Arnim Mr. Skeffington

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5080-2672-3
Verlag: Charles River Editors
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 385 Seiten

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Elizabeth von Arnim was a popular British writer in the early 20th century. One of Arnim's best known novels is Mr. Skeffington. The book was made into a film that starred Bette Davis and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Arnim, Elizabeth von

Leseproben

I
.................. FANNY, WHO HAD MARRIED A Mr. Skeffington, and long ago, for reasons she considered compelling, divorced him, after not having given him a thought for years, began, to her surprise, to think of him a great deal. If she shut her eyes, she could see him behind the fish-dish at breakfast; and presently, even if she didn’t shut her eyes, she could see him behind almost anything. What particularly disturbed her was that there was no fish. Only during Mr. Skeffington’s not very long reign as a husband had there been any at breakfast, he having been a man tenacious of tradition, and liking to see what he had seen in his youth still continuing on his table. With his disappearance, the fish-dish, of solid silver, kept hot by electricity, disappeared too—not that he took it with him, for he was much too miserable to think of dishes, but because Fanny’s breakfast, from the date of his departure to the time she had got to now, was half a grapefruit. Naturally she was a good deal worried by seeing him and the dish so distinctly, while knowing that neither he nor it were really there. She very nearly went to a doctor about it; but never having been much disposed to go to doctors she thought she would wait a little first. For after all, reasoned Fanny, who considered herself a very sensible woman, she was soon going to have a fiftieth birthday, and on reaching so conspicuous, so sobering a landmark in one’s life, what more natural than to hark back and rummage, and what more inevitable, directly one rummaged, than to come across Mr. Skeffington? He had played, for a time, a leading part in her life. He had been, she recognized, the keystone of her career. It was thanks to the settlements he had made on her, which were the settlements of an extremely rich and extremely loving man, that she was so well off, and it was thanks to his infidelities—but ought one to thank infidelities? Well, never mind—that she was free. She had adored being free. Twenty-two years of enchanting freedom she had had, and adoring every minute of them—except the minutes at the end of a love affair, when things suddenly seemed unable to avoid being distressing, and except the minutes quite lately, when she was recovering from a terrible illness, and had nothing to do, but think, and began thinking about Mr. Skeffington. Perhaps it was the highly unpleasant birthday looming so close that set her off in these serious directions. Perhaps it was being so wretchedly weak after diphtheria. Perhaps it was the way her lovely hair had fallen out in handfuls. But set off she did, and he who had once been her husband appeared to respond to the treatment with an alacrity which startled her, and gradually became quite upsettingly vivid and real. This, though, had only happened in the last few months, and she was sure would soon, when she was quite strong again, pass. Up to her illness, how unclouded her life had been! Really a quite radiant life, full of every sort of amusing and exciting things like would-be lovers—at one time the whole world appeared to want to be Fanny’s lover—and all because Mr. Skeffington was never able to resist his younger typists. How angry those typists had made her, till it dawned on her that what they really were were gates to freedom. When at last she saw them in their true light, as so many bolts shot back and doors flung open, she left off being angry, and began instead—strictly speaking, she didn’t suppose she ought to have—to rejoice. No, she oughtn’t to have rejoiced; but how difficult it was not to like being without Mr. Skeffington. At no time had she enjoyed her marriage. She was very sorry, but really she hadn’t. Among other things, he was a Jew, and she wasn’t. Not that that would have mattered, since she was without prejudices, if he hadn’t happened to look so exactly like a Jew. It wasn’t a bit necessary that he should. Lots of people she knew had married Jews, and none of them looked so exactly like one as Job (Mr. Skeffington’s name was Job, a name, everybody agreed, impossible to regard as other than unfortunate). Still, he couldn’t help that, and certainly he had been very kind. Being an upright girl, who believed in sticking to her vows and giving as good as she got, she too had been very kind. Her heart, however, hadn’t been in it. A marriage, she found, with someone of a different breed is fruitful of small rubs; and she had had to change her religion too, which annoyed her, in spite of her not really having any. So that when he offered her those repeated chances of honourably getting rid of him, though she began by being outraged she ended by being pleased. Fanny well knew that her reactions to Mr. Skeffington’s infidelities weren’t at all the proper ones, but she couldn’t help that. She was perfectly aware she ought to have gone on growing angrier and angrier, and more and more miserable; and instead, things happened this way: Obliged to forgive the first typist, such was his penitence and such his shame, the second one, though humiliating, didn’t distress her quite so acutely. Over the third she was almost calm. The fourth made her merely wonder there should be so many young persons liking him enough for that sort of thing, but she supposed it must be his money. The fifth she called on, earnestly inquiring of the alarmed and shrinking creature what she saw in him. At the sixth, she went out and bought some new hats; and after the seventh, she left. Left, and never came back. Left, and beheld him no more till they faced each other in the Divorce Court. Since then she hadn’t set eyes on Mr. Skeffington, except once, not long after the final kicking free, when her car—his car, really, if you looked at it dispassionately—was held up in Pall Mall at the very moment when he, walking to his club, chanced to be passing. There she sat, such a lovely thing, delicately fair in the dark frame of the car, obviously someone everybody would long to be allowed to love, the enormous hat of the early summer of 1914 perched on hair whose soft abundance he had often, in happier days, luxuriously stroked, and was so completely already uninterested in him that she hardly bothered to turn her head. Wasn’t this hard? Now, wasn’t this terribly hard? Mr. Skeffington asked himself, his whole being one impassioned protest. Hadn’t he worshipped her, lived for her, thought only of her—even, somehow, when he was thinking of the pretty little girl in the office as well? And what, in the long run, were the pretty little girls in the office to a man? Nothing; nothing; less than nothing, compared to a darling, exquisite, and, as he had supposed, permanent wife. But Fanny, sideways through her eyelashes, did see him, saw how he hesitated and half stopped, saw how red he grew, thought: Poor Job, I believe he’s still in love with me, and idly mused, as she was driven on up St. James’s Street in the direction of her attractive house—his attractive house really, if you looked at it dispassionately—on the evident capacity of men to be in love with several women at once. For she was sure there were several women in Job’s background at the very moment he was hesitating on the pavement, and turning red for love of her. He couldn’t do, she now thoroughly well knew, without several—one in his home, and one in his office, and one God knew where else; perhaps at Brighton, whither he was so fond of going for a breath, he used to explain, of sea air. Yet here he was half stopping when he saw her, and gazing at her with those opaque dog’s eyes of his as though she were the single love of his life. And she, who was a believer in one thing at a time, fell to considering her patience, her positively angelic patience, over his lapses. Seven lapses, before she did anything about them. Why, she might have divorced him, completely justified even in her mother’s eyes, who was all for wives sticking to their husbands, after the second lapse, and started on her delicious career of independence at twenty-three instead of twenty-eight. Then she would have had five whole years more of it, with everybody bent on making up for his shameful treatment of her, and for what it was imagined she must have suffered. Five years her patience had cost her; five years of happiness. And she asked herself, as she went into her flower-filled library—the quantity of flowers that arrived for Fanny every day at this period had to be seen to be believed—and found Lord Conderley of Upswich, an elderly (she thought him old, but he was, in fact, under fifty) and impassioned admirer, waiting to take her out to lunch—she asked herself what other woman would have been such an angel of forbearance. Or was it, really, not so much forbearance as that she didn’t care? Yes, thought Fanny, who was an honest girl, and liked to see things straight, it wasn’t being an angel; it was because, after the third lapse, she simply hadn’t cared. But that was a long while ago. It didn’t seem long, but it was. Then she was twenty-eight. Now she would soon be fifty. A generation had passed, indeed had flashed by, since she saw Mr. Skeffington that morning on the pavement of Pall Mall, and the plovers’ eggs with which, at the Berkeley, Conderley had afterwards ardently fed her—solid enough the hard-boiled things had seemed, as she cracked their shells—where were they now? Reappeared as flowers,...