Possession

by Louis Bromfield

And old Thérèse.... Once Sabine had fancied that they were friends. They had been, she remembered, congenial, almost alike in their point of view, in the angle from which they looked out upon the world. And then Thérèse had slipped away, slowly, imperceptibly in a fashion that it was impossible to define. There had been no quarrel, no bandying of words, yet they had come somehow to hate each other, coldly and with an ironic polish. She knew what it was that had come between them. It was that fortune and the need of an heir. And now in the end Thérèse was becoming slowly an untidy, disgusting old Levantine woman helpless in the power of her obsession.

If she had not married Callendar she might have been a friend even now, not alone of Thérèse but of Callendar himself. But that would have been unbearable ... much worse than this. At least in this there was a sense of finality.

So she tried as she had tried many times before, to pull those twelve years apart and pick from among the ruins the elements which had been the heart of her passion for him; but she found it impossible. She could not say why she would have returned to him now if he had asked her. Over all the years there hung a faint aura of evil (an evil which she told herself was not evil at all, but simply seemed so because she had been brought up to believe that sort of love was evil). It was desire which she felt, perhaps nothing more than that; yet it was, she was certain, not such a simple and uncomplicated thing. It was sinister, perhaps entangled in all her passion for knowing what people were, for taking them apart (she smiled to herself) to look at the works. No, this mystery was quite beyond her....

So (she thought) in the end she had not been able to compete with Ellen Tolliver. He would have her now, as he had always wanted to have her. She (Sabine) had then not been so wrong in the instinct that led her, years before, to call at the house in Rue Raynouard. There had been nothing to discover, and yet everything. What was true now of Callendar and Ellen Tolliver was true then, as they sat in the long beautiful drawing-room, just as true as it had been in the days when the girl had come to the house on Murray Hill. It was only that they themselves had changed and here (she thought almost with satisfaction) might lie the seeds of one more disaster. For Lilli Barr could not possibly be the same as the awkward, obscure Ellen Tolliver, and Callendar had hardened slowly in all the qualities which made him impossible. Ellen Tolliver would not submit to the unhappiness she herself had known; Ellen Tolliver would not wait patiently to achieve her own desire. She was capable of stormy scenes; she had clearly a genius for success, for having her own way. He had, perhaps, in all his watching never discovered this. And yet, as she thought it over and over on the drive to the Rue Tilsit, it occurred to her that it might be just this and nothing more that was the very core of that inexplicable, persistent attraction between them.

Lilli Barr ... Lilli Barr ... Lilli Barr.... She kept repeating the name to herself. She still felt no resentment. If she herself could not have Callendar, there was no reason why Lilli Barr should not have him. There was, she knew, nothing more to be done.

The voice of Amedé, the driver, roused her as he opened the door. She stepped out, bade him wait for orders, and turning, she saw little Thérèse standing in the window with the governess. It reminded her that she must see Thérèse’s friend Ella Nattatorini about the lease for the house at Houlgate.... The sea would do little Thérèse good. And there were servants to be engaged and the packing to be done....

The ocean of small things which made it possible to endure unhappiness rose and swept over her.

63

THE news of the wedding came to Sabine the following autumn while she was staying in Newport. Even the war had not crowded out of the journals an event of such interest. The bride, she read, was well known to the public as a pianist. She had described herself as Ellen Tolliver, American by birth, age thirty-four years. (It was the first time that the world knew Lilli Barr was American, for Rebecca and the forgotten Schneidermann had done their work well.) The bridegroom was prominent and the member of many clubs, the last of his family, and had not lived in America for more than ten years. He was a captain in the French army and would be stationed in Tunis where they were to spend the honeymoon.

Laying aside the Times and resuming her breakfast, she discovered that her only response to the news was one of shock at the haste with which the wedding had followed the divorce. It was almost as if they said that all these years she had stood between them, and now that Callendar was free, they must lose no time. Vaguely she felt that she should feel insulted. It was not until evening, when she drove over to dine with Mrs. Champion at The Cedars, that the sense of depression abated a little.