Part 12

March came in, blustering, with a buoyant race of large, white clouds and a wind that ruffled the swollen streams and spread steel-colored fans across the purple-blue of the sea. The air was sweet with the odor of wet earth. Willow sprouts showed silver-gray in the ditches. In the woods and hollows patches of brown snow melted in the sun. Trailing sprays of waxen arbutus lifted the pine-needles and fallen leaves, thrust them up and aside. And always the wind billowed and tumbled over the brown hills, the soaked fields, the noisy, awakened forests.

There was a stir in the earth, after the long stillness of winter.

In a short skirt, a jacket of fur, hatless, Lilah turned away from the sea and walked inland. A cane Robert had given her, of Malacca, mounted in amber, swung from her hand. She could not abide the sea, the dunes, the beach brushed with swift eddies of blown sand. A boisterous sea was strong medicine for the spirit. It was too bright, too alive; it had a ruthless virility that frightened her. If only she had been free enough, brave enough, to brace herself in the shifting, stinging sands, to breast the wind, to take great swallows of it into her lungs, to fill her body with it, to laugh at it! Because she was a coward, she preferred the woods, where, in a chill shadow, in a sort of calm beneath the brittle crackle of bending boughs above, she was safe from nature itself. She walked in a void, her thoughts held in abeyance, like hounds on a leash.

She had told Robert immediately of his good fortune. Something warned her not to express, just then, her own dissatisfaction. She noticed a difference in him; his desire for her was no longer humble; it had become definitely material and possessive, concrete. His happiness only added to her own inner tumult. He guessed nothing of what went on in her mind, her heart. He was happy. So must she be! He had never heard Flagg’s name. He did not guess what had happened, what she had felt. She was infinitely removed from him; she could even be sorry for him.

Robert behaved as she supposed all men behaved under the circumstances. He became both dictatorial and tender. She was shielded from draughts, assisted up and down stairs; he ran after her with shawls and wraps; she became the object of his unwavering, worshipful attention; his blue eyes, round, expressionless and innocent, followed every move she made. “For heaven’s sake, Robert, leave me alone. I’m quite all right. I won’t break.” And he would say absent-mindedly: “I’m sorry.” The next instant his arm would be around her waist. It was clear that he realized nothing.... Some day he must know that he had been making a fool of himself. Her physical presence, this child, were his. Her feeling, all that made her desirable, belonged to Flagg. Without Flagg, she was valueless, like a counterfeit coin. Robert was insufferable because he could not see.

To escape him, the barrier of protective, almost primitive tenderness he had built around her, she followed the bridle paths through the woods. She wanted to ride but Robert objected. There were two saddle horses in the stable, a roan and a chestnut, good English horses full of mettle that turned rakish eyes on Lilah whenever she went to their stalls. “They’ve been boxed up all winter,” Robert said. “They’re mad to run. But the ground’s soft. They won’t feel a saddle until the end of April.” He added: “We may have more snow. This is a false Spring.”

Whenever Robert touched her, Lilah had an impression of herself tamed and savage, a dangerous restraint, a hanging on beyond the powers of endurance.

She had not written Flagg. That soft St. Kitt’s voice with its accent of mockery had told him that Mrs. Peabody was “out of town.” No more. She had not seen him since that day in his rooms, when she had promised him.... Now she was gone. He would believe that she had lost courage, had fled from facts. So she had.... She could not face such facts as had assailed her, beaten her down, overwhelmed her. He would despise her. Or else he would follow and question her.... She dreaded every day that held this possibility. It would be like Flagg to get at the truth, whether or not he hurt her or hurt himself.

Men were selfish. Flagg, like the rest. She was being destroyed by the selfish love of these three men, Junius, Robert, Flagg.

Junius had said simply, at Robert’s announcement: “I’m glad. There will be some one, a Peabody, to appreciate the Moselle.” Later, to Lilah, he had added: “I wish you were happy, Lilah.” Irritated, she moved away, and he followed, put his thin, withered hand on her arm. “I don’t pretend to understand your generation. But I can read certain human sign-posts. If you can’t talk to me, to whom can you talk?”

She faced him with a stony expression. “If Robert could read sign-posts,” she said, “I wouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t want me.”

Junius Peabody’s look changed and Lilah realized that she had touched his pride. After a moment, during which he brushed his mustache with that large, cambric handkerchief scented faintly with Cologne water, he said: “I won’t argue. Your remark was in bad taste.... I don’t give a snap of my finger for Robert. He hasn’t the qualities I admire; the things I began he seems unable to finish. Or else he doesn’t care, which is the disease at the core of society to-day. You don’t care, any of you, about anything outside yourselves.... I believe I warned you, in the beginning, of what might happen?”

Lilah ignored the implied question. “I’m here,” she said briefly.

“Is duty, too, out of fashion?” he asked with an ironic smile.

“Yes,” she answered. “When it is discharged unwillingly. When it gets in the way of--”

“Of what?”

“Being yourself.”

Junius Peabody shrugged his shoulders. “What will the world be like when each one of us looks out for himself? We will be at the mercy of such disciplined creatures as the army ant. I can’t see that you gain by being what you term ‘yourself.’ You aren’t happier than the women of my day, who were what their husbands expected of them.... I am willing, however, to be instructed....”

He broke off and stared through the window at the flashing sea. “The Forsythe’s girl, Marian, spent the holidays at home. She used to come over here quite often. At first, because she came on skis across the hills and arrived as rosy as a snow apple, I enjoyed her visits. Later, I dreaded them. At seventeen, she has the knowledge and the vocabulary of a roué. She had learned more badness at a girls’ school in New York than I knew at thirty, or forty. She smoked, of course. She would sit where you are sitting and light one cigarette from another. And she tossed the ends away with the gesture of a longshoreman. She was an excellent shot.... Externals.... So I thought. But the thing went deeper. She was clever. She had reasoned herself out of responsibility and I could find no flaw in her arguments.... When she had gone I would sit for hours, depressed, frightened. That she used a lipstick, not skillfully, is certainly a symbol--of what, I am not certain. I would have said that she was going to the devil.... She had a sort of brusque contempt for love, as I understand it; yet her whole appeal was to sex. Her attitudes--initiated, purposeful--were inviting. Love would fail. Marriage would fail. She not only expected to have a lover, she behaved as if such experiments were inevitable. She liked me, at eighty-four, because, she said, I was a ‘sport.’ What she meant was that I gave her cigarettes and whisky whenever she came here. She was bored, and, I am certain, not happy. Something has been damaged in these young people; their imagination....”

Lilah said: “I wouldn’t be too complacent about the past, if I were you. There were girls like Marian Forsythe in Victoria’s day--they fainted for the same reason the modern flapper shows her legs.”

He laughed and Lilah, stooping quickly, kissed the top of his head, where the hair, snow white, showed a pink parting. “I love to quarrel with you.... You aren’t to worry about me. I’m twenty-seven, twenty-eight, almost. I love some one Robert doesn’t know, has never heard of. You said I would. I do. It happened the way that wind out there comes up in the Spring, scattering everything, waking things up, changing the face of the world. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Take him, of course. But not now.”

Junius Peabody’s face had gone a little gray; beneath the sweep of white mustaches, his lips trembled. Lilah saw that he was too old, too worn, to stand the shock of violent circumstances. He said nothing. His unsteady hands groped for hers, patting them, stroking them. Suddenly Lilah loved him, because he seemed to understand her.

* * * * *

Robert wanted her to see his spaniels. “It’s a small thing to do for me, Lilah.” It was, invariably, either too cold or too windy or too damp to cross the “greenery” to the kennels. Lilah found excuses, because to subscribe to an enthusiasm of Robert’s was to encourage him, and it was more stimulating to test his devotion by inventing subtle rebuffs. The question of the spaniels came up repeatedly; their antagonism swung to it like a weather vane; it became the focus of his desire to subjugate her and of her desire to torment him. There was no other vengeance; Lilah found comfort in blaming Robert for her loss. “I don’t like spaniels.” Robert winced and said desperately: “But they’re fine little chaps! You can’t help liking them.” Lilah knew that Robert’s pups fetched extravagant prices and that a glass case in the kennels contained a dozen blue rosettes dear to Robert’s heart. She finally inspected the trophies and the dogs. It would not do to be surly. But she managed, by an expression, a smile, a reservation, to make Robert feel that the whole business was childish, useless and absurd.

* * * * *

April came, and still there was no snow.

It was customary at the Point to send one of the stable men to the postoffice, ten miles distant, every day at noon. The mail was brought in a leather pouch and emptied upon a table in the hall. Lilah was conscious of this rite no matter where she happened to be. A month had passed without word from Flagg. She dreaded any sign from him, yet expected, longed for even the most scornful message. She waited with a peculiar, tormented shrinking for that letter she knew must come.

One day, as she passed the table, she caught sight of her name written in a small, black, unfamiliar hand upon a square envelope.

She opened it before she realized that Flagg had, at last, written. Thrusting the letter into her pocket, she went outdoors, and, this time, to the beach. No matter what he had said, he had written; she could bear the brightness of the sea! The beach was packed smooth by the receding tide, and ribbons of kelp lay at high-water mark like garlands strung from dune to dune. There was no wind. A mackerel sky, translucent shells of vapor, clouded the sun. It was such a vast sky, so tall, so immovable, so luminous! Lilah saw herself, very small, walking between sky and earth, walking in a great crystal globe, with her letter.

She read it at last, expecting a burning accusation. But Flagg said simply that he was waiting for word from her. He was remarkably better, and her absence, prolonged unreasonably, was the only thing that stood between him and happiness, recovery.

Lilah turned back to the envelope. The address, Peabody’s Point, proved that he knew where she was. If she did not write to him, he would come. And that, for every one, for herself most of all, would mean disaster.

She went through the deep, dry sand to the dunes and lay full length, her arms under her head, staring up at the sky. The earth receded, seemed to drop away, and she was floating in a void. The sand was warm on the surface, cool if you dug your fingers in. And the hum of the sea was lazy, detached, like the hum in a conch shell. Patches of cloud moved, and the sky was gentian blue.... It hurt, a physical hurt, to be alone....

What could she tell him? The truth? And drive him away! Nothing?

Suddenly, for the first time, she saw herself as a failure. She had missed everything.

* * * * *

The following morning she spoke to Robert about the necessary closing of the Thirty-eighth Street house. She thought that he ought to attend to it. Servants were always careless and she herself did not feel equal to details. Robert, in riding breeches and puttees, was polishing a saddle. He had the rich man’s fondness for doing himself what he paid other men to do. “Let Grace attend to it,” he said. “She’s a crackerjack at that sort of thing.” Lilah said tersely that Grace had gone back to nursing; she was not in New York. Robert looked up. “Well, I’ll be damned! Why didn’t you tell me so?” Lilah answered that she had not supposed he cared one way or the other. This Robert took to be a twinge of jealousy. His spirits rose and he caught Lilah and kissed her. “You care, don’t you? I mean, for me? Sometimes, I wonder. You’re a deep one.... I’m crazy about you, Lilah! I wonder if you know how happy I am?”

“Are you? Then you’ll go to town and close the house. There’s a good Bobsie.”

When he had gone, she felt relief. It was good to be alone with Junius. He pottered about at small, fussy undertakings which had the dignity of rites religiously performed. The old relish details which impede the young--the exact measure of a cup of coffee, the arrival of the mail carriage promptly at noon, the aroma of a cigar, a meticulous and rigidly adhered to change of garments at seven o’clock, the rise and fall of the barometer, the flavor of a chop. Life was given a false but comforting air of permanence and dignity by the importance of little things. There was no headlong rush.

Lilah had allowed herself to be careless; she had not, since her arrival, dressed for dinner. Now, with Robert gone, that eager, propitiating, sympathetic presence out of the way, she flattered Junius by appearing for dinner in negligeés with floating sleeves, in odd headdresses made of twisted silk, her fingers a frosty, excessive sparkle of jewels. A sort of flirtation, rather, an appreciation of one another, candid and humorous, could not have gone on in Robert’s presence. They could not be themselves where there was a likelihood of criticism. Lilah said: “We are very alike.” And Junius agreed. Changeable, intolerant, vain, impulsive. Delightful! But dangerous to other people. Together, they could play--act, shift like the winds, speak of beauty, or sit in silence, conscious of their pride and their perfection. Robert had a way, heavy, uncomprehending, of taking them for granted. “She is happier without Robert,” Junius thought. “I’ll keep him away a while longer. There is work to be done in Georgia--I’m buying cypress. I’ll send him there, make it imperative. The color’s coming back to her cheeks. Too bad! Too bad!... But I stuck, where she won’t.” He could pity her, for she was so like himself, with all that indefinable search for perfection, that restless desire never satisfied. He was sorry for such people. Far better to be commonplace and to find, in acceptance of dullness, content he and she could never find. There was something wrong, unbalanced, in such insatiable natures, and yet their very discontent and arrogance set them aside from the common run of people, made them, he felt certain, immeasurably superior. He was sorry for her. He took to watching her furtively as he smoked his single after-dinner cigar.

She had absolutely no interest in small domestic matters; however, when she was in the house things ran better than they ever did under Aunt Whiteside’s fussy management. She would spend a whole evening staring into the fire, wanting to talk to him about the man she loved, but keeping still because she had a sense of proportion--after all, he was Robert’s grandfather! Junius was curious to know about the man who had won her, what sort of fellow he was--some one unusual, of course, as different from Robert as possible. And Junius had a twinge of remote envy, an almost romantic sensation; he knew what rapture she was capable of if a man once touched her imagination. Some one mysterious, a little cruel--otherwise, she would have had nothing to do with him.... As for himself, he enjoyed her presence; he would have prolonged the moment, stretched it out indefinitely, for it contained, in its essence, the illusion of youth. He could dream, without being ashamed of dreaming. Detached, sympathetic, he watched her. She would play for him if he asked it; he liked the modern composers; the more modern the better! Old songs were wistful, reminiscent. But these strange, exciting modernists gave you a sense of to-morrow, innovation, audacity, as if anything were possible, save when, as in the Clair de Lune, there was pity and tenderness for the despised and forgotten posturings of lovers and poets....

* * * * *

Robert went reluctantly to Georgia, and Lilah was left to make her decision. Another letter came from Flagg, impatient, this time, with a touch of anger and rebellion. She answered that things were not as simple as she had expected; he must wait. A wire was brought to her two days later. He was coming!

Lilah went at once to Junius. She gave him the telegram and stood waiting. “You see. I can’t stop him. He’ll be here to-morrow.”

Junius said: “Flagg.... You didn’t tell me his name.... Does he know....”

“No!” Lilah spoke sharply. “No! I love him. I want him. What shall I do?”

“I’ll send him away. He mustn’t bother you. He’s got to be made to understand that you are here, with us, temporarily.... You see, in this I am old-fashioned. His following you shocks me. Robert is away. And as sorry as I am for you, if he insists, I’ll take my cane to him!”

He stroked her hand. “There. There. These things aren’t irrevocable.”

Lilah said: “I intend to see him.”

“I intend to prevent you.”

“You can’t.”

Their eyes met and Junius rose. “I won’t have you cheapen yourself. Sell yourself for a song! I love you, too.”

“You don’t!” she retorted. “You couldn’t, and expect me to go on living this way. Quivering, inside, when Robert comes near me. I deny him everything. I torment him. His goodness makes a devil of me. I don’t want this child. I’m drugged, now, by this place--a sort of lull, when I sleep because it is easier to sleep. But now that I know Flagg is coming, I come alive, body and soul. Perhaps I have ruined Robert’s life, but my own will be ruined unless I have Flagg.”

With a feeling of futility, of confusion and fatigue Junius said: “If this man’s a gentleman, I won’t need to send him off; he’ll go. And stay!”

With a gesture of contempt, Lilah left him. But she was more concerned than she cared to let Junius know.

She went to her room and dressed for riding. The windows were open and she could hear the excited barking of dogs in the kennel. A gardener was turning sod on the lawn, spreading manure. Lilacs were in bud. Nearly a year had passed since that marriage before an altar of syringa bloom. Another year, and what would have happened to her?

She stared at herself in the mirror; then, dissatisfied, studied her face in a hand-glass, scrutinizing her skin. The struggle to preserve a balance, to keep some sort of hold on security, had aged her; her mouth drooped. In two years she would be thirty. In ten, forty. And she was going to be a withered, embittered little old woman; perhaps, after all, beauty was a disadvantage. If Flagg lived, she would have to hold him with beauty, where another woman might hold him with easy sensuality, laughter and indifference to externals--a lazy, affectionate, humorous, slovenly woman....

Lilah put the mirror down. She passed her hands over her face, shivered, laughed unsteadily. She was slim as a boy in riding clothes.

She went out without speaking again to Junius. Their friendship had been shattered in that clash of wills; pride, in him, was intensified by senility. He was going to be difficult; he might even send for Robert because the Peabody integrity was threatened....

One of the stablemen was rollicking with the spaniel in the yard. He touched his cap and when Lilah asked him to saddle the roan, he remarked doubtfully: “He’s awful fresh, ma’am.” Lilah stooped over the dog and said tersely: “Bring him out. I can manage him.”

In the saddle, she had a moment of panic. The big horse wheeled sideways in the gravel, but Lilah mounted, with a spring from the stableman’s palm. She felt very small and light and free.

She rode directly to the woods, where, in softer ground, the roan was impatient. It was late afternoon. A sudden darkness, clouds pushing up from the western horizon, was followed by a rush of cold wind, and a whirl of leaves blew against the horse’s legs, startling him. Lilah controlled him with difficulty. Her hand on his neck, she urged him forward.

The wood was bleak, gray, silent again after that brief rush of wind, and Lilah heard a shrill, treble pipe of frogs in a pool. But where was Flagg’s dance of gnats at sundown? Spring was here and she could not watch it with him. She would have to send him away. Truth or pretext, she would have to send him away.... She thought of the child as a tide, rising, rising, uncontrollable. This life was within her. She contained it and was contained within it. Neither in body or soul was there escape. She was no longer herself; she was implicated, bound up in, adhered to, responsible for, another self, a self unrecognized, featureless, without volition, yet powerful, terrible. She was a body bound by body. Irrevocable....

The world had changed. The sun was gone, and with it the warmth of the earth. The roan was chilly, nervous. His ears flicked back, and with a whinny he began to run. Lilah thought: “I’ll give him his head and let him run it out--he’ll come to himself when he’s tired.” Already her hands were numb, her arms stiff.

The bridle path doubled through the woods, crossed and recrossed itself, gaining ten miles by this duplicity. The dark, wet earth, broken by pools of melted snow, made a tunnel through tangled growth of trees, very old and tall. A blurred twilight seemed to bar the way. Lilah bent forward. She could no longer guide the horse. Sensing her surrender, her fear, he lost his head.

He left the road. The branch of a tree tore Lilah’s hat off. She shrieked at him. “Whoa! Whoa! Stop! You brute! Stop! For God’s sake, stop!”

She was struck on the back, between her shoulders. A tearing, a blow. She was pulled, thrown, dragged, face down, in a thicket. She thought, twisting over on her side: “This is death.”

A dark pain, like blood, flowed over her breast, and she fell back again.

IX

There was nothing to do but for Lilah to go.

Robert came into her room again, pale, with that new look of a man who has found himself in suffering.

“I’m going, Robert.”

Robert sat down by the bed. He avoided looking at her. It was a pain to look at her; Lilah, with that ghost whiteness, the blue veins showing at her temples, her hair in two childish braids over her shoulders. She was like a little girl. At the same time, there was a mystery about her. She had suffered so. She had had to pass, alone, through a dark, terrible suffering where no one could follow or help her. Robert felt ashamed, because his own suffering was so unimportant in comparison to hers. And yet his own cried out for speech. He wanted her to know that she had killed something in him; he would never tell her. Never.

“You can go, if you want to,” he said stiffly.

Lilah turned her head on the pillow. “You don’t want me to stay, do you?”

“Not if you love Flagg.”

“I do.”

After a moment, Robert said, “I’ve seen Flagg. He’s staying at Biddeford. Did you know?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose my grandfather told you.”