were the last she had meant to speak aloud.

Her brother turned to her; the ghost of his old smile drew up his
lip. "Good old girl!" he mocked her—then his face dropped into
his hands, and he sat huddled against the armchair, his shaken
shoulder–blades warding off her touch.

It didn't last more than a minute; but it was the real, the only
answer. He DID care so; nothing could alter it. She looked on
stupidly, admitted for the first time to this world–old anguish
rooted under all the restless moods of man.

Jim got up, shook back his rumpled hair, and reached for a
cigarette. "That's THAT. And now, my child, what can I do? What
I'd honestly like, if she wants her freedom, is to give it to her,
and yet be able to go on looking after her. But I don't see how
that can be worked out. Father says it's madness. He says I'm a
morbid coward and talk like the people in the Russian novels. He
wants to speak to her himself—"

"Oh, no! He and she don't talk the same language…"

Jim paused, pulling absently at his cigarette, and measuring the
room with uncertain steps. "That's what I feel. But there's YOUR
father; he's been so awfully good to us; and his ideas are less
archaic…"

Nona had turned away and was looking unseeingly out of the window.
She moved back hastily. "No!"

He looked surprised. "You think he wouldn't understand either?"

"I don't mean that… But, after all, it's not his job…
Have you spoken to mother?"

"Mother? Oh, she always thinks everything's all right. She'd give
me a cheque, and tell me to buy Lita a new motor or to let her do
over the drawing–room."

Nona pondered this answer, which was no more than the echo of her
own thoughts. "All the same, Jim: mother's mother. She's always
been awfully good to both of us, and you can't let this go on
without her knowing, without consulting her. She has a right to
your confidence—she has a right to hear what Lita has to say."

He remained silent, as if indifferent. His mother's glittering
optimism was a hard surface for grief and failure to fling
themselves on. "What's the use?" he grumbled.

"Let me consult her, then: at least let me see how she takes it."

He threw away his cigarette and looked at his watch. "I've got to
run; it's nearly nine." He laid a hand on his sister's shoulder.
"Whatever you like, old girl. But don't imagine it's going to be
any use."

She put her arms about him, and he submitted to her kiss. "Give me
time," she said, not knowing what else to answer.

After he had gone she sat motionless, weighed down with half–
comprehended misery. This business of living—how right she had
been to feel, in her ignorance, what a tortured tangle it was!
Where, for instance, did one's own self end and one's neighbour's
begin? And how tell the locked tendrils apart in the delicate
process of disentanglement? Her precocious half–knowledge of the
human dilemma was combined with a youthful belief that the duration
of pain was proportioned to its intensity. And at that moment she
would have hated any one who had tried to persuade her of the
contrary. The only honourable thing about suffering was that it
should not abdicate before indifference.