Possession

by Louis Bromfield

July had passed and with it the last peril to Paris, but still Callendar did not return. She heard from him whenever he had time to write. They were busy now (he wrote). They were beginning to look toward the end. The arrival of the Americans had done much for the French, not that they counted for much because there were not enough of them, but because, simply, they were there. He had kept on the qui vive for her other brother—Robert—but he had not come across him. It was not strange since his own division was nowhere near the Americans. Still he might see him.... One could never tell.... They expected to be shifted soon eastward in the direction of the (here the word was deleted), quite near to the Americans. It was easy for him to make himself acquainted since he was, after all, half-American.

And he would write again and again, “Do not worry about me. I have the most incredible luck—always. There are some men who go through the thing knowing that nothing will ever happen to them. I know it. It’s a feeling that is in the bones. In the worst messes, I have that feeling ... so strong that it is physical. ‘Nothing will happen to me ... nothing whatever,’ I find myself repeating over and over again.”

And as she read this, it occurred to her again that such a belief belonged to the part of him which had always been strange to her—the part which escaped in some nameless fashion even the limits of her imagination. It was mystical and profound and uncanny. At the very moment that she knew he must be right in his faith, she was terrified too because he was so certain. She could not believe with such intensity save in herself. Her beliefs were related always to the power, the force which she herself had at her own command; and in all the senseless, miserable killing there was no power which lay in one’s self. It was simply a monstrous game of chance with the odds all against one.

But she found a happiness in those letters of a sort which she had never imagined. It seemed to her that in some way a part of herself was there with him enduring the same hardships and dangers, and for the first time in all her life she touched the borders of the satisfaction which comes of sharing an experience. She was troubled no longer by doubts; now that she had given her word, it never occurred to her to change. There was relief in the knowledge that all the years of indecision were at an end. There was satisfaction in feeling that the thing had been settled.

But she was abashed at the bold passion with which he wrote, shamelessly, assailing the wall of her fierce reserve. She was abashed and yet triumphant, for in all the years of struggle she had forgotten at times that she was a woman and young. His letters made her know for a little time some of the joy which Lily had possessed since the beginning.

He wrote at length that Sabine’s divorce was completed. “I am free now and will have a leave soon, so we can try then to make up for all the wasted years. Because they have been wasted. We should have been married long ago. We should have been courageous enough to have cut through the tangle and set things right. We were cowardly then. It is tragic that we only learn through long experience that wastes so much of joy, so much of happiness. But you are mine now ... mine forever. I shall never lose you again....”

But the letter troubled her strangely; it invoked with each line some disturbing memory of the past. The allusion to courage.... Who could say what had been courage and what cowardice? If the matter had rested with Callendar alone, it would have been solved because he had had what he believed was courage. He would have thrust poor Clarence aside and trampled upon him, to take ruthlessly what he himself desired. It had been a courage different from hers, whose foundations stood rooted in self-denial. Yet she had saved no one in the end, not even Clarence. Some power, in which Callendar placed such faith, had brought them together in the end, destroying Clarence despite anything she could do to save him. And it seemed to her that all the trouble, all the sorrow went back to that winter evening on the shore of Walker’s Pond when she had said “Yes” to Clarence and felt for him at the same moment a queer, inarticulate pity—a pity which she was beginning at last to understand.

She experienced again a fierce satisfaction, almost a pleasure, which Callendar, in the strangeness of his blood, would never know. It was the satisfaction in having dominated even one’s own body.

But in the last lines there lay an echo of the old conflict. You will be mine ... mine forever. I will never lose you again. It was an arrogant speech, so like the way he had come to her years ago in the Babylon Arms, not asking what she desired but simply taking for granted that she would do as he wished. The memory of that afternoon disturbed her again with the sense that this love of which he wrote was an obscene, middle-aged emotion worn by a too great experience. The freshness was gone and with it all the glow of their meetings in the open windows of Sherry’s and the walks through the Spring in Central Park.... It was this knowledge perhaps more than any other, that made his passionate phrases seem shameful. All of that first youth was gone from them, yet he posed, he wrote her still in the same ardent phrases, grown threadbare and unconvincing, of a love that had once been clean and fresh and despite all that she knew, even then, virginal. There was a touch now that bordered upon the professional....

He told her that Sabine was in Paris and might pay her a call, as much out of a gossip’s curiosity as from her curious passion for knowing the truth, for knowing with a blazing clarity exactly how things stood.