“Where is your own, Cynthia, my dear?” Lewis’ voice was oddly constrained, Cynthia thought, wondering at it. “Why don’t you look at Petra for yourself? It’s obvious you never have. You’ve supinely accepted Clare’s version of her, without using your own intelligence.”
“Clare’s version of Petra! But haven’t I just been saying that Clare is absolutely loyal to Petra? She defends her, every time. She even goes so far as to call her sullen silences ‘reticence.’ And her vanity—Petra’s obsessed over clothes, thinks of nothing else—Clare merely treats that as touchingly young and naïve. Or else she pretends that it’s evidence of artistic appreciation and taste. But if that’s what it is, why doesn’t it show itself in other directions, now and then? I’ve never seen it. Why, the other day I mentioned something in her father’s last novel, and Petra had to admit she hadn’t even read it! Imagine! No, whatever Clare pretends to herself and the rest of us about it, Petra is just plain dull.... One is sorry for Clare, of course....”
Lewis was keeping only a tenuous hold on his good temper. “How can you be so dull yourself?” he asked. “She—Petra—is as far from dull as any human being I’ve ever had the honor to know. I suppose you’ve seen her nowhere but against the general unreality of Green Doors. That’s the ‘background’ your Clare has given the child.... Petra’s truth, against her background’s untruth, has bewildered you. It hasn’t me....” He lighted a fresh cigarette.
Cynthia flapped her arms and burst into as good animitation of a rooster crowing as is possible to the human species. It was an accomplishment retained from childhood. In those early days it had been, usually, the closing note in some argument between brother and sister, where Cynthia had been proven the winner; and now, if ever, she knew herself right.
“You lose! I win!” she laughed, dropping her wings. “What good does it do you to be a psychiatrist? And a famous one? Petra and truth! That girl would as soon tell an out-and-out lie as wink. Clare never knows where she is with her when it’s a question of fact.”
“Oh, so Clarehasadmitted that much—not excused it?”
“Not a bit of it. You haven’t caughtme, darling, in a fib. Clare couldn’t excuse it or cover it up. It’s too obvious. Petra is always avoiding the truth.”
“Yes. I got a hint of that myself this afternoon. Couldn’t help it.”
But now that so suddenly and even surprisingly Lewis had acknowledged her victorious in the scrimmage, Cynthia felt a little remorseful. Not on Lewis’ account—he could afford his losses—on Petra’s.
“I needn’t have been so malicious!” she owned. “Come to think of it, I suppose Petra Farwell’s never had one atom of religious training. What is there to make her feel an obligation to be truthful—or even grateful, for the matter of that? She’s never had a chance to see life lived beautifully—till now.”
“But who of us has had religious training?” Lewisasked, surprised. “You haven’t. I certainly haven’t. Your own children haven’t. What’s that got to do with your judgments on Petra, then?”
“Oh, don’t be so logical, darling. I was only making excuses for her, I suppose. But we are different, you must admit. Lying doesn’t come natural to us, does it! And we are sincere....”
“Doesn’t it? Are we? Well—possibly. But then we are at peace with our environment. Not in danger from it. Our best policy is sincerity, telling the truth. If we were living in a jungle, my dear, an unfriendly and mysterious jungle, where we couldn’t tell the trees from the shadows, you know, we’d fall back on protective coloring and other hypocrisies, lies, wouldn’t we? That’s where Petra’s living. In a jungle. Where she can’t tell the shadows from the trees, if you want to know....”
“You’re being fantastic on purpose. Or else you’re overworking and not responsible!” Cynthia accused and then, suddenly, stopped breathing. How had they ever got to talking like this, so earnestly, about Petra Farwell? Lewis, anyway, who never talked personalities! What had happened to him? Why was he looking so strained and different? Was Lewis really interested in Petra Farwell for herself—in some particular way?
For years Cynthia had wanted Lewis to marry. Her husband agreed with her that, unmarried, the world was losing much that her famous brother could give it. He was terribly sweet with children. Her own four adored him. And some of his best and most famous work hadbeen done with children. Besides, he was—although Cynthia herself, being only his sister, could not quite see why—extraordinarily magnetic to women. They pursued him shamelessly. Avoiding that pursuit, both in his work and socially, had developed into something approximating an art in his contacts, Cynthia imagined. So he had a world to choose from. If only he had met Clare before Lowell Farwell met her! Cynthia had sighed this sigh to herself before to-night. Clare would have been perfect. But there were others. There must be. Lewis needn’t fall back on a Petra—a sullen, stodgy young beauty, who wasn’t even enough of a personality herself to appreciate personality in another, in Clare. If Lewis should be hypnotized by mere beauty and youth, and do anything so stupid,—how simply ironic that would be!
Catching back her breath, Cynthia descended precipitately from her perch on the piazza rail. She wanted to be nearer Lewis. Physical nearness might help their sympathetic nearness, which had been—she knew now—scattered to the four winds when she flapped rooster wings and crowed a minute ago. Besides, she had an inspiration. She drew a chair close to his. The arms of the two chairs touched.
“Lewis!” she said. “Do you remember that strange book, ‘Phantastes,’ by George MacDonald? We read it together the summer after Father died. No, it was the summer before. Aunt Cynthia read it to us. Those weeks we stayed with her. That was the summerbeforeFather died, wasn’t it? Anyway, we were really too young forthat book. But we got something out of it. I remember parts quite vividly, every now and then.... Particularly that gruesome bit about the Maid of the Alder. Remember that? How she was so perfectly beautiful to look at? Anodos thought so, anyway. And he went with her that long walk through the forest and spent the night with her in her cave? He thought she was the Lady of the Marble—or was it Alabaster?—whom he had sung to life and who had fled from him. He had never clearly seen her face but she was his ideal woman, the woman his soul was seeking. Now he thought he was to possess her at last.... But when morning came and he woke, his companion of the night had waked ahead of him and was at the door of the cave, standing there, looking out. Her back was turned to him.... Remember?... She had had her desire of Anodos and she simply didn’t care now if he discovered that she was not his ideal woman? She was perfectly careless that he should see how she was hollow! Do you remember her standing there, in the cave door, looking out into the forest—her hollow, rotten back, like the stump of a decayed tree? Like a coffin stood upon end? Wasn’t it gruesome just!”
Cynthia was genuinely shuddering by this time. Lewis laughed. “I should say I do remember. That morning-after scene darkened my boyhood,” he chuckled. “I’ve read ‘Phantastes’ through several times since that summer. I keep it by me. I can’t imagine—can you?—why Aunt Cynthia chose that particular book for youngsters like us? I suppose because of its fairy element—the enchantedforest, and all. To my mind, it’s one of the world’s deepest, wisest, but almost too obscurely mystical books. Doyouremember, Cynthia, how one begins to feel the horror threatening Anodos’ soul’s life, early, in the very beginning of this Maid of the Alder business, when he starts off with her on the walk to the cave? Your first twinges of horror and dread for Anodos set in when she takes such precautions to keep her face always squarely toward him, walking backwards to accomplish it, when necessary! Then, when they at last reach the cave, she makes him go inaheadof her. Inside, she always keeps her back to the wall. How horrible it is when the lamp shines through her! Anodos should have guessed then that she was hollow!... It is a nightmare....”
“But Lewis! I meant—I’m afraid I meant—that Petra Farwell, young girl though she is, has several times made me remember the Maid of the Alder. I haven’t just made it up now. Truly. I thought of it the last time I was at Green Doors. We were there for dinner....”
“Petra—the Maid of the Alder! You’re a little mad! But it’s rather a curious coincidence that I myself have been brooding on ‘Phantastes’ very lately, this afternoon, in fact, at Green Doors and apropos of Petra too. Fact! Do you remember Anodos’ song to his ideal woman—the genuine one, not the imitation—through her shrouding marble? It says how the world’s sculptors in their search for her have succeeded in embodying in theircreations no more than their ideas of what she may be. They’ve never taken hold of her living self. I even remember some lines. Bless me if I don’t!
“Round their visions, form enduring,Marble vestments thou hast thrown;But thyself, in silence winding,Thou has kept eternally;Thee they found not, many finding—I have found thee: wake for me.”
“Round their visions, form enduring,
Marble vestments thou hast thrown;
But thyself, in silence winding,
Thou has kept eternally;
Thee they found not, many finding—
I have found thee: wake for me.”
Lewis murmuring poetry in the dusk! And with the little curly smile that with him, paradoxically, meant utterest sincerity in what he was saying, even solemnity! Cynthia’s heart beat slowly and with a kind of awe at the simplicity of the way in which Lewis’ curly smile and his poetry had shut her up, permanently, on the subject of Petra. The whole situation—trivial and really nothing at all to Cynthia until only a minute ago—had between a breath and a breath been lifted to the dignity of a position on the knees of the gods, where she must perforce leave it to its own developments in that realm of pure fatality. And she thought they had been talking lightly!
But now her brother was asking—casual again, thank goodness—“Have the kids gone up to bed yet? I’m terribly afraid I promised ’em a yarn after they were packed away and that model starched nurse you indict on ’em was well out of the picture. They’ll be looking for me.”
Lewis was pledged to return to Green Doors at ten o’clock that evening. Cynthia and Harry, Clare was aware, had made plans which would keep their cherished guest occupied for all of Sunday, and he could not come then. This was the only time left. She had made the rendezvous under cover of walking up to the house with Lewis when he was leaving Green Doors this afternoon. He was to let himself in by the wicket gate and she would meet him on the terrace, for Petra was not to know that he had come back. Dick had explained her scheme to him, had he not?
Yes, Dick had explained, and while at the time of the explanation Lewis had had no intention of collaborating with Mrs. Farwell in any schemes whatever, now he agreed to return for a “talk.” Anything that touched Petra’s existence would have drawn him irresistibly back.
The great hall was wide open onto the terrace tonight, as it had been this afternoon. It made an excellent ballroom. It was a small party and every one was inside,dancing. At least, as Lewis came up onto it, the terrace seemed deserted.
His eyes found Petra first of all. She was dancing with a tall, dark youth, over a restricted area in the center of the floor. Lewis saw that the other girls were like flowers in the black-coated arms of their partners—scarlet flowers, blue, yellow, exotically scented. Or was the perfume from the flowers on the terrace? In any case, it harmonized with the exotic music. But the girls themselves seemed too fragile for the voluptuous implications of the perfume and the music. They were flowers drifting on the dark current of sensuousness with petals not yet sodden.
Lewis was amused at himself over his fancifulness but it continued to spin itself along. If the girls there were flowers, the boys were leaves. And the leaves, no more than the flowers, belonged to the dark current under the music; they were merely eddying over its surface, vacant and bemused. It was strangely unreal, unconvincing—both the would-be savage music and the would-be voluptuous dancing.
But Petra was different. His eyes came back to her. She was not bemused and she was too alive to drift. So her dancing was out of key and came near to awkwardness. Given solid earth, she could run fleetly, beautifully, Lewis was certain,—a Diana, spirit and body one. But she was too alive and too vital to find herself in this syncopated dalliance with a shadow world of sensuousness. Passion, for her to recognize it, must be bright,whole, burning with sun. Lewis was not amused now at his thought. He knew what he knew about Petra, and his heart offered up a gratitude that was religious in the knowing.
Clare stole up and stood beside him. She had been watching for his arrival, sitting with Dick in the shadow of a tall flower-grown urn. She had sent the young man back to the party peremptorily and with some excitement the instant the older and more eminent visitor appeared.
“Aren’t they precious!” she exclaimed, her fingers just touching Lewis’ arm. “All of them! But my Petra in particular? In that frosty gown!—Come to the library. We can’t talk against this racket. Lowell’s in town speaking to a meeting of the Boston Authors’ Club, otherwise he would be hiding in the library himself. He detests jazz. Except when your brother-in-law plays it. Harry’s jazz is superb. He makes it art!”
The library was a surprisingly small room but its walls rose through two stories with books all the way up to the high ceiling. A mild, yellow and diffused light, radiating from unseen sources, would make reading here—even at the top of the book ladder—as easy for the eyes as if it were broad day.
Clare settled herself in a corner of the very low, built-in modern divan which extended down one entire length of the room, and Lewis, obedient to her gesture, sat down, experimentally, beside her. He had had little practice with modernistic furniture such as this, which, he was learning now, demanded a new technique inposture, unless one were built on angular lines and accustomed to lolling. It would quite suit Farwell, for instance, whose divan it was. But Lewis, who was stocky rather than angular, found himself having to bend in all the wrong places to adapt himself to it. Mrs. Farwell, however, was perfectly at home. She had drawn her feet up under her, Japanese fashion, and sat now perched on her heels, wand-straight, small and exquisite. But then, she was as supple-bodied as a child and as poised as a dancer in every attitude that she assumed.
“I am really delighted,” she was saying, “that you have come, like this. If I had gone into town some day, instead, and seen you in your office, everything would have been so different. I should have had totellyou about things. We may have saved weeks, don’t you think so, Doctor Pryne, in getting you here where you can see it all for yourself and needn’t draw it out bit by bit with questions?”
Clare’s evening gown was flame-colored taffeta, her jewels pearls, her feet—out of sight but remembered—were sandal-shod with gold heels, curved like dagger blades. It was an elegance in striking contrast to the simplicity and seeming carelessness of her afternoon’s appearance. But Lewis felt no contrast. It was all of the same piece: all part of the game. And when he looked away from her, which he did rather quickly in very shame for the ungenerosity of every thought he seemed able to think concerning Petra’s stepmother, it was only to find her voice increasing his prejudice. No matterwhat ideas her words in themselves conveyed, certain inflections in the tones seemed to be asking over and over, “What do you think of me, what do you think of me,what do you think of me?” It was the eager and unappeasable cry of an insatiate vanity. Lewis hated himself for hearing it so plainly; but his nerves were taut. When had Doctor Pryne allowed himself the excuse of nerves before! Yet to be so near Petra and shut away in here with Mrs. Farwell!
He wound his arms around his knees. That was it. That was what you had to do to come to terms with this fantastic divan. Stick your knees up, almost to your chin, and then not to be altogether too orang-utan-like, wind your arms. The only alternative would be to sit on your feet, as his hostess was doing.
“There wouldn’t have been any need for you to come to my office,” he said. “Not to talk about Petra. She is the last person in the world, to my mind, to need psychiatric treatment.” He might as well get this part over quickly, Lewis felt.
Clare was surprised by the dry conviction with which Lewis spoke, but she was not warned. She swayed toward him, from her heels, and put her hand on his arm. The gesture was as unselfconscious, and un-sex-conscious, as if she were a child of ten. Lewis was aware of her unconsciousness all the time that her fingers stayed there, pressing into his coat sleeve, and her soft warm breath was almost on his cheek. He wondered whether she pawed Dick like this, with casual unselfconsciousness,—andwhether Dick found it engagingly innocent. Dick was just the sort of romantic youth—Lewis hadn’t needed Cynthia to explain Dick to him—to confuse sexual paucity with purity.
“Oh, but you don’t understand what we meant then, Richard and I,” she protested. “Psychiatry—anyway as you practise it, Doctor Pryne—is not for diseased minds merely. Petra is terribly sane. Saner than I am, I’m certain of that. It is something less tangible I am asking your help with. I want you to make it possible for my stepdaughter to be true to herself and to be happy.—That wasn’t Petra’s true self you saw this afternoon. I know, Doctor, that it is your faith, as much as it is mine, that most people want to find themselves and be true to themselves, to their best selves, I mean, if only they can be shown how. If youhadn’tthat faith in human nature, then you couldn’t do for people what you do. You see I know something about your work. Mrs. Dickerman is one of my intimate friends. Cornelia James too. I’ve known Cornie ever since we were at Miss Foster’s School together. So I know, for I have seen, how you took at least one woman and made her into a charming, agreeable person when she was over thirty. Why, Cornie was the most morbid, oversensitive and unhappy soul until you began treating her!—And even if I hadn’t seen these miracles, I’d still know from reading your books what you can do for people in the way of orientating them with their own highest potentialities. And all I am asking, Doctor Pryne, is that you should do that for myPetra. You do believe, don’t you, that it isn’t natural to her—can’t be natural to any one—to be so secretive and indifferent as she seems? Not at nineteen, anyway! And with Lowell Farwell for a father—and I so devoted to her!”—Clare’s fingers had relaxed their steady pressure but she was slow to remove them from Lewis’s coat sleeve.
Lewis might have laughed. He frowned to save himself from doing so; for it would not have been a pleasant laugh and the frown was, at least, silent. Clare was not the first blasphemous wealthy woman who had tried, casually and even patronizingly, to buy his services as a cure of souls for themselves or members of their family. But in this instance it was Petra’s reserve—that clean, sword-edged reserve—he was being asked to violate. Yes, this woman was looking forward to his pulling Petra all apart, like the works of a clock, and laying the pieces on the table, for them to mull over together.
He could hear Mrs. Lowell Farwell expatiating on it to her next dinner partner. Yet, no. She would hardly do that. It would be worth saving until the conversation was general. “Oh, yes. Doctor Pryne is psychoanalyzing my stepdaughter. He is frightfully interested in her case. It is too wonderful what he has done for her already. She’s a different person. Oh, but you must know who he is! Doctor Lewis Pryne! He wrote ‘Learning to be Adult.’”
Oh, yes! Mrs. Farwell would exploit it for all it wasworth at dinners, luncheons, teas and in the arms of dancing partners for weeks to come, while all the time the inflections in her voice demanded, “What do you think of me, what do you think of me, what do you think ofme now?”
Only, of course she would not—because she could not. Fortunately she had come to the wrong counter. Lewis had nothing to sell her—but, on second thoughts, something, possibly, that he would give her for nothing; for it had suddenly occurred to him that if he failed her entirely to-night, she might try elsewhere. Therewerepsychoanalysts quite the sort she imagined him to be, of course. Would Petra, with Mrs. Farwell setting her heart on it, have the hardihood to stand out against going through the fashionable paces of being psychoanalyzed? He must do what he could to avoid such a possible calamity.
“This question of finding one’s self,” he murmured,—“it’s living one’s life, isn’t it, that accomplishes that, in the end? Petra is too young to have found herself in that sense, of course. But she is old enough, on the other hand, to want to. That may be the conflict, the cause of all her ‘indifference’ to you and her life here. She said something to me this afternoon about wanting to go to business school and be independent. Wouldn’t her father send her? That would be cheaper, anyway, and infinitely more sensible than having her psychoanalyzed. She could get quite away from Green Doors. Live in theGirls’ Studio Club—or perhaps even set up an apartment with some girl friend....” He was, of course, thinking of Teresa.
It had the effect, anyway, of removing Mrs. Farwell’s hand from his arm. She was back in her corner, looking at him with surprise and even doubt.
“Petra didn’t tell you that she wanted to get away from Green Doors and all I am doing for her here? Did she? Petra didn’t actually say—this afternoon, the minute you were alone with her—that she was unhappy? Did she? I simply don’t understand, Doctor Pryne!”
“But why are you surprised?” Lewis evaded. “I gathered from young Wilder when he came to my office on Thursday that that was how things were with Petra. You felt she was abnormally indifferent to you, he said, and to all the nice things you were trying to do for her and to give her. But, do you know, now I’ve seen Petra, that indifference seems perfectly healthy to me? She is, after all, not a child. She’s a woman.Lether learn a profession and be independent! Why not?”
Mrs. Farwell was growing wider and wider eyed. Then suddenly Lewis knew what he should have guessed: Clare had never really believed that Petra was antagonistic to her. She had thought her indifference and reticence merely temperamental idiosyncrasies. In fact, she had in all sincerity thought Petra what she had made Cynthia think her, a girl deficient in sensibility. So she was only tampering with Petra’s temperament, or rather, asking Lewis to tamper with it, for the sake of drawinghim—Doctor Lewis Pryne—into the Farwells’ “interesting” circle. Modern morbid psychology was much in the air these days. Being psychoanalyzed by “well-known” doctors had become a fashionable pastime. Having one’s stepdaughter, to whom one was in every way so marvelously generous, psychoanalyzed, and then oneself discussing the case in the wings, as it were, with the famous psychiatristad infinitum, would be a new way to play the game.
A strained laugh from Clare interrupted Lewis’ bitter train of thought. “I am afraid Petra has been deceiving you, rather,” she exclaimed. “What Ican’tunderstand is how she managed it, and in so short a time, with you, who are so—so wise. She must have deliberately set out to engage your sympathies the minute I left her alone with you. But why? And as for a girl like Petra living at the Studio Club—after Green Doors—can you imagine it, really? Don’t tell meshesuggested that!”
“Perhaps not,” Lewis answered. “As a matter of fact, she would be more restricted in her freedom there than here, I suppose. But with a friend, then—in an apartment—”
Again the laugh. “You don’t know Petra, Doctor Pryne! She hasn’t an intimate friend to her name. I invite girls here, of course, all the time. They come, enjoy themselves with each other and the boys, and invite Petra to their homes in return. But as for friends, she simply doesn’t make them. She hasn’t the gift offriendship. It’s one of my worries about her,—one of the things I thought your analysis of her might cure!”
“But there’s Teresa. That’s one friend, at least, Teresa—” Too late Lewis knew himself a traitor to Petra’s confidences, and broke off, embarrassed and sorry. But to his great relief, Clare seemed not to have even heard. She was repeating, but almost as if for her own ears, and very softly, “I don’t understand. Petra took you to the guest house to show you the river view. That is all the time you two were together. And in that short while Petra conveyed to you that she was unhappy here and wanted to get away. Why, it’s unbelievable! How could even Petra be quite so—so outrageous as that!”
“But mightn’t Petra think it a little outrageous of us, of you and me, to be discussing her here now, as we are doing?” Lewis inquired reasonably. “Why shouldn’tshebe wounded—and angry? I don’t see any difference, really....”
Shock dried the tears, just gathered, from the widened eyes which were turned on him. If Clare had taken anything for granted, as certain to result from to-day’s anticipated contact with this supposedly brilliant psychiatrist, it was that he would be deeply impressed by her beautiful disinterested kindness toward this girl who had no natural claim on her whatever. But from the very first minute, so Clare began to think now, Doctor Pryne had missed everything of what should have been obvious to him. He had no subtlety then! But if this were true,why was everybody so mad about him and how could he be a successful doctor of souls! That was what Lowell called him, and he was even talking of putting him into his next novel,—disguised, of course. And then the miracles he worked! You simply had to have penetration of some sort, understanding of some sort, to do for personalities what he had done for Julia Dickerman, Cornie and all the rest! But even without any extraordinary amount of penetration you would expect him to see that it was both disloyal and cheap for Petra to have confided in him as she must have done this afternoon, the very minute they were alone together.
Suddenly Clare gave up the idea of being hurt by Petra’s astounding disloyalty. She would be too generous, too big to think of herself in the situation at all. But she understood now that she would have tosayto this man whatever it was she wanted him to know. No use trusting to his discerning anything! That was what Petra had done, apparently. Said things. Simply because Petra had said things, Doctor Pryne had believed them—and that in spite of all that he should have seen and all that Clare had meant him to see for himself! Well, she—Clare—would have to descend to Petra’s crude methods. She would explain herself to this exasperating person in words and expound her relations with Petra. But she would leave the malice to Petra. The very contrast between her generosity and Petra’s smallness ought to speak for itself. He simply could not be so obtuse as to miss that much—or could he?
She refrained from touching him, although her impulse had again been to put her fingers on his arm. Instinctively she had a minute ago come to feel that physical contact made this particular man uncomfortable. But the urgency of Clare’s fingers’ pressure was transferred to her voice when she said:
“I am afraid that you have begun by misunderstanding almost everything, Doctor Pryne. But it doesn’t matter. I mean, it doesn’t matter that you consider Petra justified in her attitude toward me and what I am trying to do for her, as you seem to. What does matter—all that I care about at all—is Petra’s good. It is for her own sake I want her to become adjusted and happy, an integrated personality. It is not for my sake. Not even for her father’s. And if you are right and I ought to give her up, let her go away,—why, then I hope I am unselfish enough to let her try it. But why business school—of all things, for a daughter of Lowell Farwell’s? It will be interesting to know.”
But she gave Lewis no chance to answer that. She hurried on:
“First you must tell me everything she said to you. I don’t mean what she may have said about Green Doors, her home here, or me. No, I am afraid hearing that would hurt too much. But what she wanted different. Let us just concentrate on the positive side of things and let the negative go.... You see, even if you won’t take her as a patient, in the way I hoped you would take her, I still need your advice, your wisdom, Doctor. Forin those brief moments you were alone with my stepdaughter, you seem to have come nearer to understanding her than I have in the years of our close association. You made her articulate for once. That in itself is something. Petra, articulate!”
She paused there, but only to draw Lewis’ glance to her face. “You see, my husband can’t help me with Petra.” Her eyes probed in the shallows of Lewis’ cold, sleepy gaze. “He is out of it, even if she is his own daughter. There is almost nothing of sympathy between them. That is what I have been working for, ever since my marriage, to help them to a more happy relationship. I have dreamed that Lowell might come to love the daughter of his youth as he loves our little Sophia. He adores the baby. But that, I am afraid, is merely because she is mine, and her very existence makesmemore his. That is the way it is in happy marriages, of course. Father-love is all bound up in the father’s love for the mother. But Lowell, you see, loved Petra’s mother (if you can call it love)—well, differently—and that is why Petra herself—I have figured it out—means so little to him....”
Again Clare kept her fingers from Lewis’ coat sleeve but she actually clutched her hands on her lap to accomplish it. And she swayed toward him, her eyes insisting on holding his cold gaze. Her whole vivid, quicksilver face was alive with her intention to make Lewis her ally, to win from him something at last, of what she had intended to win when she invited him back to-night.
“Do you mind my telling you intimate things like this?” she asked naively. “I had meant to tell them and had everything—all the information you could need—organized, you see. Even now, when you say that Petra doesn’t need psychoanalyzing, I still rather want to tell you. Before you are sure you are right about the wisdom of Petra’s leaving her father and me, giving up her life here with all its advantages, you ought to know a little more about the child herself, don’t you think? I see now—you have let me see—that my Petra herself, as a person, interests you, quite aside from your psychiatry. And I am grasping at that interest as at a straw, Doctor. I am so alone in my concern for this child and in my dreams for her! I’m not mistaken? Youareinterested, aren’t you?” This time at last the lady required an answer—waited for it.
“Yes, I am very much interested,” Lewis admitted, after a mere instant’s hesitation. But all the same he looked toward the door. If only Petra herself would appear there! Come in, in her frosty gown! Interrupt this really silly performance. He did not need any one to explain Petra to him. It was her presence he wanted. One meeting of their eyes had told him more than all the volumes Mrs. Lowell Farwell could say with that overtone in her voice which insisted on bending his understanding to her own interpretations of Petra—or more subtly yet, what she meant him to think were her interpretations. Really he could not doubt that Clare must know, as simply as he knew, that Petra did not needeither of them; the integration of her young self was a perfected accomplishment and all the more perfected for having the seal of her reticence upon it.
Suddenly now Lewis knew why the blue gentians, there in the Cambridge apartment where first he saw Petra, had stayed so sharply etched on his memory. Petra herself was like a blue gentian,—a secret, brave flower springing from an arid soil. Lewis remembered “The Wind Boy,” a story he had bought lately for his nephews and read through before giving them. The little girl in that story was named Gentian, and her brother explained it: “Father always said that one small gentian had all the sky folded around in its soft fringes. Gentian magic. Cold and frost don’t scare it, for it has the whole sky held close to give it company and heart....” Well, that was true of Petra, just as it was true of the little girl in the fairy tale. But what made it true, how Petra had appropriated the blue sky and held its secrets as her own, where she had lain hold of it,—that Lewis could not guess.
Clare at this moment was vastly encouraged by the light which played—palpably—over the doctor’s lips and almost rose in his cold sleepy eyes This was approaching the way she had imagined things would go between them when they really got to talking intimately, and he began to see her in the way she intended he should see her. Before she was through with telling him about Petra to-night—the excuse for the tête-à-tête—this light of appreciation and admiration for herselfwould have become established unequivocally in the cold sleepy eyes. She had not a moment’s doubt of it. Nothing in past experience had instilled trepidation or the imagination of the possibility of failure into this sex-unconscious flirt whose line (she acknowledged it to herself and was quite simply proud of it) was spiritualrapportwith interesting male personalities in the higher areas of contact. If passion developed in the course of these spiritual contacts, it was merely a sign, on a slightly lower plane, that all had gone well in the upper airs. It was a sign, in fact, that Clare’s vanity, though not her senses, ultimately demanded.
Her eyes fell from Lewis’ cold eyes to his mouth. She thought cleverly (she was far from stupid): “It’s a face of frozen passion. Not cold. It is all there. But frozen by asceticism.”
She was suddenly, hardly understanding why herself, extraordinarily excited.
Lewis continued to see a blue gentian etched on air, all the while Clare told him about Petra. But he heard her, well enough, in spite of the vision he was contemplating, and outwardly he was attentive.
“Lowell was frightfully young when he married Petra’s mother. And the attraction between them—it’s almost inevitable in early marriages like that, I suppose—was merely physical. So, when he waked up to that, it wasn’t nearly enough, not for a person like Lowell Farwell, anyway. But the only reason one need even remember that early tragedy is the way it still affects Petra. Her father got the idea, almost from the day she was born, that she was her mother over again. She was physically like her, in the first place. They say that Ann was a great beauty. Lowell says she was even more beautiful than Petra. But it wasn’t the physical resemblance that repelled Lowell most and still hurts. It was her mind and temperament. He got the idea that Petra had a commonplace mind, ordinary. Like her mother. And now, nineteen years after, she is still for him an echo—areverberation—of an old disappointment. It seems cruel, I know. But he can’t help himself, and one can understand, don’t you think?
“I understand, anyway. And it is appalling to think that if Petra’s mother hadn’t happened to die, Lowell might still be bound to her. She was puritanical or fundamentalist or something. Whatever the particular cult was, it was stupid and narrow and forbade divorce. She thought herself religious! Imagine calling such cruelty religion! But Providence had mercy, if she didn’t. She didn’t believe in birth control any more than she did in divorce, and she died when the second child was born, when Petra was only one year old. That, if anything, gives you the picture of how impossible Petra’s mother made things for her young, penniless, genius-husband—having another child right away. But the new baby was premature and fortunately lived only a little while.
“Lowell was through with marriage, he thought then, for all time. His religious wife had seared his faith in the sweetness of it as a human relation. But though seared, his faith was not actually destroyed. It has never been destroyed. Lowell Farwell has been bigger than the things life has done to him. Six or seven years later he saw Elsa Larsen in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at Munich. Elsa Larsen’s acting was beautiful enough to break your heart. When she stuck to Shakespeare, anyway. She was really a great actress, even if this country never woke up to her. Did you ever see her? I saw her first in Munich, when I was a young girl. I spent the year I wastwelve abroad with my mother. We went to the National Theater dozens of times to see Elsa Larsen in her Shakespeare roles. I never dreamed then that I should marry her husband one day! I may even have seen him, without knowing or remembering, in the theater. They were married inside of a week after they met. It was a perfectly wild marriage, of course. The result of utter loneliness on his part, mad infatuation on hers.
“Larsen killed herself. Yes, I know it isn’t known. And itisshocking. But she did it. She ran the car into those park gates on purpose. She meant to kill Lowell at the same time. He was begging her to get a divorce from him or let him get it, and she simply lost her head and drove straight into the gates. She saw that they were closed in plenty of time to have swerved. Lowell is certain of it.
“But what I want you to see and think about, Doctor, is Petra, of course. They put her in boarding school and she stayed there vacations and all, the few years till the so-called accident. But when poor Marian made Lowell think he had compromised her—yes, every one except Lowell himself, it seems, pretty well understood that little drama Marian staged at the Tillotsons’ house party—well, when Marian became Petra’s second stepmother, there wasn’t enough money to keep the child on at boarding school. Larsen spent all she earned and left nothing. They lived huddled up in that dreary little apartment in Cambridge with only one servant to do the work. How Marian hated it! She never lifted her hand for Petraor gave her a thought, except to resent her being there at all, one could see. But the thing Marian has really to blame herself for, to my mind, is the way she left the child to the sole companionship of whatever general-housework girl happened to be in possession of the place at the time. I myself was so appalled at seeing what Petra’s life was like when I met them, that even if I hadn’t fallen head over heels in love with Lowell I should have married him, almost, to rescue his daughter. All that was maternal in me was roused and fighting. That day I met you there—remember?—my heart was broken for Petra....
“So now you can see why I can’t blame Petra for any seeming disloyalty she may have displayed this afternoon in the talk you had with her. She has never known what it was to be loved before. How should she be counted on to return it, or even to be loyal to it? It is asking too much—even after three years, I think. But you see why I am grateful for your interest in her, and why I am ready, almost without questioning it, to act on any advice you care to give—now that you know the child’s miserable history.”
As she had been talking, Clare’s eyes had now and then been starry with tears, and on the final words one or two actually fell. She wiped them away, quite simply, with a handkerchief. She had no need to consider her make-up, as she never wore any.
Lewis withdrew his thought from a blue gentian, etched on air. He untied himself somehow and struggledup from his low place at Clare’s side. He asked if he might smoke. Clare had not remembered to offer him a cigarette because she herself did not smoke any more than she used make-up; but at once she was all charming apologies for her neglect and motioned him toward the supply near at hand. But Lewis, apologetic himself, preferred his own variety. He got out his case, lit a Lucky, took a deep inhalation,—and laughed.
Clare did not understand the laugh, considering all she had been saying to him—and her tears. But she waited. She had done what she could to make herself clear to him and it was his turn now. He must have some reaction other than that ambiguous laugh to all that she had said—andlooked—during the past minutes.
He was pacing back and forth before the long divan, his hands deep in the already sagging pockets of his tweed jacket. They did not dress for dinner at the Allens, and Lewis was in Meadowbrook without his dress clothes. But when after a few seconds of this rather surprising behavior, the man whirled and stood before her, looking down at her, his face, at last, was beginning to mirror something—she was almost certain—of what she was. Clare thought she saw her generosity reflected in Doctor Pryne’s face as in a mirror. And on account of that true reflection of herself, she forgave him all the bewilderment and uncertainty he had for just a little while caused her. It was rather wonderful having his cold, sleepy eyes no longer cold and sleepy but aware ofher. She had known all along of course that Doctor Lewis Pryne was a person of rare power and magnetism, but until this instant she had missed the biting tang of actually feeling it. To her own surprise her heart beat fast. Madly!
“Are you serious?” he was asking. “Do you really want advice from me? For I know what I would do in your place and I would do it like a shot. Shall I say?”
She looked back up at him. Was this hypnotism? She felt excitedly supine—submissive—open to this man’s will....
Her eyes, grave—and she herself knew how lovely!—promised him she was ready to do whatever he said.
“Very well.”—But how dry his voice sounded! And already he had stopped looking at her!—“First of all, I should cut off that absurd allowance. Two thousand a year, Petra said it was, and just for clothes! And then I should encourage her to take the job waiting for her in my office. It’s a good job. It can begin on Monday morning at nine o’clock. And I wouldn’t fuss any more about trying to create sympathy between father and daughter. It is too late. The time is past. Petra has had, I suppose, a pretty bad deal from the beginning, but from now on she ought to be her own environment maker. You can’t possibly go on doing it for her. Have you ever heard the phrase: ‘Environment is hidden identity’? I believe that that is perfectly true of any personality, given half a chance. It’s time Petra had her chance. Marriage and a home where she herself is the protecting force—that’sthe ultimate answer. But as a stop-gap right now, a job. That’s what I think.”
Clare had sent for Petra and they were waiting. Lewis wandered over to the massive, built-in library table. It was shaped like a scimitar. The last words in biography, essays, poetry and fiction of two continents seemed to be here under his hand, most of the volumes still in their bizarre paper jackets. In the midst of the bright jumble stood two large heavy silver frames holding photographs. One was Clare, the other Petra. Petra was in evening dress and her posture and expression must have been dictated by the photographer. The eyes in particular were self-conscious and static in their inexpressive trance. The mouth alone was sentient, not even the stare of the photographer and the camera together having succeeded in betraying it into insincerity. Clare’s photographed face, on the other hand, was vibrant, with just the hint of a candid smile dawning in eyes and lips. She was not in evening dress but had been taken in a simple blouse with a soft turnover collar. Of the two photographs, hers was much the more interesting and alluring. And so Lowell Farwell must think every time he noticed the two faces in juxtaposition here on his table.
“Just one of Clare’s little touches,” Lewis told himself, wincing. But now he was to get Petra away, out of it. That was exhilarating. He took Petra’s photograph into his hands. He was studying it, and Clare from her corner of the divan was watching him curiously, whenPetra finally came in. Clare beckoned Petra to the deserted place beside her while Lewis replaced the photograph to the exact spot on the desk from which he had taken it, and sat down on the arm of a chair facing the divan and the two living, breathing women contrasted there. He lighted a fresh cigarette but did not offer Petra one, remembering her afternoon’s embarrassment.
He began at once. “You know what you said this afternoon, Petra, about wanting to learn stenography and becoming ultimately somebody’s private secretary? Well, I have a job for you that will begin paying right away, and you can practise shorthand and typewriting in your spare moments. It’s in my office, assistant to my secretary. Miss Frazier is overworked. Has been for some time. It has been getting more and more on my conscience lately.” This was perfectly true. “But with another girl in the reception office to receive the patients, answer the telephone, and take the preliminary records, I’ll not worry. You can begin Monday morning.”
Lewis’ voice showed nothing of the elation he was feeling. His tone, in fact, was dry and his look constrained. But Petra, as well as he, had herself well in hand, it seemed. Reticence had leapt to her eyes with almost his first words—a sword on guard.
“Darling! Whatisthe matter?” Clare demanded, but without much genuine surprise. She had never expected that Petra would be delighted by Doctor Pryne’s offer of this job. She knew her stepdaughter’s love of freedom and luxury too well, she thought. And when Petralearned that her allowance was to be cut as well as her days filled with work, Clare imagined she would not even consider Doctor Pryne’s astonishing proposition. Why, this very month Petra had borrowed ahead on her allowance, to pay for the frock she had worn this afternoon. She was always borrowing ahead. She spent more on her clothes than Clare spent on her own. Petra considered that her contribution to the world’s work was making and keeping herself beautiful, and if she had deceived Doctor Pryne this afternoon into thinking her serious-minded and idealistic, he was now to be undeceived, Clare told herself almost gleefully. Watching it happen was like watching a play, immensely entertaining. But while Clare watched, she spoke.
“There’s nothing to be frightened of,” she told Petra. “Don’t look like that. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, darling. It is only a suggestion Doctor Pryne is making. Have a cigarette?” She picked one out of a box on a table at her hand, put it into Petra’s fingers, and finding an automatic lighter, held it for Petra.
Even in his bewilderment at the way Petra had received his offer, Lewis could appreciate what Clare was doing in insisting on that cigarette. Petra was a foil for herself. Physically and temperamentally, all Clare’s effects were heightened by her contrast with her stepdaughter. And Clare, the artist tireless in procuring her own effects, took advantage of even so trivial a difference as smoking and not smoking. She had not remembered to offer Lewis a cigarette, but she was practically forcingPetra to smoke. And Petra’s docile compliance was only one of the ways in which she was of use to her stepmother and earned that fantastic two thousand dollars....
But Petra’s fingers holding the cigarette were shaking. The trembling began at her elbow, resting on her knee, but it was most visible in the fingers. She said, in a voice that gave the lie to her shaking fingers, “It is very nice of you to offer me a job, Doctor Pryne. How much is the salary?”
Clare had made a mistake in insisting on the cigarette! She should have presented Petra with a spear, not an English Oval, as an emblem of the girl’s unyielding hardihood. The cigarette, moved to exquisite vibrations in her trembling fingers, merely robbed Petra’s overt hardness of its authenticity. Oh, yes, Clare would do better to play up the Diana in the girl, not a sophistication which did not exist.
“Eighteen dollars a week,” he said. “That is a small living wage, I know, but I am afraid it is all the job is really worth. And prices are down. Food, rooms, clothes, everything. They have tumbled. You ought to be able to manage on eighteen a week and get quite a lot of fun out of it, Petra.”
In saying this so lightly he remembered, of course, the millions of unemployed throughout the country, and his heart smote him at his careless words. But he did not waver in his purpose. Petra’s need of employment was different from theirs, it is true, but no less real. Hersituation, as much as theirs, was desperate.... But what was she saying!
“I don’t have to worry about living on your eighteen a week, Doctor Pryne. I never could, you know. Just my dresses cost much more than that. Besides, Clare doesn’t charge me board!”
“Petra darling! There is nothing in this offer to make you angry! Doctor Pryne got the idea from you yourself, this afternoon, that you wanted to leave Green Doors and be independent. That is why he thought of this job. He thought you were unhappy because you weren’t independent and living a life of your own. Whatever did you say to make him think that?”
Petra hesitated. Any one looking at her that moment could actually see her deciding among a choice of answers to her stepmother. Lewis did look at her and see. But Clare could not wait for the fabrication, whatever it was to be. She went on: “But Doctor Pryne has convinced me of one thing, Petra. He has made me ashamed, not for you, for myself. Your two thousand dollars’ allowance is absurd. With people hungry right in Boston. When you spend it only for clothes! It ought to be one thousand, darling. And the other thousand you can give, yourself, any way you like to do it, to charity.”
Petra’s cigarette was burning itself away in an ashtray between herself and Clare. Its smoke ascended in thick violet ribbons. Lewis felt that she was thinking with lightning speed,—but unguessable thoughts. Clarewas as much in the dark as himself as to Petra’s thoughts, he supposed; but he suspected that, unlike himself, she did not know her own ignorance. Against those ribbons of violet smoke Petra looked like a sibyl—enigmatical—young—divinely young.
“Do you mean that you are cutting my allowance in half? Now, like this,—without warning?” She spoke as if Lewis were not there, as if she and Clare were alone. Her voice was more astonished than it was angry.
“No. I wouldn’t do that, Petra. You know I wouldn’t. You can still have the second thousand for charity, to give any way you like. I will do the same myself. I had been thinking of it for myself as a matter of fact—even before my talk with Doctor Pryne about you to-night. I meant to go over my dress bills and, beginning next month, budget myself to half as much as I am accustomed to spend. Merely giving money outright, the way I have been doing, isn’t enough. It is actual sacrifice that counts.”
“But I don’t want either to give or to sacrifice,” Petra protested. “If the two thousand is mine, I shall spend it just as I have been spending it the last three years. Is it mine, or isn’t it mine, Clare? That is what I asked you.”
Clare’s glance just flickered in Lewis’ direction. But she did not want him to read the gratification in it and she put her hand to her cheek quickly, shading her eyes. She said, “Darling, unless you will look up some charity, get interested in it, and give the second thousand there, it can’t be yours any more. Not now—when I have beenseeing things through Doctor Pryne’s clear vision. But surely—”
Lewis wanted to stop the woman, wanted to undo all that he himself had so crudely brought about. But he might as well have tried to push back an oncoming steam roller as turn Clare from her honorable participation in this dramatic scene that he himself, no other, had staged. He felt this and held his peace, knowing all the while that he had blundered irreparably and made things worse for Petra than they already had been, in some mysterious way that he was not yet in a position to understand.
Petra had interrupted Clare. Her anger had now risen to the level of her astonishment. “It’s absolutely unfair,” she cried, her young face and her young voice ablaze with wrath. “It is asalaryyou are cutting, Clare Otis-Farwell! Not a mere allowance. Does Doctor Pryne know that? And you do it casually, like this, at his mere suggestion. I earn every penny of it.”
“What in heaven’s name do you mean?” For that instant Clare forgot Lewis as audience. Her expression was simply dumbfounded, with for once nothing subtle about it. “Youearn two thousand dollars a year! Why, you don’t even make your own bed!”
“But I do earn it, all the same. Every dollar of it. By being around all the while as evidence of your generosity and goodness! Everybody praises you for it! And you hope it will make my father keep on adoring you as he has never kept on adoring his other wives. I ama perpetual reminder to him of how you differ from all the others.Youarematernal! Haven’t I let you play your part? Haven’t I played mine? What have I done to spoil the picture? Surely you’ve thought it worth a miserable two thousand!”
Clare was on her feet, every tinge of color whipped by Petra’s cruel, wild words from her unrouged face.
“Petra! Hush! Are you crazy?”
Petra, too, was up. And then Lewis noticed that he himself was standing! There was nothing he could say or do, however. He felt as if his own poisonous thoughts about Clare Farwell had been, through some fault of his own, broadcast through Petra’s sibyllic lips. All the blame for the whiplash words, for the cruel scorn of them and their hatred, was his. Not Petra’s. It was he, Lewis, who had thought them and now they were brashly vocal.
But now suddenly again Petra’s voice was her own, and the words were her own, no sibyl’s. “Oh, Clare!” she was faltering. “I am sorry. I am terribly sorry. I was crazy, yes.—” And then, looking at Lewis, in a different and utterly cold tone, she asked surprisingly, “How much does eighteen a week make it a year, Doctor Pryne? Eighteen times fifty-two, do you know?”
He told her, not showing his consternation. She said, “Well, that almost makes up the two thousand, then; if I live here at Green Doors and Clare pays me one thousand for part time. Am I to go on living here,Clare? Or isn’t that possible—after what I just said?”
Clare, who was not tall, looked tall at the moment. Consciousness of a chance to show magnanimity swayed her bodily as well as mentally, like a refreshing wind, where only a minute ago she had been stifling. “Of course you may go on living here. This is your home. Of course you haven’t meant a word you said. You were a little hysterical. It was Doctor Pryne’s idea, about your living in Boston,—not mine. He even suggested Teresa Kerr as a roommate! Imagine! But as long as you can tolerate me, Petra, no matter whether you can ever learn to trust me and love me or not, I want youat home. Call it half-time salary if you like. I shall certainly give you the one thousand.”
But at mention of Teresa’s name, Petra’s anger was back, lashing this time toward Lewis. But only for a flash. It was over, as lightning is over; and it had struck through her glance. She answered Clare, turning her back on Lewis, “Thatiswonderful of you. I don’t see how you can be so forgiving. I don’t deserve it. But I want to tell you, Clare, that ever since I have been with you here at Green Doors, I have never once spoken a disloyal word about you—until this afternoon, to Doctor Pryne. And I never will again—not as long as I live here, and ever after, I hope. Can you ever trust me again? Do you believe me, Clare?”
Lewis turned away. He walked toward one of the French windows opening onto the terrace. But Petra’svoice followed him, made him turn again. She was asking in a polite voice, “Is your offer still open, Doctor Pryne? Shall I come to work on Monday?”
He came back; looked at her for a confused, almost blank moment; then said shortly, “Of course. If you really want to.”
“Do you think I can learn? Will I really be any use to you? It isn’t just your conscience giving me that other thousand, since it’s through you I’ve lost it?”
“I am sure you will earn every cent of it. Miss Frazier needs an assistant badly. I told you that.”
“Shall I take this job, Clare? Do you advise it? Do you believe what Doctor Pryne says? For I won’t take his charity. Will I be worth eighteen a week to him?”
Lewis himself knew that Petra meant would having a job in Boston hurt the effect Clare desired to obtain of her relation to her stepdaughter. And did the part-time job she would now be holding at Green Doors—that is, evenings and holidays—make the one thousand dollars a guaranteed matter? But what was in Clare’s mind when she answered, Lewis was beyond guessing.
“I should try it, anyway, Petra. Of all people, you can trust Doctor Pryne’s sincerity. Working for him will be an interesting experience, at the very least, and at the most you will be having some responsible part in the world’s work and the joy that that inevitably brings. I think it is very wonderful of Doctor Pryne to take such an interest—and help us all. He is very generous—and understanding.”