Chapter 10

The helpless feeling of her overwhelming ignorance returned. She was like a woman held beyond the closed door of treasure. “Come over here.” He unceremoniously led her to the modeling of a ruffled grouse, faithful in every diversified feather. Linda thought it admirable, really amazing; but he dismissed it with a passionate energy. “The dull figuriste!” he exclaimed. “Daguerre. Once I could have done that, yes, and been entertained by its adroitness and insolence--before you made me. Do you suppose I was able then to understand the sheer tragic fortitude to live of a scrubwoman! The head you thought unpleasant--haven't you seen her going home in the March slush of a city? Did you notice the gaps in her shoes, the ragged shawl about a body twisted with forty, fifty, sixty years of wet stone floors and steps? Did you wonder what she had for supper?”

“No, Dodge, I didn't. They always make me wretched.”

“Well, to realize all that, to feel the degradation of her nature, to lie, sick with exhaustion, on the broken slats of her bed under a ravelled-out travesty of a quilt, and get up morning after morning in an iron winter dark--to experience that in your spirit and put it into durable metal, hard stone--is to hold beauty in your hands.”

Her interest in his speech was mingled with the knowledge that, in order to dress comfortably for dinner, she must leave immediately. Pleydon helped her into the Hallet open motor landaulet. Linda demanded quantities of air. He was, he told her at the door, leaving in an hour for New York. “I wish you could be happier,” she insisted. He reminded her that he had had the afternoon with her. It was so little, she thought, carried rapidly over a smooth wide street. His love for her increased rather than lessened. How wonderful it was.... The woman outside that barred door of treasure.

XXIX

Linda thought frequently about Dodge and his feeling for her; memories of his words, his appearance, speculations, spread through her tranquil daily affairs like the rich subdued pattern of a fine carpet on the bare floor of her life. She was puzzled by the depth of a passion that, apparently, made no demands other than the occasional necessity to be with her and the knowledge that she existed. If she had been a very intelligent woman, and, of course, not quite bad-looking, she might have understood both Pleydon and Arnaud, the latter a man whose mind was practically absorbed in the pages of books. There could be no doubt, no question, of their love for her.

Then there had always been the others--the men at the parties, in her garden, through the old days of her childhood in hotels. It was very stupid, very annoying, but at the same time she became interested in what, with her candid indifference, affected them. She had never, really, even when she desired, succeeded in giving them anything, anything conscious or for which they moved. Judith Feldt, on the contrary, had been prodigal. And, while certainly numbers of men had been attracted to her, they all tired of her with marked rapidity. Men met Judith, Linda recalled, with eagerness, they came immediately and often to see her ... for, perhaps, a month. Then, temporarily deserted, she was submerged in depression and nervous tears.

But, while it was obviously impossible for all lovers to be constant, two extraordinary and superior men would be faithful to her as long as she lived, no--as long as they lived. This was beyond doubt. One was celebrated--she watched with a quiet pride Pleydon's fame penetrate the country--and the other, her husband, a person of the most exacting delicacy of habits, intellect and wit.

What was it, she wondered, that made the supreme importance of women to men worth consideration. Linda was thinking of this now in connection with her daughter. Vigné was fourteen; a larger girl than she had ever been, with her father's fine abundant cinnamon-brown hair, a shapely sensitive mouth, and a wide brown gaze with a habit of straying, at inappropriate moments, from things seen to the invisible. She was, Linda realized thankfully, transparently honest; her only affectation was the slight supercilious manner of her associations; and she read, ridiculously like her father, with increasing pleasure.

However, what engaged Linda most was the fact that Vigné already liked men; she had been at the fringe, as it were, of young dances, with a sparkling satisfaction to herself and the securely nice youths who “cut in” at her brief appearances.

The truth was that Linda saw that more than a trace of Stella Condon's warm generosity of emotion had been brought by herself to Arnaud's daughter. The faults of every life, every circumstance, were endlessly multiplied through all existence. At fourteen, it was Linda's frowning impression, her mother had very fully instructed her in the wiles and structure of admirable marriage, and she had never completely lost some hard pearls of the elder's wisdom. Should she, in turn, communicate them to Vigné?

The moment, the anxiety, she dreaded was arriving, and it found her no freer of doubt than had the other aspects of her own responses. Yet here she was possessed by the keenest need for absolute rectitude; and perhaps this, she thought, with an unusual pleasure, was an evidence of the affection she had seemed to lack. But in the end she said nothing.

She was still unable to disentangle the flesh from the spirit, love--the love that so amazingly illuminated Dodge Pleydon--from comfort. Dodge had disturbed all her sense of values, even to the point of unsettling her allegiance to the supremacy of a great deal of money. He had worked this without giving her anything definite, that she could explain to Vigné, in return. Linda preserved her demand for the actual. If she could only comprehend the force animating Dodge she felt life would be clear.

She was tempted to experiment--when had such a possibility occurred to her before?--and discover just how far in several directions Pleydon's devotion went. This would be easy now, she was unrestrained by the fact of Arnaud, and the old shrinking from the sculptor happily vanished. Yet with him before her, on one of his infrequent visits to their house, she realized that her courage was insufficient. Was it that or something deeper--a reluctance to turn herself like a knife in the source of the profoundest compliment a woman could be paid. Linda thought too highly of his love for that; the texture of the carpet had become too gratifying.

They were all three in the library, as customary; and Linda, restless, saw her reflection in a closed long window. She was wearing yellow, the color of the jonquils on a candle-stand; but with her familiar sash tied and the ends falling to the hem of her skirt. The pointed oval of her face was unchanged, her pallor, the straight line of her black bang, the blueness of her eyes, were as they had been a surprisingly long while ago. Arnaud, with a disconcerting comprehension, demanded, “Well, are you satisfied?” She replied coolly, “Entirely.” Pleydon, seated for over an hour without moving, or even the trivial relief of a cigarette, followed her with his luminous uncomfortable gaze, his disembodied passion.

XXX

Linda heard Vigné's laugh, the expression of a sheer lightness of heart, following a low eager murmur of voices in her daughter's room, and she was startled by its resemblance to the gay pitch of Mrs. Moses Feldt's old merriment. Three of Vigné's friends were with her, all approximately eighteen, talking, Linda knew, men and--it was autumn--anticipating the excitements of their bow to formal society that winter. They had, she silently added, little enough to learn about the latter. Through the year past they had been to a dancing-class identical, except for an earlier hour and age, with mature affairs; but before that they had been practically introduced to the pleasures of their inheritance.

The men were really boys at the university, past the first year, receptacles of unlimited worldly knowledge and experience. They belonged to exclusive university societies and eating clubs, and Linda found their stiff similarity of correct bigoted pattern highly entertaining. She had no illusions about what might be called their morals; they were midway in the period of youthful unrestraint; but she recognized as well that their attitude toward, for example, Vigné was irreproachable. Such boys affected to disdain the girls of their associated families ... or imagined themselves incurably in love.

The girls, for their part, while insisting that forty was the ideal age for a lover--the terms changed with the seasons, last year “suitor” had been the common phrase--were occasionally swept in young company into a high irrational passion. Mostly, through skillful adult pressure or firm negation, such affairs came to nothing; but even these were sometimes overcome. And, when Linda had been disturbed by the echo of old days in her daughter's tones, she was considering exactly such a state.

One of the nicest youths imaginable, Bailey Sandby, had lost all trace of superior aloofness in a devotion to Vigné. He was short, squarely built, with clear pink cheeks, steady light blue eyes and crisp very fair hair. This was his last season of academic instruction, after which a number of years, at an absurdly low payment, awaited him in his father's bond brokerage concern. However, he was, Linda gathered, imperious in his urgent need for Vigné's favor.

Ridiculous, she thought, at the same time illogically rehearsing the resemblances of Vigné to her grandmother. She had no doubt that the parties Vigné shared on the terraces and wide lawns, in the informal dancing at country houses, were sufficiently sophisticated; there was on occasion champagne, and--for the masculine element anyhow--cocktails. The aroma of wine, lightly clinging to her young daughter's breath, filled her with an old instinctive sickness.

She had spoken to Arnaud who, in turn, severely addressed Vigné; but during this Linda had been oppressed by the familiar feeling of impotence. The girl, of course, had properly heard them; but she gave her mother the effect of slipping easily beyond their grasp. When she had gone to bed Arnaud repeated a story brought to him by the juvenile Lowrie, under the influence of a temporary indignation at his sister's unwarranted imposition of superiority. Arnaud went on:

“Actually they had this kissing contest, it was at Chestnut Hill, with a watch held; and Vigné, or so Lowrie insisted, won the prize for length of time--something like a minute. Now, when I was young--”

Submerged in apprehensive memory Linda lost most of his account of the Eden-like youth of his earlier day. When, at last, his assertions pierced her abstraction, it was only to bring her to the realization of how pathetically little he knew of either Vigné or her. She weighed the question of utter frankness here--the quality enhanced by universal obscurity--but she was obliged to check her desire for perfect understanding. A purely feminine need to hide, even from Arnaud, any detracting facts about women shut her into a diplomatic silence. In reality he could offer them no help; their problems--in a world created more objectively by the hand of man than God--were singular to themselves. Women were quite like spoiled captives to foreign princes, masking, in their apparent complacency, a necessarily secret but insidiously tyrannical control. It wouldn't do, in view of this, to expose too much.

The following morning it was Arnaud, rather than herself, who had a letter from Pleydon. “He wants us to come over to New York and his studio,” the former explained. “He has some commission or other from a city in the Middle West, and a study to show us. I'd like it very much; we haven't seen this place, and his surroundings are not to be overlooked.”

Pleydon's rooms were directly off Central Park West, in an apartment house obviously designed for prosperous creative arts, with a hall frescoed in the tones of Puvis de Chavannes and an elevator cage beautifully patterned in iron grilling. Dodge Pleydon met them in his narrow entry and conducted them into a pleasant reception-room. “It's a duplex,” he explained of his quarters; “the dining-room you see and the kitchen's beyond, while the baths and all that are over our heads; the studio fills both floors.”

There were low book cases with their continuous top used as a shelf for a hundred various objects, deep long chairs of caressing ease and chairs of coffee-colored wicker with amazingly high backs woven with designs of polished shells into the semblance of spread peacocks' tails. The yellow silk curtains at the windows, the rug with the intricate coloring of a cashmere shawl, the Russian tea service, were in a perfection of order; and Linda almost resentfully acknowledged the skilful efficiency of his maid. It was surprising that, without a wife, a man could manage such a degree of comfort!

Over tea far better than hers, in china of an infinitely finer fragility, she studied Pleydon thoughtfully. He looked still again perceptibly older, his face continued to grow sparer of flesh, emphasizing the aggressively bony structure of his head. When he shut his mouth after a decided statement she could see the projection of the jaw and the knotted sinews at the base of his cheeks. No, Dodge didn't seem well. She asked if there had been any return of the fever and he nodded in an impatient affirmative, returning at once to the temporarily suspended conversation with Arnaud. There was a vast difference, too, in the way in which he talked.

His attitude was as assertive as ever, but it had less expression in words; unaccountable periods of silence, almost ill-natured, overtook him, spaces of abstraction when it was plain that he had forgotten the presence of whoever might be by. Even direct questions sometimes failed to pierce immediately his consciousness. Dodge, Linda told herself, lived entirely too much alone. Then she said this aloud, thoughtlessly, and she was startled by the sudden intolerable flash of his gaze. An awkward pause followed, broken by the uprearing of Pleydon's considerable length.

“I must take you into the studio before it is too dark,” he proceeded. “Every creative spirit knows when its great moment has come. Well, mine is here.” The men stood aside as Linda, her head positively ringing with the thrill that was like a strain of Gluck, the happy sadness, entered the bare high spaciousness of Dodge Pleydon's workroom.

XXXI

Everything she saw, the stripped floor, the white walls bare but for some casts like the dismembered fragments of flawless blanched bodies, the inclined plane of the wide skylight, bore an impalpable white dust of dried clay. In a corner, enclosed in low boards, a stooped individual with wood-soled shoes and a shovel was working a mass of clay over which at intervals he sprinkled water, and at intervals halted to make pliable lumps of a uniform size which he added to a pile wrapped in damp cloths. There were a number of modeling stands with twisted wires grotesquely resembling a child's line drawing of a human being; while a stand with some modeling tools on its edge bore an upright figure shapeless in its swathing of dampened cloths.

“The great moment,” Pleydon said again, in a vibrant tone. “But you know nothing of all this,” he directly addressed Linda. “Neither, probably, will you have heard of Simon Downige. He was born at Cottarsport, in Massachusetts, about eighteen forty; and, after--in the support of his hatred of any slavery--he fought through the Civil War, he came home and found that his town stifled him. He didn't marry at once, as so many returning soldiers did; instead he was wedded to a vision of freedom, freedom of opinion, of spirit, worship--any kind of spaciousness whatever. And, in the pursuit of that, he went West.

“He told them that he was going to find--but found was the word--a place where men could live together in a purity of motives and air. No more, you understand; he hadn't a personal fanatical belief to exploit and attract the hysteria of women and insufficient men. He was not a pathological messiah; but only Simon Downige, an individual who couldn't comfortably breathe the lies and injustice and hypocrisy of the ordinary community. No doubt he was unbalanced--his sensitiveness to a universal condition would prove that. Normally people remain undisturbed by such trivialities. If they didn't an end would come to one or the other, the lies or the world.

“He traveled part way in a Conestoga wagon--a flight out of Egypt; they were common then, slow canvas-covered processions with entire families drawn by the mysterious magnetism of the West. Then, leaving even such wayfarers, he walked, alone, until he came on a meadow by a little river and a grove of trees, probably cottonwoods.... That was Simon Downige, and that, too, was Hesperia. Yes, he was unbalanced--the old Greek name for beautiful lands. It is a city now, successful and corruptly administered--what always happens to such visions.

“It is necessary, Linda, as I've always told you, to understand the whole motive behind a creation in permanent form. A son of Simon's--yes, he finally married--a unique and very rich character, wife dead and no children, commissioned a monument to the founder of Hesperia, in Ohio, and of his fortune.

“They even have a civic body for the control of public building; and they came East to approve my statue, or rather the clay sketch for it. They were very solemn, and one, himself a sculptor, a graduate of the Beaux Arts, ran a suggestive thumb over Simon and did incredible damage. But, after a great deal of hesitation, and a description from the sculptor of what he thought excellently appropriate for such magnificence, they accepted my study. The present Downige, really--though I understand there is another pretentious branch in Hesperia--bullied them into it. He cursed the Beaux-Arts graduate with the most brutal and satisfactory freedom--the tyranny of his money; the crown, you see, of Simon's hope.”

He unwrapped one by one the wet cloths; and Linda, in an eagerness sharp like anxiety, finally saw the statue, under life-size, of a seated man with a rough stick and bundle at his feet. A limp hat was in his hand, and, beneath a brow to which the hair was plastered by sweat, his eyes gazed fixed and aspiring into a hidden dream perfectly created by his desire. Here, she realized at last, she had a glimmer of the beauty, the creative force, that animated Dodge Pleydon. Simon Downige's shoes were clogged with mud, his entire body, she felt, ached with weariness; but his gaze--nothing Linda discovered but shadows over two depressions--was far away in the attainment of his place of justice and truth.

She found a stool and, careless of the film of dust, sat absorbed in the figure. Pleydon again had lost all consciousness of their presence; he stood, hands in pockets, his left foot slightly advanced, looking at his work from under drawn brows. Arnaud spoke first:

“It's impertinent to congratulate you, Pleydon. You know what you've done better than any one else could. You have all our admiration.” Linda watched the tenderness with which the other covered Simon Downige's vision in clay. Later, returning home after dinner, Arnaud speculated about Pleydon's remarkable increase in power. “I had given him up,” he went on; “I thought he was lost in those notorious debauches of esthetic emotions. Does he still speak of loving you?”

“Yes,” Linda replied. “Are you annoyed by it?” He answered, “What good if I were?” She considered him, turned in his chair to face her, thoughtfully. “I haven't the slightest doubt of its quality, however--all in that Hesperia of old Downige's. To love you, my dear Linda, has certain well-defined resemblances to a calamity. If you ask me if I object to what you do give him, my answer must shock the gods of art. I would rather you didn't.”

“What is it, Arnaud?” she demanded. “I haven't the slightest idea. I wish I had.”

“Platonic,” he told her shortly. “The term has been hopelessly ruined, yet the sense, the truth, I am forced to believe, remains.”

“But you know how stupid I am and that I can't understand you.”

“The woman in whom a man sees God,” he proceeded irritably:

“'_La figlia della sua mente, l'amorosa, idea_.'”

“Oh,” she cried, wrung with a sharp obscure hurt. “I know that, I've heard it before.” Her excitement faded at her absolute inability to place the circumstances of her memory. The sound of the words vanished, leaving no more than the familiar deep trouble, the disappointing sensation of almost grasping--Linda was unable to think what.

“After all, you are my wife.” He had recovered his normal shy humor. “I can prove it. You are the irreproachable mother of our unsurpassed children. You have a hopeless vision--like this Simon's--of seeing me polished and decently pressed; and I insist on your continuing with the whole show.”

Her mind arbitrarily shifted to the thought of her father, who had walked out of his house, left--yes--his family, without any intimation. Then, erratically, it turned to Vigné, to Vigné and young Sandby with his fresh cheeks and impending penniless years acquiring a comprehension of the bond market. She said, “I wonder if she really likes Bailey?” Arnaud's energy of dismay was laughable, “What criminal folly! They haven't finished Mother Goose yet.”

XXII

Linda, who expected to see Pleydon's statue of Simon Downige finished immediately in a national recognition of its splendor, was disappointed by his explanation that, probably, it would not be ready for casting within two years. He intended to model it again, life-size, before he was ready for the heroic. April, the vivifying, had returned; and, as always in the spring, Linda was mainly conscious of the mingled assuaging sounds of life newly admitted through open windows. A single shaded lamp was lighted by a far table, where Arnaud sat cutting the pages of _The Living Age_ with an ivory blade; Dodge was blurred in the semi-obscurity.

He came over to see them more frequently now, through what he called the great moment--so tiresomely extended--of his life. Pleydon came oftener but he said infinitely less. It was his custom to arrive for dinner and suddenly depart early or late in the evening. At times she went up to her room and left the two almost morosely silent men to their own thoughts or pages; at others she complained--no other woman alive would stay with such uninteresting and thoroughly selfish creatures. They never made the pretense of an effort to consider or amuse her. At this Arnaud would put aside his book and begin an absurd social conversation in the manner of Vigné's associates. Pleydon, however, wouldn't speak; nothing broke the somberness of his passionate absorption in invisible tyrannies. She gave up, finally, a persistent effort to lighten his moods. Annoyed she told him that if he did not change he'd be sick, and then where would everything be.

All at once, through the open window, she heard Stella, her mother, laughing; the carelessly gay sound overwhelmed her with an instinctive unreasoning dread. Linda rose with a half gasp--but of course it was Vigné in the garden with Bailey Sandby.

She sank back angry because she had been startled; but her irritation perished in disturbing thought. It wasn't, she told herself, Vigné's actions that made her fear the future so much as her, Linda's, knowledge of the possibilities of the past. Her undying hatred of that existence choked in her throat; the chance of its least breath touching Vigné, Arnaud's daughter, roused her to any embittered hazard.