The Book of Susan: A Novel

Miss Goucher had then insisted that she was going to dress and go up at once to Susan, and had even begun her preparations in spite of every protest, when she was seized with so stabbing a pain in her chest that she could only collapse groaning on the bed and let Miss O'Neill minister to her as best she might with water bottles and a mustard plaster borrowed from Number Twelve..

By the time I had tardily remembered to telephone Miss Goucher it was almost nine a. m., and it was Miss O'Neill who had answered the call, receiving my assurances of Susan's well-being, and informing me in turn that poor Miss Goucher was good and sick and no mistake, let alone worrying, and should she send for a doctor? She was a Scientist herself, though she'd tried a mustard plaster, anyway, always liking to be on the safe side; but Miss Goucher wasn't, and so maybe she ought. At this point I had naturally taken charge.

And it was at this point in my long, often interrupted relation to Phil and Jimmy that Phil took charge.

"You're going to bed, Hunt – and you're going now! There's absolutely nothing further you can do this evening, and if anything turns up Jimmy or I can attend to it. You've been living on your nerves all day and you show it, too plainly. We don't want another patient to-morrow. Run out and get some veronal powders, Jimmy. Thanks. No protests, old man. You're going to bed!"

I went; and, drugged with veronal, I slept – slept dreamlessly – for fourteen hours. When I woke, a little past ten, Jimmy was standing beside me.

"Good morning, Mr. Hunt. You look rested up some! How about breakfast?" His greeting went through all the sounds and motions of cheerfulness, but it was counterfeit coin. There was something too obviously wrong with Jimmy's ordinarily fresh healthy-boy face; it had gone sallow and looked pincushiony round the eyes. I stared at him dully, but could not recall anything that might account for this alteration. Only very gradually a faint sense of discomfort began to pervade my consciousness. Hadn't something happened – once – something rather sad – and rather horrible? When was it? Where was I? And then the full gust of recollection came like a stiff physical blow over my heart. I sat up with a sharp gasp for breath..

"Well!" I demanded. "Miss Goucher! How is she?"

"She's dead, sir," answered Jimmy, turning away.

"And – "

"She's wonderful!" answered Jimmy.

He had not needed Susan's name.

Yes, in a sense, Jimmy was right. He was not a boy to look far beneath the surface effects of life, and throughout the following weeks Susan's surface effect was indeed wonderful. Apparently she stood up to her grief and mastered it, developing an outer stillness, a quietude strangely disquieting to Phil and to me. Gentleness itself in word and deed, for the first time since we had known her she became spiritually reticent, holding from us her deeper thoughts. It was as if she had secretly determined – God knows from what pressure of lonely sorrow – to conventionalize her life, to present the world hereafter nothing but an even surface of unobtrusive conformity. This, we feared, was hereafter to be her wounded soul's protection, her Chinese Wall. It had not somehow the feel of a passing mood; it had rather the feel of a permanent decision or renunciation. And it troubled our hearts..

I spare you Gertrude's funeral, and Miss Goucher's. The latter, held in a small, depressingly official mortuary chapel, provided – at a price – by the undertaker, was attended only by Phil, Jimmy, Susan, Sonia, Miss O'Neill and me. Oh – there was also the Episcopal clergyman, whom I provided. He read the burial service professionally, but well; it is difficult to read it badly. There are a few sequences of words that really are foolproof, carrying their own atmosphere and dignity with them.

Phil and I, at Susan's request, had examined Miss Goucher's effects and had made certain inquiries. She had been for many years, we found, entirely alone in the world – a phrase often, but seldom accurately, used. It is a rare thing, happily, to discover a human being who is absolutely the last member of his or her family line; in Miss Goucher's case this aloneness was complete. But so far as her nonexistent ancestors were concerned, Miss Goucher, we ascertained, had every qualification necessary for a D. A. R.; forebears of hers had lived for generations in an old homestead near Poughkeepsie, and the original Ithiel Goucher had fought as a young officer under Washington. From soldiering, the Gouchers had passed on to farming, to saving souls, to school-teaching, to patent-medicine peddling, and finally to drink and drugs and general desuetude. Miss Goucher herself had been a last flare-up of the primitive family virtues, and with her they were now extinct.

All this we learned from her papers, and from an old lady in Poughkeepsie who remembered her grandfather, and so presumably her mother and father as well – though in reply to my letter of inquiry she forbore to mention them. They were mentioned several times in letters and legal documents preserved by Miss Goucher, but – except to say that they both died before she was sixteen – I shall follow the example of the old lady in Poughkeepsie. She, I feel, and the Roman poet long before her, had what Jimmy calls the "right idea.".

Miss Goucher, always methodical, left a brief and characteristic will: "To Susan Blake, ward of Ambrose Hunt, Esq., of New Haven, Conn., and to her heirs and assigns forever, I leave what little personal property I possess. She has been to me more than a daughter. I desire to be cremated, believing that to be the cleanest and least troublesome method of disposing of the dead."

That, with the proper legal additions, was all. Her desire was of course respected, and I had a small earthenware jar containing her ashes placed in my own family vault. On this jar Susan had had the following words inscribed:

VII

MALVINAGOUCHERA GENTLE WOMAN

On one point Susan was from the first determined: Miss Goucher's death should make no difference in her struggle for independence; she would go on as she had begun, and fight things through to a finish alone. Neither Phil nor I could persuade her to take even a few days for a complete change of scene, a period of rest and recuperation. Simply, she would not. She settled down at once to work harder than ever, turning out quotable paragraphs for Whim, as daring as they were sprightly; and she resolutely kept her black hours of loneliness to herself. That she had many such hours I then suspected and now know, but on my frequent visits to New York – I had been appointed administrator of Miss Goucher's more than modest estate – she ignored them, and skillfully turned all my inquiries aside. These weeks following on Miss Goucher's death were for many reasons the unhappiest of my life.

Never since I had known Susan, never until now, had our minds met otherwise than candidly and freely. Now, through no crying fault on either side – unless through a lack of imagination on mine – barriers were getting piled up between us, barriers composed of the subtlest, yet stubbornest misunderstandings. Our occasional hours together soon became a drab tissue of evasions and cross purposes and suppressed desires. Only frankness can serve me here or make plain all that was secretly at work to deform the natural development of our lives.

There are plays – we have all attended them to our indignation – in which some unhappy train of events seems to have been irrationally forced upon his puppets by the author; if he would only let them speak out freely and sensibly, all their needless difficulties would vanish! Such plays infuriate the public and are never successful.

"Good Lord!" we exclaim. "Why didn't she say she loved him in the first place!" – or, "If he had only told her his reasons for leaving home that night!"

We, the enlightened public, feel that in the shoes of either the hero or the heroine we must have acted more wisely, and we refuse our sympathy to misfortunes that need never have occurred. Our reaction is perhaps inevitable and æsthetically justified; but I am wondering – I am wondering whether two-thirds of the unhappiness of most mortals is not due to their failure clearly to read another's thoughts or clearly to reveal their own? Is not half, at least, of the misery in our hearts born of futile misunderstandings, misunderstandings with which any sane onlooker in full possession of the facts on both sides, can have little patience, since he instinctively feels they ought never to have taken place? But it is only in the theater that we find such an onlooker, the audience, miraculously in possession of the facts on both sides. In active life, we are doing pretty well if we can partly understand our own motives; we are supermen if we divine the concealed, genuine motives of another. Certainly at this period Susan, with all her insight, did not seize my motives, nor was I able to interpret hers. Hence, we could not speak out! What needed to be said between us could not be said. And the best proof that it could not is, after all, that it was not..

The conversation that ought to have taken place between us might not unreasonably have run something like this:

Susan: Ambo dear – what is the matter? Heaven knows there's enough! – but I mean between us? You've never been more wonderful to me than these past weeks – and never so remote. I can feel you edging farther and farther away. Why, dear?

I: I've been a nuisance to you too long, Susan. Whatever I am from now on, I won't be that.

Susan: As if you could be; or ever had been!

I: Don't try to spare my feelings because you like me – because you're grateful to me and sorry for me! I've had a glimpse of fact, you see. It's the great moral antiseptic. My illusions are done for.

Susan: What illusions?

I: The illusion that you ever have really loved me. The illusion that you might some day grow to love me. The illusion that you might some day be my wife.

Susan: Only the last is illusion, Ambo. I do love you. I'm growing more in love with you every day. But I can't be your wife, ever. If I've seemed changed and sad – apart from Sister's death, and everything else that's happened – it's that, dear. It's killing me by half-inches to know I can never be completely part of your life – yours!

I:

[But I can't even imagine what babble of sorrow and joy such words must have wrung from me! Suppose a decent interval, and a partial recovery of verbal control.]

Susan: You shouldn't have rescued me from Birch Street, Ambo. Everything's made it plain to me, at last. But I've already ground the mud of it into your life now – in spite of myself. You'll never feel really clean again.

I: What nonsense! Susan, Susan – dearest!

Susan: It isn't nonsense. You forget; I'm a specialist in nonsense nowadays. Oh, Ambo, how can you care for me! I've been so insufferably self-satisfied; so childishly blind! My eyes are wide open now. I've had the whole story of what happened that awful night – all of it – from Doctor Askew. He thought he was psycho-analyzing me, while I pumped it out of him, drop by drop. And I've been to Maltby, too; yes, I've been to Maltby, behind your back. Ambo, he isn't really certain yet that I didn't go crazy that night and kill your wife. Neither, I'm sure, is Mrs. Arthur. They've given me the benefit of the doubt simply because they dread being dragged through a horrible scandal, that's all. But they're not convinced. Of course, Maltby didn't say so in so many words, but it was plain as plain! He was afraid of me – afraid! I could feel his fear. He thinks madness is in my blood. Well, he's right. Not just as he means it, but as Setebos means it – the cruel, jealous God of this world!.. No, wait, dear! Let me say it out to you, once for all. My father ended a brutal life by an insanely brutal murder, then killed himself; my own father. And I've never all these years honestly realized that as part of my life – part of me! But now I do. It's there, back of me. I can never escape from it. Oh, how could I have imagined myself like others – a woman like others, free to love and marry and have children and a home! How could I!

I: Susan! Is that all? Is it really all that's holding you from me? Good God, dear! Why, I thought you – secretly – perhaps even unknown to yourself – loved Jimmy!

Susan: Jimmy? You thought —

I: I think so even now. How can I help it? Look… [And here you must suppose me to show her those first scrawled sheets, written automatically by her hand.] Perhaps I'm revealing your own heart to you, Susan – dragging to light what you've tried to keep hidden even from yourself. See, dear. "A net. No means of escape from it. To escape – somehow. Jimmy – "

[And then Susan would perhaps have handed back those scrawled pages to me with a pitying and pitiful smile.]

Susan:

[Author's Note: This carefully written, imaginary speech has been deleted in toto by Censor Susan from the page proof – at considerable expense to me – and the following authentic confession substituted for it in her own hand. But she doesn't know I am making this explanation, which will account to you for the form and manner of her confession, purposely designed to be a continuation of my own imaginary flight. In admitting this, I am risking Susan's displeasure; but conscience forbids me to let you mistake a "genuine human document" – so dear to the modern heart – for a mere effort at interpretation by an amateur psychologist. What follows, then, is veracious, is essentially that solemn thing so dear to a truth-loving generation – sheer fact.]

Ambo dear, I can explain that, but not without a long, unhappy confession. Must I? It's a shadowy, inside-of-me story, awfully mixed and muddled; not a nice story at all. Won't it be better, all round, if I simply say again that I love you, not Jimmy, with all my heart?

[No doubt I should then have reached for her hands, and she would have drawn away.]

Ah, no, dear, please not! I've never made a clean breast of it all, even to myself. It's got to be done, though, Ambo, sooner or later, for both our sakes. Be patient with me. I'll begin at the beginning.

I'm ridiculously young, Ambo; we all keep forgetting how young I am! I'm an infant prodigy, really; you and Phil – and God first, I suppose – have made me so. And the main point about infant prodigies is that experience hasn't caught up with them. They live in things they've imagined from things they've been told or read, live on intuition and second-hand ideas; and they've no means of testing their real values in a real world. And they're childishly conceited, Ambo! I am. Less now than some months ago; but I'm still pretty bad..

Well, back in Birch Street, before I came to you, when I was honestly a child, I lived all alone inside of myself. I lived chiefly on stories I made up about myself; and of course my stories were all escapes from reality – from the things that hurt or disgusted me most. There was hardly anything in my life at home that I didn't long to escape from. You can understand that, in a general way. But there's one thing you perhaps haven't thought about; it's such an ugly thing to think about. I know it isn't modern of me, but I do hate to talk about it, even to you. I must, though. You'll never understand – oh, lots of later things – unless I do.

Love, Ambo, human love, as I learned of it there at home – and I saw and heard much too much of it – frightened and sickened me. It was swinish – horrible. Most of all I longed to escape from all that! I couldn't. I wonder if anyone ever has or can? We are made as we are made… Yes, I longed to escape from it; but my very made-up story of escape was a disguised romance. Jimmy was to be the gentle Galahad who would some day rescue me. He had done battle for me once already – with Joe Gonfarone. But some day he would come in white, shining armor and take me far away from all the mud and sweat of Birch Street to blue distant hills. Artemis was all mixed up in it, too; she was to be our special goddess; our free, swift, cool-eyed protector. There was to be no heartsick shame, no stuffiness in my life any more forever! But it wasn't Jimmy who rescued me, Ambo. You did.

Only, when we've lived in a dream, wholly, for months and months and months, it doesn't vanish, Ambo; it never vanishes altogether; it's part of us – part of our lives. Isn't it? Gertrude was once your dream, dear; and the dream-Gertrude has never really vanished from your life, and never will. Ah, don't I know!

Well, then you rescued me; and you and Phil and Maltby and Sister and books and Hillhouse Avenue and France and Italy and England, and my Magic Circle —everything– crowded upon me and changed me and made me what I am; if I'm anything at all! But Birch Street had made me first; and my dreams..

Ambo, I can never make you know what you've been to me, never! Cinderella's prince was nothing beside you, and my Galahad-Jimmy a pale phantom! I shan't try. And I can never make you know what a wild confusion of storm you sent whirling through me when I first felt the difference in you – felt your man's need of me, of me, body and soul! You meant me not to feel that, Ambo; but I did. I was only seventeen. And my first reaction was all passionate joy, a turbulent desire to give, give, give – and damn the consequences! It was, Ambo. I loved you.

But given you and me, Ambo, that couldn't last long. You're too moral – and I'm too complicated. My inner pattern's a labyrinth, full of queer magic; simple emotions soon get lost in me, lost and transformed. And please don't keep forgetting how young I was, and still am; how little I could understand of all I was conceited enough to think I understood! Well, dear, I saw you struggling to suppress your love for me as something wrong, unworthy; something that could only harm us both. And then all that first, swift, instinctive joy went out of me, and my old fear and distrust of what men call love seized me again. "Stuffiness, stuffiness everywhere – it leads to nothing but stuffiness!" I said. "I hate it. I won't let it rule my life. The great thing is to keep clear of it, clean of it, aloof and free!" The old Artemis-motive swept through me again like a hill-wind – but it came in gusts; and there were days – weeks, Ambo – when I simply wanted to be yours. And one night I threw myself into your arms..

But the next day I was afraid again. The phrase "passion's slave" got into my head and plagued me. Then you came to me and said, "It's the end of the road, dear. We can't go on." That changed everything once more, Ambo, in a flash. That was my crisis. From that moment, I was madly jealous of Gertrude; knew I always had been, from the first. My telegram to her was a challenge to battle. It was, dear – and I lost. She came back; she was wonderful, too – her way – and the old Gertrude-dream stirred in you again; just stirred, but that was enough. You said to yourself, didn't you? that perhaps after all the best solution for our wretched difficulties was for Gertrude to return to her home. At least, that would end things. But you couldn't have said that to yourself if Gertrude had been really repulsive to you. The old dream had fluttered its tired wings, once, Ambo; you know it had!

And so I flopped again, dear! I was sick of love; I hated love! I said to myself, "I won't have this stupid, brutal, instinctive thing pushing and pulling me about like this! I'll rule my own life, thanks – my own thoughts and dreams! Freedom's the thing – the only good thing in life. I'll be free! Ambo, too, must learn to be free. We can only share what's honestly best in both of us when at last we are free!"

My Galahad-Jimmy had turned up again, too. Perhaps that had something to do with my final fiercest revolt against you. I don't know. He was all I had wanted him to be, Ambo; simple and straightforward and clean. Oh, he had his white, shining armor on, bless him! But I didn't want him to rescue me, for all that; not in the old way. I was just glad my dream-boy had come a little true; that's all. You were jealous of him, weren't you? Confess! You needn't have been.

But here in New York, with Sister, things happened that made a difference..

First of all, dear, I discovered all I had lost in losing you; discovered I couldn't be free. All I could do was to make some kind of a life of it; for Sister, chiefly. And I tried; oh, I did try! Then those whispered scandals about us began. But it wasn't the scandal itself that did for me; it was something added to it – by Mrs. Arthur, I suppose – something true, Ambo, that I'd never honestly faced. Suddenly my father rose from the dead! Suddenly I was forced to feel that never, never under any conditions, would it have been possible for me to be yours – bear you children… Suddenly I felt, saw – as I should have seen long ago – that the strain of evil, perhaps of madness, in my father – the strain that made his life a hell of black passions – must end with me!

Here's where Jimmy comes back, Ambo – and it's the worst of all I have to confess. My anxiety was all for you now: not for myself, I happened to love you that way. "Suppose," I kept thinking, "suppose something should unexpectedly make it possible for Ambo to ask me to be his wife? Suppose Gertrude should fall in love herself and insist on divorce? Or suppose she should die? Ambo would be certain to come to me. And if he did? Should I have the moral courage to send him away? As I must – I must!"

Dear, from that time on a sort of demon in me kept suggesting: "Jimmy – Jimmy's the solution! He's almost in love with you now; all he needs is a little encouragement. You could manage it, Susan. You could engage yourself to Jimmy; and then you could string him along! You could make it an interminable engagement, years and years of it, and break it off when Ambo was thoroughly discouraged or cured; you're clever enough for that. And Jimmy's ingenuousness itself. You could manage Jimmy." Oh, please don't think I ever really listened to my demon, was ever tempted by him! But I hated myself for the mere fact that such thoughts could even occur to me! They did, though, more than once; and each time I had to banish them, thrust them down into their native darkness.

But they didn't die there, Ambo; they lived there, a hideous secret life, lying in wait to betray me. They never will betray me, of course; I loathe them. But they can still stir in their darkness, make themselves known. That's what the references to Jimmy mean, Ambo, in those pages I scribbled in my trance; and that's all they mean. For I don't love him; I love you.

But I can't marry you, ever. I can't. That black strain concentrated in my father – oh, it must die out with me! Just as Sister's line ended with her… She ran away from the one love of her life, Ambo – just as I must run away from you. You never knew that about Sister. But I knew it. Sonia told me. Sister told her, the week before Sonia married. Sister felt then that Sonia ought to run away from all that, as she had. But Sonia wouldn't listen to her..

"Good for Sonia!" I might then have cried out. "God bless her! Hasn't she made her husband happy? Aren't her children his pride? Why in heaven's name should she have denied herself the right to live! And for a mere possibility of evil! As if the blood of any human family on earth were wholly sound, wholly blameless! Sonia was selfish, but right, dear; and Miss Goucher was brave, but wrong! So are you wrong! Actually inherited feeble-mindedness, or insanity, or disease – that's one thing; but a dread of mere future possibilities, of mere supposed tendencies! Good Lord! The human race might as well commit suicide en bloc! It's you I love —you– just as you are. And you say you love me. Well, that settles it!"

But who knows? It might have settled it and it might not – could any such imaginary conversation conceivably have taken place. It did not take place. We are dealing, worse luck, with history.

VIII

Perhaps six weeks after Miss Goucher's death one little conversation, just skirting these hidden matters, did take place between us; but how different was its atmosphere, and how drearily different its conclusion! You will understand it better now that – like a theater audience, or like God – you are in full possession of Susan's facts and of mine; but I fear it will interest you less. To know all may sometimes be to forgive all; but more often, alas, it is to be bored by everything..