The Sundered Streams: The History of a Memory That Had No Full Stops

by Reginald Farrer

With Kingston, as was inevitable, this course insensibly began to shift her relationship. As the days went by, he talked more and more to Isabel, until by degrees she became insensibly the target for everything he said. Imperceptibly he grew to ignore his wife, thanks to the attitude that she assumed. However, she was perfectly, increasingly happy. For, as his intellectual intimacy with Isabel advanced, he grew more and more the warm lover of his wife. And she, the apparently cold and ethereal, by the irony of her own limitations, came at last to base the triumph of her wifehood on the strength of her husband’s embraces. His raptures, his compliments, his kisses, grew in number and ardour; she had her heart’s desire. No thought of jealousy could ever have approached her; for intellectual intimacy she had no taste, no wish. As long as she had Kingston’s arms, Isabel was perfectly welcome to a monopoly of his tongue. She, Gundred, was his wife, and nothing could alter the glory of that. She triumphed in the successful development of their relations.

That men like to chatter and overflow and sweat off in talk the superfluous energy of their minds she knew to be an accepted fact. Some women are born for men to talk to, but the ultimate triumph belongs to the wife, the woman who orders the man’s dinner, sees to his comforts, has him for her property at bed and board. As long as his body remains faithful and loyal, who cares where his undisciplined mind may go roving from hour to hour? So Gundred was glad to compound for Kingston’s increasing affection by welcoming the distractions in which his mind indulged, and even, in the rare moments when she could divert her attention from her own bliss, was vaguely sorry for Isabel, reduced to so poor and undignified a rôle as that of wash-pot to the intellectual offscourings of a married man. But Isabel, after all, had brought the humiliation on herself, and Gundred soon returned to the contemplation of the mastery which she had established over her husband’s affection by providing him with someone to talk to. Wifely tact, she felt, had been splendidly justified. She never stopped to consider that the means by which she had achieved her end in themselves betrayed the disastrous weakness of her position. Her idea of temptation was limited to physical allurements; husbands, she knew, were only led away by bad, beautiful women, never by untidy, talkative ones. Her position was absolutely safe and dominant; the more freely her husband’s mind was allowed to wander and kick up its heels, the more securely was her husband’s body bound in the bonds of its allegiance. Infidelity is only a matter of the flesh. Without physical desire there can be no adultery.

So passed the remaining days of their stay at Brakelond. Then the three removed to Ivescar, and, with the setting, the colour of the whole drama changed. Human life and death was the keynote of Brakelond; its Castle seemed built and mortared with the tears and tragedies of innumerable generations. Every stone was permeated with the history of ten thousand men and women, who, through eight centuries, had brought to bear upon the building the fire and fury of their individual existences. Outside the walls rolled down the skirt of forest, and below lay the sea; but forest and sea were subordinate in the scheme, decorations and embroideries on the main theme. And the main theme was the incessant human note that resounded in every detail of the old tragic Castle.

At Ivescar, on the other hand, man was a new-comer, an accident, a thing irrelevant and even incongruous. High up in its narrow mountain-valley lay the house, amid a plantation of stunted, wind-swept pines. It had the air of having been put there, not of having grown. Brakelond had sprung and waxed from the rock it stood on; it was the last crowning development of the land it dominated. Ivescar was an artificial product, unrelated to the soil, the work of alien brains and alien natures. Twenty centuries might pass over it without bringing it into any closer kindred with its surroundings, without softening the raw, crude note of novelty that it would always strike among the solemn eternal hills. It was a large sandstone building, of the most solid Early-Victorian Tudor design, as Isabel’s instinct had foretold. In the middle rose a big square tower, finished off with a stone lacework of circles and spikes. It had a flagstaff, a cupola with a bell in it, and a huge conservatory that had been put there because it was expensive to set up, and now remained there because it would be expensive to remove. On three sides of it stretched a bare lawn, and on the fourth its less honourable quarters were shrouded in sparse plantation, created at great outlay, with much difficulty and no success. The one level space of ground in the glen had been picked out, all its irregularities trimmed away, and the pretence of a park elaborately maintained under the mountain-slopes that rose stark and stern on either side. A little river struggled down from the end of the valley, and found its way among stones and mosses through the young woodland. Where it passed within sight of the house, at the other side of the flat lawn, it had been civilized and sedulously constrained into decorum. Its banks had been widened, made uniform and flat. Dammed at one end, it had been made to stretch out into a square shallow lake, whose grey and steely surface reflected the staring yellow of the house against the grey hills and sky behind, with a dreariness impossible to conceive. Coarse, rank grasses grew along its margin, and its shoals, malodorous and muddy, were abristle with melancholy rushes.

Behind and on either side of Ivescar rose the fells—steep slopes of grass and scree, carrying up to the white precipices that hemmed the little valley in. High above these again, but out of sight, rose the mass of the great mountains, each standing on its plinth of limestone. Here and there the line of a wall betrayed the existence of humanity, but otherwise, except for the house in its artificial wood, with its artificial lawn and lake, the landscape utterly ignored the world of men. It was grand, primeval, solitary, remote from all the small mortal concerns of life. As it had been since the dawn of history, so it remained to-day. Peoples had come and gone, dynasties towered and crashed; but the little glen under the shadow of the Simonstone had wrought out its own fate untroubled by the clatter and tinkle of collapsing empires. Silent and serene as it stood, the finger of man had never scarred its tranquillity, the voice of man had never broken into the current of its dream. And yet, in the midst of this immortal solitude, the fancy of a rich manufacturer had planted this insolent mushroom of a house, this brazen assertion of a fact which the hills had always chosen to ignore, though Celt and Saxon, Dane and Norman had vainly striven to enforce it on their consciousness, as they fought out their ephemeral fights across the flanks of Ravensber, or made their settlement on the flat crown of the Simonstone. The valley and the mountains had taken their unruffled course. Had the house been less clamorous, the assault on their notice less insistent, they might in time have come to assimilate the signs and the presence of man. A quieter dwelling might insensibly have melted into their scheme, have been merged into the vast individuality of the hills. But Ivescar was too flaunting, too blatant, too eternally new. It compelled attention, was an unceasing penny-whistle across the great harmony of silence. And so, unable to make Ivescar one with themselves, the mountains took the only other course, refusing all compromise, and forced the incongruity of the building upon the world’s notice, by the blank contempt with which they ignored it. Their unnoticing disdain made its yellow stones, its pretentious tower appear even more undignified than ever, emphasizing every detail of their parvenu richness, their uneasy vulgarity. Man at Brakelond was the dominant note of Castle and country; here the note was an isolated discord. Man was nothing, his works an offence, amid the enormous loneliness of the fells.

Gundred, however, found herself warmly approving of Ivescar. True, the country just round was “dreadfully black and barren, very ugly and uncultivated”; but the house was roomy, airy, warm, comfortable, quite suitable and pleasant in every way. It would hold plenty of people, and had been built with an eye to the convenience of house-parties. Carpets and curtains and cushions were all opulent and softly luxurious. They compared well, to her taste, with the bare floors, the flags, the worn matting of Brakelond. She resolved on a few improvements, but, on the whole, was very well satisfied. A building produced by one mind may, perhaps, have a less complicated personality, a simpler sense of unity, than one built up by the varying tastes of twenty succeeding generations. Ivescar was plain and direct in scheme. There was a good collection of pictures, bought, all together, by James Darnley from the previous owner, who had accumulated them because he imagined it a suitable thing to do; otherwise Ivescar was tormented by no ambitions whatever, artistic or dramatic. It only aimed, with a good-humoured whole-heartedness, at being altogether comfortable. Gundred entered into its spirit, and in an environment so congenial her abandonment of all attempt to share in conversation with Kingston and Isabel became at once more complete and less noticeable. She passed into entire absorption in the details of daily life, lost any wish to be in touch with intellectual life, took the colour of her surroundings so perfectly that neither she herself nor the others realized how completely she had withdrawn from their company.

As for Isabel, the exasperating vividness of the woman leapt into more violent relief than ever against the smug complacency of Ivescar. At Brakelond Isabel had been a part of the place; her individuality had toned in with all the other individualities that had gone to make up Brakelond. As one organ note is inconspicuous among a crowd of other organ notes, so Isabel’s nature had there been merged in a crowd of other similar natures. Here, however, at Ivescar the organ note of her personality sounded harsh and tremendous, almost terrifying, amid the clacking babble of mediocrity for ever kept up by the house. Only trifling, futile people had had part in the building and the life of Ivescar; their influence had left the place a pleasant little chorus of tinkling inanities; and, by contrast, the fierce song of Isabel’s nature rose dominant, tyrannous, obliterating all the lesser voices around.

Kingston by degrees began to notice the disappearance of his wife and the supremacy of her cousin in his mind. Occasionally he showed a dim foreknowledge of the inevitable by brief spasms of anger against Isabel, by fruitless attempts to carry Gundred with them in their flights. But by now Gundred’s mental immobility had begun to be an annoyance to him, and he was always glad to relinquish his efforts and fall back into the familiar swing of dialogue with Isabel. The faint air of greatness which for a time had been reflected on Gundred from the walls of Brakelond had now faded utterly. She was swallowed up in household details, could be seen meditating on ‘menus’ while the most fantastic notions were flying swiftly between her husband and her cousin. Her life was now consumed in coping with the cook; she was completely happy in her task, and it was with growing readiness and growing wrath that Kingston let her drop from his mental intimacy. She filled up time by talks with her mother-in-law, who had a dower house down the valley. The somewhat woolly mind of Lady Adela was very congenial to Gundred, and her small, clear-cut nature found it both harmonious and restful—like her own, though so utterly unlike. The two women took refuge in each other; and Gundred, taken up by the house and Lady Adela, would not have had the leisure, even had she had the acumen, to remark how completely she was passing out of her husband’s life.

‘Is the house insured?’ asked Isabel one morning. Kingston and she were sitting together under the long wall of the picture-gallery.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered; ‘I always forget things like that. My dear,’ he cried, calling to his mother, who had walked up across the fields with her knitting, and now had established herself in one of the cushioned window-seats close to Gundred, who was methodically checking a Stores List—‘my dear, is the house insured?’