The Book of Susan Part 31

I:

[But I can't even imagine what babble of sorrow and joy such words must have wrung from me!

Suppose a decent interval, and a partial recovery of verbal control.]

SUSAN: You shouldn't have rescued me from Birch Street, Ambo. Everything's made it plain to me, at last. But I've already ground the mud of it into your life now--in spite of myself. You'll never feel really clean again.

I: What nonsense! Susan, Susan--dearest!

SUSAN: It isn't nonsense. You forget; I'm a specialist in nonsense nowadays. Oh, Ambo, how can you care for me! I've been so insufferably self-satisfied; so childishly blind! My eyes are wide open now. I've had the whole story of what happened that awful night--all of it--from Doctor Askew. He thought he was psycho-a.n.a.lyzing me, while I pumped it out of him, drop by drop. And I've been to Maltby, too; yes, I've been to Maltby, behind your back. Ambo, he isn't really certain yet that I didn't go crazy that night and kill your wife. Neither, I'm sure, is Mrs. Arthur.

They've given me the benefit of the doubt simply because they dread being dragged through a horrible scandal, that's all. But they're not convinced. Of course, Maltby didn't say so in so many words, but it was plain as plain! He was afraid of me--afraid! I could feel his fear. He thinks madness is in my blood. Well, he's right.

Not just as he means it, but as _Setebos_ means it--the cruel, jealous G.o.d of this world!... No, wait, dear! Let me say it out to you, once for all. My father ended a brutal life by an insanely brutal murder, then killed himself; my own father.

And I've never all these years honestly realized that as part of my life--part of _me_! But now I do. It's there, back of me. I can never escape from it. Oh, how could I have imagined myself like others--a woman like others, free to love and marry and have children and a home! How could I!

I: Susan! Is that all? Is it really all that's holding you from me? Good G.o.d, dear! Why, I thought you--secretly--perhaps even unknown to yourself--loved Jimmy!

SUSAN: Jimmy? You thought----

I: I think so even now. How can I help it?

Look.... [And here you must suppose me to show her those first scrawled sheets, written automatically by her hand.] Perhaps I'm revealing your own heart to you, Susan--dragging to light what you've tried to keep hidden even from yourself. See, dear. "A net. No means of escape from it. To escape--somehow. Jimmy----"

[And then Susan would perhaps have handed back those scrawled pages to me with a pitying and pitiful smile.]

SUSAN:

[_Author's Note_: This carefully written, imaginary speech has been deleted _in toto_ by Censor Susan from the page proof--at considerable expense to me--and the following authentic confession subst.i.tuted for it in her own hand. But she doesn't know I am making this explanation, which will account to you for the form and manner of her confession, purposely designed to be a continuation of my own imaginary flight. In admitting this, I am risking Susan's displeasure; but conscience forbids me to let you mistake a "genuine human doc.u.ment"--so dear to the modern heart--for a mere effort at interpretation by an amateur psychologist. What follows, then, is veracious, is essentially that solemn thing so dear to a truth-loving generation--sheer _fact_.]

Ambo dear, I can explain that, but not without a long, unhappy confession. Must I? It's a shadowy, inside-of-me story, awfully mixed and muddled; not a nice story at all. Won't it be better, all round, if I simply say again that I love _you_, not Jimmy, with all my heart?

[No doubt I should then have reached for her hands, and she would have drawn away.]

Ah, no, dear, please not! I've never made a clean breast of it all, even to myself. It's got to be done, though, Ambo, sooner or later, for both our sakes. Be patient with me. I'll begin at the beginning.

I'm ridiculously young, Ambo; we all keep forgetting how young I am! I'm an infant prodigy, really; you and Phil--and G.o.d first, I suppose--have made me so. And the main point about infant prodigies is that experience hasn't caught up with them. They live in things they've imagined from things they've been told or read, live on intuition and second-hand ideas; and they've no means of testing their real values in a real world. And they're childishly conceited, Ambo! I am. Less now than some months ago; but I'm still pretty bad....

Well, back in Birch Street, before I came to you, when I was honestly a child, I lived all alone inside of myself. I lived chiefly on stories I made up about myself; and of course my stories were all escapes from reality--from the things that hurt or disgusted me most. There was hardly anything in my life at home that I didn't long to escape from. You can understand that, in a general way. But there's one thing you perhaps haven't thought about; it's such an ugly thing to think about. I know it isn't modern of me, but I do hate to talk about it, even to you. I must, though.

You'll never understand--oh, lots of later things--unless I do.

Love, Ambo, human love, as I learned of it there at home--and I saw and heard much too much of it--frightened and sickened me. It was swinish--horrible. Most of all I longed to escape from all that! I couldn't. I wonder if anyone ever has or can? We are made as we are made.... Yes, I longed to escape from it; but my very made-up story of escape was a disguised romance. Jimmy was to be the gentle Galahad who would some day rescue me. He had done battle for me once already--with Joe Gonfarone. But some day he would come in white, shining armor and take me far away from all the mud and sweat of Birch Street to blue distant hills. Artemis was all mixed up in it, too; she was to be our special G.o.ddess; our free, swift, cool-eyed protector. There was to be no heartsick shame, no stuffiness in my life any more forever!

But it wasn't Jimmy who rescued me, Ambo. You did.

Only, when we've lived in a dream, wholly, for months and months and months, it doesn't vanish, Ambo; it never vanishes altogether; it's part of us--part of our lives. Isn't it? Gertrude was once your dream, dear; and the dream-Gertrude has never really vanished from your life, and never will.

Ah, don't I know!

Well, then you rescued me; and you and Phil and Maltby and Sister and books and Hillhouse Avenue and France and Italy and England, and my Magic Circle--_everything_--crowded upon me and changed me and made me what I am; if I'm anything at all!

But Birch Street had made me first; and my dreams....

Ambo, I can never make you know what you've been to me, never! Cinderella's prince was nothing beside you, and my Galahad-Jimmy a pale phantom! I shan't try. And I can never make you know what a wild confusion of storm you sent whirling through me when I first felt the difference in you--felt your man's need of me, of _me_, body and soul! You meant me not to feel that, Ambo; but I did. I was only seventeen. And my first reaction was all pa.s.sionate joy, a turbulent desire to give, give, give--and d.a.m.n the consequences! It was, Ambo. I loved you.

But given you and me, Ambo, that couldn't last long. You're too moral--and I'm too complicated.

My inner pattern's a labyrinth, full of queer magic; simple emotions soon get lost in me, lost and transformed. And please don't keep forgetting how young I was, and still am; how little I could understand of all I was conceited enough to think I understood! Well, dear, I saw you struggling to suppress your love for me as something wrong, unworthy; something that could only harm us both.

And then all that first, swift, instinctive joy went out of me, and my old fear and distrust of what men call love seized me again. "Stuffiness, stuffiness everywhere--it leads to nothing but stuffiness!" I said. "I hate it. I won't let it rule my life. The great thing is to keep clear of it, clean of it, aloof and free!" The old Artemis-motive swept through me again like a hill-wind--but it came in gusts; and there were days--weeks, Ambo--when I simply wanted to be yours. And one night I threw myself into your arms....

But the next day I was afraid again. The phrase "pa.s.sion's slave" got into my head and plagued me.

Then you came to me and said, "It's the end of the road, dear. We can't go on." That changed everything once more, Ambo, in a flash. That was my crisis. From that moment, I was madly jealous of Gertrude; knew I always had been, from the first. My telegram to her was a challenge to battle. It was, dear--and I lost. She came back; she was wonderful, too--her way--and the old Gertrude-dream stirred in you again; just stirred, but that was enough. You said to yourself, didn't you? that perhaps after all the best solution for our wretched difficulties was for Gertrude to return to her home. At least, that would end things. But you couldn't have said that to yourself if Gertrude had been really repulsive to you. The old dream had fluttered its tired wings, once, Ambo; you know it had!

And so I flopped again, dear! I was sick of love; I hated love! I said to myself, "I won't have this stupid, brutal, instinctive thing pushing and pulling me about like this! I'll rule my own life, thanks--my own thoughts and dreams! _Freedom's_ the thing--the only good thing in life. I'll be free! Ambo, too, must learn to be free. We can only share what's honestly best in both of us when at last we are free!"

My Galahad-Jimmy had turned up again, too.

Perhaps that had something to do with my final fiercest revolt against you. I don't know. He was all I had wanted him to be, Ambo; simple and straightforward and clean. Oh, he had his white, shining armor on, bless him! But I didn't want him to rescue me, for all that; not in the old way. I was just glad my dream-boy had come a little true; that's all. You were jealous of him, weren't you?

Confess! You needn't have been.

But here in New York, with Sister, things happened that made a difference....

First of all, dear, I discovered all I had lost in losing you; discovered I _couldn't_ be free. All I could do was to make some kind of a life of it; for Sister, chiefly. And I tried; oh, I did try!

Then those whispered scandals about us began. But it wasn't the scandal itself that did for me; it was something added to it--by Mrs. Arthur, I suppose--something _true_, Ambo, that I'd never honestly faced. Suddenly my father rose from the dead! Suddenly I was forced to feel that never, never under any conditions, would it have been possible for me to be yours--bear you children....

Suddenly I felt, saw--as I should have seen long ago--that the strain of evil, perhaps of madness, in my father--the strain that made his life a h.e.l.l of black pa.s.sions--must end with me!

Here's where Jimmy comes back, Ambo--and it's the worst of all I have to confess. My anxiety was all for you now: not for myself, I happened to love you that way. "Suppose," I kept thinking, "suppose something should unexpectedly make it possible for Ambo to ask me to be his wife? Suppose Gertrude should fall in love herself and insist on divorce?

Or suppose she should die? Ambo would be certain to come to me. And if he did? Should I have the moral courage to send him away? As I must--I must!"

Dear, from that time on a sort of demon in me kept suggesting: "Jimmy--Jimmy's the solution!

He's almost in love with you now; all he needs is a little encouragement. You could manage it, Susan. You could engage yourself to Jimmy; and then you could string him along! You could make it an interminable engagement, years and years of it, and break it off when Ambo was thoroughly discouraged or cured; you're clever enough for that. And Jimmy's ingenuousness itself. You could manage Jimmy." Oh, please don't think I ever really listened to my demon, was ever tempted by him! But I hated myself for the mere fact that such thoughts could even occur to me! They did, though, more than once; and each time I had to banish them, thrust them down into their native darkness.

But they didn't die there, Ambo; they lived there, a hideous secret life, lying in wait to betray me.

They never will betray me, of course; I loathe them. But they can still stir in their darkness, make themselves known. That's what the references to Jimmy mean, Ambo, in those pages I scribbled in my trance; and that's _all_ they mean. For I don't love him; I love you.

But I can't marry you, ever. I can't. That black strain concentrated in my father--oh, it must die out with me! Just as Sister's line ended with her.... She ran away from the one love of her life, Ambo--just as I must run away from you. You never knew that about Sister. But I knew it. Sonia told me. Sister told _her_, the week before Sonia married. Sister felt then that Sonia ought to run away from all that, as she had. But Sonia wouldn't listen to her....

"Good for Sonia!" I might then have cried out. "G.o.d bless her! Hasn't she made her husband happy? Aren't her children his pride? Why in heaven's name should she have denied herself the right to live! And for a mere possibility of evil! As if the blood of any human family on earth were wholly sound, wholly blameless! Sonia was selfish, but right, dear; and Miss Goucher was brave, but wrong! So are you wrong! Actually inherited feeble-mindedness, or insanity, or disease--that's one thing; but a dread of mere future possibilities, of mere supposed tendencies!

Good Lord! The human race might as well commit suicide _en bloc_! It's you I love--_you_--just as you are. And you say you love me. Well, that settles it!"

But who knows? It might have settled it and it might not--could any such imaginary conversation conceivably have taken place. It did not take place. We are dealing, worse luck, with history.

VIII

Perhaps six weeks after Miss Goucher's death one little conversation, just skirting these hidden matters, did take place between us; but how different was its atmosphere, and how drearily different its conclusion!

You will understand it better now that--like a theater audience, or like G.o.d--you are in full possession of Susan's facts and of mine; but I fear it will interest you less. To know all may sometimes be to forgive all; but more often, alas, it is to be bored by everything....

[Firmly inserted note, by Susan: "Rubbish! It's only when we _think_ we know it all, and don't really, that we are bored."]

I had taken Susan for dinner that night to a quiet hotel uptown where I knew the dining-room, mercifully lacking an orchestra and a cabaret, was not well patronized, though the cooking was exceptionally good. At this hotel, by a proper manipulation of the head waiter, it is often possible to get a table a little apart from the other diners--an advantage, if one desires to talk intimately without the annoyance of being overheard.

It troubled me to find Susan's appet.i.te practically nonexistent; I had ordered one or two special dishes to tempt her, but I saw that she took no pleasure in them, merely forcing herself to eat so as not to disquiet me. She was looking badly, too, all gleamless shadow, and fighting off a physical and mental languor by a stubborn effort which she might have concealed from another, but not from me. It was only too plain to me that her wish was to keep the conversation safely away from whatever was busying and saddening her private thoughts. In this, till the coffee was placed before us, I thought best to humor her, and we had discussed at great length the proper format for her first book of poems, which was to appear within the next month. Also, we had discussed Heywood Sampson's now rapidly maturing plans for his new critical review.

"He really wants me on his staff, Ambo, and I really want to be on it--just for the pleasure of working with him. It's an absolutely unbelievable chance for me! And yet----"

"And yet----? Is there any reason why you shouldn't accept?"

"At least two reasons, yes. I'm afraid both of them will surprise you."