“Dearest Nancy,” ran the postscript, and it had been at the postscript, Oldmeadow now could gauge, that Nancy had first found herself unprepared. “I, too, am thinking of you, with Barney. It is a great joy to feel that where, he says, I’ve given him golden eagles and snow-buntings he’s given me—among so many other dear, wonderful people—a Nancy. I get the best of the bargain, don’t I? I can’t see much of the birds for looking at the peaks—mypeaks, so familiar yet, always, so new again. ‘Stern daughters of the voice of God’ that they are. Radiantly white against a cloudless sky we find them to-day. Barney’s profile is beautiful against them—but his nose is badly sun-burned!Allour noses are sun-burned! That’s what one pays for flying among the Alps.“Mother Nell—we’ve decided that that’s whatI’m to call her—looks ten years younger all the same, as I knew she would. We talk of you all so often—of you and Meg and Palgrave and Barbara, and half a dozen times a day Barney wishes that one or the other of you were with us to see this or that. It’s specially you for the birds I notice. You must take me for some bird-walks at dawn some day and teach me to know all your lovely English songsters.... Dear little Cousin-Sister, I send you my love with his and, with him, hold you warmly in my heart. Will ‘Aunt Monica’ accept my affectionate and admiring homages?“Yours ever“Adrienne”
“Dearest Nancy,” ran the postscript, and it had been at the postscript, Oldmeadow now could gauge, that Nancy had first found herself unprepared. “I, too, am thinking of you, with Barney. It is a great joy to feel that where, he says, I’ve given him golden eagles and snow-buntings he’s given me—among so many other dear, wonderful people—a Nancy. I get the best of the bargain, don’t I? I can’t see much of the birds for looking at the peaks—mypeaks, so familiar yet, always, so new again. ‘Stern daughters of the voice of God’ that they are. Radiantly white against a cloudless sky we find them to-day. Barney’s profile is beautiful against them—but his nose is badly sun-burned!Allour noses are sun-burned! That’s what one pays for flying among the Alps.
“Mother Nell—we’ve decided that that’s whatI’m to call her—looks ten years younger all the same, as I knew she would. We talk of you all so often—of you and Meg and Palgrave and Barbara, and half a dozen times a day Barney wishes that one or the other of you were with us to see this or that. It’s specially you for the birds I notice. You must take me for some bird-walks at dawn some day and teach me to know all your lovely English songsters.... Dear little Cousin-Sister, I send you my love with his and, with him, hold you warmly in my heart. Will ‘Aunt Monica’ accept my affectionate and admiring homages?
“Yours ever“Adrienne”
Oldmeadow had not expected that she could write such a human letter; yet it explained Nancy’s blush. Barney’s spontaneous affection she could have faced, but she had not been able to face his wife’s determined tenderness. Adrienne had meant it well, no doubt—Oldmeadow gazed on after he had finished, but she had no business to mean so well, no business to thrust herself, in this community of intimacy, into what was Barney’s place alone. There was more in it, he knew, with Meg and Mrs. Averil to help him, than the quite successful playfulness. She was to be more intimate than Barney, that was what it came to; more, much more tender if Barney was to be allowed intimacy and tenderness. That was really what she intended Nancy to see, and that Barney had no place at all where she, Adrienne, did not also belong.
“Very sweet; very sweet and pretty,” Mrs. Averil’s voice broke in, and he realized that he had allowedhimself to drop into a grim and tactless reverie; “I didn’t know she had such a sense of humour. Sun-burned noses and ‘Stern daughters of the voice of God.’ Well done. I didn’t think Adrienne would ever look as low as noses. They must be having a delightful tour. I know black redstarts. There was one that used to wake me every morning at four, one summer, in Normandy, with the most foolish, creaking song; just outside my window. Give Barney my love when you write and return my niece’s affectionate and admiring homages. Mother Nell. I shouldn’t care to be called Mother Nell somehow.”
So Mrs. Averil’s vexation expressed itself and so she floated Nancy along. But Nancy, long since, had pulled herself together and was able to look at Oldmeadow, while her lashes closed together in her own smile, and to say that she’d almost be willing to lose her nose for the sake of hearing the new warblers. Mrs. Averil opened her “Times” and over marmalade Nancy and Oldmeadow planned the trip that they would take some day, when their ship came in, the three of them, a bird-trip to the French Alps.
OLDMEADOWsat beside Adrienne Chadwick and knew that from the other end of the room, where he talked to Mrs. Aldesey, Barney’s eyes were on them, though he tried to keep them off. It was the first dinner-party the young couple had given since they had come up to town, for though they were established at Coldbrooks in the communal family life Adrienne seemed to find to her taste, and though Barney had at once immersed himself in country pursuits, they had taken and furnished this large house in Connaught Square and it was, apparently, settled that the winter months were to be spent in London. How that was to be combined with farming at Coldbrooks, or whether Barney intended to take a header into politics and felt a London house, big enough for entertaining, part of the programme, Oldmeadow hadn’t an idea, and for the rather sinister reason that he had hardly laid his eyes on Barney since his return from his wedding-journey. Even though asked to tea once or twice, while, established in an hotel, they were finding and furnishing the house, he had never found them alone and either Barney had made no opportunity, or his wife had seen to it that none should be made, for having atête-à-têtewith his old friend.
Oldmeadow could not associate Barney with ambitions, either social or political, nor, he was bound to say, as he looked round the dinner-table, where Adrienne sat at one end with Lord Lumley and Barney at the other with Lady Lumley, could one inferfrom its disparate and irrelevant elements any such ambitions in Adrienne. He had taken Mrs. Aldesey down and had felt her at moments to be almost too resourceful, her air of graceful skill in keeping the ball rolling seeming too much to emphasize its tendency to drop. Without Mrs. Aldesey, without Meg—vividly engaged at one corner with a fair young American—without himself, for he had aided and abetted Lydia to the best of his ability, the dinner would have been a dull one and he was not sure that even their enterprise had redeemed it. Adrienne had not any air of fearing dullness or of being in need of assistance. Oldmeadow saw that the blue ribbon was frequently unrolled and that, as always, it made a silence in which it could be watched. Lord Lumley, his handsome, official head bent in an attitude of chivalrous devotion, watched earnestly, and the fair young American paused in the midst of whatever he might be saying to Meg to take almost reverent note; but Oldmeadow fancied more than once that he caught startled eyes fixed upon it, especially when there emerged a lustrous loop of quotation:—
“One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,Never doubted clouds would break,—”
“One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,Never doubted clouds would break,—”
The silence for that had been so general that even Barney, far away, and protected by Mrs. Aldesey, was aware of it.
“How wonderfully hewears, doesn’t he, dear old Browning,” said Mrs. Aldesey, and in the glance that Barney cast upon her was an oddly mingled gratitude and worry. The fair young American, he was very fair and had clear, charming eyes, finishedthe verse in a low voice to Meg and Meg looked at him affectionately the while. He was evidently one of Adrienne’s appurtenances.
It was a dull dinner. Pretty, festive Mrs. Pope and young Mr. Haviland, reputed to be a wit and one of Meg’s young men as Mrs. Pope was one of Barney’s young women, would not with any eagerness again attend a board where the hostess quoted Browning and didn’t know better than to send you down, the first with a stern young socialist who sat silent for the most part and frowned when addressed, and the second with a jocular, middle-aged lady from California, the mother, Oldmeadow gathered, of the clear-eyed youth, from whose ample bosom Mr. Haviland’s subtle arrows glanced aside leaving him helplessly exposed to the stout bludgeonings of her humour. Adrienne paused once or twice in her conversation to smile approval upon her compatriot and to draw Lord Lumley’s attention to her special brand of merriment, good Lord Lumley adjusting his glasses obediently to take it in.
And now they were all assembled in the drawing-room. Like everything about Adrienne, it was simple and rather splendid. Barney had wisely kept his modernities for his own study and it was a pity, Oldmeadow reflected, that Adrienne had not kept for her own boudoir the large portrait of herself that hung over the mantelpiece, since it was a note more irrelevant than any Post Impressionist could have been and cast a shade of surmise over the taste displayed in the Chippendale furniture and the Chinese screens.
“Rather sweet, isn’t it; pastoral and girlish, you know,” Barney had suggested tentatively as Mrs.Aldesey had placed herself before it. “Done in Paris a good many years ago; the man was very much the fashion then. Adrienne was only sixteen. It’s an extraordinarily perfect likeness still, isn’t it?”
To which Mrs. Aldesey, all old lace and exquisite evasion, had murmured, her lorgnette uplifted: “Quite dear and ingenuous. Such a relief after your arid Cubists. What would they make of Mrs. Barneyen bergère, I’d like to know? A jumble of packing-cases with something twisted in a corner to signify a bleat.”
For the picture, painted with glib assurance and abounding in pink and azure, portrayed Adrienne dressed as a shepherdess and carrying a flower-wreathed crook.
Adrienne, to-night at all events, was looking very unlike the shepherdess, but that might be because of the approaches of her maternity. Mrs. Chadwick, when he had last been at Coldbrooks, had told him that the baby was expected in May and that Adrienne was wonderful about it, dedicating herself to its perfection in thought and deed with every conscious hour.
“If only I’d thought about my babies before they came like that, who knows what they might have turned out!” she had surmised. “But I was very silly, I’m afraid, and the only thing I really did think of was how I should dress them. I’ve always loved butcher’s-blue linen for children and I must say that mine did look very nice in it. For everyday, you know.”
Oldmeadow found it extremely difficult to think of Adrienne as a mother; it was much easier to think of her as a shepherdess. Such solidities of experiencegave her even a certain pathos in his eyes, though he was in no whit dislodged from his hostility to her. She was as mild, as satisfied, apparently, with herself and with existence, as ever, yet her eyes and lips expressed fatigue and a purely physical sadness that was uncharacteristic, and it was uncharacteristic that she should be rather thickly powdered.
They had not really met since the morning of her adjuration to him at Coldbrooks and he wondered if she remembered that little scene as vividly as he did. She would be very magnanimous did she not remember it unpleasantly; and he could imagine her as very magnanimous; yet from the fact that she had kept Barney from him he could not believe that she was feeling magnanimously.
She watched Barney and Mrs. Aldesey now, as they stood before her portrait, and he fancied that the sadness in her eyes, whatever might be its cause, deepened a little. When she turned them on him it was with an effect of being patiently ready for him. Perhaps, really, she had been more patient than pleased all evening.
“So you are settled here for the winter?” he said. “Have you and Barney any plans? I’ve hardly seen anything of him of late.”
“We have been so very, very busy, you know,” said Adrienne, as if quite accepting his right to an explanation.
She was dressed in pale blue and wore, with her pearl necklace, a little wreath of pearls in her hair. In her hands she turned, as they talked, a small eighteenth-century fan painted in pink and grey and blue, and he was aware, as he had been at Coldbrooks,of those slow and rather fumbling movements.
“We couldn’t well ask friends,” she went on, “even the dearest, to come and sit on rolls of carpet with us while we drank our tea, could we? We’ve kept our squalor for the family circle. Meg’s been with us; so dear and helpful; but only Meg and a flying visit once or twice from Mother Nell. Nancy couldn’t come. But nothing, it seems, will tear Nancy from hunting. I feel that strange and rather sad; the absorption of a fine young life in such primitiveness.”
“Oh, well; it’s not her only interest, you know,” said Oldmeadow, very determined not to allow himself vexation. “Nancy is a creature of such deep country roots. Not the kind that grow in London.”
“I know,” said Adrienne. “And it is just those roots that I want to prevent my Barney’s growing. Roots like that tie people to routine; convention; acceptance. I want Barney to find a wider, freer life. I hope he will go into politics. If we have left Coldbrooks and the dear people there for these winter months it’s because I feel he will be better able to form opinions here than in the country. I saw quite well, there, that people didn’t form opinions; only accepted traditions. I want Barney to be free of tradition and to form opinions for himself. He has none now,” she smiled.
She had been clear before, and secure; but he felt now the added weight of her matronly authority. He felt, too, that, while ready for him and, perhaps, benevolently disposed, she was far more indifferent to his impressions than she had been at Coldbrooks. She had possessed Barney before; but how muchmore deeply she possessed him now and how much more definitely she saw what she intended to do with him.
“You must equip him with your opinions,” said Oldmeadow, and his voice was a good match for hers in benevolence. “I know that you have so many well-formed ones.”
“Oh, no; never that,” said Adrienne. “That’s how country vegetables are grown; first in frames and then in plots; all guided and controlled. He must find his own opinions; quite for himself; quite freely of influence. That is the rock upon which Democracy is founded. Nothing is more arresting to development than living by other people’s opinions.”
“But we must get our opinions from somebody and somewhere. The danger of democracy is that we don’t grow them at all; merely catch them, like influenza, from a mob. Not that I disbelieve in democracy.”
“Don’t you, Mr. Oldmeadow?” She turned her little fan and smiled on him. “You believe in liberty, equality, fraternity? That surprises me.”
“Democracy isn’t incompatible with recognizing that other people are wiser than oneself and letting them guide us; quite the contrary. Why surprised? Have I seemed so autocratic?”
“It would surprise me very much to learn that you believed in equality, to start with that alone”; Adrienne smiled on.
“Well, I own that I don’t believe in people who have no capacity for opinions being impowered to act as if they had. That’s the fallacy that’s playing the mischief with us, all over the world.”
“They never will have opinions worth having unless they are given the liberty to look for them. You don’t believe in liberty, either, when you say that.”
“No; not for everybody. Some of our brothers are too young and others too stupid to be trusted with it.”
“They’ll take it for themselves if you don’t trust them with it,” said Adrienne, and he was again aware that though she might be absurd she, at all events, was not stupid. “All that we can do in life is to trust, and help, and open doors. Only experience teaches. People must follow their own lights.”
He moved forward another pawn, and though he did not find her stupid he was not taking her seriously. “Most people have no lights to follow. It’s a choice for them between following other people’s or resenting and trampling on them. That, again, is what we can see happening all over the world.”
“So it is, you must own, just as I thought; you don’t even believe in fraternity,” said Adrienne, and she continued to smile her weary, tranquil smile upon him; “for we cannot feel towards men as towards brothers, and trust them, unless we believe that the light shines into each human soul.”
He saw now that unless they went much deeper, deeper than he could be willing, ever, to go with Adrienne Toner, he must submit to letting himself appear as worsted. He knew where he believed the roots of trust to grow and he did not intend, no never, to say to Adrienne Toner that only through the love of God could one at once distrust and love the species to which one belonged. He could have shuddered at the thought of what she would certainly have found to say about God.
“You’ve got all sorts of brothers here to-night, haven’t you,” he remarked, putting aside the abstract theme and adjusting his glass. “Some of them look as though they didn’t recognize the relationship. Where did you find our young socialist over there in the corner? He looks very menacing. Most of the socialists I’ve known have been the mildest of men.”
“He is a friend of Palgrave’s. Palgrave brought him to see me. Oh, I’m so glad—Gertrude is going to take care of him. She always sees at once if anyone looks lonely. That’s all right, then.”
Oldmeadow was not so sure it was as he observed the eye with which Mr. Besley measured the beaming advance of the lady from California.
“I wonder if you would like my dear old friend, Mrs. Prentiss,” Adrienne continued, watching her method with Mr. Besley. “The Laughing Philosopher, Mother used to call her. She is a very rare, strong soul. That is her son, talking to Lady Lumley. He’s been studying architecture in Paris for the past three years. A radiant person. Mrs. Prentiss runs a settlement in San Francisco and has a brilliant literary and artistic salon. She is a real force in the life of our country.”
“Why should you question my appreciation of rarity and strength? I can see that she is very kind and that if anybody can melt Mr. Besley she will.”
“Gertrude would have melted Diogenes,” said Adrienne with a fond assurance that, though it took the form of playfulness, lacked its substance. “I hope they will find each other, for he is rare and strong, too. What he needs is warmth and happiness. He makes me think of Shelley when he talks.”
“He’s too well up in statistics to make me think of Shelley,” Oldmeadow commented. Barney, he saw, from his place beside Mrs. Aldesey at the other end of the room, was still watching them, pleased now, it was evident, by the appearance of friendly, drifting converse they presented. “He’s not altogether unknown to me for we often, in our review, get our windows broken by his stones; well-thrown, too. He’s very able. So you thought it might do the British Empire good to face him? Well, I suppose it may.”
“Which are the British Empire?” asked Adrienne. “You. To begin with.”
“Oh, no. Count me out. I’m only a snappy, snuffy scribbler. Good old Lord Lumley, of course, with all his vast, well-governed provinces shimmering in the Indian sun behind him. And Sir Archibald, who talks so loudly in the House. Palgrave didn’t bring him, I’ll be bound.”
“No. Lady Lumley brought him. He and Lord Lumley are certainly more than odds and ends.” She had an air of making no attempt to meet his badinage, if it was that, but of mildly walking past it. “They are, both of them, rather splendid people, in spite of their limitations. They’ve accepted tradition, you see, instead of growing opinion. That is their only trouble. I was afraid you were going to say Mr. Haviland. He is certainly an odd and end.”
Mr. Haviland and Mrs. Pope had found each other and were indulging in mirthful repartee in the back drawing-room. “I feel safe with Lord Lumley and Sir Archibald,” Adrienne added.
“I’d certainly rather trust myself in their hands than in Mr. Besley’s. I’d almost rather trust myself in the hands of Mr. Haviland.”
“You mean that they would, at least, keep you comfortable and that Mr. Besley wouldn’t.” She, too, had her forms of repartee.
“I expect it’s just what I do mean,” he assented. “If Mr. Besley and his friends had their way, I for instance, and workers of my type, would soon, I suspect, have to forego our tobacco and our chamber-music. We’re only marketable in a comfortable world. And there are more comfortable people, I maintain, under Lord Lumley, than there would be under Mr. Besley.”
“‘Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive,’” said Adrienne. “All revolutions must begin by burning away the evil and the refuse. Not that I am a revolutionist, or even a socialist.”
“You can’t separate good from evil by burning,” he said. “You burn them both. That’s what the French did in their lamentable bonfire, for which they’ve been paying in poorer brains and poorer blood ever since. We don’t want revolutions. All we want is slow, good-tempered reform. Revolutions are always ill-tempered, aren’t they, and nothing worth doing was ever done in an ill-temper. You are making me very didactic.”
“Oh, but I prefer that so much to persiflage,” said Adrienne, with her tranquillity. “And I am glad to hear what you really believe. But it is sad to me that you should see no ardour or glory in anything. With all its excesses and errors, I have always felt the French Revolution to be a sublime expression of the human spirit.”
“It might have been; if they could only have kept their heads—metaphorically as well as literally. But the glory and ardour were too mixed withhatred and ignorance. I’m afraid I do tend to distrust those states of feeling. They tend so easily to self-deception.”
She was looking at him, quietly and attentively, and he was, for the first time since their initial meeting, perhaps, feeling quite benevolently towards her; quite as the British Empire might feel towards a subject race. It was, therefore, the more difficult to feel anything but exasperation when she said, having, evidently, summed up her impressions and found her verdict: “Yes. You distrust them. We always come back to that, don’t we? You distrust yourself, too. So that, when you tell me what you believe, you can only do it in the form of making fun of my beliefs. I feel about you, Mr. Oldmeadow, what I felt that morning when I tried to come near you and you wouldn’t let me. I feel it more the more I see you; and it makes me sad. It isn’t only that you distrust ardour and glory, all the sunlight and splendour of life; but you are afraid of them; afraid to open your heart to trust. You shut your door upon the sunlight and take up your caustic pen; and you don’t see how the shadows fall about you.”
It was indeed a dusty tumble from the quite civilized pavement of their interchange, and it was unfortunate that upon his moment of discomfiture, when he saw himself as trying to clap the dust off his knees and shoulders in time to be presentable, Barney and Mrs. Aldesey should have chosen to approach them. Barney, no doubt, imagined it a propitious moment in which to display to Mrs. Aldesey his wife’s and his friend’s amity.
Adrienne was perfectly composed. She had borne her testimony and, again, done her best for him,pointing out to him that the first step towards enfranchisement was to open his door to the sunlight that she could so bountifully supply. She turned a clear, competent eye upon her husband and his companion.
“Well, dear, and what have you and Roger been so deep in?” Barney inquired, looking down at her with a fondness in which, all the same, Oldmeadow detected the anxiety that had hovered in his eye all evening. “You’ve seemed frightfully deep.”
“We have been,” said Adrienne, looking up at him. “In liberty, equality and fraternity; all the things I believe in and that Mr. Oldmeadow doesn’t. I can’t imagine how he gets on at all, he believes in so few things. It must be such a sad, dim, groping world to live in when there are no stars above to look at and no hands below to hold.”
“Oh, well, you see,” said Mrs. Aldesey with her dragging smile, “his ancestors didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence.”
“We don’t need ancestors to do that,” Adrienne smiled back. “All of us sign it for ourselves—all of us who have accepted our birthright and taken the gifts that our great, modern, deep-hearted world hold out to us. You are an American, Mrs. Aldesey, so you find it easy to believe in freedom, don’t you?”
“Very easy; for myself; but not for other people,” Mrs. Aldesey replied and Oldmeadow saw at once, with an added discomfort, that she underestimated, because of Adrienne’s absurdity, Adrienne’s intelligence. “But then the very name of any abstraction—freedom, humanity, what you will—has always made me feel, at once, dreadfully sleepy.It’s not ever having had my mind trained, Mrs. Barney. Now yours was, beautifully, I can see.”
Adrienne looked up at her, for Mrs. Aldesey, her lace about her shoulders, her lorgnette in her hands, had not seated herself, and it was further evident to Oldmeadow that she weighed Mrs. Aldesey more correctly than Mrs. Aldesey weighed her. “Very carefully, if not beautifully,” she said. “Have I made you sleepy already? But I don’t want to go on talking about abstractions. I want to talk about Mr. Oldmeadow. The truth is, Barney,” and her voice, as she again turned her eyes on her husband, had again the form but not the substance of gaiety, “the truth is that he’s a lonely, lonely bachelor and that we ought to arrange a marriage for him, you and I. Since he doesn’t believe in freedom, he won’t mind having a marriage arranged, will he?—if we can find a rare, sweet, gifted girl.”
Barney had become red. “Roger’s been teasing you, darling. Nobody believes in freedom more. Don’t let him take you in. He’s an awful old humbug with his Socratic method. He upsets you before you know where you are. He’s always been like that.”
“Yes; hasn’t he,” Mrs. Aldesey murmured.
“But he hasn’t upset me at all,” said Adrienne. “I grant that he was trying to, that he was doing his very best to give me a tumble; but I quite see through him and he doesn’t conceal himself from me in the very least. He doesn’t really believe in freedom, however much he may have takenyouin, Barney; he’d think it wholesome, of course, that you should believe in it. That’s his idea, you see; to give people what he thinks wholesome; to choose for them. It’s the lack of faith all through. But the reason is thathe’s lonely; dreadfully lonely, and because of that he’s grown to be, as he says, snappy and snuffy; so that we must borrow a page from his book and find what is wholesome for him. I know all the symptoms so well. I’ve had friends just like that. It’s a starved heart and having nobody to be fonder of than anyone else; no one near at all. He must be happily married as soon as possible. A happy marriage is the best gift of life, isn’t it, Mrs. Aldesey? If we haven’t known that we haven’t known our best selves, have we?”
“It may be; we mayn’t have,” said Mrs. Aldesey, cheerfully; but she was not liking it. “I can’t say. Am I to have a hand in choosing his bride? I know his tastes, I think. We’re quite old friends, you see.”
“No one who doesn’t believe in freedom for other people may help to choose her,” said Adrienne, with a curious blitheness. “That’s why he mayn’t choose her himself. We must go quite away to find her; away from ceilings and conventions and out into the sunlight. I don’t believe happiness is found under ceilings. And it’s what we all need more than anything else. Even tobacco and chamber-music don’t make you a bit happy, do they, Mr. Oldmeadow? and if one isn’t happy one can’t know anything about anything. Not really.”
“Alas!” sighed Mrs. Aldesey, keeping up her end, but not very successfully, while Barney fixed his eyes upon his wife. “And I thought I’d found it this evening, under this ceiling. Well, I shall cherish my illusion, since you tell me it’s only that, and thank you for it, Mrs. Barney. The Lumleys are going to give me a lift and I see that their car has been announced.”
“Stay on a bit, Roger,” Barney murmured, as the Lumleys approached. “I’ve seen nothing of you for ages.”
Adrienne rose to greet her parting guests.
“Darling Adrienne, good-night. It’s been perfectly delightful, your little party,” said Lady Lumley, who was large, light and easily pleased; an English equivalent of the lady from California, but without the sprightliness. “Your dear young Mr. Prentiss is a treasure. He’s been telling me about Sicilian temples. Wemustget there one day. Mrs. Prentiss says they will come to us for a week-end before they go. How extraordinarily interesting she is. Don’t forget that you are coming on the fifteenth.”
“I shall get up a headache, first thing!” Lord Lumley stated in a loud, jocular whisper, reverting to a favourite jest on Adrienne’s powers. “That’s the thing to go in for, eh? I won’t let Charlie cut me out this time. Not a night’s sleep till you come!”
“Go in for as many as you like, dear Lord Lumley,” said Adrienne, smiling her assurance of being able to deal with a series.
“Good-night, Mrs. Barney,” said Mrs. Aldesey. “Leave me a little standing-room under the stars, won’t you.”
“There’s always standing-room under the stars,” said Adrienne. “We don’t exclude each other there.”
The party showed no other signs of breaking up. The Laughing Philosopher had melted, or, at all events, mastered Mr. Besley, and talked to him with, now and again, a maternal hand laid on his knee. Mr. Haviland and Mrs. Pope still laughed in the back drawing-room, Meg and Mr. Prentiss hadcome together again and Sir Archibald was engaged with a pretty girl. After looking around upon them all, Adrienne, with the appearance of a deeper fatigue, sank back upon her sofa.
“You know, darling,” Barney smiled candidly upon his wife, “you rather put your foot in it just now. Mrs. Aldesey’s marriage isn’t happy. I ought to have warned you.”
“How do you mean not happy, Barney?” Adrienne looked up at him. “Isn’t Mr. Aldesey dead?”
“Not at all dead. She left him some years ago, didn’t she, Roger? He lives in New York. It’s altogether a failure.”
Adrienne looked down at her fan. “I didn’t know. But one can’t avoid speaking of success sometimes, even to failures.”
“Of course not. Another time you will know.”
Adrienne seemed to meditate, but without compunction. “That was what she meant, then, by saying she believed in freedom for herself but not for other people.”
“Meant? How do you mean? She was joking.”
“If she left him. It was she who left him?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Barney spoke now with definite vexation and Oldmeadow, in his corner of the sofa, his arms folded, his eyes on the cornice, gave him no help. “Except that, yes, certainly; it’s she who left him. She’s not a deserted wife. Anything but.”
“It’s only Mr. Aldesey who is the deserted husband,” Adrienne turned her fan and kept her eyes on it. “It’s only he who can’t be free. Forgive me if she’s a special friend of yours, Mr. Oldmeadow; but it explains. I felt something so brittle, so unreal inher, charming and gracious as she is. It is so very wrong for a woman to do that, I think.”
“Wrong?” Barney echoed, staring at Oldmeadow while this firm hand was laid upon his Egeria. “What the dickens do you mean, darling? She is a special friend of Roger’s. You don’t surely mean to say a woman must, under all circumstances, stick to a man she doesn’t love?”
“Anything but that, Barney. I think that she should leave him and set him free. It’s quite plain to me that if a wife will not live with her husband it is her duty to divorce him. Then, at any rate, he can try for happiness again.”
“Divorce him, my dear child!” Barney was trying to keep up appearances but the note of marital severity came through and as it sounded Adrienne raised her eyes to his: “It’s not so easy as all that! Aldesey, whatever his faults, may have given her no cause to divorce him, and I take it you’ll not suggest that Mrs. Aldesey should give him cause to divorce her.”
On her sofa, more pallid under her powder, more sunken than before, and with the queer squashed-in look emphasized, Adrienne kept steady eyes uplifted to her husband. “Not at all, dear Barney,” she returned and Oldmeadow, though hardened against the pathos of her physical disability, saw that she spoke with difficulty, “but I think that you confuse the real with the conventional wrong. Mrs. Aldesey would not care to face any unconventionality; that is quite apparent. She would draw her skirts aside from any conventional wrong-doing. But the real wrong she would be blind to; the wrong of keeping anyone bound in the emptiness you havemade for them. Setting free is not so strange and terrible a matter as you seem to imagine. It’s quite easy for brave, unshackled people.”
“Well, I must really be off,” Oldmeadow now seized the occasion to declare. “I believe, as a matter of fact, that Mr. Aldesey lives very contentedly in New York, collecting French prints and giving excellent dinners. Anything open and scandalous would be as distasteful to him as to his wife. They are, both of them, happier apart; that’s all it comes to. So you must read your lessons, even by proxy, to more authentic misdemeanants, Mrs. Barney. All right, Barney. Don’t come down. I’ll hope to see you both again quite soon.”
So he got away, concealing as best he might, his sense of tingling anger. But it died away to a sense of chill as he walked down Park Lane. Was not Barney unhappy, already? What did she say to him when she got him to herself? He felt sure that she had never bargained for a husband who could look at her with ill-temper.
“ROGER, see here, I’ve only come to say one word—about the absurd little-matter of last night. Only one; and then we’ll never speak of it again,” said poor Barney.
He had come as soon as the very next day—to exonerate, not to apologize; that was evident at once. Oldmeadow had not long to wait before learning what she had said to him when she got him to herself, nor long to wait before realizing that if Barney had been unhappy last night he thought himself happy to-day.
“Really, my dear boy,” he said, “it’s not worth talking about.”
“Oh, but we must talk about it,” said Barney. He was red and spoke quickly. “It upset her frightfully; it made her perfectly miserable. She cried for hours, Roger,” Barney’s voice dropped to a haggard note. “You know, though she bears up so marvellously, she’s ill. She doesn’t admit illness and that makes it harder for her, because it simply bewilders her when she finds herself on edge like this and her body refusing to obey her. The baby is coming in May, you know.”
“I know, my dear Barney. The evening was very fatiguing for her. I saw it all I think. I noticed from the beginning how tired she looked.”
“Horribly tired. Horribly fatiguing. I’m glad you saw it. For that’s really what I came to explain. She was tired to begin with and Mrs. Aldesey put her on edge. I think I saw that myself atdinner—and, oh, before that; on the day we had tea with her, when we first came up, in November—Adrienne felt then that Mrs. Aldesey didn’t understand or care for her. You know she is so full of love and sympathy for everybody herself that she is literally sickened when she is treated in that artificial, worldly way. And you know, Roger, Mrs. Aldeseyisartificial and worldly.”
That was how she had put it to Barney, of course. But Oldmeadow saw further than Mrs. Aldesey and her artificiality. He saw a dishevelled and weeping Adrienne stricken to the heart by the sense of threatened foundations, aghast by what she had seen in her husband’s eyes; and he was aware, even while he resented having it put upon Lydia, of a curious, reluctant pity for the pale, weeping figure. Lydia had, obviously, displeased her; but Lydia had been the mere occasion; she could have dealt easily enough with Lydia. It had been the revelation that Barney could oppose her, could almost, for a moment, dislike her, that had set her universe rocking. Her first taste of reality, then. The thought came rather grimly, with the pity. After all it was their best chance of happiness; that she should learn to accept herself as a person who could be opposed, even disliked, in flashes, while still loved. He had sat silent while he thought, one of his silences which, when he emerged from them, he often recognized as over-long. Barney must have felt the weight of all he did not say when all that he found to say was: “What it comes to, doesn’t it, is that they neither of them take much to each other. Lydia is certainly conventional.”
“Ah, but Lady Lumley is conventional, too,” said Barney with an irrepressible air of checkmate. “Hordes of conventional people adore Adrienne. It’s a question of the heart. There are people who are conventional without being worldly. It’s worldliness that stifles Adrienne. It’s what she was saying last night: ‘They have only ceilings; I must have the sky.’ Not that she thinksyouworldly, dear old boy.”
“I hope you try to interpret me to her kindly,” said Oldmeadow, smiling. Even at the moment when Barney, all innocently, was revealing to him Adrienne’s tactics, the fragments of her vocabulary imbedded in his speech were affording him amusement. “You must try and persuade her that I’ve quite a fondness for the sky myself, and even published a volume of verse in my youth.”
“I do. Of course I do,” said Barney eagerly. “And I gave her your poems, long ago. She loved them. It’s your sardonic pessimism she doesn’t understand—in anyone who could have written like that when they were young. She never met anything like it before in her life. And the way you never seem to take anything seriously. It makes her dreadfully sorry for you, even while she finds it so hard to accept in anyone she cares for—because she really does so care for you, Roger”—there was a note of appeal in Barney’s voice—“and does so long to find a way out for you. It was a joke, of course; but all the same we’ve often wished you could find the right woman to marry.”
Barney, as he had done last night, grew very red again, so that it was apparent to Oldmeadow that not only the marriage but the woman—the rare, gifted girl—had been discussed between him and his wife.
“Adrienne thinks everyone ought to be married, you see,” he tried to pass it off. “Since we are so happy ourselves.”
“I see,” said Oldmeadow. “There’s another thing you must try to persuade her of: that I’m not at allun jeune homme à marier, and that if I ever seek a companion it will probably be some one like myself, some one sardonic and pessimistic. If I fixed my affections on the lovely girl, you see, it isn’t likely they’d be reciprocated.”
“Oh, but”—Barney’s eagerness again out-stepped his discretion—“wouldn’t the question of money count there, Roger? If she had plenty of money, you know, or you had; enough for both; and a place in the country? Of course, it’s all fairy-tale; but Adrienne is a fairy-tale person; material things don’t count with her at all. She waves them away and wants other people to wave them away, too. What she always says is: ‘What does my moneymeanunless it’s to open doors for people I love?’ She’s starting that young Besley, you know, just because of Palgrave; setting him up as editor of a little review—rotten it is, I think—but Adrienne says people must follow their own lights. And it’s just that; she’d love to open doors for you, if it could make you happy.”
Oldmeadow at this, after a moment of receptivity, began to laugh softly; but the humour of the situation grew upon him until he at last threw back his head and indulged in open and prolonged mirth. Barney watched him bashfully. “You’re not angry, I see,” he ventured. “You don’t think it most awful cheek, I mean?”
“I think it is most awful cheek; but I’m not angry;not a bit,” said Oldmeadow. “Fairy-godmothers are nothing if not cheeky; are they? Oh, I know you meant your, not her, cheek. But it’s the fault of the fairy-godmother, all the same, and you must convince her that I’m not in love with anybody, and that if ever I am she’ll have to content herself with my small earnings and a flat in Chelsea.”
So he jested; but, when his friend was gone, he realized that he was a little angry all the same and he feared that his mirth had not been able to conceal from Barney that what he really found it was confounded impudence. Barney’s face had worn, as he departed, the look of mingled gratitude and worry and Barney must feel, as well as he felt, that their interview hadn’t really cleared up anything—except his own readiness to overlook the absurdities of Barney’s wife. What became more and more clear to himself was that unless he could enable Adrienne to enroll his name on her banner she would part him from Barney and that her very benevolence was a method. The more he thought of it the more uncomfortable he felt, and his inner restlessness became at length an impulse urging him out to take counsel or, rather, seek solace, with the friend from whom Adrienne could never part him. He would go and have tea with Lydia Aldesey and with the more eagerness from the fact that he was aware of a slight dissatisfaction in regard to Lydia. She had not altogether pleased him last night. She had put herself in the wrong; she had blundered; she hadn’t behaved with the skill and tact requisite; and to elicit from her a confession of ineptitude would make his sense of solace the more secure.
The day was a very different day from the one inApril when he had first gone to ask Mrs. Aldesey for information about people called Toner. It was early February, dull and cold and damp. No rain was falling, but the trees were thick with moisture and Oldmeadow had his hands deep in his pockets and the collar of his coat turned up about his ears. As he crossed the Serpentine, an electric brougham passed him, going slowly, and he had a glimpse within it, short but very vivid, of Adrienne, Meg, and Captain Hayward.
Adrienne, wearing a small arrangement of black velvet that came down over her brows, was holding Meg’s hand and, while she spoke, was looking steadily at her, her face as white as that of a Pierrot. Meg listened, gloomily it seemed, and Captain Hayward’s handsome countenance, turned for refuge towards the window, showed an extreme embarrassment.
They passed and Oldmeadow pursued his way, filled with a disagreeable astonishment though, absurdly, his mind was at first occupied only in an attempt to recover a submerged memory that Captain Hayward’s demeanour suggested. It came at last in an emancipating flash and he saw again, after how many years, the golden-brown head of his rather silly setter, John, turned aside in shy yet dignified repudiation, that still, by a dim, sick smile, attempted to conceal distress and to enter into the spirit of the game—as a kitten was held up for his contemplation. A kitten was a very inadequate analogy, no doubt, for the theme of Adrienne’s discourse; yet Captain Hayward’s reaction to a situation for which he found himself entirely unprepared was markedly like John’s. And he, like John, hadknown that the game was meant to be at his expense. John and Captain Hayward got Oldmeadow out of the park before he had taken full possession of his astonishment and could ask himself why, if Adrienne were engaged in rescuing Meg from her illicit attachment, she should do it in the company of the young man. Yet, strangely enough, he felt, as he walked, a growing sense of reassurance. For an emergency like this, after all, given amenable subjects, Adrienne was the right person. He hadn’t dreamed it to be such an emergency; but since it was, Adrienne would pull them through. As she would have laid her hand on the head of Bacchus and reformed him, so she would lay it on the head of Captain Hayward.
THEincident put Mrs. Aldesey quite out of his mind, and it was not till he stood on her doorstep and rang her bell that he remembered his grievance against her and realized that it had been made more definite by this glimpse of Adrienne’s significance. That his friend was prepared for him was evident at his first glance; she had even, he saw, been expecting him, for she broke out at once with: “Oh, my dear Roger—whatareyou going to do with her?”
He was actually pleased to find himself putting her, with some grimness, in her place. “What is she going to do with us? you mean. You underrate Mrs. Barney’s capacity, let me tell you, my dear friend.”
But Mrs. Aldesey was not easily quelled. “Underrate her! Not I! She’s a Juggernaut if ever there was one. Her capacity is immense. She’ll roll on and she’ll crush flat. That poor Barney! She is as blind as a Juggernaut, buthewill come to see—alas! he is seeing already—though you and I danced round him with veils and cymbals—that people won’t stand being pelted with platitudes from soup to dessert. The Lumleys will, of course; it’s their natural diet; though even they like their platitudes served with a touch ofsauce piquante; but Rosamund Pope told me that she felt black and blue all over and Cuthbert Haviland—malicious toad—imitates her already to perfection: dreadful little voice, dreadful little smile, dreadful little quotations and all. It will be one of his Londongags. That shepherdess! My dear Roger, don’t pretend to me thatyoudon’t see it!”
Oldmeadow, sunken in the chair opposite her, surveyed her over his clasped hands with an air of discouragement.
“What I’m most seeing at the moment is that she’s made you angry,” he remarked. “If what you say were all the truth, why should she make you angry? She’s not as blind as a Juggernaut. That’s where you made your mistake. She’ll only crush the people who don’t lie down before her. She knows perfectly well where she is going—and over whom. So be careful, that is my advice, and keep out of her way; unless you want to lose a toe or a finger.”
Mrs. Aldesey showed, at this, that he had arrested her. In spite of the element of truth in Adrienne’s verdict upon her he knew her to be, when veils and cymbals were cast aside, a sincere and gallant creature. She did not attempt to hide from him now and, after a moment of mutual contemplation, she laughed a little, with not unreal mirth and said: “I suppose I am angry. I suppose I’m even spiteful. It’s her patronage, you know. Her suffocating superiority. To have to stand there, for his sake, andtakeit! You overrate her, Roger. No woman not abysmally stupid could say the things she says.”
“Your mistake again. She’s able to say them because she’s never met irony or criticism. She’s not stupid,” he found his old verdict. “Only absurd. You know, you gave yourself away to her. You showed her what you thought of her. You patronizedher.”
“Isnoretaliation permitted?” Mrs. Aldesey moaned. “Must one accept it all? Be scourged with the stars and Browning and then bow one’s head toher caresses? After all, Barney is your friend, not mine, and it’s as your friend that I’ve tried to be decent to his wife. But she hates me like poison. She gave herself away, too, you know. I liked the way she excluded me from her prospects for your welfare. And of course she knew my marriage wasn’t a happy one.”
“I don’t think that she did. No; I don’t think so. Youarepoison to her—cold poison,” said Oldmeadow. “Don’t imagine for a moment she didn’t see that you were dancing about him with veils and cymbals. She didn’t give herself away, for she had nothing to conceal. She was candid and you weren’t. She didn’t pretend that you were under the stars with her; while you kept up appearances.”
“But what’s to become of your Barney if we don’t keep them up!” Mrs. Aldesey cried. “Is he to be allowed to see that nobody can stand her—except people he can’t stand? He’ll have to live, then, with Mrs. and Mr. Prentiss. Did you try to talk to Mrs. Prentiss? Do you know that she told me that death was ‘perfectly sublime’?”
“Perhaps it is. Perhaps she’ll find it so. They all seem to think well of death, out in California”—Oldmeadow allowed himself to relax from his admonitory severity. “Mrs. Prentiss isn’t as silly as she seems, I expect. And you exaggerate Barney’s sensitiveness. He’d get on very well with Mrs. Prentiss if you weren’t there to show him you found her a bore. He has a very simple side and we must hope it may become simpler. The only chance for Barney, I see it more and more, is that we should efface ourselves as much as possible. The people who find the Prentisses a bore, I mean. And it won’t be difficultfor us to do that. She will see to it that we are effaced. Only, of course, it’s a grief. I’m so fond of him”; and as Oldmeadow stretched forth his legs and put his hands in his pockets there drifted across his mind, in a thin, sharp, knife-like stroke, the memory of Barney—tall eighteen-year-old Barney—with dear old Effie, luxuriously upturned in his arms, being softly scratched—Barney’s hand with a cat was that of an expert—and told that she was the best and most beautiful of cats.
“It’s a great shame,” said Mrs. Aldesey; “I’ve been thinking my spiteful thoughts, too, instead of sympathizing with you. Of course, if it’s any consolation to you, one usually does lose one’s friends when they marry. But it needn’t have been as bad as this. What a thousand pities he couldn’t have fallen in love with a nice girl of his own kind. You couldn’t do anything about it when you went down in the spring?”
Oldmeadow had never said anything to Mrs. Aldesey about his hopes for Nancy. He had a secretive instinct for keeping his friendships in compartments and discussed only those portions that overflowed. “Nothing,” he said. “And the mischief was that I went down hostile, as you warned me against doing. Barney saw at once that I didn’t care for her; and she saw it at once. He even forced a sort of expression of opinion from me and I know now that it’s always glooming there at the back of his mind when he sees me. It was quite useless. Once he’d fallen under her spell it was all up with him. She has her singular power and, for a man in love with her, her singular charm. Even I, you know, understand that.”
Mrs. Aldesey contemplated him. “I confess I can’t,” she said. “She is so desperately usual. I’ve seen her everywhere, ever since I can remember. Attending lectures at the Sorbonne; listening to Wagner at Bayreuth; having dresses tried on at Worth’s; sitting in the halls of a hundred European hotels. She is the most unescapable form of the American woman; only notdu peuplebecause of the money and opportunity that has also extirpated everything racy, provincial and individual.”
“I don’t know,” said Oldmeadow. He mused, his hands clasped behind his head. “She’s given me all sorts of new insights.” His eyes, after his wont, were on the cornice and his friend’s contemplation, relaxed a little from its alert responsiveness, allowed itself a certain conjectural softness as she watched him. “I feel,” he went on, “since knowing her, that I understand America, her America, better than you do. You’re engaged in avoiding rather than in understanding it, aren’t you? What you underrate, what Americans of your type don’t see—because, as you say, it’s so oppressively usual—is the power of her type. If it is a type; if she is as ordinary as you say. It’s something bred into them by the American assumption of the fundamental rightness of life; a confidence unknown before in the history of the world. An individual, not an institutional or social, confidence. They do, actually, seem to take their stand on the very universe itself. Whereas the rest of us have always had churches or classes to uphold us. They have all the absurdities and crudities of mere individualism. They have all the illusions of their ignorance. Yet I sometimes imagine, after I’ve seen her, that it’s a power we haven’t in theleast taken into our reckoning. Isn’t it the only racial thing that America has produced—the only thing that makes them a race? It makes them independent of us, when we’ve always imagined, in our complacency, that they were dependent. It enables them to take what we have to give, but to do with it what they, not we, think best. And by Jove, who knows how far it will carry them! Not you, my dear Lydia. You’ll stay where you are—with us.”
His eyes had come back and down to her, and her gaze resumed its alertness and showed him that she found the picture he drew disquieting. “You mean it’s a new kind of civilization that will menace ours?”
“It’s not a civilization; that’s just what it’s not. It’s a state of mind. Perhaps it will menace us. Perhaps it does. We’ve underrated it; of that I’m sure; and underrated power is always dangerous. It will be faith without experience against experience without faith. What we must try for, if we’re not to be worsted, is to have both—to keep experience and to keep faith, too. Only so shall we be able to hold our own against Mrs. Barney. And even so we shan’t be able to prevent her doing things to us—and for us. She’ll do things for us that we can’t do for ourselves.” His mind reverted to the faces of the brougham. “In that way she’s bound to worst us. We’ll have to accept things from her.”
Oldmeadow’s eyes had gone back to the cornice and, in the silence that followed, Mrs. Aldesey, as she sat with folded arms, played absently with the lace ruffle at her wrist. The lace was an heirloom, like her rings, and the contemplation of them may have afforded her some sustainment. “She’s made you feel all that, then,” she remarked. “With hercrook and her hat and her rose-wreathed lamb. If such a sardonic old lion as you does really grow bodeful before the rose-wreathed lamb there is, I own, reason to fear for the future. I’m glad I’m growing old. It would hurt me to see her cutting your claws.”
“Oh, she won’t hurt us!” Oldmeadow smiled at her. “It’s rather we who will hurt her—by refusing to lie down with her lamb. If that’s any comfort to you.”
“Not in the least. I’m not being malicious. You don’t call it hurt, then, to be effaced?”
“Smothered in rose-leaves, eh?” he suggested. “It would be suffocating rather than suffering. She does give me that feeling. But you’ll make her suffer—you have, you know—rather than she you.”
“I really don’t know about that,” said Mrs. Aldesey. “You make me quite uncomfortable, Roger. You make me superstitious. She’s done that to me already. I refuse to take her seriously, but I shall avoid her. That’s what it comes to. Like not giving the new moon a chance to look at you over your left shoulder.”
ONa morning in early March Oldmeadow found, among the letters waiting for him on his breakfast-table, one from Nancy. Nancy and he, with all their fondness, seldom wrote to each other and he was aware, on seeing her writing, of the presage of something disagreeable that the unexpected often brings.