Part 33

It gave Fergus the strangest shock. He found himself turning abruptly away and hiding in the stairway with an air of having witnessed something obscene. It was all spoiled now, all the entrance he had planned, the hope of finding her alone, the mocking, teasing, grandiose speeches he had planned. The stranger had taken possession of her, placed himself there between them as a barrier. It was ridiculous....

Feeling like a small boy who had been caught eavesdropping, he coughed and scuffled his feet and then made a second entrance. This time they turned and Ellen, rising to her feet, stared at him for a moment and then rushed toward him crying, “Fergus! Fergus! You should have told me you had leave!”

He knew at once that she guessed he had seen them. Her face was flushed with shame and hurt pride. He knew the fierce _pudeur_ (there was no other word for it) that enveloped her. It was a part of her savage unwillingness to surrender, to reveal, anything of herself.

Her beauty astonished him. He had seen photographs of her, but in them he had seen nothing of the proud domination that gave her that look of swooping down on one. It occurred to him in a flash that old Julia Shane, Lily’s mother, must have looked like this in her youth. Only she had worn crinolines and Ellen was all in black in a tight gown that made her look like (the old simile returned, the inevitable one) like a greyhound. She had changed enormously; the awkwardness had vanished. This was no girl who hurried toward him; it was a woman, superb, splendid, full of fire.

“Fergus!” she cried, and ignoring the mimosa she crushed the bright gold blossoms against his blue tunic so that the yellow pollen clung to it and dimmed the silver wings. She kissed him passionately and held him in her arms for a long time. She was excited. He had never seen her like this. The shyness, the restraint was gone, for the moment at least. He felt a quick satisfaction of vanity, almost as if he had been her husband instead of her brother. She was a creature to be proud of. No wonder this stranger....

The dark man had risen now and stood waiting quietly for them to join him by the fire. He was a handsome fellow of perhaps thirty-five, though he may have been older, thin perhaps from the hardships of war. And in the olive skin were set the strangest pair of gray eyes, which looked on now with an expression of mild amusement. They were eyes which fascinated you, which you were certain had the power of seeing things which other eyes had not.

“Richard,” said Ellen, “this is my brother Fergus ... Mr. Callendar.”

Her voice trembled a little with excitement. It may have been that this was the moment for which she had returned. She had them together now, with her, in the very same room, the two men--indeed, the two persons--whom she cherished above all others in the world. She had not been, after all, too late.

* * * * *

It must have been clear to Fergus, even in the disappointment of the moment, that he had stumbled awkwardly into the midst of some queer situation. He understood now why she had sent Augustine off to bed. It explained too the excitement of her manner and the sudden falling away of the reserve which she had always held before her as a warrior his shield. She still blushed, and she lighted a cigarette with a comically obvious air of covering her confusion. It was amazing to find in this woman who was by nature so self-possessed, so cold, a sudden air of school girl coquetry. This was an Ellen whom her brother had never seen, whom perhaps no one had seen until now.

And the stranger? He still stood with his feet well apart, finishing the last of his Chartreuse, balancing himself lightly on his toes, quite calm and smiling a little in a fashion that would have been warm and friendly save for the expression in the gray eyes. In their obscure, blank depths, there lay something sinister ... “catlike” was the word. They were eyes like those of a cat, proud, sensual, indifferent, aloof, and incapable of smiling.

They sat down and for a moment Fergus was tempted to blurt out sharply that he had spied upon them unwittingly, that he knew exactly the mood into which he had blundered so clumsily. It would perhaps have shattered the tension and cleared the air, reducing them to a common ground of meeting upon which they might laugh and talk like old friends. It did not occur to him that Callendar might be his sister’s lover because, in spite even of her blushes and confusion, he knew that such a thing was impossible. Besides, their manner toward each other was not that of lovers; it lacked the hidden intimacies which come of only one experience. They were a little formal, a little strange. The flame that leapt between them was not quite clear and white and unhindered; there were obstructions, misunderstandings. It was a complicated relationship, one could see at a glance, and a little ridiculous. Even Callendar, so clearly a man of the world, so clearly a man who was neither an innocent nor a yokel, was not at his ease.

“Mr. Callendar,” said Ellen, “is an old friend of mine. Until the other day I had not seen him for years.”

But for Fergus this could have been no explanation. It told nothing of all that passed in those missing years, nothing of the intriguing of old Thérèse, nothing of the slow passion, fed upon absence and memories that instead of dying had, as Thérèse knew, gained strength. It revealed nothing of all the forces, conscious or blundering and obscure, which had been at work weaving the slow web that was now near to its end. Fergus alone guessed how nearly it was finished. It came to him in a return of that sudden flight of clairvoyance which had seized him in the dark street outside the door. He understood with an unearthly certainty that this was the man whom fate (that nonsensical force) had marked for his sister. This was the man destined to know all the tempestuous sweep of her fierce energy, her vast capacity for devotion, all the forces that until now had lain buried and dormant. This perilous man ... (It was strange that strong women were likely to be unhappy in love, to make so often a choice which all the world, even the stupidest fellow, could have told her was wrong.)

It was this current of thought which ran beneath the surface of all their polite conversation, made so scrupulously, with such labor in defiance of that strain which none--not even Callendar, who perhaps chose to make no such effort--could dissipate. For Ellen’s moment had passed swiftly as such moments, awaited so long, are likely to pass. There had been a quick flare of delight in the possession of them both and then this confused disappointment and sense of ill-ease clouding everything.

The tension lessened a little when Fergus, seeking in his amiable way one subject after another to pierce the indifference of the stranger, stumbled upon Loos and Amiens which Callendar knew as thoroughly from the ground as Fergus knew them from the air. But this led to nothing because it was now Ellen who found herself thrust outside the pale and left to grow sulky while they talked of this sector and of that one, each discovering with a swift heightening of interest that they had taken part in the same drive.

“My battery,” said Callendar, “lay just back of Hill 408, in the curve of the road beyond Jouy....”

“It was at Jouy,” interrupted Fergus, his good-natured face flushing with interest, “that we broke up a German escadrille ... four of them shot down.”

“Did you ever see Reymont?” asked Callendar.... “The general of our division?... A pompous ass!”

“He was at St. Pol while I was there. He reviewed the division when it came in from the east.... I saw him on a balcony....”

And so on, talking of this spectacle which Ellen despised as much because she could have no part in it as for any other reason. She would, at that moment, have preferred the spectacle to all the success, all the triumph; but it was no good. She was, for all her strength, all her power, simply a woman, thrust outside the experience which had enkindled Callendar and her brother. They had slipped away from her into a world of which she knew nothing.

* * * * *

At last, turning in pique from their talk, she went out and herself fetched them whiskey and soda, and when she had interrupted them long enough to pour out a glass for each she turned to the piano and fell to playing softly, as if to draw them quietly back to her. It was a plan which proved successful, for presently their talk abated a little and finally ceased; the war was put to rout and it was Ellen once more who held the center of the stage. The two men leaned back in their chairs, scrupulously silent, listening while she played for them in a fashion she had not done in years. And for a time she recaptured a little of the joy that had escaped so quickly.

She played the things she knew would please Fergus, the music which he had loved in the days of the house in Sycamore Street and the flat in the Babylon Arms, music she had played for him alone at the moments when Clarence was not there to disturb her with the silent, unrelieved pleading of his dim eyes. She played the simple old March from The Ruins of Athens, and one or two Chopin waltzes and the Marche Funèbre, which to Hattie would always be McKinley’s Funeral March and which to Fergus invoked memories of Shane’s Castle and Ellen in shirtwaist and skirt wearing at her belt a jingling thing they called a chatelaine. And she wooed them with such success that, hypnotized by the spell, they did not hear the first screams of the sirens rushing through distant streets nor the faint popping of the guns far away on the summit of Montmartre.

* * * * *

It was not until she paused, her hands resting thoughtfully on the ivory keys, that Callendar stirred himself and murmured in French, “The Boches are here.... Listen. The siren!”

And from the street nearby--perhaps from the Place Passy--the shriek of a fire engine penetrated the room, even through the heavy brocade curtains that muffled the windows. There was one more scream and then another and another, and then the faint, distant popping of guns, like a barrage of tiny fire-crackers. Fergus stood up and glanced at his wrist.

“I must go,” he said. “I’m late already.”

“Not now,” protested Ellen, turning abruptly. “Not now in the midst of a raid. You can spend the night here.... There is plenty of room.” She trembled a little, as if in terror of losing him so soon.

Fergus smiled. “I can’t,” he said. “You see, I have a rendezvous ... with a man from my escadrille. He is waiting for me now.”

“He won’t be expecting you ... not now.”

“I can’t help it, Ellen. He’ll be waiting. Great Heavens! I’ve been through a hundred raids. They’ve tried to blow us up every night....”

She had taken his hand now and was pleading anxiously. “But this is different.”

Fergus laughed. “It _is_ different,” he said. “There’s not one chance in a million here....”

Callendar merely smiled, as if to confirm the statement of Fergus that it was ridiculous to suppose there were any danger. He had, of course, no reason for wanting him to remain. It was Fergus who won in the end, merely by persistence--a strange thing, for usually it was the strong-minded Ellen who had her way. To-night he was firm and certain of his purpose. She thought perhaps that it was the war, the years that had passed since she last saw him, which had so hardened him and given strength to his will.

She went with him to the door and on the stairs, when they had turned out of the big room, she said, “You are not going back to the front to-morrow?”

“No. I shall come back here. I shall be in Paris for a week. Perhaps I’ll spend a night or two with you here.”

In their manner there was still an air of strangeness and formality, as if Callendar had in some way followed them out of the room and walked between them up the polished stairs. She helped him into his greatcoat and kissed him affectionately.

“To-morrow,” she said, “it will be better. We can be alone.” And then in a low voice she added, as if in explanation, “His permission is over to-morrow.”

Extinguishing the candles, Fergus opened the door and looked out. The rain had ceased and far above them beyond the roofs of the houses on the opposite side of the street, the searchlights fingered a sky that, save for one or two clouds, was blue and luminous like the street lamps.

“Look,” said Fergus, softly. “They’ve spotted one of them.” And they both stood in the open door fascinated by the sight of a Gotha turned to a silver dragon fly by a long finger of light. Far away in another part of the city there sounded a faint crash and then another and another. The sirens still screamed, now on one side of them, now on another.

“It is magnificent,” said Ellen, breathlessly.

“You see, they’re not dropping them anywhere near us. They are trying to hit the bridges and the government buildings. I’m only going around the corner ... into the Avenue Kléber.”

They were speaking in hushed voices, caught again in that mood of insignificance. One might have thought that in the blackness of the empty street there were figures listening. In the eyes of Fergus there was the light of fascination ... a bird held captive by a glittering snake.

“I must go,” murmured Fergus still watching the silver dragon fly. “I’m late already.”

She stood in the doorway until the darkness had swallowed him up and then, turning, slowly closed the door and went thoughtfully down the stairs. The sound of guns, the scream of the sirens and the echo of the distant, reverberating crashes grew fainter and fainter as she descended.

* * * * *

In the long drawing-room, standing before the fire with his glass in his hand Callendar was awaiting her. As she came toward him, she said, “I am proud of my brother,” with the air of making a challenge, as if she reproached him for his indifference.

“I have heard of him,” he said, quietly. “He is well known in the Division Reymont.”

To this she made no reply. She drew her chair nearer to the fire and sat staring for a time silently into the bright blaze. There was no sound save for the asthmatic breathing of Criquette, the grunts of comfort from Hansi, who had flung down his great black body by her side, and the distant echoes from somewhere in the direction of the Champ de Mars.

At length he murmured, “Perhaps we had better go into the cellar. The last one was nearer.”

But she refused. “No. Why should I?” For she understood well enough that to Callendar it was a matter of complete indifference. She knew his whole philosophy could be expressed in a single sentence--“If one died, one died.” The thing was to live while one was alive. “No,” she repeated. “Why should I be afraid? You and Fergus aren’t frightened.”

“It’s not the same,” he said softly.

“There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be.”

For a moment it may have seemed to her that she too was playing a part in the spectacle. She too might for once undertake a little of the danger they had known, the one with indifference, the other with a kind of fierce excitement.

“It is much easier,” she murmured, “to be with you both than to be here alone, not knowing what may happen to you.”

Under the heavy, sensuous lids Callendar’s gray eyes revealed a sudden sparkle of admiration for the fierce and sullen defiance of her mood. He must have known that she would have walked carelessly through the street, as carelessly as Fergus had done, that she would in her present mood have gone into an attack with a serene indifference; because she was angry now, angry at the war for which she had such a contempt, at circumstance, at the whole muddled business of living. She was angry and defiant with an Olympian anger, careless of cost or consequence.

There was another crash, nearer this time in the direction of the Trocadéro, and again Callendar’s eyelids flickered with slow admiration. She did not move. She still sat with one hand on Hansi’s head looking into the fire.

“I am not thinking about myself,” she observed suddenly with the air of answering a question which he had not spoken. “It is my brother.”

“He must be safe by now at his rendezvous. The Avenue Kléber is not far.”

* * * * *

She was thinking too, in a dazed fashion, of all that had happened in the hour before Fergus blundered in upon them. Callendar had told her that at last Sabine was divorcing him. He had not asked her to do it. She had told him that she could endure the situation no longer. For the part which Thérèse played in the affair, he could not answer. “I don’t know,” he had said, smiling. “Sabine will say nothing and my mother denies having spoken of the matter. But if she saw fit she would not hesitate to lie deliberately. Sometimes I think she is not clever, and then afterward I find she has been stupid only because it suited her, because her stupidity was dictated by a devilish shrewdness.”

And then he had told her of all the tricks Thérèse had played to bring about his remarriage, of how she had written him glowing letters about Ellen. “All she wrote,” he added, “was true, of course. You can hardly doubt that. Still, it was not the way to bring it about.”

And Ellen too had laughed and told of her interview with Thérèse in the library of the house at Murray Hill on the night of her concert, and at last she had asked abruptly, “Am I to interpret all this as a proposal?”

“My mother knew that there was no one else whom I would think of marrying. There was no need to marry at all.”

After this speech she had been silent for a time and when at last she looked up at him it was to ask, “And you want to marry me because it is the only way you can have me?”

“No.”

Her mind wandered back to the hot afternoon in the Babylon Arms when he had so nearly swept away all her self-possession. He had been different then, more ardent, more overwhelming, and yet she knew that the danger then had not been so great as it was in this very moment when he sat beside her in the big room, quiet and thoughtful, watching her with a fierce concentration.

“But there was a time,” she said slowly, “when you would have taken me in any way possible without marrying me.”

He was sitting with his body bent forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped. The hands were tense so that the knuckles showed through the tanned, dark skin.

“No,” he said softly. “That is not true. I would have married you then. I wanted to marry you, and I was younger then and not so wise. I fancied then that I could get anything I wanted in this world for the asking. And yet it was marriage that I had in mind. I have always had ... everything. I will be honest. I have always had women if I wanted them badly enough ... all save you.... And you are the only one I ever _wanted_ to marry. I swear to God that what I am saying is true.”

Watching him, she could not believe that he was lying. She saw the clenched hands. She saw that the mockery had gone out of him. She saw, with a queer tragic catch of memory, the little vein in his throat throbbing as she had seen the same vein throb in the throat of Clarence. It was all so different now. There was no headlong recklessness, no wild, sudden torrent of passion. He had not seized her now and tormented her with caresses that assailed all her resistance. They talked calmly in a fashion that might have been called calculating and cold-blooded save that underneath it there lay a current which ran more deep and more powerful than any emotion they had known on that sultry afternoon in the Babylon Arms. It was all changed now. They were older, and wiser, and in some ways more understanding. And the world about them had changed ... the shabby little flat had given way to the old, beautiful, glowing room. This calm, grave Richard was far more dangerous than the young and ardent one had been. It was more perilous now, for she was assailed through all her senses, and time was rushing on and on, past her....

She did not answer him, and presently in the same low voice he continued. “You are a woman of the world now,” he said, “so you are not likely to believe what you believed then. I do not make excuses for myself. I did not love Sabine. I have never loved her. It was an arranged, a proper marriage like thousands of others, but it turned out badly.... I could not make myself love. No one can do that.” He paused for a moment. “And she could not save herself....”

This last speech he made with such a sad humility that there was no air of conceit in it. Besides Ellen knew its truth; she had seen Sabine with her own eyes, weeping, suffering in a fashion she had once believed impossible, and pretending all the while that such suffering had been caused by a sick kitten. Yet it was this which somehow frightened her; she was afraid lest one day she herself might be humbled in the same fashion.

“My mother,” he was saying, “is as you know, a Greek, and there is a great deal of the Greek in me. Sometimes I fancy I am Oriental ... utterly, completely. An eastern man admires a woman of beauty and of spirit. He wants such a woman for the mother of his children.” He unclasped his hands and took her hand in his. “But don’t fancy that I love you in that way only. Sabine was a fine match in a worldly sense. She was rich. She was fashionable. But I too am that, so what could it mean to me? It was more than that which I wanted. I still want it. I want you to marry me as soon as it is possible.”

She did not free her hand, though the touch made her faint as it had done so many years before. She was conscious suddenly that the old sense of conflict was gone, the old feeling of a hidden antagonism between them. Could it be that it was because he was humble now, asking something of her rather than coming boldly to her to claim it?

“And still,” she heard herself saying, “I am not certain that it would work out. I don’t know.... You must give me time.”

Then he had kissed her hand and murmured, “We have not so much time as we once had.... Perhaps I have even less than I know now.”

To this she had chosen to make no answer. Instead, she had played for him until Fergus blundered in upon them.

* * * * *

It was in the midst of these thoughts that she heard Callendar say, as he stood balancing himself before the fire, “We could go to the south to-morrow, if you like. I could arrange to have my permission extended. De Cyon could do it for me. We could have a week together there.”

He must have known that it was too late now to ask such a thing. An hour earlier, before Fergus had intruded upon them, he might have succeeded. But everything was changed now. For an instant, during the time Fergus had been there, she had caught a glimpse of the old, familiar Richard, the mocking one; and the sense of conflict had risen once more sharply between them.

“How could I do that?” she asked, and after a moment’s silence, “I can’t do that sort of thing. It is impossible for me....”

He smiled. “But the world believes it of you already. The world will not care. The world expects it of you. It can make no difference ... and when the divorce is finished we will be married.”

Her answer was colored with a sudden bitterness. “You would not have said such a thing to me once.”