Possession

by Louis Bromfield

So at last, in care of the great Doctor Chausson, Madame Nozières, pale and with swollen eyes and disheveled hair, was led away, across the stone courtyard, gray now with the faint rising light of dawn, into the big gray motor that had followed him from Neuilly to the Avenue Kléber. Ellen watched them as they crossed the yard between the empty stone urns and summer chairs piled high in the corners.

When they had gone, she returned to the room and, locking the door, sat down to wait. Slowly, in the gray solitude, the relief of tears came to her. She wept silently. She understood now her fear of returning too late, that vague, nameless fear for which there had been no explanation until now. She had come so near to being late ... only a matter of a few hours, of a single night. For he had escaped them all now, forever. They would never possess him again....

She looked at him, lying here white and still in the gay blue trousers with the silver braid and the yellow sash, and she understood why it was that he had seemed so young. It was because he had never really belonged to any of them. He had not even had a country of his own. He had gone out into a war which was none of his concern. There was nothing which tied him down, not even the nonsense which people talked of “la gloire” and “la patrie.” For she, in her aloofness, had known it for the nonsense it was, just as he in his good-nature and love for all the world had known it. She remembered what he had once written her.... “A man of our generation who has missed the war will not have lived at all.... He will be a poor thing compared to the others. It is a game in which one must take a chance. It is better to die than to have missed it.”

He had believed that to the very end. Perhaps this was the secret of Old Gramp who had roamed the world and lived in this very Paris under the Second Empire. He had lived. He had done everything, and now in his old age he had a stock of memories that would last forever, a life which none of the others ever knew. He had been certain of only one life and he had made the most of it, so that he was ready when his time came to die with satisfaction, to take his chance on what lay beyond.

And as she sat there with the black dog by her side, in the slow, gray light, it occurred to her that perhaps the end of Fergus had not been after all so tragic. He had died in the very midst of life with the woman he loved at his side. If he had lived.... Who could tell? There was small place in the world for men like him. He never had the strength, the fierce aloofness of Old Gramp, the savage contempt of the old man for the drones and grubbers of life.

It was all a strange business, surely. Strange and confused and without sense. In the beginning, when she had first come into this frivolous room (so cold and dead now in the gray light) she had been angry and jealous at his deception, and bitter at Madame Nozières for having caused his death. She had thought, “If he had not been going to meet her, he would not have been killed.”

But she knew better now. She had been a fool. It was absurd and monstrous that any one, even herself, should fancy he could bend fate to his own ends. It was too imbecile, too senseless. No, she was wiser now. She was not the headlong fool she had once been. In the face of all that had happened in this one terrible night, she was utterly humbled. Who was she to question the behavior of this brother who lay dead under the gilded swans? Who was she, a cold, hard woman, to question a love of which she knew nothing? And what did it matter now? She was glad suddenly, with a strange, wild happiness, that he had known this Madame Nozières. Her blondeness, her beauty, her fine clothes, her spirit ... all these things had made him happy, on how many leaves in Paris?

What did it matter now? One lived but an instant, frantically, and time rushed on and on....

But he was right. Their mother must never know the truth.

She thought too of Callendar, for he was with her all the time, almost as if he had never gone away. The old foreboding returned to her—that phrase out of Lily’s letter—And then he rode away into the darkness. I am certain he is dead. He had gone away and she did not know where. Perhaps she had been wrong to refuse him, cruel to have denied him the happiness that Madame Nozières had given to Fergus. Things mattered so little now. It seemed to her that she stood somewhere on a lofty pinnacle, looking down on the spectacle ... a pitiful spectacle, so full of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The old quotation came back to her out of the dim memories of the past when she had hated Shakespeare with an intense passion. “Sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That was it. It was far better to be like her mother, the invincible Hattie, who never mounted to the heights but kept her eyes always on the ground, frantically occupied with a thousand tiny things, never willing, as Fergus had said, to face the truth. And now that he was gone, her favorite of them all, what would she do? There remained nothing now except the one truth which none could in the end escape.