Part 21

But Lily with her companion trooping along behind her, did not interrupt the discussion. They made their way, enveloped in a peaceful silence, into the dining-room where supper waited them--some sort of hot stuff in a silver dish with an alcohol flame burning beneath it, an urn steaming with hot chocolate, a bowl of whipped cream, a few sandwiches--superlatively French sandwiches, very thin and crustless with the faintest edge of buff colored paté showing between the transparent slices of white bread. It was all exquisite, perfect, flawless.

“Sit down,” said Lily, as she flung off the black and silver cloak. “Sit down and tell me all about yourself.”

Willie drew up a chair. “I shan’t be able to stay very late,” he said. “You see, I’m leaving early in the morning.” He watched Lily fumbling with the lamp beneath the urn. She was plumper than he had expected. Indeed she was almost fat. There was a faint air of middle-age about her, indiscernable but unmistakably present.

“What about yourself?” he asked politely. “What has your life been?”

Lily kept on turning and pushing at the silver burner. “My life?” she said. “Well, you see it all about you, Willie.” She made a little gesture to include the long, softly glittering rooms, Ellen, the piano, Paul Schneidermann. “It’s just been this,” she said. “Nothing more ... nothing less. Not much has happened.” For a moment she stopped her fumbling and sat thoughtful. “Not much has happened,” and then after another pause, “No, scarcely anything.”

There was a sudden, sharp silence, filled by the sound of Ellen’s music. She had become absorbed in it, utterly. It was impossible to say when she would come in to supper.

Then Willie, in an attempt at courtliness, strained the truth somewhat. “You don’t look a day older, Lily ... not a day.... Just the same. It’s remarkable.”

His companion lifted the lid of the chafing dish. “Some hot chicken, Willie?” she asked, and when he nodded, “I must say you look younger ... ten years younger than the last time I saw you. Why, you look as though you’d forgotten the Mills ... completely.”

Willie laughed. It was a curious elated laugh, a little wild for all its softness.

“I have,” he said. “You see I’m out of the Mills for good. I’ve been out of them for almost seven years.”

Lily looked at him. “Seven years,” she said, “seven years! Why that’s since the strike. You must have gotten out at the same time.”

“I did,” he replied, “I own some stock. That’s all. Judge Weissman is dead, you know. When mother died, the old crowd went out of it for good. All the Mills are now a part of the Amalgamated.”

LXIX

Thus in a few words, he sketched the passing of one epoch and its succession by another. The day of the small private enterprise in the Town had passed, succeeded by the day of the great corporation. Everything was owned now by capitalists, by stockholders who never saw the Mills, to whom the workers of the Flats were little more than mythical creatures, animated engines without minds or souls, whose only symbol of existence was the dividend twice a year. Machines they were ... machines ... dim machines ... not in the least real or human.

Most of the tale Willie omitted. He did not tell of the monkey-faced little man who came to the Town representing the Amalgamated. Nor did he tell of the monkey-faced man’s address to the Chamber of Commerce in which he talked a great deal of Jesus and declared that religion was what the world most needed, religion and a sense of fellowship between men. He did not tell of how the Amalgamated broke the strike by buying all the wretched houses and turning out the strikers, men, women and children. He omitted the blacklisting, the means by which the strikers were prevented from obtaining work elsewhere. He did not observe that the power which money gave Judge Weissman, himself and his mother, was as nothing compared to the power of the Amalgamated--a vast incalculable power founded upon gold and the possession of property. Nor did he say that the passing of the Mills had killed Mrs. Julis Harrison ... a thing which was as true as truth. These things were to him of no importance. He was now simply “an average citizen” minding his own business.

All Willie said was, “When mother died, the old crowd went out of it for good.”

In the drawing-room Ellen had been completely captured by the concerto. She was playing it all over again, from beginning to end, rapturously, savagely. Schneidermann lay among the cushions of the divan, his lean figure sprawled languidly, his dark eyes closed.

“And what do you do now?” asked Lily. “You must do something to occupy yourself.”

Willie’s plump face brightened. “I have a farm,” he said. “I raise ducks and chickens.” A slow smile crept over Lily’s face. “It’s a success too,” he continued. “You needn’t laugh at it. I make it pay. Why, I made this trip on last year’s profits. And I have a great deal of fun out of it.” He smiled again with an air of supreme contentment. “It’s the first time I’ve ever done what I wanted to do.”

Lily regarded him with a faint air of surprise. It may have been that she guessed then for the first time, that he was not after all a complete fool. He, too, like Ellen, like herself, even like Irene, had escaped in spite of everything.

They had been talking thus for half an hour when Ellen, followed by Paul Schneidermann, joined them. Willie stood up nervously.

“Paul,” said Lily, “Mr. Harrison--Mr. Harrison, Monsieur Schneidermann.” They bowed. “You are both steel manufacturers,” she added with a touch of irony, “You will find much in common.”

Willie protested. “No longer,” he said. “Now I am a farmer.”

“And I,” said Schneidermann, “have never been. I am a musician....” Ellen laughed scornfully and he turned to her with a curious blushing look of self-effacement, “Perhaps,” he said, “dilettante is a better word.”

For a time they talked--the stupid, polite conversation that occurs between strangers; and then, the proprieties satisfied, Ellen and Paul drifted quickly back into the realm of music. Lily devoted herself to Willie Harrison.

“It was too bad,” he remarked, “about the house at Cypress Hill.”

Lily leaned forward on the table holding up one white wrist to shield her eyes from the light of the candles. “Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry ... sentimentally, I suppose. I should never have gone back to it. It was perfectly useless to me. But I’m sorry it’s gone. I suppose it, too, was changed.”

“You would never have known it,” said Willie. “It was completely black ... even the white trimmings.” He leaned forward confidentially. “Do you know what they say? They say in the Town that some one was hired to burn it, so that you would be willing to sell.”

For a moment Lily remained silent. Her hand trembled a little. She looked across at Ellen to see whether she had been listening. Her cousin was plainly absorbed in her argument.

“They can have it now,” said Lily, with an intense bitterness. “I begrudge them even the taxes I have to pay on it. But they’ll have to pay a good price,” she added quietly. “I’ll squeeze the last cent out of them.”

It was the end of their conversation, for Willie glancing at his watch, announced that he must leave. Lily accompanied him up the long stairs to the unpretentious door. There he hesitated for a moment on bidding her good night.

“You have changed,” he said. “I can see it now.”

Lily smiled vaguely, “How?”

He fell to fumbling with the ruby clasp. “I don’t know. More calm, I think.... You’re not so impatient. And you’re like a Frenchwoman.... Why, you even speak English with an accent.”

“Oh, no, Willie ... I’m not like a Frenchwoman. I’m still American. There’s a good deal of my mother in me. I’ve realized it lately. It’s that desire to run things. You understand what I mean.... Perhaps it’s because I’m getting to the age where one can’t live upon the food of youth.” She laughed suddenly. “We Americans don’t change. What I mean is that I’m growing old.”

Willie shook hands politely and went out, leaving Lily in the doorway to watch his neat figure, silhouetted against the glow of light from the Café des Tourelles, until he reached the corner and disappeared.

It was the last time she ever saw him so it was impossible for her to have known the vagaries of his progress after he left the door of Numero Dix. Yet this progress held a certain interest. At the corner of the Rue Franklin, Willie hailed with his umbrella a passing taxicab and bade the driver take him to an address in the Rue du Bac. It was not the address of the American Hotel; on the contrary it designated a three story house with a café on the first floor and lodgings above. In one of these lived a discreet lady who frequented the Louvre by day and employed Art as a means of making the acquaintance of quiet gentlemen hanging about the fringes of tourist parties. Indeed, she could have written an interesting compendium on the effect of art and Paris upon the behavior of soberly dressed, mousy gentlemen.

For Willie, with the death of his mother and the passing of the Mills, had begun to live ... in his own awkward timid fashion, to be sure ... but none the less he had begun to live.

As he sped on his way in the crazy taxicab, it became more and more evident that his mood was changed by the encounter with Lily. He sat well back in the cab, quietly, immersed in the thought. The dim white squares, empty and deserted now; the flamboyant houses of the section near the Étoile, the light-bordered Seine, the tall black skeleton of the Eiffel Tower ... all these things now left him, for some strange reason, unmoved. They swept by the windows of the cab unnoticed. Willie was thinking of something else.

As the taxi turned into the ghostly spaces of the Place de la Concord, Willie stirred himself suddenly and thrust his head out of the window.

“Cocher! Cocher! Chauffeur!” he cried suddenly in atrocious French. “Allez a l’hotel Americain.”

The mustachioed driver grunted, turned his cab, and sped away once more as if pursued by the devil; and presently he pulled up before the American Hotel, a respectable hostelry frequented by school teachers and temperance workers.

An hour later he lay chastely in his own bed, awake and restless in the dark, but still innocent. And in the Rue du Bac the sophisticated lady waited until long after midnight. At length, after cursing all Americans, she took her lamp from the window and went angrily to bed.

LXX

At two o’clock in the house in the Rue Raynouard, Ellen came in to sit on the edge of her cousin’s bed and discuss the happenings of the day.

“I guess,” she observed, “Willie will be able to tell them a good story when he gets back to the Town. His mouth fairly hung open all the time when he was here.”

Lily smiled. “I don’t know,” she replied, braiding her heavy bronze hair. “From what he tells me, he’s in the backwater now. There are a lot of people there who have never heard of us. I suppose Willie and you and I are just back numbers so far as the Town is concerned.”

After Ellen had gone to her own room, Lily settled herself on the chaise longue and, wrapped in a peignoir of pale blue chiffon all frothy with old lace the color of ivory, she took from her desk the enameled box, opened it and read the worn clippings. The pile had grown mightily. There were a score of new clippings. The headlines had increased in size and the editorials were an inch or two longer. The man was progressing. He was denounced with a steadily increasing hatred and bitterness. It was clear that he had become a national figure, that he was a leader in the battle against the roaring furnaces.

For a long time she lay with her eyes closed ... thinking. And at last, hours after the rest of the house had grown still and dark, she sighed, replaced the clippings in the box and locked them once more into her desk. Then she settled herself to writing a letter over which she spent a long time, biting the end of the silver penholder from time to time with her firm white teeth. When at last the effort satisfied her, she placed it in an envelope and addressed it to Sister Monica in the Carmelite Convent at Lisieux. It was the hundredth letter she had written, letters in which she abased herself and begged forgiveness, letters to which there was never any reply save an unforgiving and relentless silence. It was like dropping the pale gray envelopes into a bottomless crevasse.

In the following May, Ellen went to Munich. It was the first step in a grand tour of the German cities. She would visit Salzburg, Cologne, Vienna, Leipsic. She would call upon Schönberg, Busoni, Richard Strauss, Pfitzner, von Schilling.... If the spirit moved her, she might even penetrate Russia. And certainly she would go to the festival at Weimar. All this was included in the plan she set forth to Lily. There was no schedule. She would simply progress from one place to another as her fancy dictated. She knew no German but she would learn it, as she had learned French, by living among the people. She went alone. Therefore she would have to learn the language.

The expedition was singularly characteristic of all her life. When she found that the Town was unendurable she had reversed the plan of her pioneer ancestors and turned east instead of west, to seek a new world which to her was far more strange than the rolling prairies of the west had been to her great-grandfather. When the traveling salesman, whom she used as a stepping stone, fell by the wayside and departed this life she was free to go unhindered on her own roving way, fortified by the experience of a few years of married life. She owned no fixed home. On the contrary, she moved about restlessly ... exploring, conquering, exhausting now this city, now that one. She was, it seemed, possessed of a veritable demon of restlessness, of energy, of a sharp inquiring intelligence. It was this quality, stimulated constantly by an overpowering curiosity, which sent her pioneering into the world of new music which Lily disliked so intensely. She explored those regions which musicians of a more contemplative and less restless nature dared not enter. It was as if she were possessed by a Gargantuan desire to devour all the world within a single lifetime.

Once in Paris she said to Lily, “You know, I am obsessed by a terrible sense of the shortness of life. It is impossible to know and experience all that I wish to know.”

But this was as near as she came to a contemplative philosophy. She had no time for reflection. The hours she spent with the indolent Lily inevitably fired her with a fierce and resentful unrest. It was then that she grew impatient, bad-tempered, unendurable. It was the descent of one of these black moods which drove her from the peaceful solitude of the house at Germigny upon a new voyage of exploration.

And so it happened that Lily and Madame Gigon were alone on the peaceful summer evening when Eustache, the red-cheeked farmer’s boy, returning on his bicycle through the rain from Meaux, brought the final edition of the Figaro containing a short paragraph of the most enormous importance to all the world.

Madame Gigon had been installed days before on the first floor of the lodge, because she was no longer able to leave her bed and insisted upon being placed where her ears would serve her to the greatest advantage. The door of her room opened outward upon the terrace above the Marne and here, just inside the door, sat Lily when Eustache arrived.

She opened the Figaro and spread it across her knees.

Madame Gigon, hearing the rustle of the paper, stirred and said peevishly, “What is new to-day?”

“Not much of importance,” said Lily, and after a pause. “The archduke of Austria has been assassinated. Shall I read you that?”

“Certainly,” replied the old woman with a fierce impatience. “Certainly!”

It was only part of a daily game ... this asking Madame Gigon what she would have read to her; because in the end the entire journal was read aloud by Lily--the daily progress of the celebrated case of Madame Caillaux, the signed articles by this or that politician, the news of the watering places ... Deauville, Vichy, Aix, Biarritz, the accounts of the summer charity fêtes, the annual ball at the Opéra, the military news ... everything was read to the old woman. For Madame Gigon found a keen delight in the recognition of a name among those who had been present at this fête or were stopping at that watering-place. After her own fashion, the blind old woman reduced all France to the proportions of a village. To her, the Caillaux trial became simply an old wives’ tale, a village scandal.

So Lily read of the Archduke’s assassination and Madame Gigon listened, thoughtfully, interrupting her occasionally with a clucking sound to indicate how terrible the affair really was. She understood these things, being a Bonapartist. It was as if the Prince himself had been shot down. It was the natural result of the Republican movement, of Socialism, which was, after all, the same thing. Just another example of what these wild ideas might lead to.

“These are sad times,” remarked Madame Gigon when Lily had finished reading. “There is no such thing as law and order ... no such thing as respect and regard for rank. A wild confusion (_une melée sauvage_) to see who can gain the most wealth and make the greatest display. Money!” the old woman muttered. “That’s it. Money! If you make a fortune out of chocolate or soap, that is enough to put you into the government. Good God! What times are ahead!”

To this harangue, Lily listened absently. It was all monotonously familiar to her. Madame Gigon had said it a thousand times. Every evil she attributed to “these dirty times.” She concluded by saying, “Crazy Madame Blaise is right after all. There will be a war.... She was right.... There will be.”

While she was speaking, Lily tore open the only interesting letter among the dozen. Quietly she read it to herself. When she had finished she interrupted Madame Gigon.

“I have a letter from M. de Cyon,” she said, “about some furniture I was selling. He writes that Madame is ill again with indigestion ... quite seriously this time.”

Madame Gigon made a little grunting noise. “Nadine eats too much.... I have told her so a dozen times but she will not listen. A woman as fat as that....”

And from the superior pinnacle of her great age, Madame allowed the sentence to trail off into unspeakable vistas of Madame de Cyon’s folly. At the end of a long time during which they both sat silently in the dripping quiet of the summer evening Madame Gigon said explosively, “She will go off suddenly one of these days ... like that,” and she snapped her finger weakly.

At the sound Criquette and Michou got up lazily, stretched themselves, and waddled close to her chair. For a moment she scratched their heads with groping fingers and then turning to Lily said, “It is time for their milk.... And see to it, my child, that they have a little cream in it.”

Lily rose and called the dogs inside the lodge. Across the river in the tiny church, the old curé, M. Dupont, rang the vesper bell. Behind the cropped willows along the Marne the last glow faded above the rolling fields of wheat. Inside the house Lily was singing softly, “O, le coeur de ma mie est petit, tous p’tit, p’tit.” There was no other sound.

Presently, Madame Gigon leaned back in her bed and called to Lily. “To-morrow,” she said, “you might ask M. Dupont to call on me. It has been two days since he was here.”

LXXI

Upon Germigny l’Evec, removed from the highroad and the railway, the war descended at first slowly, with the unreality of a vague dream, and then with a gathering, ponderous ferocity of an appalling nightmare. In the beginning even the farmer and his men, familiar with the army and with military service, could not believe it. Still there was the memory of 1870, said the pessimists. It was not impossible.

“Ah, but war is unthinkable,” said Lily to Madame Gigon. “The days of war are over. It could not happen. They would not dare to permit it.”

But Madame Gigon, again from the pinnacle of her superior age, replied, “My child. You have never seen a war. You know nothing of it. It is not at all impossible. You see, I can remember well 1870.”

All the talk, it seemed, turned back at once to 1870. Sooner or later every one returned to it--M. Dupont, the curé, who had served at Metz with MacMahon, the farmer and his wife, even Eustache. 1870 was no longer a half-century away. It became only yesterday, an event which was just finished the evening before at sunset. And slowly it became clear that war was not at all an impossibility. The order for mobilization made it a reality so hideous, so monstrous, as to be utterly lacking in reality. In the château and at the farm, there were no longer any barriers. The cook and the farmer’s wife, came and sat on the terrace, red-faced and weeping. In the quiet of the evening there drifted across the wheatfields the ominous whistling of trains which followed no schedule, and from the distant high-road the faint sound of an unceasing procession of taxicabs and omnibuses rushing east and north through Pantin, through Meaux, on to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre.

From Paris came three letters, two by messenger, an orderly of the Baron, the other by post. One was from the Baron himself and one was from M. de Cyon.

“It is all more grave than any of us suspect,” wrote the Baron. “Unhappily, Dear Lily, it is impossible for me to see you. I cannot leave my regiment. You cannot come to Vincennes. We must try to endure all this in the fashion of philosophers. It is not, you understand, as if it had been unexpected. It has been slow--more slow than any one hoped--in arriving.

“As for what may come of it, to me or to Jean. What is there to do? We are all helpless as if caught in a web. May God be with us all! Jean will be with me. Your heart can be assured that I shall do all it is possible to do for him. The rest remains with the good God. I would give ... What would I give? Ten years or more of my life to have seen you before going away. But that, it seems, is impossible. So we must wait until it is possible.

“We are leaving to-night. I have sent old Pierre to see to it that you and Madame Gigon are brought safely back to Paris. Germigny is safe from the Germans, but there is always a chance. Who can say what will happen? Good God! The suddenness of it!

“Au revoir, dear Lily, in haste. A thousand kisses from thy Césaire.”

It was the first time that there had been in all their correspondence even the faintest note of anything more compromising than a proper friendship between the Baron and the woman who had made his old cousin, Madame Gigon, comfortable for life. It was this which somehow gave the letter a gravity more terrible than any hint of foreboding contained in its crisp white pages. It was as if the barriers of convention had suddenly been destroyed, as if they had gone down in ruin to reveal life in all the primitive directness of unfettered nature. It seemed to say, “Nothing matters any longer save those things which have to do with life, death and love.”

The letter from M. de Cyon was more calm and dignified, the proper letter of a diplomat. It was the letter of a distinguished, white-haired gentleman.

“You must leave Germigny as soon as it is possible. I write you this in confidence and beg you not to arouse a panic among the peasants and the citizens of Meaux. It is war, Madame, and no one can say what will happen. Your security is of the deepest concern to me. I beg you to waste no time. Go on foot, by ox-cart, by train--however it is possible, but go. A battle is no place for so beautiful a woman.”