Part 8

“I must go,” Irene replied. “They’re counting on me.”

“What are you eating?...” remarked Lily, picking up a bit of cake from the tray, “Peas, potatoes, rice, dessert, milk.... Why you’ve no meat, Irene. You should eat meat. It is what you need more than anything. You’re too pale.”

Irene’s pale brow knitted into a frown. “I’ve given it up,” she said. “I’m not eating meat any longer.”

“And why not?” Lily moved away from her and stood looking down with the faintest of mocking smiles. The transparent cheek of her sister flushed slightly.

“Because I don’t believe in it. I believe it’s wrong.”

“Well, I’m going to speak to Mama about it. It’s nonsense. You’ll kill yourself with such a diet. Really, Irene....” Her voice carried a note of irritation, but she got no further for Irene turned on her suddenly, like a beaten dog which after long abuse snaps suddenly at the offending hand.

“Why can’t you leave me in peace? You and Mama treat me like a child. I am a grown woman. I want to do as I please. I am harming no one but myself ... no one.... I’m sick of it, I tell you. I’m sick of it!”

And suddenly she began to weep, softly and hysterically, her thin shoulders shaking as the sobs tore her body. “I want to go away,” she moaned. “I want to be alone, where I can think and pray. I want to be alone!” Her sobbing was at once pitiful and terrible, the dry, parched sobbing of a misery long pent up. For a moment Lily stood helplessly by her side and then, all at once, she went down on her knees in the peacock blue gown and put her lovely bare arms about her sister, striving to comfort her. The effort failed strangely. Irene only drew away and sobbed the more. “If you would only let me have peace ... I could find it alone!”

Lily said nothing but knelt by her sister’s side kissing and caressing the thin white hands until Irene’s sobbing subsided a little and she fell forward among the books and papers, burying her head in her arms. The misery of the soul and spirit in some way appalled Lily. She watched her sister with a look of bewilderment in her eyes as if she had discovered all at once a world of which she had been ignorant up to now. The spectacle stifled quickly the high spirits of a moment before. The bawdy French ballads were forgotten. She had become suddenly grave and serious, the lines in her beautiful face grown hard. She was sitting on the floor, her head in Irene’s lap, when a knock and the sound of her name roused her.

“Miss Lily,” came the mulatto woman’s voice, “Mis’ Shane says the guests are a-coming and you must come down.”

“All right Sarah.... I’ll be down at once.”

Lily, struggling with the tight satin dress, rose slowly, kissed her sister and said, “Please, dear, stay home to-night and rest.”

But Irene, still sobbing softly as if entranced by the sensual satisfaction of weeping, did not answer her. She remained leaning over the table, her face buried in her arms. But she was more quiet now, with the voluptuous stillness of one who has passed through a great emotional outburst.

Lily, once more before the mirror in her own room, rearranged her ruffled hair listening to the murmur of talk that arose from the well of the stairs. It was not until she had fastened the pin set with brilliants for a second time that she discovered with sudden horror that the peacock blue gown was split and ripped at one side from the arm to the waist. In the sudden outburst of affection for her sister, she had flung herself to her knees abandoning all thought of vanity. The gown was ruined.

From below stairs the murmur grew in volume as carriage after carriage arrived. Lily swore beneath her breath in French, tore off the gown and brought from her closet another of a pale yellow-green, the color of chartreuse. The process of dressing began all over again and in half an hour, after the mulatto woman had called twice and been sent away and the guests had gone in to dinner, Lily stood once more before the mirror, radiant and beautiful. The gown was cut lower than the one she had tossed aside, and the yellow-green blended with the tawny red of her hair so that there was something nude and voluptuous in her appearance. The smile returned to her face, a smile which seemed to say, “The Town will see something the like of which it has never seen before.”

Before going down she went to Irene’s room once more, only to find it dark and empty. Clad in the gray suit and the plain black hat Irene had made her way silently to the stairs at the back of the house and thence through the gallery that led past the drawing-room windows into the dead park. The austere and empty chamber appeared to rouse a sudden shame in Lily, for she returned to her room before descending the long stairs and took from the trunk a great fan of black ostrich feathers to shield her bare breasts alike from the stares of the impudent and the disapproving.

The ball was a great success. The orchestra, placed in the little alcove by the gallery, played a quadrille followed by waltzes, two-steps and polkas. Until ten o’clock the carriages made their way along Halsted street past the Mills and the squalid houses through the wrought iron gates into the park; and at midnight they began to roll away again carrying the guests to their homes. Lily, all graciousness and charm, moved among the dancers distributing her favors equitably save in the single instance of Willie Harrison, who looked so downcast and prematurely old in his black evening clothes that she danced with him three times and sat out a waltz, and a polka. And all the Town, ignorant of the truth, whispered that Willie’s chances once more appeared good.

Ellen Tolliver was there, in a dress made at home by her mother, and she spent much of the evening by the side of her aunt Julia who sat in black jet and amethysts at one end of the drawing-room leaning on her stick and looking for all the world like a wicked duchess. At the sound of the music and the sight of the dancers, the old gleam returned for a little time to her tired eyes.

Ellen was younger than the other guests and knew most of them only by sight but she had partners none the less, for she was handsome despite her badly made gown and her absurd pompadour, and she danced with a barbaric and energetic grace. When she was not dancing her demeanor carried no trace of the drooping wall-flower. She regarded the dancers with a expression of defiance and scorn. None could have taken her for a poor relation.

XXVIII

A little while before midnight Irene, accompanied by Krylenko, returned from the Flats and hurried quietly as a moth through the gallery past the brightly lighted windows and up the stairway to her room. The mill worker left her at the turn of the drive where he stood for a time in the melting snow fascinated by the sound of music and the sight of the dancers through the tall windows. Among them he caught a sudden glimpse of Irene’s sister, the woman who had watched him at work in the mill shed. She danced a waltz with the master of the Mills, laughing as she whirled round and round with a wild exuberance. Amid the others who took their pleasures so seriously, she was a bacchante, pagan, utterly abandoned. The black fan hung from her wrist and the pale yellow-green ball gown left all her breast and throat exposed in a voluptuous glow of beauty. Long after the music stopped and she had disappeared, Krylenko stood in the wet snowbank staring blindly at the window which she had passed again and again. He stood as if hypnotized, as if incapable of action. At length a coachman, passing by, halted for a moment to regard him in astonishment, and so roused him into action. Murmuring something in Russian, he set off down the long drive walking well to one side to keep from under the wheels of the fine carriages which had begun to leave.

The last carriage, containing Willie Harrison and two female cousins, passed through the wrought iron gates a little after one o’clock, leaving Lily, her mother and Ellen Tolliver who, having no carriage of her own, had chosen this night to spend at Cypress Hill, alone amid the wreckage of crumpled flowers and forgotten cotillion favors. With the departure of the last carriage and the finish of the music, the gleam died out of Julia Shane’s eyes. She became again an old woman with a tired bent figure, her sharp eyes half closed by dark swellings which seemed to have appeared all at once with the death of the last chord.

“I’m going to bed,” she said, bidding the others good-night. “We can discuss the party in the morning.”

She tottered up the stairs leaving her daughter and grand-niece together in the long drawing-room. When she had gone, Lily rose and put out the lamps and candles one by one until only three candles in a sconce above the piano remained lighted.

“Now,” she said, lying back among the cushions of the divan and stretching her long handsome legs, “play for me ... some Brahms, some Chopin.”

The girl must have been weary but the request aroused all her extraordinary young strength. She sat at the piano silhouetted against the candle light ... the curve of her absurd pompadour, the more ridiculous curve of her corseted figure. From the divan Lily watched her through half-closed eyes. She played first of all two études of Chopin and then a waltz or two of Brahms, superbly and with a fine freedom and spectacular fire, as if she realized that at last she had the audience she desired, a better audience than she would ever have again no matter how celebrated she might become. Above the throbbing of the Mills the thread of music rose triumphant in a sort of eternal beauty, now delicate, restrained, now rising in a tremendous, passionate crescendo. The girl invested it with all the yearnings that are beyond expression, the youth, the passionate resentment and scorn, the blind gropings which swept her baffled young soul. Through the magic of the sound she managed to convey to the woman lying half-buried among the cushions those things which it would have been impossible for her to utter, so high and impregnable was the wall of her shyness and pride. And Lily, watching her, wept silently at the eloquence of the music.

Not once was there a spoken word between them, and at last the girl swung softly and mournfully into the macabre beauties of the Valse Triste, strange and mournful music, not great, even a little mediocre, yet superbly beautiful beneath her slim fingers. She peopled the shadowy room with ghostly unreal figures, of tragedy, of romance, of burning, unimagined desires. The dancing shadows cast by the candles among the old furniture became through the mist of Lily’s tears fantastic, yet familiar, like memories half-revealed that fade before they can be captured and recognized. The waltz rose in a weird unearthly ecstasy, swirling and exultant, the zenith of a joy and a completion yearned for but never in this life achieved ... the something which lies just beyond the reach, sensed but unattainable, something which Ellen sought and came nearest to capturing in her music, which Irene, kneeling on the _prie dieu_ before the Sienna Virgin, sought in a mystic exaltation, which Lily sought in her own instinctive, half-realized fashion. It was a quest which must always be a lonely one; somehow the music made the sense of loneliness terribly acute. The waltz grew slower once more and softer, taking on a new and melancholy fire, until at last it died away into stillness leaving only the sound of the Mills to disturb the silence of the old room.

After a little pause, Ellen fell forward wearily upon the piano, her head resting upon her arms, and all at once with a faint rustle she slipped gently to the floor, the home-made ball dress crumpled and soiled beneath her slim body. Lily sprang from among the pillows and gathered the girl against her white, voluptuous breasts, for she had fainted.

XXIX

The visit of Ellen was extended from one night to three. The piano was a beautiful one, far better than the harsh-toned upright in the Tolliver parlor in the Town, and Ellen gladly played for hours with only Lily, lying among the cushions, and old Julia Shane, lost in her own fantastic memories, for an audience.

On the third night, long after twelve o’clock, as Lily and her cousin climbed the long stairway, the older woman said, “I have some clothes, Ellen, that you may have if you like. They have been worn only a few times and they are more beautiful than anything you can find in America.”

The girl did not answer until they had reached Lily’s room and closed the door behind them. Her face was flushed with the silent struggle between a hunger for beautiful things and a fantastic pride, born of respectable poverty. In some way, her cousin sensed the struggle.

“They are yours if you want them,” she said. “You can try them on if you like at any rate.”

Ellen smiled gratefully. “I’d like to,” she said timidly. “Thank you.”

While the girl took off her shirtwaist and skirt, Lily busied herself among the shadows of her closet. When she returned she bore across her arms three gowns, one dull red, one black and one yellow. The girl stood waiting shyly, clad only in her cheap underclothing coarsened and yellowed by many launderings.

“You must take those things off,” said Lily. “I’ll give you others.” And she brought out undergarments of white silk which Ellen put on, shivering a little in the chill of the big room.

Then Lily took the pale yellow gown and slipped it over her cousin’s head. It belonged to no period of fashion. It hung from the shoulders in loose folds of shining silk, clinging close to the girl’s slim body. There was a silver girdle which fastened over the hips. Ellen turned to regard herself in the mirror.

“But wait,” said Lily, laughing, “you’ve only begun. We’ve got to change your hair and do away with that ridiculous rat. Why do you spoil such beautiful hair with a wad of old wire?”

She took out the pins and let the hair fall in a clear, black shower. It was beautiful hair of the thick, sooty-black color that goes with fair skin and blue eyes. It fell in great coils over the pale yellow gown. Lily, twisting it into loose strands, held it against the light of the lamp.

“Beautiful hair,” she said, “like the hair of Rapunzel.”

Then she twisted it low about Ellen’s head, loosely so that the light, striking the free ends created a kind of halo. With a supreme gesture of scorn, she tossed the “rat” into the scrap basket.

“There,” she said, turning her cousin to face the long mirror. “There.... Behold the great pianist ... the great artist.”

In the magical mirror stood a tall lovely woman. The ridiculous awkward girl had vanished; it was another creature who stood there transfigured and beautiful. And in her frank blue eyes, there was a new look, something of astonishment mingled with determination. The magical mirror had done its work. From that moment the girl became a stranger to the Town. She had come of age and slipped all unconsciously into a new world.

With shining eyes she turned and faced her cousin.

“May I really have the clothes, Lily?”

“Of course, you silly child!”

And Lily smiled because the clothes had never been worn at all. They were completely new.

XXX

At breakfast on the following morning, the mulatto woman laid before Lily’s plate a cablegram. It read simply, “Jean has measles.”

Trunks were packed with desperate haste. The entire household was thrown into an uproar, all save old Julia Shane who continued to move about with the same unruffled calm, with the same acceptancy of whatever came to her. At midnight Lily boarded the express for the East. It was not until the middle of the week, when the drawing-room had been wrapped once more in cheesecloth and scented with camphor, that the Town learned of Lily’s sudden return to Paris. It was impossible, people decided, to calculate the whims of her existence.

Three months after her sudden departure, she sat one early spring afternoon on the terrace of her garden in the Rue Raynouard, when old Madame Gigon, in a bizarre gown of maroon poplin, with the fat and aging Fifi at her heels, brought her a letter from Julia Shane.

Tearing it open, Lily began to read,

“Of course the biggest bit of news is Ellen’s escapade. She has eloped with a completely commonplace young man named Clarence Murdock, a traveling salesman for an electrical company, who I believe was engaged to May Seton ... the Setons who own the corset factory east of the Harrison Mills. They have gone to New York to live and now, I suppose, Ellen will have her chance to go on with her music. Knowing Ellen, I am certain she does not love this absurd man. As for Hattie she is distraught and feels that Ellen has committed some terrible sin. Nothing I can say is able to alter her mind. To be sure, the fellow has nothing to commend him, but I’m willing to let Ellen work it out. She’s no fool. None of our family is that. Hattie thinks it was the gowns you gave Ellen which turned her head. But I suspect that Ellen saw this young drummer simply as a means of escape ... a way out of all her troubles. Of course the Town is in a buzz. Miss Abercrombie says nothing so unrespectable has happened in years. More power to Ellen ...!”

For a moment Lily put down the letter and sat thinking. In the last sentence there was a delicious echo of that wicked chuckle which had marked the departure of the discomfited Judge Weissman and Mrs. Julis Harrison from Cypress Hill ... the merest echo of triumph over another mark in the long score of the old against the new.

For a time Lily sat listening quietly to the distant sounds from the river ... the whistling of the steamer bound for St. Cloud, the faint clop-clop of hoofs in the Rue de Passy and the ugly chug-chug of one of the new motor wagons which were to be seen with growing frequency along the boulevards. Whatever she was thinking, her thoughts were interrupted suddenly by a little boy, very handsome and neat, in a sailor suit, who dragged behind him across the flagged terrace a stuffed toy bear. He climbed into her lap and began playing with the warm fur piece she had thrown over her shoulders.

“Mama,” he cried. “J’ai faim.... Je veux un biscuit!”

Lily gathered him into her arms, pressing his soft face against hers. “Bien, petit ... va chercher la bonne Madame Gigon.”

She seized him more closely and kissed him again and again with all the passion of a savage, miserly possession.

“Je t’aime, Mama ... tellement,” whispered the little fellow, and climbed down to run into the big house in search of kind Madame Gigon and her cakes. The gaze of Lily wandered after his sturdy little body and her dark eyes grew bright with a triumphant love.

When he had disappeared through one of the tall windows, she took up the letter once more and continued her reading.

“Irene,” wrote her mother, “seems more content now that you are gone. I confess that I understand her less and less every day. Sometimes I think she must be not quite well ... a little touched perhaps by a religious mania. She is giving her life, her strength, her soul, to these foreigners in the Flats. What for? Because it brings her peace, I suppose. But still I cannot understand her. There is one man ... Krylenko, by name, I believe, whom she has made into a sort of disciple. I only hope that news of him won’t reach the Town. God knows what sort of a tale they would make out of it. I’m afraid too of her becoming involved in the troubles at the Mills. Some day there will be open warfare in the Flats.”

When Lily had finished reading, she tore the letter slowly into bits after a custom of long standing and tossed the torn fragments into one of the stone urns that bordered the terrace.... Then she rose and pulling her fur cloak closer about her began to walk up and down restlessly as if some profound and stirring memory had taken possession of her. The rain began to fall gently and darkness to descend upon the garden. In the house behind her the servants lighted the lamps. Still she paced up and down tirelessly.

After a time she went down from the terrace to the gravel path of the garden and there continued her walking until the gate in the garden wall opened suddenly and a man stepped in, his erect soldierly figure black against the lamps of the Rue de Passy. It was the Baron, Madame Gigon’s cousin. He came toward her quickly and took her into his arms, embracing her passionately for a long time in silence.

When at last he freed her, a frown crossed his dark face, and he said, “What is it? What is distracting you? Are you troubled about something?”

Lily thrust her arm through his and leaned against him, but she avoided his gaze. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

And thus they walked through the rain until they reached the pavilion designed by Lenôtre which stood at a distance from the house. Here they halted and the Baron, taking from his pocket a key, unlocked the door and they went in silently.

Once inside, he kissed her again and presently he said, “What is it? There is something between us. There is a difference.”

“Nothing,” she murmured stubbornly. “It is nothing. You must be imagining things.”

XXXI

All that Julia Shane had written her daughter was true enough. The escapade of Ellen shocked the Town, not altogether unwillingly however, for it opened a new field for talk and furnished one more evidence of the wildness of a family which had never been content with conformity, a clan which kept bursting its bonds and satisfying in a barbarous fashion its hunger after life.

When Hattie Tolliver, tearful and shaken, came to her aunt for consolation, Julia Shane received her in the vast bedroom she occupied above the Mill yard. The old woman said, “Come, Hattie. You’ve no reason to feel badly. Ellen is a good girl and a wise one. It’s the best thing that could have happened, if you’ll only see it in that light.”

But Mrs. Tolliver, so large, so energetic, so emotional, was hurt. She kept on sobbing. “If only she had told me!... It’s as if she deceived me.”

At which Julia Shane smiled quietly to herself. “Ah, that’s it, Hattie. She couldn’t have told you, because she knew you so well. She knew that you couldn’t bear to have her leave you. The girl was wise. She chose the better way. It’s your pride that’s hurt and the feeling that, after all, there was something stronger in Ellen than her love for you.” She took the red work-stained hand of her niece in her thin, blue-veined one and went on, “We have to come to that, Hattie ... all of us. It’s only natural that a time comes when children want to be free. It’s like the wild animals ... the foxes and the wolves. We aren’t any different. We’re just animals too, helpless in the rough hands of Nature. She does with us as She pleases.”

But Mrs. Tolliver continued to sob helplessly. It was the first time in her life that she had refused to accept in the end what came to her.

“You don’t suppose I wanted Lily to go and live in Paris? You don’t suppose I wanted to be left here with Irene who is like a changeling to me? It’s only what is bound to come. If Lily _did_ help Ellen it was only because all youth is in conspiracy against old age. All children are in a conspiracy against their parents. When we are old, we are likely to forget the things that counted so much with us when we were young. We take them for granted. We see them as very small troubles after all, but that’s because we are looking at them from a long way off. The old are selfish, Hattie ... more selfish than you imagine. They envy even the life and the hunger of the young.”