Franklin Kane

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

This had all been tormenting, and Miss Buckston's presence at lunch had been something of a refuge—Miss Buckston, far more interested in her Bach choir practice than in Althea's plans, and lending but a preoccupied attention to Miss Robinson's matrimonial talk. Miss Buckston, at a glance, had dismissed Miss Robinson as frothy and shallow. They were both gone now, thank goodness. Lady Blair would not descend upon her till next morning, and Sally and Mrs. Peel were not due in London until the end of the week. Althea sat, her head leaning back, her eyes closed, and wondered whether Gerald would come and see her. He had parted from her at the station, and the memory of his face, courteous, gentle, yet so unseeing, made her feel like weeping piteously. She spent the afternoon in the chair, her eyes closed and an electric excitement of expectancy tingling through her, and Gerald did not come. He did not come that evening, and the evening passed like a phantasmagoria—the dinner in the sober little dining-room, Miss Robinson, richly dressed, opposite her; and the hours in her drawing-room afterwards, she and Miss Robinson on either side of the fire, quietly conversing. And next morning there was no word from him. It was then, as she lay in bed and felt the tears, though she did not sob, roll down over her cheeks upon the pillow, that sudden strength came with sudden revolt. A revulsion against her suffering and the cause of it went through her, and she seemed to shake off a torpor, an obsession, and to re-enter some moral heritage from which, for months, her helpless love had shut her out.

Lying there, her cheeks still wet but her eyes now stern and steady, she felt herself sustained, as if by sudden wings, at a vertiginous height from which she looked down upon herself and upon her love. What had it been, that love? what was it but passion pure and simple, the craving feminine thing, enmeshed in charm. To a woman of her training, her tradition, must not a love that could finally satisfy her nature, its deeps and heights, be a far other love; a love of spirit rather than of flesh? What was all the pain that had warped her for so long but the inevitable retribution for her back-sliding? Old adages came to her, aerial Emersonian faiths. Why, one was bound and fettered if feeling was to rule one and not mind. Friendship, deep, spiritual congeniality, was the real basis for marriage, not the enchantment of the heart and senses. She had been weak and dazzled; she had followed the will-o'-the-wisp—and see, see the bog where it had led her.

She saw it now, still sustained above it and looking down. Her love for Gerald was not a high thing; it called out no greatness in her; appealed to none; there was no spiritual congeniality between them. In the region of her soul he was, and would always remain, a stranger.

Sure of this at last, she rose and wrote to Franklin, swiftly and urgently. She did not clearly know what she wanted of him; but she felt, like a flame of faith within her, that he, and he only, could sustain her at her height. He was her spiritual affinity; he was her wings. Merely to see him, merely to steep herself in the radiance of his love and sympathy, would be to recover power, poise, personality, and independence. It was a goal she flew towards, though she saw it but in dizzy glimpses, and as if through vast hallucinations of space.

She told Franklin to come at six. She gave herself one more day; for what she could not have said. A lightness of head seemed to swim over her, and a loss of breath, when she tried to see more clearly the goal, or what might still capture and keep her from it.

She told Amélie that she had a bad headache and would spend the day on her sofa, denying herself to Lady Blair; and all day long she lay there with tingling nerves and a heavily beating heart—poor heart, what was happening to it in its depths she could not tell—and Gerald did not write or come.

At tea-time Miss Robinson could not be avoided. She tip-toed in and sat beside her sofa commenting compassionately on her pallor. 'I do so beg you to go straight to bed, dear,' she said. 'Let me give you some sal volatile; there is nothing better for a headache.'

But Althea, smiling heroically, said that she must stay up to see Franklin Kane. 'He wants to see me, and will be here at six. After he is gone I will go to bed.' She did not know why she should thus arrange facts a little for Miss Robinson; but all her nature was stretched on its impulse towards safety, and it was automatically that she adjusted facts to that end. After the first great moment of enfranchisement and soaring, it was like relapsing to some sub-conscious function of the organism—digestion or circulation—that did things for one if one didn't interfere with it. Her mind no longer directed her course except in this transformed and subsidiary guise; it had become part of the machinery of self-preservation.

'You really are an angel, my dear,' said Miss Robinson. 'You oughtn't to allow your devotees to accaparer you like this. You will wear yourself out.'

Althea, with a smile still more heroic, said that dear Franklin could never wear her out; and Miss Robinson, not to be undeceived, shook her head, while retiring to make room for the indiscreet friend.