The Old Lady

We’re stepping into the experimental world of the 1920s with a haunting piece of short fiction titled “The Old Lady”, by Evelyn Scott. 

Originally published in the May 1925 issue of The Dial—the premier magazine of the American modernist movement—this story, “The Old Lady”, was so well-regarded it was selected for The Best Short Stories of 1925. In it, we see a master of psychological depth at work, peeling back the layers of aging, memory, and the stifling weight of tradition.

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Transcript

Speaker 0:03

Welcome back to Narrated Archives, the podcast where we dust off the forgotten gems of literary history. I'm your host and narrator, Sally Barron, and I'm so thrilled to have you here. Today, we're stepping into the experimental world of the 1920s with a haunting piece of short fiction titled The Old Lady by Evelyn Scott. But before we dive into the text, let's meet the woman behind the words, the enigmatic and fiercely independent Evelyn Scott. Born Elsie Dunn in Clarksville, Tennessee. She rejected her southern aristocratic upbringing early on. In 1913, at age 20, she caused a scandal by running off to Brazil with a married man, adopting the pseudonym Evelyn Scott to evade detection. Living in near poverty in the Brazilian backlands, she began writing the poetry and prose that would eventually establish her as a leading voice of the avant-garde. Upon returning to New York in 1919, she became a fixture of Greenwich Village's bohemian scene. Her work appeared alongside greats like James Joyce and T. S. Elliott in journals like Poetry and The Dial. She is best known for her landmark 1929 Civil War novel, The Wave, which was a critical and commercial triumph. However, her uncompromising and experimental style eventually fell out of fashion, and she spent her final years in relative obscurity. Today, Scott is celebrated as a lost modernist, recognized for her pioneering use of stream of consciousness and her fearless exploration of the female psyche. Originally published in the May 1925 issue of The Dial, the premier magazine of the American Modernist Movement, this story, The Old Lady, was so well regarded it was selected for the best stories of 1925. In it, we see a master of psychological depth at work, peeling back the layers of aging, memory, and the stifling weight of tradition.

Speaker 2:26

 The Old Lady The old lady was often seen to be walking on the beaches, overlooked by the hotels. She had been tall, but was now stooped, and always advanced slowly and with the help of a cane. In spite of the expensive soberness of her dress, of fine stuffs not quite in fashion, yet much discussed by the maids in her hotel, who expected generous remuneration for their services to her, the old lady had not that aloof confidence in herself and her position, which is the usual endowment of wealth. She smiled too frequently into the faces of those who looked at her, and her excessive benevolence was like a subtle self apology. Her thoughts could not be read, and that was fortunate. When she awakened in the morning in a stately bed, from which, against an opposite wall of her large room, she saw an armoire flanked with mirrors give back her image. She always, when possible, avoided the contemplation of this reflection, or, compelled to confront a revelation which caused her pain, remarked inwardly, can it be I? And tried vainly to recall another, almost obliterated impression of her own features, queer that, remembering so distinctly the most minute incidents of a past that had been filled with dramatic interest, able to visualize with exactitude the appearances of each of her friends, today dead or separated from her by years and oceans. She had so much difficulty in piecing together from fragments retained from the lost years, even the vaguest representation of her own countenance, as it had been caught in the looking glasses long ago. People who had been dear to her, and even the people she had once disliked, had not aged, nor had they died, in that they existed continually in her thoughts in every moment of time. Only her own personality, in its once useful aspect, had disappeared in the nothingness of a feeble present. She sighed and said to herself, Well, I was never pretty. Yet without being pretty, she had commanded affection and even very strong feeling. It frightened her a little that she had become someone whom she did not know, someone whom she could not look at with clear eyes. For all the sadness which pervaded her meditations, she did not, with truth, call herself unhappy. She slept badly, dreaming often of her married daughter whom she had not seen for many months, and of a dead son. But always, after noting the thinning of darkness, by a dawn yet scarcely visible and feeling upon her dry cheeks and in her scanty hair, the still wind which rushed in a tide of freshness from the suddenly audible sea, she would turn upon her side, and, as if some sentinel duty of the night had been accomplished, find that she could rest easily. Then, from this hour into the morning, she would sleep like a child, and awaken when the sun was shining rosily upon the gilt flowered bedroom walls, while the lace curtains between the window hangings of brown and cream brocade, seemed to expand as with an ecstatic delicacy, and, in the gilded foliage of the dark plain tree beyond them, birds sang. Her maid, entering the chamber, and bringing the morning coffee in an immaculate service, received a cheery bonjour, but, offering to assist the old lady at her toilette, was invariably sent away with a refusal couched in the same terms Not yet, Francois, the time for that has not yet come. And the old lady dressed herself. She waited for something miraculous to occur. Every morning approached her with an adventure which, finally, in the heat of noontime, had not revealed itself. She felt that Francois was a good girl, who should be treated generously, and the maid, stout, handsome, and slyly officious, with the characteristics of a peasant initiate in the ways of the rich, adopted in her manner toward her prosperous mistress the attitude of a mother. The old lady was not yet deceived as to the motives which prompted this consideration, yet, in the passiveness of temperament endangered by old age, did not condemn. Well, poor girl, I must try to do something for her. I'll leave her something in my will. And the old lady felt drawn to the girl by the very exposure of self-interest, which, it seemed, should have been repelling. To know that someone depended on you, if only for money, made you feel that your presence in the world was yet of importance. Generous pity relieved the heart of the old lady from the oppression of exhausted but persistent emotions which had no outlet. There was no one to whom the old lady could express herself. Yes, she was lonely, though had she been asked if, in this loneliness, she wished to depart to an oblivion in which loneliness is not felt, she would have said no, sincerely and emphatically. Trifles which had once been of no account to her, objects and incidents which, in her youth, had failed to interest her, now compelled her whole attention and were infinitely precious. She loved her careful walks through the French town. She loved the hardy appearance of the cabbages planted in small gardens behind low fences covered with creepers. A neglected bush of marigolds, jutting ruddy colored blossoms beyond a wall, excited in her a tenderness for growing things. She watched the dark swallows in their bat flights above a puddle in the road, and their shrill beats coming vaguely to her deaf ears, made her think of them innocently as lambs. Strong sunlight, stagnant upon the plaster facade of a dwelling, enchanted her, when, with a final exertion of her ever waning strength, she climbed slowly among heaps of refuse, to the summit of a crooked street which terminated on a hillside, and could gaze below her between ancient roofs which interceded in the view, at the countryside, the still avalanches of the mountains, the small villages crusted under the red roofs that surmounted the houses, the acres of vines trembling outspread in the soaring light of morning, and resembling still lakes of green silk, the immense silence which lay beyond the town in which she was visiting, seemed to enwrap her benevolently, and the whole world, dissension and struggle obliterated, was a friendly place. It was only noontime, in the heat of the day, when, after taking her luncheon in the table d'aut downstairs, and, with nodding head, listened for a half an hour to some Spanish singers, who, on a terrace ornamented with palms and young trees in pots, and covered over by a pergola on which roses twined, were entertaining the guests of the hotel. She rested in her bedroom that she felt depressed. The sunshine filled the street below her window, but the stillness it made, as the heat arrested the play of children and hushed their voices, and footsteps became so occasional that they echoed on the cobblestones as footsteps echo in the night. This stillness was terrible and oppressive. She lowered the Venetian blinds upon her balconies, and in a semi-glow, in which the unchanging aspect of objects in her room became pronounced, she lay on her bed again, her eyes closed, and tried to sleep. Sleep was impossible. Her cheeks, pale and withered and covered by a scarcely perceptible down of white, were hot and parched, with no relief from the violence of the light, that even though drawn curtains could be discerned in the stolid brilliance of a stucco building opposite the hotel, she moistened her lips, several times adjusted the pillow beneath her head, and, without being conscious of the sounds she uttered, moaned slightly. Her health was bad. At any moment she might have a recurrence of the heart trouble from which she had suffered, a malady from which she would, at last, most certainly die. But it was not of death that she thought. Indeed, she refused to think of death. It pleased her better to imagine that she would live a long time, a long, long, long time. And when, in her promenades, her steps turned inadvertently toward the cemetery, with its crumbling mausoleums, making little intimate avenues for the dead below the black green lines of conical cypress trees, she experienced, in her first glimpse of the tombs, decorated for a perpetual holiday with wreaths of colored beads, black, violet, pale blue and white, and with bouquets of artificial flowers, a sudden shock of fright, of amazement, of some emotion which she did not attempt to describe, and turned back. Why was she traveling like this, going all over Europe, from one hotel to another, rarely encountering an acquaintance and certainly not amusing herself in the ways habitual with tourists? In her young days she had been much too occupied with personal affairs to give much of her energy to travel. There was a great deal of the world that she had never seen. Now that her daughter was married, absorbed by interest in which the old lady had but slight part, and her son was dead. She, the old lady, had uninterrupted opportunity to see odd corners of the globe that had always intrigued her, even the names of the towns she visited were those that had, years ago, seemed to her remarkable. Besides, she had a terror, continual if not dwelt upon, of being unwanted, and so, rather than remain as a tolerated outsider in her daughter's home, she had preferred the company of strangers who were not obligated to show her any attentions that were not quite spontaneous. On the terrace of the hotel, under the pergola covered with roses and with foliage which had turned blue and artificial in the glow of the electric lamps, the old lady sat in the evenings, watching those who came and went from the dancing in the saloon, while she tried to make herself unobtrusive. If a young couple approaching her ignored her, and it could be seen that they were covertly making love to one another, the old lady moved further away into the shadows and out of hearing. There she was able, when lifting her gaze, to discern the stars which at one instance appeared to her quite brilliant, while the next minute she saw only darkness, and could hear, distant under the rotating melody of a waltz played by the orchestra, a rushing sound in her ears, which might be the sea and might only be the beating of her own heart. She always preferred to think the sound was the sea, and then she would rise and walk about, still clinging to the shadows, and because she was forgotten, feeling her own person as the person of another whom she always desired to forget. No, the day was happier than the night. She loved children. In her black dress and bonnet, she often walked with her stick along the beaches. There she encountered children. She recalled the delights of her own childhood, and longed to be able in some manner, to indicate to the children in some way which would convince them that she had been a child, and that childhood was not foreign to her, as they supposed. And she was humiliated by something grotesque in this longing, as if she had convicted herself of a jealousy of youth. The children paid no heed to her, and, screaming as they ran, they brushed past her blowing skirts, brushed past her and ran down to the sea, feeling a pain which was so ignoble that she refused to recognize it. She thought, they are so young, they don't understand. And she prayed to be able always to love children as she did now, and to wish for them, with her whole being, saturate with gratitude for a happy past, a continuance of their light-heartedness. After such an experience, returning to the hotel, she wrote letters, to keep herself from growing stale, as she smilingly called it, letters to her daughter, letters to old acquaintances. Some of them had almost ceased to take account of her existence, and the reward for this insistent attention to those who were far away, perhaps forever, was an interest in the coming of the postman, so keen that it embarrassed her. Often the mails brought her nothing at all, or there came a letter from some old friend who, burdened with age, expressed herself entirely in the utterance of complaints. Poor Jane. Poor Sally poor Louisa, the old lady would say, and try to evade the fact that she had anticipated a letter of a different kind, a letter containing something stimulating, something of special interest, or something complimentary to herself. It seemed to her that her own troubles would have been quite bearable if only her dear old friends could find, as she did, the philosophical compensations of maturity. Occasionally in her travels, she encountered a woman like herself, old, isolate, seeking, in new sights and scenes, a substitute for the personal drama which was finished. Poor woman, the old lady would say of the other old woman. Then, suddenly, realizing that the one she pitied was like herself, and alarmed by the sense of an intolerable identity, she would conjure up cheerful thoughts and, from that time forward, gently avoid the new acquaintance, and this without any intention of being cruel, but simply to preserve something necessary to her. We must all live our own lives. We old people have no right to prey upon our children, she often said. It was this conviction which made her secretly a little afraid of her grandchildren of whom her daughter sent her photographs. The daughter who, with the dead son, had been for many years the one absorption of the old lady's life. When she meditated upon the joys of maternity and the intimate relations of a family, the old lady became confused. In some manner, in spite of her devotion, her attitude toward her children had been an error, but an error which she would never be able to localize within her or describe to herself accurately. She only felt that such error, or its equivalent, must be common to all the world, and in apologizing so constantly for herself, she apologized for others, too, and found that any emotion which was not pity had become incomprehensible to her. The most frightening thing of all was that pity itself required a defense, and her very desire to confess for herself and admit for others inadequacy, without condemning it, was the basis of her real apartness from her former life. She wanted to state all this intelligibly, but she had never been able to do so. Her thoughts became lost again in the past, when her eyes filled with tears, and the grief she had felt at her husband's death came back to her, not the grief she had experienced at the time, to which her health had succumbed while her reason was threatened, but another despair, which was without any quality of protest, and which she vainly attempted to unify with the emotions of twenty years before. She even tried to grieve more, but without success. It was her present incapacity for strong passion which drove her, in her phantom-like existence, to dependence on routine and the concrete regularity of meal hours, had become as important to her as any critical event. In the vast dining saloon with its glass front overlooking the water, she was punctual at one o'clock and at half past seven, and, though her appetite was variable, she was always one of the last to leave the table. What nice young people those two in the corner were, the ones who were newly married, and what an excellent mamma was the stout woman of thirty with the little daughter. The old lady usually had Had some pleasant remark for the waiter, who, good humoured and polite, was ready to serve her immediately upon her entrance into the room, though he was somewhat perfunctory and reserved his most refined solicitude for persons who, not poorer than she was, were more difficult to please. She liked hot coffee that burned her withered lips, and Michael was careful to bring coffee steaming and perfumed, and she drank it on the terrace. Yet she bored him. There was nothing beyond her guest at fortune to supply material for scandals or invite interest. She didn't resent living alone, but she was often conscious of her lonely appearance and of what it might suggest to others. She wished, on that account, to exhibit an occupation. When she went to the writing room or sat on the beach, she carried a book with her, turned over the pages carefully, and appreciated, perhaps, a paragraph of what she read. But many of the lines she perused might have been inscribed in some strange language as remote as a language of the Orient. Refusing to confront this incapacity to receive, mentally, the new impression, the secret of the universe was, to her, as if buried inscrutably in her own soul, and to be divulged, if ever, in a reconstructed understanding of what had happened to her, an understanding which included even the most trivial incidents of former days. To have lived, loved, borne children, and grown old was to have known everything. Why would she find no words to make this meaning of intimate things intelligible to her fellow men? Because she could not speak and make herself heard. It was often as though in living so fully she had never lived. Her heart beat in a troubled way, her hands on the leaves of her book trembled, and she resisted being sorry for herself. She tried to take comfort in a religion in which her faith was no longer orthodox, and ended, finally, with this great pity for the world which did not ask to be pitied, and despised pity, pity which was, she sometimes doubtfully conjured it, the reflection of her own weakness. Then the only recourse from these vague and half comprehended thoughts, was to consider a change to a new scene, a journey which would tax her strength, in which, in speaking to Francois, the old lady would ridicule weakness and make light of it, or she would rise from her deck chair and walk in the sunshine along the beach. The blue waters, angry and violent in the wind that flapped her skirts, suggested to her a darkness of night in which green fields are visible. The poetry of the comparison pleased her, as the image appeared unpremeditatedly from her mind, and was like a memory of youth. As she watched that steady onward movement of waters upon the land, she experienced what was to her, in this day, a rare moment, a moment of positive happiness. Beyond the pier where she walked, she leaned on her stick, the sea surrounding the dripping rocks of a headland. The rocks were bronze-colored and porous, like gutted and petrified combs of honey left there by bees of a giant size. Above them, in jagged curtains of white foam, in the glow of the sun, the surf towered. For an instant the suspended curtain hung twinkling in the light, to descend with the transient dew and the indolence of a floating veil, upon the agitation of waves which had conveyed it. The surface of glass which was the ocean, voluminous and rocking, like the sun-inflamed canopy of a glass tent, washed up and down magnificently, somnolently, as a cradle gently rocked, and the enormous tents of water, built up one after another, were covered all over with globules of sunshine, round and crystal, trembling like the drops that fall hesitatingly from metal which, made over warm, has begun to cool again. Once more the foam concentrated in seething currents, rushing together with subterranean hisses. The foam concentrated, lifted, and made a glittering edifice of snow, harsh, exquisite, and momentary, like the gothic traceries of frost, the tower of marble, of a lacy substance, of the purity of linen left long to bleach, but with the adamant glitter of diamonds, sank easily, waned in prismatic reflections, and was no more than a pale breath, breathed on the distance of the intense sky and evaporating like mist. Little waterspouts, such as pour from the gargoyle mouths of old fountains, ran steadily downward from the crevices in the stones. The tide rattled among the boulders. The sea had subsided, only to come forward as before, but with a more implacable ease. A glass tube, transparent on the length of the shore, showed in a bottle blue wall, ribbon tangles of reddish seaweed, designed in the clear substance with the design of objects caught in amber. The swell with its mounting undulations resolved in long blades of crystal, run high in the air in a concave symmetry, in which sank massive and transparent shadows that were the reflections of the waves themselves, carving the beaches. The old lady's bonnet strings whipped out under her chin, her wide black dress was full like a banner, and beat her legs, yet, though she steadied herself against the onslaught of winds, felt salt vapours upon her face, and was obliged to squint and lower her wrinkled lids against the glare. She saw everything vividly. The foam, the curdling sands, sticky amber, and smooth as mirrors, was a flat scallop, like a ruffle of soap suds, and the scallops ran down corsacations and runnels that were imprints of wavy hair, faintly golden. A cold smell of rotted fish and kelp came to the old lady on the same breeze that wafted to her the screams of the children, of the little boys in their striped bathing costumes who were waiting in the shallows, and little girls in white, little girls barefoot, with sandbuckets and shovels, their short skirts tilted behind their flying legs, were heard shrieking happily as they swooped, like a flock of small gulls, straight down to the water's edge. More obscurely, as from a more vast distance, the old lady heard the voices of the grown up bathers who, swimming far out into the breakers, were carried, with heads bobbing, to an immense height, lifted by the indifferent sapphire waters, as upon the flashing shoulders of armored giants. Then she turned toward the sultry horizon, where the brilliance of the day succumbed to the overshadowing clouds, and to something less visible, perhaps an emanation from the light itself, which was like unseen smoke. Beyond the cobalt welter of the sun and waves, incessantly flaked as with white flowers, a boat balanced quietly under one sail, stood upon the emptiness, like a swan upon a still lake, its head under its wing. The old lady was fatigued by this unforeseen intensity of visual appreciation. She had come to the end of the pier, and, turning reluctantly, began to retrace her footsteps to the hotel. On the shore she noted the rosy and dusked loftiness of the retreating mountains, their peaks somber under the fogs of a summer rainstorm, while on the rusted slopes the deep green of the trees suggested a relief of velvet on an old brocade, the crushed foliage of the pines and cork oaks, hinting at the tactile qualities of variegated mosses, the fashionable hotels along the waterfront, built in stucco and somewhat in the Spanish style, ancient houses in the town with walls of plaster or rubble, all showed a violent radiance of sinking sun, in which the pallor of the white surfaces and the redness of far-off roofs received a remote emphasis on objects which seemed the minute dwellings of dolls. And the old lady was suddenly overcome by an emotion which she afterwards preferred to forget. What she felt, as she turned from her promenade, the sea wind stinging her flaccid cheeks, was an imminence of death, which came to her from nowhere out of nothing, from the cries of the children, from the boat, the breeze, from the vast water that flowed after her. Yes, most of all from the sea, the sea flashing in the sunshine, the great sea, monotonous, voracious, untouched and merciless. I shall die, she thought. But they will die too. In they, she included the people in the village, the bathers in the surf, and the ladies in their organy frocks and flowered hats, with the gentlemen in flannels, gentlemen dressed so precisely, if carelessly, in imitations of the English style. The old lady, as she approached the termination of her walk, could now see them all, and the quiet gale that swept past her from some space infinitely distant, beyond even the clouds of the coming rainstorm, was the breath of a holocaust. They were all dead, all the people who covered the security of the land, people the old lady loved and had loved, indeed people who were dead already, that the sea was, had been, and always would be, long, long after these, the young, the happy, the oblivious, had ceased to live. This sea, of which she herself was afraid, so that she had never undertaken an ocean voyage without a tremor, the sea comforted her, with an immense and terrible comfort, so that, for an instant, her spirit flamed coldly and intensely. All was light, sunshine, happiness, and moving waters, and all was death, forever and ever death, though she scarcely called it so exactly, or by that name. Then, her eyes grew dim. The peculiar accuracy with which, the moment before, she had viewed and absorbed the details of her surroundings, faded in her habitual hesitance and vagueness. She began to think of saving her strength, of getting back to the hotel in time for her tea when she would eat some nice little brioches, of buying Francois a new dress, entering the hotel lobby at just quarter to five o'clock, weak and at peace after some exhausting victory, she gave to her heart the shadowy acknowledgement of its new strength, and in spite of her cheerful resolutions, was conscious of a faint, austere bitterness. It's easy to see why Scott was once considered the peer of giants like Joyce or Faulkner. Her ability to crawl inside the skin of her characters and find the universal ache in their most private movements remains startling, even a century later. In an era that often looks toward the new and the next, Scott forces us to sit with the old, the memories we can't shake, and the history that refuses to stay buried. Thank you for joining us in the Stacks today. If you enjoyed this journey into the modernist past, be sure to follow the Narrated Archives podcast for more lost voices and forgotten pages. I'm your host, Sally Barron. See you in the next chapter of the Narrated Archives. Thanks for joining me in the Stacks today, and thank you for listening.