Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“ I told Mother it was useless—with that stranger—that American, with him. She has disgraced us all.—Wretched boy! Hateful woman!”
“Meg, Meg; be soldierly. He wouldn’t have spoken like that.”
“He never liked her! Never!” she cried. “I knew he didn’t, even at the time she was flattering and cajoling us. I saw that she bewildered him and that he accepted her only because she was mine. How I loathe myself for having listened to her! How I loathe her! All that she ever wanted was power! Power over other people’s lives! ”

“ Aldesey murmured.
“But he hasn’t upset me at all,” said Adrienne. “I grant that he was trying to, that he was doing his very best to give me a tumble; but I quite see through him and he doesn’t conceal himself from me in the very least. He doesn’t really believe in freedom, however much he may have taken you in, Barney; he’d think it wholesome, of course, that you should believe in it. That’s his idea, you see; to give people what he thinks wholesome; to choose for them. It’s the lack of faith all through. ”

“ It’s my only comfort.”
“Who can say,” said Adrienne. Her gaze, as she looked at him, was deep with the mystery of her acceptance. “Perhaps. It seems to me all this was needed to bring us where we are—enmity and bitterness and grief. And my love for Barney, too. Let me tell you. It’s in the past that I think of him. As if he were dead. It’s something over; done with for ever; yet something always there. How can one be a mother and forget? Even when he is Nancy’s husband and when she is a mother, I shall not cease to feel myself his wife. ”

“ There could hardly be a better training for French,” said Miss Toner, repeating the lines with a curious placidity and perfection. “I preferred Mademoiselle Jouffert’s rendering to Bernhardt’s. Her Phèdre was, with all the fire, more tender and womanly.”
“Do you care about Racine?” Oldmeadow asked her, while the lines rang in his ears—rather as in his dream the rooks’ cawing had done—with an evocative sadness that hung, irrelevantly, about their speaker. “It’s not easy for our English ears to hear the fire and passion, is it; but they are there.” ”

“ Forgive her, Barney? For what? It is only in the eyes of the world that she has done wrong and I have lifted her above that fear. Convention does not weigh for a moment with me beside the realities of the human heart; nor would it with you, Barney, if it were not for the influence of Mr. Oldmeadow. I have warned you before; it is easy to be worldly-wise and cynical and to keep to the broad road; it is easy to be safe. ”

“ Oldmeadow had never experienced such an assault upon his personality, and he met it gagged and bound, for, assuredly, this was to be Barney’s wife. A slow flush mounted to his face.
“I’m afraid I seem very strange and unconventional to you,” Adrienne Toner went on. “You’ve lived in a world where people don’t care enough for each other to say the real things. They must be felt if they’ve to be said, mustn’t they? Yet you do care for people. I have seen that, watching you here; and you care for real things. It’s a crust of caution and convention that is about you. You are afraid of expression. ”

“ Chadwick’s conception of materialism, interchanged their smile at dinner; but since the morning Oldmeadow had known that Palgrave suspected him of indifference, perhaps even hostility, towards the new-comer. “Why don’t you like her?” the boy went on and with a growing resentment as his suspicions found voice. “She isn’t stupid; that’s just it. She’s good and noble and innocent; and gifted, too. Why should we pretend to be too sophisticated to recognize such beauty when we meet it? Why should we be ashamed of beauty—afraid of it?”
Barney, flushing deeply, looked down into his wine-glass. ”

“ Oldmeadow saw that. “But that’s where the delicate discrimination between ideals comes in, Roger. That’s where I have to leave intuition, which says ‘No,’ and turn to reason. And the trouble is that for me reason says ‘No,’ too. Because humanity—all of it that counts—has outgrown war. That’s what it comes to. It’s a conflict between a national and an humanitarian ideal. There are enough of us in the world to stop war, if we all act together; and why, because others don’t, should I not do what I feel right? Others may follow if only a few of us stand out. ”

“ Nothing else is real beside it. Nothing is real without it. And when it happens, when one feels it come through and shine further, it is more, far more, than happiness.”
All the while that she had spoken, pale, and with her trembling hands, he had lain looking at her in silence, a silence that was dividing him, as if by a vast chasm, from all his former life.
He and Adrienne stood on one side of this chasm, and, while it seemed to widen with a dizzying rapidity, he saw that on the other stood Barney, Nancy, Coldbrooks, and Lydia—poor Lydia—and that they were being borne away from him for ever. ”

“ Everything, always, with her, was to get power over other people’s lives,” said Mrs. Chadwick, and as he had, in the past, heard echoes of Adrienne in all she said, now he heard echoes of Meg, “It’s by willing it, you know. Some people practise it like five-finger exercises. You have to sit quite still and shut your eyes and concentrate. Meg has heard how it’s done. I don’t pretend to understand; but that must have been her way. And she made poor Barney miserable and set me against him at once; you said so yourself, Roger, and blinded me to all the cruel things she did. ”

“ Chadwick began to weep again. “I never saw such thick braids; like Marguerite in Faust. Her hands on the sheets so thin and white and her eyes enormous. I don’t think even you could have the heart to jibe and laugh if you saw her.”
“I didn’t laugh at Adrienne, you know,” Oldmeadow reminded her, rising and buttoning his overcoat. “I laughed at you and Jowett. No; Adrienne is no laughing matter. But she won’t die. I can assure you of that now. She’s too much life in her to die. And though I’m very sorry for her—difficult as you may find it to believe—I shall reserve my pity for Barney.” ”

“ You say people must follow their own light. It is my light. I must do what Mother asks and try to bring Meg back.”
“It is not your light, Barney. It is craft and caution and fear. More than that, do you not see, must I make plain to you what it is you do to me in going? You insult me. You treat what I have believed right for Meg to do as a crime from which she must be rescued. You drag me in the dust with her. Understand me, Barney”—the streaks of colour deepened on her neck, her breath came thickly—“if you go, you drag me in the dust.” ”

“ When people love each other they can, I’m sure, live over any amount of unspoken things.”
“It hasn’t been unspoken between you and me, though, has it, Roger?” said Barney, and he raised himself and got upon his feet as he said it. “There’s the trouble. There’s where I am wrong. For she’d feel it an intolerable wrong if she knew that it hadn’t been unspoken between you and me. And she’d be right. When people love each other such reticences and exclusions wrong their love.”
“But since you say she knows,” Oldmeadow suggested after another moment.
Barney stood staring out of the twilight window. ”

“ She said things to the end: when the ribbon began it was unrolled; and it seemed, always, to make a silence in which it could be watched.
“We went up high into the sunlight,” she said, “and one saw nothing but snow and sky. The bells were ringing on the mountains beneath; one heard no other sound. I have never forgotten the moment. It seemed an inspiration of joy and peace and strength.”
“You’ve walked so much in the Alps, haven’t you, Roger?” said Mrs. Chadwick. “Miss Toner has motored over every pass.”
“In the French Alps. I don’t like Switzerland,” said Oldmeadow. ”

“ Barney spoke now with definite vexation and Oldmeadow, in his corner of the sofa, his arms folded, his eyes on the cornice, gave him no help. “Except that, yes, certainly; it’s she who left him. She’s not a deserted wife. Anything but.”
“It’s only Mr. Aldesey who is the deserted husband,” Adrienne turned her fan and kept her eyes on it. “It’s only he who can’t be free. Forgive me if she’s a special friend of yours, Mr. Oldmeadow; but it explains. I felt something so brittle, so unreal in her, charming and gracious as she is. It is so very wrong for a woman to do that, I think.” ”

“ She had Meg, after lunch, in her room. Meg looked quite different when she came out. It’s very strange, Roger. It’s as if she’d changed them all. I almost feel,” Nancy looked round at the happy house and up at the tranquil elms where the rooks were noisily preparing for bed, “as if nothing could be the same again, since she’s come.” Her clear profile revealed little of the trouble in her heart. They had not named Barney; but he must be named.
“It’s white magic,” said Oldmeadow. “You and I will keep our heads, my dear. We don’t want to be changed, do we? What has she done to Barney? ”

“ It isn’t only that you distrust ardour and glory, all the sunlight and splendour of life; but you are afraid of them; afraid to open your heart to trust. You shut your door upon the sunlight and take up your caustic pen; and you don’t see how the shadows fall about you.”
It was indeed a dusty tumble from the quite civilized pavement of their interchange, and it was unfortunate that upon his moment of discomfiture, when he saw himself as trying to clap the dust off his knees and shoulders in time to be presentable, Barney and Mrs. Aldesey should have chosen to approach them. ”

“ Palgrave still gazed at the sky. “It’s an idea that will survive; perhaps the more truly in the spirit for perishing in the flesh, if it really came to that. Look at Greece. She’s dead, if you like; yet what existing nation lives as truly? It is Grecian minds we think with and Grecian eyes we see with. It’s Plato’s conception of the just man being the truly happy man—even if the whole world’s against him—that is the very meaning of our refusal to go with the world.”
“You’ll never stop war by refusal so long as the majority of men still believe in it,” said Oldmeadow. ”

“ Aldesey showed, at this, that he had arrested her. In spite of the element of truth in Adrienne’s verdict upon her he knew her to be, when veils and cymbals were cast aside, a sincere and gallant creature. She did not attempt to hide from him now and, after a moment of mutual contemplation, she laughed a little, with not unreal mirth and said: “I suppose I am angry. I suppose I’m even spiteful. It’s her patronage, you know. Her suffocating superiority. To have to stand there, for his sake, and take it! You overrate her, Roger. No woman not abysmally stupid could say the things she says.” ”

“ After Plato and Bach, Oldmeadow’s passions were the rivers of France.
“She’ll have something to do with you,” said Barney, and he seemed pleased with the retort. “I met her at the Lumleys. They think her the marvel of the age.”
“Well, that doesn’t endear her to me,” said Oldmeadow. “And I don’t like Americans.”
“Come, you’re not quite so hide-bound as all that,” said Barney, vexed. “What about Mrs. Aldesey? I’ve heard you say she’s the most charming woman you know.”
“Except Nancy,” Oldmeadow amended.
“No one could call Nancy a charming woman,” said Barney, looking a little more vexed. ”

“ We become afraid of them and fear is what impedes us most of all in life. For so many generations humanity has seen ghosts in the evening mists and taken its indigestion for the promptings of a demon. We’ve got away from all that now, Mr. Oldmeadow. We see that mists are mists and indigestion indigestion, and that there aren’t such things as ghosts and demons. We’ve come out, all together, hand in hand, on the Open Road and we don’t want, ever any more, to be reminded, even, of the Dark Ages. ”

“ We don’t want revolutions. All we want is slow, good-tempered reform. Revolutions are always ill-tempered, aren’t they, and nothing worth doing was ever done in an ill-temper. You are making me very didactic.”
“Oh, but I prefer that so much to persiflage,” said Adrienne, with her tranquillity. “And I am glad to hear what you really believe. But it is sad to me that you should see no ardour or glory in anything. With all its excesses and errors, I have always felt the French Revolution to be a sublime expression of the human spirit.” ”

“ The workers all over the world are beginning to see whose the hands are that pull the strings and they’ll refuse to dance to their piping. They’ll down weapons just as they’ve learned, at last, to down tools; and without them you can do nothing. That’s the way human nature will end war.”
“A spirited plan, no doubt,” said Oldmeadow, “and effective if all the workers came to be of the same mind simultaneously. But if those of one country downed weapons and those of another didn’t, the first would get their throats cut for their pains.” ”

“ They passed and Oldmeadow pursued his way, filled with a disagreeable astonishment though, absurdly, his mind was at first occupied only in an attempt to recover a submerged memory that Captain Hayward’s demeanour suggested. It came at last in an emancipating flash and he saw again, after how many years, the golden-brown head of his rather silly setter, John, turned aside in shy yet dignified repudiation, that still, by a dim, sick smile, attempted to conceal distress and to enter into the spirit of the game—as a kitten was held up for his contemplation. ”

“ Chadwick wouldn’t like it at all, nor Mrs. Averil; but it would be the best we could do for them; and I should think that when people love each other and are the right people for each other they’d be thankful for any kind of cake. Even if it were a good deal burned around the edges,” Adrienne finished, her slight bitterness evidently finding satisfaction in the simile.
“But they wouldn’t see it at all like that,” said Oldmeadow, now with unalloyed gravity. “They’d see it as a cake they had stolen; a cake they had no right to. It’s a question of the laws we live under. ”

“ You are an American, Mrs. Aldesey, so you find it easy to believe in freedom, don’t you?”
“Very easy; for myself; but not for other people,” Mrs. Aldesey replied and Oldmeadow saw at once, with an added discomfort, that she underestimated, because of Adrienne’s absurdity, Adrienne’s intelligence. “But then the very name of any abstraction—freedom, humanity, what you will—has always made me feel, at once, dreadfully sleepy. It’s not ever having had my mind trained, Mrs. Barney. ”

“ There was nothing for it but to turn from the ungarnished sideboard and face her again.
“It’s about Barney, Mr. Oldmeadow,” Miss Toner said, unmoved by his patent evasion. “It’s because I know you love Barney and care for his happiness. And it’s because I hope that you and I are to be friends, and friendship can only be built on truth. Try to trust more; will you? That’s all I want to say. Try to trust. You will be happier if you do and make other people happier.” ”

“ And if it was, it was your mistake; not your crime.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” said Adrienne, and the compulsion of his feeling had brought a note of anguish to her voice. “It wasn’t that. It was worse than that. Don’t forget. Don’t think you are fond of me because I can make you sleep. It’s always been so; I see it now—the power I’ve had over people; the horrible power. For power is horrible unless one is good; unless one is using it for goodness.”
“Well, so you were,” Oldmeadow muttered, falling back on his pillow, her vehemence, her strange passion, almost daunting him. ”

“ The people who find the Prentisses a bore, I mean. And it won’t be difficult for us to do that. She will see to it that we are effaced. Only, of course, it’s a grief. I’m so fond of him”; and as Oldmeadow stretched forth his legs and put his hands in his pockets there drifted across his mind, in a thin, sharp, knife-like stroke, the memory of Barney—tall eighteen-year-old Barney—with dear old Effie, luxuriously upturned in his arms, being softly scratched—Barney’s hand with a cat was that of an expert—and told that she was the best and most beautiful of cats. ”

“ The danger of democracy is that we don’t grow them at all; merely catch them, like influenza, from a mob. Not that I disbelieve in democracy.”
“Don’t you, Mr. Oldmeadow?” She turned her little fan and smiled on him. “You believe in liberty, equality, fraternity? That surprises me.”
“Democracy isn’t incompatible with recognizing that other people are wiser than oneself and letting them guide us; quite the contrary. Why surprised? Have I seemed so autocratic?”
“It would surprise me very much to learn that you believed in equality, to start with that alone”; Adrienne smiled on. ”

“ What was to become of poor Meg now? And after his mind had paused on poor Meg a pang of memory brought back the face of his setter John. Poor Hayward.
“She must, of course, find some work at once,” Mrs. Aldesey wrote. “The war does help to solve problems of this sort as nothing else before ever could. She must nurse, or drive an ambulance and perhaps by the time it’s all over we’ll have forgotten irrelevancies that happened so long ago. Sometimes it feels like that to me and I know I’m much too old to face the world that will have grown up out of the wreckage of the world I knew.” ”

“ Barney echoed, staring at Oldmeadow while this firm hand was laid upon his Egeria. “What the dickens do you mean, darling? She is a special friend of Roger’s. You don’t surely mean to say a woman must, under all circumstances, stick to a man she doesn’t love?”
“Anything but that, Barney. I think that she should leave him and set him free. It’s quite plain to me that if a wife will not live with her husband it is her duty to divorce him. Then, at any rate, he can try for happiness again.” ”

“ Barney was not quite comfortable; Oldmeadow saw that. He kicked about in the gravel, a little flushed, and when, once or twice, the old family friend met his eye, it was quickly averted. “God is Good; and everything else is mortal mind—mistake—illusion.”
“You are a sound Platonist, Miss Toner,” Oldmeadow observed, and his kindness hardly cloaked his irony.
“Am I?” she said. When she looked at one she never averted her eyes. She looked until she had seen all that she wished to see. “I am not fond of metaphysics.” ”

“ We are forced to seem on his side and against her. And Adrienne has her eye upon them.”
“Let her keep it on them,” said Oldmeadow in strong indignation. “And much good may it do her!”
“Oh, it won’t do her any good—nor us!” said Mrs. Averil. “She’s sick with jealousy, Roger. Sick. I’m almost sorry for her when I see it and see her trying to hide it, and see it always, coming in by the back door when she shuts the front door on it—as it always does, you know. And Nancy sees it, of course; and is quite as sick as she is; and Barney, of course, remains as blind as a bat.” ”

“ Barney is better. When will you all be back at Coldbrooks?”
“In June, I hope. Yes; she is better. But so feeble, still; so frail. And quite, quite changed from her old bright self. It’s all very depressing, Roger. Very depressing and wearing,” said Mrs. Chadwick, opening her eyes very wide and staring before her in a way characteristic of her when she repressed tears. “Sometimes I hardly know how to keep up at all. For nothing cheers her. And Barney isn’t really much help. He has very little power of fighting against depression.” ”

“ She had possessed Barney before; but how much more deeply she possessed him now and how much more definitely she saw what she intended to do with him.
“You must equip him with your opinions,” said Oldmeadow, and his voice was a good match for hers in benevolence. “I know that you have so many well-formed ones.”
“Oh, no; never that,” said Adrienne. “That’s how country vegetables are grown; first in frames and then in plots; all guided and controlled. He must find his own opinions; quite for himself; quite freely of influence. That is the rock upon which Democracy is founded. ”

“ That shepherdess! My dear Roger, don’t pretend to me that you don’t see it!”
Oldmeadow, sunken in the chair opposite her, surveyed her over his clasped hands with an air of discouragement.
“What I’m most seeing at the moment is that she’s made you angry,” he remarked. “If what you say were all the truth, why should she make you angry? She’s not as blind as a Juggernaut. That’s where you made your mistake. She’ll only crush the people who don’t lie down before her. She knows perfectly well where she is going—and over whom. ”

“ Barney, after all, was to gain everything from what he had to tell him, and Lydia was to lose; how much was Lydia to lose? He recalled their last evening together and its revelations and saw that the old laughing presage was now more than fulfilled. Lydia was to lose more than her toes and fingers; in any case. Even if he returned to her alone, she cared for him too much not to feel, always, the shadow of his crippled heart; his heart not only crippled, but occupied, so occupied that friendships, however near, became, in a sense, irrelevancies. ”

“ Oldmeadow was wondering too. There was something about Barney’s attitude as he sat there beside his cousin, silent and absent-minded it seemed, listening as little to the music as he looked little at her, that he would rather Lydia Aldesey had not been there to observe. They had a curiously marital appearance, the young couple, or, rather, Barney had; the air of being safe with some one with whom no explanations were needed and for whom no appearances must be kept up; some one, even, with whom he was so identified that he was hardly conscious of her. Nancy was not so unconscious. ”

“ She would go much further than most people in any direction she wanted to go simply because she was not aware of obstacles and had no inhibitions.
“Call it what you like,” said Miss Toner. She still smiled—but more gravely. Barney had ceased to stroll and kick. He had come to a standstill beside them, and, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed on his beloved, showed himself as completely reassured. Palgrave still stood on the step above her and seemed to watch the snowy, piled-up clouds that adorned the tranquil sky. ”