Chapter 8

In her room all emotion faded. Pleydon had said that she was still young; but she was sure she could never, in experience or feeling, be older. She became sorry for herself; or rather for the illusions, the Linda, of a few hours ago. She examined her features in the limited uncertain mirror--strong sensations, she knew, were a charge on the appearance--but she was unable to find any difference in her regular pallor. Then, mechanically conducting her careful preparations for the night, her propitiation of the only omnipotence she knew, she put out the candles of her May.

XXII

What welcome Linda met in New York came from Mr. Moses Feldt, who embraced her warmly enough, but with an air slightly ill at ease. He begged her to kiss her mama, who was sometimes hurt by Linda's coldness. She made no reply, and found the same influence and evidence of the power of suggestion in Judith. “We thought maybe you wouldn't care to come back here,” the latter said pointedly, over her shoulder, while she was directing the packing of a trunk. The Feldts were preparing for their summer stay at the sea.

Her mother's room resembled one of the sales of obvious and expensive attire conducted in the lower salons of pleasure hotels. There were airy piles of chiffon and satin, inappropriate hats and the inevitable confections of silk and lace. “It's not necessary to ask if you were right at home with your father's family,” Mrs. Condon observed with an assumed casual inattention. “I can see you sitting with those old women as dry and false as any. No one saved me in the clacking, I'm sure.”

“We didn't speak of you,” Linda replied. She studied, unsparing, the loose flesh of the elder's ravaged countenance. Her mother, she recognized, hated her, both because she was like Bartram Lowrie and still young, with everything unspent that the other valued and had lost. In support of herself Mrs. Feldt asserted again that she had “lived,” with stacks of friends and flowers, lavish parties and devoted attendance.

“You may be smarter than I was,” she went on, “but what good it does you who can say? And if you expect to get something for nothing you're fooled before you start.” She shook out the airy breadths of a vivid echo of past daring. “From the way you act a person might think you were pretty, but you are too thin and pulled out. I've heard your looks called peculiar, and that was, in a manner of speaking, polite. You're not even stylish any more--the line is full again and not suitable for bony shoulders and no bust.” She still cherished a complacency in her amplitude.

Linda turned away unmoved. Of all the world, she thought, only Dodge Pleydon had the power actually to hurt her. She knew that she would see him soon again and that again he would ask her to marry him. She considered, momentarily, the possibility of saying yes; and instantly the dread born with him in the Lowrie garden swept over her. Linda told herself that he was the only man for whom she could ever deeply care; that--for every conceivable reason--such a marriage was perfect. But the shrinking from its implications grew too painful for support.

Her mother's bitterness increased hourly; she no longer hid her feelings from her husband and Judith; and dinner, accompanied by her elaborate sarcasm, was a difficult period in which, plainly, Mr. Moses Feldt suffered most and Linda was the least concerned. This condition, she admitted silently, couldn't go on indefinitely; it was too vulgar if for no other reason. And she determined to ask the Lowries for another and more extended invitation.

Pleydon came, as she had expected, and they sat in the small reception-room with the high ceiling and dark velvet hangings, the piano at which, long ago it now seemed, Judith had played the airs of Gluck for her. He said little, but remained for a long while spread over the divan and watching her--in a formal chair--discontentedly. He rose suddenly and stood above her, a domineering bulk obliterating nearly everything else. In response to his demand she said, pale and composed, that she was not “reasonable”; she omitted the “yet” included in his question. Pleydon frowned. However, then, he insisted no further.

When he had gone Linda was as spent as though there had been a fresh brutal scene; and the following day she was enveloped in an unrelieved depression. Her mother mocked her silence as another evidence of ridiculous pretentiousness. Mr. Moses Feldt regarded her with a furtive concerned kindliness; while Judith followed her with countless small irritating complaints. It was the last day at the apartment before their departure for the summer. Linda was insuperably tired. She had gone to her room almost directly after dinner, and when a maid came to her door with a card, she exclaimed, before looking at it, that she was not in. It was, however, Arnaud Hallet; and, with a surprise tempered by a faint interest, she told the servant that she would see him.

There was, Linda observed at once, absolutely no difference in Arnaud's clothing, no effort to make himself presentable for New York or her. In a way, it amused her--it was so characteristic of his forgetfulness, and it made him seem doubly familiar. He waved a hand toward the luxury of the interior. “This,” he declared, “is downright impressive, and lifted, I'm sure, out of a novel of Ouida's.

“You will remember,” he continued, “complaining about my sense of humor one evening; and that, at the time, I warned you it might grow worse. It has. I am afraid, where you are concerned, that it has absolutely vanished. My dear, you'll recognize this as a proposal. I thought my mind was made up, after forty, not to marry; and I specially tried not to bring you into it. You were too young, I felt. I doubted if I could make you happy, and did everything possible, exhausted all the arguments, but it was no good.

“Linda, dear, I adore you.”

She was glad, without the slightest answering emotion, that Arnaud, well--liked her. At the same time all her wisdom declared that she couldn't marry him; and, with the unsparing frankness of youth and her individual detachment, she told him exactly why.

“I need a great deal of money,” she proceeded, “because I am frightfully extravagant. All I have is expensive; I hate cheap things--even what satisfies most rich girls. Why, just my satin slippers cost hundreds of dollars and I'll pay unlimited amounts for a little fulling of lace or some rare flowers. You'd call it wicked, but I can't help it--it's me.

“I've always intended to marry a man with a hundred thousand dollars a year. Of course, that's a lot--do you hate me for telling you?--but I wouldn't think of any one with less than fifty--”

Arnaud Hallet interrupted quietly, “I have that.”

Linda gazed incredulously at his neglected shoes, the wrinkles of his inconsiderable coat and unstudied scarf. She saw that, actually, he had spoken apologetically of his possessions; and a stinging shame spread through her at the possibility that she had seemed common to an infinitely finer delicacy than hers.

XIII

Most of these circumstances Linda Hallet quietly recalled sitting with her husband in the house that had been occupied by the Lowries'. A letter from Pleydon had taken her into a past seven years gone by; while ordinarily her memory was indistinct; ordinarily she was fully occupied by the difficulties, or rather compromises, of the present. But, in the tranquil open glow of a Franklin stove and the withdrawn intentness of Arnaud reading, her mind had returned to the distressed period of her wedding.

Elouise Lowrie--Amelia was dead--sunk in a stupor of extreme old age, her bloodless hands folded in an irreproachable black surah silk lap, sat beyond the stove; and Lowrie, Linda's elder child, five and a half, together with his sister Vigné, had been long asleep above. Linda was privately relieved by this: her children presented enormous obligations. The boy, already at a model school, appalled her inadequate preparations by his flashes of perceptive intelligence; while she was frankly abashed at the delicate rosy perfection of her daughter.

The present letter was the third she had received from Dodge Pleydon, whom she had not seen since her marriage. At first he had been enraged at the wrong, he had every reason to feel, she had done him. Then his anger had dissolved into a meager correspondence of outward and obvious facts. There was so much that she had been unable to explain. He had always been impatient, even contemptuous, of the emotion that made her surrender to him unthinkable--Linda realized now that it had been the strongest impulse of her life--and, of course, she had never accounted for the practically unbalanced enmity of her mother.

The latter had deepened to an incredible degree, so much so that Mr. Moses Feldt, though he had never taken an actual part in it--such bitterness was entirely outside his generous sentimentality--had become acutely uncomfortable in his own home, imploring Linda, with ready tears, to be kinder to her mama. Judith, too, had grown cutting, jealous of Linda's serenity of youth, as her appearance showed the effect of her wasting emotions. Things quite extraordinary had happened: once Linda's skin had been almost seriously affected by an irritation that immediately followed the trace of her powder-puff; and at several times she had had clumsily composed anonymous notes of a most distressing nature.

She had wondered, calmly enough, which of the two bitter women were responsible, and decided that it was her mother. At this the situation at the Feldts', increasingly strained, had become an impossibility. Arnaud Hallet, after his first visit, had soon returned. There was no more mention of his money; but every time he saw her he asked her again, in his special manner--a formality flavored by a slight diffident humor--to marry him. Arnaud's proposals had alternated with Pleydon's utterly different demand.

Linda remembered agonized evenings when, in a return of his brutal manner of the unforgettable night in the Lowrie garden, he tried to force a recognition of his passion. It had left her cold, exhausted, the victim of a mingled disappointment at her failure to respond with a hatred of all essential existence. At last, on a particularly trying occasion, she had desperately agreed to marry him.

The aversion of her mother, becoming really dangerous, had finally appalled her; and a headache weighed on her with a leaden pain. Dodge, too, had been unusually considerate; he talked about the future--tied up, he asserted, in her--of his work; and suddenly, at the signal of her rare tears, Linda agreed to a wedding.

In the middle of the night she had wakened oppressed by a dread resulting in an uncontrollable chill. She thought first that her mother was bending a malignant face over her; and then realized that her feeling was caused by her promise to Dodge Pleydon. It had grown worse instead of vanishing, waves of nameless shrinking swept over her; and in the morning, further harrowed by the actualities of being, she had sent a telegram to Arnaud Hallet--to Arnaud's kindness and affection, his detachment not unlike her own.

They were married immediately; and through the ceremony and the succeeding days she had been almost entirely absorbed in a sensation of escape. At the death of Amelia Lowrie, soon after, Arnaud had suggested a temporary period in the house she remembered with pleasure; and, making small alterations with the months and years, they had tacitly agreed to remain.

Linda often wondered, walking about the lower floor, why it seemed so familiar to her: she would stand in the dining-room, with its ceiling of darkened beams, and gaze absent-minded through the long windows at the close-cut walled greenery without. The formal drawing-room, at the right of the street entrance, equally held her--a cool interior with slatted wooden blinds, a white mantelpiece with delicately reeded supports and a bas-relief of Minerva on the center panel, a polished brass scuttle for cannel-coal and chairs with wide severely fretted backs upholstered in old pale damask.

The house seemed familiar, but she could never grow accustomed to the undeniable facts of her husband, the children and her completely changed atmosphere. She admitted to herself that her principal feeling in connection with Lowrie and Vigné was embarrassment. Here she always condemned herself as an indifferent, perhaps unnatural, mother. She couldn't help it. In the same sense she must be an unsatisfactory wife. Linda was unable to shake off the conviction that it was like a play in which she had no more than a spectator's part.

This was her old disability, the result of her habit of sitting, as a child, apart from the concerns and stir of living. She made every possible effort to overcome it, to surrender to her new conditions; but, if nothing else, an instinctive shyness prevented. It went back further, even, she thought, than her own experience, and she recalled all she had heard and reconstructed of her father--a man shut in on himself who had, one day, without a word walked out of the door and left his wife, never to return. These realizations, however, did little to clarify her vision; she was continually trying to adjust her being to circumstances that persistently remained a little distant and blurred.

In appearance, anyhow, Linda told herself with a measure of reassurance, she was practically unchanged. She still, with the support of Arnaud, disregarding current fashion, wore her hair in a straight bang across her brow and blue gaze. She was as slender as formerly, but more gracefully round, in spite of the faint characteristic stiffness that was the result of her mental hesitation. Her clothes, too, had hardly varied--she wore, whenever possible, white lawns ruffled about the throat and hem, with broad soft black sashes, while her more formal dresses were sheaths of dull unornamented satin extravagant in the perfection of their simplicity.

XXIV

Arnaud Hallet stirred, sharply closing his book. He had changed--except for a palpable settling down of grayness--as little as Linda. For a while she had tried to bring about an improvement in his appearance, and he had met her expressed wish whenever he remembered it; but this was not often. In the morning a servant polished his shoes, brushed and ironed his suits; yet by evening, somehow, he managed to look as though he hadn't been attended to for days. She would have liked him to change for dinner; other men of his connection did, it was a part of his inheritance. Arnaud, however, in his slight scoffing disparagement, declined individually to annoy himself. He was, she learned, enormously absorbed in his historical studies and papers.

“Did you enjoy it?” she asked politely of his reading. “Extremely,” he replied. “The American Impressions of Tyrone Power, the English actor, through eighteen thirty-three and four. His account of a European packet with its handbells and Saratoga water and breakfast of spitch-cock is inimitable. I'd like to have sat at Cato's then, with a julep or hail-storm, and watched the trotting races.”

Elouise Lowrie rose unsteadily, confused with dozing; but almost immediately she gathered herself into a relentless propriety and a formal goodnight.

“What has been running through that mysterious mind of yours?”

“I had a letter from Dodge,” she told him simply; “and I was thinking a little about the past.” He exhibited the nice unstrained interest of his admirable personality. “Is he still in France?” he queried. “Pleydon should be a strong man; I am sure we are both conscious of a little disappointment in him.” She said: “I'll read you his letter, it's on the table.

“'You will see, my dear Linda, that I have not moved from the Rue de Penthièvre, although I have given up the place at Etretat, and I am not going to renew the lease here. Rodin insists, and I coming to agree with him, that I ought to be in America. But the serious attitude here toward art, how impossible that word has been made, is charming. And you will be glad to know that I have had some success in the French good opinion. A marble, Cotton Mather, that I cut from the stone, has been bought for the Luxembourg.

“'I can hear you both exclaim at the subject, but it is very representative of me now. I am tired of mythological naiads in a constant state of pursuit. Get Hallet to tell you something about Mather. What a somber flame! I have a part Puritan ancestry, as any Lowrie will inform you. Well, I shall be back in a few months, very serious, and a politician--a sculptor has to be that if he means to land any public monuments in America.

“'I hope to see you.'”

The letter ended abruptly, with the signature, “Pleydon.”

“Are you happy, Linda?” Arnaud Hallet asked unexpectedly after a short silence. So abruptly interrogated she was unable to respond. “What I mean is,” he explained, “do you think you would have been happier married to him? I knew, certainly, that it was the closest possible thing between us.” Now, however, she was able to satisfy him:

“I couldn't marry Dodge.”

“Is it possible to tell me why?”

“He hurt me very much once. I tried to marry him, I tried to forget it, but it was useless. I was dreadfully unhappy, in a great many ways--”

“So you sent for me,” he put in as she paused reflectively. “I didn't hurt you, at any rate.” It seemed to her that his tone was shadowed. “You have never hurt me, Arnaud,” she assured him, conscious of the inadequacy of her words. “You were everything I wanted.”

“Except for my hats,” he said in a brief flash of his saving humor. “It would be better for me, perhaps, if I could hurt you. That ability comes dangerously close to a constant of love. You mustn't think I am complaining. I haven't the slightest reason in the face of your devastating honesty. I didn't distress you and I had the necessary minimum--the fifty thousand.” His manner was so even, so devoid of sting, that she could smile at the expression of her material ambitions. “I realize exactly your feeling for myself, but what puzzles me is your attitude toward the children.”

“I don't understand it either,” she admitted, “except that I am quite afraid of them. They are so different from all my own childhood; often they are too much for me. Then I dread the time when they will discover how stupid and uneducated I am at bottom. I'm sure you already ask questions before them to amuse yourself at my doubt. What shall I do, Arnaud, when they are really at school and bring home their books?”

“Retreat behind your dignity as a parent,” he advised. “They are certain to display their knowledge and ask you to bound things or name the capital of Louisiana.” She cried, “Oh, but I know that, it's New Orleans!” She saw at once, from his entertained expression, that she was wrong again, and became conscious of a faint flush of annoyance. “It will be even worse,” she continued, “when Vigné looks to me for advice; I mean when she is older and has lovers.”

“She won't seriously; they never do. She'll tell you when it's all over. Lowrie will depend more on you. I may have my fun about the capital of Louisiana, Linda, but I have the greatest confidence in your wisdom. God knows what an unhappy experience your childhood was, but it has given you a superb worldly balance.”

“I suppose you're saying that I am cold,” she told him. “It must be true, because it is repeated by every one. Yet, at times, I used to be very different--you'd never imagine what a romantic thrill or strange ideas were inside of me. Like a memory of a deep woods, and--and the loveliest adventure. Often I would hear music as clearly as possible, and it made me want I don't know what terrifically.”

“An early experience,” he replied. Suddenly she saw that he was tired, his face was lined and dejected. “You read too much,” Linda declared. He said: “But only out of the printed book.” She wondered vainly what he meant. As he stood before the glimmering coals, in the room saturated in repose, she wished that she might give him more; she wanted to spend herself in a riot of feeling on Arnaud and their children. What a detestable character she had! Her desire, her efforts, were wasted.

He went about putting up the windows and closing the outside shutters, a confirmed habit. Linda rose with her invariable sense of separation, the feeling that, bound on a journey with a hidden destination, she was only temporarily in a place of little importance. It was like being always in her hat and jacket. Arnaud shook down the grate; then he gazed over the room; it was all, she was sure, as it had been a century ago, as it should be--all except herself.

XXV

Yet her marriage had realized in almost every particular what she had--so much younger--planned. The early suggestion, becoming through constant reiteration a part of her knowledge, had been followed and accomplished; and, as well, her later needs were served. Linda told herself that, in a world where a very great deal was muddled, she had been unusually fortunate. And this made her angry at her pervading lack of interest in whatever she had obtained.

Other women, she observed, obviously less fortunate than she, were volubly and warmly absorbed in any number of engagements and pleasures; she continually heard them, Arnaud's connections--the whole superior society, eternally and vigorously discussing servants and bridge, family and cotillions, indiscretions and charities. These seemed enough for them; their lives were filled, satisfied, extraordinarily busy. Linda, for the most part, had but little to do. Her servants, managed with remote exactness, gave no trouble; she had an excellent woman for the children; her dress presented no new points of anxiety nor departure ... she was, in short, Arnaud admitted, perfectly efficient. She disposed of such details mechanically, almost impatiently, and was contemptuous, no envious, of the women whose demands they contented.

At the dinners, the balls, to which Arnaud's sense of obligation both to family and her took them against his inclination, it was the same--everyone, it appeared to Linda, was flushed with an intentness she could not share. Men, she found, some of them extremely pleasant, still made adroit and reassuring efforts for her favor; the air here, she discovered, was even freer than the bravado of her earlier surroundings. This love-making didn't disturb her--it was, ultimately, the men who were fretted--indeed, she had rather hoped that it would bring her the relief she lacked.

But again the observations and speculation of her mature childhood, what she had heard revealed in the most skillful feminine dissections, had cleared her understanding to a point that made the advances of hopeful men quite entertainingly obvious. Their method was appallingly similar and monotonous. She liked, rather than not, the younger ones, whose confidence that their passion was something new on earth at times refreshed her; but the navigated materialism of greater experience finally became distasteful. She discussed this sharply with Arnaud:

“You simply can't help believing that most women are complete idiots.”

“You haven't said much more for men.”

“The whole thing is too silly! Why is it, Arnaud? It ought to be impressive and sweep you off your feet, up--”