Chapter 7

Imogen had gone to the fire and was gazing into it. She was full of a deep contentment. By her attitude toward Jack this evening, her reception of his avowal, she had completely vindicated herself. Peace of mind was impossible to Imogen unless her conscience were clear of any cloud, and now the morning's humiliating fear was more than atoned for. She was not the woman to clutch at safety when pain threatened; she had spoken to him exactly as she would have spoken yesterday, before knowing that she was poor. And, under this satisfaction, was the serene gladness of knowing him so surely hers.

Her face, as she turned it toward her mother, adjusted itself to a task of loving severity. "I cannot think of having her, mama."

"Why not? She will add almost nothing to our expenses. I never for a moment dreamed of your not having her. I don't know why you thought it my wish."

Imogen looked steadily at her: "Not your wish, mama? After what you told me this morning?"

"I only said that we must be economical and careful."

"To have one's friends to stay with one is a luxury, is not to be economical and careful. I don't forget what you said of my expensive mode of life, of my clothes--a reproof that I am very sure was well deserved; I should not have been so thoughtless. But it is not fair, mama, really it is not fair--you must see that--to reproach me, and my father--by implication, even if not openly--with our reckless charities, and then refuse to take the responsibility for my awakening."

Imogen, though she spoke with emotion, spoke without haste. Her mother sat with downcast eyes, working on, and a deep color rose to her cheeks.

"I do want things to be open and honest between us, mama," Imogen went on. "We are so very different in temperament, in outlook, in conviction, that to be happy together we must be very true with each other. I want you always to say just what you mean, so that I may understand what you really want of me and may clearly see whether I can do it or not. I have such a horror of any ambiguity in human relations, I believe so in the most perfect truth."

Valerie was still silent for some moments after this. When she did speak it was only of the practical matter that they had begun with. "I do want you to have your friends with you, Imogen. It will not be a luxury. I will see that we can afford it."

"I shall be very, very glad of that, dear. I wish I had understood before. You see, just now, before Jack, I felt that you were hurt, displeased, by my inference from our talk this morning. You made me feel by your whole manner that you found me graceless, tasteless, to blame in some way--perhaps for speaking about it to Jack. Jack is very near me, mama."

"But not near me."

"Ah, you made me feel that, too; and that you reproached me with having, as it were, forced an intimacy upon you."

Valerie was drawing her dark brows together, as though her clue had indeed escaped her. Imogen's mind slipped from link to link of the trivial, yet significant, matter with an ease and certainty of purpose that was like the movement of her own sleek needle, drawing loop after loop of wool into a pattern; but what Imogen's pattern was she could hardly tell. She abandoned the wish to make clear her own interpretation, looking up presently with a faint smile. "I'm sorry, dear. I meant nothing of all that, I assure you. And as to 'Jack,' it was only that I did not care to seem to justify myself before him--at your expense it might seem."

"Oh, mama dear!" Imogen laughed out. "You thought me so wrong, then, that you were afraid of harming his devotion to me by letting him see how very wrong it was! Jack's devotion is very clear-sighted. It's a devotion that, if it saw wrongs in me, would only ask to show them to me, too, and to stand shoulder to shoulder with me in fighting them."

"He must be a remarkable young man," said Valerie, quite without irony.

"He is like most _real_ people in this country, mama," said Imogen, on a graver note. "We have, I think, evolved a new standard of devotion. We don't want to have dexterous mamas throwing powder in the eyes of the men who care for us and sacrificing their very conception of right on the altar of false maternal duty. The duty we owe to any one _is_ our truth. There is no higher duty than that. Had I been as ungenerous, as unkind, as you, I'm afraid, imagined me this evening, it would still have been your duty, to him, to me, to bring the truth fearlessly to the light. I would have been amused, hadn't I been so hurt, to see you, as you fancied, shielding me! Please never forget, dear, in the future, that Jack and I are truth-lovers."

Looking slightly bewildered by this cascade of smooth fluency, Valerie, still with her deepened color, here murmured that she, too, cared for the truth, but the current bore her on. "I don't think you _see_ it, mama, else you could hardly have hurt me so."

"Did I hurt you so?"

"Why, mama, don't you imagine that I am made of flesh and blood? It was dreadful to me, your leaving me like that, with the situation on my hands."

Valerie, after another little silence, now repeated, "I'm sorry, dear," and, as if accepting contrition, Imogen stooped and kissed her tenderly.

IX

Mary's visit took place about six weeks later, when Jack Pennington was again in New York, and Mrs. Wake, returned from Europe, had been for some time established in her little flat not very far away in Washington Square.

The retrenchments in the Upton household had taken place and Mary found her friend putting her shoulder to the wheel with melancholy courage. The keeping up of old beneficences meant redoubled labor and, as she said to Mary, with the smile that Mary found so wonderful: "It seems to me now that whenever I put my hand out to help, it gets caught and pinched." Mary, helper and admirer, said to Jack that the way in which Imogen had gathered up her threads, allowing hardly one to snap, was too beautiful. These young people, like the minor characters in a play, met often in the drawing-room while Imogen was busy up-stairs or gone out upon some important errand. Just now, Miss Bocock's lectures having been set going, the organization of a performance to be given for the crippled children's country home was engaging all her time. Tableaux from the Greek drama had been fixed on, the Pottses were full of eagerness, and Jack had been pressed into service as stage-manager. The distribution of rôles, the grouping of the pictures, the dressing and the scenery were in his hands.

"It's really extraordinary, the way in which, amidst her grief, she goes through all this business, all this organization, getting people together for her committee, securing the theater," said Mary. "Isn't it too bad that she can't be in the tableaux herself? She would have been the loveliest of all."

Jack, rather weary, after an encounter with a band of dissatisfied performers in the library, said: "One could have put one's heart into making an Antigone of her; that's what I wanted--the filial Antigone, leading Oedipus through the olive groves of Colonus. It's bitter, instead of that, to have to rig Mrs. Scott out as Cassandra; will you believe it, Mary, she insists on being Cassandra--with that figure, that nose! And she has fixed her heart on the scene where Cassandra stands in the car outside the house of Agamemnon. She fancies that she is a tragic, ominous type."

"She has nice arms, you know," said the kindly Mary.

"Don't I know!" said Jack. "Well, it's through them that I shall circumvent her. Her arms shall be fully displayed and her face turned away from the audience."

"Jack, dear, you mustn't be spiteful," Mary shook her head a little at him. "I've thought that I felt just a touch of--of, well--flippancy in you once or twice lately. You mustn't deceive poor Mrs. Scott. It's that that is so wonderful about Imogen. I really believe that she could make her give up the part, if she set herself to it; she might even tell her that her nose was too snub for it--and she would not wound her. It's extraordinary her power over people. They feel, I think, the tenderness, the disinterestedness, that lies beneath the truth."

"I suppose there's no hope of persuading her to be Antigone?"

"Don't suggest it again, Jack. The idea hurt her so."

"I won't. I understand. When is Rose coming?"

"In a day or two. She is to spend the rest of the winter with the Langleys. What do you think of for her?"

"Helen appearing between the soldiers, before Hecuba and Menelaus. I only wish that Imogen had more influence over Rose. Your theory about her power doesn't hold good there."

"Ah, even there, I don't give up hope. Rose doesn't really know Imogen. And then Rose is a child in many ways, a dear, but a spoiled, child."

"What do you think of Mrs. Upton, now that you see something of her?" Jack asked abruptly.

"She is very sweet and kind, Jack. She is working so hard for all of us. She is going to make my robe. She is addressing envelopes now--and you know how dull that is. I am sure I used to misjudge her. But, she is very queer, Jack."

"Queer? In what way queer?" Jack asked, placing himself on the sofa, his legs stretched out before him, his hands in his pockets.

"I hardly know how to express it. She is so light, yet so deep; and I can't make out why or where she is deep; it's there that the queerness comes in. I feel it in her smile, the way she looks at you; I believe I feel it more than she does. She doesn't know she's deep."

"Not really found herself yet, you think?" Jack questioned; the phrase was one often in use between these young people.

Mary mused. "Somehow that doesn't apply to her--I don't believe she'll ever look for herself."

"You think it's you she finds," Jack suggested; voicing a dim suspicion that had come to him once or twice of late.

"What do you mean, exactly, Jack?"

"I'm sure I don't know," he laughed a little. "So you like her?" he questioned.

"I think I do; against my judgment, against my will, as it were. But that doesn't imply that one approves of her."

"Why not?"

"Why, Jack, you know the way _you_ felt about it, the day you and I and Rose talked it over."

"But we hadn't seen her then. What I want to know is just what _you_ feel, now that you have seen her."

Mary had another conscientious pause. "How can one approve of her while Imogen is there?" she said at last.

"You mean that Imogen makes one remember everything?"

"Yes. And Imogen is everything she isn't."

"So that, by contrast, she loses."

"Yes, and do you know, Jack," Mary lowered her voice while she glanced up at Mrs. Upton's portrait, "I can hardly believe that she has suffered, really suffered, about him, at all. She is so unlike a widow."

"I suppose she felt herself a widow long ago."

"She had no right to feel it, Jack. His death should cast a deeper shadow on her."

As Jack, shamefully, could see Mr. Upton as shadow removed, he only said, after a slight pause: "Perhaps that's another of the things she doesn't obviously show--suffering, I mean."

"I'm afraid that she's incapable of feeling any conviction of sin," said Mary, "and that wise, old-fashioned phrase expresses just what I mean as to a lack in her. On the other hand, in a warmhearted, pagan sort of way, she is, I'm quite sure, one of the kindest of people. Her maid, when she went back to England the other day, cried dreadfully at leaving her, and Mrs. Upton cried too. I happened to find them together just before Felkin went. Now I had imagined, in my narrow way, that a spoilt beauty was always a tyrant to her maid."

"Oh, so her maid's gone! How does she do her hair, then?"

"Do her hair, Jack? What a funny question. As we all do, of course, with her wits and her hands, I suppose. Any one with common-sense can do their hair."

Jack kept silence, reflecting on the picture that Imogen had drawn for him--the child bereft of its toy. Had it given it up willingly, or had it been forced to relinquish it by the pressure of circumstance? Remembering his own stringent words, he felt a qualm of compunction. Had he armed Imogen for this ruthlessness?

The lustrous folds of Mrs. Upton's hair, at lunch, reassured him as to her fitness to do without Felkin in that particular, but his mind still dwelt on the picture of the crying child and he asked Imogen, when he was next alone with her, how the departure of Felkin had been effected.

"You couldn't manage to let her keep the toy, then?"

"The toy?" Imogen was blank.

He enlightened her. "Her maid, you know, who had to do her hair."

"Oh, Felkin! No," Imogen's face was a little quizzical, "it couldn't be managed. I thought it over, what you said about sacrificing other people's needs to her luxuries, and felt that you were right. So I put it to her, very, very gently, of course, very tactfully, so that I believe that she thinks that it was she who initiated the idea. Perhaps she _had_ intended from the first to send her back; it was so obvious that a woman as poor as she is ought not to have a maid. All the same, I felt that she was a little vexed with me, poor dear. But, apart from the economical question, I'm glad I insisted. It's so much better for her not to be so dependent on another woman. It's a little degrading for both of them, I think."

Jack, who theoretically disapproved of all such undemocratic gauds, was sure that Mrs. Upton was much better off without her maid; yet something of the pathos of that image remained with him--the child deprived of its toy; something, too, of discomfort over that echo of her father that he now and then detected in Imogen's serene sense of rightness.

This discomfort, this uneasy sense of echoes, returned more than once in the days that followed. Mrs. Upton seemed, as yet, to have made very little difference in the situation; she had glided into it smoothly, unobtrusively--a silken shadow; when she was among them it was of that she made him think; and in her shadowed quietness, as of a tranquil mist at evening or at dawn, he more and more came to feel a peace and sweetness. But it was always in this sweetness and this peace that the contrasting throb of restlessness stirred.

He saw her at the meals he frequently attended, meals where the conversation, for the most part, was carried on by Imogen. Mrs. Wake, also a frequent guest, was a very silent one, and Mary an earnest listener.

If Imogen's talk had ceased to be very interesting to Jack, that was only because he knew it so well. He knew it so well that, while she talked, quietly, fluently, dominatingly, he was able to remain the dispassionate observer and to wonder how it impressed her mother. Jack watched Mrs. Upton, while Imogen talked, leaning her head on her hand and raising contemplative eyes to her daughter. Those soft, dark eyes, eyes almost somnolent under their dusky brows and half-drooped lashes,--how different they were from Imogen's, as different as dusk from daylight. And they were not really sad, not really sleepy, eyes; that was the surprise of them when, after the downcast mystery, they raised to one suddenly their penetrating intelligence. The poetry of their aspect was constantly contradicted by the prose of their glance. But she did more than turn her own poetry into prose, so he told himself; she turned other people's into prose, too. Her glance became to him a running translation into sane, almost merry, commonplace, of Imogen's soarings. He knew that she made the translation and he knew that it was a prose one, but its meaning she kept for herself. It was when, now and then, he felt that he had hit upon a word, a phrase, that the discomfort, the bewilderment, came; and he would then turn resolutely to Imogen and grasp firmly his own conception of her essential meaning, a meaning that could bear any amount of renderings.

She was so beautiful, sitting there, the girl he loved, her pearly face and throat, her coronet of pale, bright gold, rising from the pathetic blackness, that it might well be that the mother felt only his own joy in her loveliness and could spare no margin of consciousness for critical comment. She was so lovely, so young, so good; so jaded, too, with all the labor, the giving of herself, the long thoughts for others; why shouldn't she be dominant and assured? Why shouldn't she even be didactic and slightly complacent? If there was sometimes a triteness in her pronouncements, a lack of humor, of spontaneity, in her enthusiasms, surely no one who loved her could recognize them with any but the tenderest of smiles. He felt quite sure that Mrs. Upton recognized them with nothing else. He felt quite sure that the "deepest" thing in Mrs. Upton was the most intense interest in Imogen; but he felt sure, too, that the thing above it, the thing that gazed so quietly, so dispassionately, was complete indifference as to what Imogen might be saying. Didn't her prose, with its unemphatic evenness, imply that some enthusiasms went quite without saying and that some questions were quite disposed of for talk just because they were so firmly established for action? When he had reached this point of query, Jack felt rising within him that former sense of irritation on Imogen's behalf, and on his own. After all, youthful triteness and enthusiasm were preferable to indifference. In the stress of this irritation he felt, at moments, a shock of keen sympathy for the departed Mr. Upton, who had, no doubt, often felt that disconcerting mingling of interest and indifference weigh upon his dithyrambic ardors. He often felt very sorry for Mr. Upton as he looked at his widow. It was better to feel that than to feel sorry for her while he listened to Imogen. It did not do to realize too keenly, through Imogen's echo, what it must have been to listen to Mr. Upton for a lifetime. When, on rare occasions, he had Mrs. Upton to himself, his impulse always was to "draw her out," to extract from her what were her impressions of things in general and what her attitude toward life. She must really, by this time, have enough accepted him as one of themselves to feel his right to hear all sorts of impressions. He was used to talking things over, talking them, indeed, over and over; turning them, surveying them, making the very most of all their possible significance, with men and women to whom his relationship was half brotherly and wholly comradely, and whom, in the small, fresh, clear world, where he had spent his life, he had known since boyhood. It was a very ethical and intellectual little world, this of Jack's, where impressions passed from each to each, as if by right, where some suspicion was felt for those that could not be shared, and where to keep anything so worth while to oneself was almost to rob a whole circle. Reticence had the distinct flavor of selfishness and uncertainty of mind, the flavor of laxity. If one were earnest and ardent and disciplined one either knew what one thought, and shared it, or one knew what one wanted to think, and one sought it. Jack suspected Mrs. Upton of being neither earnest, nor ardent, nor disciplined; but he found it difficult to believe that, as a new inmate of his world, she couldn't be, if only she would make the effort, as clear as the rest of it, and that she wasn't as ready, if manipulated with tact and sympathy, to give and to receive.

Wandering about the drawing-room, while, as usual in her leisure moments, she crocheted a small jacket, Tison in her lap, he wondered, for instance, what she thought of the drawing-room. He knew that it was very different from the drawing-room in her Surrey cottage, and very different from the drawing-rooms with which, as he had heard from Imogen, she was familiar in the capitals of Europe. Mrs. Upton was, to-day, crocheting a blue border as peacefully as though she had faced pseudo-Correggios and crimson brocade and embossed wall-paper all her life, so that either her tastes shared the indifference of her intelligence or else her power of self-control was commendably complete.

"I hope that you are coming to Boston some day," he said to her on this occasion, the occasion of the blue border. "I'd like so much to show you my studio there, and my work. I'm not such an idler as you might imagine."

Mrs. Upton replied that she should never for a moment imagine him an idler and that since she was going to Boston to stay with his great-aunt, a dear but too infrequently seen friend of hers, she hoped soon for the pleasure of seeing his work. "I hear that you are very talented," she added.

Jack, who considered that he was, did not protest with a false modesty, but went on to talk of the field of art in general, and questioning her, skeptical as to her statement that her artistic tastes were a mere medley, he put together by degrees a conception of vague dislikes and sharp preferences. But, in spite of his persistence in keeping her to Chardin and Japanese prints, she would pass on from herself to Imogen, emphasizing her satisfaction in Imogen's great interest in art. "It's such a delightful bond between people," And Mrs. Upton, with her more than American parental discretion, smiled her approval of such bonds.

Jack reflected some moments before saying that Imogen knew, perhaps, more than she cared. He didn't think that Imogen had, exactly, the esthetic temperament. And that there was no confidential flavor in these remarks he demonstrated by adding that it was a point he and Imogen often discussed; he had often told her that she should try to feel more and to think less, so that Valerie might amusedly have recalled Imogen's explanation to her of the fundamental frankness that made lovers in America such "remarkable young men." Jack's frankness, evidently, would be restrained by neither diffidence nor affection. She received his diagnosis of her daughter's case without comment, saying only, after a moment, while she turned a corner of her jacket, "And you are of the artistic temperament, I suppose?"

"Well, yes," he owned, "in a sense; though not in that in which the word has been so often misused. I don't see the artist as a performing acrobat nor as an anarchist in ethics, either. I think that art is one of the big aspects of life and that through it one gets hold of a big part of reality."

Mrs. Upton, mildly intent on her corner, looked acquiescent.

"I think," Jack went on, "that, like everything else in life worth having, it's a harmony only attained by discipline and by sacrifice. And it's essentially a social, not a selfish attainment; it widens our boundaries of comprehension and sympathy; it reveals brotherhood. The artist's is a high form of service."

He suspected Mrs. Upton, while he spoke, of disagreement; he suspected her, also, of finding him sententious; but she continued to look interested, so that, quite conscious of his didactic purpose and amused by all the things he saw in their situation, he unfolded to her his conception of the artist's place in the social organism.

She said, finally, "I should have thought that art was much more of an end in itself."

"Ah, there we come to the philosophy of it," said Jack. "It _is_, of course, a sort of mysticism. One lays hold of something eternal in all achievement; but then, you see, one finds out that the eternal isn't cut up into sections, as it were--art here, ethics there--intellect yonder; one finds out that all that is eternal is bound up with the whole, so that you can't separate beauty from goodness and truth any more than you can divide a man's moral sense from his artistic and rational interests."

"Still, it's in sections for us, surely? What very horrid people can be great artists," Mrs. Upton half questioned, half mused.

"Ah, I don't believe it! I don't believe it!" Jack broke out. "You'll find a flaw in his art, if you find a moral chaos in him. It must be a harmony!"