Possession

by Louis Bromfield

But Rebecca had, all the same, a feeling that it was not Lily whom she was fighting but some one else—whom, she could not imagine. She could not have known of course that Thérèse Callendar had already written her son that she had seen Ellen Tolliver, that she was handsomer than ever and more fascinating and sullen, and that in a sly postscript she had remarked, “The strange thing is that I believe she is still in love with you. I watched her, out of curiosity, and I am sure of it.”

And, of course, none of them knew that Callendar on reading the letter somewhere in the mud near Loos, with the throbbing of the barrage in his ears, had smiled at the trickery of women and thought, “Curiosity, indeed!”

It was in the end Rebecca who won, not a victory perhaps but at least a delay. The little Jewess was much too shrewd ever to suppose that Ellen might be conquered so easily; if she had won a temporary advantage she understood it was because Ellen chose to let her win, because Ellen had weighed the question and decided that all things considered, Rebecca was right. To turn back at this point was a folly which she could not deny. Belonging now in a sense to the whole world she was no longer absolute mistress of her own fortune; such freedom was, after all, the privilege only of the obscure. She was in truth, she thought bitterly, still a mountebank, an entertainer, who waited behind a painted screen to entertain the public. The stage was greater now and the audience had grown from the fashionable little group in the Callendar drawing-room to all the world. That was the only difference.

But stronger than any sense of duty or obligation was the old terror of a terrible poverty which forced one to keep up appearances. She had tasted the security that comes of riches and she could not turn back. There were memories which would not die, memories of the days when as a girl she had put on a bold face before all the Town, memories, even worse, of the drab petty economies she had known in the days at the Babylon Arms. And even stronger than all these things was her fear of failure, a passionate fear which might easily have driven her in some circumstances to suicide. One who had been so ruthless, so arrogant, so proud, dared not fail. That way too had been blocked.

So she found herself brought up sharply against the problem of the Town. They wanted her there; they were, strangely enough, proud of her. Eva Barr had written her, and Miss Ogilvie, and even May Biggs, whom she had feared ever to see again. She had left them all believing that she would never turn back, believing that by stepping aboard the express for the East she had turned her back forever upon a place which, in honest truth, she despised. But she had not escaped; there were ties, intangible and tenuous, which bound her to the place. There were times when she was even betrayed by a certain nostalgia for the sight of the roaring black furnaces, the dark empty rooms of Shane’s Castle, closed now and barren of all life; the decaying smoke-stained houses that stood far back from the streets surrounded by green lawns and old trees.

She thought, “This again is a sign that something has gone from me, something fierce and spirited. I am growing softer.”

They had, so May Biggs wrote, built a new concert hall, and what could be so appropriate as to have it opened by a daughter of the Town? “A daughter of the Town,” she reflected bitterly. “Yes, I am that. It, too, claims me.”

And it was true. She was a daughter of the Town. There was in her the same fierce energy, the same ruthlessness, the same pride. If she had been born elsewhere, in some less harsh and vigorous community, she would herself have been softer, less overwhelmingly successful. It was true. She was a daughter of the hard, uncompromising Town.

“It happens like that ...” Miss Ogilvie had said, “in the most unexpected places ... in villages, in towns.... Why, even in a dirty mill town like this.”

But in the end, it was her pride which led her back. Because, a dozen years ago, she had talked wildly and desperately, because she had boasted of what she would one day do, she must return now to let them see that she had done it. It was a triumph which in her heart she counted as more than the triumphs of London, of Paris, of New York, of all the world. For she had not yet escaped the Town. She would not be free until they saw her fabulous success.