Let Love Come Last

by Taylor Caldwell

  She waited for him to say something, but she did not wait very long. She went on: “I am not fond of Mrs. Templeton. She was only a temporary expedient, for appearances’ sake. I cannot imagine her in my house. Why should we have a housekeeper?” continued the daughter of frugal Germans. “I am quite competent, I assure you. I presume there will be other servants besides Lucy, but I can manage them. A housekeeper! How ridiculous!”

  He sat down, heavily. “Ursula,” he said, with deliberation, “I don’t think you understand. I intend to have a large establishment, the best and most formal in the city. There are a few families here who have housekeepers. I am not thinking only of them. There are the others who come here in the summer, and some who live on the hills most of the time. I know some of them. They are not provincials, like many of your friends. They have fine homes, conducted in the best style. I do not intend that they shall surpass me.”

  Ursula considered this. She had a faint moment of pleasure in contemplating the fact that William was richer than she had supposed. But she was still annoyed at the thought of Mrs. Templeton. She said: “Let us put aside for a little the discussion of future grandeur.” Her voice was satirical. “Let us consider my regard for Mrs. Templeton. I have nothing against her of a serious nature, except that she annoys me. She is very petty and pretentious, in a tight sort of way. She and I would get very much on each other’s nerves.”

  “I find her very capable. I noticed that she can manage servants.” William’s tone was obdurate again.

  “You mean Lucy? Why, Lucy is a far better person than Mrs. Templeton. She is certainly more human. She understands children. She is much more intelligent than Mrs. Templeton.”

  There was a knock on the door, announcing breakfast. William rose with alacrity to greet the two waiters. He said, as the door opened: “Nevertheless, I want Mrs. Templeton to be our housekeeper.”

  Fuming, Ursula kept her peace while the breakfast was being arranged on the table. She watched William as he supervised the placing of the silver dishes. She could not help smiling to herself. What a child this was! A clumsy, dynamic and inarticulate child, for all his bigness and his enormous capacities! But she would not give up the argument about Mrs. Templeton, for whom she had suddenly conceived an intense dislike. However, William managed to retain one of the waiters to serve him and his wife. It was done deliberately, she saw, to avoid further controversy with her. This amused her still more. She would not be contentious before servants.

  She decided, however, to be perverse, and not to be a lady, in order to vex him. He had not kissed her this morning; he had shown her no tenderness. He had arbitrarily thrust Mrs. Templeton upon her. She would punish him. She sat down at the table, allowed herself to be served, and then repeated: “Mrs. Templeton annoys me. I can’t bear the woman. If we have to have a housekeeper, it must be someone else. Why this insistence upon Mrs. Templeton?” The waiter was impassive, but he was listening with keen enjoyment, she saw.

  “Why discuss it just now?” asked William, giving his white napkin an irritable flip, but still not looking directly at her. “Is that bacon crisp enough?”

  “Of course. But I want to discuss Mrs. Templeton. I have the deepest desire to discuss her.”

  He suddenly looked up at her, and she was startled. His eyes were flat and blazing. His rage was all out of proportion, she thought confusedly. Now she felt fear and repulsion. It was a violent face that confronted her, almost savage, as if he hated her.

  “I said,” and he spoke quietly, “that we shall have Mrs. Templeton.”

  Ursula turned very pale. She glanced at the waiter. “That will be all,” she said, clearly. The man bowed, and removed himself.

  There was silence in the room. William’s face was still ugly, with an immense ugliness she had never encountered before in her life. He ate his breakfast, every movement deliberate. Ursula’s breakfast cooled before her, as she watched her husband. The rain lashed the windows. The light outside became grayer and duller.

  “William,” said Ursula, gently.

  He ignored her; then, very slowly, he put down his knife and fork. “Ursula,” he said, and she thought there was something terrible in his voice, “I want you to know this now: When I make up my mind I don’t intend to be disputed or opposed.”

  Fear, anger, affront, all tightened Ursula’s heart. She spoke resolutely: “Don’t talk to me like that, William. This is our first day of marriage. You have forgotten, I think. No matter. But this must be settled now. You mustn’t talk to me as you have just talked. I won’t have it.”

  All his features appeared to swell, to become congested. He said: “Don’t provoke it, then. Ursula, you were brought up by a very womanish man, I have heard. You have always had your own way. You are a married woman now. You are my wife. I have no time, and I shall have no time, to engage in small domestic arguments with you. You must learn this. You must learn that I intend to have my way.”

  Ursula’s fingertips pressed into the white tablecloth. She could not speak. Her throat had closed. She knew that what she felt in herself was horror and insult and outrage. No, while she felt this way she must not speak.

  He was staring at her formidably. Then, while she watched him in a daze, his face changed again. She did not know that her own face startled him, had taken him aback, with its stern pallor and immobility, and that he was ashamed. He was not turned from his purpose but, still, he was ashamed.

  “You are thinking that I am a vulgarian without manners, that I am disgusting,” he said. “Perhaps I am.” He paused. Her yellowish eyes did not move from his; they had brightened and dilated. Her mouth was only a pale carving in her face. He looked away from her. “I haven’t forgotten this is our first morning together, Ursula. At least, I am remembering it now. Probably my manner to you has been unpardonable. Will you try to remember that I know it was?”

  “Yes,” she whispered at last, with difficulty. There was such a terror in her, such a repudiation.

  “Shall we forget it?” he asked. There was no humility in his voice, but she knew he was ashamed.

  “Yes,” she repeated.

  He smiled. “Well, then, won’t you eat your breakfast?”

  She took up her fork. Her hand was very cold.

  He tried for a lighter note. “I’m sorry you don’t like Mrs. Templeton. I’m afraid that it’s too late for any other arrangement. I asked her, the other day.”

  “I don’t care about Mrs. Templeton,” said Ursula, speaking through the pain that would not leave her throat.

  “Well, then, it is settled.” He tried to sound relieved. But he was enormously uneasy. “There is another thing: Could you arrange for flowers to be sent to Mrs. Arnold, in both our names?”

  “No,” she said. “I shall send no flowers.”

  Very carefully, he poured coffee for her.

  “It would be bad taste, you think?” he said.

  “It would be the most horrible bad taste.” She tried to drink the coffee. Her only desire was to rise and leave this room, to go away into quietness, and not to remember. Her head began to pound heavily, and to swim.

  “I shall always defer to you in matters of taste, Ursula,” he said, seriously.

  He was trying to apologize, she saw. If the offense had been less, if she had not seen what she had seen in his face, if he had not looked at her as he had done less than ten minutes ago, she could have forgotten, she could have forgiven, she could even have felt tenderness and compassion for him. She might feel all this later; but as yet the shock was too great.

  He was so intuitive that he guessed much of the turmoil of sick emotion in her, and he was freshly ashamed.

  “Ursula, you are not forgetting, are you?” he said.

  She lifted the cup to her lips. She put it down. “I am trying,” she answered.

  She wanted to cry, suddenly and wildly. “It was all so trivial,” she stammered.

  He got up, slowly and awkwardly. He came to her, and put his hand on her he
ad. “Ursula,” he said. She sat there, her head bent, not moving. “Believe me,” he went on, “it won’t happen again.”

  Oh, yes, she thought. It will happen again. It will happen over and over, all our lives together. You will look at me like that many times, and each time I shall be shocked almost to death. I shall never become accustomed to it.

  She reached up, touched his hand gently, then removed it. “It was all so trivial,” she repeated.

  A shaft of pale sunlight struck into the room, bringing with it a lighting up of all the dreadful redness. “We shall have our drive after all,” said Ursula.

  CHAPTER XIV

  It had been one of Ursula’s private axioms that one should, as much as practical, avoid too earnest an introspection about unpleasant things, and live as much as possible on the surface of life, especially with regard to any disagreeableness which might affect one’s personal serenity and detached point of view. The art of living, August had once drily observed, was not to involve oneself in living to the extent of experiencing any strong or upsetting emotions. “Leave the passions to the poets and the statesmen and the saints and the busybodies,” he had told Ursula. “Ordinary mortals must, for the sake of their very existence, pretend, even to themselves, that God is working for the Good, twenty-four hours a day, and that all’s well that ends well. Clichés? Well, then thank God for clichés! They keep the majority of us from madness.”

  Now in the early days of her marriage, Ursula turned thankfully to clichés. Of course, it would only be temporary, she assured herself. A woman must certainly not let herself be engaged too intensely in the study of her new husband, especially not during the first months or so. One must accept, be as serene as possible, and watch and wait. Dull clichés, but she suspected that many a marriage reached ripeness and calmness because of this early attitude on the part of a wife.

  Love, before marriage, had brought to her hours of exaltation, when her mingling of passion and pity and tenderness had been like a great and sudden light on the once-shadowy landscape of her spirit. It had revealed to her depths of feeling of which she had always believed herself incapable; she had learned suffering and, through that suffering, joy.

  She had been married hardly forty-eight hours when she knew that for a time, at least, she must withdraw from too much feeling, from too much ecstasy and abandon. And especially from too much expectation. Her love for her husband was an immense flood which must be held back by the dam of that old serene acceptance which had held her a prisoner of complacency and resignation. She could permit herself to love William, and to feel for him that immense charity which is the essence of the deepest love. But it must be a love which did not analyze, did not demand, did not look beyond the hour, the day, the surface. She very early saw that there would never be any companionship between herself and her husband, such as there had been between herself and her father. William feared what was weak in himself.

  What shall we talk about, we two, when we are alone? she thought in moments of despair. The men he knew were known to her, but they did not have her interest. She and William had no mutual background; their attitudes of mind were completely antagonistic. William, too, was a man without humor, and while he was subtle, it was a subtlety without lightness or wit. It operated only in an atmosphere of suspicion and disquiet, or pain.

  It was late May now, and in May it was not possible to be desperate every moment. William, on the second day, and on the third, and on the fourth and fifth, was gone every morning till noon. She felt some comfort in being lazy, even amid the florid atmosphere of the suite which was to be her home until her house had been built. She breakfasted alone, and late. She read, and planned the furnishings of the house. When William returned for luncheon, and to spend the rest of the day with her, she greeted him with warmth and calm and tenderness, and with no suggestion in her manner of any passion there might have been in the night. Then, in the afternoon, they would go for a drive through the country, return and have dinner alone. It was the hours after dinner and before retiring that were the worst. She began to be glad that, after the first few nights, William would open his dispatch case and go over thick sheafs of paper. Then she could read or think, but not too strenuously, and watch him furtively over the top of her book, while only street noises could be heard and the rustle of the papers.

  William had given Ursula the architect’s general outline of the plans for the new house. She had studied them with mingled amazement and misgiving. The house was too formidable. It would be quite the most imposing and enormous structure in Andersburg or its wealthy suburbs. She could not quite conceive of it standing on that desolate tract of land which William had purchased from her, even when he impatiently reiterated over and over that the whole area would shortly be very fashionable, and much desired.

  Ursula repeated to herself that her husband was wealthy, and that he would most probably become even wealthier. But she had not come of a German strain to whom a “Schloss” was a familiar thing, and one to be accepted as natural. She came of a burgher strain, prudent and careful. One spent a certain proportion, to live in comfort and even in a sort of solid and suety richness. But only if one could afford it. Even then, one thought of the future, and a sensible man had no particular trust in the future. Was it possible that William trusted the future, or, more probably, trusted himself?

  She said, one night: “William, this house! Why such a huge house? Now, please don’t think that I prefer ‘littleness’,” she added, as William began to scowl at her over his papers. “It is just that all this seems—seems redundant,” she went on, helplessly. She glanced at the plans on her knee. “A ballroom! None of our acquaintances have ballrooms. Yes, I have heard there are ballrooms, perhaps one or two, in the houses on the hills. So absurd, really. Our friends simply remove most of the furniture from the drawing-room, when they have a drawing-room, turn over the rugs, and dance. Besides, Andersburg is not exactly a dancing city; most of us feel that dancing is either too ‘grand’ or slightly immoral.

  “And two drawing-rooms, each one tremendous! Andersburg is not a great city, and even if we have guests from other cities two drawing-rooms would be too much. A music room! A library! A billiard room!

  “Look at this reception hall. Does it have to be almost as large as one of these drawing-rooms? Oh, please do not frown. I am only joking, but really, the dining-room is too large. It would seat at least thirty people, with much space to spare.”

  She hastened to another page of the plans, which covered the second floor. William was ominously silent. His own papers no longer rustled. The blazing chandeliers flared down. But Ursula was desperate and determined.

  “The bedrooms. Fourteen of them, eight with dressing-rooms. Who will fill all of them?” She colored slightly, then compressed her lips and went on: “A conservatory to grow enough flowers for half a dozen houses and a funeral establishment or two. Stables for about five carriages, with rooms above, for grooms and stable-boys, I presume, and gardeners.”

  She put down the plans on the red sofa beside her. “William,” she said, seriously, “have you really decided upon such an enormous household? Have you counted the cost? And, even if you have, why do we need it?”

  His dark face tightened. “I told you before that I expect to have the finest house in this part of the country. Have you forgotten? As for the cost, I was under the impression that it was a man’s place to consider that, and not his wife’s. I assure you, I am well aware of what I am doing.”

  “Such a house would be very bad taste in Andersburg,” said Ursula. “You said you would defer to my taste, William.”

  “I intend to, if it is at all sensible.” His voice rose, and she heard anger in it, and impatience. “You are not being sensible now.”

  William’s face changed, became almost pleasant. He said: “I forgot to tell you. The stone for the house arrived late today. Tomorrow, we’ll go out and look at it.”

  He returned to his papers. Ursula sat and stared at him
fixedly. She thought for a few hopeful moments that he was only pretending to forget her, and then she saw that he had indeed forgotten her.

  She sighed. It was too ridiculous. She had a vision of an enormous pile on the lonely land he had bought; it would tower over the whole landscape, ludicrous and too impressive, for all the grounds about it. She said despondently: “The stone? White-gray, I hope? Surely not brick?” She shuddered slightly, contemplating such a house of brick. Even covering it with ivy would not be enough.

  He looked up from his papers irascibly. “Brick? Don’t be a fool, Ursula. Brick! No, not white-gray stone, either. But why speak of it now? You’ll see the stone tomorrow.”

  “Not brown?” said Ursula, faintly. “I loathe brown stone.”

  It is probably brown, she thought with consternation, when he regarded her blackly. He said: “What is wrong with brown? The best houses here are of brown stone. Why are you so insistent? I haven’t said it was brown, have I?” However, he was uncomfortable. “Have you no patience at all? You’ll see it tomorrow.”

  Ursula had another frightful thought. “William, the furniture! When is it to be bought? When am I to help choose it?”

  He did not reply. He frowned at a paper or two, wrote several lines, put some sheets aside with the swift and certain movements she had always admired in him. He said absently: “The furniture has already been chosen. I chose it a month ago, in New York. Also, all the chandeliers, the marbles, the rugs.” He did not look at her.

  Oh, no! she protested to herself. She cried, with spirit: “But William, am I not to be consulted at all? Let us be reasonable; I am to live in that house. A woman’s tastes are usually considered.”

  He did not answer her.

  “You have chosen everything, for every room?” murmured Ursula, aghast.

  “Everything.”

  Ursula rubbed her forehead. It was too much. Now she, too, was angered. “I think that is very inconsiderate of you! You know my own tastes. I had thought of moving the best from my own house to our new one. How can I visualize it there if I have not seen the furniture you have already bought?”