To Lydia this view of life had become a matter of course, just as lumbering about in her mother-in-law’s landau had come to seem the only possible means of locomotion, and listening every Sunday to a fashionable Presbyterian divine the inevitable atonement for having thought oneself bored on the other six days of the week. Before she met Gannett her life had seemed merely dull: his coming made it appear like one of those dismal Cruikshank prints in which the people are all ugly and all engaged in occupations that are either vulgar or stupid.
It was natural that Tillotson should be the chief sufferer from this readjustment of focus. Gannett’s nearness had made her husband ridiculous, and a part of the ridicule had been reflected on herself. Her tolerance laid her open to a suspicion of obtuseness from which she must, at all costs, clear herself in Gannett’s eyes.
She did not understand this until afterwards. At the time she fancied that she had merely reached the limits of endurance. In so large a charter of liberties as the mere act of leaving Tillotson seemed to confer, the small question of divorce or no divorce did not count. It was when she saw that she had left her husband only to be with Gannett that she perceived the significance of anything affecting their relations. Her husband, in casting her off, had virtually flung her at Gannett: it was thus that the world viewed it. The measure of alacrity with which Gannett would receive her would be the subject of curious speculation over afternoon-tea tables and in club corners. She knew what would be said—she had heard it so often of others! The recollection bathed her in misery. The men would probably back Gannet to “do the decent thing”; but the ladies’ eyebrows would emphasize the worthlessness of such enforced fidelty; and after all, they would be right. She had put herself in a position where Gannet “owed” her something; where, as a gentleman, he was bound to “stand the damage.” The idea of accepting such compensation had never crossed her mind; the so-called rehabilitation of such a marriage had always seemed to her the only real disgrace. What she dreaded was the neccessity of having to explain herself; of having to combat his arguments; of calculating, in spite of herself, the exact measure of insistance with which he pressed them. She knew not whether she most shrank from his insisting too much or too little. In such a case the nicest sense of proportion might be at fault; and how easy to fall into the error of taking her resistance for a test of his sincerity! Whichever way she turned, an ironical implication confronted her: she had the exasperated sense of having walked into the trap of some stupid practical joke.
Beneath all these preoccupations lurked the dread of what he was thinking. Sooner or later, of course, he would have to speak; but that, in the meantime, he should think, even for a moment, that there was any use in speaking, seemed to her simply unendurable. Her sensitiveness on this point was aggravated by another fear, as yet barely on the level of consciousness; the fear of unwillingly involving Gannett in the trammels of her dependence. To look upon him as the instrument of her liberation; to reist in herself the least tendency to a wifely taking possession of his future; had seemed to Lydia the one way of maintaining the dignity of their relation. Her view had not changed, but she was aware of a growing inability to keep her thoughts fixed on the essential point—the point of parting with Gannett. It was easy to face as long as she kept it sufficiently far off: but what was this act of mental postponement but a gradual encroachment on his future? What was needful was the courage to recognize the moment when, by some word or look, their voluntary fellowship should be transformed into a bondage the more wearing that it was based on none of those common obligations which make the most imperfect marriage in some sort a centre of gravity.
When the porter, at the next station, threw the door open, Lydia drew back, making way for the hoped-for intruder, but none came, and the train took up its leisurely progress through the spring wheat-fields and budding copses. She now began to hope that Gannett would speak before the next station. She watched him furtively, half-disposed to return to the seat opposite his, but there was an artificiality about his absorption that restrained her. She had never before seen him read with so conspicuous an air of warding off interruption. What could he be thinking of? Why should he be afraid to speak? Or was it her answer that he dreaded?
The train paused for the passing of an express, and he put down his book and leaned out of the window. Presently he turned to her with a smile.
“There’s a jolly old villa out here,” he said.
His easy tone relieved her, and she smiled back at him as she crossed over to his corner.
Beyond the embankment, through the opening in a mossy wall, she caught sight of the villa, with its broken balustrades, its stagnant fountains, and the stone satyr closing the perspective of a dusky grass-walk.
“How should you like to live there?” he asked as the train moved on.
“There?”
“In some such place, I mean. One might do worse, don’t you think so? There must be at least two centuries of solitude under those yew-trees. Shouldn’t you like it?”
“I—I don’ know,” she faltered. She knew now that he meant to speak.
He lit another cigarette. “We shall have to live somewhere, you know,” he said as he bent above the match.
Lydia tried to speak carelessly. “Je n’en vois pas la ńecessité! Why not live everywhere, as we have been doing?”
“But we can’t travel forever, can we?”
“Oh, forever’s a long word,” she objected, picking up the review he had thrown aside.
“For the rest of our lives then,” he said, moving nearer.
She made a slight gesture which caused his hand to slip from hers.
“Why should we make plans? I thought you agreed with me that it’s pleasanter to drift.”
He looked at her hesitatingly. “It’s been pleasant, certainly; but I suppose I shall have to get at my work again some day. You know I haven’t written a line since—all this time,” he hastily emended.
She flamed with sympathy and self-reproach. “Oh, if you mean that—if you want to write—of course we must settle down. How stupid of me not to have thought of it sooner! Where shall we go? Where do you think you could work best? We oughtn’t to lose any more time.”
He hesitated again. “I had thought of a villa in these parts. It’s quiet; we shouldn’t be bothered. Should you like it?”
“Of course I should like it.” She paused and looked away. “But I thought—I remember your telling me once that your best work had been done in a crowd—in big cities. Why should you shut yourself up in a desert?”
Gannett, for a moment, made no reply. At length he said, avoiding her eye as carefully as she avoided his: “It might be different now; I can’t tell, of course, till I try. A writer ought not to be dependent on his milieu; it’s a mistake to humor oneself in that way; and I thought that just at first you might prefer to be—”
She faced him. “To be what?”
“Well—quiet. I mean—”
“What do you mean by ‘at first’?” she interrupted.
He paused again. “I mean after we are married.”
She thrust up her chin and turned toward the window. “Thank you!” she tossed back at him.
“Lydia!” he exclaimed blankly; and she felt in every fibre of her averted person that he had made the inconceivable, the unpardonable mistake of anticipating her acquiescence.
The train rattled on and he groped for a third cigarette. Lydia remained silent.
“I haven’t offended you?” he ventured at length, in the tone of a man who feels his way.
She shook her head with a sigh. “I thought you understood,” she moaned. Their eyes met and she moved back to his side.
“Do you want to know how not to offend me? By taking it for granted, once for all, that you’ve said your say on this odious question and that I’ve said mine, and that we stand just where we did this morning before that—that hateful paper came to spoil everything between us!”
“To spoil everything between us?
What on earth do you mean? Aren’t you glad to be free?”
“I was free before.”
“Not to marry me,” he suggested.
“But I don’t want to marry you!” she cried.
She saw that he turned pale. “I’m obtuse, I suppose,” he said slowly. “I confess I don’t see what you’re driving at. Are you tired of the whole business? Or was I simply a—an excuse for getting away? Perhaps you didn’t care to travel alone? Was that it? And now you want to chuck me?” His voice had grown harsh. “You owe me a straight answer, you know; don’t be tenderhearted!”
Her eyes swam as she leaned to him. “Don’t you see it’s because I care—because I care so much? Oh, Ralph! Can’t you see how it would humiliate me? Try to feel it as a woman would! Don’t you see the misery of being made your wife in this way? If I’d known you as a girl—that would have been a real marriage! But now—this vulgar fraud upon society—and upon a society we despised and laughed at—this sneaking back into a position that we’ve voluntarily forfeited: don’t you see what a cheap compromise it is? We neither of us believe in the abstract ‘sacredness’ of marriage; we both know that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love for each other; what object can we have in marrying, except the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work our way back gradually—oh, very gradually—into the esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated? And the very fact that, after a decent interval, these same people would come and dine with us—the women who talk about the indissolubility of marriage, and who would let me die in a gutter to-day because I am ‘leading a life of sin’—doesn’t that disgust you more than their turning their backs on us now? I can stand being cut by them, but I couldn’t stand their coming to call and asking what I meant to do about visiting that unfortunate Mrs. So-and-so!”
She paused, and Gannett maintained a perplexed silence.
“You judge things too theoretically,” he said at length, slowly. “Life is made up of compromises.”
“The life we ran away from—yes! If we had been willing to accept them”—she flushed—“we might have gone on meeting each other at Mrs. Tillotson’s dinners.”
He smiled slightly. “I didn’t know that we ran away to found a new system of ethics. I supposed it was because we loved each other.”
“Life is complex, of course; isn’t it the very recognition of that fact that separates us from the people who see it tout d’une pièce? If they are right—if marriage is sacred in itself and the individual must always be sacrificed to the family—then there can be no real marriage between us, since our—our being together is a protest against the sacrifice of the individual to the family.” She interrupted herself with a laugh. “You’ll say now that I’m giving you a lecture on sociology! Of course one acts as one can—as one must, perhaps—pulled by all sorts of invisible threads; but at least one needn’t pretend, for social advantages, to subscribe to a creed that ignores the complexity of human motives—that classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it in everybody’s reach to be on Mrs. Tillotson’s visiting-list. It may be necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions—but if we believed in them, why did we break through them? And if we don’t believe in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford?”
Gannett hesitated. “One may believe in them or not; but as long as they do rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection that one can find a modus vivendi”
“Do outlaws need a modus vivendi?”
He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.
She thought she had scored a point and followed it up passionately. “You do understand, don’t you? You see how the very thought of the thing humiliates me! We are together to-day because we choose to be—don’t let us look any farther than that!” She caught his hands. “Promise me you’ll never speak of it again; promise me you’ll never think of it even,” she implored, with a tearful prodigality of italics.
Through what followed—his protests, his arguments, his final unconvinced submission to her wishes—she had a sense of his but half-discerning all that, for her, had made the moment so tumultuous. They had reached that memorable point in every heart-history when, for the first time, the man seems obtuse and the woman irrational. It was the abundance of his intentions that consoled her, on reflection, for what they lacked in quality. After all, it would have been worse, incalculably worse, to have detected any overreadiness to understand her.
II.
WHEN the train at night-fall brought them to their journey’s end at the edge of one of the lakes, Lydia was glad that they were not, as usual, to pass from one solitude to another. Their wanderings, during the year had indeed been like the flight of outlaws: through Sicily, Dalmatia, Transylvania and Southern Italy they had persisted in their tacit avoidance of their kind. Isolation, at first, had deepened the flavor of their happiness, as night intensifies the scent of certain flowers; but in the new phase on which they were entering, Lydia’s chief wish was that they should be less abnormally exposed to the action of each other’s thoughts.
She shrank, nevertheless, as the brightly-looming bulk of the fashionable Anglo-American hotel on the water’s brink began to radiate toward their advancing boat its vivid suggestion of social order, visitors’ lists, Church services, and the bland inquisition of the table-d’hôte. The mere fact that in a moment or two she must take her place on the hotel register as Mrs. Gannett seemed to weaken the springs of her resistance.
They had meant to stay for a night only, on their way to a lofty village among the glaciers of Monte Rosa; but after the first plunge into publicity, when they entered the dining-room, Lydia felt the relief of being lost in a crowd, of ceasing for a moment to be the centre of Gannett’s scrutiny; and in his face she caught the reflection of her feeling. After dinner, when she went upstairs, he strolled into the smoking-room, and an hour or two later, sitting in the darkness of her window, she heard his voice below and saw him walking up and down the terrace with a companion cigar at his side. When he came up he told her he had been talking to the hotel chaplain—a very good sort of fellow.
“Queer little microcosms, these hotels! Most of these people live here all summer and then migrate to Italy or the Riviera. The English are the only people who can lead that kind of life with dignity—those soft-voiced old ladies in Shetland shawls somehow carry the British Empire under their caps. Civis Romanus sum. It’s a curious study—there might be some good things to work up here.”
He stood before her with the vivid preoccupied stare of the novelist on the trail of a “subject.” With a relief that was half painful she noticed that, for the first time since they had been together, he was hardly aware of her presence.
“Do you think you could write here?”
“Here? I don’t know.” His stare dropped. “After being out of things so long one’s first impressions are bound to be tremendously vivid, you know. I see a dozen threads already that one might follow—”
He broke off with a touch of embarrassment.
“Then follow them. We’ll stay,” she said with sudden decision.
“Stay here?” He glanced at her in surprise, and then, walking to the window, looked out upon the dusky slumber of the garden.
“Why not?” she said at length, in a tone of veiled irritation.
“The place is full of old cats in caps who gossip with the chaplain. Shall you like—I mean, it would be different if—”
Roman Fever and Other Stories Page 9
