Twilight Sleep (18 page)

Pauline paused; then she said gently: "And can you face giving up
your baby?"

"Baby? Why should I? You don't suppose I'd ever give up my baby?"

"Then you mean to ask Jim to give up his wife and child, and to
assume all the blame as well?"

"Oh, dear, no. Where's the blame? I don't see any! All I want is
a new deal," repeated Lita doggedly.

"My dear, I'm sure you don't know what you're saying. Your husband
has the misfortune to be passionately in love with you. The
divorce you talk of so lightly would nearly kill him. Even if he
doesn't interest you any longer, he did once. Oughtn't you to take
that into account?"

Lita seemed to ponder. Then she said: "But oughtn't he to take
into account that he doesn't interest me any longer?"

Pauline made a final effort at self–control. "Yes, dear; if it's
really so. But if he goes away for a time… You know he's to
have a long holiday soon, and my husband has arranged to have him
go down with Mr. Wyant to the island. All I ask is that you
shouldn't decide anything till he comes back. See how you feel
about him when he's been away for two or three weeks. Perhaps
you've been too much together—perhaps New York has got too much on
both your nerves. At any rate, do let him go off on his holiday
without the heartbreak of feeling it's good–bye… My husband
begs you to do this. You know he loves Jim as if he were his son—"

Lita was still leaning on her elbow. "Well—isn't he?" she said in
her cool silvery voice, with innocently widened eyes.

For an instant the significance of the retort escaped Pauline.
When it reached her she felt as humiliated as if she had been
caught concealing a guilty secret. She opened her lips, but no
sound came from them. She sat wordless, torn between the desire to
box her daughter–in–law's ears, and to rush in tears from the
house.

"Lita … " she gasped … "this insult…"

Lita sat up, her eyes full of a slightly humorous compunction.
"Oh, no! An insult! Why? I've always thought it would be so
wonderful to have a love–child. I supposed that was why you both
worshipped Jim. And now he isn't even that!" She shrugged her
slim shoulders, and held her hands out penitently. "I AM sorry to
have said the wrong thing—honestly I am! But it just shows we can
never understand each other. For me the real wickedness is to go
on living with a man you don't love. And now I've offended you by
supposing you once felt in the same way yourself…"

Pauline slowly rose to her feet: she felt stiff and shrunken. "You
haven't offended me—I'm not going to allow myself to be offended.
I'd rather think we don't understand each other, as you say. But
surely it's not too late to try. I don't want to discuss things
with you; I don't want to nag or argue; I only want you to wait, to
come with the baby to Cedarledge, and spend a few quiet weeks with
us. Nona will be there, and my husband … there'll be no
reproaches, no questions … but we'll do our best to make you
happy…"

Lita, with her funny twisted smile, moved toward her mother–in–law.
"Why, you're actually crying! I don't believe you do that often,
do you?" She bent forward and put a light kiss on Pauline's
shrinking cheek. "All right—I'll come to Cedarledge. I AM dead–
beat and fed–up, and I daresay it'll do me a lot of good to lie up
for a while…"

Pauline, for a moment, made no answer: she merely laid her lips on
the girl's cheek, a little timidly, as if it had been made of
something excessively thin and brittle.

"We shall all be very glad," she said.

On the doorstep, in the motor, she continued to move in the
resonance of the outrageous question: "WELL—ISN'T HE?" The
violence of her recoil left her wondering what use there was in
trying to patch up a bond founded on such a notion of marriage.
Would not Jim, as his wife so lightly suggested, run more chance of
happiness if he could choose again? Surely there must still be
some decent right–minded girls brought up in the old way … like
Aggie Heuston, say! But Pauline's imagination shivered away from
that too… Perhaps, after all, her own principles were really
obsolete to her children. Only, what was to take their place?
Human nature had not changed as fast as social usage, and if Jim's
wife left him nothing could prevent his suffering in the same old
way.

It was all very baffling and disturbing, and Pauline did not feel
as sure as she usually did that the question could be disposed of
by ignoring it. Still, on the drive home her thoughts cleared as
she reflected that she had gained her main point—for the time, at
any rate. Manford had enjoined her not to estrange or frighten
Lita, and the two women had parted with a kiss. Manford had
insisted that Lita should be induced to take no final decision till
after her stay at Cedarledge; and to this also she had acquiesced.
Pauline, on looking back, began to be struck by the promptness of
Lita's surrender, and correspondingly impressed by her own skill in
manoeuvring. There WAS something, after all, in these exercises of
the will, these smiling resolves to ignore or dominate whatever was
obstructive or unpleasant! She had gained with an almost startling
ease the point which Jim and Manford and Nona had vainly struggled
for. And perhaps Lita's horrid insinuation had not been a
voluntary impertinence, but merely the unconscious avowal of new
standards. The young people nowadays, for all their long words and
scientific realism, were really more like children than ever…

In Pauline's boudoir, Nona, curled up on the hearth, her chin in
her hands, raised her head at her mother's approach. To Pauline
the knowledge that she was awaited, and that she brought with her
the secret of defeat or victory, gave back the healing sense of
authority.

"It's all right, darling," she announced; "just a little summer
shower; I always told you there was nothing to worry about." And
she added with a smile: "You see, Nona, some people DO still
listen when your old mother talks to them."

If only Aggie Heuston had changed those sour–apple curtains in the
front drawing–room, Nona thought—if she had substituted deep
upholstered armchairs for the hostile gilt seats, and put books
in the marqueterie cabinets in place of blue china dogs and
Dresden shepherdesses, everything in three lives might have been
different…

But Aggie had probably never noticed the colour of the curtains or
the angularity of the furniture. She had certainly never missed
the books. She had accepted the house as it came to her from her
parents, who in turn had taken it over, in all its dreary
frivolity, from their father and mother. It embodied the New York
luxury of the 'seventies in every ponderous detail, from the huge
cabbage roses of the Aubusson carpet to the triple layer of
curtains designed to protect the aristocracy of the brown–stone age
from the plebeian intrusion of light and air.

"Funny," Nona thought again—"that all this ugliness should prick
me like nettles, and matter no more to Aggie than if it were in the
next street. She's a saint, I know. But what I want to find is a
saint who hates ugly furniture, and yet lives among it with a
smile. What's the merit, if you never see it?" She addressed
herself to a closer inspection of one of the cabinets, in which
Aggie's filial piety had preserved her mother's velvet and silver
spectacle–case, and her father's ivory opera–glasses, in
combination with an alabaster Leaning Tower and a miniature copy of
Carlo Dolci's Magdalen.

Queer dead rubbish—but queerer still that, at that moment and in
that house, Nona's uncanny detachment should permit her to smile at
it! Where indeed—she wondered again—did one's own personality
end, and that of others, of people, landscapes, chairs or spectacle–
cases, begin? Ever since she had received, the night before,
Aggie's stiff and agonized little note, which might have been
composed by a child with a tooth–ache, Nona had been apprehensively
asking herself if her personality didn't even include certain
shreds and fibres of Aggie. It was all such an inextricable
tangle…

Here she came. Nona heard the dry click of her steps on the stairs
and across the polished bareness of the hall. She had written:
"If you could make it perfectly convenient to call—" Aggie's
nearest approach to a friendly summons! And as she opened the
door, and advanced over the cabbage roses, Nona saw that her narrow
face, with the eyes too close together, and the large pale pink
mouth with straight edges, was sharpened by a new distress.

"It's very kind of you to come, Nona—" she began in her clear
painstaking voice.

"Oh, nonsense, Aggie! Do drop all that. Of course I know what
it's about."

Aggie turned noticeably paler; but her training as a hostess
prevailing over her emotion, she pushed forward a gilt chair. "Do
sit down." She placed herself in an adjoining sofa corner.
Overhead, Aggie's grandmother, in a voluted gilt frame, held a
Brussels lace handkerchief in her hand, and leaned one ruffled
elbow on a velvet table–cover fringed with knobby tassels.

"You say you know—" Aggie began.

"Of course."

"Stanley—he's told you?"

Nona's nerves were beginning to jump and squirm like a bundle of
young vipers. Was she going to be able to stand much more of these
paralyzing preliminaries?

"Oh, yes: he's told me."

Aggie dropped her lids and stared down at her narrow white hands.
Then a premonitory twitch ran along her lips and drew her forehead
into little wrinkles of perplexity.

"I don't want you to think I've any cause of complaint against
Stanley—none whatever. There has never been a single unkind
word… We've always lived together on the most perfect
terms…"

Feeling that some form of response was required of her, Nona
emitted a vague murmur.

"Only now—he's—he's left me," Aggie concluded, the words wrung
out of her in laboured syllables. She raised one hand and smoothed
back a flat strand of hair which had strayed across her forehead.

Nona was silent. She sat with her eyes fixed on that small
twitching mask—real face it could hardly be called, since it had
probably never before been suffered to express any emotion that was
radically and peculiarly Aggie's.

"You knew that too?" Aggie continued, in a studiously objective
tone.

Nona made a sign of assent.

"He has nothing to reproach me with—nothing whatever. He
expressly told me so."

"Yes; I know. That's the worst of it."

"The worst of it?"

"Why, if he had, you might have had a good row that would have
cleared the air."

Suddenly Nona felt Aggie's eyes fixed on her with a hungry
penetrating stare. "Did you and he use to have good rows, as you
call it?"

"Oh, by the hour—whenever we met!" Nona, for the life of her,
could not subdue the mocking triumph in her voice.

Aggie's lips narrowed. "You've been very great friends, I know;
he's often told me so. But if you were always quarrelling how
could you continue to respect each other?"

"I don't know that we did. At any rate, there was no time to think
about it; because there was always the making–up, you see."

"The making–up?"

"Aggie," Nona burst out abruptly, "have you never known what it was
to have a man give you a jolly good hug, and feel full enough of
happiness to scent a whole garden with it?"

Aggie lifted her lids on a glance which was almost one of terror.
The image Nona had used seemed to convey nothing to her, but the
question evidently struck her with a deadly force.

"A man—what man?"

Nona laughed. "Well, for the sake of argument—Stanley!"

"I can't imagine why you ask such queer questions, Nona. How could
we make up when we never quarrelled?"

"Is it queer to ask you if you ever loved your husband?"

"It's queer of you to ask it," said the wife simply. Nona's swift
retort died unspoken, and she felt one of her slow secret blushes
creeping up to the roots of her hair.

"I'm sorry, Aggie. I'm horribly nervous—and I suppose you are.
Hadn't we better start fresh? What was it you wanted to see me
about?"

Aggie was silent for a moment, as if gathering up all her strength;
then she answered: "To tell you that if he wants to marry you I
shan't oppose a divorce any longer."

"Aggie!"

The two sat silent, opposite each other, as if they had reached a
point beyond which words could not carry their communion. Nona's
mind, racing forward, touched the extreme limit of human bliss, and
then crawled back from it bowed and broken–winged.

"But ONLY on that condition," Aggie began again, with deliberate
emphasis.

"On condition—that he marries me?"

Aggie made a motion of assent. "I have a right to impose my
conditions. And what I want is"—she faltered suddenly—"what I
want is that you should save him from Cleo Merrick…" Her level
voice broke and two tears forced their way through her lashes and
fell slowly down her cheeks.

"Save him from Cleo Merrick?" Nona fancied she heard herself
laugh. Her thoughts seemed to drag after her words as if she were
labouring up hill through a ploughed field. "Isn't it rather late
in the day to make that attempt? You say he's already gone off
with her."

"He's joined her somewhere—I don't know where. He wrote from his
club before leaving. But I know they don't sail till the day after
tomorrow; and you must get him back, Nona, you must save him. It's
too awful. He can't marry her; she has a husband somewhere who
refuses to divorce her."

"Like you and Stanley!"

Aggie drew back as if she had been struck. "Oh, no, no!" She
looked despairingly at Nona. "When I tell you I don't refuse
now…"

"Well, perhaps Cleo Merrick's husband may not, either."

"It's different. He's a Catholic, and his church won't let him
divorce. And it can't be annulled. Stanley's just going to live
with her … openly … and she'll go everywhere with him …
exactly as if they were husband and wife … and everybody will
know that they're not."

Nona sat silent, considering with set lips and ironic mind the
picture thus pitilessly evoked. "Well, if she loves him…"

"Loves him? A woman like that!"

"She's been willing to make a sacrifice for him, at any rate.
That's where she has a pull over both of us."

"But don't you see how awful it is for them to be living together
in that way?"

"I see it's the best thing that could happen to Stanley to have
found a woman plucky enough to give him the thing he wanted—the
thing you and I both refused him."

She saw Aggie's lifeless cheek redden. "I don't know what you mean
by … refusing…"

"I mean his happiness—that's all! You refused to divorce him,
didn't you? And I refused to do—what Cleo Merrick's doing. And
here we both are, sitting on the ruins; and that's the end of it,
as far as you and I are concerned."

"But it's not the end—it's not too late. I tell you it's not too
late! He'll leave her even now if you ask him to … I know he
will!"

Nona stood up with a dry laugh. "Thank you, Aggie. Perhaps he
would—only we shall never find out."

"Never find out? When I keep telling you—"

"Because even if I've been a coward that's no reason why I should
be a cad." Nona was buttoning her coat and clasping her fur about
her neck with quick precise movements, as if wrapping herself close
against the treacherous sweetness that was beginning to creep into
her veins. Suddenly she felt she could not remain a moment longer
in that stifling room, face to face with that stifling misery.

"The better woman's got him—let her keep him," she said.

She put out her hand, and for a moment Aggie's cold damp fingers
lay in hers. Then they were pulled away, and Aggie caught Nona by
the sleeve. "But Nona, listen! I don't understand you. Isn't it
what you've always wanted?"

"Oh, more than anything in life!" the girl cried, turning
breathlessly away.

The outer door swung shut on her, and on the steps she stood still
and looked back at the ruins on which she had pictured herself
sitting with Aggie Heuston.

"I do believe," she murmured to herself, "I know most of the new
ways of being rotten; I only wish I was sure I knew the best new
way of being decent…"