Chapter 6

What was she?

Her attention wandered to the squat Chinese god in the glass case. It was clear that he hadn't stirred for ages. A difficult thought partly formed in her mind--the Chinese was the god of this room, of Markue's party, of the women seated in the dim light on the floor and the divans; the low gurgle of their laughter, the dusky whiteness of their shoulders in the upcoiling incense, the smothered gleams of their hair, with the whispering men, were the world of the grayish-green image.

She explained this haltingly to Pleydon, who listened with a flattering interest. “I expect you're laughing at me inside,” she ended impotently. “And the other, the Greek Victory,” he added, “is the goddess of the other world, of the spirit. It's quaint a heathen woman should be that.”

Linda discovered that she liked Pleydon enormously. She continued daringly that he might be the sort of man she wanted to marry. But he wouldn't be easy to manage; probably he could not be managed at all. Her mother had always insisted upon the presence of that possibility in any candidate for matrimony. And, until now, Linda's philosophy had been in accord with her. But suddenly she entertained the idea of losing herself completely in--in love.

A struggle was set up within her: on one hand was everything that she had been, all her experience, all advice, and her innate detachment; on the other an obscure delicious thrill. Perhaps this was what she now wanted. Linda wondered if she could try it--just a little, let herself go experimentally. She glanced swiftly at Pleydon, and his bulk, his heavy features, the sullen mouth, appalled her.

Men usually filled her with an unaccountable shrinking into her remotest self. Pleydon was different; her liking for him had destroyed a large part of her reserve; but a surety of instinct told her that she couldn't experiment there. It was characteristic that a lesser challenge left her cold. She had better marry as she had planned.

Susanna Noda came up petulantly and sank in a brilliant graceful swirl at his feet. Her golden eyes, half shut, studied Linda intently.

XVI

“I am fatigued,” she complained; “you know how weary I get when you ignore me.” He gazed down at her untouched. “I have left Lao-tze for Greece,” he replied. She found this stupid and said so. “Has he been no more amusing than this?” she asked Linda. “But then, you are a child, it all intrigues you. You listen with the flattery of your blue eyes and mouth, both open.”

“Don't be rude, Susanna,” Pleydon commanded. “You are so feminine that you are foolish. I'm not the stupid one--look again at our 'child.' Tell me what you see.”

“I see Siberia,” she said finally. “I see the snow that seems so pure while it is as blank and cold as death. You are right, Dodge. I was the dull one. This girl will be immensely loved; perhaps by you. A calamity, I promise you. Men are pigs,” she turned again to Linda; “no--imbeciles, for only idiots destroy the beauty that is given to them. They take your reputation with a smile, they take your heart with iron fingers; your beauty they waste like a drunken Russian with gold.”

“Susanna, like all spendthrifts, is amazed by poverty.”

Even in the gloom Linda could see the pallor spreading over the other's face; she was glad that Susanna Noda spoke in Russian. However, with a violent effort, she subdued her bitterness. “Go into your Siberia!” she cried. “I always thought you were capable of the last folly of marriage. If you do it will spoil everything. You are not great, you know, not really great, not in the first rank. You've only the slightest chance of that, too much money. You were never in the gutter as I was--”

“Chateaubriand,” he interrupted, “Dante, Velasquez.”

“No, not spiritually!” she cried again. “What do you know of the inferno! Married, you will get fat.” Pleydon turned lightly to Linda:

“As a supreme favor do not, when I ask you, marry me.”

This, for Linda, was horribly embarrassing. However, she gravely promised. The Russian lighted a cigarette; almost she was serene again. Linda said, “Fatness is awful, isn't it?”

Pleydon replied, “Death should be the penalty. If women aren't lovely--” he waved away every other consideration.

“And if men have fingers like carrots--” Susanna mimicked him. Judith, flushed, her hair loosened, approached. “Linda,” she demanded, “do you remember when we ordered the taxi? Was it two or three?” Markue, at her shoulder, begged her not to consider home.

“I'm going almost immediately,” Pleydon said, “and taking your Linda.” His height and determined manner scattered all objections.

Linda, at the entrance to the apartment, found to her great surprise--in place of the motor she had expected--a small graceful single-horse victoria, the driver buttoned into a sealskin rug. Deep in furs, beside Pleydon, she was remarkably comfortable, and she was soothed by the rhythmic beat of the hoofs, the even progress through the crystal night of Fifth Avenue.

Her companion flooded his being with the frozen air. They had, it seemed, lost all desire to talk. The memory of Markue's party lingered like the last vanishing odor of his incense; there was a confused vision of the murmurous room against the lighted exterior where the drinks sparkled on a table. Linda made up her mind that she would not go to another. Then she wondered if she'd see Pleydon again. The Russian singer had been too silly for words.

It suddenly occurred to her that the man now with her had taken Susanna Noda, and that he had left her planted. He had preferred driving her, Linda Condon, home. He wasn't very enthusiastic about it, though; his face was gloomy.

“The truth is,” he remarked at last, “that Susanna is right--I am not in the first rank. But that was all nonsense about the necessity of the gutter--sentimental lies.”

Linda was not interested in this, but it left her free to explore her own emotions. The night had been eventful because it had shaken all the foundation of what she intended. That single momentary delicious thrill had been enough to threaten the entire rest. At the same time her native contempt of the other women, of Judith with her tumbled hair, persisted. Was there no other way to capture such happiness? Was it all hopelessly messy with drinks and unpleasant familiarity?

What did Pleydon mean by spirit? Surely there must be more kinds of love than one--he had intimated that. She gathered that “Homer's children,” those airs of Gluck that she liked so well, were works of art, sculpture, such as he did. Yet she had never thought of them as important, important as oatmeal or delicate soap. She made up her mind to ask him about it, when she saw that they had reached the Eighties; she was almost home.

“I am going away to-morrow,” he told her, “for the winter, to South America. When I come back we'll see each other. If you should change address send me a line to the Harvard Club.” The carriage had stopped before the great arched entrance to the apartment-house, towering in its entire block. He got out and lifted her to the pavement as if she had been no more than a flower in his hands. Then he walked with her into the darkness of the garden.

The fountains were cased in boards; the hedged borders, the bushes and grass, were dead. High above them on the dark wall a window was bright. Linda's heart began to pound loudly, she was trembling ... from the cold. There was a faint sound in the air--the elevated trains, or stirring wings? It was nothing, then, to be lifted into heaven. There was the door to the hall and elevator. She turned, to thank Dodge Pleydon for all his goodness to her, when he lifted her--was it toward heaven?--and kissed her mouth.

She was still in his arms, with her eyes closed. “Linda Condon?” he said, in a tone of inquiry.

At the same breath in which she realized a kiss was of no importance a sharp icy pain cut at her heart. It hurt her so that she gasped. Then, and this was strange, she realized that--as a kiss--it hadn't annoyed her. Suddenly she felt that it wasn't just that, but something far more, a part of all her inner longing. He had put her down and was looking away, a face in shadow with an ugly protruding lip.

She saw him that way in her dreams--in the court under the massive somber walls, with a troubled frown over his eyes. It seemed to her that, reaching up, she smoothed it away as they stood together in a darkness with the fountains, the hedges, dead, the world with never a sound sleeping in the prison of winter.

XVII

Linda thought about Dodge Pleydon on a warm evening of the following May. At four o'clock, in a hotel, Pansy had been married; and the entire Feldt connection had risen to a greater height of clamorous cheer than ever before. Extravagant unseasonable dishes, wines and banked flowers were lavishly mingled with sentimental speeches, healths and tears. Linda had been acutely restless, impatient of all the loud good humor and stupid compliments. The sense of her isolation from their life was unbearably keen. She would have a very different wedding with a man in no particular like Pansy's.

After dinner--an occasion, with Pansy absent, where Mr. Moses Feldt's tears persisted in flowing--she had strayed into the formal chamber across from the dining-room and leaned out of a window, gazing into the darkening court. Directly below was where Pleydon had kissed her. She often re-examined her feelings about that; but only to find that they had dissolved into an indefinite sense of the inevitable. Not alone had it failed to shock her--she hadn't even been surprised. Linda thought still further about kissing, with the discovery that if, while it was happening, she was conscious of the kiss, it was a failure; successful, it carried her as far as possible from the actuality.

Pleydon, of course, had not written to her; he had intimated nothing to the contrary, only asking her to let him know, at the Harvard Club, if she changed address. That wasn't necessary, and now, probably, he was back from South America. Where, except by accident, might she see him? Markue, with his parties, had dropped from Judith's world, his place taken by a serious older dealer in Dutch masters with an impressive gallery just off Fifth Avenue.

That she would see him Linda was convinced; this feeling absorbed any desire; it was no good wanting it or not wanting it; consequently she was undisturbed. She considered him gravely and in detail. Had there been any more Susanna Nodas in his stay south? She had heard somewhere that the women of Argentine were irresistible. Her life had taught her nothing if not the fact that a number of women figured in every man's history. It was deplorable but couldn't be avoided; and whether or not it continued after marriage depended on the cunning of any wife.

Now, however, Linda felt weary already at the prospect of a married life that rested on the constant play of her ingenuity. A great many things that, but a little before, she had willingly accepted, seemed to her probably not less necessary but distinctly tiresome. Linda began to think that she couldn't really bother; the results weren't sufficiently important.

Dodge Pleydon.

She slept in a composed order until the sun was well up. It was warmer than yesterday; and, going to an afternoon concert with Judith, she decided to walk. Linda strolled, in a short severe jacket and skirt, a black straw hat turned back with a cockade and a crisp flushed mass of sweet peas at her waist. The occasion, as it sometimes happened, found her in no mood for music. The warmth of the sunlight, the open city windows and beginning sounds of summer, had enveloped her in a mood in which the jangling sentimentality of a street organ was more potent than the legato of banked violins.

She was relieved when the concert was over, but lingered at her seat until the crowd had surged by; it made Linda furious to be shoved or indiscriminately touched. Judith had gone ahead, when Linda was conscious of the scrutiny of a pale well-dressed woman of middle age. It became evident that the other was debating whether or not to speak; clearly such an action was distasteful to her; and Linda had turned away before a restrained voice addressed her:

“You will have to forgive me if I ask your name ... because of a certain resemblance. Seeing you I--I couldn't let you go.”

“Linda Condon,” she replied.

The elder, Linda saw, grew even paler. She put out a gloved hand. “Then I was right,” she said in a slightly unsteady voice. “But perhaps, when I explain, you will think it even stranger, inexcusable. My dear child, I am your father's sister.”

Linda was invaded by a surprise equally made up of interest and resentment. The first was her own and the second largely borrowed from her mother. Besides, why had her father's family never made the slightest effort to see her. This evidently had simultaneously occurred to the other.

“Of course,” she added, quite properly, “we can't undertake family questions here. I shouldn't blame you a bit, either, if you went directly away. I had to speak, to risk that, because you were so unmistakably a Lowrie. It is not a common appearance. We--I--” she floundered for a painful moment; then she gathered herself with a considerable dignity. “Seeing you has affected me tremendously, changed everything. I have nothing to say in our defense, you must understand that. I am certain, too, that my sister will feel the same--we live together in Philadelphia. I hope you will give me your address and let us write to you. Elouise will join with me absolutely.”

Linda told her evenly where she lived, and then allowed Miss Lowrie to precede her toward the entrance. She said nothing of this to Judith, nor, momentarily, to her mother. She wanted to consider it undisturbed by a flood of talk and blame. It was evident to her that the Lowries had behaved very badly, but just how she couldn't make out. She recalled her father's sister--her aunt--minutely, forced to the realization that she was a person of entire superiority. Here, she suddenly saw, had been the cause of all their difficulties--the Lowries hadn't approved of the marriage, they had objected to her mother.

Five years ago she would have been incensed at this; but now, essentially, she was without personal indignation. She wanted, for herself, to discover as much as possible about her father and his family. A need independent of maternal influences stirred her. Linda was reassured by the fact that her father had been gently born; while she realized that she had always taken this for granted. Her mother must know nothing about the meeting with Miss Lowrie until the latter had written.

That was Friday and the letter came the following Tuesday. Linda, alone at the breakfast-table, instantly aware of the source of the square envelope addressed in a delicate regular writing, opened it and read in an unusual mental disturbance:

“My dear Linda,

I hope you will not consider it peculiar for me to call you this, for nothing else seems possible. Meeting you in that abrupt manner upset me, as you must have noticed. Of course I knew of you, and even now I can not go into our long unhappy affair, but until I saw you, and so remarkably like the Lowries, I did not realize how wicked Elouise and I had been. But I am obliged to add only where you were concerned. We have no desire to be ambiguous in that.

However, I am writing to say that we should love to have you visit us here. It is possible under the circumstances that your mother will not wish you to come. Yet I know the Lowries, a very independent and decided family, and although it is my last intention to be the cause of difficulty with your mother, still I hope it may be arranged.

In closing I must add how happy I was at the evidence of your blood. But that, I now see, was a certainty. You will have to forgive us for a large measure of blindness. Affectionately,

AMELIA VIGNÉ LOWRIE.”

Almost instantaneously Linda was aware that she would visit the Lowries. She liked the letter extremely, as well as all that she remembered of its sender. At the same time she prepared for a scene with her mother, different from those of the past--with the recourse to the brandy flask--but no less unpleasant. They had very little to say to each other now; and, when she went into her mother's room with an evident definite purpose, the latter showed a constrained surprise, a palpable annoyance that her daughter had found her at the daily renovation of her worn face.

XVIII

Linda said directly, “I met Miss Lowrie, father's sister, at a concert last week, and this morning I had a letter asking me to stay with them in Philadelphia.”

Mrs. Feldt's face suddenly had no need for the color she held poised on a cloth. Her voice, sharp at the beginning, rose to a shrill unrestrained wrath.

“I wonder at the brass of her speaking to you at all let alone writing here. Just you give me the letter and I'll shut her up. The idea! I hope you were cool to her, the way they treated us. Stay with them--I guess not!”

“But I thought of going,” Linda replied. “It's only natural. After all, you must see that he was my father.”

“A pretty father he was, too good for the girl he married. It's my fault I didn't tell you long ago, but I just couldn't abide the mention of him. He deserted me, no, us, cold, without a word--walked out of the door one noon, taking his hat as quiet as natural, and never came back. I never saw him again nor heard except through lawyers. That was the kind of heart he had, and his sisters are worse. I hadn't a decent speech of any kind out of them. The Lowries,” she managed to inject a surprising amount of contempt into her pronouncement of that name. “What it was all about you nor any sensible person would never believe:

“The house smelled a little of boiled cabbage. That's why he left me, and you expected in a matter of a few months. He said in his dam' frigid way that it had become quite impossible and took down his hat.”

“There must have been more,” Linda protested, suppressing a mad desire to laugh.

“Not an inch,” her mother asserted. “Nothing, after a little, suited him. He'd sit up like a poker, just as I've seen you, with his lips tight together in the Lowrie manner. It didn't please him no matter what you'd do. He wouldn't blow out at you like a Christian and I never knew where I was at. I'd come down in a matinée, the prettiest I could buy, and then see he didn't like it. He would expect you to be dressed in the morning like it was afternoon and you going out. And as for loosening your corsets for a little comfort about the house, you might as well have slapped him direct.

“That wasn't the worst, though; but his going away without as much as a flicker of his hand; and with me like I was. Nobody on earth but would blame him for that. I only got what was allowed me after we had changed back to my old name, me and you. He never asked one single question about you nor tried to see or serve you a scrap. For all he knew, at a place called Santa Margharita in Italy, you might have been born dead.”

She was unable, Linda recognized, to defend him in any way; he had acted frightfully. She acknowledged this logically with her power of reason, but somehow it didn't touch her as it had her mother, and as, evidently, the latter expected. She was absorbed in the vision of her father sitting, in the Lowrie manner, rigid as a poker; she saw him quietly take up his hat and go away forever. Linda understood his process completely; she was capable of doing precisely the same thing. Whatever was the matter with her--in the heartlessness so often laid to her account--had been equally true of her father.

“You ought to know what to say to them,” Mrs. Moses Feldt cried, “or I'll do it for you! If only I had seen her she would have heard a thing or two not easy forgotten.”

Linda's determination to go to Philadelphia had not been shaken, and she made a vain effort to explain her attitude. “Of course, it was horrid for you,” she said. “I can understand how you'd never never forgive him. But I am different, and, I expect, not at all nice. It's very possible, since he was my father, that we are alike. I wish you had told me this before--it explains so much and would have made things easier for me. I am afraid I must see them.”

She was aware of the bitterness and enmity that stiffened her mother into an unaccustomed adequate scorn:

“I might have expected nothing better of you, and me watching it coming all these years. You can go or stay. I had my life in spite of the both of you, as gay as I pleased and a good husband just the same. I don't care if I never see you again, and if it wasn't for the fuss it would make I'd take care I didn't. You'll have your father's money now I'm married; I wonder you stay around here at all with your airs of being better than the rest. God's truth is you ain't near as good, even if I did bring you into the world.”

“I am willing to agree with you,” Linda answered. “No one could be sweeter than the Feldts. I sha'n't do nearly as well. But that isn't it, really. People don't choose themselves; I'm certain father didn't at that lonely Italian place. If you weren't happy laced in the morning it wasn't your fault. You see, I am trying to excuse myself, and that isn't any good, either.”

“Unnatural,” Mrs. Moses Feldt pronounced. And Linda, weary and depressed, allowed her the last word.

XIX

Nothing further during the subsequent brief exchange of notes between Miss Lowrie and Linda was said of the latter's intention to visit her father's family. Mrs. Feldt, however, whose attitude toward Linda had been negatively polite, now displayed an animosity carefully hidden from her husband but evident to the two girls. The elder never neglected an opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishness or make her personality seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored from her wide sense of the inconsequence of most things.

Yet she was relieved when, finally, she had actually left New York. She looked forward with an unusual hopeful curiosity to the Lowries. To her surprise their house--miles, it appeared, from the center of the city--was directly on a paved street with electric cars, unpretentious stores and very humble dwellings nearby. Back from the thoroughfare, however, there were spacious green lawns. The street itself, she saw at once, was old--a highway of gray stone with low aged stone façades, steep eaves and blackened chimney-pots reaching, dusty with years, into the farther hilly country.

A gable of the Lowrie house, with a dignified white door, a fanlight of faintly iridescent glass and polished brasses, faced the brick sidewalk, while to the left there was a high board fence and an entrance with a small grille open on a somber reach of garden. A maid in a stiff white cap answered the fall of the knocker; she took Linda's bag; and, in a hall that impressed her by its bareness, Linda was greeted by the Miss Lowrie she had seen.

Her aunt was composed, but there was a perceptible flush on her cheeks, and she said in a rapid voice, after a conventional welcome, “You must meet Elouise at once, before you go up to your room.”

Elouise Lowrie was older than Amelia, but she, too, was slender and erect, with black hair startling in its density on her wasted countenance. Linda noticed a fine ruby on a crooked finger and beautiful rose point lace. “It was good of you,” the elder proceeded, “to come and see two old women. I don't know whether we have more to say or to keep still about. But I, for one, am going to avoid explanations. You are here, a fool could see that you were Bartram's girl, and that is enough for a Lowrie.”