Twilight Sleep (Wharton)/Chapter 17
XVII
WHAT was the sense of it all?
Nona, sitting up in bed two days after her nocturnal visit to the Housetop, swept the interval with a desolate eye.
She had made her great, her final, refusal. She had sacrificed herself, sacrificed Heuston, to the stupid ideal of an obstinate woman who managed to impress people by dressing up her egotism in formulas of philanthropy and piety. Because Aggie was forever going to church, and bossing the committees of Old Women's Homes and Rest-cures for Consumptives, she was allowed a license of cruelty which would have damned the frivolous.
Destroying two lives to preserve her own ideal of purity! It was like the horrible ailing old men in history books, who used to bathe in human blood to restore their vitality. Every one agreed that there was nothing such a clever sensitive fellow as Stanley Heuston mightn't have made of his life if he'd married a different kind of woman. As it was, he had just drifted: tried the law, dabbled in literary reviewing, taken a turn at municipal politics, another at scientific farming, and dropped one experiment after another to sink, at thirty-five, into a disillusioned idler who killed time with cards and drink and motor-speeding. She didn't believe he ever opened a book nowadays: he was living on the dwindling capital of his early enthusiasms. But, as for what people called his "fastness," she knew it was merely the inevitable opposition to Aggie's virtues. And it wasn't as if there had been children. Nona always ached for the bewildered progeny suddenly bundled from one home to another when their parents embarked on a new conjugal experiment; she could never have bought her happiness by a massacre of innocents. But to be sacrificed to a sterile union—as sterile spiritually as physically—to miss youth and love because of Agnes Heuston's notion of her duty to the elderly clergyman she called God!
That woman he said he was going off with. . . Nona had pretended she didn't know, had opened incredulous eyes at the announcement. But of course she knew; everybody knew; it was Cleo Merrick. She had been "after him" for the last two years, she hadn't a rag of reputation to lose, and would jump at the idea of a few jolly weeks with a man like Heuston, even if he got away from her afterward. But he wouldn't—of course he never would! Poor Stan—Cleo Merrick's noise, her cheek, her vulgarity: how warm and life-giving they would seem as a change from the frigidarium he called home! She would hold him by her very cheapness: her recklessness would seem like generosity, her glitter like heat. Ah—how Nona could have shown him the difference! She shut her eyes and felt his lips on her lids; and her lids became lips. Wherever he touched her, a mouth blossomed. . . Did he know that? Had he never guessed?
She jumped out of bed, ran into her dressing-room, began to bathe and dress with feverish haste. She wouldn't telephone him—Aggie had long ears. She wouldn't send a "special delivery"—Aggie had sharp eyes. She would just summon him by a telegram: a safe anonymous telegram. She would dash out of the house and get it off herself, without even waiting for her cup of coffee to be brought.
"Come and see me any time today. I was too stupid the other night." Yes; he would understand that. She needn't even sign it. . .
On the threshold of her room, the telegram crumpled in her hand, the telephone bell arrested her. Stanley, surely; he must have felt the same need that she had! She fumbled uncertainly with the receiver; the tears were running down her cheeks. She had waited too long; she had exacted the impossible of herself. "Yes—yes? It's you, darling?" She laughed it out through her weeping.
"What's that? It's Jim. That you, Nona?" a quiet voice came back. When had Jim's voice ever been anything but quiet?
"Oh, Jim, dear!" She gulped down tears and laughter. "Yes—what is it? How awfully early you are!"
"Hope I didn't wake you? Can I drop in on my way down town?"
"Of course. When? How soon?"
"Now. In two minutes. I've got to be at the office before nine."
"All right. In two minutes. Come straight up."
She hung up the receiver, and thrust the telegram aside. No time to rush out with it now. She would see Jim first, and send off her message when he left. Now that her decision was taken she felt tranquil and able to wait. But anxiety about Jim rose and swelled in her again. She reproached herself for having given him so little thought for the last two days. Since her parting from Stan on the doorstep in the rainy night everything but her fate and his had grown remote and almost indifferent to her. Well; it was natural enough—only perhaps she had better not be so glib about Aggie Heuston's selfishness! Of course everybody who was in love was selfish; and Aggie, according to her lights, was in love. Her love was bleak and cramped, like everything about her; a sort of fleshless bony affair, like the repulsive plates in anatomical manuals. But in reality those barren arms were stretched toward Stanley, though she imagined they were lifted to God. . . What a hideous mystery life was! And yet Pauline and her friends persisted in regarding it as a Sunday school picnic, with lemonade and sponge cake as its supreme rewards. . .
Here was Jim at her sitting-room door. Nona held out her arms, and slanted a glance at him as he bent his cheek to her kiss. Was the cheek rather sallower than usual? Well, that didn't mean much: he and she were always a yellow pair when they were worried!
"What's up, old man? No—this armchair's more comfortable. Had your coffee?"
He let her change the armchair, but declined the coffee. He had breakfasted before starting, he said—but she knew Lita's household, and didn't believe him.
"Anything wrong with Exhibit A?"
"Wrong? No. That is. . ." She had put the question at random, in the vague hope of gaining time before Lita's name was introduced; and now she had the sense of having unwittingly touched on another problem.
"That is—well, he's nervous and fidgety again: you've noticed?"
"I've noticed."
"Imagining things—. What a complicated world our ancestors lived in, didn't they?"
"Well, I don't know. Mother's world always seems to me alarmingly simple."
He considered. "Yes—that's pioneering and motor-building, I suppose. It's the old New York blood that's so clogged with taboos. Poor father always wants me to behave like a Knight of the Round Table."
Nona lifted her eyebrows with an effort of memory. "How did they behave?"
"They were always hitting some other fellow over the head."
She felt a little catch in her throat. "Who—particularly—does he want you to hit over the head?"
"Oh, we haven't got as far as that yet. It's just the general principle. Anybody who looks too hard at Lita."
"You would have to be hitting about! Everybody looks hard at Lita. How in the world can she help it?"
"That's what I tell him. But he says I haven't got the feelings of a gentleman. Guts, he means, I suppose." He leaned back, crossing his arms wearily behind his back, his sallow face with heavy-lidded eyes tilted to the ceiling. "Do you suppose Lita feels that too?" he suddenly flung at his sister.
"That you ought to break people's heads for her? She'd be the first to laugh at you!"
"So I told him. But he says women despise a man who isn't jealous."
Nona sat silent, instinctively turning her eyes from his troubled face. "Why should you be jealous?" she asked at length.
He shifted his position, stretched his arms along his knees, and brought his eyes down to a level with hers. There was something pathetic, she thought, in such youthful blueness blurred with uncomprehended pain.
"I suppose it's never got much do with reasons," he said, very low.
"No; that's why it's so silly—and ungenerous."
"It doesn't matter what it is. She doesn't care a hang if I'm jealous or if I'm not. She doesn't care anything about me. I've simply ceased to exist for her."
"Well, then you can't be in her way."
"It seems I am, though. Because I do exist, for the world; and as the boy's father. And the mere idea gets on her nerves."
Nona laughed a little bitterly. "She wants a good deal of elbow-room, doesn't she? And how does she propose to eliminate you?"
"Oh, that's easy. Divorce."
There was a silence between the two. This was how it sounded—that simple reasonable request—on the lips of the other partner, the partner who still had a stake in the affair! Lately she seemed to have forgotten that side of the question; but how hidcously it grimaced at her now, behind the lines of this boyish face wrung with a man's misery !
"Old Jim—it hurts such a lot?"
He jerked away from her outstretched hand. "Hurt? A fellow can stand being hurt. It can't hurt more than feeling her chained to me. But if she goes—what does she go to?"
Ah—that was it! Through the scorch and cloud of his own suffering he had seen it, it was the centre of his pain. Nona glanced down absently at her slim young hands—so helpless and inexperienced looking. All these tangled cross-threads of life, inextricably and fatally interwoven; how were a girl's hands to unravel them?
"I suppose she's talked to you—told you her ideas?" he asked.
Nona nodded.
"Well, what's to be done: can you tell me?"
"She mustn't go—we mustn't let her."
"But if she stays—stays hating me?"
"Oh, Jim, not hating—!"
"You know well enough that she gets to hate anything that doesn't amuse her."
"But there's the baby. The baby still amuses her."
He looked at her, surprised. "Ah, that's what father says: he calls the baby, poor old chap, my hostage. What rot! As if I'd take her baby from her—and just because she cares for it. If I don't know how to keep her, I don't see that I've got any right to keep her child."
That was the new idea of marriage, the view of Nona's contemporaries; it had been her own a few hours since. Now, seeing it in operation, she wondered if it still were. It was one thing to theorize on the detachability of human beings, another to watch them torn apart by the bleeding roots. This botanist who had recently discovered that plants were susceptible to pain, and that transplanting was a major operation—might he not, if he turned his attention to modern men and women, find the same thing to be still true of a few of them?
"Oh Jim, how I wish you didn't care so!" The words slipped out unawares: they were the last she had meant to speak aloud.
Her brother turned to her; the ghost of his old smile drew up his lip. "Good old girl!" he mocked her—then his face dropped into his hands, and he sat huddled against the armchair, his shaken shoulder-blades warding off her touch.
It didn't last more than a minute; but it was the real, the only answer. He did care so; nothing could alter it. She looked on stupidly, admitted for the first time to this world-old anguish rooted under all the restless moods of man.
Jim got up, shook back his rumpled hair, and reached for a cigarette. "That's that. And now, my child, what can I do? What I'd honestly like, if she wants her freedom, is to give it to her, and yet be able to go on looking after her. But I don't see how that can be worked out. Father says it's madness. He says I'm a morbid coward and talk like the people in the Russian novels. He wants to speak to her himself—"
"Oh, no! He and she don't talk the same language. . ."
Jim paused, pulling absently at his cigarette, and measuring the room with uncertain steps. "That's what I feel. But there's your father; he's been so awfully good to us; and his ideas are less archaic. . ."
Nona had turned away and was looking unseeingly out of the window. She moved back hastily. "No!"
He looked surprised. "You think he wouldn't understand either?"
"I don't mean that. . . But, after all, it's not his job. . . Have you spoken to mother?"
"Mother? Oh, she always thinks everything's all right. She'd give me a cheque, and tell me to buy Lita a new motor or to let her do over the drawing-room.
Nona pondered this answer, which was no more than the echo of her own thoughts. "All the same, Jim: mother's mother. She's always been awfully good to both of us, and you can't let this go on without her knowing, without consulting her. She has a right to your confidence—she has a right to hear what Lita has to say."
He remained silent, as if indifferent. His mother's glittering optimism was a hard surface for grief and failure to fling themselves on. "What's the use?" he grumbled.
"Let me consult her, then: at least let me see how she takes it."
He threw away his cigarette and looked at his watch. "I've got to run; it's nearly nine." He laid a hand on his sister's shoulder. "Whatever you like, old girl. But don't imagine it's going to be any use."
She put her arms about him, and he submitted to her kiss. "Give me time," she said, not knowing what else to answer.
After he had gone she sat motionless, weighed down with half-comprehended misery. This business of living—how right she had been to feel, in her ignorance, what a tortured tangle it was! Where, for instance, did one's own self end and one's neighbour's begin? And how tell the locked tendrils apart in the delicate process of disentanglement? Her precocious half-knowledge of the human dilemma was combined with a youthful belief that the duration of pain was proportioned to its intensity. And at that moment she would have hated any one who had tried to persuade her of the contrary. The only honourable thing about suffering was that it should not abdicate before indifference.
She got up, and her glance fell on the telegram which she had pushed aside when her brother entered. She still had her hat on, her feet were turned toward the door. But the door seemed to open into a gray unpeopled world suddenly shorn of its magic. She moved back into the room and tore up the telegram.