All Kneeling/Chapter 5
I'll face any sacrifice with you gladly—oh, gladly!" Christabel told Elliott. "I know life isn't going to be easy for us, darling, but what does anything matter as long as we have each other? And I want you to promise not to mind my family if it doesn't quite understand. You see, it's a darling family, but it loves me a little bit too much; it has silly ideas about me, and so, though you're the most wonderful man in the world, the dear geese aren't going to think even you are good enough for their marvelous, wonderful Christabel!"
"Well, they won't be so very far wrong. I"
She put a hand across his mouth and he kissed it, thinking again, how good it smells! How can I ever be worthy of her? If I could only make her happy. But her eyes had an other-world look in them; she spoke of sacrifice so often, beautifully, he thought, but sadly. After all, getting married wasn't entirely sacrifice. Some people seemed to enjoy parts of it, at least. But Christabel, with her shining eyes and gallant words, sometimes made him feel as if he had helped her into the tumbril and started her off toward the guillotine.
There can be sacrifice on both sides, he thought. It's not going to be so easy to paint the things I want to paint, with a wife to support.
"We're never going to interfere with each other's work," she said.
"Well, but the kind of thing I do now isn't bringing in enough to live on."
"Dearest, I know you can find other things, just to do in your spare time. You see, you don't realize how wonderful you are, and I do! I believe in you, Elliott!"
"What sort of things?"
"Oh, cover designs and things like that."
"I loathe the idea!"
She looked wounded.
"Of course I'd do anything to make our marriage possible, but that sort of thing is simply soul-destroying."
"I don't see why. Think of the people you could reach, the good you could do!"
"I'm trying to do serious work, Christabel. I can't do popular stuff. I"
"My dear, don't I know! I'm just the same; I couldn't bear it if people in general liked my writing. If you speak as truly as you can, and as beautifully, refusing to shriek and scream and get easy effects, how can you expect to be heard through all the noise of bad popular writing?"
"What I mean about my painting"
"Painting isn't writing, Elliott. Of course you must go on with your real work, but you could easily do other things just for relaxation. Why, look at some of the advertisements! Beautiful! And they pay tremendously!"
"You don't understand."
"Oh, Elliott! How you hurt me!"
And then he had to comfort her, tell her she did understand, always, ask for her forgiveness. He might as well get to work on canned peaches and silk stockings, he thought, for he was so upset most of the time now that he couldn't concentrate on decent painting. But he hugged to himself for comfort the thought that theirs was a great love, and the greater the love the greater the suffering, according to the classics. And he must be loyal to her, even if he didn't want to be—but he did, he did! He loved her as no woman had ever been loved before, he assured himself. And he must be as loyal as she who promised him so sweetly:
"Nothing the family, can say will ever change me."
So he had expected her family to despise him. Not that I care, he thought, in the train on his way to be inspected, sustaining himself by the memory of the still life of calla lilies he was painting. Let them despise me! I despise them! I care less than nothing what anyone in the world thinks of me, except Christabel. He moved his head up and down to ease the pain in the back of his neck, and looked at his new mauve shirt and dark purple tie in the glass of the train window.
But now, sitting with Uncle Johnnie after dinner at Aunt Deborah's, on the last evening of his Germantown visit, he knew the family considered him a nice young man. They beamed approval, they had offered an allowance, a little house to be built in a corner of Shady Lawn, a position in Cousin William Starkweather's advertising business, with a salary that would make living easy. He had been completely accepted as one of them on the day when Aunt Eliza took him for a drive and showed him the spot in the cemetery where he would be buried. She had been so pleased about it, and had so glowingly described the beauty of the dogwood there in the spring—"You'll enjoy that, with your artistic eye"—that he had felt his faltered thanks to be inadequate.
But I'll do whatever they want me to do, for Christabel's sake, he decided. The calla lilies that had comforted him at first had grown fainter and fainter through the week—now they floated between him and the butler bringing in coffee, and faded away completely. I'd give anything to make her happy, he thought, and made himself remember the way she had looked coming downstairs tonight in her white dress, the quick handclasp she had given him as she left him alone with Uncle Johnnie.
"Thank you, sir," he said, taking a cigar he didn't want. He felt faint with fatigue. All week he had been lost in a regiment of old women, picking up balls of wool, drinking rivers of tea, trotting for miles through conservatories full of rare plants, waxen or hairy, while he agreed with voices flung briskly back or quavering feebly from bundles of shawls, saying that Christabel was a wonderful person. Shady Lawn, The Cedars, Ferncroft. Great-aunts Deborah, Eliza, Lydia, Hannah, Susannah, and Ann. They melted from one to another in his mind, figures in a fever-dream. Cups of tea, balls of wool, hairy, spiny, waxen plants, and his mouth aching from its constant stretch of nervous smile.
Being engaged was marvelous, of course, but it was exhausting. Emotion took it out of one, and having to be intense and real all the time. The room was hot and made his head swim—or was it the cigar?
"Here, have another drop of brandy," said Uncle Johnnie.
Elliott for one wild moment wanted to put his head down on Uncle Johnnie's shoulder and burst into tears. He wanted to say, "How have you managed to keep free among them all?" But the butler opened a window and the brandy spread through him reassurringly. Once more he was himself, the happiest man in the world, except for the knowledge that he could never be worthy of the wonderful girl he was engaged to.
Mr. Caine was in bed with a cold, and Mrs. Caine went upstairs early, with elaborate yawns. Christabel and Elliott stood gazing into the fire. He was remembering some advice Uncle Johnnie had given him that evening. "Don't be so reverent with her. Women like men to be rough." He thought of a brainless athlete named Gerald Smith, all bulging muscles and curly yellow excelsior for hair, who seemed to enchant Christabel by snatching her at parties they had been to, and dancing her off with never a question as to whether he might have the pleasure. And suddenly Elliott threw his arms around Christabel and pulled her down on the sofa with such force that it surprised them both. But then, once he had kissed her, he wasn't sure he knew how to go on being just rough enough. Besides, he felt too tired tonight. He slid down to the floor, his head against her knees, and she began to stroke his hair. It made him feel sleepy, and before he could stop himself he gave a loud gasping yawn.
She pushed his head impatiently and he twisted around and gazed up at her.
"What's the matter, darling?"
"Oh, nothing." Her sigh was almost a sob. He searched his mind for something to please her.
"I was just thinking how wonderful it was to sit here together in silence, and yet each of us knowing everything the other was thinking and feeling."
But it was no good. He saw one of her moods coming over her as clearly as he had seen the bright fluidity of water dull and harden in freezing cold. Moods called by Christabel herself, as he had read in her Secret Journal, "those dark cold tides that drown me." He tried again, apprehensively:
"You look so beautiful in this dim light."
It did not need the sound that from anyone else he would have called a snort, to tell him that could have been better. He hurried on:
"I'm always afraid of being too rough with you—of shattering something exquisite by a touch or a word when you look the way you're looking now."
She relaxed enough to lay her hand on him lightly, as if in accolade.
"I always feel like that place in Carnation Flower where Juan has a fever and goes into the church and thinks the Madonna is Annunciata."
"Juan and Annunciata! Elliott, am I betraying them? Am I silly? Tell me I am! I have this feeling that when Carnation Flower is published, if it is published"
"If!"
"Well, then, when—I have this feeling that they'll feel betrayed. I've made them from bits of my own heart, my dreams, my secret things, and it seems wrong, somehow, to show them just to anybody, to sell them."
"Think of the good you'll be doing."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, bringing such beauty into the world, and—I don't know—I mean—such truth"
"Well, I do think that—hope it, anyway. My poor little book may not have very much, but I have tried to give it truth and beauty. But don't be disappointed in me when it isn't popular, darling. Will you promise? Because it won't be. I don't want it to be. I want just to speak simply, truly, to the few who will understand. You know I don't want what the world means when it says success"
"Oh, I do know, darling. That's just the way I feel about my own work."
"What do I write for, Elliott? Not for success. I should feel sick with terror if that came to me. I'd know I'd failed, somehow, that I hadn't been true to the real things. Not for pleasure, certainly, for my work is done in grief and pain, and I don't use those words lightly, dear. And yet I must write or die. Why is this burden on me?"
"Because you have the artist's soul, Christabel. I know how it is myself"
"Will I never go free?"
"Never, my darling."
"Will I always have to suffer this ache of beauty? Oh, Elliott, will I always have to suffer?"
Oh, beautiful girl! his heart cried, worshiping the glowing face she bent above him. And she loves me. Not Gerald Smith, not anyone else in the world. She loves me. She might have chosen anyone, she's so popular at every party; everyone loves her, but she loves me. The foot he was sitting on began to go to sleep, but he tried to keep from moving, for fear of shattering their perfect moment.