Part 29

“People don’t change as much as that ... especially if they not seen each other. They are likely to keep a memory of that sort always fresh. It’s likely to grow strong instead of weak.”

“I’ve seen her since ... several times ... at her concerts.”

She saw, with her small piercing eyes, that she had uncovered a weak place in his armor ... a single chance on which to pin all her hopes.

“Have you talked to her?”

“No.”

She knew too that he was, in a sense, invincible. Sabine, so far as the world was concerned, made an excellent wife. She was worldly, distinguished, clever. So far as he was himself concerned, she gave him no trouble. She did not make scenes and she did not indulge in passionate outbreaks of jealousy. She did not even speak of the love which he sought outside his marriage ... the intrigues that were always taking place and now made him invincible in the face of her argument. She effaced herself, and as she had done once before, waited. But on that occasion she had waited for marriage, and had won. Now she was waiting for love, which was quite a different matter.

“If it’s an heir you want, I have one already.” He smiled. “He must be nearly twelve by now. Of course, he is the grandson of a janitor and the son of a music hall singer.... Still, he is an heir. We might legitimatize him.”

By this stroke he had won, for he had made her angry ... the thing he had been seeking to do all the while.

“I hear from him twice a year ... when my lawyer sends his mother money.”

“You’d do well to forget his existence.”

And then they had talked for a time without arriving anywhere.

As usual it was Richard who had won. He had gone back to Sabine as if nothing at all had occurred.

* * * * *

Thérèse drank the last of her coffee and then laid her dumpy figure down on the divan in the dark library. She was tired for the first time in her life, as if she had not the strength to go on fighting. She might have but a few years longer to live and she must hurry and settle this matter. There must be an heir to whom she might pass on the fortune ... not a sickly girl like little Thérèse but a man who could manage a responsibility so enormous.

Though her body was weary, her mind was alert. There still remained a chance. In the gathering darkness, she knew that the chance depended upon two things ... the hope that Ellen Tolliver still loved Richard as she had so clearly loved him on the night years earlier when the girl had talked to her in this very room; and the hope that Lilli Barr was as honest, as respectable, as bourgeois as Ellen Tolliver had been.

She got up and in the darkness made her way to the bell. When the butler appeared and switched on the lights, she said, “Please get me a box for the concert of Lilli Barr.... It’s a week from to-morrow.” And, as he was leaving, she added, “I shall give a dinner that night. See to it that the rest of the house is got ready.”

This was the first step.

48

On the very same night in her weathered house sheltered by lilacs and syringas in the Town Miss Ogilvie, trembling and fluttering like a canary set free and preening itself in the sun, packed her trunk for the trip to the East. Any one looking on might have believed her, save for the wrinkled rosy cheeks and the slight spare figure, a young girl on the eve of her first party. After all, it was an event ... the first trip she had made to the East since the Seventies when she had sailed as a girl for Munich. And she was going East to hear Ellen Tolliver play ... Ellen who had been a chit of a girl when she had last seen her, Ellen who was now Lilli Barr, whose name and picture appeared everywhere in the papers, Ellen who had hidden on the night she fled the Town in the nest-like parlor of this very house.

Miss Ogilvie, packing her best taffeta with its corals and cameos to wear at the concert, indulged in an orgy of memories ... memories that went back to the years before Ellen was born, to the days in Munich when for a delirious week, until the heavy hand of her father intervened, she had fancied she would become a great musician and play in public.

Pausing beside the old tin-bound trunk, she thought, “No, I never could have done it. I was too much a coward. But Ellen has ... Ellen has.... And to think that I advised her to do it, that I told her to go ahead.”

In the long span of a gentle life in which there had been no heights and no valleys, this occasion eclipsed all else ... even the day she had herself sailed on the black _paquebot_ for Europe.

“_It happens like that ... in the most unexpected places, in villages, in towns.... Why, even in a dirty mill town like this._”

It all came back to her now, all the conversation between herself and Ellen on that last day when, weeping, she said to the girl, “I no longer count for anything. You are beyond me. Who am I to instruct you?”

And she remembered too with a sudden warmth the old bond between them, the hatred of this awful, sooty Town ... a desert from which Ellen had boldly escaped, which Miss Ogilvie had accepted, hiding always in her heart her loathing of the place.

“And to think that she remembered me ... a poor, insignificant old woman like me! To think that she even paid my way!”

For Miss Ogilvie could not have come otherwise. As the years passed she had grown poorer and poorer in her house behind the trees.

Her conscience pricked the old lady. “I wonder,” she thought, sitting on the edge of her chair before the old trunk. “I wonder if I should confess to Hattie Tolliver that it was I who helped them to escape. It would be more honest, since I am going to stay with her.”

And then she grew worried for fear Ellen might be ashamed of her in her old-fashioned taffeta with coral and cameo pins. Ellen had been living in Paris with Lily Shane; she would know all about the latest thing in clothes. And to convince herself that the dress was not too bad, she put it on and pinning fast the coral and cameos, stood before her glass, frizzing her hair and pulling the dress this way and that.

In the midst of these preparations, she was interrupted by the distant jangle of the bell and the sound caused her to blush and start as if she, an old dried-up woman, had been caught by an intruder coquetting before her mirror.

She knew who was at the door. It was Eva Barr and May Biggs come to send messages to Ellen, for they too shared a little her excitement. They would talk, the three of them, about Ellen as they remembered her until long after midnight; for all three hoped that Ellen might be induced to play in the Town, especially since there was such a fine new auditorium. They too had claims upon her, claims of friendship and blood and old associations.

49

On the night of the concert Ellen wore a gown of crimson velvet, according to a plan of Rebecca who determined that the occasion should be a sensational one not to be forgotten. The house was filled and when Lilli Barr came through the door at the back of the stage there was a quick hush, a sudden breathlessness, caused not so much by her beauty (for she was never really beautiful in the sense that Lily was beautiful) but by the whole perfection of the picture. The crimson dress fitted her tightly and was sleeveless and cut low to show the perfection of her strong, handsome shoulders. Her black hair, so black that in the brilliant light which showered upon her from overhead (a device of Rebecca’s) it appeared blue as the traditional raven’s wing. She wore it pulled back tightly from her smooth forehead and done in a small knot at the nape of the neck. In her ears she wore old Portuguese rings of paste and silver. She was superb, glittering, slender, strong, and possessed of the old brilliant power to distract thought and concentrate attention.

In that instant the battle was half won. There were those in the audience who felt that the mere sight of her was enough.

In her box on the first tier, Mrs. Callendar sat up with a start, raised her lorgnettes and said “Tiens! Quel chic!”

Beside her Mrs. Mallinson (the lady novelist) murmured, “Superb creature!” and the Honorable Emma Hawksby (back again to live off the Americans on the strength of being a niece to the disreputable Duke of Middlebottom) thought again that the big feet of Englishwomen were a serious hindrance and that perhaps her countrywomen went in too much for walking. The elderly rake, Wickham Chase, sighed bitterly at the tragedy of old age and the loss of vigor. Bishop Smallwood (whom Sabine had dubbed the Apostle to the Genteel) thought, “She looks like my wa’am friend, Mrs. Sigourney,” but, considering the impression, thought better of it and said nothing, since Mrs. Sigourney had long since overplayed her game and become utterly déclassée. And the third, a nondescript bachelor, strove to peer between Mrs. Mallinson’s supporting dog-collar and the bony back of the Honorable Emma Hawksby. If he had any thoughts at all, they were not very interesting; for thirty years he had been sitting in the back of boxes at plays, concerts and the opera, peering between plump backs and skinny ones.

Below them the audience stretched away row upon row, in dim lines marshaled into neat columns like an advancing army seen through a mist.

Mrs. Callendar thought, “Ah! She is magnificent. The transformation scarcely seems possible.... Still, the girl had it in her always.” And a little voice kept saying to her, “You will win. She is an admirable pawn. You will succeed. You will get what you want if you work hard enough and are clever about it.”

Down among the dim rows spread out below them sat Hattie Tolliver, in a new gown chosen by Ellen. Large and vigorous she sat, looking a little like a powerful and eccentric duchess, by the side of Miss Ogilvie in her mauve taffeta with the corals and cameos, her thin hair done elaborately in a fashion she had not worn since she was a girl. They sat there, the eagle and the linnet, trembling with excitement, the tears very close to the surface of the emotional Hattie.

Presently, as Ellen took her place at the piano and struck a few crashing chords, Hattie could bear it no longer. She leaned toward the stranger at her side, a woman with short hair and an umbrella, and said in triumph, “That’s my daughter who’s playing.”

The stranger stared at her for an instant and murmured, “Is it indeed?” And the music began.

Hattie really wanted to tell them all--the row upon row of strangers, obscured now by the darkness.

Charles Tolliver at his end of the row closed his eyes and slipped presently into the borderland between sleep and consciousness, a country where there is no reality and all is covered by a rosy mist. Through this the music came to him distantly. He fancied he was back once more in the shabby living room with Ellen playing sullenly at the upright piano. And for a little time he was happy.

Robert, who had no ear for music, felt uncomfortable and disapproved of his sister’s low-cut gown. Robert was a prig; he took after his grandfather Barr, “the citizen.”

The Everlasting was not to be seen. He had been left at home, because it was impossible to say how he would behave on such an occasion. One dared not take the risk.

* * * * *

In the mind of Hattie, sitting there in the shadows of the great hall, there could be no question of failure. Was it not her Ellen, her little girl whom she had once held upon her knee, who now sat, as it were, upon a throne before a world which listened breathlessly? All those people who filled the seats about her and above her might have risen and left, but to Hattie the evening would have been a great success, a triumph in which the judgment of the world had been wrong. They did not leave; instead they sat, leaning forward a bit or slipped down in their seats with closed eyes, bedazzled as much by the perfection and grace of this new musician as by the music itself.

Rebecca, standing in the darkness at the back of the great hall, understood all that. She knew that in part the triumph was her own, for had she not tricked them, hypnotized them? They would not be able to forget. She, like Hattie, felt with every fiber of her body, the very sensations of all those people who listened--people from great houses of the rich who had heard of Lilli Barr from friends in Europe, people from the suburbs who would rush away in frantic haste for the last train home, people--young people--like the one who sat next to Hattie, in shabby clothes and worn shoes, who were fighting now desperately, as Ellen had once fought, to reach that same platform, that same brilliant shower of light. They listened, enchanted by the sound, caught by the spell of one woman’s genius and another’s brilliant trickery. Possessed they were, for the moment.

And presently the tears began to stream down Hattie’s face. They dropped to the hands worn and red, concealed now by the expensive gloves which cramped her uncomfortably.

The applause rose and fell in great waves, sweeping over her with the roaring of a great surf heard far away, and through it the voice of Miss Ogilvie, saying gently, “Who would have believed it?”

And then at length, when the sound of the last number had died away, an overwhelming surf which would not die even when the woman in crimson appeared again and again under the brilliant shower of light; until at last Lilli Barr seated herself before the great satiny piano and the crowd, which had pushed forward to the stage, grew quiet and stood listening, waiting, silent and expectant ... the people from great houses, the people from the suburbs, the young people with worn shoes and shabby clothes. And into the air there rang a shower of spangled notes, gay and sparkling, embracing a rhythm older than any of them. For Lilli Barr--(or was it Ellen Tolliver)--was playing now The Beautiful Blue Danube. It was not the old simple waltz that Hattie had picked out upon the organ in her father’s parlor, but an extravagant, brilliant arrangement which beneath the strong, white fingers became fantastical and beautiful beyond description.

Hattie Tolliver wept because she understood. It was as if Ellen--the proud, silent Ellen--had been suddenly stripped of all the old inarticulate pride, as if suddenly she had grown eloquent and all the barriers, like the walls of Jericho, had tumbled down. Hattie Tolliver understood. Her daughter was speaking to her now across all the gulf of years, across the hundred walls which stood between them. This was her reward. She understood and wept at the sudden revelation of the mysterious thread that ran through all life. All this triumph, this beauty, all this splendor had its beginning long ago on the harmonium in the parlor of old Jacob Barr’s farm.

When the lights went up and Hattie, drying her eyes and suffering her hand to be patted by Miss Ogilvie, was able to look about her, she saw with a feeling of horror among the figures crowded in a group before the stage a coonskin coat and a sharp old face that was familiar. It was The Everlasting. He had come, after all, alone, aloof, as he had always lived. He stood with his bony old head tilted back a little, peering through his steel rimmed spectacles at the brilliant figure of his granddaughter.

For an instant Hattie thought, triumphantly, “Now he can see that my child is great. That she is famous. He will see,” she thought, “what a good mother I have been.”

But her sense of triumph was dimmed a little because she knew that Ellen belonged also to him ... all that part which she had never been able to understand. It was Gramp’s triumph as well as Hattie’s. To her horror she heard him shouting, “Bravo! Bravo!” in a thin, cracked voice, as if he were a young man again listening while Liszt played to an audience of foreigners.

* * * * *

In the box, looking down on the crowd below, Thérèse Callendar waited to the end. She sent Mrs. Mallinson, the Honorable Emma Hawksby, the Apostle to the Genteel, Wickham Chase and the nondescript bachelor away in her motor, bidding the driver return for her. She sat peering down through her lorgnettes, plump and secure in her sables and dirty diamonds, a little bedazzled like all the others but still enough in control of her senses to be interested in the figures below. Among them she too noticed the extraordinary figure of a skinny old man in a coonskin coat, who stood a little apart from the others with a triumphant smile on his sharp, wrinkled face.

At the moment she was in an optimistic mood because there had occurred in the course of the concert an incident which, with all the rich superstition of her nature, she interpreted as a good omen. Between the two parts of the program when dozens of bouquets (mostly purchased by Rebecca) were rushed forward to the platform, she saw that Lilli Barr leaned down and chose a great bunch of yellow roses. It was the bouquet which Thérèse had sent. It was an omen. If there had been any wavering in the mind of Thérèse it vanished at once. Ellen could not consciously have chosen it. She was sure now that she would succeed.

Behind the stage whither she turned her steps when the last of the applause had died away and the lights were turned out, she found Ellen standing surrounded by a noisy throng. Among them she recognized only Sanson, who had grown feeble and white since last she saw him. And there was an extraordinary, powerful woman, handsome in a large way, who wore her white gloves awkwardly; and beside her a little old spinster in an absurd gown of mauve taffeta adorned with cameos and coral pins. These two stood beside the musician, the one proud and smiling, the other a little frightened, as a bird might be.

It was all exciting. Thérèse waited on the edge of the throng until all had gone save the big handsome woman and the little spinster in mauve. Then she stepped forward and saw that Ellen recognized her.

“Ah,” said Ellen, coldly. “Mrs. Callendar! Were you here too?”

Thérèse did not say that the concert was magnificent. She knew better than to add one more to the heap of garish compliments. She said, “It was the first time I have been where I could hear you. I knew you would do it some day.... You remember, I told you so.”

There was a look in Ellen’s eye which said, “Ah! You forgot me for years. Now that I am successful everything is different.” Then drawing her black cloak about her crimson dress, she laid a hand on the arm of the big, handsome woman.

“This is my mother ... Mrs. Callendar,” she said. “And this is Miss Ogilvie, my first music teacher.”

Mrs. Tolliver eyed Thérèse with suspicion, and Miss Ogilvie simpered and bowed.

“I came back to ask you to come home to supper with me,” said Mrs. Callendar to Ellen. “We could have a sandwich and a glass of sherry and talk for a time. I’ve opened the house.”

For a moment the air was filled with a sense of conflict. The suspicion of Hattie, as she saw her daughter slipping from her, rose into hostility. In the end she lost, for Ellen said, “Yes, I’ll come for a little time.” And then turning to her mother, she added, “You and Miss Ogilvie go to the Ritz. I’ll come there later. Rebecca has ordered supper.”

But it was not Thérèse Callendar who won. It was some one who was not there at all ... a dark man of whose very existence Hattie Tolliver had never heard.

50

Meanwhile in the front of the concert hall a little man whom none of them had seen slipped away before the lights came up, into the protecting darkness of the street. He had come in late to sit far back in the shadow beneath the balcony. Rebecca had noticed him, for he sat almost beside her and behaved in a queer fashion; but never having seen him before, she gave the matter no further thought. In the midst of the concert he had suddenly begun to weep, snuffling and drying his eyes with a furtive shame. He was a small man with a sallow face and shifting eyes which looked at you in a trembling, apologetic fashion (a trick that had come over him in the years since he had been driven from the comfortable flat on the top floor of the Babylon Arms). Rebecca, of course, had never heard of Mr. Wyck, yet she noticed him now because he fidgeted with his umbrella and because his hands trembled violently when he held his handkerchief to his eyes. He appeared, in his sniveling, frightened way, to be deeply affected by the music.

He went out quickly, among the first, looking behind him as if he stood in terror of being recognized and accused before all those people. Once in the street, he drew his shabby overcoat close about him, and turned his steps southward with such speed that at times the passers-by glared at him for jostling them at the crossings. They must have thought too, when he looked at them, that there was a reflection of madness in the staring eyes. He plunged south into the glare of light that pierced the darkness above Broadway like a pillar of fire.

He had seen her again ... the one woman whom he hated above all persons on earth. He would have killed her. It would have given him pleasure to see her die, but as he ran, he knew that he had not the courage. He thought, “I could not bear to face her even for the moment before I struck. I could not bear the look in her eyes” ... (the old look of contempt and accusation, as if she knew what it was he had told Clarence)....

He was gone now ... Clarence. Perhaps one might find him on the other side.

On and on he ran past brilliant pools of light, red and purple, green and yellow; past lurid posters adorning movie palaces showing men in death cells and women being carried down ladders in the midst of flames; past billboards on which extravagantly beautiful women kicked naked legs high in the air (they were not for him, whose only knowledge of love was that feeble flicker of affection he had had for Clarence); past rich motors filled with furs and painted women; past restaurants and hotels glittering with light from which drifted faintly the sounds of wild music; past all this until he emerged at last from the phantasmagoria in which he had no part, into the protective murkiness of a street which led west toward the North River ... a street which began in delicatessen and clothing shops and degenerated slowly into rows of shabby brownstone houses, down-at-the-heel and neglected, with the placards of chiropractors and midwives and beauty doctors thrust behind dusty lace curtains.

He hurried now, more rapidly than ever, with the air of a terrified animal seeking its burrow, to hide away from all that world of success and wealth and vigor that lay behind him.

She had come (he thought) out of the middle west, knowing nothing, bringing nothing, to destroy Clarence and win all that he had seen to-night. She had trampled them all beneath her feet. And what had he? Mr. Wyck? Nothing! Nothing! Only the obscenities of a boarding house into which she had driven him a second time. It was like all women. They preyed upon men. They destroyed them. And she had been vulgar and stupid and awkward....

At last he turned in at a house which bore a placard “Rooms to Let.” There he let himself in with a key and hurried up the gas-lit stairs pursued by a gigantic shadow cast by the flickering of a flame turned economically low.

His room lay at the end of the top floor passage beyond the antiquated bathroom with its tin tub. Once inside, he bolted the door and flung himself down on the blankets of his bed to weep. A light, brilliant but far away, cast the crooked outline of an ailanthus tree against the faded greasy paper of the room. A cat, lean and adventurous, moved across the sill, and a cat fifty times its size moved in concert across the wall at the foot of the bed. Amid the faint odors of onions and dust, Mr. Wyck wept pitifully, silently.