Early Autumn quotes

it did not belong in this genteel world. On the fringes of the party there was some drunkenness among the undergraduates imported from Cambridge, but there was very little gaiety.

The champagne fell upon barren ground. The party drooped.

Though the affair was given primarily to place Sybil Pentland upon the matrimonial market of this compact world, it served, too, as an introduction for Thérèse Callendar, who had come to spend the summer at Brook Cottage across the stony meadows on the other side …

It was not that she surrounded herself by adoring young men eager to dance with her. She was, after all, a woman of forty-six, and she had no tolerance for mooning boys whose conversation was limited to bootlegging and college clubs.

It was a success of a singular sort, a triumph of indifference.

People like Aunt Cassie Struthers remembered her as a shy and awkward young girl with a plain face, a good figure and brick-red hair which twenty years ago had been spoken of as “Poor Sabine’s ugly red hair.”

It was not only because this was true, but because people like Aunt Cassie knew it was true, that she aroused interest and even indignation.

She had turned her back upon them all and no awful fate had overtaken her; instead, she had taken a firm hold upon life and made of it a fine, even a glittering, success; and this is a thing which is not easily forgiven.

As she moved through the big rooms—complete and perfect from her superbly done, burnished red hair to the tips of her silver slippers—there was about her an assurance and an air of confidence in her own perfection that bordered upon insolence.

for in Aunt Cassie’s speech God seemed to have a hand in everything.

He had a way of delivering trials and blessings indiscriminately, and so in the end became responsible for everything.

Indeed, she grew a bit spiteful about Sabine, for there was in the back of her mind the memory of an encounter, a day or two earlier, when she had been put completely to rout.

She sighed abysmally and continued, “But, then, we mustn’t judge. I suppose the poor girl has had a great deal of misery. I pity her to the depths of my heart!”

In Aunt Cassie’s speeches, in every phrase, there was always a certain mild theatrical overtone as if she sought constantly to cast a sort of melodramatic haze over all she said.

Nothing was ever stated simply. Everything from the sight of a pot of sour cream to the death of her husband affected her extravagantly, to the depths of her soul.

A sigh answered her … a sigh filled with implications regarding Aunt Cassie’s position as a lonely, ill, bereft, widowed creature for whom life was finished long ago.

“I am not young any longer, Sabine,” she said.

“And I feel that the old ought to give way to the young. There comes a time. …”

… I am just the same as I have always been, only tonight I have spoken out.

We all live in a dream here⁠ ⁠… a dream that some day will turn sharply into a nightmare.

And then what will we do? What will you do … and Aunt Cassie and all the rest?”

They never even told her the truth about Anson’s mother, the old woman who lived in solitude in the north wing. She was, they said, too ill at the moment to see anyone.

Pentlands, in that far-off day, had seemed to the tired, friendless girl like some vast, soft green bed where she could fling herself down and rest forever

, a world where she could make friends and send down roots that would hold her secure for all time. To a hotel child Pentlands was a paradise;

It seemed that life grew more and more tenuous and complicated, more blurred and indistinct, until at times it became simply a morass of minute problems in which she found herself mired and unable to act. No one spoke directly any more.

It was like living in a world of shadows.

And this old man, her father-in-law, was the greatest puzzle of all, because it was impossible ever to know how much he understood of what went on about him, how much he chose to ignore in the belief that by denying its existence it would …

She had been born thus, and now as a woman she found that in a way it was less a curse than a blessing.

In a world which survived only by deceiving itself, she found that seeing the truth and knowing it made her strong.

Here, perhaps, lay the reason why all of them had come to depend upon her.

It was a journey begun years ago as a kind of pleasure colored by hope, which for a long time now, bereft of all hope, had become merely a monotonous dreary duty.

It was like a journey of penance made by some pilgrim on his knees up endless nights of stairs.

For more than twenty years, as far back as Olivia could remember, he had been absent from the house for a night but twice, and then only on occasions of life and death.

And she felt a sudden almost warm sense of returning memories, roused by Aunt Cassie’s passion for overstatement.

Aunt Cassie could never bring herself to say simply, “I’m going to die” which was not at all true. She must say, “I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”

Sabine said, “Oh, no. … Oh, no. … Don’t say that.”

“Everything?” echoed Sabine.

“Has anyone in the world got everything?”

“It is Olivia’s fault if she hasn’t everything. All the materials are there. She has a good husband … a husband who never looks at other women.”

Sabine’s artificially crimson mouth took on a slow smile.

“It would be too bad if the Pentland family drove two wives insane⁠—one after the other.”

Again Aunt Cassie came near to defeat by losing her composure. She snorted, and Sabine helped her out by asking: “And Anson?” ironically. “What is dear Anson doing?”

Somewhere she had learned all this.

She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.

They talked for a time, idly and pleasantly, with a sense of understanding unusual in two people who had known each other for so short a time;

At ten o’clock each night John Pentland bade them good night and went off to bed, and at eleven Anson, after arranging his desk neatly and placing his papers in their respective files, and saying to Olivia,

“I wouldn’t sit up too late, if I were you, when you are so tired,”

left them and disappeared. Soon after him, Sybil kissed her mother and climbed the stairs past all the ancestors.

“I’ll tell you, then,” he was saying.

“I’ve been seeing a great deal of Sybil in the hope that I should see a little of her mother.”

She did not answer him. She simply sat there, speechless, overcome by confusion, as if she had been a young girl with her first lover. She was even made a little dizzy by the sound of his voice.

She was able now simply to sit there politely as she had once done, listening while the old woman talked on and on; only now she did not even listen with attention.

It seemed to her at times that Aunt Cassie was like some insect beating itself frantically against a pane of glass, trying over and over again with an unflagging futility to enter where it was impossible to enter.

It was Sabine who gave her a sudden glimpse of penetration into this instinct about Aunt Cassie, Sabine who spent all her time finding out about people.

“And now she goes about like an angel of pity, a very brisk angel of pity, a harpy in angel’s clothing. She has played her role well. Everyone believes in her as a frail, good, unhappy woman.

Some of the saints must have been very like her. Some of them must have been trying old maids.

”

She experienced, too, an odd and satisfying feeling of reality, of truth, as if in some way the air all about her had become cleared and freshened.

Death was not a thing one could deny by pretense. Death was real.

It marked the end of something, definitely and clearly for all time. There could be no deceptions about death.

The hall seemed suddenly alive with people, whispering and murmuring together, and there was a sound of hysterical sobbing from some frightened servant.

Death, which ought to occur in the quiet beauty of solitude, was being robbed of all its dignity.

They would behave like this for days. She knew that it was only now, in the midst of all that pitiful hubbub, that she had lost her son. He had been hers still, after a fashion, while she was alone there in the room.

It seemed to Olivia that there was in the sound of it some dark power which, penetrating the stillness of the old house, shattered the awesome silence that had settled down at last with the approach of death.

It was as if life were celebrating its victory over death, in a savage, wild, exultant triumph.

It was music, too, that sounded strange and passionate in the thin, clear air of the New England night, such music as none of them had ever heard there before;

For a moment she caught a quick flash of the sudden bad temper which sometimes betrayed him.

“It’s because you’re so damned ladylike. Sometimes I wish you were a servant or a scrub-woman.”

“And then I wouldn’t be the same—would I?”

“Shall we tell her?” asked Jean in a furious whisper.

“No⁠ ⁠… never tell anything in Durham.”

The spell was broken now and Jean was angry. Rising, he shouted at Thérèse, “Go and chase your old bugs and leave us in peace!” He knew that, like her mother, Thérèse was watching them scientifically, as if they were a pair of insects.

Olivia was silent, but beneath the silence there ran a torrent of cold, rebellious thoughts.

Being a Pentland, then, was not a matter of blood: it was an idea, even an ideal.

She thought fiercely, “I’m not a Pentland. I’m alive. I am myself. I’ve not been absorbed into nothing. All these years haven’t changed me so much. They haven’t made me into a Pentland.”

It’s why they hate each other so. She’s Cassie turned inside out, as you might say. They’d both sacrifice everything for the sake of stirring up some trouble or calamity that would interest them.

They live⁠ ⁠… vicariously.

”

None of them played any part in the course of her life. They did not matter. She had no fear of them; rather they seemed to her now fussy and pitiful.

But John Pentland believed. It was that which made the difference.

Stumbling along half-blindly, she found herself presently at the bridge where the lane from Pentlands crossed the river on its way to Brook Cottage.

It was as if everything, each little thought and action, became more and more tangled and hopeless, more and more intricate and complicated with the passing of each day.

There was no way out save to cut the web boldly and escape.

“No,” she thought, “I will not stay. … I will not sacrifice myself. Tomorrow I shall tell Michael that when Sybil is gone, I will do whatever he wants me to do. …”

Everything was the same, even Higgins, whom she had mistaken for a ghost as he crossed the mist-hung meadows a few hours earlier.

It was as if there were two realities at Pentlands⁠—one, it might have been said, of the daylight and the other of the darkness; as if one life⁠—a secret, hidden one⁠—lay beneath the bright, pleasant surface of a world composed of green fields and trees, the sound of barking dogs, the faint odor of coffee arising from the kitchen, and the sound of a groom whistling while he saddled a thoroughbred.

It was a misfortune that chance had given her an insight into both the bright, pleasant world and that other dark, nebulous one. The others, save perhaps old John Pentland, saw only this bright, easy life that had begun to stir all about her.

Yes, it would appear thus to a stranger, so it might be that the dark, fearful world existed only in her imagination. Perhaps she herself was ill, a little unbalanced and morbid … perhaps a little touched like the old woman in the north wing.

Still, she thought, most houses, most families, must have such double lives⁠—one which the world saw and one which remained hidden.

As she pulled on her boots she heard the voice of Higgins, noisy and cheerful, exchanging amorous jests with the new Irish kitchen-maid, marking her already for his own.

For Mrs. Pulsifer was certain to go to the bottom of the affair, if for no other reason than to do harm to Sabine; she had once lived in a house on Chestnut Street with a bow-window which swept the entrance to every house.

She was one of John Pentland’s dead, who lived by watching others live.

From the moment she encountered Mr. Gavin on the turnpike until the tragedy which occurred two days later, life at Pentlands appeared to lose all reality for Olivia.

… I’m going to Newport for two weeks and then to Biarritz for October. Thérèse wants to go to Oxford.” She grinned sardonically. “There’s a bit of New England in her, after all … this education business.

I wanted a femme du monde for a daughter and God and New England sent me a scientist who would rather wear flat heels and look through a microscope.

It’s funny how children turn out.”

“You were wise. … I think Thérèse is right, perhaps … righter than any of us.

She says that nature has a contempt for marriage certificates.

Respectability can’t turn decay into life … and Jean is alive. … So is his mother.”

“Day after tomorrow I shall be forty!”

Sabine was tracing the design of roses on Horace Pentland’s Savonnerie carpet with the tip of her parasol. “Gather them while you may,” she said and went out into the blazing heat to cross the meadows to Brook Cottage.

Left alone, Olivia knew she was glad that day after tomorrow Sabine would no longer be here. She saw now what John Pentland meant when he said, “Sabine ought never to have come back here.”

She went away without troubling to finish what she had meant to say, lost again in an overwhelming sense of the futility of everything.

She felt, she thought, like an idiot standing in the middle of an empty field, making gestures.

… upon them at the mention of horses, and as she approached she was struck, as she always was, by the fiery beauty of the animal, the pride of her lean head, the trembling of the fine nostrils as she breathed, the savagery of her eye.

She was a strange, half-evil, beautiful beast.

Olivia heard Higgins saying that it was no use trying to breed her … an animal like that, who kicked and screamed and bit at the very sight of another horse. …

The sudden action brought a lump into her throat, and yet she did not want to be pitied.

She hated pity, because it implied weakness on her part.

“Oh,” she said quickly, “they’ll come back from time to time. … I think that some day they may come back here to live.”

Perhaps, deep down beneath all the fierce reticence of his nature, there lay a humanity far greater than any she had ever encountered. She thought, “And I have always believed him hard and cold and disapproving.”

She was beginning to fathom the great strength that lay in his fierce isolation, the strength of a man who had always been alone.

“And you, Olivia?” he asked presently. “Are you happy?”

You see, Olivia, there are people … people like you … who have to be strong enough to look out for the others. It’s a hard task … and sometimes a cruel one.

If it weren’t for such people the world would fall apart and we’d see it for the cruel, unbearable place it is.

That’s why I’ve trusted everything to you. That’s what I was trying to tell you the other night. You see, Olivia, I know you … I know there are things which people like us can’t do. … Perhaps it’s because we’re weak or foolish—who knows?

It was a strange sensation, as if he took possession of her, leaving her powerless to act, prisoning her again in that terrible wall of rightness in which he believed. The familiar sense of his strength frightened her, because it seemed a force so irresistible.

It was the strength of one who was more than right; it was the strength of one who believed.

She had a fierce impulse to turn from him and to run swiftly, recklessly, across the wet meadows toward Michael, leaving forever behind her the placid, beautiful old house beneath the elms.