Part 3

“There’s no point in saying it isn’t rum, because it is,” he murmured to himself. “And _here_,” he added, looking about. There was no moral support in those crimson walls, those great pier-glasses, those insignificant writing-tables with red-shaded electric lights, those uncomfortable tapestried armchairs. It wasn’t the setting to help you through a crisis. He was in the quietest corner of the most essentially respectable hotel in New York. There were plenty of them--scores--that were incidentally respectable; but at the St. Justin respectability had been cherished through years for its own sake, as more important than the register, the cuisine, or the unimpeachable location that no metropolitan progress could render inconvenient. As a very young bachelor with virtually no family ties, he was not familiar with the St. Justin. It wasn’t a place where you would expect to get the kind of thing his kind of human being wanted. He couldn’t, for example, have induced Marty to lunch there. They had lunched at Plon’s. It was a hotel where you might be perfectly sure your grandparents had stopped. It was natural that his mother should have selected it for their meeting, as she hadn’t been in America for well over twenty years. But there was less backing than he had expected, somehow.

Sitting uncomfortably in one of the corners by a writing-table (his back to the window so that the familiar streets shouldn’t lure him too much to flight), he took the privilege of the consciously crucial moment. He reviewed his life. It was so very short, after all, that it was easily reviewed. He was only a few months out of the university, and he was just twenty-two. The insoluble was there to the point of being either romantic or absurd, he didn’t know which. He had what so many young people long for in vain, a mystery. He had amused himself occasionally with monstrous hypotheses. But what real account could he give of himself? What account, that is, of the sort that Marty Martin and his like had by heart before they could spell? The most that he knew about his parents--except that they were alive and in the tropics--was that they banked in Honolulu and had some natural hold or other on Marty Martin’s uncle. Marty Martin’s uncle had picked out Peter’s school and his college for him, and was telegraphed for when Peter had appendicitis. That was as near the parental relation as anything he had known from experience. Lonely? Well, any fellow was lonely when the other fellows all went trooping home for holidays; but loneliness he had always frankly diagnosed as three-quarters pride. The fellows were always glad to get back to school or college, he noticed. In any case, he had stopped thinking about it much--his plight. That saved his dignity. What he sat now vaguely dreading was the immense, the cataclysmic downfall of his dignity. He tried to put the facts to himself so simply that they should be as reassuring as a primer. Ollendorf, he had once complained to a teacher, would take the zest out of a murder, the sense out of a scandal. Tragedy was a verbal matter. Put a crime into any foreign language, and it sounded like a laundry list. He would try, as it were, to find the French for his situation.

“Oh, rot!” he began, taking his own advice quite seriously. “It isn’t so Sudermannish as all that. My father and my mother chose to go to the tropics to live, a year after I was born. They did not take me with them. They have never sent for me; but they have supported me; they have written to me occasionally; they have got Marty Martin’s uncle to keep me out of the hands of the S.P.C.C., and trained me generally to do without them. I’ve never been invited to go to Tahiti. And Tahiti isn’t like London--if you know any one there, you can’t go without an invitation. They can’t have turned against me, when I was eleven months old, on account of my vices. I’ve kept pretty jolly and managed to regularize the situation with my friends. Now my mother has written that she’s coming to America to see me. Indeed, she has actually come. I wasn’t allowed to meet her at a steamer, decently. I have to meet her here--here.” (He looked gloomily around at the conventional walls.) “Yet she doesn’t seem to be staying here. I don’t know whether she will want tea, or where to take her to dinner. I don’t know her when I see her. I don’t know--oh, hang it, I don’t know anything! And if I could funk it, like Marty, I would. But what can you do when a lady takes the trouble to bring you into the world? If it had been my father, now, I wouldn’t--I positively wouldn’t--have consented to meet him. It’s--it’s no way to treat a fellow.”

His vain attempt at Ollendorfian flatness broke down: the mere facts seemed so very much against him. He had often complained to Marty Martin that it was dashed awkward, this being the only original changeling; but, in point of fact, he had never been so uncomfortable in his life as now, at the prospect of playing the authentic filial rôle. “I’ll make her dine here,” he muttered. He could think of nothing worse without being actually disrespectful. An old lady in a gray shawl walked slowly down the hall past the door, and it suddenly struck him that his mother would perhaps like to dine at the St. Justin. “I ought to have cabled to ask what color _her_ shawl would be,” he began, in a flippant whisper, to himself. The flippant whisper stopped. He was much too genuinely nervous to be flippant any longer without an audience. At the same time, he found himself wondering--oh, insincerely, theatrically, rhetorically wondering--why he had not bought an etiquette book. There was something--well, to be honest, something like an extra gland in his throat, something like a knot in his healthy young nerves--that kept him from putting the question to himself audibly. “If she cries--” he reflected, with anticipatory vindictiveness. What he really meant was: “If she makes me so much as sniff.” For your mother was really the one person in the world who had you necessarily at a disadvantage. Even if you hadn’t the habit of her, you couldn’t count on yourself for reticence. You might be as bored as possible, but that wouldn’t save you. There might be treacheries of the flesh, disloyalties of the cuticle--all manner of reversions to embryonic helplessness. She somehow had your nerves, your physical equilibrium, at her mercy. Old Stein, prodding at you with instruments in the psychological laboratory, was a mere joke in comparison. Even the most deceived, the most docile and voluble student ended respectably in a card catalogue. Peter felt suddenly an immense tenderness for the decencies, the unrealities of “science.” But to meet your mother in conditions like these was the real thing: the naked horror of revelation. “It’s literature,” thought Peter to himself, “and what is literature but just the very worst life can do?” He came back to his familiar conclusive summary. It _was_ rum.

The next quarter of an hour passed more mercifully. The mere empty lapse of time helped him, half duped him into thinking that the scene might not come off at all. It was foolish to be there ahead of time, but what could a man in his predicament do, or pretend to do, between luncheon and an interview like that? They had had, he and Marty, a civilized meal at Plon’s; but he had not been hungry, and to smoke among the stunted box-trees afterward had been--well, impossible. They had got to the St. Justin ridiculously early, and then Marty had bolted. Peter didn’t bear him any grudge for that; of course it was perfectly proper for Marty to bolt. It would have been worse, he began to think, to face her first before a witness.

By this time he had accepted the smallest writing-room of the St. Justin as the predestined scene of the great encounter; accepted it as, perhaps divinely, perhaps diabolically, but at all events supernaturally, appointed. These walls had been decorated by dead people to be unsympathetic and grossly unfit witnesses of Peter Wayne’s embarrassment. To that extent they belonged to him. The sudden superstition was genuine; so genuine that he found himself resenting a bit of chatter that sprang up outside the door and, even more, the immediate quick entrance into the writing-room of one of the chatterers. Why hadn’t his mother given him an appointment in her own sitting-room, at her own hotel--whatever that might be? He didn’t know; he knew nothing of her since the wireless message that had made the appointment; and of course since she was managing the thing that way, he hadn’t even tried to meet her at her steamer, though it had actually docked at some unearthly hour that morning. But she was likely to pay, too, for her perversity, since the lady who had just come in and had sat down rather aimlessly at one of the tables would probably annoy her as much as she did him. He had owned--or pretended?--to Marty Martin a furtive curiosity as to this mother of his, whom he had virtually never seen, of whom he hadn’t so much as a photograph. Now something quite different stirred within him: the instinct to protect her against anything she would not like. He suddenly saw her frail and weary and overwrought and quite old--pathetically, not ironically, like the little old lady who had hobbled past the door--and he resented any detail that might crown her long effort at reunion with an extra thorn. He was sure she would hate this other woman’s being there--the younger woman who had just come in, and sat down so nonchalantly.

This lady obviously intended to stop long enough for their discomfiture, since--just here he got up and looked at his watch as he did so--it lacked scarce two minutes of the appointed hour. He looked at the intruder a little impatiently. She wasn’t writing. Perhaps he could suggest, by some flicker of expression, some implication of gesture, that he wasn’t there in that ridiculous galley for nothing, and still less there for casual company. She was slim and smartly veiled and outrageously made up. That was all he saw out of the corner of his eye, but it was enough to make him feel that she had no such rights at the St. Justin as a reunited mother and child. She wasn’t waiting for a parent, he knew; only for some frivolous friend or other. He was so nervous as to wonder if there were any conceivable way in which one could ask her to go into one of the other rooms. A depopulated chain of them stretched down the corridor. He threw another glance at her. She was well dressed. Peter, though he might know as little as a poodle about the nature of the current fashion, could, like most men, pounce unerringly on the unfashionable. Her exuberance wasn’t a matter of gewgaws; it was all in the meretricious harmonies of her features and complexion. And yet--Peter caught himself away from staring, as he passed her, but one glance was enough to show him that--it was a perfectly honest mask; her paint and powder were as respectable as blue glasses. Again he knew it unerringly. He was glad to recognize it. For at that moment he became so nervous that he did, without a qualm, the most preposterous thing he had ever done, even at two and twenty.

His mother was imminent; he knew it in a hundred ways. The atmosphere was charged with more than the mere prospect, was charged with the actual certainty of her. He found that he was going to put it to the lady who sat there. He stood in the door of the writing-room and looked down the dark hall. It was empty, save for a woman who sat humbly near, bonneted, veiled, faithfully clasping some kind of bag--obviously a servant. Remembering the bit of chatter, he fancied it the maid of the intruding lady. No one else was in sight. Yet somehow he knew that his mother would be on time: the crispness of her earlier cablegrams promised it. The lady really must go elsewhere, and the maid--old and “colored” and manifestly respectable--must move down the hall and sit outside another door. He went back, and this time walked straight across to the stranger.

“Will you pardon me, madam” (“madam” was a deplorable word, but the powder somehow demanded an extravagant formality), “if I speak to you, to ask you something very odd?”

She stared at him through her fantastically patterned veil.

“I have been put in the position of having to meet an elderly lady--a near relative--here for a more or less intimate conversation. I don’t think she realized, in making the appointment, how little privacy you have a right to in a hotel. It is very long since she has been in a great city. Will you pardon the--the really unpardonable--liberty of my asking if you are likely to be here much longer? I mean--ought I to arrange to take her elsewhere in the hotel when she comes? She will be here in a moment.”

It was a dreadful thing to have had to do, and, if he judged by what the veil showed of the lady’s face, it couldn’t have been worse done. She looked dismayed. Peter was angry: so angry that he managed to stop just where he had stationed himself before her; so angry that he didn’t deprecate, that he simply set his teeth and waited. There was nothing he could do now, he felt, to convince her that she hadn’t been insulted.

She lifted her veil ever so little, just freeing her lips, slightly constricted by its tight-drawn mesh. As she did so, she both rose and spoke.

“Aren’t you Peter Wayne?”

He bowed, relieved. If they had a ground of acquaintance, he could perhaps cover it all up, make it plausible, get rid of her on some dishonest, hilarious pretext. “I am.” He waited; there was no use in pretending that he remembered her.

The veil was lifted farther, then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a voice sounded in his astonished ears. “Turn to the light, my son, and let me look at you. I’ve not had a photograph, you remember, since you were a child.”

Even as he faced the light, he was saying to himself that it was rummer than ever; but it was rummest when he turned for his legitimate look at her. She was older than he had assumed the strange lady to be; but she was a long way from the little old lady in the gray shawl. This was his mother, and it was over--he felt it as those sinking for the third time may feel. In another instant he saw his mistake. He had been pulled up out of the surge into the terrible air--this was his mother, and it had just begun! He mastered his breath--his breath that under the water had been playing tricks with him. He looked her over, searching stare for searching stare. Her fair hair had lost what must once have been a golden lustre, but it was carefully, elaborately arranged, waved, curled, braided. It was as fashionable as her clothes. The white mask of powder left clear the contour of the fine, thin nose but cloaked the subtler modellings of the face. The blue eyes, idle yet intent, looked at him from behind it; below them it was rent, once, by the scarlet stab of the mouth. Peter remembered vaguely having heard that the tropical sun necessitated such protection. It was the northern dimness and drizzle that turned make-up into a moral question. Even for the _grands boulevards_, to be sure, Mrs. Wayne’s make-up would have been overdone. This was the chief result of his searching stare. She wasn’t like one’s mother at all, confound it!--not like any one’s mother. He would have been glad of a little more sophistication than even at wise two-and-twenty he was conscious of possessing.

“Your maid?” he asked, remembering the figure outside the door.

“Oh, yes; my old Frances. She recalls you as a baby. She’ll want to see you. You must speak to her before we go.”

“But you’re not going----”

“I find I’d better get off to-night. I’ve learned since landing, that if I do, I can just get a boat at Vancouver. It’s not as if I had any business to do. You’ll take me to dinner somewhere--some restaurant. I don’t like hotels.”

“But--you don’t mean you’ve come for only twenty-four hours--across all that?”

The straight red mouth elongated itself into a smile. “If there weren’t so much of it to cross, I could, perhaps, stay longer. I came only to say one or two things.”

She spoke as if she had run up from her country place for the day. Peter suddenly revolted against this careless treatment of his plight. He was glad if his prayers had succeeded in averting tragedy. At the same time, he didn’t intend to be turned into farce. He hadn’t let himself in for all this only to be shirked as he had been shirked for more than twenty years. He meant to know things, hang it! He had been afraid of a scene; afraid of twenty years’ emotion expressed in an hour; of a creation of human ties as violent and sudden as the growth of the tree from the mango-seed in the fakir’s hands. “In ten minutes you eat the ripe mango,” a globe-trotting friend had told him. If he hadn’t the fakir’s miracle to fear, well and good; but neither was he going to suffer the other extreme, the complete dehumanizing of the experience. After all, she was his mother, hang it! If she wasn’t going to make him pay--well, he would make her pay. Somebody had to get something out of so preposterous a situation. He leaned forward.

“Things you couldn’t write? Or have you just funked it, on the way?”

“Funked it?” Her vocabulary apparently did not hold the word.

“I mean--oh, I mean, let us talk straight. You’ve let it all go for more than twenty years. Now you take it all up again. I’m a gentleman, I hope. I didn’t bolt, though you can bet I wanted to. It would have been easier never to have seen you at all.”

“You’ve never wanted to see your mother?”

Peter looked out of the window into the familiar street. If it hadn’t been for the utter detachment of her tone, he would have felt that she was hitting below the belt.

“What do you take me for? I’ve nearly died of--well, call it interest, more times than I can count up. No little boy likes to have no mother; likes to have his mother care nothing for him. But I’ve grown perfectly used to it. And I know--I _know_ now, mind you--that you don’t care. Well, it may not be what I should have chosen, but at least it lets me out. It’s too late, now, to make me care.”

It was by no means the whole truth. But it was what he had been trying, and in vain, to say to himself an hour since about it all. There was some triumph in being able to say it now to her.

Her blue eyes turned on him a stranger’s sudden kindness. “Were those years bad, Peter? I thought they’d be less bad if you began them very young. You see, they had to begin some time.”

“Oh, they began--and they lasted. Now, they’re not bad at all. So why rake it all up now?”

If she had been little and old and shaking, he couldn’t have pressed the question, he knew. The powdered cheeks, the elaborate hair, the vermilion lips gave him a kind of sanction. There was a pitiful way of wearing rouge, no doubt; this wasn’t pitiful in the least. He didn’t know what she looked like underneath the mask, but he could almost have sworn she didn’t need it.

“I’m not trying to do that. If I’ve come so late, it’s because I feel quite sure that it’s too late to undo any of it. I am not trying”--her brilliant, dyed smile was extraordinarily little in the maternal tradition--“to get a single claw into you. I’ve come to pay damages, Peter, not to claim them. But you must be very, very, very polite to me. I’m not used to anything else. And America rather frightens me.”

“I don’t want to be anything but polite,” murmured Peter, abashed. “And the freer you really are, the more it’s up to you to play the game, don’t you think?”

She smiled vaguely, and he saw at once that she belonged to the generation that preceded slangy paradox. She might almost have worn a fluffy gray shawl.

“I am sure you don’t wish to be anything but polite,” she brought out, still vaguely. “But--I’ve odd things to say, and I’ve come a long way to say them; and you, my son, must listen.”

“It’s what I’m here for.”

“_Evidemment._ How much has Spencer Martin told you?”

“Old Martin? Nothing at all, ever--except the figure of my allowance.”

“Not why we first went to Hawaii?”

“Good Lord, no! I might have been a foundling.”

“You didn’t ask?” She had taken off her gray glove; and pushed her veil up farther on her forehead, with beautiful white fingers.

“No,” answered Peter curtly. “A fellow wouldn’t ask. You can see that.”

She seemed to muse. “He would have told you that, I think, if you had. There was no reason why you shouldn’t know.”

“I naturally supposed, if there was no reason why I shouldn’t know, you’d have seen to it that I was told.”

“So you thought there was something disgraceful--something that drove us out of America?”

“It has occurred to me. But I never let myself worry about it. And old Martin himself was a kind of proof that there wasn’t.”

“There wasn’t.” She echoed his words in a disdainful, emphatically affirmative tone. “No, Peter, not that.” She paused for a moment, staring out into the gray street. “These women are very ugly, aren’t they?” she asked irrelevantly. “On the boat, they were horrors. And they jerked about so--_did_ so many things. Do the men like them that way?” Her tone was desultory.

“I suppose so.” He felt a mischievous desire to tell her how little the men he knew would probably like them _her_ way; but, in fact, the slow conviction was encroaching on his mind--not so much penetrating it as fluidically enwrapping it--that she was compounded of many graces. Her gestures, for example: they were all slow, and each showed off something, if only, for an instant, some lesser, some negligible contour. She had the air of not having stirred a limb or a feature for years, except to please, and of being now in the practice infallible. She was very feminine--no, hang it! that dairymaid word wouldn’t do. (Peter had been, in college, the proudest product of his several “theme-courses,” and the quest of the epithet was not unknown to him.) She was very simple and very sophisticated. He had to leave it at that.

“I’ll tell you about our leaving America. You ought to have known long since. And yet--perhaps it was better your sympathies shouldn’t have been touched. If you thought we were brutes, that would leave you free, wouldn’t it?”

“It did.”

“Ah, yes--exactly!” She seemed to triumph for an instant. Then she looked out of the window again, and again spoke irrelevantly. “Are you in love?”

Peter frowned. “No.” He was too young not to be stiff about it.

“That’s rather a pity. I could have explained better.”

“Oh, I know what it stands for.”

She corrected him gently. “It ‘stands for’ nothing whatever. Either you’ve loved or you haven’t. It might have helped me--that’s all.” Then she seemed to brace herself for difficult exposition.

“Listen, Peter. You must know this first. In the months just following your birth, everything changed. Your father developed tuberculosis--alarmingly, it was then supposed. That meant another climate. He owned property in Honolulu. It occurred to him to go there. In not taking you we acted on physicians’ advice. There was no telling what sort of life we might have to live. You were best off here. You were under expert care, and in those days we had news of you constantly. I am quite well aware”--her voice grew surer as she went on; she seemed less fantastically feminine, more simply human--“that many women would have chosen differently. For me there could be no question. You had been brought into the world in the belief that there would be no choice to make. We never dreamed, when you were born, of anything but the normal American life. I insist on your realizing that.”

Peter bowed. It already began to change his vision of himself a little, though he wasn’t sure he liked his mystery to be merely tubercular. Though if that was all, why in the world--but he saw that he could only listen and wait.