Adrienne Toner: A Novel

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

He said he wasn’t, but would love to read Dante with her.

“And we must get a piano,” she finished, “and have music after dinner. It will be a wonderful holiday for me.”

So the days fell at once into a series of rituals. He saw that she had always mapped them out conscientiously, as Mrs. Toner had doubtlessly taught her to do, careful of the treasure of time—as Mrs. Toner would have said—entrusted to each soul by life. So, no doubt, Adrienne would put it still. And what he would, in first knowing her, have found part of her absurdity, he found now part of her charm.

That was what it all came back to. He saw, reconstructing their past, that from the beginning she had had her deep charm for him.

It was the trivial word for the great fact; the compulsion of personality; the overflow of vitality; the secret at once of the saint and of the successful music-hall singer. Her own absorption in life was so intense that it communicated itself. Her confidence was so secure that it begot confidence. Her power was implicit in all she did. It was not only the rapatriés she dealt with, as, at the first, she had dealt with the wounded. She dealt as successfully and as accurately with the little things of life. Honey was on their breakfast-table; flowers on the consoles; music on the piano. The gilded hotel salon became a home.

She was still, in demeanour, the cultured, travelled American, equipped always, for their walks, with a guide-book or history, from which she often read to him as they paused to lean on the parapets of the splendid quais. There were few salient facts in the history of the potent city that were not imparted to him; and with anyone else what a bore it would have been to have to listen! But he was more than content that she should tell him about the Romans or Richelieu. It was everything to him to feel that they shared it all, from the honey to Richelieu.

And with all the intimacy went the extreme reserve.

She had showed him, when it was necessary for their understanding as friends, the centre of her life; yet she remained, while so gentle, so absorbed, and even loving, as remote, as inaccessible, as he had felt her to be on those first days in the hospital. She never referred to her own personal situation not to any emotion connected with it. She never referred to herself or expressed a taste or an opinion touched with personal ardour. He did not know what she was really feeling, ever. Though, when he looked at her, sitting opposite him in her grey and addressed by the assiduities of the waiters, he could imagine that he was living with a wife, he could imagine more often that he was living with a nun. Her control and her selflessness were cloistral. He could not think her in any need of a director.

They walked one afternoon along the Quai des Brotteaux, returning from the park of the Tête d’Or, where they had wandered on the gravel under the tall, melancholy trees and fed the deer. The ugly yet magnificent city was spread before them in one of its most splendid aspects, climbing steeply, on the further banks of the Rhône, to the cliff-like heights of the Croix Rousse and marching, as it followed the grandiose curve of the river, into a sunset sky where the cupola of the Hospice hung like a dark bubble against the gold and the Alps, not visible from the river level, seemed yet to manifest themselves in the illumined clouds ranged high above the horizon.

Ten days of their appointed fortnight had now passed and while Oldmeadow kept a half unseeing yet appraising eye upon the turbulent glories of the river, he was wondering when and how he should make his revelation and his appeal. If her reserve made it more difficult to imagine, her intimacy did not make it more easy. It was because she was so intimate that she had remained so unaware. For all his self-command he felt sure that in any other circumstances she could not, for these ten days, have remained so blind.