Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 33
It was long after midnight when Ellen, entering the cabriolet at last, was driven off by the impatient Wilkes to the Babylon Arms. When she arrived, she found Clarence in the lower hall pacing up and down with a pitiful air of anxiety.
"I should have telephoned," she said, "but I forgot. I did not know how late it was. You see we talked for a long time afterward."
And then she kissed him gently, swept again by the old sense of pity. During all the drive home, in the long moments when she had been alone in the dark cabriolet, she had struggled, bitterly, with the puzzle that confronted her, knowing always in the back of her mind that whatever happened she could never run away with Richard Callendar. She might fall ill, she might die, she might go mad, but there were some things which she could not do. Deep down in her heart there was a force that was quite beyond her, a power that was an instinct, as much a physical thing as her very arms and hands. It was the part of her that was Hattie Tolliver.
There had been the other way out, but when she kissed Clarence she knew that it too was impossible. When she saw him waiting, his eyes wild with anxiety, his whole face suddenly lighted up with joy and adoration at sight of her, she knew too that she could never divorce him. His very weakness destroyed her, for she knew that if she had asked him he would have freed her. There was nothing that he would deny her . . . nothing that he was able to give; and what she wanted from him, he would never be able to give because he was, after all, only a poor thing.
But the hardest part of the ordeal lay before her. It was the meeting with Callendar when, for the first time, they would both be forced to recognize the truth and deny it, forever. She understood this well enough; she was in a way even eager to have it occur at once so that she might put the memory of it behind her, so that she might stamp out the incident forever and go on her triumphant way. It came at last when Callendar, in a brief note, asked if he might call upon her. The letter, in a headlong handwriting so unlike the mocking cynicism which he cultivated, gave no hint of what was in his mind. It asked merely that she set a time and place.
She bade him come to the apartment in the Babylon Arms and he came, strangely sobered and quiet, with a chastened look in his gray eyes. At sight of him he appeared to her, as it seemed long afterward, for the first time in any semblance of reality; he existed with a new clarity, a new distinctness of outline. It was as if she had never seen him rightly before, as if until now he had been to her some one whom she accepted vaguely without questioning. Only one quality carried over completely into the new Callendar; it was the old sense of conflict, of will against will, of a pleasurable, almost perverse sensation of struggle. The new Callendar was an older man in a fashion she could not altogether define, save that the impression was related to the effect which his mother had upon her, of weakening and diminishing all reliance in herself.
The first thing she said to him was, "I am frightened."
He took off his hat and laid it quietly on the divan by the side of his stick and then he turned and looking at her with his strange gray eyes, replied, "I too am frightened."
Among the cheap furniture that crowded the room the old sense of his superiority returned to her, mingled this time with a new consciousness that he was utterly alien, stranger than she had ever imagined until now. She sat down quietly while he drew a chair to her side.
"I've talked to my mother," he said. "Or rather she talked to me. She's told me everything."
Under the gaze of the gray eyes, Ellen turned aside, discomfited, wretched. "I wasn't honest," she murmured. "I'm sorry, but I hadn't meant to be dishonest. I never thought it would make the least difference to any one."
"It has made a difference though . . . a great difference. It's changed everything." He reached over with a tenderness that suddenly weakened her and took one of her hands in his. She knew his hands; she knew them as she had known Clarence's on the night in the Setons' parlor when she had judged him nice enough but a bit of a prig. Callendar's hands were slender, dark and strong, beautifully shaped in a way that made her fear them. When they approached her, she became weak; she felt that she was losing herself. She could not have explained the feeling save by a sense she had of their power. He was talking again, softly in the low voice with the thin trace of an accent, like Lily's.
"I was foolish," he was saying. "I should have known that the thing which made me afraid of you was the thing that would have kept you from taking a lover. I'd never encountered anything quite like it before." He smiled and touched his mustache gently. "I was a fool. I should have known better. I thought perhaps you would love me some time . . . not without a struggle. No, I never expected that. I thought we might understand each other. . . ." For an instant the incredible happened. Callendar was blushing. It was a thing which she had not seen happen before. "I thought that one day we should come together. . . . I thought you were an artist, living as artists I have known do live. I was idiotic. I should have known better. You'll forgive me that . . . won't you?"
For a moment she did not answer. The sound of his soft voice, the touch of the dark hands, had taken possession of her. Dimly she knew that she should have been insulted, yet she had no feeling at all, no sense of indignation; there was only a curious faintness that made her afraid. Somehow she understood that all this in reality had nothing to do with insults, with conventions, even with laws. It was something which might never again come her way and yet something which was to be feared, because it might destroy her forever. At last she said, "Why should I forgive you? It would make no difference now. . . ."
"It would make a difference. . . . It would make a difference," he said quickly. "I want you to marry me. . . . We can arrange everything. It makes no difference how." And then after a sharp silence, he added in a low voice, "There is a magnificence about you, . . . a bravery . . ." And the rest of the sentence trailed away so that she did not hear it.
Out of a great depth as if by a great physical effort she returned into the daylight. She found her lips moving. She found herself saying over and over again, "I must remember. . . . I must remember. . . . I must not ruin everything." He had never even asked whether she loved him. He had accepted it as a fact. He had asked her nothing. He had come simply to take her.
Then she withdrew her hand slowly and sat staring at it with an air of looking at some object unfamiliar to her. "I can't marry you," she said slowly. "I can't. . . . I can't. . . . There is nothing to be done. . . . There is nothing to be done." And she began to cry silently, so that the tears fell down upon her hands.
The speech appeared to astonish him, for he made no effort to regain her hand but sat staring at her as at a stranger. When at last he spoke it was in a voice that was low and caressing, but the tenderness had slipped away and in its place there was a hardness, as of steel; it was like a sudden glimpse of claws emerging from a soft and furry paw.
"Is it because you won't give him up," he asked, "as you told my mother?"
"It is because I cannot give him up. . . . I cannot treat him that way. . . . I cannot . . . cannot."
The steel in the voice emerged a little more sharply. There was an edge to it now, sarcastic, cutting. "Is it because he is so fine . . . so handsome . . . so magnificent . . . so dazzling?"
He repeated thus all the things that Clarence was not, and so he gave her the last bit of strength that she required, for the sound of his voice, the sharp edge of the sarcasm, filled her with a sudden anger and a wild desire to protect Clarence as something which was her own. She found herself fighting for a man who was none of these things against a man who to her was all of them. It struck somehow at her sense of gallantry . . . that Callendar who had everything should sneer at poor Clarence who had nothing.
She said, "It has nothing to do with that. . . . There are some things that one cannot do. . . . This I will not do." She dried her eyes and sat more erectly. "There is no use. . . . There was no use in your coming here. . . . My mind was made up . . . long before you came."
At this he turned angry. "You are like all your women. . . . Love to you is nothing. . . . It is something to be controlled. You don't know what love is. . . . You would exploit it. . . . You are like all your women."
So he talked thus for a time in a childish vein strange and new while she sat impassive, conscious all the while of the power he could exert over her, a power that had to do with the beauty of his hands, with the strange quality of his eyes, with the sound of his voice, with the soft catlike way in which he moved; yet she remained in some mysterious way safe from that power. It was, perhaps, her intelligence which saved her, for as she watched him she gained slowly a curious intuition of what he might do to her if she yielded. The old sense of conflict was fanned into a new life, more intense than it had ever been. He sought to overpower her will. She knew all at once that this was the very essence of his confused, unreasonable emotion.
And as she listened to him her woman's instinct for the dramatic came to her aid. She saw herself sitting there calm and a little cold, slowly but surely winning in the battle. She listened to his abuse. It did not enrage her. It did not even make her weep. It seemed rather to increase her coldness, her very strength. She felt him beating against the wall of her serenity and a kind of fierce triumph flowed through her body. For a time she possessed truly a great magnificence. At a little distance, she stood outside herself and watched the spectacle. She saw him standing by her, white with anger.
"You have lied to me. . . ." he was saying. "You have never cared at all. . . ." And again the reproach. "You are like all your women . . . cold . . . magnificent . . . not worthy of love." He came nearer to her. "I will love you. . . . I will teach you what love can be. . . . What does he know of love . . . ? Nothing. . . . I will give you a happiness such as you never dreamed of. . . . I . . . I am a lover. . . . I know these things."
And then he went down suddenly upon his knees, the steel gone swiftly from his voice; the warmth and tenderness flowing back. "You will not refuse me." He leaned forward and pressed his head against her. "You cannot. . . . I will give you everything . . . all the things which he cannot give you. . . ." And again he took her hands and this time kissed them passionately in a fashion that frightened her and filled her with the old weakness.
The spectacle of his humility, of this sudden collapse of what to her was his dignity, his will, his strength, astonished and embarrassed her. In her coldness it seemed to her incredible that any woman, least of all herself, should possess such power over any man. It was all unreal, beyond belief, and yet it fed her pride and gave her strength with which, one might have said, to destroy her own happiness, to resist the force of circumstances, even of nature, as she had defied it once before in marrying Clarence.
At last he rested his head against her knee and she bent over him, touching his dark hair with gentle fingers.
"Don't," she said. "Don't. . . . Please don't. . . . It is no good. I know better than you. . . . I should always be thinking of him. . . . I should never be happy, so neither of us could be happy. There are some things which I cannot do . . . and this is one. It is impossible."
They said nothing more. Richard remained kneeling with his head against her knees and slowly the old peace which she had not known in months took possession of her, heightened now by a new knowledge of her completeness and power. It was a kind of satisfaction which was new to her, an emotion which was heady and intoxicating. She was uplifted, free now of Callendar, free of Clarence, free of everything in all the world . . . alone, liberated, triumphant. She had defeated them all. And when he turned toward her for the last time there was a look in her eyes which said, "Is is no use. You need have no hope. It can never be."
On leaving, he kissed her hand, gently this time as if the passion had gone out of him. All he said was, "I shall do then what they expect of me. Some day you may wish for what you have thrown away. . . . I don't imagine a thing like this happens every day."
He was polite but, like herself, he was unbroken. He appeared to have regained possession of himself, to have become cold and calm and even a trifle indifferent. That was all he said and when he had gone the sight of his back, so slim, so strong, so inscrutable, filled her with a sudden weakness, for she knew that she had closed the door not alone upon Callendar but upon his mother, upon Sabine, upon the big house on Murray Hill, upon all that she had built up with such terrible patience.
He did what was expected of him. In a fortnight there appeared in the newspapers an announcement of the engagement of Richard Callendar to Sabine Cane. It described the great fortune of the prospective bridegroom and enlarged upon the social position of the happy couple. On the same day there was a paragraph apprising the world of the fact that Thérèse Callendar had sailed as usual to spend the remainder of the year abroad. But there was nothing said of the girl whom the world had seen lunching with Richard Callendar in Sherry's. She was talked of, to be sure, in the circles in which Mrs. Champion and the Virgins, Mrs. Mallinson and the Apostle to the Genteel, were shining lights. They agreed that it must have been the clever Thérèse who disposed of the girl (perhaps paid her well) and made the match she desired; and they predicted with some satisfaction an unhappy life for Sabine. But Sabine in the end had won her game of patience, though she never knew the reason.