Twilight Sleep (Wharton)/Chapter 19
XIX
IF only Aggie Heuston had changed those sour-apple curtains in the front drawing-room, Nona thought—if she had substituted deep upholstered armchairs for the hostile gilt seats, and put books in the marqueterie cabinets in place of blue china dogs and Dresden shepherdesses, everything in three lives might have been different. . .
But Aggie had probably never noticed the colour of the curtains or the angularity of the furniture. She had certainly never missed the books. She had accepted the house as it came to her from her parents, who in turn had taken it over, in all its dreary frivolity, from their father and mother. It embodied the New York luxury of the 'seventies in every ponderous detail, from the huge cabbage roses of the Aubusson carpet to the triple layer of curtains designed to protect the aristocracy of the brown-stone age from the plebeian intrusion of light and air.
"Funny," Nona thought again—"that all this ugliness should prick me like nettles, and matter no more to Aggie than if it were in the next street. She's a saint, I know. But what want to find is a saint who hates ugly furniture, and yet lives among it with a smile. What's the merit, if you never see it?" She addressed herself to a closer inspection of one of the cabinets, in which Aggie's filial piety had preserved her mother's velvet and silver spectacle-case, and her father's ivory opera-glasses, in combination with an alabaster Leaning Tower and a miniature copy of Carlo Dolci's Magdalen.
Queer dead rubbish—but queerer still that, at that moment and in that house, Nona's uncanny detachment should permit her to smile at it! Where indeed she wondered again—did one's own personality end, and that of others, of people, landscapes, chairs or spectacle-cases, begin? Ever since she had received, the night before, Aggie's stiff and agonized little note, which might have been composed by a child with a tooth-ache, Nona had been apprehensively asking herself if her personality didn't even include certain shreds and fibres of Aggie. It was all such an inextricable tangle. . .
Here she came. Nona heard the dry click of her steps on the stairs and across the polished bareness of the hall. She had written: "If you could make it perfectly convenient to call—" Aggie's nearest approach to a friendly summons! And as she opened the door, and advanced over the cabbage roses, Nona saw that her narrow face, with the eyes too close together, and the large pale pink mouth with straight edges, was sharpened by a new distress.
"It's very kind of you to come, Nona—" she began in her clear painstaking voice.
"Oh, nonsense, Aggie! Do drop all that. Of course I know what it's about."
Aggie turned noticeably paler; but her training as a hostess prevailing over her emotion, she pushed forward a gilt chair. "Do sit down." She placed herself in an adjoining sofa corner. Overhead, Aggie's grandmother, in a voluted gilt frame, held a Brussels lace handkerchief in her hand, and leaned one ruffled elbow on a velvet table-cover fringed with knobby tassels.
"You say you know—" Aggie began.
"Of course."
"Stanley—he's told you?"
Nona's nerves were beginning to jump and squirm like a bundle of young vipers. Was she going to be able to stand much more of these paralyzing preliminaries?
"Oh, yes: he's told me."
Aggie dropped her lids and stared down at her narrow white hands. Then a premonitory twitch ran along her lips and drew her forehead into little wrinkles of perplexity.
"I don't want you to think I've any cause of complaint against Stanley—none whatever. There has never been a single unkind word. . . We've always lived together on the most perfect terms. . ."
Feeling that some form of response was required of her, Nona emitted a vague murmur.
"Only now—he's—he's left me," Aggie concluded, the words wrung out of her in laboured syllables. She raised one hand and smoothed back a flat strand of hair which had strayed across her forehead.
Nona was silent. She sat with her eyes fixed on that small twitching mask—real face it could hardly be called, since it had probably never before been suffered to express any emotion that was radically and peculiarly Aggie's.
"You knew that too?" Aggie continued, in a studiously objective tone.
Nona made a sign of assent.
"He has nothing to reproach me with—nothing whatever. He expressly told me so."
"Yes; I know. That's the worst of it."
"The worst of it?"
"Why, if he had, you might have had a good row that would have cleared the air."
Suddenly Nona felt Aggie's eyes fixed on her with a hungry penetrating stare. "Did you and he use to have good rows, as you call it?"
"Oh, by the hour—whenever we met!" Nona, for the life of her, could not subdue the mocking triumph in her voice.
Aggie's lips narrowed. "You've been very great friends, I know; he's often told me so. But if you were always quarrelling how could you continue to respect each other ?"
"I don't know that we did. At any rate, there was no time to think about it; because there was always the making-up, you see."
"The making-up?"
"Aggie," Nona burst out abruptly, "have you never known what it was to have a man give you a jolly good hug, and feel full enough of happiness to scent a whole garden with it?"
Aggie lifted her lids on a glance which was almost one of terror. The image Nona had used seemed to convey nothing to her, but the question evidently struck her with a deadly force.
"A man—what man?"
Nona laughed. "Well, for the sake of argument—Stanley!"
"I can't imagine why you ask such queer questions, Nona. How could we make up when we never quarrelled?"
"Is it queer to ask you if you ever loved your husband?"
"It's queer of you to ask it," said the wife simply. Nona's swift retort died unspoken, and she felt one of her slow secret blushes creeping up to the roots of her hair.
"I'm sorry, Aggie. I'm horribly nervous—and I suppose you are. Hadn't we better start fresh? What was it you wanted to see me about?"
Aggie was silent for a moment, as if gathering up all her strength; then she answered: "To tell you that if he wants to marry you I shan't oppose a divorce any longer."
"Aggie!"
The two sat silent, opposite each other, as if they had reached a point beyond which words could not carry their communion. Nona's mind, racing forward, touched the extreme limit of human bliss, and then crawled back from it bowed and broken-winged.
"But only on that condition," Aggie began again, with deliberate emphasis.
"On condition—that he marries me?"
Aggie made a motion of assent. "I have a right to impose my conditions. And what I want is"—she faltered suddenly—"what I want is that you should save him from Cleo Merrick. . ." Her level voice broke and two tears forced their way through her lashes and fell slowly down her cheeks.
"Save him from Cleo Merrick?" Nona fancied she heard herself laugh. Her thoughts seemed to drag after her words as if she were labouring up hill through a ploughed field. "Isn't it rather late in the day to make that attempt? You say he's already gone off with her."
"He's joined her somewhere—I don't know where. He wrote from his club before leaving. But I know they don't sail till the day after tomorrow; and you must get him back, Nona, you must save him. It's too awful. He can't marry her; she has a husband somewhere who refuses to divorce her."
"Like you and Stanley!"
Aggie drew back as if she had been struck. "Oh, no, no!" She looked despairingly at Nona. "When I tell you I don't refuse now. . ."
"Well, perhaps Cleo Merrick's husband may not, either."
"It's different. He's a Catholic, and his church won't let him divorce. And it can't be annulled. Stanley's just going to live with her . . . openly ... and she'll go everywhere with him . . . exactly as if they were husband and wife . . . and everybody will know that they're not."
Nona sat silent, considering with set lips and ironic mind the picture thus pitilessly evoked. "Well, if she loves him. . ."
"Loves him? A woman like that!"
"She's been willing to make a sacrifice for him, at any rate. That's where she has a pull over both of us,"
"But don't you see how awful it is for them to be living together in that way?"
"I see it's the best thing that could happen to Stanley to have found a woman plucky enough to give him the thing he wanted—the thing you and I both refused him."
She saw Aggie's lifeless cheek redden. "I don't know what you mean by . . . refusing. . ."
"I mean his happiness—that's all! You refused to divorce him, didn't you? And I refused to do—what Cleo Merrick's doing. And here we both are, sitting on the ruins; and that's the end of it, as far as you and I are concerned."
"But it's not the end—it's not too late. I tell you it's not too late! He'll leave her even now if you ask him to . . . I know he will!"
Nona stood up with a dry laugh. "Thank you, Aggie. Perhaps he would—only we shall never find out."
"Never find out? When I keep telling you—"
"Because even if I've been a coward that's no reason why I should be a cad." Nona was buttoning her coat and clasping her fur about her neck with quick precise movements, as if wrapping herself close against the treacherous sweetness that was be- ginning to creep into her veins. Suddenly she felt she could not remain a moment longer in that stifling room, face to face with that stifling misery.
"The better woman's got him—let her keep him," she said.
She put out her hand, and for a moment Aggie's cold damp fingers lay in hers. Then they were pulled away, and Aggie caught Nona by the sleeve. "But Nona, listen! I don't understand you. Isn't it what you've always wanted?"
"Oh, more than anything in life!" the girl cried, turning breathlessly away.
The outer door swung shut on her, and on the steps she stood still and looked back at the ruins on which she had pictured herself sitting with Aggie Heuston.
"I do believe," she murmured to herself, "I know most of the new ways of being rotten; I only wish I was sure I knew the best new way of being decent. . ."