Mrs. Osmond Page 5

  It was there in her dim little reading room, and in that heightened though formless mood, that she had been chanced upon by her Aunt Lydia, Ralph Touchett’s mother. This forceful lady, remote in manner yet startlingly direct in address, lived mainly in Italy, and was visiting America to check the state of her investments, which she kept strictly separate from her husband’s widely encompassing financial sphere—not that Daniel Touchett had the least urge to meddle in his formidable wife’s business affairs—and had come up from New York to pay a rare visit to her late sister’s family, her two married daughters, and this one, who as yet was contentedly single. They spent an hour and more together, Isabel and Mrs. Touchett, while the rough rain spattered on the roof and the noisy young students across the way straggled back to their lessons, and by the time they parted it had been agreed between them that Isabel, to whom the undemonstrative elderly lady had decidedly “taken a shine,” should accompany her aunt when in the summer she returned to Europe. By then the Albany house would be sold—Isabel’s brother-in-law was to handle the matter with his accustomed brisk dependability—and the girl should have her modest portion of the proceeds, with which to maintain at least the aspect of independence.

  Now, sitting at Miss Janeway’s table, and drawn within the strangely discomfiting ambit of that lady’s concern, Isabel acknowledged to herself, not for the first time but with an unprecedented pang of what was almost anger, that it was in that rainy hour her downfall had begun. Downfall, yes: the word was not too large for what, in her case, it encompassed. Yet had she refused Aunt Lydia’s handsome invitation—although it had been less invitation than directive—and stayed in Albany, what would have become of her? How long would it have taken for the airy balloon bearing her aloft to come fizzling back to earth? She seemed to hear again the racket of children’s voices from the Dutch House school across the street, and pictured herself, older than she was now, standing by a blackboard, with a ruler in her hand and chalk-dust in her hair, dully paying out the reels of rote that years of repetition had robbed even of what little interest or purpose they might once have possessed for her. Yes, that would have been her fate: a teacher at a provincial school for fractious tots, or otherwise a governess, perhaps; perhaps even—dear heavens!—the paid companion of a person such as her Aunt Lydia was bound one day, quite soon, to become.

  It was a fact that, for Isabel, Europe had been unavoidable; Europe had been her fate, and so it was still. Yet she should not have allowed her aunt to thrust her upon that fabled continent so precipitately, as a free-trader’s posse might snatch from the doorway of a dockside tavern some poor young hearty fuddled on rum and press him into a captive life upon the roiling ocean; indeed, she should not have allowed it. Her aunt was not to blame that she was lashed by unbreakable bonds to Europe’s mast. The girl had lived her Albany life offhandedly, as it might be, without due regard; impatient of being young, of being merely young, she had struck out strongly where she should have lingered, at least for a while, and in eager haste had covered leagues, of land and sea, to arrive in a place that had seemed the place itself of pure possibility, pure potential. She had, if not willed it, then acquiesced to it, all this, with haughty enthusiasm, taking it as her due. What was it she had once said to someone as a definition of her ideal of happiness? Something about being in a coach and four of a pitch-dark night rattling over unseen roads. Ah, she thought, the innocence of it—the arrogance! The creature she imagined in that coach now was not herself, but a captive child, baffled and frightened and in dread of whatever destination lay ahead, while up on the driving seat, in the darkness of the rushing night, a wordless fiend rattled the reins and mercilessly plied the whip.

  They had reached the end of the course of uncompromising greens—Isabel had called up the knack, which we all learned in the nursery, of arranging a nearly full plate so as to make it seem half-empty—and now the cheerful maid, having cleared the table, carried in two small porcelain bowls of lemon syllabub and an open tin of little hard brown biscuits. As on many another exclusively female occasion, Isabel found herself hankering after the male dispensations of decanter and cigar, if only for the glistening look of the brandy glass and the humid savour of scented smoke; a drink of plain water, refreshing though it was, did not encourage one to settle down and delve deep into intimate matters. In this regard, however, Miss Janeway was made of sterner stuff than her guest, and, obviously considering sufficient time had elapsed for the earlier awkwardness to have dissipated, set her elbows firmly on the table and folded together her slender, pale, though not unwrinkled hands and once more plunged straight in.

  “The good Henrietta hinted,” she said, “that your domestic circumstances—in Rome, I mean—set a definite hindrance to your attending at your cousin’s deathbed.”

  Isabel managed the feat of nodding and shrugging simultaneously. “By ‘domestic circumstances,’ ” she said drily, “you mean of course my husband.”

  Miss Janeway glanced into her bowl of syllabub like a scryer looking to her crystal globe for guidance. “Mr. Osmond, I understand,” she said, “is not, was not, an admirer of the deceased young man.”

  Isabel in response was still more dry. “There are not many people Mr. Osmond does admire, among my circle, such as it is, or in the world at large, for that matter. Our friend Miss Stackpole, for instance, inspires in him the liveliest disdain; he would have set Ralph Touchett hardly a step above her in esteem. The term it pleased him most often to apply to Ralph was ‘that long jackanapes’—my cousin was very tall, and very spare. He suffered from consumption throughout his short life, and died of it in the end. He was also, I have discovered,” she went on, feeling anew the wonder of it, “the person who in the world loved me most dearly, and whom I loved most dearly in return.”

  At this her hostess made a cautious pause, and for a moment the silence seemed to press about them both, as if they were trapped inside a tremulous and steadily swelling bubble. Isabel ate a spoonful of her dessert, assuming a placidly blank expression; it was imperative to maintain the quotidian appearance of things—the niceties of a shared table, polite manners, a tone of calm discourse—otherwise everything at any moment might burst in a cascade of soap-suds and miniature rainbows, for the skin of the bubble in which they were held was exceedingly fine.

  “He loved you,” Miss Janeway ventured at last, in a voice perfectly, deliberately, flat, and without the faintest shade of an interrogation mark, “and you loved him.”

  “Yes,” Isabel answered, with a matching lack of emphasis, “but it was not the kind of love to trouble a husband. Or not a normal husband, at least,” she added.

  Miss Janeway was gazing at her over the peak of her clasped hands, projecting forward slightly the side of her head where her good ear was.

  “Do you consider Mr. Osmond to be an abnormal husband, then?” she asked, with what Isabel thought might even be the faintest flicker of humour.

  She should counter the question by quashing it at once, Isabel knew, yet instead she paused to reflect upon it. What, in a husband, would constitute normality? She was not sure that it was “normal” to be a husband at all, or, even more, a wife. From what she had learned of the married state—and she had learned much, and at much cost to her sense both of herself and of society’s arrangements—it seemed to her nothing but a throwback to a prehistoric time, a codification of far more casual, rough rituals of seizure and subjugation. She gave due regard to the civilising moral principle of the marriage vow, yet still she could not stifle the sense she had of how strange a thing it was to be required to commit oneself body and soul to another human being for the entire length of a life. For a long time she had been content to accept what all the laws and all the religions assured her was the case, namely that marriage was the natural state for men and women to live and thrive in, but then, gradually at first and more recently with a quickening conviction, she had come to see what the thing really entailed, and had come to recognise the vast anachronism of i
t, as vast as the fact of life itself; as vast as the fact of death.

  She wondered, with a quaver of alarm, what the lean lady seated opposite her would make of such heresies, were she to hear them voiced aloud, and raising her eyes cautiously now from her dessert she saw by Miss Janeway’s look that she had more than an inkling of the thoughts that had been skittering through her guest’s troubled consciousness.

  “I take it you have not come here in the expectation of advice,” the lady said in a measured tone. “Spinsters,” she went on, with a wide-eyed blankness of expression that might have been the surrogate for a smile, “tend not to be called upon to arbitrate in the kind of predicament in which I suspect you are”—her hesitation was of the briefest—“trapped.”

  “Oh, of course,” Isabel responded quickly, stumbling a little in awkwardness and confusion, “I would not dream—that is, I would not presume to burden you with my troubles. Only—” Here her voice trailed off into an agitated silence. She saw herself now, from a distance and yet with a strange and frightening clarity, not as a passenger in a careering carriage, but as a floundering animal crushed under the iron of the vehicle’s wheels, and she felt for herself the same remote compassion that she would extend to any such poor maimed victim. She cast an unseeing glance here and there about the bright little room, striving to gather her thoughts. “I have a choice, you see,” she said quietly, looking aside still and directing her words more at herself than towards her hospitable companion.

  “A choice?” Miss Janeway prompted, and when Isabel, seeming lost in herself, failed to respond, went on: “All choices are always difficult, in my experience. However, I’m sure my experience stops far short of the kinds of alternatives that you, my dear, find yourself caught between at the present moment.”

  It was apparent, however, that Isabel had not been listening fully, and now she fairly burst out again: “I have not one choice,” she said, “but a number! The first, which is clear and simple, is to return to Rome—simple and clear, but momentous too, of course. When that decision is made, then, then I shall know how difficult are the others that present themselves.”

  Miss Janeway sat through a lengthy pause, and at last enquired, with all the tact and gentleness of tone that surely she was capable of: “Does your husband expect you to return? I mean, has he allowed for it?”

  Here Isabel gave herself a sort of rough shake, as if reproving herself for her recent inattention, then drew a deep breath that made her lift up her shoulders and raise high her chin. “I no longer know what my husband expects,” she said, and then, with a woeful smile, “I suspect I no longer know my husband at all—if I ever did.”

  VI

  The maid reappeared—by now Isabel had come to think of her as one of those minor but necessary characters in a drawing-room drama, who pop out from the wings to interrupt the action so that the audience may have an opportunity to shuffle their feet and lean back in their seats and cough—carrying before her reverently, as if it were a ciborium, an antique silver teapot, authentically dented, and giving off a sharp grassy odour that provoked in Isabel a glum sense of foreboding. There were more biscuits, less brown, less hard and ever so slightly sweeter than their predecessors, and a small slab of cheese on a wooden board.

  “Mrs. Pullan says to tell you,” the girl informed her mistress, “that she’s going off now, if that’s all right, as Mr. Pullan is at home today with his bad leg, and requires tending.”

  “Very well, Daisy,” Miss Janeway said. “But please make sure she understands that she must be back in time to prepare dinner—Miss Woolson is coming, and she does not care to dine late.”

  “Yes’m,” Daisy said, and departed, casting another friendly smile in Isabel’s direction. The maid was of such a warm and easy disposition, Isabel noted wistfully, that her appearances in the room, however fleeting, seemed at once to intensify and soften the sunlight falling in at the window. Had she herself ever been thus, the burdened young woman wondered, that she could light up a room simply by stepping into it? Ralph Touchett would have answered her with a ringing affirmative, and there were others, a couple, at least, of not inconsiderable gentlemen, and perhaps even a lady or two, who would have seconded him in his certainty, but for herself she had her doubts. She suspected the light that Ralph and the others had detected shining from her was no more than the outward glow of an inner self-regard. She had always too assured and lofty an opinion of herself, she saw that now—oh, how she saw it, and with such starkness!—but was it required that she should cast herself altogether from that high perch to plummet down and flutter helplessly in the dust? Surely no one expected total abjection of her, not even her husband—not even the infinitely subtle Serena Merle. It was possible, Isabel knew, that she was her own harshest critic, for whom the aforementioned sackcloth and ashes were what would be as a bed of roses for those less inclined than she to self-laceration.

  “I wish,” she said, looking towards that light-filled window, “I wish to be free.”

  “To see?” Miss Janeway responded, with a startled and uncertain frown. “What is it you wish to see?”

  For a moment they gazed at each other helplessly, until it came to Isabel that she had been misheard.

  “Ah, no,” she exclaimed, again striving not to seem to yell, “free is what I said—free, not see.” She looked away quickly from those splotches high on Miss Janeway’s cheekbones as they intensified from rose to flame. “You marvelled a little while ago at what you seemed to think the almost indecent breadth of freedom at my command,” Isabel said, conscious of “hurrying on” so as to cover an awkwardness, “I mean when I spoke of perhaps stopping a while in Paris on my way to Rome; but that is not the kind of freedom to which I am referring.”

  “You mean, then,” Miss Janeway said, fingering the base of her emptied dessert dish, “that you wish to be free of your husband.”

  Her tone seemed one of prim deprecation, but Isabel guessed the lady had spoken rather out of that access of irritation and chagrin into which the hard of hearing must be plunged many times every day, when yet another mistaken response provokes yet another flurry of earnestly ignored potential comedy.

  “I think,” Isabel said, with a smile betokening misery, “that it is myself I wish to be free of.”

  She had meant, with that smile, to placate and disarm; Miss Janeway, however, still smarting from what had been, after all, a trivial display of infirmity, was relentless. “But your husband must be, of course,” she said, “a part of the self of which you chafe to be free.”

  The atmosphere in the room had markedly altered—what had gone wrong had gone momentously wrong—and even the sunlight seemed to have taken on a sort of creeping chill. In her hostess too Isabel detected a gelid glint of an intensity she had not registered hitherto, if indeed it had been there, if indeed it was there now and she were not imagining it. But no, it was not her imagining: looking more closely, and testing the air, as it were, with the most delicate feelers she was capable of extending, she understood that behind her mask of measured sympathy Miss Janeway was, not to put too fine a point on it—not to put a point on it of any fineness at all—quite simply, if faintly, gratified. She had watched Isabel since her arrival, had watched, and studied, and, for all her defective hearing, had listened, too, oh, had listened with the keenest attention. And now Isabel saw herself as she was being seen, as a wife, merely, young and spoilt and discontented, bored with the grandeurs of her Roman life, and wishing to be rid of an ageing, dull husband. Well, what else could she have expected? She had as good as invited herself here, had descended, like some great ruddy-faced raucous girl, on the home of a woman with whom she was barely acquainted, thinking to be understood and sympathised with and indulged, while she prattled of freedom, and choices, and Paris. And all the while Miss Janeway had observed her, taking note of everything and recording it all, in all its satisfyingly dismal detail, with the clever little cold steel-pen of her intellect. There was a word—Isabel tried to rec
all it now—a German word that her husband often used, with a delectatory and spiteful smacking of the lips. What was it, the word? No; it would not come.

  Miss Janeway had poured out for her a cup of formidably aromatic tea, and it was upon the gently steaming surface of this blameless beverage that Isabel now fixed her gaze. She should not have come here; no, she should not have come.

  There was a light tap upon the door, and a young woman entered. She wore a dark dress so severely lacking in any hint of frill or furbelow as to bespeak the conventual. Her hair was braided and coiled into a tight round and held in a net at the nape of her neck. Her features were as plain as her gown. She bore in her hands a large sheet of stiff cardboard, on one side of which Isabel glimpsed some tall stark letters printed in a violent shade of scarlet. Miss Janeway addressed the young woman as Mary Anne, and rose and went to her, seeming to regard it superfluous to introduce her to her guest. The two moved nearer to the window, and Miss Janeway took the sheet of cardboard and held it at arm’s length up to the light and studied it in silence. Then she nodded, and returned it to the girl, who withdrew as quietly as she had entered; her brief presence had made hardly a ripple upon the air.

  “We have a little printing press here,” Miss Janeway explained, returning to the table and seating herself as before. “I had one of the back bedrooms converted to accommodate it. We are to make a demonstration tomorrow at the Houses of Parliament. Mary—Miss Evans—is overseeing the printing of the banners.”

  “A demonstration?” Isabel vaguely enquired.

  Miss Janeway bent on her a faintly ironical look. “You spoke just now of wishing to be free. But freedom is first and foremost a practical matter.”