Adrienne Toner: A Novel

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

He had screwed his eyeglass into his eye the better to see Miss Toner and looked very much like a solicitor trying to coax dry facts out of a romantic client. And in the transparent shadow of her hat Miss Toner, with her incomparable composure, gave him all her attention.

“I don’t account. I don’t account for anything. Do you?” she said. “I only feel and know. But even the dreadful things, the things that seem to us so dreadful—isn’t it always ignorance? Ignorance of what is really good and happy—and the illusion of a separate self? When we are all, really, one. All, really, together.” She held out her arms, her little basket hanging from her wrist. “And if we feel that at last, and know it, those dreadful things can’t happen any more.”

“Your ‘if’ is the standing problem of metaphysics and ethics. Why don’t we feel and know it? That’s the question? And since we most of us, for most of the time, don’t feel and know it, don’t we keep closer to the truth if we accept the traditional phraseology and admit that there’s something in the texture of life, something in ourselves, that tempts us, or impedes us, or crushes us, and call it sin—evil?”

He was looking at her, still with his latent irony though kindly enough indeed, and he had, as he looked, an intuition about her. She had never been tempted, she had never been impeded, she had never been crushed. That was her power. She was, in a fashion, sinless. It was as if she had been hypnotized in infancy to be good. And while the fact made her in one sense so savourless, it made her in another so significant. She would go much further than most people in any direction she wanted to go simply because she was not aware of obstacles and had no inhibitions.

“Call it what you like,” said Miss Toner. She still smiled—but more gravely. Barney had ceased to stroll and kick. He had come to a standstill beside them, and, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed on his beloved, showed himself as completely reassured. Palgrave still stood on the step above her and seemed to watch the snowy, piled-up clouds that adorned the tranquil sky. “I feel it a mistake to make unreal things seem real by giving them big names. We become afraid of them and fear is what impedes us most of all in life. For so many generations humanity has seen ghosts in the evening mists and taken its indigestion for the promptings of a demon. We’ve got away from all that now, Mr. Oldmeadow. We see that mists are mists and indigestion indigestion, and that there aren’t such things as ghosts and demons. We’ve come out, all together, hand in hand, on the Open Road and we don’t want, ever any more, to be reminded, even, of the Dark Ages.”

Before her fluency, Oldmeadow felt himself grow less kindly. “You grant there have been dark ages, then? I count that a concession. Things may not be evil now, but they were once.”

“Not a concession at all,” said Miss Toner. “Only an explanation of what has happened—an explanation of what you call the mess, Mr. Oldmeadow.”

“So that when we find ourselves misbehaving to one another as we march along the Open Road, we may know it’s only indigestion and take a pill.”

She didn’t like badinage. That, at all events, was evident to him, even in her imperturbability. She took it calmly—not lightly; and if she was not already beginning to dislike him, it was because disliking people was a reality she didn’t recognize. “We don’t misbehave if we are on the Open Road,” she said.

“Oh, but you’re falling back now on good old-fashioned theology,” Oldmeadow retorted. “The sheep, saved and well-behaved, keeping to the road, and the goats—all those who misbehave and stray—classed with the evening mists.”