Chapter IX (3)

“No, Anson, not for a moment. What I ask is a simple thing. It has been done before.”

He did not answer her at once, and began to move about the room in the deepest agitation, a strange figure curiously out of place in the midst of Horace Pentland’s exotic, beautiful pictures and chairs and bibelots--as wrong in such a setting as he had been right a month or two earlier among the museum of Pentland family relics.

“No,” he said again and again. “What you ask is preposterous! To-morrow when you are less tired you will see how ridiculous it is. No ... I couldn’t think of such a thing!”

She made an effort to speak quietly. “Is it because you don’t want to put yourself in such a position?”

“It has nothing to do with that. Why should you want a divorce? We are well off, content, comfortable, happy....”

She interrupted him, asking, “Are we?”

“What is it you expect, Olivia ... to live always in a sort of romantic glow? We’re happier than most.”

“No,” she said slowly. “I don’t think happiness has ever meant much to you, Anson. Perhaps you’re above such things as happiness and unhappiness. Perhaps you’re more fortunate than most of us. I doubt if you have ever known happiness or unhappiness, for that matter. You’ve been uncomfortable when people annoyed you and got in your way, but ... that’s all. Nothing more than that. Happiness ... I mean it in the sensible way ... has sometimes to do with delight in living, and I don’t think you’ve ever known that, even for a moment.”

He turned toward her saying, “I’ve been an honest, God-fearing, conscientious man, and I think you’re talking nonsense!”

“No, not for a moment.... Heaven knows I ought to know the truth of what I’ve been saying.”

Again they reached an impasse in the conversation and again they both remained silent, disturbed perhaps and uneasy in the consciousness that between them they had destroyed something which could never be restored; and yet with Olivia there was a cold, sustained sense of balance which came to her miraculously at such times. She felt, too, that she stood with her back against a wall, fighting. At last she said, “I would even let you divorce me--if that would be easier for you. I don’t mind putting myself in the wrong.”

Again he began to tremble. “Are you trying to tell me that....”

“I’m not telling you anything. There hasn’t been anything at all ... but ... but I would give you grounds if you would agree.”

He turned away from her in disgust. “That is even more impossible.... A gentleman never divorces his wife.”

“Let’s leave the gentlemen out of it, Anson,” she said. “I’m weary of hearing what gentlemen do and do not do. I want you to act as yourself, as Anson Pentland, and not as you think you ought to act. Let’s be honest. You know you married me only because you had to marry some one ... and I ... I wasn’t actually disreputable, even, as you remind me, if my father was shanty Irish. And ... let’s be just too. I married you because I was alone and frightened and wanted to escape a horrible life with Aunt Alice.... I wanted a home. That was it, wasn’t it? We are both guilty, but that doesn’t change the reality in the least. No, I fancy you practised loving me through a sense of duty. You tried it as long as you could and you hated it always. Oh, I’ve known what was going on. I’ve been learning ever since I came to Pentlands for the first time.”

He was regarding her now with a fixed expression of horrid fascination; he was perhaps even dazed at the sound of her voice, slowly, resolutely, tearing aside all the veils of pretense which had made their life possible for so long. He kept mumbling, “How can you talk this way? How can you say such things?”

Slowly, terribly, she went on and on: “We’re both guilty ... and it’s been a failure, from the very start. I’ve tried to do my best and perhaps sometimes I’ve failed. I’ve tried to be a good mother ... and now that Sybil is grown and Jack ... is dead, I want a chance at freedom. I’m still young enough to want to live a little before it is too late.”

Between his teeth he said, “Don’t be a fool, Olivia.... You’re forty years old....”

“You needn’t remind me of that. To-morrow I shall be forty. I know it ... bitterly. But my being forty makes no difference to you. To you it would be all the same if I were seventy. But to me it makes a difference ... a great difference.” She waited a moment, and then said, “That’s the truth, Anson; and it’s the truth that interests me to-night. Let me be free, Anson.... Let me go while being free still means something.”

Perhaps if she had thrown herself at his feet in the attitude of a wretched, shameful woman, if she had made him feel strong and noble and heroic, she would have won; but it was a thing she could not do. She could only go on being coldly reasonable.

“And you would give up all this?” he was saying. “You’d leave Pentlands and all it stands for to marry this cheap Irishman ... a nobody, the son perhaps of an immigrant dock-laborer.”

“He _is_ the son of a dock-laborer,” she answered quietly. “And his mother was a housemaid. He’s told me so himself. And as to all this.... Why, Anson, it doesn’t mean anything to me ... nothing at all that I can’t give up, nothing which means very much. I’m fond of your father, Anson, and I’m fond of you when you are yourself and not talking about what a gentleman would do. But I’d give it all up ... everything ... for the sake of this other thing.”

For a moment his lips moved silently and in agitation, as if it were impossible for him to answer things so preposterous as those his wife had just spoken. At last he was able to say, “I think you must have lost your mind, Olivia ... to even think of asking such a thing of me. You’ve lived here long enough to know how impossible it is. Some of us must make a stand in a community. There has never been a scandal, or even a divorce, in the Pentland family ... never. We’ve come to stand for something. Three hundred years of clean, moral living can’t be dashed aside so easily.... We’re in a position where others look up to us. Can’t you see that? Can’t you understand such a responsibility?”

For a moment she had a terrible, dizzy, intoxicating sense of power, of knowing that she held the means of destroying him and all this whited structure of pride and respectability. She had only to begin by saying, “There was Savina Pentland and her lover....” The moment passed quickly and at once she knew that it was a thing she could not do. Instead, she murmured, “Ah, Anson, do you think the world really looks at us at all? Do you think it really cares what we do or don’t do? You can’t be as blind as that.”

“I’m not blind ... only there’s such a thing as honor and tradition. We stand for something....”

She interrupted him. “For what?”

“For decency, for a glorious past, for stability ... for endless things ... all the things which count in a civilized community.”

He really believed what he was saying; she knew that he must have believed it to have written all those thousands of dull, laborious words in glorification of the past.

He went on. “No, what you ask is impossible. You knew it before you asked.... And it would be a kindness to me if you never mentioned it again.”

He was still pale, but he had gained control of himself and his hands no longer trembled; as he talked, as his sense of virtue mounted, he even grew eloquent, and his voice took on a shade of that unction which had always colored the voice of the Apostle to the Genteel and made of him a celebrated and fashionable cleric. Perhaps for the first time since his childhood, since the days when the red-haired little Sabine had mocked his curls and velvet suits, he felt himself a strong and powerful person. There was a kind of fierce intoxication in the knowledge of his power over Olivia. In his virtuous ardor he seemed for a moment to become a positive, almost admirable person.

At length she said quietly, “And what if I should simply go away ... without bothering about a divorce?”

The remark shattered all his confidence once more; and she knew that she had struck at the weakest point in all his defense--the fear of a scandal. “You wouldn’t do that!” he cried. “You couldn’t--you couldn’t behave like a common prostitute!”

“Loving one man is not behaving like a common prostitute.... I never loved any other.”

“You couldn’t bring such a disgrace on Sybil, even if you don’t care for the rest of us.”

(“He knew, then, that I couldn’t do such a thing, that I haven’t the courage. He knows that I’ve lived too long in this world.”) Aloud she said, “You don’t know me, Anson.... In all these years you’ve never known me at all.”

“Besides,” he added quickly, “he wouldn’t do such a thing. Such a climber isn’t likely to throw over his whole career by running away with a woman. You’d find out if you asked him.”

“But he _is_ willing. He’s already told me so. Perhaps you can’t understand such a thing.” When he did not answer, she said ironically, “Besides, I don’t think a gentleman would talk as you are talking. No, Anson.... I don’t think you know what the world is. You’ve lived here always, shut up in your own little corner.” Rising, she sighed and murmured, “But there’s no use in talk. I am going to bed.... I suppose we must struggle on as best we can ... but there are times ... times like to-night when you make it hard for me to bear it. Some day ... who knows ... there’s nothing any longer to keep me....”

She went away without troubling to finish what she had meant to say, lost again in an overwhelming sense of the futility of everything. She felt, she thought, like an idiot standing in the middle of an empty field, making gestures.