The black Flemings

by Kathleen Thompson Norris

The mail to David, nowadays, meant either nothing or everything. Usually it was nothing. Once a month perhaps it glowed and sparkled with one of those disreputable and miscellaneous little envelopes that Gabrielle affected: sometimes a hotel sheet, sometimes a lined shiny page torn from an account book, but always exquisite to David because of the fine square crowded writing and the delicious freedom and cleverness of the phrases.

For two or three days a letter would make him exquisitely happy. He always put off the work of answering for a fortnight if possible—but sometimes he could not wait so long—to savour more fully the privilege he felt it to be, and to lessen the interval before the next letter from her.

When his answer had gone there was always a time of blankness. David would walk past the Keyport post office, go back, ask casually if there were letters—no matter. But when something approaching a fortnight passed, he would find himself thinking of nothing else but that precious little sheet; find himself declining invitations to Boston or New York for fear of missing it for an unnecessary few days, find himself wiring Rucker in the latter place, “If letters for me, please forward.”

For the rest, when Sylvia wrote with charming regularity every week Gabrielle was, of course, always mentioned, and almost always in a way that gave David more pain than pleasure.

The doctor, Sylvia might write, for example, “of course madly in love with Gay,” had said this or that about Tom’s staying where he was. Or, “our fellow traveller, whose son is the nice Yale boy, has taken a great fancy to my humble self, perhaps in self-defence, as the boy can see nothing but Gabrielle.” Gabrielle “got a blue hat and a dark blue suit in San Francisco, and looked stunning.” Gabrielle wanted to add a line. And there, added, would be the precious line: “Love; I am writing.”

What David suffered during these crowded months that were yet so empty without, only David knew. He knew now that whatever his feeling was, it was the only emotion of any importance that he had ever known in his life. The departure for the war front, five years before, somewhat reminded him of it, but, after all, those feelings had been faint and vague compared to these. Buying his uniforms, equipping his bag, cutting every tie with the old life, facing the utterly unknown in the new, David remembered feeling some such utter obsession and excitement as he felt now.

But, after the thrilling commencement, that military life had faded into the stupidity of mismanaged training for what he had felt to be an ill-conceived purpose. David could only remember it now as a boy’s blind exultation and enthusiasm.

This other thing was the realest in the world—the devouring need of a man for the one woman, the beautiful, inaccessible, wonderful woman who could never again, lost or won, be put out of his life. David was perhaps not so much humble as unanalytical; he never had felt himself a particularly desirable husband, although at one time, studying Sylvia’s future prospects with his characteristic interest and concern, he had been obliged to recognize the fact that her marriage to him would be an extremely suitable thing.

Now he felt that nothing about him was suitable or desirable. No woman could possibly contemplate marriage with him with any enthusiasm; least of all this beautiful woman of twenty, whose wealth was the smallest of her advantages. David was not a particularly successful painter, past thirty, leading the quietest and least thrilling of lives. It was a part of the conscientiousness that these brilliant Flemings and their exactions had bred in him, that he felt himself in honour bound now not to complicate Gabrielle’s problems by any hint of his own personal hopes or fears. She needed him too much, in the management of her own and Tom’s business, for that. Self-consciousness between them would have been a fresh trial for her, just emerging from too many changes and sorrows.

Wastewater was all hers now, for Tom did not care to live there, even if it had been the wisest thing in the world for him to do. He had deeded it all to her, and she and Rucker had held a casual correspondence regarding the new barns and John’s house, and the prospect of a new Wastewater. It must be “rambly and irregular,” Gabrielle had stipulated, “perhaps a little like one of those French farmhouses of creamy white brick with the red roofs.” It must have “one long nice room, with an open fireplace at the end, where supper or breakfast could be brought in if it was snowing.” And she “would love a hall with glass doors and fanlights at the front and back, so that when you stood at the front door on a hot summer day you could see wallflowers and gillies and things all growing in the back garden, right straight through the house.”