The Unpossessed (20 page)

Through the pounding and the pulsing in her ears there floated up some feeling, faint, some straw to cling to, wake for; something to flag the fast express; some memory she could not place. The high speed slackened; this day was not like other days; the bed rocked, swayed: she was on some boat, no fast train this, this slow and gentle motion. She lay there trying to waken, trying to remember; like trying to capture some name which, lost in memory, becomes the keynote, the important cabala. Perhaps when she found it, it would be some name like White; or it might recall associations in no way satisfying the urgent need. Yet it would remain a fact; and though one could not conjure with it, it must be endured, accepted, forever after faced. She tossed on the bed as the train moved slower. The memory came up clean and shining;
Bruno, she was going home to Bruno
; the brakes ground noiselessly; she was awake with a new wide day before her. Something of the joy of waking in the Longview nursery shone in the wavering stateroom. Bruno next door; Bruno waiting at the pier; in twenty-four short hours.

“NO, YOU GO, go without me, darling,” Margaret said absently; “you can represent us both, I'm tired.”

December already, she thought, the middle of December; leaving only January, February, March
. . . the months stopped on her fourth finger, the ring finger; August on the finger that wore the little marriage band. The doctor had laughed; he couldn't be sure, he said, as long as the months counted so many ahead, up to his own ring finger; ah you eager young women, he said, and wagged the June index finger playfully. But Margaret and Mrs. Salvemini were perfectly certain. It didn't take a doctor, Mrs. Salvemini said, to tell
her
; she knew it; had the feeling; a heaviness in the eyes, a lightness in the heart—it was she who told the doctor. And I always ask God, said Mrs. Salvemini, I always ask God. Go ahead, said Margaret, her eyes shining with her heresy; go ahead and ask your God; for me, Missis Salvemini, she said. God, snorted Mrs. Salvemini; I'll ask the Mother of God, Missis Flinders.

A heaviness in the eyes, a lightness in the heart—let Miles wait for scientific confirmation from the doctor; Margaret Flinders had it from Mrs. Salvemini and Mrs. Salvemini had it straight from the Mother of God. And be sure and take it easy, Missis Flinders, Mrs. Salvemini said; it's the first two months you have to look out for; one I lost, she said, I lost because I didn't wait for Mr. Salvemini to come home and beat the rugs; you take it easy, Missis Flinders, she said, scolding in advance.

“You're such a funny girl,” Miles said, bewildered, and followed her from room to room; “staying home from politics—to take a
bath
.” But being in love with her again, she reflected, he was in love with her eccentricities too. She glowed complacently; dropped the last shred of her clothing and stood before the mirror screwing back her hair. “Don't you want to keep up,” he said; “the Magazine, don't you want . . .”

“But I'm definitely not the
au courant
type,” said Margaret placidly. She enjoyed Miles' faint discomfiture on beholding her with sails full-set, naked at an unexpected hour in the day. “I'm a political moron, dear, we know that. Besides, I don't
want
to be courant—with anything but you.” She turned with one hand guiding her long hair to a ridiculous knot on her head and blew him a kiss with the free one.

“It's too soon after dinner,” he said, disconcerted, “it's too soon after dinner, to take a bath.” She knew what he was telling her: it was too soon after dinner to catch him unawares, surprise him with love. He hovered like a shadow while she pulled her hair into a ridiculous plume on the top of her head. A heaviness in the eyes, a lightness in the heart—she moved with the special consciousness of a woman grown suddenly beautiful, a woman loved; she felt proud and secretive, gathering towels and flying to the bathroom to watch the quickly spouting water, Miles slowly coming after. He took his puzzled dignity and sat with his hesitant grace on the laundry hamper beside the tub.

“And you can tell me,” Margaret said, “everything that happens; all about Jeff and Mrs. Middleton, and Bruno and his pet lamb Emmett—and of course the machinations . . .” She swished her hands with pleasure through the soapy water; gravely handed him the brush.

“You know I won't see any of those undercurrents you specialize in,” he said with his sheepish reluctant grin that told her he knew more, in his inarticulate way, than she would ever know, about himself. “I'll hear the wrangling, I'll come away wondering if Jeffrey can be trusted, I'll have my philosophic doubts, my conscience will prick—but none of it will look like melodrama, as you see things.” He floated the brush absently over her shimmering knees. “But you, Meg, aren't you interested, don't you care—don't you care for anything, but being
happy
?”

Some day she would cure him, Margaret thought, of saying the word in quotations, as though he borrowed it from some foreign language, speaking it faintly with an accent. “Of course, if you prefer
la type courante
—” she raised her soapy face; eyed him with mock archness through sleepy lowered lids (if life held anything sweeter, she swiftly thought, than the luxury of flirting with one's husband—then Margaret didn't want it).

“No, I prefer you,” Miles admitted awkwardly. “Even with your face all soaped—even with that crazy top-knot dancing on your bean—” he tried to pull his shots, inject his caustic New England—but it failed; his voice fell into tenderness; “I suppose you looked like that when you were Mrs. Banner's little girl, Maggie?” He examined the back of the brush minutely; focussed his eyes on a spot on the laundry hamper; cleared his throat with embarrassment.

The heart could grow so light, she discovered, that it nearly flew out of one's chest. But Margaret Flinders had grown canny; gently she tempered her love and her joy till they were something he could take; his New England tract was small. “Getting late,” she said calmly; “Bruno will be there by now.” She had a sense of deliberately dimming her lights.

“I ought to go,” he said reluctantly. “I really ought to go. I can't announce at the Middletons' that I was late because I stopped to watch my wife take a bath. My wife,” he repeated, surprised. “
Wife
,” he said again. And paused as though the word, the fact, were something new; “
wife—
” he examined the effect on himself and faintly smiled. She saw the tremulous moisture gather in his eyes. Be strong! she told herself; not all at once; it mustn't come too soon and frighten him. “I'm getting positively balmy myself,” he murmured, smoothing the bristles of the brush. “You're seducing me, you soapy wench! with your balmy wiles, your top-knot guiles . . .”

Darling beloved, she swiftly thought, let's die now, quickly, in this bathroom. The world holds nothing greater
.

“Old softy,” she said; “if your New England aunts could see you now!” For a little grit must always be thrown in his joy; a little sand preserved in her own voice when she spoke to him. O Margaret was taking no chances now! “Get along, darling, to the meeting of the world-revisers. One of us must be
courant
.” For he must not stay, for both their sakes. Margaret must be alone with the lightness of her heart, alone so she could shamelessly enjoy it. And Miles must run away from too much joy, so it would not drown him, choke him. But more than that. The Magazine and Margaret—they made a cycle for him; maintained the balance in his conscience; each made the other possible. The Magazine restored his faith, his long-lost God, gave life a forgotten validity; and so he earned his personal joy, a joy made valid by religious satisfaction.

“But I don't want to go,” he said incredulously. (Feeling took him by such quaint surprise!) “I want to stay home and take baths with my God damned
wife
.” He trailed his fingers in the water. “It's much more fun at home.” He shyly winked.

“Counter-revolutionary,” she mocked.

“All those schemes and Manifestoes,” he said recklessly; “let Bruno and Jeff be the commissars—I want to make love to my wife.”

She grew grave. “But Margaret—your scheming wife—has plans too, darling, a life-ahead plan, Miles. You aren't forgetting, Miles . . .” She could not resist the pleading; the lightness of the heart was not to be belied. She drew herself back with difficulty from telling him what she and Mrs. Salvemini between them knew. Happiness was too precarious . . .

“I'll stick to my side of the bargain,” he said courageously. “But—it does worry me, darling. My salary—I'm sure to be cut again, or fired.”

“A smoke-screen, darling,” she said carefully; “not what you really mean, Miles. Come clean, my dear.”

“The Magazine,” he offered; “the movement, revolution—these things mean more to me than to you.” He played vaguely with a lock of his own hair.

“Come cleaner, darling.” She was playful, but hard. “You're mixing your mind with your emotions, Miles—a common New England fallacy.” She watched him gravely.

“It does worry me, Margaret; it—I think it
embarrasses
me. As if I weren't ready for so large a step.” His voice was husky. “I can't seem to—seem to—imagine it somehow, believe it. I don't cotton to it, as my aunt Martha used to say. I—maybe I'm jealous, Maggie; but I can't seem to see myself, quite, in the rôle . . .”

She laughed vigorously. “Quite natural, Mister Flinders. Missis Salvemini says—until he saw them with his own two eyes, Mister Salvemini never gave a damn. She says that men are like that. Very dear and very, very stupid.”

“Are you taking up with the Salveminis,” he said, bewildered. “We might call him Daniel, Maggie,” he said suddenly. They were quiet with the vision. “And will you look like Mrs. Salvemini, Maggie, when . . .”

“No, the Banners don't run to so many bosoms, not even ‘when' ”—she mocked his puritan reticence. “I may be a bit more billowy,” she said proudly. “I may look older,” she said firmly. “I may look a little on the full-bloom side—like my mother looked before she died. Do you remember my lovely mother, Miles?” She paused, moved; and shaken with wonder that they both instinctively went backward in their minds when they contemplated going forward; the thing made the thread, the meaning. “We mustn't let ourselves forget her, darling.” She recalled her mother's astonished acceptance of Miles; her loyal explanation, in the terms of the only thing she had ever understood, that the lad was young, the lad had never had a childhood. “Do you think I look the least bit like her, Miles?” she wistfully asked. But she was not like her mother, with her head filled with recipes for calming men and scalloping potatoes; or was she? “My forehead, I think, my eyes?”

“In your balmy moods,” he said, with one of his quick, rare flashes; and he put his hand on her forehead so that she felt it round and high and beautiful beneath his touch; “in your balmy moods you look exactly like Mrs. Thomas Banner; telling her son-in-law to take life easy, to be happy with her daughter.” He smiled, the recollection filling him with tenderness. He could face Mrs. Thomas Banner and her ultra, rich-developed balminess, thought Margaret, more tenderly now she was dead; and could transfer his fear of it to the strain of the same thing in her daughter. She was deeply grateful for his tribute to her mother; felt it ironic but inevitable that only death had bridged the gap between the two she loved the most.
Do you see, mother, do you see what's happening to your daughter? she has a real live husband now, a man of flesh and blood, of tenderness; a man who dares to be a father
.

“Mrs. Thomas Banner,” she said softly, “wouldn't need to tell you now.”

His lips (so bitten in against emotion) trembled. He looked as he had on that dear morning when he marched across the kitchen to say, “Wait, I love you, Margaret.” He looked at her—then quickly down. “It needs a lot of strength,” he said, “to take so much. Even to look you in the eyes these days. It's almost blinding.” He ran his fingers on the rim of the tub. His eyes he held carefully lowered; and suddenly, as though he were hiding the motion even from himself, his hands shot out toward her and reached with the despair of a child.

In a flash Margaret Flinders forgot all she knew, all she had carefully schooled herself to remember—and was in his arms, all wet and clean and naked, all of her pressed and gathered to his frightened heart that beat so painfully under the clothes he wore to hide it. He sobbed against her shoulder. Again she wished that they might die, that minute, so that their joy would last forever. But they would not die. And through her unbearable love for him, her grateful, overwhelming love for this moment that was like the end of all her aims, her newfound wisdom slowly filtered back. She held his head like something infinitely precious against her. But over his head her mind conferred with Mrs. Salvemini's Mother of God.

As when a thousand people gather in a square, an enigma called “mob” is born, so two people cannot live together without giving birth to a third entity, at once a part of themselves and greater than the whole. This entity, so Margaret thought, was a thing to be reckoned with, wooed, its presence constituting the aura in which lovers must live. They are never alone. This thing that is born of their being together is a censor, a chaperon, made of their separate consciousnesses meeting, not quite merging, wavering in a pattern they never can see, which nevertheless (dancing on the bathroom walls, the ceiling over their bed at night) dominates their life together. Ignored, it stretches forth an icy hand and claws their joy to death. Wooed, it hovers like a blessing on their heads.

Margaret, born with the knowledge dumbly in her soul, having had it simply nourished by her mother who was born for nothing else, lived to court its blessing. Margaret could hold her breath forever in its service. But men, she thought, need something more; something at once more and less. So Miles, just dimly conscious as she felt he must be, would fight it even against his will, because it threatened death to him of those parts exclusively his own.
She
became whole (she knew it shamelessly) only when her self was merged. But Miles feared drowning.