Part 18

And Lily, all the while, kept her secret. Undoubtedly she was no longer in her first youth. This may have depressed her, for she was a woman to whom beauty and youth were the beginning and the end. Yet the fits of melancholy had something to do with a more definite and tangible thing. They were associated in some way with a little enameled box in which she kept a growing bundle of clippings from the American newspapers which Ellen brought into the house at Numero Dix.

In the solitude of her room, she opened the box and reread them many times, over and over again until the edges became frayed and the print blurred from much fingering. They had to do with the career of a certain labor leader, a man named Krylenko who seemed a strange person to excite the interest of a woman like Madame Shane. The clippings marked the progress of the man. Whenever there was a strike, Krylenko appeared to take a hand in it. Slowly, clipping by clipping, the battle he fought was being won. The unions penetrated now this steel town, now that one. There were battles, brutalities, deaths, fires in his trail, but the trail led steadily upward toward a goal. He was winning slowly. That he was strong there could be no doubt. He was so strong that great newspapers printed editorials against him and his cause. They called him an “anarchist,” “an alien disturber,” “a peril to the great American nation” and, most frequently of all, “a menace to prosperity and the inalienable rights of property.”

Lily kept the enameled box locked in a drawer of her writing desk. No one had ever seen it. No one would see it until she died. It had been there for seven years.

It was on the morning after one of these attacks of melancholy, a few days after Jean’s visit, that the Town suddenly intruded once more upon the house in the Rue Raynouard.

Lily sat on the sunlit terrace of the garden before a late breakfast of chocolate and buttered rolls, opposite Ellen whose habit it was to arise early and pursue some form of violent exercise while her cousin still slept. This morning she had been riding in the Bois de Bologne. As a little girl she learned to ride under the instruction of her grandfather, old Jacob Barr, and she rode well and easily with the air and the skill of one who has grown up with horses. The languid Schneidermann accompanied her on these early morning jaunts. She owned her horse because in the long run it was more economical and, as she said, “No pennies slip through my fingers.”

She wore a tight black riding habit with a white stock and a low derby hat. The riding crop lay across her strong, slim knees as she smoked and watched Lily devour too many rolls and a too large bowl of rich chocolate.

Between them on the table lay the morning’s letters. In Ellen’s little heap there were three or four notes from struggling music students, begging help or advice from her, one from a manager proposing an interview with regard to an American tour, a bill from Durand the publisher. Lily’s pile was altogether different. It consisted almost entirely of bills, from Coty, from Worth, from Henri the florist, from Augustin the hairdresser, from Lanvin ... from ... on and on endlessly and at the bottom a letter from the lawyers who succeeded on the death of William Baines, “the old fogy,” to the management of Lily’s holdings in the Town.

The last letter she read through twice with so deep an interest that the chocolate grew cold and she was forced to send for a hot cup and more hot rolls. When she had finished she leaned back in the wicker chair, buried beneath the silk, the lace ruffles and the pale tiny bows of her peignoir.

“D’you know, Ellen,” she remarked, “I am growing too rich. I’ve no idea what to do with all my money.”

Ellen put down her letter abruptly and knocked the ash from her cigarette.

“There are plenty of places for it.” She slapped the envelope against her slim thigh. “I’ve had two letters this morning asking me for money ... from two music students. Heaven knows I’ve got nothing to spare. All that’s left over I send to Ma. What is it now? A gold mine or an oil well?”

“Neither,” said Lily. “It’s just the Town making me richer and richer. It’s from Folsom and Jones ... I guess they’re since your time. They’re lawyers and they handle Irene’s and my estate. They want me to sell the rest of the property we own.”

Ellen pursed her lips reflectively. “How much are they offered?”

“Something over five hundred thousand. They say they can get six in a pinch.”

She whistled softly. “Take it ... take it. Those old shacks can’t be worth that.”

“It isn’t the shacks,” said Lily. “It’s the land itself they want. The shacks aren’t even worth repair. Why, they were built, most of them, while father was still living. The lawyers hint that the Town is ashamed of them, that they are a disgrace to the Town.”

“I suppose it has changed,” remarked Ellen.

“The population has doubled,” said her cousin. “There aren’t enough houses for the people. Why, last summer people who came to work at the Mills had to live in tents for a time. Even the people on Park avenue let out rooms. The Chamber of Commerce asked them to. They appealed to their pride not to stop the tremendous growth. There’s been a tremendous....”

Ellen interrupted her. “I know ... I know.... Watch us grow. The biggest city in the state in ten years. Well, it’s money in your pocket. You’ve no kick coming.”

The chocolate and rolls arrived and Lily began once more to eat.

“I don’t see how you can eat all that and keep your figure,” observed Ellen.

“Massage,” said Lily. “Massage ... and luckily the time is coming when I can eat all I want and be as fat as I like. In another fifteen years I’ll be an old woman and it won’t matter what I do.” The faint bitterness again drifted through the speech, evasive and imperceptible.

“What does Irene say to your selling?” inquired Ellen.

“The lawyers say she wants to sell. You know I haven’t had a line from her in years. She’s in France now, you know.”

“In France!” said Ellen, her eyebrows rising in surprise.

“Yes, at Lisieux.”

“I should think you’d go and see her.”

“She wouldn’t see me if I went. What good would it do?”

LX

There was a sudden silence while Ellen beat her riding crop against her leg. “I must say she’s very queer. I never understood her. You know when I was a girl, she gave me the creeps ... the way she had of looking at you with those pale eyes.”

“I know,” replied Lily. And then after a pause. “You know they want to buy Cypress Hill too. The Lord alone knows how many times they tried. They began before Mama died. Irene hasn’t any share in it. It belongs outright to me.”

“I suppose it’s the Mills.”

“No, not this time. The Town wants it now.” She paused while she buttered another roll. “They want it for a new railway station ... a union station, you know, for all three roads. It’s perfect for that. And each time they increase the offer. Now they write me that they’ve made a last offer. If I won’t sell, they’ll undertake proceedings to condemn it.”

During this speech the countenance of Ellen Tolliver underwent a complete metamorphosis. The devil-may-care look vanished slowly, replaced by a certain hardness, a squaring of the handsome jaw, a slight hardening of the firm lips. It may have been that while Lily talked her cousin was swept by a torrent of memories--memories of hurt pride, of poverty and indignities endured because she was helpless, memories of patronizing women and young girls who spoke of “poor Ellen Tolliver,” memories of her father’s defeats and disappointments, of Judge Weissman’s dishonesty and corruption, of her mother’s agonizing and endless struggle to keep up appearances. As sometimes occurs with individuals of strong personality, a whole life, a complete philosophy stood revealed for an instant in her intelligent face. She had run off with Clarence Murdoch “to show the Town.” She had become famous and successful because, deep down in her heart, she was resolved always to show the Town how little it counted in her life, how great was the contempt she felt for it. It was always this thought--this more than everything else--which had driven her forward. And now came this new opportunity, perhaps the best of all, to block the Town, to thwart its most cherished desire. It was a chance to prevent a new and flamboyant effort to advertise its wealth, its prosperity, its bigness.

“As if,” she said aloud, “‘bigness’ was something to be proud of. Let them try and condemn it, Lily. I doubt if they can. Anyway I’d keep it just to spite them. It’s a chance to show your power.” She leaned earnestly across the table, striking it with her riding crop to emphasize her words. “You hate the place as much as I do. Why, it isn’t even the same Town we grew up in. It’s another place built upon filth and soot. It’s not that we’re fouling our own nest. Why, Lily, the Town your mother and my grandfather loved wasn’t that sort of place at all. It was a pleasant place where people lived quietly and peacefully, where they had horses and dogs and were decent to each other. And now that’s all buried under those damned filthy Mills, under a pile of muck and corruption with Judge Weissman and his crowd enthroned on the very top.” She stood up, her blue eyes flashing. “It’s changed the very people in it. It’s made them noisy, common, cheap. Damn it! I hate them all!” She struck the table a violent blow with her riding crop. “Don’t sell it. You don’t need the money. It’s nothing to you ... not even if they offered you a million!” And then she laughed savagely. “That’s the best part of it. The longer you hold it, the more they’ll have to pay you. The more prosperous they are, the more it will cost them to have a new railway station. You’re the one who has the power now. Don’t you see what power there is in money?... the power that grows out of just owning a thing?”

Lily, it appeared, was amazed by the passion of the sudden, outburst. For a time she lay back in the wicker chair, regarding her cousin with a thoughtful look. At last, she said, “I had no idea that you felt that way about it. It’s the way Mama used to feel. I suppose I never had enough of the place to really hate it.”

Ellen again interrupted her passionately. “If you’d had as much as I had, you’d have hated it all right.”

“I just ran away from it as soon as I could,” continued Lily. “Besides,” she added after a pause, “Mama left a letter asking me to keep Cypress Hill. She always felt that way about the Town.”

Ellen, persistent, bent over the table toward her cousin. The riding crop fell to the gravel terrace. “Promise me you won’t sell it, Lily.... Promise me you’ll keep it. It’s a chance to hit back.... Promise!”

And Lily, who after all was indifferent in matters of business, promised, perhaps because the violent revelations made by her cousin astounded her so completely that she was unable to think of any argument. Doubtless she had reasons of her own ... secret reasons which had to do with the worn clippings in the enameled box.

“I’ll keep it,” she replied. “They can wait until Hell freezes over. And besides you put the idea so that it amuses me. I’ll sell the other stuff and invest the money.”

Ellen interrupted her with a bitter laugh. “It’s funny, you know, that all this time they’ve been pouring money into your pocket. That’s the joke of it. In a way, it was all this booming and prosperity that helped me too. If you hadn’t been so rich, I suppose I’d never have made a success of it.”

Lily languidly finished the last of her chocolate. “I’d never thought of it in that way. It’s an amusing idea.”

Ellen was satisfied. Gathering up her letters she went into the house, changed her clothes, and in a little while, seated under the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner, she was working stormily at her music, filling the house with glorious sound until it overflowed and spilled its rhapsodies over the terrace into the garden where the first bright irises were abloom.

LXI

Upstairs Lily made her way, after a toilette which occupied two hours, to the room of Madame Gigon. It was, amid the elegance of the house, a black-sheep of a room, its walls covered with books, its corners cluttered with broken fragments of Gothic saints and virgins, the sole legacy of the distant and obscure M. Gigon, curator at the Cluny Museum. In the center stood a table covered with dark red rep, heavily embroidered and cluttered with inkpots, pens and all the paraphernalia of writing. Bits of faded brocade ornamented the wall save for a space opposite the door where hung an immense engraving of the First Napoleon, dominating a smaller portrait of Napoleon the Little in all the glory of his mustaches and imperial. An engraving of the Eugènie by Winterhalter stood over the washstand, a convenience to which Madame Gigon clung even after Lily’s installation of the most elaborate American plumbing.

Madame Gigon huddled like a benevolent old witch among the bedclothes of her diminutive bed. At the foot, in a bright patch of sunlight, lay Criquette and Michou amiably close to each other and both quite stuffed with toasted rolls and hot chocolate.

Lily came in looking fresh and radiant in a severe suit and smart hat. They exchanged greetings.

“How are you this morning, Tante Louise?” she inquired of the old woman.

“Not so well ... not so well. I slept badly. The pain in my hip.”

Lily went and sat on the bed, taking the old woman’s hand which she caressed as she felt her pulse.

“You have everything you want?” she inquired.

“Oui ... everything.” There was a little pause and Madame Gigon peered at her with dim eyes. “I’ve been thinking how lucky I am.”

Lily smiled.

“I mean that I’m not left poor and alone. You’ve been good to me.”

Lily’s smile expanded into a laugh. “Nonsense.... Nonsense. It’s given me enough pleasure....”

“It seems like the hand of God,” said the old woman very piously.

“It may be,” said Lily. “Mees Ellen has been telling me it’s the hand of man.”

And Madame Gigon, not having heard the talk on the terrace, was puzzled. Secretly she disapproved Mees Ellen’s lack of piety.

“Mees Ellen plays well this morning ... beautifully,” said Madame Gigon. “She is an artist ... a true artist. Will you ask her a favor?”

Lily nodded.

“Will you ask her to play something of Offenbach? I’ve been hungry for it.” She looked feeble and appealing somewhat confused by violence of the life with which she found herself surrounded since the advent of Mees Ellen and the grown-up Jean.

“Of course,” said Lily.

“And one more thing,” said Madame Gigon. “This I must ask of you.... I’m too ill to go to Madame Blaise this afternoon. I want you to go and explain why I have not come. Tell her I am too ill.” A slight frown crossed Lily’s brow. Madame Gigon, with her dim eyes could not possibly have seen it, yet she said, “Madame Blaise admires you.... She thinks you are all that a woman should be ... a perfect woman.”

If Lily had felt any genuine hesitation, the faint flattery destroyed it, for she replied, “I’ll go, certainly. I’m lunching out and I’ll go there late and tell her.”

“Not too late.... She is easily offended,” said Madame Gigon. “You know she is a little ...” She made a comic gesture indicating that Madame Blaise was a little cracked.

Then Lily read to her for a time out of Faure’s History of Art which undoubtedly bored her but gave Madame Gigon the greatest pleasure; and at last she left for her mysterious lunch. A little while later there arose from below stairs the tinkling melodies of the overture to Orpheus in the Underworld. Somewhere among the piles of old music in the drawing-room closet, Ellen had discovered the whole score and she played it now in a wild good humor. Sometimes the music became actually noisy in its triumphant violence. It was the playing of a woman who had achieved a victory.

LXII

It is possible that Madame Blaise felt for Lily the admiration which Madame Gigon attributed to her, but she was such a queer old thing that it was impossible ever to know for a certainty. It could not be said that she revealed these sentiments by any open demonstration, or even by an occasional word of approval. There are women whose manner of showing their devotion assumes an inverted character; it takes to displaying itself in sharp criticisms of the object they love or admire. There are women who nag their lovers, who deprecate the charms of their own children, who sharply denounce the behavior of their dearest friends. And if there be any truth in this theory of inverted demonstration, it could be said that Madame Blaise admired Lily. Indeed judging from her behavior it could be said that she experienced a profound affection for the younger woman.

The old woman seldom addressed Lily, yet when Lily politely assumed the initiative and inquired after the health of Madame Blaise or her plans for the summer, Madame Blaise was flattered and smiled with all the warmth of an August sun. To Madame Gigon she criticized Lily unmercifully. She called her indolent, without ambition. She accused her of having wasted her life and permitted her beauty to fade without using its power. It was not true that Lily had faded, yet Madame Blaise was convinced of it. To have heard her talk, one would have thought Lily was a withered old harridan.

“I understand these things,” she told Madame Gigon confidentially, “because I was a beauty myself ... a famous beauty.” And the memory of her triumphs led her to bridle and cast a glance at the nearest mirror. Yet she never spoke of these things to Lily, whose greater youth, already turning into middle-age, seemed to inspire the old woman with an awe tinged by actual worship.

“Why does she bury herself among these old women?” she would say. “Has she no energy ... no zest for life? If only she could capture some of Mees Tolliver’s _élan_. Mees Tolliver could spare her a great deal and be the more charming for it.”

And to all this, Madame Gigon had one answer which it was her habit to repeat over and over again. “Madame Shane is content. Is not that enough? What more can any of us wish upon this earth?”

So it ran, this perpetual and carping interest of Madame Blaise. Although she avoided Lily, she could not resist discussing her. And Madame Gigon, believing firmly that Madame Blaise was a little cracked, never mentioned these things to Lily.

There hung about Madame Blaise something of the mystery which envelopes people suffering from delusions. Not only was it impossible to know when she was lying and when she was speaking the truth ... it was impossible even to say, “Madame Blaise is thus and so. She is mean or she is benevolent. She is hostile or she is friendly.” It was impossible to reach any sensible opinion concerning her. She was subject to the most absurd whims which rendered impossible any anticipation of her actions. Besides, she lived in a world of her own which resembled in no way the world of her friends, so bound up in shopkeepers, food, laundry, housekeeping, etc. Her world was inhabited by all sorts of fantastic and imaginary creatures. She believed passionately that she was still a fine figure of a woman. Not even a mirror could persuade her otherwise. She asserted with a challenging pugnacity that she had once played a prominent part in European politics, and hinted that she was the last of the women who would go down in history as creatures who ruled kings; but what it was she had done or when she had done it, no one could discover. The tragedy was that no one took her seriously. When one spoke of her, there was always a suspicion in the speech of that comic gesture which Madame Gigon used to indicate that her friend was a little cracked. Yet they were kind to her. No one allowed her to suspect that she was accepted generally as a mere pack of highly animated hallucinations. Indeed her _faiblesse_ gave her the whip hand over her friends. People humored her. They submitted to her insults with a calm good-nature.

When she began one of her long tales, people smiled and feigned interest and remarked, “How wonderful! Who would have thought it?” Or with mock protests, they would say, “But my dear Madame Blaise, you are still a fine figure of a woman.” And she would go off home delighted that she had managed to preserve her figure and her youthful complexion, even if a bit of rouge was at times necessary. Her delight was always apparent. It was visible in every line of her seamed old face.

There were all sorts of stories concerning Madame Blaise, stories of the most fantastic and incredible nature, stories that she was well known in the generation which she had outlived, stories even that she had been the mistress of this or that politician. Indeed some of the most fantastic tales were contributed slyly by Madame Blaise herself. But no one really knew anything of her youth; and although every one repeated the stories with a certain relish, there was no one who really believed them.

The old women who came to Madame Gigon’s salon knew that she had come to Paris some twenty years earlier as the widow of a merchant from Marseilles. She was rich, respected, and at that time seemed wholly in her right mind, save for an overfondness to surround herself with mystery. A respectable Bonapartist, the uncle of Captain Marchand, acted as her sponsor. She settled herself presently into the respectable circle. She had her _salon_ and all went well. By now she had been accepted for so long a time that she seemed always to have been a part of that neat little society, so neat, so compact and so circumspect. She was a figure. Madame Blaise? Why, of course, every one knew Madame Blaise ... always. What had gone before became quickly veiled in the mists of the past, and Madame Blaise, whose life may have been after all one of the most romantic and exciting, found herself a part of a singularly dull and prosaic society.

Lily could have known no more than this concerning the old woman. Indeed it is probable that she knew even less, for her good nature and her tolerant indifference had long since stifled all her curiosity concerning people. She went to Madame Blaise on that Tuesday afternoon to please Madame Gigon, because she had no other engagement, and because she was accustomed to obliging her friends. She may even have suspected that the visit would give pleasure to Madame Blaise herself. She arrived very late as usual (it was impossible for Lily to be punctual) having lingered a long time over lunch and made an expensive tour of the shops in the Rue de la Paix.

In a little enclosure shaded by old trees and high, neglected shrubbery in Passy five minutes walk from the Trocadero, Madame Blaise had her house. The enclosure was shared by two other houses, less pretentious, which stood respectfully apart at a little distance. The dwelling was built of wood in imitation of a Swiss chalet, and ornamented with little carved balconies and fantastic ornaments in bizarre exaggeration of some cowherd’s house on the mountains above Lucerne. A wall ran about the enclosure with an opening which was barred at night by a massive iron gate. Here Lily stepped down from the fiacre, passing, on her way through the gate, Madame de Cyon and the Marchands, who were leaving.

“You are late,” observed Madame de Cyon, taking in Lily’s costume with her small green eyes.

“I have been hurrying all the way,” replied Lily. “I was kept by business.”

Captain Marchand and his wife bowed gravely.

“Every one has gone,” observed Madame de Cyon, waiting as though curious to see what Lily would do.

“Well, I must go in.... Madame Gigon was too ill to come. She asked me to convey her compliments.”

Madame de Cyon brightened. “Nothing serious, I hope.”

“No,” said Lily. “Madame is an old woman ...” And then politely, “She tells me Monsieur de Cyon is back from the Balkans.”