Part 17

One bright afternoon in May they walked all the way from Sherry’s through the park to the Babylon Arms. It was a soft day when the park appeared veritably to reflect its greenness upon the air itself, a day when the willows were softened by a haze of new leaves, and the rare clusters of cherry trees appeared in faint blurs of delicate pink. Along the edges of the lake, freed now of its burden of ice and not yet burdened anew with the old newspapers of sweltering August, the nursemaids divided the iron benches with vagabonds and old ladies who had come there simply to rest, to sit relaxed, silent, as if they were sustained somehow without effort by the very softness of the air. The quality of this pervading gentleness appeared to have its effect upon the two; for a time they were enveloped by a languor which drugged the intelligence and warmed the senses. They walked lazily, side by side, Ellen in a tight gray suit and a large picture hat, Callendar looking at her now and then out of his gray eyes and poking the fresh green grass with his malacca stick. At times they stopped and laughed, for Callendar was in a charming mood when he became a _blagueur_, irresistible and caressing. Under the influence of the day even the hardness of Ellen, which could be at times almost pitiful, appeared to melt away. She laughed at him. She even watched him slyly from the corner of her eyes, but not in the old hostile fashion. It was more the way one would watch a charming little boy, fearful lest his knowledge of the admiration might give him an advantage.

It could not have been the weather alone which so changed her. There were other things, among them beyond all doubt Callendar himself and the friendship which he had given her, the same friendship which his mother and even Sabine in her brusque, shy way had offered. They were friends in a way no one, save Lily, had ever been before. It is possible that there came to her on this soft warm day a knowledge of her kinship with these people, of a bond which if undefinable was none the less certain and secure. They had nothing to gain from her and they were not concerned with subduing her; they did not seek to change her in any way at all. They were like her old Aunt Julia and the mysterious Lily, who had warned her not to let people make her fit a pattern, not to let them drag her down to the level of their own mediocrity; she understood now what Lily meant. These were people who, by some quality of honesty that was almost a physical thing, had attained an aristocracy of their own, a state which had its foundations in that very honesty. There was, too, a distinction about them of a sort beyond such individuals as the genteel, decayed Mr. Wyck, May Seton and her giggles, Mr. Bunce who was so robust and kind, and (this thought must have occurred to her) even Clarence whose kindly humbleness barred him forever. They were not muddled; they stood outlined, for all their strangeness, with a sharp clarity.

It was an understanding that had come to her over a long time dimly as through a mist. To-day she knew it. She began to understand why there were some people whom she admired and some for whom she could have in her heart contempt or at best an emptiness that bordered upon pity.

So she walked very happily with the fascinating, dark young man, content perhaps that she might go on thus forever, that she might always have him and Sabine and Thérèse quite as they were, without any change. And in the depths of her heart it would have given her a sharp, leaping pleasure to have encountered suddenly on one of those asphalt paths May Seton and others of her townspeople. It would have pleased her to have had them witness her triumph. For she had not yet escaped the Town.

* * * * *

Into the midst of this a new knowledge came, sharp and unforeseen.

Under the shadow of Daniel Webster in the bronze attitude of a pouter pigeon, Callendar halted sharply and turned toward her with a swift directness, looking at her so closely that for an instant she blushed.

“Might I come in with you this afternoon?” he asked. “Will you be alone?”

Faced by the disarming gaze of the gray eyes, she forgot for a moment her game of watching. She answered, “Why, yes. I’ll be alone.” And then, as if she could not control herself, she looked away and started walking once more.

He did not speak again until they had reached the outer barrier of the park when he said,

“I’d like to have you play for me ... alone. I’ve never heard you save in a crowd. I fancy you would play best for an audience of one.”

They turned presently between the Syrian Lions of the Babylon Arms and, after being borne silently aloft in the swaying elevator, they climbed the two flights of stairs to the door of the tiny apartment which Ellen opened with her key. The room was in darkness until she lifted the shades which (on the advice of that passionate housekeeper, her mother) were drawn to protect the cheap, bright carpet from the sharp rays of the spring sun, and then the light revealed a shabby little room stuffed with the things which Clarence had bought her. There were chairs and sofas and pillows, pictures, ornaments and little tables. In one corner the grand piano stood somewhat apart in a little bay cleared of furniture. Richard, leaning on his stick and viewing the confusion gravely, must have thought her lover a poor sort, who could offer her only a great profusion of things in the poorest of taste. Yet he did not smile, perhaps because he was not greatly interested in the room. In the midst of all the stuff, Ellen, taking off her picture hat and blushing still with a hazy sense of confusion, possessed an air of aloofness, of being detached from all the shabby things. She rose above them as once before she had risen above the furniture in the Setons’ dismal parlor.

The gaiety that had flourished in the bright park became dampened now by a queer sense of strain, an awkwardness which made itself apparent in the silence of both. They were no longer in the bright open park: the walls which shut them in had changed everything, sharpened in some indefinable way the power of their senses. For an instant they stood regarding each other shyly, and presently Ellen said, “Do sit down there.... And I’ll play for you. What do you want to hear?”

Richard told her that the choice must be hers, and then he seated himself in Clarence’s leather arm chair and lighted a cigarette with the matches from Clarence’s smoking table in the Mission style. Without speaking again she began to play. It was as if she had said, “I will talk to you in this fashion,” and after the first few chords had fallen the sense of strain and conflict disappeared, swallowed up again, this time in the man’s attitude of passionate listening.

She played for him, first of all, some Schumann which was so like the shadowy, soft consciousness of this new feeling born with such abruptness there in the park; and then she played some of his beloved Chopin and turned at last into the Sonata Appassionata. She played as she played only for Fergus who listened in the same fashion, slumped down in his chair, his eyes half closed, his curling, golden hair all rumpled, with the air of one intoxicated by sound. It must have occurred to her, for the first time, that there was between her brother and this stranger a certain likeness, a capacity for wild abandonment that was terrifying. To-day all the things which for so long a time had been shut up within the walls of her bitter secrecy poured forth and overflowed into the music; and with this there was united a new fire, a sudden warmth that was strange to her. She knew a strange desire to share all that she possessed, a curious, aching desire close to the border of tears. It was so, perhaps, because love would always be to her like this ... a wild and passionate heightening of the senses which found its manifestation in an unearthly unity of spirit. For a time she carried Richard with her into the ecstasy she was able to invoke.

And when at length the last chords drifted slowly away, they permitted the silence to remain unbroken for a long time while he sat, still slumped in his chair, his eyes half closed, watching her with the air of one on whom a spell has been cast.

He sat there in Clarence’s chair in Clarence’s place, magnificent like herself in all that desert of commonplace things. There was a sense of unreality about the whole scene. She must have known, deep within that hard intelligence of hers, that what she saw was at best an illusion since between them both there lay differences, circumstances, facts that were not to be overcome.

He went presently, after they had exchanged a few stupid phrases drawn by sheer force from the depths of an emotion which neither was willing to betray save by their silence. They did not even speak of another meeting; nothing happened; upon the surface their parting was strangely empty and bare. And when the door had closed behind him, Richard halted for a moment in the dark hallway and leaned against the wall. Perhaps he remembered what his mother, so old in her wisdom and so shrewd, had told him. _She’s not the ordinary sort.... You’d best keep clear of her._

The mocking look had gone out of his eyes. Something had happened to him, an experience that was altogether new in a life by no means limited in such matters ... a thing which opened the fancy to a new magnificence, a new rapture, a new intoxication. It was a vision which he may have doubted because he had never believed in its existence. But between him and this wild adventure there stood a barrier against which he could make no progress. It was an invisible wall of a sort he had never encountered in any woman, not even in the terrible serenity of Sabine. Hard it was, and clear like crystal, protecting something which he might see but never touch. _She’s not the ordinary sort.... You’d best keep clear of her._

* * * * *

On the opposite side of the door Ellen flung herself down on the ugly divan and wept, silently and horribly, as she had wept once before in the dark solitude of her own virginal room, while the autumn rain drenched the garden outside. And again she could not have told why she wept. It was a passionate sensuous weeping which exhausted itself presently and left her weary and quiet until long after the lights had begun to twinkle through the smoke along the river.

Yet nothing had happened--nothing at all of which she could say, “It is this or that.”

32

Meanwhile from the Town there came to Ellen in the weekly letters of her mother bits of news which sometimes interested her but more often did not. There was the news of May Seton’s marriage to Herman Biggs, an evening wedding in the Methodist church with a supper afterwards at which Skinflint Seton, in a gesture of triumph and vindication, had flung loose the purse strings and gone so far as to provide an orchestra which played behind a screen of smilax and carnations.

“Herman,” wrote Hattie Tolliver, “looked a gawk, with his freckles, and May was too fat for her dress. It was cut princess fashion and trimmed with duchess lace. She carried a shower bouquet of white roses and sweet peas. Herman’s trousers bagged at the knees. At least this is what Cousin Eva Barr, who went to the wedding, told me. I wasn’t invited. They say that the Setons have been living on cold hash ever since.

“They went to French Lick Springs on their honeymoon and now Herman is back at the factory learning the corset business.”

Miss Ogilvie had not been well lately and Aunt Julia was becoming more and more eccentric. She had shut up all but one great room at Shane’s Castle and would see no one but the Doctor and Hattie Tolliver. “I go to see her three times a week. She needs some one to take hold of that great house. There’s no one else, so I do it. Miss Ogilvie comes in to sit with Pa while I’m gone. She’s given up some of her pupils. She says she finds she can’t do as much as she once could.

“Your father is doing well at the bank and I’ve managed to lay aside quite a sum after the debts were paid. We’ll need it to send Fergus to school. I’ve sold the rings that Aunt Julia gave me and we’re now on the prosperous side of things once more. If your father had only listened to me, we’d have been rich to-day, but he always said he knew best, and he trusted people too much. Before long we’ll have enough to come East. I want to be with my children.”

Then there were inquiries after her health and Clarence’s welfare and endless cautions and advice concerning the management of the flat, for distance made little difference to Hattie Tolliver when it concerned the interests of some one she loved. It was as if she ran Ellen’s household as well. In one letter she was even bold enough to ask whether there was any hope of her becoming a grandmother.

Each of these letters, though it bore a great similarity to all the others, was in a sense an epic. They recorded in sentences vigorously written and crowded with a host of details, the daily history of a community. They were fiercely personal and colored by the prejudices of Hattie Tolliver. In her enemies there was nothing good and in those she loved best nothing bad. Her world was one of a savage intensity, painted like Skinflint Seton’s entirely in blacks and whites.

She inquired frequently whether Clarence would be coming West, insisting that he must stop and see them in the Town and tell them all the news. And the credulous woman was put off with the story that Clarence had given up traveling and would not be in the West again for a long time. It was a lie that Ellen invented to protect him, since he was too timid ever to risk meeting any one who might recognize him as spiritual ravisher of Mrs. Herman Biggs (née May Seton).

And at length there came a letter containing the news that Grandpa Barr had died.

“He passed away,” wrote Mrs. Tolliver, “quietly. I was in the room and he was just lying there looking at the ceiling and singing an old song that he used to sing when Ma was still alive and I was a little girl. They used to sing it as a duet. ‘I will find my rest in the eagle’s nest,’ it was called, and they sang it in the long summer evenings when all the chores were done and they sat out under the trees. I can remember it well. He was humming this when suddenly he tried to sit up, and said, ‘Why, Ma.... There you are, come to meet me.... I’m coming to you.... In just a minute, as soon as I get the little red cow in from the field by the cairn.’ And then he lay back and died without another word. (It was indeed a long way from Grandpa Barr, dead now, with his memories of the frontier, to Thérèse Callendar and her carved emerald saved from the sack of Constantinople.)

“It was a good thing because he wanted to die for so long. It was hard on a man like that who had always been so active. He was like a little child. For a long time he hadn’t said anything sensible. I did everything for him and I don’t regret it. It was hard sometimes with so much else to worry me and take up my time.

“Aunt Julia is getting worse and worse. She can’t leave her bed now and can only eat things without sugar. I make her cakes every week and custards, the kind she likes. I can’t even have a holiday, because she grows restless and worse when I’m away.”

And then there was a significant paragraph, brightened by a certain spice of resentment. “Gramp remains just the same ... not a day older and just as strong as ever. It looks to me as if he’d live forever. _I don’t see what I’ve done to bear such a cross!_”

* * * * *

The letters from Ellen grew steadily fewer and more unsatisfactory. With her old instinct, she wrote only of those things which were of no importance, bits of news concerning the health of Clarence and herself, comments on the heat, even stories which she had read in the newspapers. Of her unhappiness she said nothing, though it was at the moment the one thing which dominated all her existence.

After the stifled farewell on the afternoon in May Callendar appeared to vanish. Clarence returned and they gave their party for the Bunces--a party to which Mr. Wyck, somewhat uppish and deeply wretched, brought a spinister heiress from Brooklyn. They played pinochle and drank beer which the radiant Clarence brought in from a delicatessen store. Ellen, it must be said, behaved beautifully and played for them to dance until the tenant from the floor below, a retired actress with yellow hair and a white poodle, made a profane protest to the janitor. She was kind to Clarence and even affectionate, as if in some way the tenderness brought her peace.

Only once was there an unpleasantness and this occurred when Mr. Wyck, finding her alone in a corner looked at her out of his green eyes and observed, “I understand you’re growing famous. I hear that you play a great deal in public ... at fashionable parties.”

For an instant, Ellen looked at him sharply and then, believing perhaps that he knew nothing, replied, “Not often ... now and then.... It is profitable.”

He did not address her again but sat meditating in a sour fashion, absorbed apparently in the color of the beer he held in his long soft hands, and presently, with the air of emerging from a fog of thought, he observed, “It’s too bad Clarence can’t enjoy the parties too.”

“He would hate them,” said Ellen abruptly.

This observation Wyck turned over in his mind and when he spoke again, it was with an air of confidence, of making a concession.

“No,” he said, “I understand that. He wouldn’t feel at home. He’d be the most miserable person there.”

But the look in his eye, the soft insinuation of his voice said, without saying it, “No, you and I are different. We were made for the fashionable world.”

Ellen laughed, but there was in the laugh a little sudden choke of bitterness. She came to her husband’s defense. “I don’t think he’d like it, but it wouldn’t be on that account.”

It was the most friendly conversation they had ever had, and although he did not address her again during the remainder of the evening, she was aware at odd moments that he was watching her. The sight disturbed her, perhaps because she understood vaguely that the anemic little man possessed an amazing sense of intuition. She understood too that, under the air of condescension which he observed toward the other guests, there was at work all the old hostility, heightened now by a new knowledge that had come to him from some mysterious source. It was as if she were in combat with a woman, sharp-witted and feline, over the possession of a man whom she had no desire to own. Absurdity enveloped the idea of any one fighting for possession of Clarence. He was so easy to possess.

* * * * *

Not even when she went to the Callendars’ to play did she have a glimpse of Richard. The group had dwindled now as one by one the friends of Mrs. Callendar betook themselves into the country. There remained during the hot months only the good-natured hostess and occasionally Sabine who was staying in town until Mrs. Callendar sailed. They made excuses for Richard; they told her when she noted his absence that he was at Newport, or in Philadelphia, or vaguely that he was in the country; they kept up a little game in which Mrs. Callendar and Sabine told lies and Ellen accepted them, and both sides knew that the other had no belief in the deceit. Beyond the shrewd probing which the plump Greek woman practised on the evenings when Ellen came to dine with her alone there was no sign on either side. Yet a grayness enveloped them all, altering in its descent the whole tone of their days.

Sabine gave least evidence of the change, but with her it was impossible from her behavior ever to discover the faintest knowledge of her heart, impossible to know anything that lay behind the shield of her terrible self-possession. She had betrayed herself only once, for an instant. Beyond that one could only judge that she was waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... with an overpowering patience, as if she knew the rules of the world in which she lived would give her the prize in the end. There was magnificence in the sight of her, sitting there in the evenings, marvelously dressed, not beautiful but fantastically attractive, listening quietly to the music made by a woman whom she had every reason to hate.

They all talked of the same things, in the same fashion, refusing to admit that anything had happened to change the pleasant, even way of their existence; and each knew that the other knew exactly what she knew. There were times, after dinner in the dark library, when there would be long silences broken only by the faint click of a tiny coffee cup against a saucer. Each of them watched the others, and in those long evenings the two who were so old, so wise in experience, came to respect the newcomer who played the game quite as well as themselves.

* * * * *

A night or two before Thérèse Callendar sailed, Ellen came to dine with her alone. Throughout the long dinner, which the Greek woman had served in the library at a small table, they kept up the game. It was not until the cigarettes and coffee were brought in that Thérèse as the servant closed the door behind him, said abruptly, “I want to talk to you about my son.”

It came so suddenly, after so much waiting, that Ellen said nothing. She blushed and the tears came into her eyes. She kept silent.

“I think I know what has happened,” said Mrs. Callendar. She did not speak now in her old cynical fashion, slipping quickly from one thing to another. All the evening she had been grave and now, mingled with the gravity, there was a curious warmth, a sympathy which reached out and touched Ellen. She understood, it seemed, that the matter had arrived at the point where it was necessary to go beneath the thin surface of their pretense, when she must delve under all those polished little speeches that made life move along an easy path and deal, directly, with a thing that was stronger than any of them.

“We all know,” she continued softly. “We played the game very nicely, but now something must be done about it. Sabine knows it too. She’s known all along and it hurts her perhaps more than any of us because she understands that in my son there are things which are beyond her control....” She coughed. “For that, my dear, you are much better equipped. I hope you respect Sabine for an extraordinary woman ... civilized. I think you might put her to torture and never succeed in making her cry out.”

Ellen, sitting now with her head bowed as if she had been accused, said, “I know.... I know that.”

“I know my own son ...” repeated Mrs. Callendar gravely. “I know him well. We are very different in some ways ... but I know him.” Here she paused for a moment and stirred her coffee with the tiny silver spoon. “I’ve seen him when he fancied he was in love with a woman.” She raised one plump hand and the soiled diamonds glittered darkly. “Oh, this has not been the first time. It has happened before. But this time there is a difference.” She coughed and added, “This time instead of pursuing the object, he has run away from her.... That makes it serious.”

Ellen, mute and frightened by the frankness of the older woman, sat awkwardly, like a little girl, regarding her. Surely she had never heard any one talk in quite this fashion ... so honestly and yet so calmly. In a moment like this she had expected anger, even denunciation; she had prepared herself for it.