by Gwen Bristow
He paused a moment. Elizabeth still did not understand where he was leading her, but she still listened.
“Sometimes it’s so obvious that a child can see what they’re doing—baldheaded grandfathers acting like fools over young girls, women in their fifties making themselves up into ridiculous caricatures of adolescence. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that they do this because they’ve still got adolescent minds? They’ve never developed to the point where they can enjoy adult pleasures in the company of adults, so they try to imitate and associate with the children whose equals they are. A ripe mentality is an achievement. It takes effort, and some people have never made the effort. So instead of growing up, they stay half-finished, and spend what ought to be their most abundant years paying their dancing partners and beauty operators to tell them how young they look. You’ve seen them and laughed at them.”
Elizabeth caught her breath in protest. “But you were just telling me I wasn’t like that. I’m not—for heaven’s sake, I’m not going to be a fat old woman who gets her face lifted and goes starry-eyed over a gigolo!” She laughed shortly at the idea. “But even if I were, what has this got to do with us now, today, with what I came here to tell you?”
“It has a great deal to do with it, Mrs. Herlong,” Kessler insisted. “You’re a charming woman, not because you’re sixteen but because you aren’t. Genuine maturity has a gracious poise that youth never has. The charm of youth is its physical freshness, but the charm of maturity is a flowering of the spirit. Those others I was recalling to you, they have no youth and no maturity either. You have maturity, you know how fine it is—don’t start to be like them. Don’t reach back now!”
“I don’t understand you!” she exclaimed. “I want to know whether or not you are Arthur Kittredge come back from that German hospital where they told me you had died. What are you trying to tell me?”
He answered her simply. “I am trying to tell you that if you want to believe I am Arthur Kittredge, you can persuade yourself that I am. You can make yourself see me as a living reminder of a period of your life that was very happy—that perhaps has grown happier in your recollection of it.”
“I didn’t come here,” retorted Elizabeth, “to be advised whether or not I should believe in a fantasy. I came to be told the truth.”
“I am telling you the truth,” he insisted. “The truth is that you can stop living in the present if you want to. You can reach back and demand that the past be returned to you. But it won’t be returned to you. You won’t get back what you have lost, you’ll only be destroying what you have.”
“But if you are—” she began, and stopped, her eyes going over him with an intense scrutiny. She had listened to him impatiently, but she had heard what he had been saying to her. He was like Arthur. But he was different too. When she had first looked at him this morning she had been sure. Now she began to ask herself again whether the differences meant another man or the changes of war and years.
“If you will let me,” Kessler said, “I can tell you why you want me to be Arthur Kittredge.”
“Go on,” Elizabeth said faintly.
“For the past few months you have found the present very hard to take. You have been looking back into a time when you weren’t aware of the demands life was going to make on you. In those days every minute was delightful for itself. You had what you wanted and you didn’t know you were going to have to pay for it. You’ve personified that lovely thoughtlessness of youth in the figure of the man who shared it with you. You want it back—not Arthur, but the young freedom Arthur symbolizes for you.”
Elizabeth started. She felt a tremor run through her, so sharply that for a moment she could not control her voice sufficiently to answer. She had never been resentful about the passage of time as some people were; actually, she had been too busy to think much about it. Or so she had believed until now. Was it possible that her looking for Arthur was only part of the universal human wish for irresponsibility? Her voice was thin with astonishment as she exclaimed,
“My God, is that what I’ve been doing?”
“Yes,” he said, “it is.”
Elizabeth was silent. She felt as if she had been accused of a sin, and found just enough echo of guilt in herself to be unable to speak in her own defense.
“You can’t get it back, Mrs. Herlong,” Kessler said gently. “But if you keep trying, you will lose what you have. And you have so much to lose now, so much more than you had twenty-five years ago.”
Elizabeth moved forward in her chair, listening intently. The curious sense of guilt had not left her.
“As for your first husband—” Kessler began.
“Yes—what about him?”
“How old were you when you married him?”
“Eighteen.” After she had spoken she realized that her answer had come as readily as though she had never had any reason for believing he knew this already.
“Eighteen!” Kessler repeated. “What did you know then about loving a man?”
“I thought I knew a great deal,” she retorted.
“Naturally you thought so. How could you judge your feeling for him except by the standard you had then? But look at it now and see what it was by the standard of love you have today. A bright girlish rapture. Beautiful, no doubt, but no more than that.”
“But what else is a young girl’s love? What else should it be?”
“Nothing else. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. But what did you lose when you lost Arthur? A lover and a playmate. You had nothing else to lose.”
Elizabeth drew back and stared at him, almost angrily, resenting what he had said and fighting against having to accept it. He wanted a moment to give her time to get used to it, and then went on.
“When we get older, and are drawn into the depths of experience, it is sometimes very tempting to look back and regret the time when we were skipping over the surface without dreaming how thin it was.”
Elizabeth still did not answer. All this was new to her, as relating to herself. It was as though he were accusing her of having been foolish just when she thought she was being wise.
“When we do look back,” said Kessler, “it means that just then we are frightened at the challenge of being adult.”
“I have been frightened,” she acknowledged, still astonished at all he was showing her. “You know that.”
“What we forget in those moments, of course,” he went on, “is that the profoundest joys, as well as the greatest trials, are found in the depths of experience. The happiness of youth is a shallow merriment, it can’t be anything else. But the happiness of maturity, I mean real mental and emotional maturity, is strong and deeply rooted because it comes of having tested this and that until we have discovered the permanent values. Cherry is heartbroken if she goes to a party and isn’t dressed like the others. Some women your age are too, because they’re still judging life by Cherry’s standards, but you aren’t, because you long ago outgrew letting yourself be heartbroken over things that didn’t matter. Mrs. Herlong,” he exclaimed earnestly, “you have gone so far—don’t turn back now!”
“And that’s what I’m doing!” she confessed. “I didn’t know it. But I’m trying to go back!”
“Yes. You are looking back to the rapturous days when no war had interrupted your pleasures, when you had no son to go into danger, when there was no crisis to demand your courage. In looking for that dream of security, you have been looking for Arthur.” He added, firmly and incisively, “If I were your first husband, Mrs. Herlong, I would tell you exactly what I am telling you now. You don’t want him back.”
Elizabeth passed her hand over her forehead, pushing back her hair. The gesture seemed to clear her eyes and her mind with them. She said, “You are not Arthur, then?”
“No. Your first husband is dead. You can’t have him back, and I repeat, you don’t want him back.”
He paused to be sure she was listening. She nodded to assure him that she was.
“You don’t want him,” he repeated. “We often think we want the dead back, but actually we do not, because we have gone on without them and if they should return they would be thrusting themselves into a world that has moved past the place where they left it. If Arthur Kittredge came back to you now it would be an intolerable intrusion, not only because you have your husband and children, but because you are no longer the woman who loved him. You have changed —who does not change in twenty-five years? If he had lived, you would have changed together. But this didn’t happen. You have lived with Spratt Herlong. What intimate experiences you two have had I don’t know as you know them, but I know this: in the course of them you have built a citadel that only the two of you can share. That’s true, isn’t it?”
Elizabeth thought of the time when Cherry, as a baby, had been so ill they had feared they might lose her. She remembered when Spratt had lost his job, hit from behind by a friend he had trusted. She thought of the night when she had sobbed secretly on his shoulder at Dick’s joining the Marines, and he had said, “What do you suppose I’m here for?”
“Yes!” she exclaimed. “Oh yes.”
“I can be a friend of you both,” said Kessler, “a dear friend perhaps, but I’m outside your essential life because I did not help you build it. Don’t let me threaten it now, Mrs. Herlong! You can keep it—that depends on your self-command, not on mine. No human being can destroy the structure of a marriage except the two who made it. It is the one human edifice that is impregnable except from within. Keep it. You need it.”
Elizabeth smiled, without realizing that she was doing so. “Yes,” she said to him, “I need it.”
“If you keep what you have, I’ll be glad I came here. Because, as your friend, I believe I’ve been of some help to you at a trying time.”
“You know you have.”
“Then, can’t you take what I can give you, instead of trying to make me an instrument of destruction?”
“You make it very clear, all of a sudden,” she said, almost incredulously. ‘‘When I came in here, I was so sure. But— you look like him, and yet you don’t look like him. You—Maybe you’re right, Mr. Kessler, and I’ve let a chance resemblance take me back. But why was I so sure?”
“You won’t like this,” he answered, “but I’m going to say it anyway, because it’s true.”
“Go ahead. You’ve told me several unpleasant truths already. I shan’t be angry with you.”
Kessler spoke with penetrating directness. “You have never quite got rid of your first marriage. Even when you thought you had most certainly lost it, it was still casting a long shadow over your life. You have remembered Arthur, haven’t you, more than you have ever confessed to your husband?”
Elizabeth sat up straight in her astonishment.
“How did you know that?”
“Haven’t you?” he insisted.
“Yes. I couldn’t help it. Not all the time—sometimes for years I hardly thought of him, then the recollection would come back suddenly, dreadfully. I have never before this minute confessed it to anybody.”
Kessler smiled at her with a tender wisdom. “Have you remembered him at times when going ahead with your life seemed especially difficult?”
Startled, she tried to think back. She could not recall all the occasions at once, but she remembered the most recent one. It was last fall, when Spratt had said something about the imminence of Dick’s going away, and she had watched him by the pool, and had resolved she was not going to think about it, and then the date on the calendar had recalled Arthur. She said frankly, “Maybe you are right. I can’t be sure. But I—I believe you are right. I never thought of that till now. My grief at his death came back, when I was shrinking from the job ahead.” As she spoke she felt a sense of uplift, as if suddenly released from something; she exclaimed, “Oh, thank you for making me know that!”
“Mrs. Herlong,” Kessler said gently, “as you know, I have undergone some pretty horrible experiences. But they taught me something. They taught me that looking backward is the one sure gesture of self-destruction. We’re involved in a worldwide calamity right now because a part of the world is looking back and trying to raise the past. If we are to save ourselves, we can’t join them. We must look to what is before us. It’s no fun, especially right now, but we’ve got to. The past is gone, but we’re here, we’re moving into the future. We can’t help moving, we can only wreck ourselves trying not to.”
As she heard him, she was aware of a tremendous enlightenment, not as regarded the world, but as regarded herself. “I see,” she exclaimed. “You mean, I somehow let that first marriage hang over me—”
“Yes.”
“—trying to recapture that first golden flush, suffering because I couldn’t do it. I knew I couldn’t do it, that’s what I told Spratt when he asked me to marry him. But I didn’t know I was still trying to find it.”
He nodded emphatically. “You have still suffered now and then because of what you had lost, when what you had gained in place of it was so much more excellent—haven’t you?”
“Yes—” She paused, and exclaimed, “and you are right, it is more excellent.” She looked at him closely. “Mr. Kessler, you are not Arthur, are you?”
“Ah! You do want the present, then. You want today and tomorrow.”
Elizabeth had a sense of freedom like nothing she had ever felt before. She drew a long breath. Her mind flashed back to that bright year with Arthur, and then lingered on her twenty years with Spratt. The two periods were as different in meaning as they were in length. She had known all along that the second had a value greater than the first. But she had never placed them side by side, as Kessler had made her do today, to see with vehement clarity how her love for Spratt overpowered anything she had ever shared with Arthur.
“Thank you, Mr. Kessler,” she said in a low voice. “You don’t know what you’ve done for me.”
Kessler smiled at her gratefully, but he did not answer. It was as though, having accomplished what he had set out to do, he felt no need of saying anything more.
Elizabeth leaned back in her chair. In body and mind she felt perfectly at ease. Kessler had reached out and taken a burden from her. She thought of Arthur, of how she had loved him, of her torture at losing him, and realized that this was the first time since her marriage to Spratt that she had let her thoughts dwell on Arthur without trying to recall them, because this was the first time she had been able to think of him without pain. How foolish to have let that shadow lie over her, and in all these full, joyous years to have been unable to escape it completely. Now she was sure that Kessler had taken it away. She would never again feel herself sinking into one of those secret quagmires of anguish. He had given her freedom from Arthur simply by making her understand that she no longer had any reason to want him.
Like herself, Kessler had leaned back in his chair, and now, his whole body relaxed and his hand lightly holding his cane, he looked like a man who had accomplished a task and was now content to rest. With the point of his cane he was idly tracing the pattern of the rug.
As she looked at him, Elizabeth raised her head sharply. How often she had seen Arthur sit like that, resting in a big chair, his eyes down, when he was tired at the end of a hard day.
Her muscles tightened involuntarily. She sat up, about to begin again where she had begun this morning, and then, as her lips parted to speak she remembered what he had said. “If I were your first husband, Mrs. Herlong, I would tell you exactly what I am telling you now. You don’t want him back.”
He believed he had convinced her that he was not Arthur. For a few minutes he had succeeded in doing so. Now, again, she was not sure.
But as she watched him Elizabeth was convinced of something, else, which was that he had meant just what he had
said. He was never going to tell her any more than he had told her. If he was not Arthur, further persistence on her part would be useless. If he was Arthur, it would be equally useless. He would never tell her. She might suspect to the end of her life, but she would never know.
She understood, as in her agitation last night and this morning she had not understood, what Kessler had done for somebody, if not for her. He had resolutely moved himself into a sphere of his own, where his disaster would be only his, not interfering in any way with the normal lives of normal persons. It was all very well to say now that if she had known twenty-five years ago Arthur was making such a sacrifice, she would not have accepted it. But, if this man was Arthur—then, because she had not known, she had accepted it. And now, because she was not sure, she had to go on accepting it. If she had any magnanimity of spirit, the only return she could make him was to accept fully what he wanted to give her by letting him believe she was persuaded he was not Arthur. But as she watched him Elizabeth thought, “I never will be sure. I’ll never, never know.”
But today she could say that to herself without distress. Last night and earlier this morning, it had seemed of vital importance that she should be sure. Now, it was not important. No matter what happiness Arthur might have given her if he had come back from the war, the fact was that he had not given it to her, and Spratt had. Kessler had shown her that. To the end of her life she would be grateful to him. If there was anything she could do for him, it was to let him continue to believe what he so evidently wanted to believe, that he had convinced her entirely. Since that was what he wanted from her, that he should have.
But she remembered that there was something else she could do for him. He had told her so last night. She roused herself to speak.
She said, “Mr. Kessler, last night you suggested you had a favor to ask of me. I hope that’s still true.”
Kessler looked up, with a slight start as though her voice had recalled him from a great distance. For a moment he seemed to be getting his thoughts in order. Then he answered, “Yes, it’s still true.”
