Twilight, Julia Frankau [100 books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗

SHE was surprised at what had happened to her, thought a great deal about it, magnifying or minimising it according to her mood. But in a way the incident drew her more definitely toward Gabriel Stanton. She began to admit she was in love with him, to do as he had bidden her, “let herself go.” In imagination at least. Had she been a psychological instead of an epigrammatic novelist, she would have understood herself better. To me, writing her story at this headlong pace, it was nevertheless all quite clear. I had not to linger to find out why she did this or that, what spirit moved her. I knew all the time, for although none of my own novels ever had the success of “The Dangerous Age “I knew more about what the author wrote there than he did himself, much more. The Dangerous Age comes to a woman at all periods. With Margaret Capel it was seven years after her marriage and over six from the time when she had left her husband. She was impulsive, and for all her introspective egotism, most pitifully ignorant of herself and her emotional capacity. Fortunately Gabriel Stanton was almost as ignorant as she. But, at least after that Sunday evening, there was no more talk of friendship between them. There was coquetting on her side and some obtuseness on his. Rare flashes of understanding as well, and on her part deepening feeling under a light and varying surface.

She was rarely twice alike, often she merely acted, thinking of herself as a strange character in a drama. She was genuinely uncertain of herself. Her love flamed wild sometimes. Then she would pull herself up and remember that something like this she had felt once before, and it had proved a will o’ the wisp over a bog. She wanted to walk warily.

“Supposing I am wrong again this time?” she asked him once with wide eyes.

“You are not. This is real. Trust me, trust yourself.” She liked to nestle in the shelter of his arm, to feel his lips on her hair, to torment and adore him. The weekends seemed very short; the week-days long. Week-days during which she was restless and excitable, and Peter Kennedy and his bag of tricks, medical tricks, often in request. She was very capricious with Peter, calling him ignorant, and a country yokel. As a companion he compared very badly with Gabriel. As an emotional machine he was easier to play upon. She spared him nothing, he was her whipping-boy. Watching him one noticed that he grew quieter, improved in many ways as she secured more and more mastery over him. When there were scenes now they were of her and not of his making. He was wax in her hands, plastic to her moulding. Sometimes she was sorry for him and a little ashamed of herself. Then she gave him a music lesson or lectured him gravely on his shortcomings. But from first to last he was nothing to her but a stop-gap. His devotion had the smallest of reward.

The weeks went by. Gabriel Stanton coming and going, staying always at the local hotel. Ever more secure in his position with her, but never taking advantage of it.

“He is naturally of a cold nature,” she argued. And once her confidant was Peter Kennedy and she compared the two of them. This was in early days, before her treatment of Peter had subdued him.

“What’s he afraid of?” Peter asked brusquely.

“Until the decree has been made absolute I am not free.”

“So what he is afraid of is the King’s Proctor?”

“Don’t.”

“His precious respectability, the great house of Stanton.”

“You take it all wrong, you don’t understand. How should you?”

“Don’t I? I wish I’d half his chances.”

“You are really not in the same category of men. It is banal I have never fully realised the value of a banal phrase before, but you are ‘ not fit to wipe the mud off his shoes.’”

“Because I am a country doctor.”

“Because you are Peter Kennedy.”

She knew then how comparatively thick-skinned he was; that if he had some sense or senses in e.vcelsis, in others he was lacking, altogether lacking and unconscious. It is not paradoxical but plain that the more she saw of Gabriel Stanton the less heed she took of Peter Kennedy’s freedom of speech and ways. The two men were as apart as the poles, that they both adored her proved nothing but her undoubted charm. She was not quite looking forward, like Gabriel Stanton, through the “decree absolute” to marriage. She lived in the immediate present; in the Saturdays to Mondays when she tortured Gabriel Stanton and in a way was tortured by him. For she had never met so fine a brain, nor honour and simplicity so clean and clear, and she was upborne by and with him. And the Tuesdays to Fridays she had attacks or crises of the nerves and Kennedy alternately doctored and clumsily courted her.

There came a time when she wrote and asked Gabriel to bring his sister next time he came, and that both of them should stay in the house with her, at Carbies. It was clear, if it had not been put into actual words, that they would marry as soon as she was free, and she thought it would please him that she should recognise the position.

“I want to know her. Tell her I am a friend of yours who is interested in Christian Science, then she won’t think it strange that I should invite her here.” She was not frank enough to say “since she is to be my sister-in-law.”.

Gabriel, nevertheless, was translated when the letter came, and answered it rapturously. The invitation to his sister seemed to admit his footing, to make the future more definite and domestic.

But if you want me to stay away I will stay away. Remember it is your wishes not mine that count. I tired you, perhaps? Did I tire you? God bless you!

I can never tell you half that is in my heart. You are an angel of goodness, and I am on my knees before you all the time. I will tell Anne as little as possible until you give me permission, yet I am sure she must guess the rest. My voice alters when I speak of you, although I try to keep it even and calm. I went to her when I got your letter. “A friend of mine wants to know you.” I began as absurdly as that. She looked at me in surprise, and I went on hurriedly, “She wants you to go down with me to her house in Pineland at the end of the week….”

“You have been there before?” she asked suspiciously, sharply. “Is that where you have been each week lately?”

“Yes,” I answered, priding myself that I did not go on to tell her each week I entered Paradise, lingered there a little while. She began to question, probe me. Were you old, young, beautiful; the questions poured forth. Somehow or other, in the end these questions froze and silenced me. I could not tell her, you were you! She would not have understood. Nor was I able to satisfy her completely on any point. I could not describe you, felt myself stammering like a schoolboy over the colour of your hair, your eyes. How could I say to her ‘This sweet lady who invites you to make her acquaintance is just perfection, no more nor less; all compound of fire and dew, made composite and credible with genius “? As for giving a description of you, it would need a poet and a painter working together, and in the end they would give up the task in despair. I did not tell Anne this.

She is now reviewing her wardrobe. And I … I am reviewing nothing… past definite thought. Do you know that when I left you on Sunday I feared that I had vexed or disappointed you again? You seemed to me a little cold constrained. Monday and Tuesday I have examined and crossexamined myself suffered. My whole life is yours but if I fail to please you! I was in a hotel in the country once, when a man was brought in from the football field, very badly hurt. His eyes were shut, his face agonised; he moaned, for all his fortitude. There was a doctor in the crowd that accompanied him, who gave what seemed to me a strange order: “Put him in a hot bath, just as he is, don’t delay a moment; don’t wait to undress him.” My own bath was just prepared and I proffered it. They lowered him in. He was a fine big fellow, but suffering beyond selfrestraint. Within a minute of the water reaching him, clothes on and everything, he left off moaning.

His face grew calm. “My God! I am in heaven!” he exclaimed.

The relief must have been exquisite. I thought of the incident when your letter came, when I had submerged myself in it.