Adrienne Toner: A Novel

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

There was indeed no enmity to plead against. Only a deep exhaustion. Adrienne had pressed too heavily on the spring and it was broken.

“I’m sure she is very sorry to have made so much mischief, but she isn’t what I thought her, Roger,” she said, shaking her head, when he had finished. “I’m sorry for her, but I used to believe her to be a sort of saint and now I know that she is very far indeed from being one.”

“The mere fact of failure doesn’t deprive you of sainthood,” said Oldmeadow, remembering Nancy’s plea. “You haven’t less reason now than you had then for believing her one.”

But even with her broken spring Mrs. Chadwick had not lost all her shrewdness. It flickered in the sad eyes she lifted from the khaki sock. “Some kinds of failure do, Roger. That gift of healing, you remember; all she could do for people in that way; she has quite, quite lost it. That is a reason. It’s that more than anything that has made me feel differently about her.”

“Lost it?” He felt strangely discomposed, little as the gift of healing had ever impressed him.

“Quite,” Mrs. Chadwick repeated. “I think it distressed her dreadfully herself. I think she counted upon it more than upon anything, perhaps without knowing she did. It must have made her seem so sure to herself, mustn’t it? The first time was before the war, just a little after you were here that day in the summer—dear me, how long ago it seems; and I had one of my headaches, one of the worst I ever had. I was so dreadfully troubled, you know, about Barbara and Meg. And Adrienne came and sat by me as she used to and put her hand on my forehead; and I know it wasn’t my lack of faith, for I quite believed it would get well; but instead of the peaceful feeling, it grew much worse; oh, much. As if red hot needles were darting through my eyes and an iron weight pressing down on my head. And such tumult and distress. I had to tell her. I had to ask her to take away her hand. Oh, she felt it very much, poor thing, and grew very white and said it must be because she was still not strong; not quite herself. But I knew then that it was because she was not right; not what I had thought her. I began to suspect, from that very moment, that I had been mistaken; because hypnotizing people isn’t the same as being a saint, is it, Roger? and—I think you said so once, long ago; and that was all that she had done; hypnotized us all to think her good and wonderful. Later on, after Meg had come, I let her try once more, though it quite frightened me; she looked so strange. And!—oh, dear—it was dreadful. It distressed me dreadfully. She suddenly put her hands before her face and sat quite still and then she burst into tears and got up and ran out of the room, crying. It made me feel quite ill. And of course I knew there could be nothing saintly about a person who made you feel like that—who could feel like that themselves, and break down.”

“Even saints have their times of darkness and dryness,” Oldmeadow found after a little time had passed. The picture she put before him hurt him. “It was an error of judgment to have believed her a saint because she could hypnotize you—if that was what it was; but the fact that she can’t hypnotize you any longer—that she’s too unhappy to have any power of that sort—doesn’t prove she’s not a saint. Of course she’s not. Why should she be?”

“I’m sure I don’t know why she should be; but she used to behave as if she were one, didn’t she? And when I saw that she wasn’t one in that way I began to see that she wasn’t in other ways, too. It was she who made me so unjust, so unkind to poor Barney. She was so unjust and so unkind; and I never saw it till then. I was blind till then; though you saw very well, that day you came to Connaught Square, that it was a sort of spell she cast. It was a spell, Roger. The moment I saw her, after the baby’s death, I forgot everything she’d done and felt I loved her again. She willed me to. So as to get power over me. Everything, always, with her, was to get power over other people’s lives,” said Mrs. Chadwick, and as he had, in the past, heard echoes of Adrienne in all she said, now he heard echoes of Meg, “It’s by willing it, you know. Some people practise it like five-finger exercises. You have to sit quite still and shut your eyes and concentrate. Meg has heard how it’s done. I don’t pretend to understand; but that must have been her way. And she made poor Barney miserable and set me against him at once; you said so yourself, Roger, and blinded me to all the cruel things she did. It was to punish him, you know. To make him feel he was dreadfully wrong and she quite right; about Meg, and everything else; for you came in, too. It used to be so dreadful at Torquay. I knew it would be sad there; but I never guessed how sad it would be—with that horrid blue, blue sea. She used to sit, day after day, on the terrace of the house, and gaze and gaze at the sea and if Barney would come, so lovingly, and ask her what he could do for her and take her hand, oh, it was more and more mournful, the way she would look at him; that dreadful, loving look that didn’t mean love at all, but only trying to break him down and make him say that he was down. I begged Barney’s pardon, Roger, for having treated him as I did. We treated him dreadfully, all of us; because she put him, always, in the wrong. Oh, no, Roger, I’m sorry for her, but she’s a dangerous woman; or was dangerous. For now she has lost it all and has become like everybody else; quite ordinary and unhappy.”

He felt, in the little silence that, again, followed, that he could hardly better this summing-up. That was precisely what poor Adrienne Toner had become; ordinary and unhappy. The two things she would have believed herself least capable of becoming. There was nothing to be gained in urging extenuating circumstances, especially since he was not sure that there were any. Mrs. Chadwick, at bottom, saw as clearly as he did. He asked her presently, leaving the theme of Adrienne, whether she would not seriously consider going away for a little while with Nancy. “Meg could go down to The Little House,” he said.

“Oh, no, she couldn’t, Roger,” said Mrs. Chadwick, “she won’t go anywhere. She’ll hardly speak to Monica. She just sits out-of-doors, all day, wrapped in a cloak, in the corner of the garden, staring in front of her, and she pays not the slightest attention to anything I say. And at night, in her room, I hear her sobbing, sobbing, as if her heart would break. I can’t think hardly of Eric any longer, Roger. Isn’t it strange; but it’s almost as if he were my son that had been killed. And Barney may be killed,” the poor mother’s lip and chin began to tremble. “And you, too, Roger. I don’t know how we shall live through all that we must bear and I keep thinking of the foolish little things, like your having cold feet and wearing the same clothes day after day in those horrible trenches. He suffered it all, poor Eric. No, I can’t think hardly of him. All the same,” she sobbed, “my heart is broken when I remember that they can never be married now.”