Kitabı oku: «The Book of Susan: A Novel», sayfa 16

VII

MALVINA

GOUCHER

A GENTLE WOMAN

On one point Susan was from the first determined: Miss Goucher's death should make no difference in her struggle for independence; she would go on as she had begun, and fight things through to a finish alone. Neither Phil nor I could persuade her to take even a few days for a complete change of scene, a period of rest and recuperation. Simply, she would not. She settled down at once to work harder than ever, turning out quotable paragraphs for Whim, as daring as they were sprightly; and she resolutely kept her black hours of loneliness to herself. That she had many such hours I then suspected and now know, but on my frequent visits to New York – I had been appointed administrator of Miss Goucher's more than modest estate – she ignored them, and skillfully turned all my inquiries aside. These weeks following on Miss Goucher's death were for many reasons the unhappiest of my life.

Never since I had known Susan, never until now, had our minds met otherwise than candidly and freely. Now, through no crying fault on either side – unless through a lack of imagination on mine – barriers were getting piled up between us, barriers composed of the subtlest, yet stubbornest misunderstandings. Our occasional hours together soon became a drab tissue of evasions and cross purposes and suppressed desires. Only frankness can serve me here or make plain all that was secretly at work to deform the natural development of our lives.

There are plays – we have all attended them to our indignation – in which some unhappy train of events seems to have been irrationally forced upon his puppets by the author; if he would only let them speak out freely and sensibly, all their needless difficulties would vanish! Such plays infuriate the public and are never successful.

"Good Lord!" we exclaim. "Why didn't she say she loved him in the first place!" – or, "If he had only told her his reasons for leaving home that night!"

We, the enlightened public, feel that in the shoes of either the hero or the heroine we must have acted more wisely, and we refuse our sympathy to misfortunes that need never have occurred. Our reaction is perhaps inevitable and æsthetically justified; but I am wondering – I am wondering whether two-thirds of the unhappiness of most mortals is not due to their failure clearly to read another's thoughts or clearly to reveal their own? Is not half, at least, of the misery in our hearts born of futile misunderstandings, misunderstandings with which any sane onlooker in full possession of the facts on both sides, can have little patience, since he instinctively feels they ought never to have taken place? But it is only in the theater that we find such an onlooker, the audience, miraculously in possession of the facts on both sides. In active life, we are doing pretty well if we can partly understand our own motives; we are supermen if we divine the concealed, genuine motives of another. Certainly at this period Susan, with all her insight, did not seize my motives, nor was I able to interpret hers. Hence, we could not speak out! What needed to be said between us could not be said. And the best proof that it could not is, after all, that it was not..

The conversation that ought to have taken place between us might not unreasonably have run something like this:

Susan: Ambo dear – what is the matter? Heaven knows there's enough! – but I mean between us? You've never been more wonderful to me than these past weeks – and never so remote. I can feel you edging farther and farther away. Why, dear?

I: I've been a nuisance to you too long, Susan. Whatever I am from now on, I won't be that.

Susan: As if you could be; or ever had been!

I: Don't try to spare my feelings because you like me – because you're grateful to me and sorry for me! I've had a glimpse of fact, you see. It's the great moral antiseptic. My illusions are done for.

Susan: What illusions?

I: The illusion that you ever have really loved me. The illusion that you might some day grow to love me. The illusion that you might some day be my wife.

Susan: Only the last is illusion, Ambo. I do love you. I'm growing more in love with you every day. But I can't be your wife, ever. If I've seemed changed and sad – apart from Sister's death, and everything else that's happened – it's that, dear. It's killing me by half-inches to know I can never be completely part of your life – yours!

I:

[But I can't even imagine what babble of sorrow and joy such words must have wrung from me! Suppose a decent interval, and a partial recovery of verbal control.]

Susan: You shouldn't have rescued me from Birch Street, Ambo. Everything's made it plain to me, at last. But I've already ground the mud of it into your life now – in spite of myself. You'll never feel really clean again.

I: What nonsense! Susan, Susan – dearest!

Susan: It isn't nonsense. You forget; I'm a specialist in nonsense nowadays. Oh, Ambo, how can you care for me! I've been so insufferably self-satisfied; so childishly blind! My eyes are wide open now. I've had the whole story of what happened that awful night – all of it – from Doctor Askew. He thought he was psycho-analyzing me, while I pumped it out of him, drop by drop. And I've been to Maltby, too; yes, I've been to Maltby, behind your back. Ambo, he isn't really certain yet that I didn't go crazy that night and kill your wife. Neither, I'm sure, is Mrs. Arthur. They've given me the benefit of the doubt simply because they dread being dragged through a horrible scandal, that's all. But they're not convinced. Of course, Maltby didn't say so in so many words, but it was plain as plain! He was afraid of me – afraid! I could feel his fear. He thinks madness is in my blood. Well, he's right. Not just as he means it, but as Setebos means it – the cruel, jealous God of this world!.. No, wait, dear! Let me say it out to you, once for all. My father ended a brutal life by an insanely brutal murder, then killed himself; my own father. And I've never all these years honestly realized that as part of my life – part of me! But now I do. It's there, back of me. I can never escape from it. Oh, how could I have imagined myself like others – a woman like others, free to love and marry and have children and a home! How could I!

I: Susan! Is that all? Is it really all that's holding you from me? Good God, dear! Why, I thought you – secretly – perhaps even unknown to yourself – loved Jimmy!

Susan: Jimmy? You thought —

I: I think so even now. How can I help it? Look… [And here you must suppose me to show her those first scrawled sheets, written automatically by her hand.] Perhaps I'm revealing your own heart to you, Susan – dragging to light what you've tried to keep hidden even from yourself. See, dear. "A net. No means of escape from it. To escape – somehow. Jimmy – "

[And then Susan would perhaps have handed back those scrawled pages to me with a pitying and pitiful smile.]

Susan:

[Author's Note: This carefully written, imaginary speech has been deleted in toto by Censor Susan from the page proof – at considerable expense to me – and the following authentic confession substituted for it in her own hand. But she doesn't know I am making this explanation, which will account to you for the form and manner of her confession, purposely designed to be a continuation of my own imaginary flight. In admitting this, I am risking Susan's displeasure; but conscience forbids me to let you mistake a "genuine human document" – so dear to the modern heart – for a mere effort at interpretation by an amateur psychologist. What follows, then, is veracious, is essentially that solemn thing so dear to a truth-loving generation – sheer fact.]

Ambo dear, I can explain that, but not without a long, unhappy confession. Must I? It's a shadowy, inside-of-me story, awfully mixed and muddled; not a nice story at all. Won't it be better, all round, if I simply say again that I love you, not Jimmy, with all my heart?

[No doubt I should then have reached for her hands, and she would have drawn away.]

Ah, no, dear, please not! I've never made a clean breast of it all, even to myself. It's got to be done, though, Ambo, sooner or later, for both our sakes. Be patient with me. I'll begin at the beginning.

I'm ridiculously young, Ambo; we all keep forgetting how young I am! I'm an infant prodigy, really; you and Phil – and God first, I suppose – have made me so. And the main point about infant prodigies is that experience hasn't caught up with them. They live in things they've imagined from things they've been told or read, live on intuition and second-hand ideas; and they've no means of testing their real values in a real world. And they're childishly conceited, Ambo! I am. Less now than some months ago; but I'm still pretty bad..

Well, back in Birch Street, before I came to you, when I was honestly a child, I lived all alone inside of myself. I lived chiefly on stories I made up about myself; and of course my stories were all escapes from reality – from the things that hurt or disgusted me most. There was hardly anything in my life at home that I didn't long to escape from. You can understand that, in a general way. But there's one thing you perhaps haven't thought about; it's such an ugly thing to think about. I know it isn't modern of me, but I do hate to talk about it, even to you. I must, though. You'll never understand – oh, lots of later things – unless I do.

Love, Ambo, human love, as I learned of it there at home – and I saw and heard much too much of it – frightened and sickened me. It was swinish – horrible. Most of all I longed to escape from all that! I couldn't. I wonder if anyone ever has or can? We are made as we are made… Yes, I longed to escape from it; but my very made-up story of escape was a disguised romance. Jimmy was to be the gentle Galahad who would some day rescue me. He had done battle for me once already – with Joe Gonfarone. But some day he would come in white, shining armor and take me far away from all the mud and sweat of Birch Street to blue distant hills. Artemis was all mixed up in it, too; she was to be our special goddess; our free, swift, cool-eyed protector. There was to be no heartsick shame, no stuffiness in my life any more forever! But it wasn't Jimmy who rescued me, Ambo. You did.

Only, when we've lived in a dream, wholly, for months and months and months, it doesn't vanish, Ambo; it never vanishes altogether; it's part of us – part of our lives. Isn't it? Gertrude was once your dream, dear; and the dream-Gertrude has never really vanished from your life, and never will. Ah, don't I know!

Well, then you rescued me; and you and Phil and Maltby and Sister and books and Hillhouse Avenue and France and Italy and England, and my Magic Circle —everything– crowded upon me and changed me and made me what I am; if I'm anything at all! But Birch Street had made me first; and my dreams..

Ambo, I can never make you know what you've been to me, never! Cinderella's prince was nothing beside you, and my Galahad-Jimmy a pale phantom! I shan't try. And I can never make you know what a wild confusion of storm you sent whirling through me when I first felt the difference in you – felt your man's need of me, of me, body and soul! You meant me not to feel that, Ambo; but I did. I was only seventeen. And my first reaction was all passionate joy, a turbulent desire to give, give, give – and damn the consequences! It was, Ambo. I loved you.

But given you and me, Ambo, that couldn't last long. You're too moral – and I'm too complicated. My inner pattern's a labyrinth, full of queer magic; simple emotions soon get lost in me, lost and transformed. And please don't keep forgetting how young I was, and still am; how little I could understand of all I was conceited enough to think I understood! Well, dear, I saw you struggling to suppress your love for me as something wrong, unworthy; something that could only harm us both. And then all that first, swift, instinctive joy went out of me, and my old fear and distrust of what men call love seized me again. "Stuffiness, stuffiness everywhere – it leads to nothing but stuffiness!" I said. "I hate it. I won't let it rule my life. The great thing is to keep clear of it, clean of it, aloof and free!" The old Artemis-motive swept through me again like a hill-wind – but it came in gusts; and there were days – weeks, Ambo – when I simply wanted to be yours. And one night I threw myself into your arms..

But the next day I was afraid again. The phrase "passion's slave" got into my head and plagued me. Then you came to me and said, "It's the end of the road, dear. We can't go on." That changed everything once more, Ambo, in a flash. That was my crisis. From that moment, I was madly jealous of Gertrude; knew I always had been, from the first. My telegram to her was a challenge to battle. It was, dear – and I lost. She came back; she was wonderful, too – her way – and the old Gertrude-dream stirred in you again; just stirred, but that was enough. You said to yourself, didn't you? that perhaps after all the best solution for our wretched difficulties was for Gertrude to return to her home. At least, that would end things. But you couldn't have said that to yourself if Gertrude had been really repulsive to you. The old dream had fluttered its tired wings, once, Ambo; you know it had!

And so I flopped again, dear! I was sick of love; I hated love! I said to myself, "I won't have this stupid, brutal, instinctive thing pushing and pulling me about like this! I'll rule my own life, thanks – my own thoughts and dreams! Freedom's the thing – the only good thing in life. I'll be free! Ambo, too, must learn to be free. We can only share what's honestly best in both of us when at last we are free!"

My Galahad-Jimmy had turned up again, too. Perhaps that had something to do with my final fiercest revolt against you. I don't know. He was all I had wanted him to be, Ambo; simple and straightforward and clean. Oh, he had his white, shining armor on, bless him! But I didn't want him to rescue me, for all that; not in the old way. I was just glad my dream-boy had come a little true; that's all. You were jealous of him, weren't you? Confess! You needn't have been.

But here in New York, with Sister, things happened that made a difference..

First of all, dear, I discovered all I had lost in losing you; discovered I couldn't be free. All I could do was to make some kind of a life of it; for Sister, chiefly. And I tried; oh, I did try! Then those whispered scandals about us began. But it wasn't the scandal itself that did for me; it was something added to it – by Mrs. Arthur, I suppose – something true, Ambo, that I'd never honestly faced. Suddenly my father rose from the dead! Suddenly I was forced to feel that never, never under any conditions, would it have been possible for me to be yours – bear you children… Suddenly I felt, saw – as I should have seen long ago – that the strain of evil, perhaps of madness, in my father – the strain that made his life a hell of black passions – must end with me!

Here's where Jimmy comes back, Ambo – and it's the worst of all I have to confess. My anxiety was all for you now: not for myself, I happened to love you that way. "Suppose," I kept thinking, "suppose something should unexpectedly make it possible for Ambo to ask me to be his wife? Suppose Gertrude should fall in love herself and insist on divorce? Or suppose she should die? Ambo would be certain to come to me. And if he did? Should I have the moral courage to send him away? As I must – I must!"

Dear, from that time on a sort of demon in me kept suggesting: "Jimmy – Jimmy's the solution! He's almost in love with you now; all he needs is a little encouragement. You could manage it, Susan. You could engage yourself to Jimmy; and then you could string him along! You could make it an interminable engagement, years and years of it, and break it off when Ambo was thoroughly discouraged or cured; you're clever enough for that. And Jimmy's ingenuousness itself. You could manage Jimmy." Oh, please don't think I ever really listened to my demon, was ever tempted by him! But I hated myself for the mere fact that such thoughts could even occur to me! They did, though, more than once; and each time I had to banish them, thrust them down into their native darkness.

But they didn't die there, Ambo; they lived there, a hideous secret life, lying in wait to betray me. They never will betray me, of course; I loathe them. But they can still stir in their darkness, make themselves known. That's what the references to Jimmy mean, Ambo, in those pages I scribbled in my trance; and that's all they mean. For I don't love him; I love you.

But I can't marry you, ever. I can't. That black strain concentrated in my father – oh, it must die out with me! Just as Sister's line ended with her… She ran away from the one love of her life, Ambo – just as I must run away from you. You never knew that about Sister. But I knew it. Sonia told me. Sister told her, the week before Sonia married. Sister felt then that Sonia ought to run away from all that, as she had. But Sonia wouldn't listen to her..

"Good for Sonia!" I might then have cried out. "God bless her! Hasn't she made her husband happy? Aren't her children his pride? Why in heaven's name should she have denied herself the right to live! And for a mere possibility of evil! As if the blood of any human family on earth were wholly sound, wholly blameless! Sonia was selfish, but right, dear; and Miss Goucher was brave, but wrong! So are you wrong! Actually inherited feeble-mindedness, or insanity, or disease – that's one thing; but a dread of mere future possibilities, of mere supposed tendencies! Good Lord! The human race might as well commit suicide en bloc! It's you I love —you– just as you are. And you say you love me. Well, that settles it!"

But who knows? It might have settled it and it might not – could any such imaginary conversation conceivably have taken place. It did not take place. We are dealing, worse luck, with history.

VIII

Perhaps six weeks after Miss Goucher's death one little conversation, just skirting these hidden matters, did take place between us; but how different was its atmosphere, and how drearily different its conclusion! You will understand it better now that – like a theater audience, or like God – you are in full possession of Susan's facts and of mine; but I fear it will interest you less. To know all may sometimes be to forgive all; but more often, alas, it is to be bored by everything..

[Firmly inserted note, by Susan: "Rubbish! It's only when we think we know it all, and don't really, that we are bored."]

I had taken Susan for dinner that night to a quiet hotel uptown where I knew the dining-room, mercifully lacking an orchestra and a cabaret, was not well patronized, though the cooking was exceptionally good. At this hotel, by a proper manipulation of the head waiter, it is often possible to get a table a little apart from the other diners – an advantage, if one desires to talk intimately without the annoyance of being overheard. It troubled me to find Susan's appetite practically nonexistent; I had ordered one or two special dishes to tempt her, but I saw that she took no pleasure in them, merely forcing herself to eat so as not to disquiet me. She was looking badly, too, all gleamless shadow, and fighting off a physical and mental languor by a stubborn effort which she might have concealed from another, but not from me. It was only too plain to me that her wish was to keep the conversation safely away from whatever was busying and saddening her private thoughts. In this, till the coffee was placed before us, I thought best to humor her, and we had discussed at great length the proper format for her first book of poems, which was to appear within the next month. Also, we had discussed Heywood Sampson's now rapidly maturing plans for his new critical review.

"He really wants me on his staff, Ambo, and I really want to be on it – just for the pleasure of working with him. It's an absolutely unbelievable chance for me! And yet – "

"And yet – ? Is there any reason why you shouldn't accept?"

"At least two reasons, yes. I'm afraid both of them will surprise you."

"I wonder."

"Won't they? If not, Ambo, you must suppose you've guessed them. What are they?"

Susan rather had me here. I had not guessed them, but wasn't willing to admit even to myself that I could not if I tried. I puckered my brows, judicially.

"Well," I hesitated, "you may very naturally feel that 'Dax' is too plump a bird in the hand to be sacrificed for Heywood's slim bluebird in the bush. Any new publication's a gamble, of course. On the other hand, Heywood isn't the kind to leave his associates high and dry. Even if the review should fail, he'll stand by you somehow. He has a comfy fortune, you know; he could carry on the review as a personal hobby if he cares to, even if it never cleared a penny."

Susan smiled, gravely shaking her head: "Cold, dear; stone cold. I'm pretty mercenary these days, but I'm not quite so mercenary as that. Now that I've discovered I can make a living, I'm not nearly so interested in it; hardly at all. It's the stupid side of life, always; I shouldn't like it to make much difference to me now, when it comes to real decisions. I did want a nice home for Sister, though. As for me, any old room most anywhere will do. It will, Ambo; don't laugh; I'm in earnest. But what's your second guess?" she added quickly.

"You've some writing you want to do – a book, maybe? You're afraid the review will interfere?"

"Ah, now you're a tiny bit warmer! I am afraid it will interfere, but in a much deeper way than that; interfere with me."

"I don't quite follow that, do I!"

"Good gracious, no – since you ask. It's simple enough, though – and pretty vague. Only it feels important – here." For an instant her hand just touched her breast. "I hate so to be roped in, Ambo, have things staked out for me – spiritually, I mean. Mr. Sampson's a darling; I love him! But he's a great believer in ropes and stakes and fences – even barbed wire. I'm beginning to see that the whole idea of his review is a scheme for mending political and moral and social fences, stopping up gaps in them made by irresponsible idealists – anarchists, revolutionary socialists – people like that. People like me, really! – There! Now you do look surprised."

I was; but I smiled.

"You've turned Red, Susan? How long since? Overnight?"

"Not red," answered Susan, with bravely forced gayety; "pinkish, say! I haven't fixed on my special shade till I'm sure it becomes me."

"It's certain to do that, dear."

She bobbed me a little bow across the cloth, much in the old happy style – alas, not quite. "But I never did like washed-out colors," she threw in for good measure.

"You are irresponsible, then! Suppose Phil could hear you – or Jimmy. Jimmy'd say your Greenwich Village friends were corrupting you. Perhaps they are?"

"Perhaps they are," echoed Susan, "but I think not. I'm afraid it goes farther back, Ambo. It's left-over Birch Street; that's what it is. So much of me's that. All of me, I sometimes believe."

"Not quite. You'll never escape Hillhouse, either, Susan. You've had both."

"Yes, I've had both," she echoed again, almost on a sigh, pushing her untasted demi-tasse from her.

Suddenly her elbows were planted on the cloth before her, her face – shadowed and too finely drawn – dropped between her hands, her eyes sought and held mine. They dizzied me, her eyes..

"Ambo," she said earnestly, "I suppose I'm a dreadful egotist, but more and more I'm feeling the real me isn't a true child of this world! I love this world – and I hate it. I don't know whether I love it most or hate it most. I bless it and damn it every day of my life – in the same breath often. But sometimes I feel I hate it most – hate it for its cold dullness of head and heart! Why can't we care more to make it worth living in, this beautiful, frightful world! What's the matter with us? Why are we what we are? Half angels – and half pigs or goats or saber-toothed tigers or snakes! Each and every one of us, by and large! And oh, how we do distrust our three-quarters angels – while they're living, anyway! Dreamers – mad visionaries – social rebels – outcasts! Crucify them, crucify them! Time enough to worship them – ages of to-be-wasted time enough – when they're dead!" She paused, still holding my eyes, and drawing in a slow breath, a breath that caught midway and was almost a sob; then her eyes left mine.

"There – that's over. Saying things like that doesn't help us a bit; it's – silly… And half the idealists are mad, no doubt, and have plenty of pig and snake in them, too. I've simply coils and coils of unregenerate serpent in me – and worse. Oh, Ambo dear – but I've a dream in me beyond all that, and a great longing to help it come true! But it doesn't – it won't. I'm afraid it never will – here. Will it there, Ambo? Is there a there?.. Have we got all of Sister that clean fire couldn't take, shut up in that tiny vase?"

"We can hope not, at least," I replied.

"Hope isn't enough," said Susan. "Why don't you say you know we haven't! I know we haven't. I do know it. It's the only thing I —know!"

A nervous waiter sidled up to us and softly slipped a small metal tray before me; it held my bill, carefully turned face downward.

"Anything more, sir?" he murmured.

"A liqueur?" I suggested to Susan. She sat upright in her chair again, with a slight impatient shake of the head.

I ordered a cigar and a fine champagne. The waiter, still nervously fearful of having approached us at a moment when he suspected some intimate question of the heart had grown critically tense, faded from us with the slightest, discreetest cough of reassurance. He was not one, he would have us know, to obtrude material considerations when they were out of place.

"No; I can't go with Mr. Sampson," Susan was saying; "and he'll be hurt – he won't be able to see why. But I'm not made to be an editor – of anything. Editors have to weigh other people's words. I can't even weigh my own. And I talk of nothing but myself. Ugh!"

"You're tired out, overwrought," I stupidly began.

"Don't tell me so!" cried Susan. "If I should believe you, I'd be lost."

"But," I blundered on, "it's only common sense to let down a little, at such a time. If you'd only take a real rest – "

"There is no such thing," said Susan. "We just struggle on and on. It's rather awful, isn't it?" And presently, very quietly, as if to herself, she said over those words, surely among the saddest and loveliest ever written by mortal man:

 
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
 
 
That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
 

"To sea," she repeated; "to sea… As if the sea itself knew rest! – Now please pay your big fat bill from your nice fat pocketbook, Ambo; and take me home."

"If I only could!" was my despairing thought; and I astounded the coat-room boy, as I tipped him, by muttering aloud, "Oh, damn Jimmy Kane!"

"Yes, sir – thank you, sir – I will, sir," grinned the coat-room boy.

On our way downtown in the taxi Susan withdrew until we reached her West Tenth Street door. "Good-night, Ambo," she then said; "don't come with me; and thank you for everything – always." I crossed the pavement with her to the loutish brownstone front-stoop of the boarding house; there she turned to dismiss me.

"You didn't ask my second reason for not going on the review, Ambo. You must know it though, sooner or later. I can't write any more – not well, I mean. Even my Dax paragraphs are falling off; Hadow Bury mentioned it yesterday. But nothing comes. I'm sterile, Ambo. I'm written out at twenty. Bless you. Good-night."

"Susan," I cried, "come back here at once!" But she just turned in the doorway to smile back at me, waved her hand, and was gone.

I was of two minds whether to follow her or stay. Then, "A whim," I thought; "the whim of a tired child. And I've often felt that way myself – all writers do. But she must take a vacation of some kind – she must!"

She did.