Part 15

To this abrupt statement, Clarence found no answer. He yielded quietly and, presently, on the nights when Ellen played in the great house on Murray Hill, he found himself going back once more to his three lodges and the Mutual Benefit Association of the Superba Electrical Company. There were members of the latter organization who thought it queer that their vice president attended the annual ball, held that year in a Brooklyn Hotel, as he had always done, alone, without his wife. It happened that she played that night in the solid house on Murray Hill.

* * * * *

And what then of Ellen herself? She was not, surely, unconscious of all that was happening so slowly, so imperceptibly about her. It is true that she was one of those who are born to success, one for whom the past does not exist and the present has reality only in so far as it provides a step into the future. Indeed, during those years in the city, even the Town itself became a very distant and shadowy memory. She was concerned, desperately, with what lay before her, confused perhaps by a sense of imminent disaster so vague that it could have for her no real meaning or significance.

But of course she never spoke of these things to her husband, perhaps because she was conscious that he might not understand them. At times the old pity for him, the same pity which had seized her so unaccountably upon the night of their flight, overwhelmed her, and at such moments it was her habit to be tender with him in a fashion that sent him into extravagant flights of happiness. But these moments became, after a while, conscious things on the part of Ellen so that presently she used them cheaply to quiet his unhappiness as one might use a gaudy stick of candy to quiet an unhappy child. Such little things made him happy.

* * * * *

Sometimes in the night she would lie in one of the green beds ornamented with garlands of salmon pink roses, listening to the sounds of the city that lay far beneath them ... the distant rumble which rose and mingled somehow with the glow of light that filled all the dome of the sky, a rumble pierced sharply by the sudden shrill cry of a city child playing late in the streets, or the faint clop! clop! of hoofs upon asphalt blurred now and again by the ghostly boom of a great ship’s whistle rising from the fog-veiled river ... marvelous, splendorous sounds of a great world close at hand. There lay in these sounds a wonderful sense of the crowd--in which she herself was not a part. Lying there, her fingers would clutch the bedclothes tightly and presently she would become conscious that in her listening she was not alone, that beside her, separated by the little chasm which divided the two green beds, Clarence too lay awake ... listening. She must have known in those hours an unreal consciousness of something that was waiting ... a Thing destined not to become clear until long afterward ... a Thing which waited silently and with a terrible patience. It was an experience that was not rare; it happened many nights, so that presently she came to be happy in the weeks when Clarence, traveling through the night hundreds of miles from her, was not there at all.

Sometimes her hand would steal out and in the darkness be touched and clasped by another hand that trembled and clung to hers in a sort of terror.

27

Ellen’s awareness of Richard Callendar came over her slowly, a sensation neither desired nor anticipated, but one which stole upon her in some obscure fashion through the corridors of her own music. It would have been impossible to fix the moment at which this awareness took form; certainly it was not during that first damp drive through the park, when, wedged between his slim body and that of the yellow-clad Sabine, she had her first view of him. On that occasion she had remarked him merely as a young man perhaps of thirty (in this she was wrong by five years) who possessed a beauty of a kind new to her, a beauty of which there were traces to be found among certain of the workers in the Mills that hugged the dying hedges of Shane’s Castle. It was, in short, a kind of mystical, unearthly beauty born of an old, old race that was sensual and filled with an intense capacity for suffering ... a kind of beauty never to be found among her own Scotch and English friends and relatives. It had its determining quality in the extraordinary blackness of his hair, the dark olive of his skin and the unreality of gray eyes so queerly placed in so much darkness.

Sabine Cane, so completely civilized, so disillusioned, understood this beauty with the mind of one capable of an amazing detachment and power of analysis, for she had an extraordinary power of pulling herself up short in the midst of her emotions and saying, “This is indeed interesting. Here am I giving way to a good wholesome passion. Well! Well!...” and then, “It’s all very good so long as I don’t allow myself to be hurt by it.” For Sabine had the sort of intelligence which is the equipment of every potential sensualist.

This awareness on the part of Ellen forced its way through a torrent of impressions and emotions into a consciousness never too well organized. At the “parties” of Mrs. Callendar, there were, as the amusing woman predicted, never more than three or four people. There was always herself and usually her son. Sometimes Sabine Cane, whose relationship to the older woman was that of one who shares a complete understanding, was present, and now and then an elderly beau or two, of the sort which appears at concerts and the opera where they sit in the rear of boxes obscured somewhat by bedizened dowagers.

These entertainments, referred to variously by Thérèse Callendar as musicales, parties and soirées, were held in the vast drawing room where Ellen appeared on that first evening. While she played, the others, flanked by brocade curtains of immense dimensions, rows of Callendar family portraits and cases filled with bronze Buddhas and jade tear bottles, sat about respectful, listening, prepared to speak only in hushed voices, for it was true that all of them were wholly devoted to music ... all perhaps, save Sabine who, it might be said, was present as much because she found Thérèse Callendar amusing and had a profound curiosity regarding the shy, handsome girl who came to entertain them.

Ellen had a capacity for “feeling her audience.” She had not played many times before she knew exactly the degree and quality of appreciation in each of those who listened. She came to know that Sabine neither understood music nor cared very greatly for it, and that Mrs. Callendar preferred the compositions which were a little wild and barbaric. In the dark young Richard Callendar there was a quality altogether different from any of the others. It was a kind of appreciation which she had experienced only twice before. Lily listened in that fashion and her own brother Fergus. It was as if they abandoned themselves completely to the sound, as if they became in all their senses quite immersed. For a long time after the music ceased it was difficult for them to return wholly to the world of reality. She herself knew the intoxication; it was an emotion quite beyond the realm of drunkenness; it might be perhaps comparable to the effect of certain drugs. Richard Callendar listened in that fashion, and understanding this she came at length to play for him alone, moved only by an instinct of profound gratitude.

Even Sabine Cane, with all her sharp intelligence, failed to understand what was happening before her green eyes. She knew, vaguely, that there were times when the girl outdid herself, when the sounds she made possessed a beauty unusual in degree and quality, but her penetration seldom progressed beyond this point, because, by virtue of that strange and mystical bond, the other two were raised into a world quite beyond her. If there was a difference it lay in this ... that to Sabine one would have said that nothing could ever happen, because she guarded herself so carefully.

* * * * *

In the beginning, Ellen had come in only to play in the evenings at nine o’clock when the others had finished dinner and were sitting in the walnut-paneled library over cigarettes, coffee and liqueurs. She came, as a mountebank, to entertain. It was her habit to arrive quietly, to greet Mrs. Callendar and then sit modestly a little apart from the others until the moment came for her to play. They were kind to her, and sometimes quite cordial--even Sabine who, out of an awkwardness born of a nature really shy, talked with her in the most confused and disjointed fashion, sometimes, under the stress of temptation, striving even to pry into the details of her life. Perhaps Sabine, in the recesses of her clear intelligence, speculated regarding the origins, the background, the very surroundings of Ellen. Her own life had been one ordered and held in check by a rigid tradition ... a nurse, a day school kept by an affected and clever old harridan in impoverished circumstances, a year abroad and at last a coming-out ball. The independence she possessed lay altogether in her own thoughts, a thing hid away deeply. It moved like a mountain torrent confined placidly within the walls of a canal. It manifested itself only in a sharpness of tongue, a restless and malicious desire for gossip. She encouraged her imagination to rebuild the lives of her friends according to some pattern more exciting than that of the straight-laced world by which she was submerged. It was this, perhaps, which drew her to old Thérèse Callendar and her son. In them she found a freedom, a sophistication that elsewhere was lacking. Richard Callendar was not unwilling to discuss such things as mistresses. Thérèse did not treat her as if she were a spotless virgin to be protected against the realities of the world. They provided release to an intelligence bound in upon all sides by the corseted bejetted traditions of the day. They treated her with respect, as an individual. They possessed candor.

And so in the beginning her curiosity had seemed to Ellen, not understanding all this, an impudent thing, to be snubbed quietly in the proud way she had. She understood, well enough, that Sabine possessed the advantage ... at least in the world of Mrs. Callendar’s drawing-room. Sabine was at home there. She had lived always in such drawing-rooms. And yet there came a night when Sabine turned with her strange abruptness and said apropos of nothing, “I envy you.”

At which Ellen smiled and asked, “Why?”

“Because,” continued the abrupt Sabine, “you will always have the advantage over us (she was quite frank in admitting that they belonged to different worlds). It is always so with those who make their way by their wits.”

Once Ellen might have pondered such a speech, wondering whether she should consider herself insulted by it. But in the experience of many talks with Sabine, she came to understand that there lay at the bottom of the observation no more than a complete honesty. Indeed, the remark was so honest that in the very moment it was made, Ellen saw not only its honesty but its truth. She _was_ making her way by her wits. Sabine had nothing to make ... nothing to expect save a marriage which would occur in due time according to the plan that controlled all Sabine’s life. And the artist in Ellen leapt at once to assume the rôle. She would make her way by her wits, from now on, consciously. That placed her. It provided her with a certain definiteness of personality.

“People like that are always more sure of themselves,” Sabine continued. “I’ve noticed it. Take Mrs. Sigourney. She’s done it. She’s outraged some people but she’s got what she wanted.... She was nobody and now she’s chic. It’s her wits, always her wits.... She never does the wrong thing ... never puts herself in a place where she can be hurt.”

At the end of the speech, Sabine’s voice dropped suddenly. There was even a little echo of something ... perhaps a faint sigh, as if it came somewhere from deep within her. She _had_ been hurt then, perhaps a long time ago. Perhaps her flawless clothes, her sharp and witty tongue, her air of entering a room, were all no more than an armor she had raised about herself. She was not, like Ellen, isolated, independent, free ... belonging to nothing, to no one, save only herself. Her friendship with Richard Callendar may only have been a bit of bravado, to flaunt in the face of the others who desired him.

Ellen saw it, clearly now. In the Town she would have been like Sabine. There, in a community all her own, they could have hurt her. Here in this world there was no one who could do her any injury. Alone, isolated, she was stronger than she had been in the very midst of all those who had known her since the beginning.

“I wish,” continued Sabine, “that you would tell me about yourself some time.... Tell me and Richard. He’s interested in such things.”

“But I must play now,” said Ellen.

* * * * *

On the same night when the hour came for Ellen to be sent home in Mrs. Callendar’s cabriolet, the plump woman said, “The next time.... Let’s see, it’s Thursday, isn’t it?... You must come for dinner.... I’ll send Wilkes at twenty to eight.”

28

That there was any such thing as kindliness involved in all these complicated, new relationships had never occurred to Ellen, perhaps because she had never for a moment expected it. It was only with the invitation to dinner, in itself a tacit recognition of her individuality as something more than a mere music box, that the real state of affairs first became clear to her. It was as if she had progressed a step in the world, as if she had achieved a little already of the vast things she had set out to accomplish. She tried, in her direct, unsubtle way of speaking, to convey something of the idea to Clarence. She wanted him, as always, desperately to understand her actions. She wanted him, perhaps dishonestly, to believe that she could not help acting as she did, that it was not from choice but from a desire to brighten both their lives that she left him now and then to venture forth into regions which it was impossible for him to penetrate. And in her own fashion, as she had done so often with her mother, she told him the truth selectively, so that although she did not lie she managed to achieve an effect that was not the truth.

The great thing which she neglected to admit was this ... that she had come now to the point where it was no longer possible to take him with her. Even his fantastic dreams could not make him more than he was, and that was not enough. He had come to the end of his tether. She had barely begun. Imagine him in Mrs. Callendar’s drawing-room! Fancy the abrupt Sabine Cane talking to him as she talked to Ellen! He, she knew, would suffer more than any one.

She said to him, “I’m sorry, but on Thursday I shall be out for dinner.... I’ve got to dine with Mrs. Callendar.... It’s business, dear.... I must do these things.”

And at the speech, Clarence assumed that hurt and crestfallen look which touched her sense of pity. It was the one thing which could alter her determination; indeed there were times when she must have suspected that he used it consciously, as his only weapon. It moved her even now, so that she went so far as to kiss him and say, “It’s just one night.”

“But it’s a beginning.” He saw it perhaps, clearly enough, more clearly than she ever imagined. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

And then she explained to him again the things which it was necessary for her to do in order to win what she must have. She talked long and eloquently, for she was earnest and she pitied him. It was clear that her dishonesty arose not so much out of any evil calculation as out of a desire to have everything, to go her way and still leave Clarence unharmed and happy. It was a thing impossible, of course, yet it never seemed so to her. There was in her so much of her indomitable mother that she was never able to believe in the impossible.

So she talked eloquently and at length she even arranged it for him that he should dine on Thursday night with Mr. and Mrs. Bunce. Thus, by a single act, she accomplished another thing. She dined with the Bunces without having to dine with them. She knew too that they would be happier with Clarence there alone. It would be like the old days, without strain, an evening when the three of them,--Clarence and Harry Bunce and his rosy wife,--could dine, as one might say, in peace. There would be no strain, no sense of an intruder in their midst. For she was a stranger, always; they were never quite at ease with her.

Thus Clarence found the evening arranged, and he was content in his way, for he liked the Bunces.

Afterward Ellen’s clearest memory of the evening was the voice of Sabine drifting from the drawing-room as she entered the hall, saying, “The trouble with Boston people is that they are all descended from middle class immigrants and they’ve been proud of it ever since.”

This speech became fixed somehow in her brain as a symbol of Sabine’s queer worldliness, of a strangely cynical honesty that would color her whole point of view up to the very end. If Sabine thought it idiotic to take pride in being middle class, if she thought it absurd not to strive after distinction, she would say it, whether or not people thought her a snob. The world to her was thus and so; it moved according to an ancient pattern. All the orations in the world upon the subject of democracy could not alter the rule of things. Besides, it was a good enough rule. Why pretend it wasn’t? Sabine, of course, could afford to take such a position. In a worldly sense, she had nothing to strive for. She had been born to those things.

Ellen, removing the squirrel coat Clarence had given her, turned these considerations over in her mind as she entered the room. She was watching them all to-night as she had watched them once before through the crack in the lacquered screen, cautiously, with an air of an enemy laying siege to their fortress.

There was, beneath the gaze of the Callendar ancestors, only Mrs. Callendar in a dress of jet and sequins, Sabine in a brilliant green gown and Richard Callendar, handsome and dark in his black and white clothes. Richard rose and came forward to meet her.

“Mama,” he said, smiling, “has just been talking of you. She believes that one day you will be a great personality.”

“We are dining alone, the four of us,” said Mrs. Callendar abruptly. It was clear that she meant to keep Ellen forever in ignorance of what she had said.

* * * * *

The dining room was done in the grand manner of the Second Empire, a room copied at the behest of young Callendar’s grandfather from a house built by the Duc de Morny for one of his mistresses. It was grandiose, with columns of white and gilt, centering upon a massive table and a group of chairs with backs which ended a foot or two sooner than they should have ended. On the four panels of the walls there hung pictures of Venice in the dry, hard manner of Canaletto ... Venice at Dawn, Venice at Sunset, Venice at Carnival Time and Venice in Mourning for the Pope. On the huge table stood a silver épergne filled to overflowing with the most opulent of fruits ... mangoes, persimmons, red bananas, Homberg grapes and pomegranates. It was as if Thérèse Callendar had built this monument of fruit to recapture something of her own Oriental background--the rest of the room was so bad, so filled with the shadows of Cockney demi-mondaines and snuffbox adventures out of the Second Empire. At the four corners of the vast épergne stood four huge candelabra of silver.

Despite the air of depression given out by the monstrous room, it possessed a somber magnificence. To Ellen, the only magnificence approaching it lay in the drawing-room of that gloomy house known as Shane’s Castle, set in the midst of the smoking furnaces. Aunt Julia’s house was like it, filled with pictures and furniture and carpets which, like these, had been brought out of Europe.

There were wines for dinner, not one or two, but an array of port, madeira, sauterne, sherry and, at the place where Mrs. Callendar seated herself in a chair raised more than the others so that she might dominate the massive table, a pint of champagne for herself in a tiny silver bucket filled with ice. It was a schoolgirl’s dream of magnificence ... something out of the pages of a super-romantic novelette. In the beginning, the spectacle, proceeding through course after course, dazzled Ellen and made her shy. It was superb food, for in the veins of Thérèse there blended the blood of Frenchman and Greek. It was food that had a taste ... not the boiled stuff of Anglo-Saxons.

* * * * *

After dinner, when they had all gone into the dark library, the moment came at last when Ellen’s tongue was loosed. It may have been the wine she drank or it may have been the cigarette which, in her new freedom, she smoked over the coffee (for in a single evening she had broken two of Clarence’s rules); but it is more likely that it was the picture hanging over the mantelpiece, which changed everything.

She looked at it carefully and then said, “Is that by Turner? My aunt has one by him.”

And a moment later, under the subtle urgence of Sabine, she was telling them everything. She described, for example, the Town, its Mills, its desolation, the misery of the workers. She painted for them a picture of her own family, of the Red Scot who lay now, helpless and childish, in her own big bed. She told them of her other grandfather, cold and aloof, who had run away in his youth and lived in the Paris of the Second Empire, and now existed in a room walled in by books. She recreated before their eyes the gloomy color of Shane’s Castle, only to be interrupted in the midst by Thérèse Callendar, who turned to Sabine and observed, “She is a cousin, you know, of the Madame Shane we saw once at Madame de Cyon’s in Paris.... You remember Madame de Cyon, the Russian woman, whose husband was French minister to Bulgaria.... She lived in the Avenue du Bois. A Bonapartist. Madame Shane was the beauty with red hair.... Miss Tolliver’s Aunt Julia is her mother.”

And then she permitted Ellen to continue, and the girl meanwhile, even as she talked, understood that Mrs. Callendar had not forgotten Lily. She had even fixed the place and time of their meeting. It was clear that she had been thinking of Lily, as every one did.

She told the story simply enough, but with an earnestness that was moving. To her the canvas which she painted was not remarkable, but to the listeners it appeared to hold, perhaps because it was so new to them, the fascination of a world which was utterly strange and a little exotic. They listened, moved by the simplicity of her utterance, and Richard Callendar asked her questions about the mills and furnaces, about the foreign population. The recital was a success and out of it she learned something new,--that there was nothing of such power as simplicity, nothing of such interest as individuality. She understood all that from the way in which they listened. It was the first time in all her life when she had thrown caution to the winds. She was, for an hour, her complete self.

But there was one part of the story which she did not tell. It was that part which concerned her elopement and all that had followed it. She said simply, “And so I came to New York to study, and luckily fell into the hands of Sanson....”

Richard Callendar stood up suddenly and poked the fire. His mother said, “You could not have done better,” and Sabine observed, “Here in New York we forget that the rest of the country exists.... I’ve never been out of New York except to go to Europe or to some summer place.”