Part 36
But this Callendar. Who was he and why had she never spoken of him before? Surely she was a strange girl who kept such secrets so passionately hidden. Where had he come from? Was he of good healthy stock? What had his life been? For a time she paced up and down the room in a ferment of curiosity. She tried to imagine what sort of man Ellen would choose to marry. (This time she must be marrying only for love; there could be no other reason.) She tried again and again to picture him and she found herself baffled. It was impossible to imagine....
And when she had grown more calm and the sense of the dreary flat was borne in upon her once more, she remembered The Everlasting. He was ninety-five, and yet not really an old man; his mind had never faltered in its course. But he was feeble and needed care. She could not desert him now. She deceived herself into believing that it was her duty to care for him until he died; and only the Almighty knew when that would be. No, she must take him with her. She could not leave him, as Ellen suggested, in some home for the aged. That would be wrong; it would be, in a sense, indecent. He was after all the father of her husband, the grandfather of her children. One could not do a thing like that. She debated the matter with herself for hours, thinking, strangely enough, only of reasons why she _should_ take him; and it never once occurred to her that she really had no desire _not_ to take him. The arguments against it were simply the habit of an intermittent civil war that had endured for more than thirty years. She could not bear to leave him behind, any more than she could have borne it to leave behind the old clothes, the worn shoes, and the Bible she had given Fergus on his tenth birthday. Gramp was a fixture now, a part of the past. Without him she would feel lost and lonely.
When she told him the intoxicating news, the old man, with a wariness that placed no trust in their unreal truce, looked at her sharply and said, doubtfully, “I don’t know, Hattie. I’m too old and too feeble. I think perhaps I’d better stay behind.” He opposed the idea in the belief that if he opposed it she would insist upon its being carried through.
But she was firm. She would not even argue the matter. He must go with her to Paris. He would be quite as well off there as anywhere else and he would at least be where she could look after him.
“Much better off,” thought Gramp, whose only desire was to see Paris again before he died. But he still maintained a resentful air as if he opposed the idea with his last breath but was far too feeble to offer any real resistance.
59
In Paris the house in the Rue Raynouard was got ready for the arrival. It had begun again to take on a little of the old gaiety and sense of life, for it had passed through the depths of its depression in the days which first Lily and then Ellen had spent there alone in their sorrow. All things pass in time and so the grief and loneliness had begun to pass from the house. Lily, as the shrewd Rebecca predicted during her first quarrel with Ellen, found in time some one to console her for the loss of César. It was impossible that one so simple, so without complexities, should have gone on mourning; Lily lived as much in the present as Ellen lived in the future. Her consoler was the grave, dignified Monsieur de Cyon (the same white-haired gentleman connected with the government, whom Fergus had met at tea) the widower of “Tiens! Tiens!” de Cyon, whom Ellen had loathed long ago when she first came to the Rue Raynouard. He was glad no doubt to have been freed by death from the crêpe-laden “Tiens! Tiens!” and satisfied to have found so agreeable a creature as Lily--a woman whom he described to his friends as dignified, worldly, cultivated and beautiful, not omitting the fact that she was very rich and that she was an American, a factor of political importance at a moment when America was so necessary to Europe in general and to France in particular.
And Lily too was, in her casual way, content with such a marriage. In the room, smelling of scent and powder, where she had exchanged other confidences with Ellen, she said, “He is a gentleman and distinguished. Perhaps he may be in the next cabinet. I am rich. I can help him. And as for me....” She laughed softly, with a touch of the old abandon in her voice. “He will not bother me much. He is an old man.” But she was grave too when she spoke again. “And I ... I am no longer young. I am forty-three. I must begin to look about for something to take the place of youth. I shall make him a good wife. I shall be able to entertain and give dinners that will help him and I will have a position that I have never had before.”
And then she grew thoughtful and added, “It will be good for Jean too. It is time he had a father ... a thing he has never had. It is time that I stepped out of the picture and made way for him.”
She had lived, if not a life beyond reproach, one that was at least discreet and marked by good taste, and so the other things, since the world is as it is, did not matter. Of those who had really known her secret only three remained ... Ellen and Hattie and Jean. César and Madame Gigon and Old Julia were dead. It did not, of course, occur to her to include The Everlasting, who had known all the while.
* * * * *
Jean too was happier now, for he had grown used to wandering about on crutches and had become accustomed to a new leg, made so admirably that he could still ride as much as he liked. It would have been impossible for him to have remained depressed; there was too much of Lily in him and, it must not be forgotten, he resembled Fergus greatly. The old friendship between him and Ellen waxed stronger than ever. It seemed to her at times that Fergus had returned or had never died at all. In the evenings while his mother sat talking quietly in the big soft drawing room with Monsieur de Cyon, Ellen joined him at the piano in playing with four hands the wildest songs out of the music halls. Rebecca in rare moments of good humor added to the gaiety with imitations of poor old Sarah Bernhardt or Mistinguette or Spinelly.
Rebecca had long since come to make herself at home in the big house. She was settled now in one of the rooms opening on the long gallery and she was perpetually with them, for it never occurred to Lily to offer objections to one more guest; but, having nothing to occupy her time, she grew irritable and restless. Her occupation had gone suddenly and there remained nothing to absorb her energy. Ellen remained stubborn and mysterious. She would not return to America where there was a fortune awaiting her.
“I have enough,” she said. “I need not work myself to death. I am rich now. I am through with struggling. Whenever I see fit I can return.”
But to Rebecca, it must have seemed that Ellen had slipped somehow out of her reach, beyond the control which she had once held over her. She would not even quarrel as they had once done so often and with such vigor. She would simply repeat, “No. When I am ready, I will tell you. I am going to rest for a time.”
It was her contentment that clearly had the power of disturbing Rebecca. She seemed at times almost happy. The old wilfulness and caprice were gone, and when she sat at the piano with Jean, there were times when it even seemed that she was enveloped by a hard, bright gaiety, touched, it is true, by hysteria and bitterness. She was unmanageable in a way she had never been.
“You are deceiving me,” Rebecca reproached her. “There is something that I don’t know. You are keeping something from me.” And she would grow tearful and descend to the rich depths of Oriental sentiment. “Me,” she would repeat, beating her thin breast, “who have given my life for you ... who have worked myself to the bone ... given all my time.... For no other reason than to make you a success. It is shameful.”
And Ellen, in her new wisdom, might have answered, “Because you have found the thing you were born to do. Because you were aimless till you fastened upon me.... Because you found happiness in taking possession of me and my life.”
But she said none of these things because it seemed to her that quarreling was useless. She only laughed and replied, “And you told the most wonderful lies about me.... You created Lilli Barr but Lilli Barr is having a rest now. I am being myself ... Ellen Tolliver ... for a little time.”
Still Rebecca, too wise to be put off with such answers, only looked at her with suspicion and remained sulky. She could not run off now to visit Uncle Otto and Aunt Lina in Vienna nor the aunt in Riga nor the cousins in Trieste. She could not even make a round of the watering places, for all those which were not closed or filled with wounded soldiers lay on the other side of the circus parade that had begun to draw near to the end. One could almost hear the distant toots of the steam calliope, manned and manipulated by politicians, that fetched up the rear.
July had passed and with it the last peril to Paris, but still Callendar did not return. She heard from him whenever he had time to write. They were busy now (he wrote). They were beginning to look toward the end. The arrival of the Americans had done much for the French, not that they counted for much because there were not enough of them, but because, simply, they were _there_. He had kept on the _qui vive_ for her other brother--Robert--but he had not come across him. It was not strange since his own division was nowhere near the Americans. Still he might see him.... One could never tell.... They expected to be shifted soon eastward in the direction of the (here the word was deleted), quite near to the Americans. It was easy for him to make himself acquainted since he was, after all, half-American.
And he would write again and again, “Do not worry about me. I have the most incredible luck--always. There are some men who go through the thing _knowing_ that nothing will ever happen to them. I _know_ it. It’s a feeling that is in the bones. In the worst messes, I have that feeling ... so strong that it is physical. ‘Nothing will happen to me ... nothing whatever,’ I find myself repeating over and over again.”
And as she read this, it occurred to her again that such a belief belonged to the part of him which had always been strange to her--the part which escaped in some nameless fashion even the limits of her imagination. It was mystical and profound and uncanny. At the very moment that she knew he must be right in his faith, she was terrified too because he was so certain. She could not believe with such intensity save in herself. Her beliefs were related always to the power, the force which she herself had at her own command; and in all the senseless, miserable killing there was no power which lay in one’s self. It was simply a monstrous game of chance with the odds all against one.
But she found a happiness in those letters of a sort which she had never imagined. It seemed to her that in some way a part of herself was there with him enduring the same hardships and dangers, and for the first time in all her life she touched the borders of the satisfaction which comes of sharing an experience. She was troubled no longer by doubts; now that she had given her word, it never occurred to her to change. There was relief in the knowledge that all the years of indecision were at an end. There was satisfaction in feeling that the thing had been settled.
But she was abashed at the bold passion with which he wrote, shamelessly, assailing the wall of her fierce reserve. She was abashed and yet triumphant, for in all the years of struggle she had forgotten at times that she was a woman and young. His letters made her know for a little time some of the joy which Lily had possessed since the beginning.
He wrote at length that Sabine’s divorce was completed. “I am free now and will have a leave soon, so we can try then to make up for all the wasted years. Because they have been wasted. We should have been married long ago. We should have been courageous enough to have cut through the tangle and set things right. We were cowardly then. It is tragic that we only learn through long experience that wastes so much of joy, so much of happiness. But you are mine now ... mine forever. I shall never lose you again....”
But the letter troubled her strangely; it invoked with each line some disturbing memory of the past. The allusion to courage.... Who could say what had been courage and what cowardice? If the matter had rested with Callendar alone, it would have been solved because he had had what he believed was courage. He would have thrust poor Clarence aside and trampled upon him, to take ruthlessly what he himself desired. It had been a courage different from hers, whose foundations stood rooted in self-denial. Yet she had saved no one in the end, not even Clarence. Some power, in which Callendar placed such faith, had brought them together in the end, destroying Clarence despite anything she could do to save him. And it seemed to her that all the trouble, all the sorrow went back to that winter evening on the shore of Walker’s Pond when she had said “Yes” to Clarence and felt for him at the same moment a queer, inarticulate pity--a pity which she was beginning at last to understand.
She experienced again a fierce satisfaction, almost a pleasure, which Callendar, in the strangeness of his blood, would never know. It was the satisfaction in having dominated even one’s own body.
But in the last lines there lay an echo of the old conflict. _You will be mine ... mine forever. I will never lose you again._ It was an arrogant speech, so like the way he had come to her years ago in the Babylon Arms, not asking what she desired but simply taking for granted that she would do as he wished. The memory of that afternoon disturbed her again with the sense that this love of which he wrote was an obscene, middle-aged emotion worn by a too great experience. The freshness was gone and with it all the glow of their meetings in the open windows of Sherry’s and the walks through the Spring in Central Park.... It was this knowledge perhaps more than any other, that made his passionate phrases seem shameful. All of that first youth was gone from them, yet he posed, he wrote her still in the same ardent phrases, grown threadbare and unconvincing, of a love that had once been clean and fresh and despite all that she knew, even then, virginal. There was a touch now that bordered upon the professional....
He told her that Sabine was in Paris and might pay her a call, as much out of a gossip’s curiosity as from her curious passion for knowing the truth, for knowing with a blazing clarity exactly how things stood.
Sabine did call, in her small, expensive motor, accompanied by little Thérèse, an awkward, sickly girl of ten, but Ellen sent word that she was out. She had no desire to see Sabine, perhaps because she feared what Sabine had to tell her. And she could not turn back now; for too many years she had followed a straight unswerving path.
60
It was a fantastic journey for Hattie and The Everlasting. On passports arranged by Thérèse Callendar they were borne along a way made easy by all the power behind Thérèse Callendar’s fortune, through all the hubbub and turmoil of the war. Their companions on shipboard were correspondents and doctors and nurses and soldiers and congressmen (bound for the front to garner out of the very graves material for new campaigns). The others aboard the ship must have found them a strange pair concerning whom it was possible to speculate endlessly--this handsome, grim woman and the old, old man in her charge. It is probable that no one ever learned precisely who they were or whither they were bound, for Hattie was a suspicious traveler who placed no trust in fellow voyagers. She warned them away by her looks; and Gramp, of course, had not the faintest desire to enter upon conversation. He read his books and once a day made a circuit, under the escort of Hattie, of the entire deck, his coonskin coat (from which he refused to be separated) blowing in and out against his skinny old body. He never spoke, even to Hattie, even in reply to such remarks as, “Now, Grandpa, you must not eat that,” or “Now, Grandpa, you had best move your chair, there’s a draft in that corner.”
(All this to Gramp who had never denied himself anything and had a perfect digestion; who had never thought of drafts since he was born.)
Indeed, there was something touching in the spectacle of the middle-aged woman, tending so carefully the old, old man. It was as if she feared that he might by some ill chance be blown from the deck into the open sea or fall down a companionway and shatter forever the brittle old bones that had defied time itself. No one could have guessed that they were enemies, that despite the temporary truce they could never be anything but enemies by the very nature of things. Hattie treated him still as if he were some fragile piece of old glass which she must deliver safely to Lily’s house in the Rue Raynouard.
It was only after she had seen him safely to bed in his cabin that she was able to give range to all her passionate energy and walk round and round the deck, her ostrich plumes blowing in the gale, her strong, buxom figure outlined against the luminous blue of the Atlantic night. At such times she was almost happy again for it seemed to her that in the winds and fogs Fergus was somewhere close at hand, just beyond reach, waiting for her.
And she was going now to take up once more the threads of life. Ellen was to be married.... Ellen was to be married.... She must have a child.... She must have a child.... These things she thought over and over again until she came at length to repeat them aloud to herself as she walked, bracing her body against the gale, through the darkness. She had joined Thérèse Callendar in this passionate desire for a grandchild, but it was not for the same reason. To Hattie a grandchild would alter everything. It would be for her like being young again, almost like bearing a child of her own.
She had never traveled before; she knew not a word of French and The Everlasting saw fit not to reveal his knowledge of the tongue; but she was undaunted. In some way, by an heroic effort touched with a profound scorn for a nation which chattered such an abominable tongue, she managed everything ... the customs at Havre, the accommodations in hotels already crowded to the doors and, last of all, the journey from the port into the Gare du Nord. (Lily had sent a courier to meet her but the meeting never occurred.) She was indomitable and she was almost happy again in all the business of managing tickets and meals and luggage, shepherding The Everlasting and his precious books. For Hattie believed that nothing was impossible....
From the corridor of the crowded train, where she stood protecting Gramp and jostling her fellow passengers, Hattie saw them standing on the platform of the smoking cave called the Gare du Nord.... Ellen and Lily and a dark man in a blue uniform; and as the train jolted to a halt, her own car (for she thought of it thus) stopped almost abreast of them so that she was able to see that they talked earnestly with grave faces and an air of preoccupation. Wedged between a poilu slung round with a dozen musettes and wine bottles, and a trim English colonel with white mustaches and a red face, she was held immovable, unable to signal to them though she pounded upon the glass and shouted to them through windows open by some miracle against the stifling September heat. To Hattie, nothing existed in all that echoing cavern save those three figures, standing together amid mountains of luggage.
In the resounding shed steam hissed and engines squealed in ridiculous Gallic fashion; soldiers shouted to one another and a cocotte just beneath her window cried ribald jests to a lover somewhere in the same car who joined in the shouts of laughter. They looked up and down the platform--those three. It seemed that years passed before Lily, turning languidly in the heat, caught a glimpse of Hattie’s red and agitated face and Gramp’s sharp nose and inscrutable eyes.
They moved toward her; the English colonel whose toes had been trampled gave way in indignation and Hattie, bearing an immense amount of luggage and followed indifferently by Gramp, descended to the platform.
Ellen kissed her and then Lily, and at last she heard Ellen saying, “This is Richard, Ma. He is on leave.”
Above all the flurry and the conversation, she and Callendar regarded each other searchingly, the one with a piercing gaze of appraisal, the other with an air almost of astonishment. He had not, perhaps, pictured her as such a handsome woman, nor one, despite the grimness on which one could not put one’s finger, of such immense gusto. She accounted for Ellen’s strength and vitality, but there was clearly nothing subtle in her and nothing cold: the answer to all that lay elsewhere--perhaps in the ancient man who peered at them all like a spiteful mouse through his dim spectacles.
As for Hattie, her eyes asked only one thing, “Was he--this man--good enough for Ellen?” His foreign blood showed itself more plainly than she had expected. It troubled her that her daughter should be marrying a man of foreign blood; for, vaguely, all foreigners were associated in her mind with those dark, sullen, violent men who worked in the black Mills surrounding Shane’s Castle.
There flashed between the two--Callendar and Hattie--no spark either of understanding or enmity. Rather it seemed that the opinions of both were colored by surprise and a touch of suspicion. In Hattie’s eyes there was a fire of pride and possession, the look of one who would fight for her children, passionately; and in the gray eyes of Callendar there was only the opaque, inscrutable expression which only Ellen, of them all, had ever seen dissolve or change.
But they were grave, all of them, in a fashion that presently entered Hattie’s spirit and made her feel that their welcome was lacking in enthusiasm. Perhaps (she thought) it was the war; they were so close to it and Ellen, like herself, must be thinking always of Fergus. Perhaps they did not really want her there ... any of them. Yet they had written her with so much eagerness. It was a doubt that filled her with a sharp terror of growing old and useless and dependent.
Lily (whom she had not seen in years, Lily who was now Madame de Cyon) seemed scarcely changed at all. She could not be (Hattie, watching her, hastily calculated the years) she could not be a day less than forty-five; yet there she was, a woman who had sinned, looking young, almost fresh, scarcely a day older than Ellen who was twelve years younger ... more plump than Ellen and, strangely enough, more soft. Still, Hattie reflected, with a grim satisfaction, she had painted her face, and her hair, it was certain, had been “touched up.”
Perhaps in Paris all life was different; perhaps such a life as Lily’s made not too great a difference. Looking at her cousin, so beautiful, so charming and so unnaturally young, all the deep rooted respectability of Hattie’s nature rose and bristled. And as she stood on the steps of the Gare du Nord waiting for Callendar to fetch the gray blue Government motor to drive them to the Rue Raynouard, it swept over her that it was a strange and ridiculous turn of affairs which had brought her of all people “into the wickedest city in the world,” to live in the house of Lily whom she had always distrusted. She had not thought of it until this moment when she stood looking out across the Place Roubaix.