Adrienne Toner: A Novel

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

She was tired, more tired than she knew. During dinner she hardly spoke, and, finding the resolve suddenly, he said, as they came back to their salon: “Do you know what you must do now. Go and lie down and rest for an hour. Until nine. It’s not unselfishness. I’d rather have half of you to talk to for our last talk, than none of you at all.”

“How dear of you,” she said. She looked at him with gratitude and, still, with the compunction. “It would be a great rest. It would be better for our talk. I can go to sleep at once, you know. Like Napoleon,” she added with a flicker of her playfulness.

When she had gone into her room Oldmeadow went out and walked along the quai. The night was dark and dimmed with fog, but there was a moon and as he walked he watched it glimmer on the windows of St. Jean. He seemed to see the august form of the cathedral through a watery element and the grey and silver patterns of the glass were like the scales of some vast fish. A sort of whale waiting to swallow up the Jonah that was himself, he reflected, and, leaning his elbows on the parapet of the quai, the analogy carried him further and he saw the cathedral like a symbol of Adrienne’s life—her “big, big” life—looming there before him, becoming, as the moon rose higher, more and more visible in its austere and menacing majesty. What was his love to measure itself against such a vocation?—for that was what it came to, as she had said. She was as involved, as harnessed, as passionately preoccupied as a Saint Theresa. How could he be fitted in with Serbia and all the hordes of human need and wretchedness that he saw her sailing forward to succour? He knew a discouragement deeper than any he had felt, for he was not a doctor and his physical strength was crippled by his wounds; and, shaking his shoulders in the chilly November air, he turned his back on the cathedral and leaned against the parapet to look up through leafless branches where the plane tassels still hung, at the lighted windows of the hotel; their hotel, where the room, still theirs, waited for them. He felt himself take refuge in the banal lights. After all, she wasn’t really a Saint Theresa. There was human misery everywhere to succour. Couldn’t she, after a winter in Serbia, found crêches and visit slums in London? The masculine scepticism she had detected in him had its justification. Women weren’t meant to go on, once the world’s crisis past, doing feats of heroism; they weren’t meant for austere careers that gave no leisure and no home. The trivial yet radiant vision of intimacy rose again before him. She slept there above him and he was guarding her slumber. He would always watch over her and guard her. He would follow her round the world, if need be, and brush her hair for her in Serbia or California.

CHAPTER IX

THE gilt clock on the mantelpiece pointed to nine, but when he went to Adrienne’s door and listened there was no sound within her room, and his heart sank as he wondered if she might not sleep on, in her fatigue, sleep past all possible hour for their colloquy. Yet he did not feel that he could go in and wake her. The analogy of the cathedral loomed before him. It would be like waking Saint Theresa.

He walked up and down the empty, glittering salon; walked and walked until the clock struck ten. Desperation nerved him then and he went again to her door and knocked.

With hardly a pause her voice answered him; yet he knew that he had awakened her and it echoed for him with the pathos of so many past scenes of emergency when it must so have answered a summons from oblivion: “Coming, coming.” Among bombings, he reflected; and sudden terrible influxes of dying men from the front.

“Coming,” he heard her repeat, on a note of dismay. She had sprung up, turned on her light and seen the hour.

He was reminded vividly, as he saw her enter—and it was as if a great interval of time had separated them—of his first meeting with her. She was so changed; but now as then she was more composed than anyone he had ever met.

But it was of much more than the first meeting that the pale, still face reminded him. His dreams were in it; the dream where she had come to him along the terrace, lifting her hand in the moonlight; and the dream of horror when he had again and again pushed it down to drown.