Here and Beyond

It was not till the following spring that I plucked up courage to tell
Mrs. Bridgeworth what had happened to me that night at Morgat.

In the first place, Mrs. Bridgeworth was in America; and after the night
in question I lingered on abroad for several months--not for pleasure,
God knows, but because of a nervous collapse supposed to be the result
of having taken up my work again too soon after my touch of fever in
Egypt. But, in any case, if I had been door to door with Grace
Bridgeworth I could not have spoken of the affair before, to her or to
any one else; not till I had been rest-cured and built up again at one
of those wonderful Swiss sanatoria where they clean the cobwebs out of
you. I could not even have written to her--not to save my life. The
happenings of that night had to be overlaid with layer upon layer of
time and forgetfulness before I could tolerate any return to them.

The beginning was idiotically simple; just the sudden reflex of a New
England conscience acting on an enfeebled constitution. I had been
painting in Brittany, in lovely but uncertain autumn weather, one day
all blue and silver, the next shrieking gales or driving fog. There is a
rough little white-washed inn out on the Pointe du Raz, swarmed over by
tourists in summer but a sea-washed solitude in autumn; and there I was
staying and trying to do waves, when some one said: "You ought to go
over to Cape something else, beyond Morgat."

I went, and had a silver-and-blue day there; and on the way back the
name of Morgat set up an unexpected association of ideas: Morgat--Grace
Bridgeworth--Grace's sister, Mary Pask--"You know my darling Mary has a
little place now near Morgat; if you ever go to Brittany do go to see
her. She lives such a lonely life--it makes me so unhappy."

That was the way it came about. I had known Mrs. Bridgeworth well for
years, but had only a hazy intermittent acquaintance with Mary Pask, her
older and unmarried sister. Grace and she were greatly attached to each
other, I knew; it had been Grace's chief sorrow, when she married my old
friend Horace Bridgeworth, and went to live in New York, that Mary, from
whom she had never before been separated, obstinately lingered on in
Europe, where the two sisters had been travelling since their mother's
death. I never quite understood why Mary Pask refused to join Grace in
America. Grace said it was because she was "too artistic"--but, knowing
the elder Miss Pask, and the extremely elementary nature of her interest
in art, I wondered whether it were not rather because she disliked
Horace Bridgeworth. There was a third alternative--more conceivable if
one knew Horace--and that was that she may have liked him too much. But
that again became untenable (at least I supposed it did) when one knew
Miss Pask: Miss Pask with her round flushed face, her innocent bulging
eyes, her old-maidish flat decorated with art-tidies, and her vague and
timid philanthropy. Aspire to Horace--!

Well, it was all rather puzzling, or would have been if it had been
interesting enough to be worth puzzling over. But it was not. Mary Pask
was like hundreds of other dowdy old maids, cheerful derelicts content
with their innumerable little substitutes for living. Even Grace would
not have interested me particularly if she hadn't happened to marry one
of my oldest friends, and to be kind to his friends. She was a handsome
capable and rather dull woman, absorbed in her husband and children, and
without an ounce of imagination; and between her attachment to her
sister and Mary Pask's worship of her there lay the inevitable gulf
between the feelings of the sentimentally unemployed and those whose
affections are satisfied. But a close intimacy had linked the two
sisters before Grace's marriage, and Grace was one of the sweet
conscientious women who go on using the language of devotion about
people whom they live happily without seeing; so that when she said:
"You know it's years since Mary and I have been together--not since
little Molly was born. If only she'd come to America! Just think...Molly
is six, and has never seen her darling auntie..." when she said this,
and added: "If you go to Brittany promise me you'll look up my Mary," I
was moved in that dim depth of one where unnecessary obligations are
contracted.