He dropped his hands from the machine in a sudden despair. It was impossible, it was a kind of absurd day-dream, it was unreal, he ought to have known better. It could not be done, would never be done. It could not be said. You felt these things or you didn’t.… Instead, they would quarrel, and then quarrel again, they would quarrel day after day and night after night, there would be no end to it forever.
THISTLEDOWN
I.
The dandelion seed, when it blows, does not know where it is going: it will cross miles of meadow, sail over forests of pine, travel down mountain gorges, be caught for a day in a cobweb, and at last find its growing place in the least likely of spots. It will perhaps try to grow in an old shoe, or an empty tomato tin, or a crack in a wall. And, of course, it will have no memory of the poor plant, leagues away, from which it set out on its journey. There is a kind of pathos in this, and something beautiful also. And it is with just such an image that I always think of Coralyn, that gallantest of creatures, when I try to tell her story. There is, to be quite truthful, no story—at best, only the materials for a story. Life seldom arranges itself in an obvious pattern. It may surprise us—and often does—or it may shock us, or turn swiftly from melodrama to comedy, or from the humdrum to tragedy; but how few lives do we know in which there is any perceptible “form,” any design of the sort that novelists employ! Coralyn’s story is at best a chronicle—hardly even that. It is a series of episodes, an uneven progress in time; it is as aimless as the voyage of the dandelion thistle, and almost as purposeless. And as I look back on it, with its span of five or six years, I even wonder, sometimes, whether Coralyn, any more than the thistledown, remembered where she had come from, or knew where she was going. This is an exaggeration, of course—that she did, now and then, remember, was attested by those strange despairs into which now and then she would suddenly pass. Abruptly, she would drop her gayety, her frivolity, her tomboyish violences and absurdities, and be plunged into a half-hour of despair and weeping with which I never in the least knew how to deal. Did she, at such moments, remember and foresee? Did she have some sudden foreknowledge of doom? She would never tell me. All that she would say to me, when I tried to comfort her, was the phrase (which always struck terror to my heart), “I’m afraid! I’m afraid.”
What was it that she was afraid of? Was it life itself, perhaps? Not, certainly, in any obviouse sense. She was a brave girl, clear-eyed, clear-headed, straightforward (with some exceptions), and I never knew anyone who so consistently, even recklessly, took life with both hands. It may have been this, indeed, that she was afraid of; she may have guessed, sooner than we did, and more accurately, the dark forces that were at work in her and to what end they would bring her at last. For there was little or no self-deception in Coralyn. If now and then she flinched a little from telling us, or telling me, the truth about herself, I am sure she never flinched from facing the truth where it most, after all, matters—in her conscience and consciousness. When she had occasion to be dishonest, she knew it.
One of the earliest instances of this was at the very beginning. She had come to act as secretary to my wife, who was an authoress; Mabel had found her through a local employment agency. What Coralyn was doing in New Haven, where we then lived, we couldn’t make out. She was vague about this, only telling us that she was a graduate of a Western university, that she came of an old Virginia family, that her relatives were, with one exception (a cousin), dead, and that she had come East simply because of a conviction that there were more opportunities, of a mildly literary sort, in New England. Heaven knows where she had got this idea, or why she should, of all places, have picked out New Haven. Possibly the presence of the university had something to do with it—I seem to remember that this is what we thought at the time. Anyway, we both liked her and believed her. She was charming, gentle, quiet, refined, never obtrusive, delightful to look at without being exactly pretty, and extremely intelligent. She was then, I think, about twenty-two. One had only to see her for a moment to realize that she was by no means the ordinary sort of secretary. She was always quite beautifully dressed, but without any flashiness, and struck me as singularly uncorrupted by those minor vulgarities of the moment which so many of her generation regarded as the sign manual of sophistication. If she rouged, one didn’t guess it. In fact, the most pronounced impression she made, with her candid forehead and gray eyes and straight carriage, and a kind of touching simplicity of speech, was of an almost frightening unworldiness and innocence. I know now, of course, that this appearance was by no means entirely true—or true, at any rate, only to the role for which she had cast herself. And isn’t this a very essential kind of truth? She was escaping from something of which, for various not very good reasons, she was ashamed; and she was molding herself, or trying to, very courageously, according to an ideal.
About all this she was, I am sure, quite explicit with herself. I imagine she said to herself: “Now Coralyn, you little fool, here is your chance! Let’s have no sentimental nonsense about it. It won’t help the Wassons to know things about you that they needn’t know. It won’t help you either. For the love of Pete, keep your mouth shut, be a lady, be refined, or learn to be, and take one clear step upward or forward to the sort of life you want to lead. Onward to literature and New York and, maybe, a good marriage!… And anyway there’ll be good ‘contacts.’”… And she played her part to perfection. Mabel—poor soul—always said she was the best secretary she ever had. Not only in the mere drudgery, either—for by degrees, as the two women came to know and like each other, Coralyn was more and more called upon to act also in a critical capacity. I myself was never much use at this. My wife was a writer of best-sellers—historical romances and such—and my own tastes simply didn’t happen to run in that direction; my passion for Trollope was Mabel’s despair. But Coralyn, as by degrees she came out of her shell, or was invited out of it by Mabel, and as she was more and more permitted to step out of her position as employee and assume that of friend, became, as Mabel used often to say, invaluable. She was an excellent judge of “what the public wants,” and with this, also, she was an uncommonly keen judge of detail, and of matters of style. When I came home from the office at the end of the day, as that first winter passed, it was increasingly often that I found Coralyn still in the drawing room with Mabel, discussing the latest novel over a cup of tea or a cocktail. From this, it was by the easiest of transitions that she became Mabel’s most intimate friend; in so far as poor Mabel, who never had much genius for friendship, could be said to have an intimate friend. Coralyn was kept not only for tea, but for dinner. She was kept not only for dinner, but overnight. She stayed with us for week-ends, she sometimes ran the house for us when we went to New York, she filled in at bridge, she helped with the preparations for parties, and, in short, she ended by becoming, before many months were over, practically a member of the household. Which, as I see now, was exactly what she was after.
And this brings me to the first point, in the story, at which I myself became at all intimately involved with Coralyn; I will try to tell it as simply as possible. From the outset, I had been fearfully attracted to her. So much so, I recall, that at first I was almost studiously rude to her, out of a sort of instinctive fear. At the time, Mabel and I had been married ten years. We had no children, we had separate interests, and while we were as fond of each other as the average married pair, nevertheless we were no longer, naturally, wildly in love. Just the same I was, as I always was, extraordinarily fond of Mabel, had the very highest admiration for her, and wouldn’t have hurt her for worlds. Nor had I ever had any great desire for extra-conjugal adventures, or to be any kind of Don Juan. All this came into my mind when Coralyn appeared; we had no sooner looked at each other than I experienced a dread. I knew that I attracted her; I knew that if I let her guess that I too was attracted there would be trouble; I wanted to see her, but also I wanted to avoid trouble, and to avoid hurting Mabel. Consequently, while I took great pains to tell Mabel that I thought Coralyn an admirable person, I was, as I say, very often deliberately rude to Coralyn herself. I made a point, from time to time, of quite obviously avoiding her. On several occasions when it happened that we were left alone in the house together I made palpably lying excuses and left her; I could see that she was distressed. If she tried to draw me into conversation à deux, I would answer her monosyllabically, or retreat to my study for a pretense of work; there to smoke cigarettes one after another and to wonder what would happen.… I might have guessed.