GITA arrived at the manor in time for dinner and spent the greater part of the night wandering about the house, which she had ordered to be lit from drawing-room to attic. She was so glad to be there—and alone—that she felt no inclination to sleep, and even the haunting terrors of the past week were banished for the moment.
She had a quite personal species of humor that she could invoke at will, and a large surface-tract in her mind upon which she had lived abundantly during the past year. But, always ruthlessly honest with herself, she had begun to suspect, even before that remarkably odd outbreak under the goading of De Witt Turner, that something had been going on underneath that broad and fertile surface which it was time for her to tweak to the light and examine. She had turned from it in terror, almost in horror, and had permitted herself a respite until she was alone at her manor.
But on this night of her return she felt only happiness and content. This was hers, her own domain, memoried, beautiful, and intensely personal; so personal that she had at times the impression she had lived in this house consecutively for two hundred and sixty-three years. It seemed to return her passionate devotion, to enfold her, to promise her peace, possibly happiness. She exulted in every stone of it, and drew her hand lovingly across the old pieces of furniture, less sensible of their value than of their intimate association with the past.
She could remain here for the rest of her life if she chose, denying even Eustace hospitality, and she had a sense of freedom, of buoyancy, vastly different from the superficial enjoyments of the past winter in New York. They had been novel and entrancing, but both novelty and charm had worn thin; and they had served their purpose. No woman is complete until she has had her experience of the lighter pleasures of life; barely conscious of the depths underneath until frivolities turn into débris and balance is established.
She had long suspected that she knew a good deal more than she admitted to herself, both apart from her personal ego and inextricably entangled with it, and it was time to find out what it was. She was uneasy, frightened, but determined.
Well, in a day or two she would take the lid off, but tonight she would play with the idea that she had lived her life at the manor and that no serious problems had ever knocked at her consciousness for solution.
A storm raged during the night and showed no sign of abatement next morning. She put on a raincoat and stout boots and went over to the deserted Boardwalk. The chain of shops looked like an abandoned village. But the waves thundered in almost to the high promenade, and she took a fierce pleasure in battling with the wind, clinging only occasionally to the rail. She felt as if she were charging an elemental enemy and chose to take it as a portent, that although she might for a moment be forced to clutch at something stronger than herself, she could neither be blown over nor forced to retreat.
That night she slept twelve hours, and when the broad sunlight awakened her, her brain was as clear as the sky and she knew that her respite was over; or would be when the day itself was over. She had decided that the night, when she would be free of interruption from even her docile servants, was the time to “have it out.”
Topper had received instructions to admit no one and to bring her no telephone messages. Eustace had promised not to return to the manor before Friday, nor attempt to communicate with her. Her isolation was complete.
After breakfast she took a long walk on the hard roads, and spent the afternoon answering an accumulation of letters from her California friends. Ann Melrose had spent the winter in New York and written home reports both astonishing and amusing; the result had been a revival of correspondence with the girl they had “given up as a bad job.”
But the hands of the clock, made for the first American Carteret, in Connecticut—a province that would seem to have been so completely occupied during the seventeenth century building historic furniture for twentieth-century collectors the wonder is it found time for the making of Puritanical history—moved relentlessly on, and at nine o’clock the house was as silent as the vault in the churchyard.
Early in the day she had brought down from the attic the gown of gold tissue she had worn the night of the party, and she went up to her bedroom and put it on. The wigs had been returned, but she powdered her hair and even put a patch on her cheek. She had a whimsical idea that in capturing the outward semblance of the old Gita Carterets she would banish the last of those inhibitions which had made her so different not only from them but from all other girls, and, with her saner knowledge of life, help her to that exact understanding of herself she had fancied she possessed in the past.
She locked the doors of the drawing-room, lit several candles, and established herself in one of the few comfortable chairs a century, singularly indifferent to comfort, had produced.
“Now!” she said aloud, “off with the lid.” And she routed a last moment of shrinking.
Nature had endowed her superlatively, and a neurosis, inevitable in a sensitive aspiring fastidious girl, had given her a rabid hatred of a sex designed, among other purposes, to complete her own. Her abhorrence of sex in all its manifestations had been, in a measure, a subtle protest against thwarted romance: an invention of the Teutonic-Nordics, to be sure, but none the less potent when rubbed in by the centuries. Nor had modernism killed it. Realists were not so much realists from reaction or conviction as from resentment at their own inability to realize it. They were in the same class with radicals who hated a society in which they were incapacitated by natural equipment to achieve success.
Life, literature, nor history would be sufferable without the glamour of romance, however personally immiscible. The invention and constant use of the word “love” was proof of that. Mere decency ordained that a certain enchantment be shed over a function as native as hunger, where personal selection, imposed by civilization, was concerned.
Well, she accepted the fact. Also the fact that what her three friends called a sound endocrine constitution had saved her from becoming one of those semi-outlaws so freely discussed in her new circle. That was a phase she had no desire to dwell on, but she faced it squarely. Such women, she had been told, had sometimes the most idealized relationships, a mental and spiritual harmony seldom found with men; being rarely fools. Through this ominous lack of balance in the ductless glands and an arbitrary gift from Nature of cells which had no legitimate place in their anatomy, they were not only enabled but compelled to love their own sex; and as faithfully, protectively, and self-sacrificingly, as those that were fitted with normal response to man. Often more so. They were by no means mere sensualists. Nature here was as inexorable as elsewhere and she had not waited upon the decadence of civilizations to develop the type. It had existed since the dawn of history. No doubt since the dawn of time.
What Nature’s purpose was no man could guess. But that she had a purpose, methodical creature that she was, no intelligent man could doubt.
But she had passed over one Gita Carteret, even refusing to unbalance those cells, with everything working in her favor. The result was that Gita Carteret had been isolated high and dry. A rock in mid-ocean. A capacity for agreeable friendships, but about as emotional as an unhatched egg.
Well, that was that. She’d never think of it again if she could avoid it. But insularity had its compensations!
She felt as if something resistant in her brain were straining and creaking as she swung it ruthlessly to that strange moment when De Witt Turner’s words—uttered more or less at random—had turned her mind into a cauldron. But that frenzied moment had not only been a revelation but a deliverance. She had experienced a sensation of exhaustion when it was over, during which she felt that something had exploded, then taken wing. That such an access of hatred for a side of life still unexplored would never come again. She had been delivered—and for what?
Not for Eustace Bylant. Her recoil from that gleam in his eyes when he bent forward to kiss her was conclusive. No need to be asexual to be revolted at the thought of kissing a man she did not love and never could love. Even his light and frequent touch, of which she had barely been conscious as long as the lid was down, would be unendurable hereafter.
He “loved” her, of course. Always had. She had kept the lid down with a vengeance! She must have known from the first that he was in love with her in the orthodox male fashion—known it down in that, automatically recording invisible register; but that censored mind of hers had turned its back blithely; kept its conscious part suspended in that rarefied ether she had chosen as her habitat, peopled with queer eidola of her human acquaintance.
Too bad! It would have been the ideal solution to love Eustace, who had so much to offer, with whom she could live her life in a companionship found by few women with the men of their choice. But she did not. She almost hated him. He must never return here. She’d write and tell him so at once. If he hadn’t loved her she’d be willing to go on. But she had had one of her illuminating flashes. She knew he had reached the limit of his endurance.
But she had no intention of making him ridiculous. She had liked him too well for that, owed him too much. They could give out they were starting for Europe or South America—which he often talked of visiting—and he could travel while she lived in secrecy at the manor. The manor was her best friend. A friend, it seemed to her, and not only last night, that had schooled and soothed and strengthened her for centuries. A part of her. Even the blood that had come down to her had stained its boards. There had been a duel out there in the hall. And, in another century, an unbridled Carteret, who loved the wife of his guest, had been stabbed in his bedroom—the one her imperturbable grandmother had chosen for her own. . . .
Poor Eustace! What irony! Years of seeking for the one woman who exteriorized his secret fixation, to find her only to learn that the shell had deluded him, that there was nothing within it for him. Worse. To train her, to wear down her defenses, to deliver her from her accumulated obliquities, for another man. What was the matter with life? Controlled it would seem, not by a Beneficent Power, but by what Poe had called the Imp of the Perverse. . . .
The only thing she hated to give up was Bladina’s pearls!
And the Brittany set. But no doubt she could buy that from Eustace. . . .
She told herself harshly that she was twisting and turning from that final probing, and after a moment of real terror, in which she felt an impulse to flee from the room, tearing off that whispering old gown as she ran, she set her teeth and went to the brink and peered down once more.
She was in love with Geoffrey Pelham. She said the words aloud to steady her nerves with their finality. Then shrugged her shoulders and settled back in her chair, although she kicked a stool across the room.
Well, what did it mean? What was she to do about it? He had been obsessing her conscious mind since the night at the Pleydens’, possibly her unconscious since they had sat together in this room. Now that she had hauled him out into the light he would probably obsess every waking moment and haunt her dreams.
She felt that no caged eagle could be more resentful than she at this moment. Her pride had been as abnormal as her existence. Her ego could hardly have been more extended if she had been a heroin addict. That old dream of herself, solitary on a solitary peak had been more than an escape-fulfillment; it had been a reveling of the ego in its complete independence. And there was no independence in the surrender of one’s ego to another, even in this latter-day pretense of fifty-fifty. Women were exactly the same fundamentally as they had always been. Their instinct was surrender—blind instinct of the race to survive.
But she hadn’t got as far as that yet! If loathing had been exorcised in that final explosion under that detestable novelist’s goading, and she had been ejected out of the fog into a dazzle of light—mercifully blinded for the moment to the fact of Geoffrey Pelham—she was conscious of no sexual discomfort. She had never discussed that subject with anyone, but modernists in fiction were remarkably frank, and while they deadened the imagination of the reader, they left little to be learned by mere experience. She knew all about it!
But although her blood traveled its accustomed gait, she knew that Geoffrey Pelham’s image was sunken deep in that unpicturesque pump of hers called heart, and probably forever. She was not the woman to be able to love twice. She recalled the definition of love he had given to Polly, and concluded it was more likely to be correct than anything heretofore advanced. Science was explaining one mystery after another, psychical as well as physical, and she for one liked to know what was the matter with her.
She analyzed her sensations toward this man who had torn her old theories about herself up by the roots. Eustace had once told her that analysis was fatal to love, but that was an old delusion that surprised her in a man uncommonly clear and precise of vision. She felt exactly the same whether she analyzed or not.
Polly had said she felt thrills, turned hot and cold, lost her breath. Well, so far, she had felt none of that. But there was a piercing sweetness, moments of intolerable aspiration, of a desire to wing upward with him to unimaginable heights, dwelling in spiritual contact with him forever. Another trick of elemental sex, no doubt, preliminary to the desire for surrender. . . .
Hacking her way through what was left of the fog she arrived at the conclusion that if she were still insensible to passion it was because, after her long lethargy, mortared with violent repulsion, she was dependent for that upon his physical contact.
But here she would have kicked another stool across the room had there been one within reach.
This piercing sweetness was all right, this divine consciousness that uplifted and exalted her—but did she want anything more? She doubted it. One indelible lesson life had taught her: that realities were disillusionizing and commonplace. Often hard and ugly. Moreover——Yes, moreover! One inhibition appeared to be still firmly planted.
She knew she could marry Geoffrey if she chose. Eustace would never stand in her way. He would be bitterly disappointed, wretched, mortified, angry, but he was not the man to hold a woman to a hollow alliance. When he realized that she was inexorable he would wrap himself up in a mantle of philosophy and retire from the field.
And if she did not marry Geoffrey Pelham, Polly would. She’d make herself as intimate and necessary as his coat and button herself round him in some moment of hopeless depression. After that, of course, he would love her. No man could help it.
She emitted a low growl. Then beat her hands on the arms of her chair. What did it matter? Why deprive the poor man of what consolation he could get? He had given her something Polly could never take from her (what Polly would be forced to content herself with was what she herself rejected) and she could continue to love him and fulfill her soul more completely than if she entered into prosaic—and hateful—matrimony with him. No pleasures, when all was said and done, could equal those of the imagination. She had always despised stories with happy endings. And shrunk from ultimates. After flowers weeds. No soil left for imagination or the psyche. Happy marriages? Oh, yes, plenty of them. She had even seen several in advanced sophisticate circles, although they were always informing you they gave each other complete liberty, and would not shed a tear over a passing infatuation. Or else worrying if it could last, and exactly how they would act if it didn’t. Commit suicide or look round for someone else? But with all their febrile self-consciousness they were happy enough. And outside of that limited circle, where people did not bother about being modern and took life as it came, no doubt there were thousands of happy marriages.
But life had not educated her for happiness of that sort, however she may have scrambled to the top of her old pit. She could love, but not in duality. She had found something very wonderful and precious and inspiring, but there was only one way to keep it.
To be jealous of Polly was monstrous, unworthy of her. She was, of course, but she’d dig it out by the roots.
And what was she to do with her life? She must make something of it. She wanted no more of society of any sort. She took no interest—beyond that of any intelligent person—in politics, and she certainly would associate herself with nothing that led to being constantly surrounded by masses of women. She had no artistic gift; active work in the cause of charity would merely bore her. . . . It might be amusing to adopt a dozen children. . . . Well, that decision could wait. She had enough on her hands for the present——