Chapter 4

Her thoughts returned vaguely to the mystery, the nuisance, of love. Surely she had heard something before, immensely important, about it, and totally different from all her mother had said. Her mind was filled with the fantastic image of a forest, of dangers, and a fat china figure with curled plumes, a nodding head, that brushed her with fear and disgust. A shuddering panic took possession of her, flashes burned before her eyes, and she ran gasping to the perfumed soft reassurances of her mother.

IX

In a recurrence of her surprising concern of the day before Mrs. Condon declined to leave her dearest Linda alone; and, their arms caught together in a surging affection, they walked down Fifth Avenue toward the hairdresser's. There was a diffused gray sparkle of sunlight--it was early for the throngs--through which they passed rapidly to the accompaniment of a rapid eager chatter. Linda wore a deep smooth camel's hair cape, over which her intense black hair poured like ink, and her face was shaded by a dipping green velvet hat. Her mother, in one of the tightly cut suits she affected, had never been more like a perfect companion.

They saw, in the window of a store for men, a set of violent purple wool underwear, and barely escaped hysterics at the thought of Mr. Moses Feldt in such a garb. They giggled idiotically at the spectacle of a countryman fearfully making the sharp descent from the top of a lurching omnibus. And then, when they had reached the place of Mrs. Condon's appointment, stopped at the show of elaborately waved hair on wax heads and chose which, probably, would resemble the elder and which, in a very short while now, Linda.

There was an impressive interior, furnished in gray panels and silvery wood; and the young woman at the desk was more surprisingly waved than anything they had yet seen. M. Joseph would be ready almost immediately; and in the meanwhile Mrs. Condon could lay aside her things in preparation for the hair to be washed. She did this while Linda followed every movement with the deepest interest.

At the back of the long room was a succession of small alcoves, each with an important-looking chair and mirror and shelves, a white basin, water-taps and rubber tubes. Settled, in comfort, Mrs. Condon's hair was spread out in a bright metal tray fastened to the back of the chair, and the attendant, a moist tired girl in a careless waist, sprayed the short thick gold-colored strands.

“My,” she observed, “what some wouldn't give for your shade! Never been touched, I can see, either. A lady comes in with real Titian, but yours is more select. It positively is Lillian Russell.” While she talked her hands sped with incredible rapidity and skill. “The gentlemen don't notice it; of course not; oh, no! There was a girl here, a true blonde, but she didn't stay long--her own car, yes, indeed. Married her right out of the establishment. There wasn't any nonsense to her.

“So this is your little girl! I'd never have believed it. Not that she hasn't a great deal of style, a great deal--almost, you might say, like an Egyptian. In the movies last night; her all over. It's a type that will need studying. Bertha Kalich. But for me--”

Already, Linda saw, this part of the operation was done. The girl wheeled into position a case that had a fan and ring of blue flickering flames, and a cupped tube through which hot air was poured over her mother's head. M. Joseph strutted in, a small carefully dressed man with a diminutive pointed gray beard and formal curled mustache. He spoke with what Linda supposed was a French accent, and his manners, at least to them, were beautiful. But because the girl had not put out the blue flames quickly enough he turned to her with a voice of quivering rage.

It was so unexpected, in the middle of his bowing and smooth assurances, that Linda was startled, and had to think about him all over. The result of this was a surprising dislike; she hated, even, to see him touch her mother, as he unnecessarily did in directing them into the enclosure for the permanent wave.

The place itself filled her with the faint horror of instruments and the unknown. Above the chair where Mrs. Condon now sat there was a circle in the ceiling like the base of a chandelier and hanging down from it on twisted green wires were a great number of the strangest things imaginable: they were as thick as her wrist, but round, longer and hollow, white china inside and covered with brown wrapping. The wires of each, she discovered, led over a little wheel and down again to a swinging clock-like weight. In addition to this there were strange depressing handles on the wall by a dial with a jiggling needle and clearly marked numbers.

The skill of the girl who had washed her mother's hair, however, was slight compared with M. Joseph's dexterity. The comb flashed in his white narrow hands; in no time at all every knot was urged out into a shining smoothness. “Just the front?” he inquired. Not waiting for Mrs. Condon's reply, he detached a strand from the mass over her brow, impaled it on a hairpin, while he picked up what might have been a thick steel knitting-needle with one end fastened in the middle of a silver quarter. The latter, it developed, had a hole in it, through which he drew the strand of hair, and then wrapped it with an angry tightness about the long projection.

At this exact moment a new girl, but tired and moist, appeared, took a hank of white threads from a dressing-table, and tied that separate lock firmly. This, Linda counted, was repeated fifteen times; and when it was accomplished she was unable to repress a nervous laughter. Really, her mother looked too queer for words: the long rigid projections stood out all over her head like--like a huge pincushion; no, it was a porcupine. Mrs. Condon smiled in uncertain recognition of her daughter's mirth.

Then Linda's attention followed M. Joseph to a table against a partition, where he secured a white cotton strip from a film of them soaking in a shallow tray, took up some white powder on the blade of a dessert knife and transferred it to the strip. This he wrapped and wrapped about the hair fastened on a spindle, tied it in turn, and dragged down one of the brown objects on wires, which, to Linda's great astonishment, fitted precisely over the cotton-bound hair. Again, fifteen times, M. Joseph did this, fastening each connection with the turn of a screw. When so much was accomplished her mother's hair, it seemed, had grown fast to the ceiling in a tangle of green ends. It was the most terrifying spectacle Linda had ever witnessed. Obscure thoughts of torture, of criminals executed by electricity, froze her in a set apprehension.

The hair-dresser stepped over to the dials on the wall, and, with a sharp comprehensive glance at his apparatus, moved a handle as far as it would go. Nothing immediately happened, and Linda gave a relaxing sigh of relief. M. Joseph, however, became full of a painful attention.

X

He brought into view an unsuspected tube, with a cone of paper at its end, and bent over her mother, directing a stream of cold air against her head. “How do you feel?” he asked, with, Linda noticed, a startling loss of his first accent. Mrs. Condon so far felt well enough. Then, before Linda's startled gaze, every single one of the fifteen imprisoning tubes began to steam with an extraordinary vigor; not only did they steam, like teapots, but drops of water formed and slowly slid over her mother's face. If the process appeared weird at the beginning, now it was utterly fantastic.

The little white vapor spurts played about Mrs. Condon's dripping countenance; they increased rather than diminished; actually it resembled a wrecked locomotive she had once seen. “How are you?” M. Joseph demanded nervously. “Is it hot anywhere?” With a sudden gesture she replied in a shaking voice, “Here.”

Instantly he was holding the paper cone with its cold air against her scalp, and the heat was subdued. He glanced nervously at his watch, and Mrs. Condon managed to ask, “How long?”

“Twenty minutes.”

Dangerous as the whole proceeding seemed nothing really happened, and Linda's fears gradually faded into a mere curiosity and interest. A curtain hung across the door to the rest of the establishment, but it had been brushed partly aside; and she could see, in the compartment they had vacated, another man bending with waving irons over the liberated mass of a woman's hair. He was very much like M. Joseph, but he was younger and had only a dark scrap of mustache. As he caught up the hair with a quick double twist he leaned very close to the woman's face, whispering with an expression that never changed, an expression like that of the wax heads in the show-case. He bent so low that Linda was certain their cheeks had touched. She pondered at length over this, gazing now at the man beyond and now at M. Joseph flitting with the cold-air tube about her mother; wondering if, when she grew older, she would like a hair-dresser's cheek against hers. Linda decided not. The idea didn't shock her, the woman in the other space plainly liked it; still she decided she wouldn't. A different kind of man, she told herself, would be nicer.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sharp, unpleasant odor--the odor of scorched hair; and she was absolutely rigid with horror at an agonized cry from her mother.

“It's burning me terribly,” the latter cried. “Oh, I can't stand it. Stop! Stop!”

M. Joseph, as white as plaster, rushed to the wall and reversed the handle, and Mrs. Condon started from the chair, her face now streaming with actual tears; but before she could escape the man threw himself on her shoulders.

“You mustn't move,” he whispered desperately, “you'll tear your hair out. I tell you no harm's been done. Everything is all right. Please, please don't cry like that. It will ruin my business. There are others in the establishment. Stop!” he shook her viciously.

Linda had risen, terrorized; and Mrs. Condon, with waving plucking hands, was sobbing an appeal to be released. “My head, my head,” she repeated. “I assure you”--the man motioned to a pallid girl to hold her in the chair. With a towel to protect his hand he undid a screw, lifted off the cap and untwisted the cotton from a bound lock of hair; releasing it, in turn, from the spindle it fell forward in a complete corkscrew over Mrs. Condon's face.

“Do you see!” he demanded. “Perfect. I give you my word they'll all be like that. The cursed heat ran up on me,” he added in a swift aside to his assistant. “Has Mrs. Bellows gone? Who's still in the place? Here, loose that binding ... thank God, that one is all right, too.”

Together they unfastened most of the connections, and a growing fringe of long remarkable curls marked Mrs. Condon's pain-drawn and dabbled face. Linda sobbed uncontrollably; but perhaps, after all, nothing frightful had happened. Her poor mother! Then fear again tightened about her heart at the perturbed expression that overtook the hair-dresser. He was trying in vain to remove one of the caps. She caught enigmatic words--“the borax, crystallized ... solid. It would take a plumber ... have to go.”

The connection was immovable. Even in her suffering Mrs. Condon implored M. Joseph to save her hair. Nothing, however, could be done; he admitted it with pale lips. The thing might be chiseled off; in the end he tried to force a release and the strand, with a renewal of Mrs. Condon's agony--now, in the interest of her appearance, heroically withstood--snapped short in the container.

Rapidly recovering her vigor, she launched on a tirade against M. Joseph and his permanent waving establishment--Linda had never before heard her mother talk in such a loud brutal manner, nor use such heated unpleasant words, and the girl was flooded with a wretched shame. Still another lock, it was revealed, had been ruined, and crumbled to mere dust in its owner's fingers.

“The law will provide for you,” she promised.

“Your hair was dyed,” the proprietor returned vindictively. “The girl who washed it will testify. Every one is warned against the permanent if their hair has been colored. So it was at your own risk.”

“My head's never been touched with dye,” Mrs. Condon shrilly answered. “You lying little ape. And well does that young woman know it. She complimented me herself on a true blonde.” The girl had, too, right before Linda.

“You ought to be thrashed out of the city.”

“Your money will be given back to you,” M. Joseph told her.

Outside they found a taxi, and sped back to their hotel. Above, Mrs. Condon removed her hat; and, before the uncompromising mirror, studied her wrecked hair--a frizzled vacancy was directly over her left brow--and haggard face. When she finally turned to Linda, her manner, her words, were solemn.

“I'm middle-aged,” she said.

A dreary silence enveloped them sitting in the dark reception-room while Mrs. Condon restlessly shredded unlighted cigarettes on the floor. She had made no effort to repair the damages to her appearance, and when the telephone bell sharply sounded, she reached out in a slovenly negligence of manner. Linda could hear a blurred articulation and her mother answering listlessly. The latter at last said: “Very well, at seven then; you'll stop for us.” She hung up the receiver, stared blankly at Linda, and then went off into a harsh mirth. “Oh, my God!” she cried; “the old ladies' home!”

XI

With her mother away on a wedding-trip with Mr. Moses Feldt, Linda was suddenly projected into the companionship of his two daughters. One, as he had said, was light, but a different fairness from Mrs. Condon's--richly thick, like honey; while Judith, the elder, who must have been twenty, was dark in skin, in everything but her eyes, which were a contrasting ashen-violet. She spoke at once of Linda's flawless whiteness:

“A magnolia,” she said, in a deliberate dark voice; “you are quite a gorgeous child. Do you mind my saying that your clothes are rather quaint? They aren't inevitable, and yours ought to be that.”

They were at lunch in the Feldt dining-room, an interior of heavy ornately carved black wood, panels of Chinese embroidery in imperial yellow, and a neutral mauve carpet. The effect, with glittering iridescent pyramids of glass, massive frosted repoussé silver, burnished gold-plate and a wide table decoration of orchids and fern, was tropical and intense. It was evident to Linda that the Feldts were very rich indeed.

The entire apartment resembled the dining-room, while the building itself filled a whole city block, with a garden and fountains like an elaborate public square. Linda, however, wasn't particularly impressed by such show; she saw that Judith and Pansy had expected that of her; but she was determined not to exhibit a surprise that would imply any changes in her mother's and her condition. In addition, Linda calmly took such surroundings for granted. Her primary conception of possible existence was elegance; its necessity had so entered into her being that it had departed from her consciousness.

“I must take you to Lorice,” Judith continued; “she will know better than any one else what you ought to have. You seem terribly pure--at first. But you're not a snowdrop; oh, no--something very rare in a conservatory. Much better style than your mother.”

“I hope you won't mind Judith,” Pansy put in; “she's always like that.” A silence followed in which they industriously dipped the leaves of mammoth artichokes into a buttery sauce. Linda, as customary, said very little, she listened with patient care to the others and endeavored to arrive at conclusions. She liked Pansy, who was as warm and simple as her father. Judith was harder to understand. She was absorbed in color and music, and declared that ugliness gave her a headache at once. Altogether, Linda decided, she was rather silly, especially about men; and at times her emotions would rise beyond control until she wept in a thin hysterical gasping.

The room where, mostly, they sat was small, but with a high ceiling, and hung in black, with pagoda-like vermilion chairs. The light, in the evening, was subdued; and Pansy and Judith, in extremely clinging vivid dresses, the former's hair piled high in an amber mass and Judith's drawn severely across her ears, were lovely. Linda thought of the tropical butterflies of the river Amazon, of orchids like those always on the dining-room table. A miniature grand piano stood against the drapery, and Judith often played. Linda learned to recognize some of the composers. Pansy liked best the modern waltzes; Judith insisted that Richard Strauss was incomparable; but Linda developed an overwhelming preference for Gluck. The older girl insisted that this was an affectation; for a while she tried to confuse Linda's knowledge; but finally, playing the airs of “Orpheus and Eurydice,” she admitted that the latter was sincere.

“They sound so cool,” Linda said in a clear and decided manner.

There was a man with them, and he shook his head in a mock sadness. “So young and yet so formal. If, with the rest, you had Judith's temperament, you would be the most irresistible creature alive. For see, my dear child, as it is you stir neither tenderness nor desire; you are remote and perfect, and faintly wistful. I can't imagine being human or even comfortable with you about. Then, too, you have too much wisdom.”

“She is frightful,” Pansy agreed; “she's never upset nor her hair a sight; and, above all else, Linda won't tell you a thing.”

“Some day,” Judith informed them from the rippling whisper of the piano, “she will be magnificently loved.”

“Certainly,” the man continued; “but what will Linda, Linda Condon, give in return?”

“It's a mistake to give much,” Linda said evenly.

“No, no, no!” Judith cried. “Give everything; spend every feeling, every nerve.”

“You are remarkable, of course; almost no women have the courage of their emotions.” His name was Reynold Chase, a long thin grave young man in a dinner coat, who wrote brilliant and successful comedies. “Yet Linda isn't parsimonious.” He turned to her. “Just what are you? What do you think of love?”

“I haven't thought about it much,” she replied slowly. “I'm not sure that I know what it means. At least it hasn't anything to do with marriage--”

“Ah!” he interrupted her.

Her usually orderly mind grew confused; it eddied as though with the sound of the piano. “It is not marriage,” she vaguely repeated her mother's instruction. Reynold Chase supported her.

“That destroys it,” he asserted. “This love is as different as possible from the ignominious impulse eternally tying the young into knots. It's anti-social.”

“How stupid you are, Reynold,” Pansy protested. “If you want to use those complicated words take Judith into the drawing-room. I'm sure Linda is dizzy, too.”

The latter's mental confusion lingered; she had a strong sense of having heard Reynold Chase say these strange things long before. Judith left the piano, sat beside him, and he lightly kissed her. A new dislike of Judith Feldt deepened in Linda's being. She had no reason for it, but suddenly she felt absolutely opposed to her. The manner in which Judith rested against the man by her was very distasteful. It offended Linda inexplicably; she wanted to draw into an infinity of distance from all contact with men and life.

She didn't even want to make one of those marriages that had nothing to do with love, but was only a sensible arrangement for the securing of gowns and velvet hangings and the luxury of enclosed automobiles. Suddenly she felt lonely, and hoped that her mother would come back soon.

XII

But when her mother, now Mrs. Moses Feldt, did return, Linda was conscious of a keen disappointment. Somehow she never actually came back. It wasn't only that, after so many years together, she occupied a room with another than Linda, but her manner was changed; it had lost all freedom of heart and speech. The new Mrs. Feldt was heavily polite to her husband's daughters; Linda saw that she liked Pansy, but Judith made her uncomfortable. She expressed this in an isolated return of the old confidences:

“That girl,” she said sharply, “likes petting. She can talk all night about her soul and beauty, and play the piano till her fingers drop off, but I--I--know. You can't fool me where they are concerned. I can recognize an unhealthy sign. I never believed in going to all those concerts and kidding yourself into a fever. I may have shown myself a time, but you mark my word--I was honest compared to Judith Feldt. Don't you be impressed with all her art talk and the books she reads. I was looking into one yesterday, and it made me blush; you can believe it or not, it takes some book for that!”

At the same time she treated Judith with a studious sweetness. Mr. Moses Feldt--Linda always thought of him as that--was a miracle of kindly cheerfulness. He made his wife and her daughter, and his own girls, an unbroken succession of elaborate and costly presents. “What's it for if not to spend on those you love?” he would remark, bringing a small jeweler's box wrapped in creamy-pink paper from his pocket. “You can't take it with you. I wasn't born with it--mama and I were as poor as any--you'll forgive me, Stella, I know, for speaking of her. I got enough heart to love you both. 'Oh, mama!' I said, and she dying, 'if you only won't go, I'll give you gold to eat.'”

Curiously, as Linda grew older, the consciousness of her stepfather as an absurd fat little man dwindled; she lost all sense of his actual person; and, as the influence of her mother slipped from her life, the mental conception of Mr. Moses Feldt deepened. She thought about him a great deal and very seriously; the things he said, the warm impact of his being, vibrated in her memory. He had the effect on her of the music of Christopher Gluck--the effect of a pure fine chord.

Pansy she now thought of with a faint contempt: she was rapidly growing thick-waisted and heavy, and she was engaged to a dull young man not rich enough to be interesting. They sat about in frank embraces and indulged in a sentimental speech that united Judith and Linda in common oppression.

There were, not infrequently, gatherings of the Feldts at dinner, a noisy good-tempered uproar of a great many voices speaking at once; extraordinary quantities of superlative jewels and dresses of superfine textures; but the latter, Linda thought, were too vivid in pattern or color for the short full maternal figures they often adorned. But no one, it seemed, considered himself ageing or even, in spite of the most positive indications, aged. The wives with faded but fashionable hair and animated eyes in spent faces talked with vigorous raillery about the “boys,” who, it might have happened, had gone in a small masculine company to a fervid musical show the evening before. While they, in their turn, thick like their brother or cousin Moses, with time-wasted hair and countenances marked with the shrewdness in the service of which the greater part of their lives had vanished, had their little jokes about the “girls” and the younger and handsomer beaux who threatened their happiness.

At times the topic of business crept into the lighter discussion, and, in an instant, the gaiety evaporated and left expressionless men and quick sharp sentences steely with decision, or indirect and imperturbably blank. A memorandum book and a gold pencil would appear for an enigmatic note, after which the cheerfulness slowly revived.