Adrienne Toner: A Novel

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“It is! it is!” she repeated. “I’ve seen it happen too often. It always happens. It binds people to me. It makes them cling to me as if I could give them life. It makes them believe me to be a sort of saint!”

“Well, if you can help them with it? You have helped them. The war’s your great chance in that, you’ll admit. No one can accuse you of trying to get power over people now.”

“Perhaps not. I’m not thinking of what I may be accused of, but of what happens.”

“It doesn’t happen with me. I was fond of you—well, we won’t go back to that. And you did use it for goodness. Power came by the way and you took it. Of course.”

“I thought I was using it for goodness. I thought I was good. That was the foundation of everything. We must go back, Mr. Oldmeadow. You don’t see as I thought you did. You don’t understand. I didn’t mean to set myself up above other people. I thought they were good, too. I was happy in my goodness, and when they weren’t happy it seemed to me they missed something I had and that it was a mistake that I could set right for them. I’m going back to the very beginning. Long before you ever knew me. Everything fell into my hand. I loved people, or thought I did, and if they didn’t love me I thought it their mistake. That was the way it looked to me, for my whole life long, until you came. I couldn’t understand at first, when you came. I couldn’t see what you thought. I believed that I could make you love me, too, and when I saw, for you made it plain, that you disliked me, it seemed to me worse than mistake. I thought that you must be against goodness; dangerous; the way you pushed me back—back—and showed me always something I had not thought I meant at the bottom of everything I did. I felt that I wanted to turn away from you and to turn people who loved me away from you, lest you should infect them. And all the while, all the while I was trying to escape—the truth that you saw and that I didn’t.” She stopped for a moment while, sunken on his pillows, Oldmeadow stared at her. Her breath seemed to fail her, and she leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees and bent her forehead on her joined hands. “It came at last. You remember how it came,” she said, and the passion of protest had fallen from her voice. She spoke with difficulty. “Partly through you, and, partly, through my failure; I had never failed before. My failure with Barney. My failure to keep him and to get him back. I couldn’t believe it at first. I struggled and struggled. You saw me. Everything turned against me. It was as if the world had changed its shape and colour when I struggled against it. Everything went down. And when I felt I wasn’t loved, when I felt myself going down, with all the rest, I became bad. Bad, bad,” she repeated, and her voice, heavy with its slow reiteration, was like a clenched hand of penitence beating on a breast: “really bad at last, for I had not known before what I was and the truth was there, staring me in the face. I did dreadful things, then. Mean things; cruel, hateful things, shutting my eyes, stopping my ears, so that I should not see what I was doing. I ran about and crouched and hid—from myself; do you follow my meaning?—from God. And then at last, when I was stripped bare, I had to look at Him.”

She raised herself and leaned back in her chair. Her voice had trembled more and more with the intensity of the feeling that upheld her and she put her handkerchief to her lips and pressed it to them, looking across at him. And, sunken on his pillows, Oldmeadow looked back at her, motionless and silent.

Was it sympathy, pity or tenderness that almost overwhelmed him as he gazed at her? He could not have said, though knowing that the unity that was in them both, the share of the eternal that upheld their lives, flowed out from his eyes into hers as he looked and from hers to his. They were near at last; near as it is rarely given to human beings to experience nearness, and the awe of such a partaking was perhaps the ground of all he felt.

“You see,” he said, and a long time had passed, “I was mistaken.”

She did not answer him. Perhaps she did not understand.

“I never knew you were a person who could come to the truth like that,” he said.