Tante

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

The unspoken, for the first month or so of Madame von Marwitz's return, remained accepted. There were no declarations and no definitions, and Gregory's immunity was founded on something more reassuring than the mere fact that Madame von Marwitz frequently went away. When she was in London, it became apparent, he was to see very little of her, and as long as they did not meet too often he felt that he was, in so far, safe. Madame von Marwitz was tremendously busy. She paid many week-end visits; she sat to Belot—who had come to London to paint it—for a great portrait; she was to give three concerts in London during the winter and two in Paris, and it was natural enough that she had not found time to come to the flat again.

But although Gregory saw so little of her, although she was not in his life as a presence, he felt her in it as an influence. She might have been the invisible but portentous comet moving majestically on the far confines of his solar system; and one accounted for oddities of behaviour in the visible planets by inferring that the comet was the cause of them. If he saw very little of Madame von Marwitz, he saw, too, much less of his twin planet, Karen. It was not so much that Karen's course was odd as that it was altered. If Madame von Marwitz sent for her very intermittently, she had, all the same, in all her life, as she told Gregory, never seen so much of her guardian. She frankly displayed to him the radiance of her state, wishing him, as he guessed, to share to the full every detail of her privileges, and to realise to the full her gratitude to him for proving so conclusively to Tante that there was none of the selfishness of love in him. Tante must see that he made it very easy for her to go to her, and Gregory derived his own secret satisfaction from the thought that Karen's radiance was the best of retorts to Madame von Marwitz's veiled intimations. As long as she made Karen happy and let him alone, he seemed to himself to tell her, he would get on very well; and he suspected that her clutch of Karen would soon loosen when she found it unchallenged. In the meantime there was not much satisfaction for him elsewhere. Karen's altered course left him often lonely. Not only had the readings of Political Economy, begun with so much ardour in their spare evenings, almost lapsed for lack of consecutiveness; but he frequently found on coming home tired for his tea, and eager for the sight of his wife, a little note from her telling him that she had been summoned to Mrs. Forrester's as Tante was "with Fafner in his cave" and wanted her.

Fafner was the name that Madame von Marwitz gave to her moods of sometimes tragic and sometimes petulant melancholy. Karen had told him all about Fafner and how, in the cave, Tante would lie sometimes for long hours, silent, her eyes closed, holding her hand; sometimes asking her to read to her, English, French, German or Italian poetry; their range of reading always astonished Gregory.

He gathered, too, from Karen's confidences, how little, until now, he had gauged the variety of the great woman's resources, how little done justice to her capacity for being merely delightful. She could be whimsically gay in the midst of melancholy, and her jests and merriment were the more touching, the more exquisite, from the fact that they flowered upon the dark background of the cave. It was, he saw, with a richer flavour that Karen tasted again the charm of old days, when, after some great musical or social event, in which the girl had played her part of contented observer, they had laughed together over follies and appreciated qualities, in the familiar language of allusion evolved from long community in experience.

Karen repeated to him Tante's sallies at the expense of this or that person and the phrase with which she introduced these transformations of human foolishness to the service of comedy. "Come, let us make méringues of them."

The dull or ludicrous creatures, so to be whipped up and baked crisp, revealed, in the light of the analogy, the tempting vacuity of a bowl of white of egg. When Tante introduced her wit into the colourless substance she frothed it to a sparkling work of art.

Gregory was aware sometimes of a pang as he listened. He and Karen had, indeed, their many little jokes, and their stock of common association was growing; but there was nothing like the range of reference, nothing like the variety of experience, that her life with Madame von Marwitz had given her to draw upon. It was to her companionship, intermittent as it had been, with the world-wandering genius that she owed the security of judgment that often amused yet often disconcerted him, the catholicity of taste beside which, though he would not acknowledge its final validity, he felt his own taste to be sometimes narrow and sometimes guileless. He saw that Karen had every ground for feeling her own point of view a larger one than his. It was no personal complacency that her assurance expressed, but the modest recognition of privilege. Beyond their personal tie, so her whole demeanour showed him, he had nothing to add to her highly dowered life.

Gregory had known that his world would mean nothing to Karen; yet when, under Betty's guidance, she fulfilled her social duties, dined out, gave dinners, received and returned visits, the very compliance of her indifference, while always amusing, vexed him a little, and a little alarmed him, too. He had known that he would have to make all the adjustments, but how adjust oneself to a permanent separation between one's private and one's social life? Old ties, lacking new elements of growth, tended to become formalities. When Karen was not there, he did not care to go without her to see people, and when she was with him the very charm of her personality was a barrier between him and them. His life became narrower as well as lonelier. There was nothing much to be done with people to whom one's wife was indifferent.

It was very obvious to him that she found the sober, conventional people who were his friends very flavourless, especially when she came to them from Fafner's cave. He had always taken his friends for granted, as part of the pleasant routine of life, like one's breakfast or one's bath; but now, seeing them anew, through Karen's eyes, he was inclined more and more to believe that they weren't as dull as she found them. She lacked the fundamental experience of a rooted life. She was yet to learn—he hoped, he determined, she should learn—that a social system of harmonious people, significant perhaps more because of their places in the system than as units, and bound together by a highly evolved code, was, when all was said and done, a more satisfactory place in which to spend one's life than an anarchic world of erratic, undisciplined, independent individuals. Karen, however, did not understand the use of the system and she saw its members with eyes as clear to their defects as were Gregory's to the defects of Madame von Marwitz.

Gregory's friends belonged to that orderly and efficient section of the nation that moves contentedly between the simply professional and the ultra fashionable. They had a great many duties, social, political and domestic, which they took with a pleasant seriousness, and a great many pleasures which they took seriously, too. They "came up" from the quiet responsibilities of the country-side for a season and "did" the concerts and exhibitions as they "did" their shopping and their balls. Art, to most of them, was a thing accepted on authority, like the latest cut for sleeves or the latest fashion for dressing the hair. A few of them, like the Cornish Lavingtons, had never heard Madame Okraska; a great many of them had never heard of Belot. The Madame Okraskas and the Belots of the world were to them a queer, alien people, regarded with only a mild, derivative interest. They recognized the artist as a decorative appurtenance of civilized life, very much as they recognized the dentist or the undertaker as its convenient appurtenances. It still struck them as rather strange that one should meet artists socially and, perhaps, as rather regrettable, their traditional standard of good faith requiring that the people one met socially should, on the whole, be people whom one wouldn't mind one's sons and daughters marrying; and they didn't conceive of artists as entering that category.