The Refugee

An Experiment on the Person of an Unexceptional Young Girl in Two Kinds of Unhappiness

DAVID CORT

IN Adamdale the neighbours were in no way surprised when Jenny Couzens, at the age of eighteen, narrowed her attention to one presentable young fellow: they had come so naturally to think of her as the "marrying sort", as one of those who by their wholesome unexceptionalness are committed to the work of making the world go 'round.

But when, at nineteen—a certain amount of water having passed under the bridge—Jenny entered a convent, the neighbours thought this, too, perfectly explicable. They were certainly very sorry for her, but they found no occasion for attempting to discover, in speculation, anything more than met the eye, for Jenny had always been a gay and innocent girl, really incapable of surprising or alarming anyone.

But after eighteen reasonably happy years and six unreasonably happy months, Jenny had died her first death. It was for her a new and astonishing experience, a disillusion whose rigours were more deadly even than the illusion which had preceded it was lovely. She had given her love away for nothing and now she found herself exploring for the first time the stricken acres of the limbo of heartbreak. Apparently she had misunderstood everything, she had thought this was the real thing, she had become, in her own mind, a woman overnight and as a woman she thought she had betrothed herself. But now she realized that she had been deficient in experience. That was all. It was necessary to learn that everything wasn't love. There were ever so many substitutes, and in future one must be wary. Once you had added disbelief to your equipment, you were immune against such errors of recognition. Thus casually Jenny plucked that bitter berry and dropped it into her consciousness.

BUT in the meanwhile her heart was broken, and she abandoned herself to taking full knowledge of the immediate emotion. It was painful, and yet it was not altogether unpleasant. One was companioned by the not too insistently gnawing fox in the bosom, but it was a real companionship: one became almost friendly with it. One's heart took over the properties of a limb, it was as though it had rested for awhile in an uncomfortable posture and had gone partly to sleep, so that now it was shot with pleasurable little twinges and mantled by a half-sensed prickling. To convert the first sharp hurt into these sensuous abstractions, it was only necessary to forget the man and the event, and to dwell on the emotion.

Naturally, it had not been so easy at first. She had been unwilling to accept the fact of the actual stature of her tragedy. It would have been intolerable then to think that it had not been a great love, a great loss. She had grafted upon him the growing ends of her capacity for emotion, she had fixed one face in her dreams to take the unvarying role of the face that confronted hers. And when she was constrained to withdraw the gift so naively given, the pitiless wrench left her severed nerves dangling like broken wires, but it had been a longer process to dispossess him of his place in her dreams. Well, that too she had done. She had accepted the fearful verity that it had not been a great love, a great loss, even though it had been necessary to minimize herself to do it. Everything had dwindled sadly from heroic dimensions, herself, her heart, her life and he, but the contraction had cost her something. With an instinct against absolute waste, she had begun to try to show some profit on the transaction. She had formulated a few rules about "life in general", had taken a new inventory and marked up the valuation opposite "experience". Thus she contrived to balance her accounts in some fashion.

BUT this emotional book-keeping was not in any sense a thrifty preparation for new enterprise. As she conceived it for the moment, she had finished. She had her rules for future conduct, but they were all negative, backward-looking, "life is not this", "life is not that". Something had happened, been completed, it made a sum as large as she wished to attempt. Life had presented her with a few facts and she wanted no more, she was willing to examine those she already had and in recapitulation and analysis to discover from them such sad truths as they might be made to yield. She decided that she had come to a fit age for philosophy and reflection, and she renounced the consolations of worldliness. But until this time, contrary to all that her contemporaries in Adamdale thought later in retrospect, she had not so much as thought of renouncing the distractions of the world. She had not thought of becoming a nun. But on the other hand she had resolved that she would not, as her heart healed, exercise it a little and a little more each day until it recovered its full health. The injury had apparently been only functional, it had not been organic, she could afford to sulk.

Wherefore, Jenny Couzens began to read Emerson and Marcus Aurelius, comfortably finding in the pages whatever she wished to find; and, it being the beginning of the summer vacation, she decided to quit the places where she might by chance meet her betrayer. To this end she persuaded her parents to send her to visit her older sister, a Mrs. Stone, who lived at no great distance with her two young children, having been separated for several years from her husband. The sister kept chiefly to herself and her children, she scarcely ever went out in society, and she lived in a comfortable and moderate style. Jenny thought it would be an ideal situation for her convalescence. Furthermore, she had always been a little impressed and mystified by her sister, she gave her the respect due one who had lived out the master-experiences, marriage, children, separation from her husband. Her sister, in effect, served the purposes of an ideal, one who was more than a match for life, a lady serene and intact who always came to the correct solution.

Mrs. Stone welcomed her sister pleasantly and gave her as much solitude as she wished. For several weeks the girl and the woman maintained a friendly and uneffusive relationship, meeting at meals and occasionally walking together for an hour or so in the evening through the country lanes. Finally, on one such evening, when the slight draughts of wind brought the sweet heavy scents of the field and the sweet delicate scents of the wood and the quiet unafraid night sounds of the birds and small animals, the two women went in silence along the upland paths, thinking each her own thoughts. And Jenny felt saddened and curiously strong and began to tell her sister in a subdued glad voice of her unhappiness, offering it to her sister proudly as a testament to the older woman's strength and wisdom.

Mrs. Stone listened without interruption to the end, but afterward, for a long while, as they walked onward, she did not say anything. Jenny presently understood that her sister was weeping, making no sound, only letting the heavy dreadful tears slide helplessly down her face. The tears had no connection with the woman's will or memory, they flowed silently and indifferently from unimaginable obscure depths, the source-springs of being. The girl was as embarrassed as possible and glad of the dark and, through the terrible silent lamentation of her companion, wondered to herself why her story, of which she found now that she was merely a little vain, should make her sister so unhappy.

AS the two climbed higher, the breeze freshened and the odours of the night took on an almost unbearable sweetness, yet lightened and elusive, a drug impossible of surfeit. Jenny breathed it in, exhilarated and ashamed, trying to compel herself to a recognition of her sister's sorrow. But the woman seemed to be taking no notice of her, she walked on more rapidly, and occasionally moved her head from side to side as if to give the impression that she was still enjoying the evening. When they came to a dark place in the road, she took out her handkerchief and wiped her face dry. A little later, she said in a level voice: "I don't want you to feel, Jenny, that you must say something when I have finished. I simply want to talk for a little while." As though it were a set recitation completely memorized, Mrs. Stone rehearsed in rapid, toneless words, a story that Jenny had often read in novels.

Mrs. Stone, nine years late, was in love with her husband. Before her marriage, her husband had been impossibly in love with her; he had been a lover self-tormented into wild reproaches and black gloom. The mere fact of so violent a passion had antagonized her, she had over a period of two years baited and toyed with him until, at last, exhausted and still a little apprehensive, she had married him. With marriage, his passion and his adoration became only the more intense and she continued to flinch from the obligations his faith attempted to impose on her. They had one child and, in the third year of their marriage, she had begun an experimental affair with another man, really hoping that by that indirection she might come to appreciate her husband the more. But, as luck would have it, she found herself with child by the other man. No art could divert her husband's suspicions and the furies of his jealousy. He was a man in the old tradition and he was incapable of being "civilized" about infidelity. He was rended by every torture, he lost the way of sleeping, he hardly knew what he was doing or saying. But he arrived at length at a decision. He left his wife permanently.

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Then the design was made complete. Perhaps Mrs. Stone fell in love with her husband for the first time, perhaps she had always been in love with him. But the devils that had tormented him were nothing to those that now set upon Mrs. Stone. The knowledge that it was she who had taken the way, the intuition that there was no recourse, the vain remorse, in unending penance she submitted her heart to these fires and ever fanned the flames to a fiercer heat. Too late she knew that the only life she was destined to live was finished. Like the shades of those who have died, her only power was to remember the bright fields above, nor could she purchase any forgetfulness. All the elements of happiness had been given her, she had disarranged them only a little, and she had nothing. Her loss did not diminish, it grew more vast. It was irreducible to mere emotion, it continually took fresh force from the remembered event. No consolations of disillusion were allowed her. As time went on, her loss assumed the ever more gigantic dimensions of what-might-have-been and all sophistries were impotent to minimize it. And her husband, after two years abroad, wrote her a pleasant, forgiving letter, saying that he had been very silly in the past, would not divorce her unless she wished, but that he found it more convenient to keep a separate establishment. The last blow being dealt her, Mrs. Stone nevertheless managed to maintain the outward forms of life. She had last heard from her husband the year before.

The two were nearing home as Mrs. Stone finished her story. Jenny was grateful that no word was expected from her. When they came to the house, they bade one another good night, and Jenny went to her room. As she undressed, she felt that she did not know what to think, but the stirrings of an anger at her sister began in her. She turned out the light and got into bed, but she was unable to fall at once into sleep. The walk had tired her, and she should have been drowsy, but though she closed her lids over her eyes, the eyes remained wide awake. Now, from deep within her, she felt a rising consternation, the coming of dark legions of fear and weakness. The unhappiness she had had before this evening had been so neat, so closed; an event within itself; a backward looking. But now it was forgotten, supplanted by a greater amorphous unhappiness, and Jenny looked forward into life and was terrified. Evil powers swarmed around her head. She felt life as a quantity, a malicious abstraction, life as a sunken road of unguessed potentialities lying in wait for her; the life in her own members waiting to feel and to be destroyed. The cruel play without meaning must be played out; even now the other actors were coming relentlessly to the rendezvous to which she had been pledged at birth. She huddled between the bed-clothes: monstrous and unreasonable terrors mounted within her, and she made up her mind that very soon she would become a nun.