Луис Бромфилд - Early Autumn - A Story of a Lady

For a long time he simply stood staring at the floor with the round, silly blue eyes which sometimes filled her with terror because they were so like the eyes of that old woman who never left the dark north wing and was known in the family simply as she, as if there was very little that was human left in her. At last he muttered through the drooping mustache, as if speaking to himself, “I can’t imagine what has happened to you.”

“Nothing,” said Olivia. “Nothing. I am the same as I have always been, only tonight I have come to the end of saying ‘yes, yes’ to everything, of always pretending, so that all of us here may go on living undisturbed in our dream … believing always that we are superior to everyone else on the earth, that because we are rich we are powerful and righteous, that because … oh, there is no use in talking. … I am just the same as I have always been, only tonight I have spoken out. We all live in a dream here … a dream that some day will turn sharply into a nightmare. And then what will we do? What will you do … and Aunt Cassie and all the rest?”

In her excitement her cheeks grew flushed and she stood up, very tall and beautiful, leaning against the mantelpiece; but her husband did not notice her. He appeared to be lost in deep thought, his face contorted with a kind of grim concentration.

“I know what has happened,” he said presently. “It is Sabine. She should never have come back here. She was like that always … stirring up trouble … even as a little girl. She used to break up our games by saying: ‘I won’t play house. Who can be so foolish as to pretend muddy water is claret! It’s a silly game.’”

“Do you mean that she is saying it again now … that it’s a silly game to pretend muddy water is claret?”

He turned away without answering and began again to pace up and down over the enormous faded roses of the old Victorian carpet. “I don’t know what you’re driving at. All I know is that Sabine … Sabine … is an evil woman.”

“Do you hate Sabine because she is a friend of mine?”

She had watched him for so many years disliking the people who were her friends, managing somehow to get rid of them, to keep her from seeing them, to force her into those endless dinners at the houses of the safe men he knew, the men who had gone to his college and belonged to his club, the men who would never do anything that was unexpected. And in the end she had always done as he wanted her to do. It was perhaps a manifestation of his resentment toward all those whom he could not understand and even (she thought) feared a little—the attitude of a man who will not allow others to enjoy what he could not take for himself. It was the first time she had ever spoken of this dog-in-the-manger game, but she found herself unable to keep silent. It was as if some power outside her had taken possession of her body. She had a strange sensation of shame at the very moment she spoke, of shame at the sound of her own voice, a little strained and hysterical.

There was something preposterous, too, in the sight of Anson prancing up and down the old room filled with all the souvenirs of that decayed respectability in which he wrapped himself … prancing up and down with all his prejudices and superstitions bristling. And now Olivia had dragged the truth uncomfortably into the light.

“What an absurd thing to say!” he said bitterly.

Olivia sighed. “No, I don’t think so. … I think you know exactly what I mean.” (She knew the family game of pretending never to understand a truthful, unpleasant statement.)

But this, too, he refused to answer. Instead, he turned to her, more savage and excited than she had ever seen him, so moved that he seemed for a second to attain a pale flash of power and dignity. “And I don’t like that Fiji Islander of a daughter of hers, who has been dragged all over the world and had her head filled with barbaric ideas.”

At the sight of him and the sound of his voice Olivia experienced a sudden blinding flash of intuition that illuminated the whole train of their conversation, indeed, the whole procession of the years she had spent here at Pentlands or in the huge brownstone house in Beacon Street. She knew suddenly what it was that frightened Anson and Aunt Cassie and all that intricate world of family. They were terrified lest the walls, the very foundations, of their existence be swept away leaving them helpless with all their little prides and vanities exposed, stripped of all the laws and prejudices which they had made to protect them. It was why they hated O’Hara, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic. He had menaced their security. To be exposed thus would be a calamity, for in any other world save their own, in a world where they stood unprotected by all that money laid away in solid trust funds, they would have no existence whatever. They would suddenly be what they really were.

She saw sharply, clearly, for the first time, and she said quietly, “I think you dislike Thérèse for reasons that are not fair to the girl. You distrust her because she is different from all the others … from the sort of girls that you were trained to believe perfect. Heaven knows there are enough of them about here … girls as like as peas in a pod.”

“And what about this boy who is coming to stay with Sabine and her daughter … this American boy with a French name who has never seen his own country until now? I suppose he’ll be as queer as all the others. Who knows anything about him?”

“Sabine,” began Olivia.

“Sabine!” he interrupted. “Sabine! What does she care who he is or where he comes from? She’s given up decent people long ago, when she went away from here and married that Levantine blackguard of a husband. Sabine … Sabine would only like to bring trouble to us … the people to whom she belongs. She hates us. … She can barely speak to me in a civil fashion.”

Olivia smiled quietly and tossed her cigarette into the ashes beneath the cold steel engraving of the Signing. “You are beginning to talk nonsense, Anson. Let’s stick to facts, for once. I’ve met the boy in Paris. … Sybil knew him there. He is intelligent and handsome and treats women as if they were something more than stable boys. There are still a few of us left who like to be treated thus … as women … a few of us even here in Durham. No, I don’t imagine you’ll care for him. He won’t belong to your club or to your college, and he’ll see life in a different way. He won’t have had his opinions all ready made, waiting for him.”

“It’s my children I’m thinking of. … I don’t want them picking up with anyone, with the first person who comes along.”

Olivia did not smile. She turned away now and said softly, “If it’s Jack you’re worrying about, you needn’t fuss any longer. He won’t marry Thérèse. I don’t think you know how ill he is. … I don’t think, sometimes, that you really know anything about him at all.”

“I always talk with the doctors.”

“Then you ought to know that they’re silly … the things you’re saying.”

“All the same, Sabine ought never to have come back here. …”

She saw now that the talk was turning back into the inevitable channel of futility where they would go round and round, like squirrels in a cage, arriving nowhere. It had happened this way so many times. Turning with an air of putting an end to the discussion, she walked over to the fireplace … pale once more, with faint, mauve circles under her dark eyes. There was a fragility about her, as if this strange spirit which had flamed up so suddenly were too violent for the body.

“Anson,” she said in a low voice, “please let’s be sensible. I shall look into this affair of Sybil and O’Hara and try to discover whether there is anything serious going on. If necessary, I shall speak directly to both of them. I don’t approve, either, but not for the same reason. He is too old for her. You won’t have any trouble. You will have to do nothing. … As to Sabine, I shall continue to see as much of her as I like.”