Part 30

For a long time he lay thus, tormented by memories of what he had seen ... the crowd cheering and applauding, the woman in crimson and diamonds (an evil creature, symbol of all the cruelties which oppressed him). There were memories too that went back to the days at the Babylon Arms before she had come out of the west to destroy everything, days when Clarence, succumbing to the glamour of a name, had treated him as if he were human ... days which had marked the peak of happiness. Since then everything had been a decline, a slipping downward slowly into a harsh world where there was no place for him....

After a time, he grew more calm and lay with the quiet of a dead man, staring at the shadows on the wall until at last he raised himself and sat on the edge of the bed, holding his head in his thin hands. It was midnight ... (a clock somewhere in the distance among all those lights sounded the hour slowly) ... when he again stirred and, taking up from the bed an old newspaper, set himself to tearing it slowly into strips. He worked with all the concentration of a man hypnotized, until at last the whole thing had been torn into bits. Then he went to the window and with great care stuffed each tiny crevice in the rattling frame. In the same fashion he sealed the cracks about the sagging door. And when he had done this he approached the jet on which he was accustomed to heat the milk which made him sleep. But to-night the bottle of milk was left in its corner, untouched. He glanced at it and, after a moment’s thought, reached up and slowly turned the knob of the jet until the gas began to hiss forth into the tiny room. When he had done all this he returned to the bed and, wrapping himself in his overcoat, lay down in peace. He did not weep now. He was quite calm. He came very close to achieving dignity. He waited....

Outside the adventurous cat set up an amorous wail. The shadows danced across the wall-paper in a fantastic procession, and presently as if by a miracle their place was taken by another procession quite different--a procession in which there were ladies in crinolines out of the portraits which had once known the grandeur of a house on lower Fifth Avenue, and men in trousers strapped beneath their boots and even a carriage or two drawn by bright, prancing horses ... a dim procession out of the past. And presently the second procession faded like the first. The walls of the room melted away. There was a great oblivion, a peace, an endless space where one stood alone, very tall and very powerful.... A great light and through a rosy mist the sound of a tom cat’s amorous wail, more and more distant, raised in an ironic hymn of love to accompany the passing of Mr. Wyck, for whom there was no place in this world.

51

The sound of the same clock striking midnight failed to penetrate the thick old curtains muffling the library on Murray Hill. Here Thérèse and Ellen sat talking, almost, one might have said, as if nothing had happened since Ellen last passed through the bronze door on her way to the Babylon Arms. Under the long, easy flow of Thérèse’s talk her irritation had dissolved until now, two hours after the concert, they faced each other much as they had done long ago. It was Ellen who had changed; Thérèse was older, a little weary, and a trifle more untidy but otherwise the same--shrewd, talkative, her brisk mind darting now here, now there, like a bright minnow, seeking always to penetrate the shiny, brittle surfaces which people held before them as their characters. She found, no doubt, that Ellen had learned the trick of the shiny, brittle surface; she understood that it was by no means as easy as it had been to probe to the depths the girl’s inmost thoughts. She had learned to protect herself; nothing could hurt her now unless she chose to reveal a weakness in her armor. Thérèse understood at once that if her plan was to succeed, it must turn upon Ellen’s own volition; the girl (she was no longer a girl but Thérèse still thought of her in that fashion) could not be tricked into a bargain. Beyond all doubt she understood that Richard was dangerous, that he had the power of causing pain.

As they talked, far into the night, Thérèse fancied that Ellen sat there--so handsome in the long crimson gown, so self-possessed, so protected by the shiny, brittle surface--weighing in her mind the question of ever seeing him again. They did not approach the topic openly; for a long time Thérèse chattered, in the deceptive way she had, of a thousand things which had very little to do with the case.

“You have seen Sabine now and then,” she put forward, cautiously.

“Two or three times. She called on me.”

Thérèse chuckled quietly. “She must admire you. It is unusual for her to make an advance of that sort.”

The observation drew just the answer she had hoped for, just the answer which Ellen, thinking perhaps that the whole matter should be brought out into the light, saw fit to give.

“It was not altogether admiration,” she said. “It was more fear. You see, she had imagined a wonderful story ... a story that he had brought me to Paris, and that I was his mistress.”

For a moment Ellen felt a twinge of conscience at breaking the pledge of confidence she had given Sabine. Still, she must use the weapons at hand. She understood perfectly that there was something they wanted of her; she understood that any of them (save only Callendar himself) would have sacrificed her to their own schemes. He would sacrifice her only to himself.

“She was a little out of her head, I think ... for a long time after little Thérèse was born. She grieved too because she could never have another child. She wanted to give Dick an heir.... She was very much in love with him ... then.” The last word she added, as if by an afterthought.

At this Ellen thrust forward another pawn, another bit of knowledge which had come to her from Sabine. “He neglects her badly, doesn’t he?”

Thérèse pursed her lips and frowned, as if for a moment the game had gotten out of hand. “I don’t fancy it’s a case of neglect.... They’re simply not happy. You see, it was not....” She smiled with deprecation. “Shall I be quite frank? It was not a matter of love in the beginning.... It was a _mariage de convenance_.”

“Yes. He told me that ... himself. Before the wedding took place.”

There was a light now in Ellen’s eye, a wicked gleam as if the game were amusing her tremendously, as if she found a mischievous delight in baiting this shrewd old woman with bits of knowledge which showed her how little she really knew of all that had taken place.

“Of course,” Thérèse continued, “she fell in love with him after a time.... But for him it was impossible.... You see, there is only one person with whom he has ever really been in love. It was a case of fascination....”

Ellen did not ask who this person was because she knew now, beyond all doubt. She had a strange sense of having lived all this scene before, and she knew that it was her sense of drama which was again giving her the advantage; once before it had saved her when her will, her conscious will, had come near to collapse. (Long ago it was ... in the preposterous Babylon Arms which Clarence had thought so grand.)

“He gave me a dog,” she said, by way of letting Mrs. Callendar know that she understood who the mysterious person was. “Just before I left for Vienna.... I have him here with me, at the Ritz. He is very like Richard....”

Mrs. Callendar poured out more sherry. She felt the need of something to aid her. And then she emerged abruptly, after the law of tactics which she usually followed, into the open.

“I don’t mind saying, my dear, that you’re the one who has fascinated him ... always.”

Ellen smiled coldly. “He is not what one might call a passionate lover.”

“He is faithful.”

Ellen’s smile expanded into a gentle laugh. “One might call it, I suppose, ... a fidelity of the soul, ... of the spirit, a sublimated fidelity.” There crept into her voice a thin thread of mockery, roused perhaps by the memory of Sabine’s confidences.

Thérèse shrugged her fat shoulders and the movement set the plastron of dirty diamonds all a-glitter. “That is that,” she observed. “You know him as well as I do.”

(“Better,” thought Ellen, “so much better, because I know how dangerous he is.”) But she kept silent.

“I think he would marry you to-morrow ... if you would have him.”

For an instant Ellen came very near to betraying herself. She felt the blood rise into her face. She felt a sudden faintness that emerged dimly from the memories of him as a lover, so charming, so subtle, so given to fierce, quick waves of passion.

“Did he send you to tell me that?” she asked in a low voice.

“No.... But I know it just the same. I have talked to him ... not openly, of course.”

(“No,” thought Ellen, “not openly, but like this, like the way you are talking to me.” It was dangerous, this business of insinuation.)

“It is remarkable that the feeling has lasted so long ... so many years,” Thérèse continued. “It has not been like that with any other woman. I think he is fascinated by your will, your power, your determination.”

“You make me a great person,” observed Ellen with irony, “but not a very seductive one.”

“There are ways and ways of seduction. What seduces one man passes over the head of another.”

“It is a perverse attraction....”

“Perhaps.... But most attractions are.”

Thérèse had seen the sudden change at the mention of her son’s name, just as she had seen the change in her son when Ellen’s name had been brought into the light. She meditated for a time in silence and then observed, “You are looking tired to-night.”

There were dark circles under Ellen’s eyes, pale evidences of the strain, the excitement which had not abated for an instant since they embarked for Vienna.

“I am tired,” she said, “very tired.”

“You should rest,” pursued Thérèse. “You could go to the place on Long Island. You could be alone there, if you liked. I shouldn’t bother you. I shall be busy in town until this tangle over money is settled.”

Ellen stirred and sighed. “No, that’s impossible. It’s good of you to offer it, but I can’t accept.... I can’t stop now. You see the ball has been started rolling. One must take advantage of success while it’s at hand. Never let a chance slip past. I know that ... by experience. You see, Miss Schönberg--she’s my manager--has arranged a great many engagements.”

“Whenever you want a place to rest,” continued Thérèse, “let me know.”

It was true that she was tired, bitterly tired; and more troubling, more enduring than the mere exhaustion was the obscure feeling that she had passed from one period of her life into another, that she had left behind somewhere in these three exciting years a milestone that marked the borderland of youth, of that first, fresh, exuberant youth which, at bottom, had been the source of all her success. It had slipped away somehow, in the night, without her knowing it. She was still strong (she knew that well enough), still filled with energy, but something was gone, a faint rosy mist perhaps, which had covered all life, even in the bitterest moments, with a glow that touched everything with a glamorous unreality, which made each new turning seem a wild adventure. It was gone; life was slipping past. Here she sat, a woman little past thirty, and what had she gained in exchange? Fame, perhaps? And wealth, which lay just around the next corner? Something had escaped her; something which in her mind was associated dimly with Lily and the memory of the pavilion silvered by the moon.

She stirred suddenly. “I must go. My mother and Miss Ogilvie are waiting at the Ritz.”

She rose and Thérèse pulled herself with an heroic effort from the depths of her chair. Together they walked through the bleak, shadowy hall and at the door Mrs. Callendar said, “You will come to dinner with me some night ... yes? I will ring you up to-morrow.”

And as Ellen moved away down the steps, she added, “Remember, you must not overwork.... You must care for yourself. You are not as young as you were once.”

It was that final speech _You are not as young as you were once_ which, like a barbed arrow, remained in her mind and rankled there as she drove in the Callendar motor through the streets to the Ritz where she found her mother and Miss Ogilvie sitting sleepily with an air of disapproval while Sanson and Rebecca and Uncle Raoul drank champagne and labored to be gay in celebration of the triumph.

It was about this hour that the amorous wailing of the tom-cat died forever upon the ears of Mr. Wyck.

* * * * *

In the morning the newspapers printed, in the column devoted to murders, suicides and crimes of violence, a single paragraph----

“Herbert Wyck, aged forty-three, single, committed suicide last night by inhaling gas in his room in a boarding house at ---- West 35th street. The only existing relative is Miss Sophronia Wyck residing in Yonkers. It is said that the dead man’s family once played a prominent part in the life of New York in the Seventies.”

But no one saw it ... not Hattie Tolliver, nor her husband, nor Robert, nor Ellen; they were all busy reading the triumphant notices of the concert at which, more than one critic said, a new Tèresa Carreño had arrived.

Thus passed Mr. Wyck whose one happiness was desolated because Lily Shane had encountered Clarence Murdock in the dining car of a transcontinental train. “Women like that,” Harvey Seton had said....

* * * * *

Ellen went to dine in the ugly dining room copied from the Duc de Morny not once but many times and she met there those people--Mrs. Mallinson, the Honorable Emma, the Apostle to the Genteel, Mr. Wickham Chase and scores of others--who had once sat on the opposite side of the lacquered screen waiting for the Russian tenor, the Javanese dancer and the unknown young American girl. She sat at dinner between bankers and bishops, between fashionable young men and elderly millionaires. She was a success, for she possessed an indifference bordering upon rudeness which allowed her dinner companions to talk as much as they pleased about themselves and led them into extraordinary efforts to win a gleam of interest from her clear blue eyes. And she learned that many things had changed since she last dined in the Callendar house. She learned that Mrs. Sigourney was no longer fashionable but merely material for the newspapers, and that Mrs. Champion and her Virgins had sunk into a brownstone obscurity in the face of a new age which no longer had a great interest in virginity; and that artists, musicians and writers were becoming the thing, that no dinner was complete without them. But it was amazing how little the whole spectacle interested her. She knew that it had all been arranged with a purpose; the indomitable Thérèse, for all her fatigue and worry, was preparing for the next step. These dinners gave Lilli Barr a place in the world of the Honorable Emma and the Apostle to the Genteel; they fixed her.

52

The first letter from Lily since Ellen had left the house in the Rue Raynouard for Vienna arrived on the eve of her departure from New York for the West. It was a sad letter, tragic and strangely subdued for one so buoyant, so happy as Lily to have written. Still, there were reasons ... reasons which piled one upon another in a crescendo of sorrow and tragedy. It was, as Ellen remarked to Rebecca while they sat at breakfast in the bright sitting room, as if the very foundations of Lily’s life had collapsed.

César was missing. “I have given up hope,” wrote Lily, “of seeing him again. Something tells me that he is dead, that even if he were a prisoner I should have heard from him. I know he is gone. I saw him on the night he went into action. His troop passed through Meaux in the direction of the Germans and he stopped for five minutes ... five precious minutes ... at Germigny. And then he rode away into the darkness.... I am certain that he is dead.”

Nor was this all. Madame Gigon too was dead. With Lily she had been trapped in the house at Germigny, too ill to flee. The Germans had entered the park and the château and spent a night there. Before morning they were driven out again. During that night Madame Gigon had died. She was buried now in the family grave at Trilport, nearby.

And Jean ... the Jean (eighteen now) who was such a friend of Ellen’s, who had ridden wildly through the Bois and through the fields at Germigny, was in the hospital. He had been with César’s troop. César had pledged himself to look out for the boy. But César had vanished during the first skirmish with the Uhlans. Jean had lost him, and now Jean lay in the hospital at Neuilly with his left leg amputated at the knee.

“I am back in the Rue Raynouard,” wrote Lily, “but you can imagine that it is not a happy place. I am alone all day and when I go out, I see no one because all the others are busy with the war, with their own friends and relations. Many of them have gone to the country because living has become very dear in Paris. We are safe again, but I am alone. There is not much pleasure here. I too have been very ill. I know now what a stranger I have always been. I am American still, despite everything. They know it too and have left me alone.”

When Rebecca had gone, bustling and rather hard, out into the streets, Ellen sat for a long time with Hansi beside her, holding the sad letter in her hands. This, then, was what had happened to Lily’s world, a world which, protected by wealth, had seemed so secure, so far beyond destruction. In a single night it was gone, swept away like so much rubbish out of an open door. Only Jean was left; and Jean, who loved life and activity and movement, was crippled now forever.

Moved by an overwhelming sadness, Ellen reproached herself for having been rude to old Madame Gigon, for having quarreled with César. She had been unpleasant to them because (she considered the thing honestly now, perhaps for the first time) because the one had been of no use to her and the other had threatened to stand in her way. She knew too for the first time how much Lily had loved her César. In her letter she made no pretenses; she was quite frank, as if after what had happened it was nonsense, pitiful nonsense, any longer to pretend. They were lovers; they had loved each other for years ... it must have been nearly twelve years of love which stood blocked by César’s sickly wife. There was, Ellen owned, something admirable in such devotion, still more when there was no arbitrary tie to bind them, the one to the other.

She rose presently and began to pace up and down the sunlit room, the black dog following close at her heels, up and down, up and down, up and down. And the weariness, the strange lack of zest, which she had spoken of to Mrs. Callendar, took possession of her once more. She was, in the midst of her triumph, surrounded by the very clippings which acclaimed her, afraid with that curious fear of life which had troubled her since the beginning. It was a hostile world in which one must fight perpetually, only to be defeated in the end by some sinister thrust of circumstance ... a thrust such as had destroyed all Lily’s quiet security. It was well indeed to have humility.

She remembered too that Fergus was caught up in the torrent which had swept away so much that Lily held dear.... Fergus and (she halted abruptly in her restless pacing and grew thoughtful) Fergus and Callendar, the two persons in all the world whom she loved best. In the terror of the moment, she was completely honest. She loved Callendar. If there had ever been any doubt, she knew it now. She did not, even to save her own emotions, to shield her own vanity, put the thing out of her mind. She gave herself up to the idea.

In her restless pacing, she fancied that she must do something. She must save them--Callendar and Fergus--by some means; but like Thérèse in her anxiety over her fortune, like Hattie in her desperation, she found herself defeated. There was nothing to be done. This gaudy show, this spectacle, this glittering circus parade which crossed the face of Europe could not be blocked. She could not save them because they preferred the spectacle to anything in all the world. Ah, she knew them both!... She knew what it was in them that was captured and held fast by the spectacle. She knew that if she had been a man, she too would have been there by their side. They must be in the center of things, where there was the most going on, the one aloof, the other fairly saturated in the color, the feel, the very noise of the whole affair. It was a thirst for life, for a sense of its splendor.... She knew what it was because she too was possessed by it. It had nothing to do with patriotism; that sort of emotion was good enough for the French.

Like Hattie, like Thérèse, like a million other women she was helpless, and the feeling terrified her, who had never been really helpless before. This war, which she had damned for a nuisance that interrupted her own triumphant way, became a monster, overwhelming and bestial, before which she was powerless. And in her terror she was softened by a new sort of humanity. She became merely a woman whose men were at war, a woman who could do nothing, who must sit behind and suffer in terror and in doubt.

* * * * *

Rebecca found her there when she returned at three o’clock, still pacing up and down, up and down, the great black dog following close at her heels. She had not lunched; she had not thought of eating.

“The letter from Lily,” she told Rebecca, with an air of repression, “has upset me. I don’t know what I’m to do. I want to go back to Paris.”

The statement so astounded Rebecca that she dropped the novels and papers she was carrying and stood staring.

“What!” she cried, “Go back now? Sacrifice everything we have worked for? Ruin everything? Give up all these engagements? You must be mad.”

It was plain that Ellen had thought of all this, that the struggle which she saw taking form with Rebecca had already occurred in her own soul. She knew what she was sacrificing ... if she returned.

“Lily is alone there, and in trouble. Some one should go to her.”

So that was it! Rebecca’s tiny, bright ferret’s eyes grew red with anger. “Lily! Lily!” she said. “Don’t worry about Lily. I’ll wager by this time she has found some one to console her.”

Ellen moved toward her like a thunder cloud, powerful, menacing in a kind of dignity that was strange and even terrifying to Rebecca. “You can’t say that of her. I won’t have you. How can you when it was Lily who has helped me more than any one in the world? I won’t have it. Who are you to speak like that of Lily ... my own cousin?”

“Lily who has helped you!” screamed Rebecca. “And what of me? What of me?” She began to beat her thin breasts in a kind of fury. Her nose became a beak, her small eyes red and furious. “Have I done nothing? Am I no one, to be cast aside like this? What of the work I have done, the slaving?”

For a moment they stood facing each other, silent and furious, close in a primitive fashion to blows. There was silence because their anger had reached a point beyond all words and here each held herself in check. It was Ellen who broke the silence. She began to laugh, softly and bitterly.

“Perhaps you’re right,” she said in a low voice. “I do owe you a great deal ... as much, really, as I owe to Lily. It has given you the right to a certain hold upon me.”

(But the difference, she knew, was this--that Lily would never exert her right of possession.)