The Book of Susan: A Novel. Dodd Lee Wilson
back. I saw him yesterday. He didn't know me."
"Sex is a miserable nuisance. It muddles things – interferes with honest human values. It's just Nature making fools of us for her own private ends. These are not pretty sentiments for a young girl, Susan Blake!"
"Speak up, Susan – clear the air! You are living here under false pretenses. If you can't manage to feel like Ambo's daughter – you oughtn't to stay."
III
It was perhaps when reticent Phil finally spoke to me of his love for Susan that I first fully realized my own predicament – a most unpleasant discovery; one which I determined should never interfere with Susan's peace of mind or with the possible chances of other, more eligible, men. As Susan's guardian, I could not for a moment countenance her receiving more than friendly attention from a man already married, and no longer young. A grim, confused hour in my study convinced me that I was an impossible, even an absurd, parti. This conviction brought with it pain so sharp, so nearly unendurable, that I wondered in my weakness how it was to be unflinchingly borne. Yet borne it must be, and without betrayal. It did not occur to me, in my mature folly, that I was already, and had for long been, self-betrayed.
"Steady, you old fool!" whispered my familiar demon. "This isn't going to be child's play, you know. This is an hour-by-hour torture you've set out to grin and bear and live through. You'll never make the grade, if you don't take cognizance in advance. The road's devilishly steep and icy, and the corners are bad. What's more, there's no end to it; the crest's never in sight. Clamp your chains on and get into low… Steady!
"But, of course," whispered my familiar demon, "there's probably an easier way round. Why attempt the impossible? Think what you've done for Susan! Gratitude, my dear sir – affectionate gratitude – is a long step in the right direction.. if it is the right direction. I don't say it is; I merely suggest, en passant, that it may be. Suppose, for example, that Susan – "
"Damn you!" I spat out, jumping from my chair. "You contemptible swine!"
Congested blood whined in my ears like a faint jeering laughter. I paced the room, raging – only to sink down again, exhausted, my face and hands clammy.
"What a hideous exhibition," I said, distinctly addressing a grotesque porcelain Buddha on the mantelpiece. Contrary, I believe, to my expectations, he did not reply. My familiar demon forestalled him.
"If by taking a merely conventional attitude," he murmured, "you defeat the natural flowering of two lives – ? Who are you to decide that the voice of Nature is not also the voice of God? Supposing, for the moment, that God is other than a poetic expression. If her eyes didn't haunt you," continued my familiar demon, "or a certain way she has of turning her head, like a poised poppy.."
As he droned on within me, the mantelpiece blurred and thinned to the blue haze of a distant Tuscan hill, and the little porcelain Buddha sat upon this hill, very far off now and changed oddly to the semblance of a tiny huddled town. We were climbing along a white road toward that far hill, that tiny town.
"Ambo," she was saying, "that isn't East Rock – it's Monte Senario. And this isn't Birch Street – it's the Faenzan Way. How do you do it, Ambo – you wonderful magician! Just with a wave of your wand you change the world for me; you give me – all this!"
A bee droned at my ear: "Gratitude, my dear sir. Affectionate gratitude. A long step."
"Damn you!" I whimpered… But the grotesque porcelain Buddha was there again, on the mantelshelf. The creases in his little fat belly disgusted me; they were loathsome. I rose. "At least," I said to him, "I can live without you!" Then I seized him and shattered him against the fireplace tiles. It was an enormous relief.
Followed a knock at my door that I answered calmly: "Who is it? Come in."
Miss Goucher never came to me without a mission; she had one now.
"Mr. Hunt," she said, "I should like to talk to you very plainly. May I? It's about Susan." I nodded. "Mr. Hunt," she continued resolutely, "Susan is in a very difficult position here. I don't say that she isn't entirely equal to meeting it; but I dread the nervous strain for her – if you understand?"
"Not entirely, Miss Goucher; perhaps, not at all."
"I was afraid of this," she responded unhappily. "But I must go on – for her sake."
Knowing well that Miss Goucher would face death smiling for Susan's sake, her repressed agitation alarmed me. "Good heavens!" I exclaimed. "Is there anything really wrong?"
"A good deal." She paused, her lips whitening as she knit them together, lest any ill-considered word should slip from her. Miss Goucher never loosed her arrows at random; she always tried for the bull's-eye, and usually with success.
"I am speaking in strict confidence – to Susan's protector and legal guardian. Please try to fill in what I leave unsaid. It is very unfortunate for Susan's peace of mind that you should happen to be a married man."
"For her peace of mind!"
"Yes."
"Wait! I daren't trust myself to fill in what you leave unsaid. It's too – preposterous. Do you mean – But you can't mean that you imagine Susan to be in love with – her grandfather?" My heart pounded, suffocating me; with fright, I think.
"No," said Miss Goucher, coldly; "Susan is not in love with her grandfather. She is with you."
I could manage no response but an angry one. "That's a dangerous statement, Miss Goucher! Whether true or not – it ruins everything. You have made our life here together impossible."
"It is impossible," said Miss Goucher. "It became so last summer. I knew then it could not go on much longer."
"But I question this! I deny that Susan feels for me more than – gratitude and affection."
"Gratitude is rare," said Miss Goucher enigmatically, her eyes fixed upon the fragments of Buddha littering my hearth. "True gratitude," she added, "is a strong emotion. When it passes between a man and a woman, it is like flame."
"Very interesting!" I snapped. "But hardly enough to have brought you here to me with this!"
"She feels that you need her," said Miss Goucher.
"I do," was my reply.
"Susan doesn't need you," said Miss Goucher. "I don't wish to be brutal; but she doesn't. In spite of this, she can easily stand alone."
"I see. And you think that would be best?"
"Naturally. Don't you?"
"I'm not so sure."
As I muttered this my eyes, too, fixed themselves on the fragments of Buddha. Would the woman never go! I hated her; it seemed to me now that I had always hated her. What was she after all but a superior kind of servant – presuming in this way! The irritation of these thoughts swung me suddenly round to wound her, if I might, with sarcasm, with implied contempt. But it is impossible to wound the air. With her customary economy of explanation Miss Goucher had, pitilessly, left me to myself.
IV
The evening of this already comfortless day I now recall as one of the most exasperating of my life. Maltby Phar arrived for dinner and the week-end – an exasperation foreseen; Phil came in after dinner – another; but what I did not foresee was that Lucette Arthur would bring her malicious self and her unspeakably tedious husband for a formal call. Lucette was an old friend of Gertrude, and I always suspected that her occasional evening visits were followed by a detailed report; in fact, I rather encouraged them, and returned them promptly, hoping that they were. In my harmless way of life even Lucette's talent for snooping could find, I felt, little to feed upon, and it did not wholly displease me that Gertrude should be now and then forced to recognize this.
The coming of Susan had, not unnaturally, for a time, provided Lucette with a wealth of interesting conjecture; she had even gone so far as to intimate that Gertrude felt I was making – the expression is entirely mine – an ass of myself, which neither surprised nor disturbed me, since Gertrude had always had a tendency to feel that my talents