Tomorrow Is Forever (15 page)

“I'm losing courage to listen to the radio,” Elizabeth confessed. “All it brings is news of more calamities.”

For an instant Kessler did not reply. She had said nothing to him about her dread of Dick's going away, but she saw him give a glance toward the house and suspected that he had guessed it. Leaning heavily on his cane, he turned back to her, saying, “Mrs. Herlong, will you forgive me if I tell you something?”

“Certainly.” Then, as she saw the gentle gravity of his eyes, she added, “If it's a rebuke, go ahead. I deserve it.”

“Yes,” answered Kessler, “you do.” He smiled, and went on. “Mrs. Herlong, talking about one's personal problems is unforgivable unless one has learned something from them that is worth passing on. You and your family are so kind about ignoring my handicaps that I feel almost unkind to refer to them. But I have learned something from them.”

“Yes, go on,” she said earnestly. “I know you've had to face life in a way that I haven't. Tell me.”

“It's simply this,” said Kessler. “There is a rigorous joy in facing a battle even when you have very little chance of winning it. The worst experience on earth isn't tragedy that comes from outside. That may be dreadful, and it frequently is, but it's almost pleasant compared with the experience of being ashamed of yourself.”

Elizabeth lowered her eyes. They showed her his thick right hand grasping the cane, and she looked up again. “You can tell me that better than anyone else I know,” she said in a low voice, “because—well, you've never said anything to me about your past life, and I'm not asking you, but I know you aren't referring only to physical distress. Such a disaster as yours doesn't just change your bodily powers, but everything else. You had to face spiritual tragedy as well, didn't you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And you did face it,” she went on. “Instead of becoming resentful and bitter, you became so wise and kind and understanding that everyone who sees you feels the presence of a great man. You have suffered terribly, but you have no reason to be ashamed of yourself.”

“Neither have you, Mrs. Herlong.”

“How do you know?”

“You haven't told me anything about your past life either,” he returned smiling. “But as soon as I came into your home the first time, I knew I was meeting a mature and courageous woman. It's impossible for anyone to live as long as you have—”

“Forty-four years,” she said with a little laugh. “I'm not sensitive about the passage of time.”

“Very well, it's impossible for anyone to live forty-four years without experiencing a good many unpleasant events, things you either have to face or run away from. When you meet a woman whose husband adores her, whose children are intelligent and uninhibited, whose domestic affairs run like invisible clockwork, and who goes about with a serenity suggesting that all these things just happened that way—you can be sure that she achieved it by meeting each crisis as it came. Some people's lives are like wastebaskets, so cluttered up that nobody can find anything there but trash that should have been disposed of long ago.”

“I have tried to keep things clear,” she answered simply. “I can't say I've always been successful. But looking back, I can say I've tried.”

“When I left your home that first evening, I told you that being there had made me very happy. Perhaps you thought I was too intense in what I said. But I had seen so much clutter, so much wretchedness that could have been avoided, that it did make me happy to see so much unobtrusive richness of living. I had hoped I should find you like that.”

“You had hoped? Why did you care what you'd find?”

He bit his lip as though he had said too much. But he answered, “Was it too much to hope for? I had left a continent full of torture and despair, for one thing; for another, I liked and admired your husband, and he had shown me your photographs. You have a good life, Mrs. Herlong, because you have made it a good life. Don't lose it now by being afraid.”

“How can I help being afraid?” she exclaimed. “Yes, I have a good life. I've said so myself a thousand times. And I
have
worked for it. As you said, there are plenty of occasions in anybody's experience when he's tempted to sit down and quit trying. But when you do achieve a good life, when you feel that now at last you have what you want and can enjoy having it, and then when you see it about to be blown to pieces by circumstances you aren't responsible for and can't control—how can you help being afraid? I'm sick with fear. I look over it all—Spratt bothering about his pictures, Brian with his bats and bugs, Cherry excited about a party dress, Dick struggling with his lessons, and I think, ‘How much longer?' I love them so, I've been so proud to know I was important to them—but now!” She stopped. “Why on earth am I talking to you like this? It's the first time I've been so frank about it to anybody.”

“You couldn't talk to anybody who'd be more interested,” Kessler answered. “It's good now and then to confess our fears. Of course you're frightened. You see the war coming closer, and you don't know what it may bring—”

“I do know,” she interrupted sharply. “I don't live in a tower looking down on two conflicting ideologies! Oh, it may be a noble struggle, fought for a better world, but I don't see it that way and I can't. I don't see it in terms of anything but my son.”

“I wish to God there were something I could say to you,” he told her in a low voice.

Elizabeth had clasped her hands and was moving them against each other restlessly. “I don't know why I feel so much like talking to you. Maybe it's just that if I don't talk it out pretty soon I don't know what will become of me. Do you mind listening?”

“I want to,” he answered, with such simple sincerity that she could have no doubt of his sympathy. He hesitated an instant, then asked, “Can we sit down, Mrs. Herlong?”

“How stupid of me!” she exclaimed. She hurried to lead the way to two deck chairs placed on the lawn, at the side of the house. Cherry had left a sweater on one of them, and Elizabeth put it on, for the evening chill was blowing in from the sea. “We aren't just courteous about not noticing your limitations, Mr. Kessler,” she remarked as they sat down, “we're usually not even aware of them.”

When he answered it was in a matter-of-fact voice. “This is one of the things I found hardest to get used to,” he said. “I mean, asking for a chair. I had always been so healthy that I was the one who had to be reminded not to expect too much of other people. Please don't be embarrassed—I'm not.”

“Are you cold?” asked Elizabeth.

“No. What was it you wanted to tell me?”

“I'm glad it's getting dark,” said Elizabeth. “Talking in the dark is easier for some reason. It's about the war, about feeling it coming close, about this unbearable sense of helplessness. I've always thought of myself as a rather strong person, one who could take things as they came and go on somehow. But this time I feel beaten before I start. My husband is afraid of what we're up against too, but he's taking it much better than I am. You see, there's a difference: when you don't know what you're facing, and when you do.”

She heard Kessler move his cane against the grass, but he did not answer. She went on.

“I can't tell him. In fact, I don't want to tell him—why should I? But I'm shaking with terror because I've had a tragedy of war before. And if it should happen again like that—when I say I'd rather die than get another of those telegrams from the War Department, I'm not speaking lightly.”

Kessler's cane was poking at a tuft of grass. Nobody had turned on the lights in the rooms on this side of the house and it had grown dark outside. She could not see him, nor did she try to; she could barely make out the end of the stick, restlessly attacking the grass, but she did not turn her eyes toward him as she continued.

“Spratt is my second husband—you didn't know that, did you? It's not important in any personal sense between us, it never has been important and it wouldn't be now except that my first husband was killed in the last war. I loved him very much. Of course now, looking back on it, it's easy to say it shouldn't have mattered so much, I was a young girl with all my life before me, and as it happened I met Spratt and everything turned out as you've seen it. But at the time there was no way for me to look forward. When I remember it—” She stopped.

After a moment Kessler asked, “Did you suffer so horribly?”

“I can't tell you what it was. It wasn't anything anybody could understand except somebody who had been through it. I had loved him so, and then all of a sudden he was dead. It was—anyway, I never went through anything like it before, and I never have again. Of course, it's all over—I don't even think of it very often, but now—” She stopped again.

There was a silence that seemed to last a long time. At last Kessler said, in a voice so low she barely heard him, “Yes? But now?”

“Don't you understand? I can't take it again. I can't. I thought there never would be anything else like that. It was over and done with. My world had been shot to pieces, and I picked up the pieces and made myself go on living, and I was rewarded more than I ever dreamed of expecting. But I can't do that another time. Even if I had the strength, it's too late. I was twenty when I lost Arthur. God knows it wasn't easy to go on then. But now I'm forty-four. If my world is shot to pieces again, it stays that way. I can't go back and start over. And why should I be expected to? Life can't be all beginnings and no fulfillment!”

As she broke off Kessler asked, “What is that exquisite scent that's suddenly here all around us?”

“Night-blooming jasmine. Sometimes it blooms till late in the year. Are you listening to me?”

“If I hadn't been listening I shouldn't have asked about the flowers. I was just thinking, in a world so full of possibilities for pleasure, why should anyone have to say what you are saying to me?”

“Yes, why should we?” exclaimed Elizabeth. “Why should it be like this? I don't know and I'm tired of asking. It's too much to demand of us. It's as though destiny were saying, The world is all broken up, start over and build a new one. Hurry and get it done so it will be all ready to be demolished again. We'll give you just enough rest between strokes to make sure you're quite conscious and sensitive to feel the next one. We won't start the next war until your firstborn son is just old enough to be carried off. You thought you'd felt the last limit of pain, but you may find that you haven't. If this happens, it will be worse.”

“It would be worse?” Kessler asked her. His voice seemed to have a thickness, a. slight unsteadiness, that was unlike him.

“Yes. Because before, there was only myself. If I had cracked, if I'd ended my own life or had lived on like a useless shadow, it really wouldn't have mattered to anybody. But now it's different. There are people who count on me. There's Spratt—oh, I know Spratt goes striding around the studio lot like the most self-sufficient creature alive.”

“I have sometimes wondered,” said Kessler, “if you knew how much he depends on you.”

“Yes, I know. There's a lot between us that I shan't discuss. Say I'm his best friend and let it go at that. And there are the younger children. They need me so much more than they realize—if I weren't equal to it they'd know then what they had lost. Don't think I'm trying to say I'd be the only one who'll be hurt by this war. Spratt loves Dick as much as I do. As for Cherry and Brian, heaven only knows what the war will take away from them. But what I do mean is that in the midst of anything that may happen, I'm the one who'd be expected to stand like a pillar. When you said I was the center of this household you were right. I've made it that way. I've wanted them to need me. I've done my best to make them feel that no matter what happened, trivial irritations or the most vital disillusionments, I would always be there to listen and understand. And now I'm about to fail them. They don't know it yet—or maybe Spratt has guessed it in spite of me—but already, before we've been hurt at all, I'm cracking inside because I'm afraid.”

Again there was a silence. It lasted a long time. After awhile Elizabeth turned her head toward him. Kessler was sitting very still. By the starlight she could just make out the lines of his figure, lying back in the deck chair. He was no longer poking at the grass with his stick. It was resting at his side, his hand on it.

“You're not answering me, are you?” she said. ‘There isn't any answer. But thank you for listening.” After a moment she went on, “I can't tell you what a relief it has been to say all this. I believe saying it to you has got it out of me so I won't pour it all out to Spratt. That's why I'm grateful.” She reached her hand out and laid it over his, as it rested on the head of his cane. To her astonishment, she found that instead of lying there lightly as she had thought, his hand was gripping the cane with such violence that the muscles were hard and the knuckles were like rocks. Elizabeth drew away quickly and sat up. “Mr. Kessler! What have I done to you?”

“Nothing,” he answered sharply, and sat up too, as though startled. “What is the trouble?”

“Why couldn't I keep quiet?” she demanded of herself contritely. “Here I've been babbling like a child who thinks nobody has anything to do but listen—”

“But I wanted to listen!” Kessler exclaimed. “You're not sorry you talked to me!”

“Not for myself, oh no. But I was so absorbed in myself I didn't realize how I might be affecting you. Have I brought back something that's better forgotten? Forgive me, please forgive me, if I've tried you too far.”

Kessler stood up abruptly. He turned and moved a step so as to face her. She looked up at him standing between her and the stars, a black figure that gave an impression of strength in spite of the crippled body.