by Willa Cather
The end, when it came, had, by the mercy of Heaven, come suddenly. An illness of three days at Fortuney, their own place on the Oise, and it was over. He was flung out into space to find his way alone; to keep fighting about in his circle, forever yearning toward the center.
One morning, when Harold asked her to go for a long walk into the country, Harriet felt from the moment they left the town behind them that he had something serious to say to her. They were having their déjeuner in the garden of a little auberge, sitting at a table beside a yellow clay wall overgrown with wall-peaches, when he told her that he was going away.
“I don’t know for just how long. Perhaps a week; perhaps two. I’d hate to have you misunderstand. I don’t want you to underestimate the good you’ve done me these last weeks. But, you see, this is a sort of—a sort of tryst,” he explained, smiling faintly. “We got stranded once in an absurd little town down on the Mediterranean, not far from Hyères. We liked it and stayed for days, and when we left, Eleanor said we’d go back every year when the grapes were ripe. We never did go back, for that was the last year. But I’ve been there that same week every autumn. The people there all remember her. It’s a little bit of a place.”
Harriet looked at him, holding her breath. The black kitten came up and brushed against him, tapping his arm with its paw and mewing to be fed.
“Is that why you go away so much? Ethel has told me. She said there was some business, but I doubted that.”
“I’m sorry it has to be so. Of course, I feel despicable—do all the time, for that matter.” He wiped his face and hands miserably with his napkin and pushed back his chair. “You see,” he went on, beginning to make geometrical figures in the sand with his walking-stick, “you see, I can’t settle down to anything, and I’m so driven. There are times when places pull me—places where things happened, you know. Not big things, but just our own things.” He stopped, and then added thoughtfully, “Going to miss her is almost what going to meet her used to be. I get in such a state of impatience.”
Harriet couldn’t, she simply couldn’t, altogether despise him, and it was because, as he said, she did know. They sat in the quiet, sunny little garden, full of dahlias and sunflowers and the hum of bees, and she remembered what Eleanor had told her about this fishing-village where they had lived on figs and goat’s milk and watched the meager vintage being gathered; how, when they had to leave it, got into their compartment and flashed away along the panoramic Mediterranean shore, she had cried—she who never wept for pain or weariness, Harriet put in fondly. It was not the blue bay and the lavender and the pine hills they were leaving, but some peculiar shade of being together. Yet they were always leaving that. Every day brought colors in the sky, on the sea, in the heart, which could not possibly come just so again. That tomorrow’s would be just as beautiful never quite satisfied them. They wanted it all. Yes, whatever they were, those two, they were Olympian.
As they were nearing home in the late afternoon, Forscythe turned suddenly to Harriet. “I shall have to count on you for something while I am away, you know.”
“About the business? Oh, yes, I’ll understand.”
“And you’ll do what you can for her, won’t you?” he asked shakily. “It’s such a hellish existence for her. I’d do anything if I could undo what I’ve done—anything.”
Harriet paused a moment. “It simply can’t, you know, go on like this.”
“Yes, yes, I know that,” he replied abstractedly. “But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that sometimes I feel as if Eleanor wants me to give her up; that she can’t stand it any longer and is begging me to let her rest.”
Harriet tried to look at him, but he had turned away his face.
IV
Forscythe’s absence stretched beyond a fortnight, and no one seemed very definitely informed as to when he might return. Meanwhile, Mrs. Westfield had his wife considerably upon her hands. She could not, indeed, account for the degree to which she seemed responsible. It was always there, groping for her and pulling at her, as she told Westfield. The garden wall was not high enough to shut out entirely the other side: the girl pacing the gravel paths with the meek, bent step which poor Harriet found so exasperating, her wistful eyes peering from under her garden-hat, her preposterous skirts trailing behind her like the brier-torn gown of some wandering Griselda.
During the long, dull hours in which they had their tea together, Harriet realized more and more the justice of the girl’s position—of her claim, since she apparently had no position that one could well define. The reasonableness of it was all the more trying since Harriet felt so compelled to deny it. They read and walked and talked, and the subject to which they never alluded was always in the air. It was in the girl’s long, silent, entreating looks; in her thin hands, nervously clasping and unclasping; in her ceaseless pacing about. Harriet distinctly felt that she was working herself up to something, and she declared to Westfield every morning that, whatever it was, she wouldn’t be a party to it.
“I can understand perfectly,” she insisted to her husband, “how he did it. He married her to talk to her about Eleanor. Eleanor had been the theme of their courtship. The rest of the world went on attending to its own business and shaking him off, and she stopped and sympathized and let him pour himself out. He didn’t see, I suppose, why he shouldn’t have just a wife like other men, for it didn’t occur to him that he couldn’t be just a husband. He thought she’d be content to console; he never dreamed she’d try to heal.”
As for Ethel, Harriet had to admit that she, too, could be perfectly accounted for. She had gone into it, doubtless, in the spirit of self-sacrifice, a mood she was romantically fond of permitting herself and humanly unable to live up to. She had married him in one stage of feeling, and had inevitably arrived at another—had come, indeed, to the place where she must be just one thing to him. What she was, or was not, hung on the throw of the dice in a way that savored of trembling captives and barbarous manners, and Harriet had to acknowledge that almost anything might be expected of a woman who had let herself go to such lengths and had yet got nowhere worth mentioning.
“She is certainly going to do something,” Harriet declared. “But whatever can she hope to do now? What weapon has she left? How is she, after she’s poured herself out so, ever to gather herself up again? What she’ll do is the horror. It’s sure to be ineffectual, and it’s equally sure to have distinctly dramatic aspects.”
Harriet was not, however, quite prepared for the issue which confronted her one morning. She sat down shaken and aghast when Ethel, pale and wraith-like, glided somnambulantly into her garden and asked whether Mrs. Westfield would accompany her to Fortuney on the following day.
“But, my dear girl, ought you to go there alone?”
“Without Harold, you mean?” the other inaudibly suggested. “Yes, I think I ought. He has such a dread of going back there, and yet I feel that he’ll never be satisfied until he gets among his own things. He would be happier if he took the shock and had done with it. And my going there first might make it easier for him.”
Harriet stared. “Don’t you think he should be left to decide that for himself?” she reasoned mildly. “He may wish to forget the place in so far as he can.”
“He doesn’t forget,” Ethel replied simply. “He thinks about it all the time. He ought to live there; it’s his home. He ought not,” she brought out, with a fierce little burst, “to be kept away.”
“I don’t know that he or any one else can do much in regard to that,” commented Harriet dryly.
“He ought to live there,” Ethel repeated automatically; “and it might make it easier for him if I went first.”
“How?” gasped Mrs. Westfield.
“It might,” she insisted childishly, twisting her handkerchief around her fingers. “We can take an early train and get there in the afterno
on. It’s but a short drive from the station. I am sure”—she looked pleadingly at Harriet—“I’m sure he’d like it better if you went with me.”
Harriet made a clutch at herself and looked pointedly at the ground. “I really don’t see how I could, Ethel. It doesn’t seem to me a proper thing to do.”
Ethel sat straight and still. Her liquid eyes brimmed over and the tears rolled mildly down her cheeks. “I’m sorry it seems wrong to you. Of course you can’t go if it does. I shall go alone, then, tomorrow.” She rose and stood poised in uncertainty, her hand on the back of the chair.
Harriet moved quickly toward her. The girl’s infatuate obstinacy carried a power with it.
“But why, dear child, do you wish me to go with you? What good could that possibly do?”
There was a long silence, trembling and gentle tears. At last Ethel murmured: “I thought, because you were her friend, that would make it better. If you were with me, it couldn’t seem quite so—indelicate.” Her shoulders shook with a sudden wrench of feeling and she pressed her hands over her face. “You see,” she faltered, “I’m so at a loss. I haven’t—any one.”
Harriet put an arm firmly about her drooping slenderness. “Well, for this venture, at least, you shall have me. I can’t see it, but I’m willing to go; more willing than I am that you should go alone. I must tell Robert and ask him to look up the trains for us.”
The girl drew gently away from her and stood in an attitude of deep dejection. “It’s difficult for you, too, our being here. We ought never to have come. And I must not take advantage of you. Before letting you go with me, I must tell you the real reason why I am going to Fortuney.”
“The real reason?” echoed Harriet.
“Yes. I think he’s there now.”
“Harold? At Fortuney?”
“Yes. I haven’t heard from him for five days. Then it was only a telegram, dated from Pontoise. That’s very near Fortuney. Since then I haven’t had a word.”
“You poor child, how dreadful! Come here and tell me about it.” Harriet drew her to a chair, into which she sank limply.
“There’s nothing to tell, except what one fears. I’ve lost sleep until I imagine all sorts of horrible things. If he has been alone there for days, shut up with all those memories, who knows what may have happened to him? I shouldn’t, you know, feel like this if he were with any one. But this—oh, you are all against me! You none of you understand. You think I am trying to make him—inconstant” (for the first time her voice broke into passionate scorn). “But there’s no other way to save him. It’s simply killing him. He’s been frightfully ill twice, once in London and once before we left India. The London doctors told me that unless he was got out of this state he might do almost anything. They even wanted me to leave him. So, you see, I must do something.”
Harriet sat down on the stool beside her and took her hand.
“Why don’t you, then, my dear, do it—leave him?”
The girl looked wildly toward the garden wall. “I can’t—not now. I might have once, perhaps. Oh!” with a burst of trembling, “don’t, please don’t talk about it. Just help me to save him if you can.”
“Had you rather, Ethel, that I went to Fortuney alone?” Harriet suggested hopefully.
The girl shook her head. “No; he’d know I sent you, and he’d think I was afraid. I am, of course, but not in the way he thinks. I’ve never crossed him in anything, but we can’t go on like this any longer. I’ll go, and he’ll just have to—choose.”
Having seen Ethel safely to her own door, Harriet went to her husband, who was at work in the library, and told him to what she had committed herself. Westfield received the intelligence with marked discouragement. He disliked her being drawn more and more into the Forscythes’ affairs, which he found very depressing and disconcerting, and he flatly declared that he wanted nothing so much as to get away from all that hysteria next door and finish the summer in Switzerland.
“It’s an obsession with her to get to Fortuney,” Harriet explained. “To her it somehow means getting into everything she’s out of. I really can’t have her thinking I’m against her in that definite, petty sort of way. So I’ve promised to go. Besides, if she is going down there, where all Eleanor’s things are—”
“Ah, so it’s to keep her out, and not to help her in, that you’re going,” Westfield deduced.
“I declare to you, I don’t know which it is. I’m going for both of them—for her and for Eleanor.”
V
Fortuney stood in its cluster of cool green, halfway up the hillside and overlooking the green loop of the river. Harriet remembered, as she approached it, how Eleanor used to say that, after the south, it was good to come back and rest her eyes there. Nowhere were skies so gray, streams so clear, or fields so pleasantly interspersed with woodland. The hill on which the house stood overlooked an island where the haymakers were busy cutting a second crop, swinging their bright scythes in the long grass and stopping to hail the heavy lumber-barges as they passed slowly up the glassy river.
Ethel insisted upon leaving the carriage by the roadside, so the two women alighted and walked up the long driveway that wound under the linden-trees. An old man who was clipping the hedge looked curiously at them as they passed. Except for the snipping of his big shears and occasional halloos from the island, a pale, sunny quiet lay over the place, and their approach, Harriet reflected, certainly savored all too much of a reluctance to break it. She looked at Ethel with all the exasperation of fatigue, and felt that there was something positively stealthy about her soft, driven tread.
The front door was open, but, as they approached, a bent old woman ran out from the garden behind the house, her apron full of gourds, calling to them as she ran. Ethel addressed her without embarrassment: “I am Madame Forscythe. Monsieur is awaiting me. Yes, I know that he is ill. You need not announce me.”
The old woman tried to detain her by salutations and questions, tried to explain that she would immediately get rooms ready for Madame and her friend. Why had she not been told?
But Ethel brushed past her, seeming to float over the threshold and up the staircase, while Harriet followed her, protesting. They went through the salon, the library, into Harold’s study, straight toward the room which had been Eleanor’s.
“Let us wait for him here in his study, please, Ethel,” Harriet whispered. “We’ve no right to steal upon any one like this.”
But Ethel seemed drawn like the victim of mesmerism. The door opening from the study into Eleanor’s room was hung with a heavy curtain. She lifted it, and there they paused, noiselessly. It was just as Harriet remembered it: the tapestries, the prie-dieu, the Louis-Seize furniture—absolutely unchanged, except that her own portrait, by Constant, hung where Harold’s used to be. Across the foot of the bed, in a tennis-shirt and trousers, lay Harold himself, asleep. He was lying on his side, his face turned toward the door and one arm thrown over his head. The habit of being on his guard must have sharpened his senses, for as they looked at him he awoke and sprang up, flushed and disordered.
“Ethel, what on earth—?” he cried hotly.
She was frightened enough now. She trembled from head to foot and pressed her hands tightly over her breast. “You never told me not to come,” she panted. “You only said,” with a wild burst of reproach, “that you couldn’t.”
Harold gripped the foot of the bed with both hands and his voice shook with anger. “Please go downstairs and wait in the reception-room, while I ask Mrs. Westfield to enlighten me.”
Something leaped into Ethel’s eyes as she took another step forward into the room and let the curtain fall behind her. “I won’t go, Harold, until you go with me,” she cried. Drawing up her frail shoulders, she glanced desperately about her—at the room, at her husband, at Harriet, and finally at her, the handsome, disdainful f
ace which glowed out of the canvas. “You have no right to come here secretly,” she broke out. “It’s shameful to her as well as to me. I’m not afraid of her. She couldn’t but loathe you for what you do to me. She couldn’t have been so contemptible as you all make her—so jealous!”
Forscythe swung round on his heel, his clenched hands hanging at his side, and, throwing back his head, faced the picture.
“Jealous? Of whom—my God!”
“Harold!” cried Mrs. Westfield entreatingly.
But she was too late. The girl had slipped to the floor as if she had been cut down.
VI
One rainy night, four weeks after her visit to Fortuney, Forscythe stood at Mrs. Westfield’s door, his hat in his hand, bidding her good night. Harriet looked worn and troubled, but Forscythe himself was calm.
“I’m so glad you gave me a chance at Fortuney, Harold. I couldn’t bear to see it go to strangers. I’ll keep it just as it is—as it was; you may be sure of that, and if ever you wish to come back—”
Forscythe spoke up quickly: “I don’t think I shall be coming back again, Mrs. Westfield. And please don’t hesitate to make any changes. As I’ve tried to tell you, I don’t feel the need of it any longer. She has come back to me as much as she ever can.”
