Читать книгу The Wasted Generation - Owen Johnson - Страница 10

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As I try to reconstruct this episode, much of it remains blurred,—a confused repetition of fatiguing emotions; scenes of jealousy no sooner ended than begun again: revulsions in me away from her, weak returns: the obsession of her presence; her caprices and her demands disorganizing all the routine of a once methodical existence. Only a few scenes come back to me vividly. Of her life I know as little as of the motives which ran in her agile mind. I am beginning to see her now with a colder point of view; then I did not understand her at all. We never discussed her life or mine,—that is, what had happened before our meeting.

I do not know her age exactly (perhaps twenty-five, perhaps thirty) yet she seemed always of another generation, and old in the wisdom of experience. I had often the curious feeling of not looking at her but at the mirror of a woman, and of never being able to progress beyond the pale reflection.

As I try to analyze her now, her salient quality was an utter inability to feel pain. Nor do I believe she could understand it in others, even when for her own enjoyment she was its cause. She was, of course, one of those women of over-refined temperament who simulate sensations they no longer can feel, seeking mentally what is no longer a natural impulse. Her curiosity in inflicting pain was of this nature.

* * * * *

Occasionally, however, she was capable of an amazing frankness, whether by cunning or from the inconsistency of her woman’s nature. Once, when I sought to penetrate beyond her reserve—the occasion was after an accidental meeting with her mother as we were driving in the Bois—she said something to me in such prophetic artlessness that to this day I wonder if for one moment this was not the true Letty.

Our carriages had met and passed and for an instant I had felt her suddenly rigid at my side. I looked over and saw something out of Letty’s past,—a thin, crooked old lady, very black, bejeweled and grotesquely dressed, who was agitating a pink parasol as though it were a bell-rope, to attract our attention. The next second, and we had passed.

“Your mother?”

“Yes.”

She had been too startled to deny it.

“Letty,” I said eagerly, for the tone of her voice threw an air of romantic mystery about her figure to me, “don’t you want to,—can’t you tell me something of your life?”

She shook her head.

“To you, if to any one. Don’t ask me. It is too painful!”

She added, and at such moments I felt twenty years rushing in between us:

“Life is only a succession of doors to be closed and never reopened. I never do.”

Something made me reply:

“Not very flattering to me.”

She looked at me, and answered:

“Oh, you! How you will hate me, some day!”

It was by such unexpected remarks, by the very seeming frankness of an abrupt confession, that she knew how to rouse my curiosity and to surround herself with a glamor of mystery. I believed in her sorrows until the day came when I was shocked out of my fatuity and saw the feline delight in playing with a wounded animal which alone was insatiable in her character.

I have often wondered over that speech and why she had made it. A sense of the dramatic, a moment’s indulgence in absolute truth, a sure sense of the effect on my tempestuous imagination, to be warned of danger? Perhaps, all three.

“Life is only a succession of doors to be closed and never reopened.”

It is strange how a phrase remains when a memory has been conquered. This phrase, which summed up all her defiant, selfish, worldly wisdom, has come back to me again and again and, though I am freed of the tyranny of her malicious personality, the poison of her philosophy still lurks in my memory.

* * * * *

There are moments when we look back in cold memory and cannot comprehend the whence and the wherefore of the hot fever that once dominated every sense and drove us through the hallucination of a passion. So with me, to-day.

When I think of Jenny Barnett, I seem to remember a confidence told me by a friend of college days: when I recall Letty, I seem to recall a chapter in some unhealthy romance. It is impossible that I and that David Littledale are one and the same person!

* * * * *

The heart of a man is like running water,—the years in their course purify the moral contagion. I do not know that this is true of all men. Perhaps those who remain in the stagnant pools of little existence never free themselves of the scum of the past; yet it is true of those who venture out into the traveling current. In a large sense, it is true of the generations, that move as great rivers move,—and in this running purification is the hope of all society.

* * * * *

Why, at this period of my life, should I have fallen so completely under the spell of such a woman as Madame de Tinquerville? It was not genuine love that caused it, for as I conceive love it is the calm of a great certainty,—and with Letty it was never anything but a ceaseless conflict. If not Letty, would it have been some one else? Was it an experience which I was to undergo,—an impulse that came from within me, rather than from outside? Perhaps I understand better to-day the springs of my impulses.

There are in most men two strong and opposite impulses towards women which, at first sight, appear contradictory but are easily reconcilable, as they spring from the two linked needs of their natures and are the key to the many seeming inconsistencies, infidelities, abrupt passions and incomprehensible tyrannies into which their sentimental cravings lead them. A man seeks in woman saint and sinner, calm and tempest, salvation and demoralization.

As architects of life our instincts are towards order and discipline, yet we are eternally seeking the thing that will upset our self-control. We are irresistibly attracted by what threatens our equanimity, enslaves our senses, imprisons our will,—for that brief, fleeting ecstasy which we feel at its fullness only when we are aware that we have cast aside the reins of our government. But, as the abiding instinct of our nature is order, there remains always the ideal of woman, which represents the revulsion to sanity, calm and serenity,—back to which we grope with reverence and to which we fasten with the instinct of self-preservation. I know this is true, though to-day this woman, the woman who is serenity and order, has not come into my life.

So intimately entwined are these two natures, these twin struggling impulses, that they often remain confused and inseparable. This is the explanation of the two tragedies of society, each proceeding from the same complex source: the phenomenon of a man’s marrying his mistress and that darker mystery which remains behind the curtain of marriage, the debasing of an ideal once raised in reverence.

* * * * *

The ease with which I yielded to her dominance, the disorganization into which I plunged, and the violent revulsion which came in the end are explainable, I believe, by this conflict in our nature. But then I did not reason thus, I did not reason at all, and therein lay the danger,—a danger that I shudder now to contemplate.

What was the essence of this corruption which she exercised over me,—that was more moral and mental than physical? It was in the stifling of all the youth and ambition of my nature by the baleful weight of her age-old weariness of intellect. She took a keen delight in seeking out my illusions, one by one; of slowly destroying them before my eyes under her malicious wit. She taught me that all striving was futile, that youth was a season of riotous enjoyment for the wise, and that only fools sacrificed it in a groaning pursuit of an ambition which could never be attained.

“Why strain for the thing that is here, at your finger tips? This is the fullness of life; seize it. What would you seek?—a career?—fame? My dear little Davy, you are not a genius. Your talents are not even considerable. The chances are that after ten years of drudgery you would only have condemned yourself to the bitterness of disillusionment! What do men seek in fame? Just the vanity that a pretty woman has to be noticed as she enters a restaurant. Believe me, the quality of youth, which you hold so lightly, is worth all your drowsy, rheumatic celebrities! You have senses given you to enjoy life with,—enjoy it!”

“And, the end—”

“Who knows what may be the end? Rather remorse than regrets!”

All her philosophy was summed up in this sentence. Yet she was exceedingly punctilious in her religious observances and, although she had a sort of dare-devil courage, she hated so the intrusion of realities that she would turn down a side street rather than meet a funeral.

* * * * *

The struggle to free myself was a hideous one. Again and again I determined to fling off the unhealthy bondage that weighed on my freedom of thought, and as often, from weakness, from fear of giving pain, with rage and hatred in my soul, I temporized. The fear of giving pain! How it holds a man at the last to his own destruction! For I was still innocent enough of what such a world can hold of depravity to believe that, such as she was, she loved me with all the good and bad of her nature.

Once, after a week of mutual recriminations, driven beyond my strength by her simulated scenes of jealousy, I went to her, determined to provoke a final rupture. I can still remember the rage in my heart as I came into her salon that night of the final rupture that calls out the primitive criminal which abides in all of us. For criminal instinct is essentially the instinct of the survival of the fittest, and in that moment when, rightly or wrongly, we reach the frenzy where we must tear from us the arms that hold us back,—we destroy as criminals destroy. I cannot think of what might have happened that night, without a shudder.

I came resolved to wound her on the raw, to force her out of her calm, and in the clash of our hatreds to find my escape. Yet, despite taunts and insults, she remained superbly self-possessed,—complete mistress of the situation. When from very exhaustion I stopped, she looked up at me, with her smile of Mona Lisa, her eyes sparkling with triumph, and said carelessly:

“So you love me as much as that!”

“Love you?” I cried, choking with inarticulate rage. I tried to continue but I could not. I felt that if I remained another minute in her presence I did not know what I might do. “The end—thank God! The end!”

I flung up my arms, with a horrible laugh, and bolted for the door. But as I went I heard her clap her hands, as a delighted child might have done, and her voice came to me:

“David—you will come back.”

* * * * *

And back I returned, to delude myself, once more, with her sudden melting repentance, to listen to her self-accusation, to believe that all she had done wickedly and consciously had been only the instinct of a jealous woman to know how completely she was loved. Not a delectable page in my life. I set it down as it happened, without extenuation. Yet, two days later, I was free of her, forever! She lied to me and I caught her in the lie.

* * * * *

We were to have dined together and to have gone to the theater, but she had written me the day before that she would be forced to leave town. This had often happened and this postponement did not in the least excite my suspicion. A young Frenchman, the Comte Maurice Plessis de Saint Omer, one of my intimate friends, happened to drop in on me, and agreeing to dine together, we set out for Foyot’s, near the Luxemburg, bent on an epicurean dinner and a quiet evening.

Maurice de Saint Omer, in the pleasure-seeking crowd in which we moved, had the reputation of being a great dandy and my natural attraction towards him was considerably enhanced by the compliment to my vanity. He came of one of the great families of France which named its ancestors before the Crusades (his father was the Duc de Saint Omer and the château is the famous one near the Lorraine border). While he lived the life of a thorough man of the world, as it was understood in the Paris before the war, he brought to all relations of life dignity and distinction. He was neither rake nor profligate. Straight, tawny-haired, nose high-bridged and sensitively chiseled, blue-eyed and soft of voice, almost too elegant for our American ideal, his courage and tact had made him one of the arbiters on the field of honor. Why he should have taken to me, I do not know, but he did, and he occasionally favored me with his confidences. My own entanglement with Madame de Tinquerville was known to him. In fact, for months all his influence had been exerted to show me the quicksands into which I was sinking. We were talking of her as we neared the restaurant.

“And La Belle Tinquerville?”

“I was to have dined with her to-night but she was called to St. Germain.”

“No use warning you, my dear fellow, I suppose?”

“Evidently not,” I answered moodily. “I must work out my fate alone.”

“At least—open your eyes.”

“In what way?”

“Neither she nor you is the slightest in love.”

“What do you call it, then, when one moment you are ready to do murder, and the next you are as weak as a child, ready to believe anything, undergo anything, afraid of everything?”

“My dear friend, I went through that, at the age of sixteen, with a little girl in a laiterie who could not write five words correctly and who ran off with a lawyer’s clerk. The trouble is you are still sixteen. You know, I do not discuss women lightly; my principles are fixed on that point. But you have come to me as a friend and as a friend I am once more going to warn you.”

“Go on,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“My dear David,—you have no place in this society of ours,” he said, taking my arm. “You have a heart, and you have no knowledge of the conventions of the game. We do not love in this crowd; we play at love; just as we do not discuss; we play at discussing. We meet, to fence lightly and gracefully, with tremendous lunges,—which are always parried. We do not seek a woman because we want her but because twenty other men want her and—we wish to carry off the prize. You are seeking romance, and—it has never crossed our thresholds. This society is old: it refines only on its emotions. It is egotistical, selfish, superficial, and self-indulgent. There isn’t a man or woman in it who doesn’t love himself or herself better than anything else in the world. Madame de Tinquerville may be better, or worse, than the rest of her set. I do not know. If you were an American nabob, perhaps she might make up her mind to marry you. Luckily, you are not. There is something primitive enough in you to resist and rebel. There is still something young in you,—a piece of a real heart left. When she has completely broken you, dominated you and corrupted you, you will cease to interest her. Bid her good-by before she closes the door in your face.”

“Every word you say is the truth,” I said impulsively, “but,—then—”

“I know,—I know,” he said, laughing, and then, turning to a more serious tone, he added, “Do not think me cynical. I am not. There exist in this world women that are worthy to be loved, in reverence. One day I shall meet a young girl whom I can respect and adore as I do the ideal of womanhood that is in my mother and sister, but when I take a wife I shall never bring her to this poisoned atmosphere. David, if you were a man of the world, if you could keep to the surface of things, I should shrug my shoulder, but you can not.” He gripped my arm tightly. “You are not even a man. Confess that it is only your vanity that holds you, that at bottom you hate this entanglement that humiliates you and corrupts you.”

“It is a nightmare,” I said gloomily.

“Well, then?”

“In her way,” I said, “she loves me.”

He stopped and looked at me in amazement at my innocence. I did not understand his look then. I do, now. He started to speak. I can imagine what was on the tip of his tongue but, beyond a certain point his notion of chivalry would not permit him to go.

“In that case, my dear David, I have nothing more to say. Your appetite, at least, is not affected?”

“Not in the least.”

“Then a very good solution to all problems is a certain Canard au vin blanc and gooseberries, that Carlo will cook for us with his own hands!”

We had ascended the old Rue de Tournon, the Senate rising ahead of us. We entered the restaurant, and the first person I saw was Madame de Tinquerville, dining en tête-à-tête with a man unknown to me.

She looked up, saw me, and glanced down again, quickly. We passed into the inner room and took a table. Something exploded in my brain.

“You saw?” said De Saint Omer.

“Yes.”

“You are convinced?”

“Quite. The man?”

“Pedro Fornesco,—an Argentine millionaire.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Three months.”

I began to laugh. De Saint Omer slipped his hand over my wrist.

“David—it is Providence.”

“Thank God,” I said loudly, but, despite myself, I felt a cold in the small of my back and a dryness in my throat.

“Will you follow my advice?” he said, studying me anxiously.

“Wait.” I put my head in my hands and drew great breaths, while I fought for calm and decision.

“Now.”

“You are sure of your control?”

“Absolutely.”

“No scenes?”

“I give you my word.”

“That must be understood,” he said firmly. “No public scandal—no dramatics, my friend, or as sure as you are sitting here you will have to answer to me. Is that understood?”

“I assure you I never was more master of myself,” I said, smiling, and, indeed, a cold indifference had come to me. I felt a tempest raging in my brain and somewhere in that tempest a voice crying, “Now or never!”

“Very well, I believe you. Carlo!” The head waiter came hastily to us.

“Carlo. A table opposite M. Fornesco,—the one that is engaged.”

“M. le Comte—”

“Carlo—this is an exception. I must have it.”

His eye met the head waiter’s, who hesitated and bowed. We rose and, sauntering into the main dining room, seated ourselves two tables away from Madame de Tinquerville, in an angle that was partitioned off from the rest of the room. When, with an appearance of casualness, I turned to watch her, I saw in her eyes a look of abject terror. Every such woman believes more or less in the dramatics of Camille and, from that moment to the end, I know Letty awaited the public scene that would strip her sacred reputation and leave her the butt of Paris gossip. As for myself, I was at that moment capable of the greatest cruelty without the turning of a hair: I found resources of self-control in me that astounded me. I laughed, discussed affairs of the day whimsically, and swapped anecdotes, as though out on a collegian’s holiday. Madame de Tinquerville watched me from the corner of her eye, never losing me from her gaze, listening, waiting—

Towards the end of the dinner, De Saint Omer said to me:

“You know the anecdote on Gommecourt,—no? Quite amusing. I’ll tell it to you. Besides,—there is a moral.”

“A moral?” I said, feeling that the comedy was about to begin.

“Gommecourt was a young parvenu of the time of the Regence who had become involved in an affair with a celebrated actress of those days. He was avaricious, vain, prudent, and not without a certain wit, as you shall see.”

The conversation at Madame de Tinquerville’s table had stopped. De Saint Omer’s voice could be heard distinctly, and I knew that Letty was listening breathlessly.

“When it was time for Gommecourt to marry, he was much embarrassed how to break away from his charming but expensive friend. He took up a pen and wrote a long and very tender letter, recalling his past happiness, his regret at the decision of his family,—a very, very moving, affectionate, temperamental and tragic letter, and at the end he wrote, ‘I shall never forget, and I send you an order for one hundred thousand francs.’”

“Very handsome,” I said mechanically, not yet seeing daylight.

“A little too handsome—as Gommecourt decided, after a very brief struggle. He wrote a second letter, a very tender letter, too, but a little modified in its transports of passion, and ended by announcing a gift of fifty thousand francs.”

“Very prudent.”

“Wasn’t it? You see, Gommecourt was of good, thrifty stock. The more he considered it, the more absurd it seemed to him to give way to his impulses. And then, suppose she had not been faithful? He wrote a third letter, quite formal this time, and cut the sum to twenty thousand francs.”

By this time the conversation at the other two tables had ceased, and every one was listening, quite frankly amused at De Saint Omer’s vivacious account.

“So, Gommecourt, quite delighted with his two transactions by which he had saved himself eighty thousand francs, arose to send off letter number three. But, halfway to the bell, suddenly he stopped, struck his forehead and exclaimed, ‘But, after all, it’s simpler than that!’ And, returning to the table, he wrote a final letter, thus,—‘I have discovered all. Adieu.’”

“Bravo!” I cried loudly, above the ripple of laughter which greeted the ending. “And he was right.”

“You like the anecdote?”

“Excellent.” I glanced at Madame de Tinquerville and saw her rigidly examining her plate. “But it doesn’t fit all cases,—since we are now talking of ruptures.”

“Oh, a friend of mine had an even better expedient!”

“I should like to know it,” I remarked, pretending to laugh. “One never knows—”

“He simply took his card and marked on it ‘P.P.C.’ and left it at her home. That, and nothing more.”

“Thanks for the idea.”

I drew out my portfolio instantly and selected a card. The couple next to us, deceived by my gayety, began to laugh.

“A pencil?”

“Be careful!” said De Saint Omer, under his breath.

“Don’t worry.”

I took the pencil he offered me, after a little hesitation, and inscribed the three letters.

“Carlo! An envelope—and call a taxi.”

“David! No scene.”

“Don’t worry, I tell you.”

I addressed the envelope, slipping the card into it and, the reckoning being paid, rose and stood deliberately facing Madame de Tinquerville. For that one awful moment, which I prolonged, I paid her back in terror the thousand humiliations of those hideous months.

Then we lifted our hats with exaggerated ceremony and went out.

We left the letter at her concierge’s and went directly to my apartment.

“You have letters—keepsakes—of hers?” asked De Saint Omer.

I nodded.

“Make a package of them and leave them with the concierge, to be given to her when she calls—”

“When she calls?”

“Idiot, she will come at once! And now, throw some things in a bag, and come away with me for a couple of weeks’ fishing.”

* * * * *

As I look back at it now I am filled only with a feeling of nausea. All I can say in extenuation of this period, when the thinking man had ceased and was near to the brute, is that for weeks I had not been master of myself, that I moved in a delirium of passionate anger, weak jealousy, with every nerve unstrung and every impulse riotous, incapable of either controlling or judging my action.

* * * * *

It is not a chapter that I like to contemplate but, as it was I write it down. For the mystery of evil is that out of it there often comes a revulsion to sanity. I am not sure but in the end it was beneficial. The shock of experience made me see myself as I was, and after the disorganization the primeval spirit of order awoke in me, and now that I am seeking to build up again it is as my own mason, consciously and responsible.

The trouble with the New England tradition is its lack of flexibility. Nothing gives, but it breaks. Yield the slightest, and everything crumbles. We lack a sure sense of values and are therefore at the mercy of little things as well as great. We conceive of man’s struggle against the forces of demoralization as the defence of a fortress: one breach made, and capitulation follows. More mature reflection, tempered with a knowledge of good and evil, has led me, I think, to a broader philosophy. We are not intrenched in our beliefs but are mobile forces, constantly maneuvering, constantly at war—turned back here, advancing there—with only the ultimate objective important.

* * * * *

We had been gone but four days when the war broke out and we separated, he to join his regiment, and I to enlist in the Foreign Legion. His last words to me were, “David, my dear friend, if through weakness you return now, you are worse than the most despicable of men,—you will be utterly lost. After this, Madame de Tinquerville will hate you or love you beyond anything else in life,—and either will be fatal.”

I did not see her again. I threw myself into the war as a salvation, seeking an escape from a life that filled me with horror, hating and despising myself, asking only to forget. She wrote me many letters, frantic, repentant, imploring an answer, and then a final one—the rage of a woman scorned—full of veiled threats. I did not answer them.

I heard indirectly that she had entered the Red Cross, devoting herself with a courage and determination that had surprised every one. When the memory had receded and my normal self had returned, I was willing to believe that the mobilization which had come to France as a moral re-birth had perhaps reached the Magdalene in her,—as in how many others! Yet, I wondered how much the dramatic impulse was responsible.

But the scales had fallen from my eyes. It was not against the woman but myself against which I revolted with every force in me. The strange thing is that, once the rupture was complete, she passed completely out of my existence, and in a fortnight I was looking back upon that period with incredulity. Events were too colossal to remember private sorrows. I felt myself, at last, one of a great army of action, redeemed to meaning and purpose.

* * * * *

Those who did not see the mobilization can never have a conception of all that war can bring of sublimity and purification,—as those who never knew the first winter in the trenches cannot imagine the long horror of that soul-crushing defence. If the war had only ended in the first year! But, it didn’t. Incredulity succeeded the first flaming rise of faith. Neither the end nor the issue can now be foreseen. Those who had faith remain in that faith; others, to whom faith had come as a revealing experience, have lapsed into the old easy habits. Life has readjusted itself along the lines of war, and society has returned to its old divisions! So it must have been with Madame de Tinquerville. By the end of the year the impulse had burned out. The daily thing ceased to be dramatic. Her old nature asserted itself. She drifted away to England, and then to America, gradually and easily back into the life of self-indulgence and pleasure she craved.

I had not heard of her for over a year and a half when, dragged out of the inferno at Verdun, transported from a field hospital, more dead than alive, to the Hospital du Val du Grace at Paris, I came out of a battle for life to have a letter from my brother placed in my hands, announcing his marriage to Letty, Madame de Tinquerville.

I went off into a delirium and for weeks fought against a return to life. But the obstinate nature in me triumphed over my will, and I found myself at last convalescent, facing the issue of some day confronting the brother I loved with the knowledge of the secret which must always be between us.

* * * * *

The thing that frightens me, that leaves me cold when I think of it, is this: Can she still have power over my senses? I say I am certain that I never loved her, that this yoked hostility, this mutual tyranny could not be love, and yet—Something there was that was insidious and instinctive, something that blinded me and stopped my ears to warnings, and sent me to her with the obsession of pursuit and conquest. I have seen infatuation in other men and understood it, yet in myself it still is incredible. If it had to be, I only hope it is a fever that has burned itself out and left me immune for the future.—Yet now, as I stop to analyze myself and my motives, as I look back at that scene in the Café Foyot (I think I suffered as much as she did), and remember the first wild leap of animal rage when I saw her with Fornesco at her side, I wonder—

If I were only sure that I could write—Milestone Number 3.