The Letter

In Which A Lady Is Allowed One Chance, and No More, to Change Her Mind

DAVID CORT

THE morning sunlight that fell in on the breakfast table of Mr. and Mrs. Adolf Frayme was perfect of all things happy and secure. It transfigured the primary act of eating into a blessed symbol of felicity. It touched, with overlaid gilding, the silver; the coffee urn in Mrs. Frayme's hand; the centrepiece spray of hothouse marigolds; the very peninsula of baldness on Mr. Frayme's shining skull; with an illusion of serenity, formally perfect, almost stylized. Through the great windows it came in a flood, picking with light the vibrant motes of dust, dancing in a benediction over that so fortunate table, that so happy couple, creating in the end its effect of a perfection so golden, so glittering as to seem a little counterfeit.

The scene was ultimate; it was unreal; you would have recognized in it the posed and brittle idealization of an advertisement for breakfast food or furniture or cutlery or Domestic Bliss, and looked for the caption: "The one-time Isabella Darnell, now Mrs. Frayme, Operating Under Entirely New Management, namely, Mr. Adolf Frayme, Banker and Spouse Extraordinary."

Mr. Frayme has mastered the art of possession. It was like him to have been meekly worshipping, before marriage, and, from the moment the wedding ring was on his wife's finger, to have begun, in one magnificent gasp of assumption, an almost medieval proprietorship over her. He doubtless wished now that he could know, and censor to his taste, that of which she was thinking. To his slightly gloating survey she was, however, all that she should be. The sunlight had not overlooked her. In it the designed confusion of her hair had the fine and floating unreality of sea-ferns suspended in water. Mrs. Frayme realized the sum of what all wives wish to seem to their husbands at breakfast: gracious and spiritual, radiant and a little mystical. Her undeniably physical loveliness was informed at this hour with a disembodied beauty that somehow superseded and denied the tangible flesh. The perfect wife, the perfect mistress of his house, the perfect matutinal vista, thought Mr. Frayme.

His coffee, slipping down his throat in a thick hot amber, seduced him into a final contented indolence, and completed the beatitude of Mr. Frayme. His wife rose as he did, and accompanied him into the hall. To his kiss she turned a face placidly affectionate, honouring and obedient. She watched him as he climbed into his car, and drove away. She saw the machine slip swiftly over the edge of the nearest hill. For some time she stood facing toward the point of the compass where she had last seen him. Now he would be drawing up at the rural railway station. . . . There was the train-whistle, two sharp screeches .... And now he was well on his way to the city.

She was alone, really alone, now. She made one or two uncertain movements with her hand, stood for several minutes in an intense abstraction, and suddenly drew from her bosom a still unopened letter and walked quickly into the dining-room. The maid had cleared the table but for the coffee-urn and one cup. She decided to sit here and think this matter out to its end. The sun warmed her, and reassured her of her strength.

Mrs. Frayme remembered. She remembered Isabella Darnell, and a time not long past when her admirers had been called, in pleasant exaggeration, legion. Among the most inconspicuous had been Adolf Frayme, undistinguished romantically, however important financially, in that metropolitan society. Periodically he delivered his set proposal with what seemed to her then the presumptuous clause that if she ever wanted him, she could have him, any time, any how.

There was another. All the men she had known, even Mr. Frayme, somehow, all resolved into a blurred though animated backdrop for the stellar emotions of herself and Peter Dykeman. They two moved together across such stages as offered, with a brilliant and preoccupied abandon. Always, as they ran, they were a little dazzled by this thing that was happening to them. The glory and the grace of it made them tremble sometimes. Surely no one had ever loved as they. But the very violence and depth of their love made them require of one another the impossible perfection of gods. Their sulkings diverted an audience of ten thousand of the polite. But now Isabella recalled even their dissensions, with a heart stirred by the vain desire to recover yesteryear's snows. Those hours that were gone had received the finest of her genius for living. And they were ended. Peter and she had quarrelled more magnificently than ever before.

FOR the life of her she could not remember IP how it had begun. They had both been possessed by devils. In outrage and pride and pique and revenge, she had gone to Adolf Frayme. He, aware of the possibly transient nature of her mood, had seized her with both hands and married her in haste.

"The remembrance of times past . . . times past." The immortal phrase rose in her mind like strangling smoke. One could remember, but what good was there in that? Times past: times dead; would that one had died with them! It was not that the present was intolerable; she knew that the moment at hand would never be quite perfect. Even during that time she had been too busy feeling the pain to feel the joy. A fruitless memory, and a still more fruitless wish, were all that remained. The banal and inexorable finality of yesterday would not grant an exception for petulance nor for despair nor for any price whatever. She could almost hear the pitiless laughter of the vanished yesterdays at her wish, her foolish effort to recapture them.

The sealed letter looked up at her from the table. "Mrs. Adolf Frayme" was the superscription—what hurt it must have cost him to give her the title. The handwriting was one that she could never mistake. Her fingernail traced along the line of the ink, following the letters in a movement like a caress. The same fair sunlight that had hallowed the conjugal breakfast so acceptably did service also to this gesture.

And yet she wished the letter had not come. But for this, there would be no problem, no available alternative to going on as before. It had come last night and since then it had wheedled, stormed and reasoned with her to open it. Before that she had been at peace with her destiny. It was a far from hard one. Frayme loved her. She found him agreeable. Life was arranged for her, not excitingly perhaps, but satisfactorily. She was able to look down the years without distaste or the prospect of boredom. And now this letter came to make her begin it all again.

YET the letter had come. It was here. One II thing or another must be done about it. Surely she could make a decision: either to destroy it unread or to re-address and return it to Peter, or to read it and face the necessity of making another decision. As she looked again at the envelope, the letters seemed for an instant to plead with her before resolving themselves passively, attentively, to await her desires.

She was certain that if she could guess what the letter said, her problem would be made easier. Holding the envelope against the light, she turned it over curiously. It might be an announcement of his marriage to another woman. No: the envelope was not the proper size; there was notepaper inside, not a card; and if he had given her up so completely as to marry he would not have written. It might be a felicitating letter on her own marriage. But that was long overdue. He had made no sign whatever. Furthermore, this was no formal note. From the thickness and weight of it, she estimated that he had covered six, perhaps eight, pages. Fhe opaqueness of the envelope baffled her closer scrutiny. By examining it at various angles and in changing lights she was able to make out a word that might be "might", another that seemed to be "impossible", and a probable question-mark. No more of its mystery would the letter yield up to her in spite of the most painstaking attention. A just consideration of the probabilities, however, convinced her that this was a love-letter.

The thought brought with it the memory of other love-letters from him. Life, fulfillment, the response to her own existence, were in that letter. Perhaps it might all be lived again. Everything worth having was within her grasp, if she would but reach for it.

And then she asked herself: But was it? She had successfully forgotten this man once, or she had thought she had. She had removed him to the substance of a memory, and a memory that was diminishing and might, but for this, have soon paled out altogether. Times past were indeed beyond recovery. The finality of yesterday was inexorable. She grew cold as she realized the certainty of this knowledge and that she had at last accepted it.

And again the sun warmed her and gave her strength. She had decided. Straightway she was comforted and content. Peter Dykeman would be, in another minute, out of her life and thoughts forever. The fact was something absolute, that could be lived with. In a perfect composure she took the letter to her writing-desk, scratched out her own name and address, and readdressed it to Peter Dykeman.

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* ⅜ * » *

From outside came the approaching sound of wheels. The rural mail wagon was making its morning collection. Mrs. Frayme ran out and instinctively called to the driver, before she remembered that he was deaf. He saw her, however, and ha ted his antique equipage until she had given him the letter.

The receding wagon held her gaze. She was determined to watch it out of sight for, when it was gone, Isabella Darnell would be quite dead. The last disturbing element in this remote and pleasant existence was going more swiftly out of her life. With a smile she saw the wagon rise in silhouette and vanish on the other side of the hill. The sun smiled, too, on her resignation as she remained standing by her gate gazing in a still abstraction down the now empty road.

* * * * *

The sound of the door-bell pealed through the house. As Mrs. Frayme's maid hastened to answer it, she heard a rude pounding and formed in her mind the phrase with which she would rebuke the offender. Upon opening the door she was confronted by one of the "natives", a farmer who lived some two miles down the road. But it was his burden that brought a quick gasp of fright and astonishment from the woman. Her face paled, the intended rebuke failed her, and she began simultaneously a dozen queries. The farmer checked her.

"Don't get fussed. She's just fainted —plugged out, I reckon. I seen her runnin' after the mail wagon, shoutin' and that deaf old coot never hearin' her, and she wavin' her arms and a-stumblin' and a-fallin' and gettir.' up, and runnin' again like she was mad. Down by my orchard, she'd almost caught up with it when she keeled over—and didn't get up again. So I went down and got her."

"What," said the maid stupidly, still a little dazed, "what did she want?"

"Dunno."

The two carried Mrs. Frayme upstairs to her room. Her physical collapse had been more complete than they had at first thought. Finally, after an hour, the doctor arrived, and applied himself energetically to revive her. Mrs. Frayme at length came into consciousness. Her eyes grew wide with the effort of remembrance. She said at last, "Where's the mailwagon ? "

At the moment she spoke, the four beings in the room turned to listen to a faint, far-off screech, that might have been a gloat of triumph, or the cry of one to whom life is intolerable, or a divine period to the aspiration of those who wish to recover the past.

It was the doctor who said, "There goes the mail-train".