A Far Country, Book 3

W >> Winston Churchill >> A Far Country, Book 3


The irony of circumstances--of what might have been--prevented now my
laying this trophy at Nancy's feet, for I knew I had only to mention the
matter to be certain of losing her.




XXIII.

I had bought a small automobile, which I ran myself, and it was my custom
to arrive at the farm every evening about five o'clock. But as I look
back upon those days they seem to have lost succession, to be fused
together, as it were, into one indeterminable period by the intense
pressure of emotion; unsatisfied emotion,--and the state of physical and
mental disorganization set up by it is in the retrospect not a little
terrifying. The world grew more and more distorted, its affairs were
neglected, things upon which I had set high values became as nothing. And
even if I could summon back something of the sequence of our intercourse,
it would be a mere repetition--growing on my part more irrational and
insistent--of what I have already related. There were long, troubled, and
futile silences when we sat together on the porch or in the woods and
fields; when I wondered whether it were weakness or strength that caused
Nancy to hold out against my importunities: the fears she professed of
retribution, the benumbing effects of the conventional years, or the
deep-rooted remnants of a Calvinism which--as she proclaimed--had lost
definite expression to persist as an intuition. I recall something she
said when she turned to me after one of these silences.

"Do you know how I feel sometimes? as though you and I had wandered
together into a strange country, and lost our way. We have lost our way,
Hugh--it's all so clandestine, so feverish, so unnatural, so unrelated to
life, this existence we're leading. I believe it would be better if it
were a mere case of physical passion. I can't help it," she went on, when
I had exclaimed against this, "we are too--too complicated, you are too
complicated. It's because we want the morning stars, don't you see?" She
wound her fingers tightly around mine. "We not only want this, but all of
life besides--you wouldn't be satisfied with anything less. Oh, I know
it. That's your temperament, you were made that way, and I shouldn't be
satisfied if you weren't. The time would come when you would blame me I
don't mean vulgarly--and I couldn't stand that. If you weren't that way,
if that weren't your nature, I mean, I should have given way long ago."

I made some sort of desperate protest.

"No, if I didn't know you so well I believe I should have given in long
ago. I'm not thinking of you alone, but of myself, too. I'm afraid I
shouldn't be happy, that I should begin to think--and then I couldn't
stop. The plain truth, as I've told you over and over again, is that I'm
not big enough." She continued smiling at me, a smile on which I could
not bear to look. "I was wrong not to have gone away," I heard her say.
"I will go away."

I was, at the time, too profoundly discouraged to answer....

One evening after an exhausting talk we sat, inert, on the grass hummock
beside the stream. Heavy clouds had gathered in the sky, the light had
deepened to amethyst, the valley was still, swooning with expectancy,
louder and louder the thunder rolled from behind the distant hills, and
presently a veil descended to hide them from our view. Great drops began
to fall, unheeded.

"We must go in," said Nancy, at length.

I followed her across the field and through the orchard. From the porch
we stood gazing out at the whitening rain that blotted all save the
nearer landscape, and the smell of wet, midsummer grasses will always be
associated with the poignancy of that moment.... At dinner, between the
intervals of silence, our talk was of trivial things. We made a mere
pretence of eating, and I remember having my attention arrested by the
sight of a strange, pitying expression on the face of Mrs. Olsen, who
waited on us. Before that the woman had been to me a mere ministering
automaton. But she must have had ideas and opinions, this transported
Swedish peasant.... Presently, having cleared the table, she retired....
The twilight deepened to dusk, to darkness. The storm, having spent the
intensity of its passion in those first moments of heavy downpour and
wind, had relaxed to a gentle rain that pattered on the roof, and from
the stream came recurringly the dirge of the frogs. All I could see of
Nancy was the dim outline of her head and shoulders: she seemed
fantastically to be escaping me, to be fading, to be going; in sudden
desperation I dropped on my knees beside her, and I felt her hands
straying with a light yet agonized touch, over my head.

"Do you think I haven't suffered, too? that I don't suffer?" I heard her
ask.

Some betraying note for which I had hitherto waited in vain must have
pierced to my consciousness, yet the quiver of joy and the swift,
convulsive movement that followed it seemed one. Her strong, lithe body
was straining in my arms, her lips returning my kisses.... Clinging to
her hands, I strove to summon my faculties of realization; and I began to
speak in broken, endearing sentences.

"It's stronger than we are--stronger than anything else in the world,"
she said.

"But you're not sorry?" I asked.

"I don't want to think--I don't care," she replied. "I only know that I
love you. I wonder if you will ever know how much!"

The moments lengthened into hours, and she gently reminded me that it was
late. The lights in the little farmhouses near by had long been
extinguished. I pleaded to linger; I wanted her, more of her, all of her
with a fierce desire that drowned rational thought, and I feared that
something might still come between us, and cheat me of her.

"No, no," she cried, with fear in her voice. "We shall have to think it
out very carefully--what we must do. We can't afford to make any
mistakes."

"We'll talk it all over to-morrow," I said.

With a last, reluctant embrace I finally left her, walked blindly to
where the motor car was standing, and started the engine. I looked back.
Outlined in the light of the doorway I saw her figure in what seemed an
attitude of supplication....

I drove cityward through the rain, mechanically taking the familiar turns
in the road, barely missing a man in a buggy at a four-corners. He
shouted after me, but the world to which he belonged didn't exist. I
lived again those moments that had followed Nancy's surrender, seeking to
recall and fix in my mind every word that had escaped from her lips--the
trivial things that to lovers are so fraught with meaning. I lived it all
over again, as I say, but the reflection of it, though intensely
emotional, differed from the reality in that now I was somewhat able to
regard the thing, to regard myself, objectively; to define certain
feelings that had flitted in filmy fashion through my consciousness,
delicate shadows I recognized at the time as related to sadness. When she
had so amazingly yielded, the thought for which my mind had been vaguely
groping was that the woman who lay there in my arms, obscured by the
darkness, was not Nancy at all! It was as if this one precious woman I
had so desperately pursued had, in the capture, lost her identity, had
mysteriously become just woman, in all her significance, yes, and
helplessness. The particular had merged (inevitably, I might have known)
into the general: the temporary had become the lasting, with a chain of
consequences vaguely implied that even in my joy gave me pause. For the
first time in my life I had a glimpse of what marriage might
mean,--marriage in a greater sense than I had ever conceived it, a sort
of cosmic sense, implying obligations transcending promises and
contracts, calling for greatness of soul of a kind I had not hitherto
imagined. Was there in me a grain of doubt of my ability to respond to
such a high call? I began to perceive that such a union as we
contemplated involved more obligations than one not opposed to
traditional views of morality. I fortified myself, however,--if indeed I
really needed fortification in a mood prevailingly triumphant and
exalted,--with the thought that this love was different, the real thing,
the love of maturity steeped in the ideals of youth. Here was a love for
which I must be prepared to renounce other things on which I set a high
value; prepared, in case the world, for some reason, should not look upon
us with kindliness. It was curious that such reflections as these should
have been delayed until after the achievement of my absorbing desire,
more curious that they should have followed so closely on the heels of
it. The affair had shifted suddenly from a basis of adventure, of
uncertainty; to one of fact, of commitment; I am exaggerating my concern
in order to define it; I was able to persuade myself without much
difficulty that these little, cloudy currents in the stream of my joy
were due to a natural reaction from the tremendous strain of the past
weeks, mere morbid fancies.

When at length I reached my room at the Club I sat looking out at the
rain falling on the shining pavements under the arc-lights. Though waves
of heat caused by some sudden recollection or impatient longing still ran
through my body, a saner joy of anticipation was succeeding emotional
tumult, and I reflected that Nancy had been right in insisting that we
walk circumspectly in spite of passion. After all, I had outwitted
circumstance, I had gained the prize, I could afford to wait a little. We
should talk it over to-morrow,--no, to-day. The luminous face of the city
hall clock reminded me that midnight was long past....

I awoke with the consciousness of a new joy, suddenly to identify it with
Nancy. She was mine! I kept repeating it as I dressed; summoning her, not
as she had lain in my arms in the darkness--though the intoxicating
sweetness of that pervaded me--but as she had been before the
completeness of her surrender, dainty, surrounded by things expressing an
elusive, uniquely feminine personality. I could afford to smile at the
weather, at the obsidian sky, at the rain still falling persistently; and
yet, as I ate my breakfast, I felt a certain impatience to verify what I
knew was a certainty, and hurried to the telephone booth. I resented the
instrument, its possibilities of betrayal, her voice sounded so
matter-of-fact as she bade me good morning and deplored the rain.

"I'll be out as soon as I can get away," I said. "I have a meeting at
three, but it should be over at four." And then I added irresistibly:
"Nancy, you're not sorry? You--you still--?"

"Yes, don't be foolish," I heard her reply, and this time the telephone
did not completely disguise the note for which I strained. I said
something more, but the circuit was closed....

I shall not attempt to recount the details of our intercourse during the
week that followed. There were moments of stress and strain when it
seemed to me that we could not wait, moments that strengthened Nancy's
resolution to leave immediately for the East: there were other, calmer
periods when the wisdom of her going appealed to me, since our ultimate
union would be hastened thereby. We overcame by degrees the
distastefulness of the discussion of ways and means.... We spent an
unforgettable Sunday among the distant high hills, beside a little lake
of our own discovery, its glinting waters sapphire and chrysoprase. A
grassy wood road, at the inviting entrance to which we left the
automobile, led down through an undergrowth of laurel to a pebbly shore,
and there we lunched; there we lingered through the long summer
afternoon, Nancy with her back against a tree, I with my head in her lap
gazing up at filmy clouds drifting imperceptibly across the sky,
listening to the droning notes of the bees, notes that sometimes rose in
a sharp crescendo, and again were suddenly hushed. The smell of the
wood-mould mingled with the fainter scents of wild flowers. She had
brought along a volume by a modern poet: the verses, as Nancy read them,
moved me,--they were filled with a new faith to which my being responded,
the faith of the forth-farer; not the faith of the anchor, but of the
sail. I repeated some of the lines as indications of a creed to which I
had long been trying to convert her, though lacking the expression. She
had let the book fall on the grass. I remember how she smiled down at me
with the wisdom of the ages in her eyes, seeking my hand with a gesture
that was almost maternal.

"You and the poets," she said, "you never grow up. I suppose that's the
reason why we love you--and these wonderful visions of freedom you have.
Anyway, it's nice to dream, to recreate the world as one would like to
have it."

"But that's what you and I are doing," I insisted.

"We think we're doing it--or rather you think so," she replied. "And
sometimes, I admit that you almost persuade me to think so. Never quite.
What disturbs me," she continued, "is to find you and the poets founding
your new freedom on new justifications, discarding the old law only to
make a new one,--as though we could ever get away from necessities,
escape from disagreeable things, except in dreams. And then, this
delusion of believing that we are masters of our own destiny--" She
paused and pressed my fingers.

"There you go-back to predestination!" I exclaimed.

"I don't go back to anything, or forward to anything," she exclaimed.
"Women are elemental, but I don't expect you to understand it. Laws and
codes are foreign to us, philosophies and dreams may dazzle us for the
moment, but what we feel underneath and what we yield to are the primal
forces, the great necessities; when we refuse joys it's because we know
these forces by a sort of instinct, when we're overcome it's with a full
knowledge that there's a price. You've talked a great deal, Hugh, about
carving out our future. I listened to you, but I resisted you. It wasn't
the morality that was taught me as a child that made me resist, it was
something deeper than that, more fundamental, something I feel but can't
yet perceive, and yet shall perceive some day. It isn't that I'm clinging
to the hard and fast rules because I fail to see any others, it isn't
that I believe that all people should stick together whether they are
happily married or not, but--I must say it even now--I have a feeling I
can't define that divorce isn't for us. I'm not talking about right and
wrong in the ordinary sense--it's just what I feel. I've ceased to
think."

"Nancy!" I reproached her.

"I can't help it--I don't want to be morbid. Do you remember my asking
you about God?--the first day this began? and whether you had a god?
Well, that's the trouble with us all to-day, we haven't any God, we're
wanderers, drifters. And now it's just life that's got hold of us, my
dear, and swept us away together. That's our justification--if we needed
one--it's been too strong for us." She leaned back against the tree and
closed her eyes. "We're like chips in the torrent of it, Hugh."....

It was not until the shadow of the forest had crept far across the lake
and the darkening waters were still that we rose reluctantly to put the
dishes in the tea basket and start on our homeward journey. The tawny
fires of the sunset were dying down behind us, the mist stealing,
ghostlike, into the valleys below; in the sky a little moon curled like a
freshly cut silver shaving, that presently turned to gold, the white star
above it to fire.

Where the valleys widened we came to silent, decorous little towns and
villages where yellow-lit windows gleaming through the trees suggested
refuge and peace, while we were wanderers in the night. It was Nancy's
mood; and now, in the evening's chill, it recurred to me poignantly. In
one of these villages we passed a church, its doors flung open; the
congregation was singing a familiar hymn. I slowed down the car; I felt
her shoulder pressing against my own, and reached out my hand and found
hers.

"Are you warm enough?" I asked....

We spoke but little on that drive, we had learned the futility of words
to express the greater joys and sorrows, the love that is compounded of
these.

It was late when we turned in between the white dates and made our way up
the little driveway to the farmhouse. I bade her good night on the steps
of the porch.

"You do love me, don't you?" she whispered, clinging to me with a sudden,
straining passion. "You will love me, always no matter what happens?"

"Why, of course, Nancy," I answered.

"I want to hear you say it, 'I love you, I shall love you always.'"

I repeated it fervently....

"No matter what happens?"

"No matter what happens. As if I could help it, Nancy! Why are you so sad
to-night?"

"Ah, Hugh, it makes me sad--I can't tell why. It is so great, it is so
terrible, and yet it's so sweet and beautiful."

She took my face in her hands and pressed a kiss against my forehead....

The next day was dark. At two o'clock in the afternoon the electric light
was still burning over my desk when the telephone rang and I heard
Nancy's voice.

"Is that you, Hugh?"

"Yes."

"I have to go East this afternoon."

"Why?" I asked. Her agitation had communicated itself to me. "I thought
you weren't going until Thursday. What's the matter?"

"I've just had a telegram," she said. "Ham's been hurt--I don't know how
badly--he was thrown from a polo pony this morning at Narragansett, in
practice, and they're taking him to Boston to a private hospital. The
telegram's from Johnny Shephard. I'll be at the house in town at four."

Filled with forebodings I tried in vain to suppress I dropped the work I
was doing and got up and paced the room, pausing now and again to gaze
out of the window at the wet roofs and the grey skies. I was aghast at
the idea of her going to Ham now even though he were hurt badly hurt; and
yet I tried to think it was natural, that it was fine of her to respond
to such a call. And she couldn't very well refuse his summons. But it was
not the news of her husband's accident that inspired the greater fear,
which was quelled and soothed only to rise again when I recalled the note
I had heard in her voice, a note eloquent of tragedy--of tragedy she had
foreseen. At length, unable to remain where I was any longer, I descended
to the street and walked uptown in the rain. The Durrett house was
closed, the blinds of its many windows drawn, but Nancy was watching for
me and opened the door. So used had I grown to seeing her in the simple
linen dresses she had worn in the country, a costume associated with
exclusive possession, that the sight of her travelling suit and hat
renewed in me an agony of apprehension. The unforeseen event seemed to
have transformed her once more. Her veil was drawn up, her face was pale,
in her eyes were traces of tears.

"You're going?" I asked, as I took her hands.

"Hugh, I have to go."

She led me through the dark, shrouded drawing room into the little salon
where the windows were open on the silent city-garden. I took her in my
arms; she did not resist, as I half expected, but clung to me with what
seemed desperation.

"I have to go, dear--you won't make it too hard for me! It's
only--ordinary decency, and there's no one else to go to him."

She drew me to the sofa, her eyes beseeching me.

"Listen, dear, I want you to see it as I see it. I know that you will,
that you do. I should never be able to forgive myself if I stayed away
now, I--neither of us could ever be happy about it. You do see, don't
you?" she implored.

"Yes," I admitted agitatedly.

Her grasp on my hand tightened.

"I knew you would. But it makes me happier to hear you say it."

We sat for a moment in helpless silence, gazing at one another. Slowly
her eyes had filled.

"Have you heard anything more?" I managed to ask.

She drew a telegram from her bag, as though the movement were a relief.

"This is from the doctor in Boston--his name is Magruder. They have got
Ham there, it seems. A horse kicked him in the head, after he fell,--he
had just recovered consciousness."

I took the telegram. The wordy seemed meaningless, all save those of the
last sentence. "The situation is serious, but by no means hopeless."
Nancy had not spoken of that. The ignorant cruelty of its convention! The
man must have known what Hambleton Durrett was! Nancy read my thoughts,
and took the paper from my hand.

"Hugh, dear, if it's hard for you, try to understand that it's terrible
for me to think that he has any claim at all. I realize now, as I never
did before, how wicked it was in me to marry him. I hate him, I can't
bear the thought of going near him."

She fell into wild weeping. I tried to comfort her, who could not comfort
myself; I don't remember my inadequate words. We were overwhelmed,
obliterated by the sense of calamity.... It was she who checked herself
at last by an effort that was almost hysterical.

"I mustn't yield to it!" she said. "It's time to leave and the train goes
at six. No, you mustn't come to the station, Hugh--I don't think I could
stand it. I'll send you a telegram." She rose. "You must go now--you
must."

"You'll come back to me?" I demanded thickly, as I held her.

"Hugh, I am yours, now and always. How can you doubt it?"

At last I released her, when she had begged me again. And I found myself
a little later walking past the familiar, empty houses of those
streets....

The front pages of the evening newspapers announced the accident to
Hambleton Durrett, and added that Mrs. Durrett, who had been lingering in
the city, had gone to her husband's bedside. The morning papers contained
more of biography and ancestry, but had little to add to the bulletin;
and there was no lack of speculation at the Club and elsewhere as to
Ham's ability to rally from such a shock. I could not bear to listen to
these comments: they were violently distasteful to me. The unforeseen
accident and Nancy's sudden departure had thrown my life completely out
of gear: I could not attend to business, I dared not go away lest the
news from Nancy be delayed. I spent the hours in an exhausting mental
state that alternated between hope and fear, a state of unmitigated,
intense desire, of balked realization, sometimes heightening into that
sheer terror I had felt when I had detected over the telephone that note
in her voice that seemed of despair. Had she had a presentiment, all
along, that something would occur to separate us? As I went back over the
hours we had passed together since she had acknowledged her love, in
spite of myself the conviction grew on me that she had never believed in
the reality of our future. Indeed, she had expressed her disbelief in
words. Had she been looking all along for a sign--a sign of wrath? And
would she accept this accident of Ham's as such?

Retrospection left me trembling and almost sick.

It was not until the second morning after her departure that I received a
telegram giving the name of her Boston hotel, and saying that there was
to be a consultation that day, and as soon as it had taken place she
would write. Such consolation as I could gather from it was derived from
four words at the end,--she missed me dreadfully. Some tremor of pity for
her entered into my consciousness, without mitigating greatly the
wildness of my resentment, of my forebodings.

I could bear no longer the city, the Club, the office, the daily contact
with my associates and clients. Six hours distant, near Rossiter, was a
small resort in the mountains of which I had heard. I telegraphed Nancy
to address me there, notified the office, packed my bag, and waited
impatiently for midday, when I boarded the train. At seven I reached a
little station where a stage was waiting to take me to Callender's Mill.

It was not until morning that I beheld my retreat, when little wisps of
vapour were straying over the surface of the lake, and the steep green
slopes that rose out of the water on the western side were still in
shadow. The hotel, a much overgrown and altered farm-house, stood,
surrounded by great trees, in an ancient clearing that sloped gently to
the water's edge, where an old-fashioned, octagonal summerhouse
overlooked a landing for rowboats. The resort, indeed, was a survival of
simpler times....

In spite of the thirty-odd guests, people of very moderate incomes who
knew the place and had come here year after year, I was as much alone as
if I had been the only sojourner. The place was so remote, so peaceful in
contrast to the city I had left, which had become intolerable. And at
night, during hours of wakefulness, the music of the waters falling over
the dam was soothing. I used to walk down there and sit on the stones of
the ruined mill; or climb to the crests on the far side of the pond to
gaze for hours westward where the green billows of the Alleghenies lost
themselves in the haze. I had discovered a new country; here, when our
trials should be over, I would bring Nancy, and I found distraction in
choosing sites for a bungalow. In my soul hope flowered with little
watering. Uncertain news was good news. After two days of an impatience
all but intolerable, her first letter arrived, I learned that the
specialists had not been able to make a diagnosis, and I began to take
heart again. At times, she said, Ham was delirious and difficult to
manage; at other times he sank into a condition of coma; and again he
seemed to know her and Ralph, who had come up from Southampton, where he
had been spending the summer. One doctor thought that Ham's remarkable
vitality would pull him through, in spite of what his life had been. The
shock--as might have been surmised--had affected the brain.... The
letters that followed contained no additional news; she did not dwell on
the depressing reactions inevitable from the situation in which she found
herself--one so much worse than mine; she expressed a continual longing
for me; and yet I had trouble to convince myself that they did not lack
the note of reassurance for which I strained as I eagerly scanned
them--of reassurance that she had no intention of permitting her
husband's condition to interfere with that ultimate happiness on which it
seemed my existence depended. I tried to account for the absence of this
note by reflecting that the letters were of necessity brief, hurriedly
scratched off at odd moments; and a natural delicacy would prevent her
from referring to our future at such a time. They recorded no change in
Ham's condition save that the periods of coma had ceased. The doctors
were silent, awaiting the arrival in this country of a certain New York
specialist who was abroad. She spent most of her days at the hospital,
returning to the hotel at night exhausted: the people she knew in the
various resorts around Boston had been most kind, sending her flowers,
and calling when in town to inquire. At length came the news that the New
York doctor was home again; and coming to Boston. In that letter was a
sentence which rang like a cry in my ears: "Oh, Hugh, I think these
doctors know now what the trouble is, I think I know. They are only
waiting for Dr. Jameson to confirm it."