One conclusion from my observation of the Alderlings during the week I
spent with them was that it is bad for a husband and wife to be
constantly and unreservedly together, not because they grow tired of each
other, but because they grow more intensely interested in each other.
Children, when they come, serve the purpose of separating the parents;
they seem to unite them in one care, but they divide them in their
employments, at least in the normally constituted family. If they are
rich, and can throw the care of the children upon servants, then they
cannot enjoy the relief from each other that children bring to the mother
who nurtures and teaches them, and to the father who must work for them
harder than before. The Alderlings were not rich enough to have been
freed from the wholesome responsibilities of parentage, but they were
childless, and so they were not detached from the perpetual thought of
each other. If they had only had different tastes, it might have been
better, but they were both artists, she not less than he, though she no
longer painted. When their common thoughts were not centred upon each
other’s being, they were centred on his work, which, viciously enough,
was the constant reproduction of her visible personality. I could always
see them studying each other, he with an eye to her beauty, she with an
eye to his power.
He was every now and then saying to her, “Hold on, Marion,” and staying
her in some pose or movement, while he made mental note of it, and I was
conscious of her preying upon his inmost thoughts and following him into
the recesses of his reveries, where it is best for a man to be alone,
even if he is sometimes a beast there. She was not like those wives who
ask their husbands, when they do not happen to be talking, “What are you
thinking about?” and I put this to her credit, till I realized that she
had no need to ask, for she knew already. Now and then I saw him get up
and shake himself restively, but I am bound to say in her behalf, that
her pursuit of him seemed quite involuntary, and that she enjoyed it no
more than he did. Twenty times I was on the point of asking, “Why don’t
you people go in for a good long separation? Is there nothing to call you
to Europe, Alderling? Haven’t you got a mother, or sister, or some one
that you could visit, Mrs. Alderling? It would do you both a world of
good.”
But it happened, oddly enough, that the Alderlings were as kinless as
they were childless, and if he had gone to Europe he would have taken her
with him, and prolonged their seclusion by the isolation in which people
necessarily live in a foreign country. I found I was the only
acquaintance who had visited them during the years of their retirement on
the coast, where they had stayed, partly through his inertia, and partly
from his superstition that he could paint better away from the ordinary
associations and incentives; and they ceased, before I left, to get the
good they might of my visit because they made me a part of their
intimacy, instead of making themselves part of my strangeness.
After a day or two, their queer experiences began to resume themselves,
unabashed by my presence. These were mostly such as they had already more
than hinted to me: the thought-transferences, and the unconscious
hypnotic suggestions which they made to each other. There was more
novelty in the last than the first. If I could trust them, and they did
not seem to wish to exploit their mysteries for the effect on me, they
were with each other because one or the other had willed it. She would
say, if we were sitting together without him, “I think Rupert wants me;
I’ll be back in a moment,” and he, if she were not by, for some time,
would get up with, “Excuse me, I must go to Marion; she’s calling me.”
I had to take a great deal of this on faith; in fact, none of it was
susceptible of proof; but I have not been able since to experience all
the skepticism which usually replaces the impression left by sympathy
with such supposed occurrences. The thing was not quite what we call
uncanny; the people were so honest, both of them, that the morbid
character of like situations was wanting. The events, if they could be
called so, were not invited, I was quite sure, and they were varied by
such diversions as we had in reach. I went blueberrying with Mrs.
Alderling in the morning after she had got her breakfast dishes put away,
in order that we might have something for dessert at our midday dinner;
and I went fishing off the old stone crib with Alderling in the
afternoon, so that we might have cunners for supper. The farmerfolks and
fisherfolks seemed to know them and to be on tolerant terms with them,
though it was plain that they still considered them probational in
their fellow-citizenship. I do not think they were liked the less
because they did not assume to be of the local sort, but let their
difference stand, if it would. There was nothing countrified in her
dress, which was frankly conventional; the short walking-skirt had as
sharp a slant in front as her dinner-gown would have had, and he wore his
knickerbockers--it was then the now-faded hour of knickerbockers--with an
air of going out golfing in the suburbs. They stood on ceremony in
addressing the natives, who might have been Jim or Liza to each other,
but were always Mr. Donald or Mrs. Moody, with the Alderlings. They said
they would not like being called by their first names themselves, and
they did not see why they should take that freedom with others. Neither
by nature nor by nurture were they out of the ordinary in their ideals,
and it was by a sort of accident that they were so different in their
realities. She had stayed on with him through the first winter in the
place they had taken for the summer, because she wished to be with him,
rather than because she wished to be there, and he had stayed because he
had not just found the moment to break away, though afterwards he
pretended a reason for staying. They had no more voluntarily
cultivated the natural than the supernatural; he kindled the fire for
her, and she made the coffee for him, not because they preferred, but
because they must; and they had arrived at their common ground in the
occult by virtue of being alone together, and not by seeking the solitude
for the experiment which the solitude promoted. Mrs. Alderling did not
talk less, nor he more, when either was alone with me, than when we were
all together; perhaps he was more silent, and she not quite so much; she
was making up for him in his absence as he was for her in her presence.
But they were always hospitable and attentive hosts, and though under the
peculiar circumstances of Mrs. Alderling’s having to do the house-work I
necessarily had to do a good many things for myself, there were certain
little graces which were never wanting, from her hands: my curtains were
always carefully drawn, and my coverlet triangularly opened, so that I
did not have to pull it down myself. There was a freshly trimmed lamp on
the stand at my bed-head, and a book and paper-cutter put there, with a
decanter of whiskey and a glass of water. I note these things to you,
because they are touches which help remove the sense of anything
intentional in the occultism of the Alderlings.
I do not know whether I shall be able to impart the feeling of an obscure
pathos in the case of Mrs. Alderling, which I certainly did not
experience in Alderling’s. Temperamentally he was less fitted to undergo
the rigors of their seclusion than she was; in his liking to talk, he
needed an audience and a variety of listening, and she, in her somewhat
feline calm, could not have been troubled by any such need. You can be
silent to yourself, but you cannot very well be loquacious, without
danger of having the devil for a listener, if the old saying is true. Yet
still, I felt a keener poignancy in her sequestration. Her beauty had
even greater claim to regard than his eloquence. She was a woman who
could have commanded a whole roomful with it, and no one would have
wanted a word from her. She could only have been entirely herself in
society, where, and in spite of everything that can be said against it,
we can each, if we will, be more natural than out of it. The reason that
most of us are not natural in it is that we want to play parts for which
we are more or less unfit, and Marion Alderling never wished to play a
part, I was sure. It would have sufficed her to be herself wherever she
was, and the more people there were by, the more easily she could have
been herself.
I am not able to say now how much of all this is observation of previous
facts, and how much speculation based upon subsequent occurrences. At the
best I can only let it stand for characterization. In the same interest I
will add a fact in relation to Mrs. Alderling which ought to have its
weight against any undue appeal I have been making in her behalf. Without
in the least blaming her, I will say that I think that Mrs. Alderling ate
too much. She must have had naturally a strong appetite, which her active
life sharpened, and its indulgence formed a sort of refuge from the
pressure of the intense solitude in which she lived, and which was all
the more a solitude because it was _solitude à deux_. I noticed that
beyond the habit of cooks she partook of the dishes she had prepared,
and that after Alderling and I had finished dinner, and he was impatient
to get at his pipe, she remained prolonging her dessert. One night, when
he and I came in from the veranda, she was standing at the sideboard,
bent over a saucer of something, and she made me think of a large
tortoise-shell cat which has got at the cream. I expected in my nerves to
hear her lap, and my expectation was heightened by the soft, purring
laugh with which she owned that she was hungry, and those berries were so
nice.
At the risk of giving the effect of something sensuous, even sensual, in
her, I find myself insisting upon this detail, which did not lessen her
peculiar charm. As far as the mystical quality of the situation was
concerned, I fancy your finding that rather heightened by her innocent
_gourmandise_. You must have noticed how inextricably, for this life at
least, the spiritual is trammeled in the material, how personal character
and ancestral propensity seem to flow side by side in the same individual
without necessarily affecting each other. On the moral side Mrs.
Alderling was no more to be censured for the refuge which her nerves
sought from the situation in over-eating than Alderling for the smoking
in which he escaped from the pressure they both felt from one another;
and she was not less fitted than he for their joint experience.