What welcome Linda met in New York came from Mr. Moses Feldt, who embraced her warmly enough, but with an air slightly ill at ease. He begged her to kiss her mama, who was sometimes hurt by Linda's coldness. She made no reply, and found the same influence and evidence of the power of suggestion in Judith. “We thought maybe you wouldn't care to come back here,” the latter said pointedly, over her shoulder, while she was directing the packing of a trunk. The Feldts were preparing for their summer stay at the sea.
Her mother's room resembled one of the sales of obvious and expensive attire conducted in the lower salons of pleasure hotels. There were airy piles of chiffon and satin, inappropriate hats and the inevitable confections of silk and lace. “It's not necessary to ask if you were right at home with your father's family,” Mrs. Condon observed with an assumed casual inattention. “I can see you sitting with those old women as dry and false as any. No one saved me in the clacking, I'm sure.”
“We didn't speak of you,” Linda replied. She studied, unsparing, the loose flesh of the elder's ravaged countenance. Her mother, she recognized, hated her, both because she was like Bartram Lowrie and still young, with everything unspent that the other valued and had lost. In support of herself Mrs. Feldt asserted again that she had “lived,” with stacks of friends and flowers, lavish parties and devoted attendance.
“You may be smarter than I was,” she went on, “but what good it does you who can say? And if you expect to get something for nothing you're fooled before you start.” She shook out the airy breadths of a vivid echo of past daring. “From the way you act a person might think you were pretty, but you are too thin and pulled out. I've heard your looks called peculiar, and that was, in a manner of speaking, polite. You're not even stylish any more—the line is full again and not suitable for bony shoulders and no bust.” She still cherished a complacency in her amplitude.
Linda turned away unmoved. Of all the world, she thought, only Dodge Pleydon had the power actually to hurt her. She knew that she would see him soon again and that again he would ask her to marry him. She considered, momentarily, the possibility of saying yes; and instantly the dread born with him in the Lowrie garden swept over her. Linda told herself that he was the only man for whom she could ever deeply care; that—for every conceivable reason—such a marriage was perfect. But the shrinking from its implications grew too painful for support.
Her mother's bitterness increased hourly; she no longer hid her feelings from her husband and Judith; and dinner, accompanied by her elaborate sarcasm, was a difficult period in which, plainly, Mr. Moses Feldt suffered most and Linda was the least concerned. This condition, she admitted silently, couldn't go on indefinitely; it was too vulgar if for no other reason. And she determined to ask the Lowries for another and more extended invitation.
Pleydon came, as she had expected, and they sat in the small reception-room with the high ceiling and dark velvet hangings, the piano at which, long ago it now seemed, Judith had played the airs of Gluck for her. He said little, but remained for a long while spread over the divan and watching her—in a formal chair—discontentedly. He rose suddenly and stood above her, a domineering bulk obliterating nearly everything else. In response to his demand she said, pale and composed, that she was not “reasonable”; she omitted the “yet” included in his question. Pleydon frowned. However, then, he insisted no further.
When he had gone Linda was as spent as though there had been a fresh brutal scene; and the following day she was enveloped in an unrelieved depression. Her mother mocked her silence as another evidence of ridiculous pretentiousness. Mr. Moses Feldt regarded her with a furtive concerned kindliness; while Judith followed her with countless small irritating complaints. It was the last day at the apartment before their departure for the summer. Linda was insuperably tired. She had gone to her room almost directly after dinner, and when a maid came to her door with a card, she exclaimed, before looking at it, that she was not in. It was, however, Arnaud Hallet; and, with a surprise tempered by a faint interest, she told the servant that she would see him.
There was, Linda observed at once, absolutely no difference in Arnaud's clothing, no effort to make himself presentable for New York or her. In a way, it amused her—it was so characteristic of his forgetfulness, and it made him seem doubly familiar. He waved a hand toward the luxury of the interior. “This,” he declared, “is downright impressive, and lifted, I'm sure, out of a novel of Ouida's.
“You will remember,” he continued, “complaining about my sense of humor one evening; and that, at the time, I warned you it might grow worse. It has. I am afraid, where you are concerned, that it has absolutely vanished. My dear, you'll recognize this as a proposal. I thought my mind was made up, after forty, not to marry; and I specially tried not to bring you into it. You were too young, I felt. I doubted if I could make you happy, and did everything possible, exhausted all the arguments, but it was no good.
“Linda, dear, I adore you.”
She was glad, without the slightest answering emotion, that Arnaud, well—liked her. At the same time all her wisdom declared that she couldn't marry him; and, with the unsparing frankness of youth and her individual detachment, she told him exactly why.
“I need a great deal of money,” she proceeded, “because I am frightfully extravagant. All I have is expensive; I hate cheap things—even what satisfies most rich girls. Why, just my satin slippers cost hundreds of dollars and I'll pay unlimited amounts for a little fulling of lace or some rare flowers. You'd call it wicked, but I can't help it—it's me.
“I've always intended to marry a man with a hundred thousand dollars a year. Of course, that's a lot—do you hate me for telling you?—but I wouldn't think of any one with less than fifty—”
Arnaud Hallet interrupted quietly, “I have that.”
Linda gazed incredulously at his neglected shoes, the wrinkles of his inconsiderable coat and unstudied scarf. She saw that, actually, he had spoken apologetically of his possessions; and a stinging shame spread through her at the possibility that she had seemed common to an infinitely finer delicacy than hers.
Most of these circumstances Linda Hallet quietly recalled sitting with her husband in the house that had been occupied by the Lowries'. A letter from Pleydon had taken her into a past seven years gone by; while ordinarily her memory was indistinct; ordinarily she was fully occupied by the difficulties, or rather compromises, of the present. But, in the tranquil open glow of a Franklin stove and the withdrawn intentness of Arnaud reading, her mind had returned to the distressed period of her wedding.
Elouise Lowrie—Amelia was dead—sunk in a stupor of extreme old age, her bloodless hands folded in an irreproachable black surah silk lap, sat beyond the stove; and Lowrie, Linda's elder child, five and a half, together with his sister Vigné, had been long asleep above. Linda was privately relieved by this: her children presented enormous obligations. The boy, already at a model school, appalled her inadequate preparations by his flashes of perceptive intelligence; while she was frankly abashed at the delicate rosy perfection of her daughter.
The present letter was the third she had received from Dodge Pleydon, whom she had not seen since her marriage. At first he had been enraged at the wrong, he had every reason to feel, she had done him. Then his anger had dissolved into a meager correspondence of outward and obvious facts. There was so much that she had been unable to explain. He had always been impatient, even contemptuous, of the emotion that made her surrender to him unthinkable—Linda realized now that it had been the strongest impulse of her life—and, of course, she had never accounted for the practically unbalanced enmity of her mother.
The latter had deepened to an incredible degree, so much so that Mr. Moses Feldt, though he had never taken an actual part in it—such bitterness was entirely outside his generous sentimentality—had become acutely uncomfortable in his own home, imploring Linda, with ready tears, to be kinder to her mama. Judith, too, had grown cutting, jealous of Linda's serenity of youth, as her appearance showed the effect of her wasting emotions. Things quite extraordinary had happened: once Linda's skin had been almost seriously affected by an irritation that immediately followed the trace of her powder-puff; and at several times she had had clumsily composed anonymous notes of a most distressing nature.
She had wondered, calmly enough, which of the two bitter women were responsible, and decided that it was her mother. At this the situation at the Feldts', increasingly strained, had become an impossibility. Arnaud Hallet, after his first visit, had soon returned. There was no more mention of his money; but every time he saw her he asked her again, in his special manner—a formality flavored by a slight diffident humor—to marry him. Arnaud's proposals had alternated with Pleydon's utterly different demand.
Linda remembered agonized evenings when, in a return of his brutal manner of the unforgettable night in the Lowrie garden, he tried to force a recognition of his passion. It had left her cold, exhausted, the victim of a mingled disappointment at her failure to respond with a hatred of all essential existence. At last, on a particularly trying occasion, she had desperately agreed to marry him.
The aversion of her mother, becoming really dangerous, had finally appalled her; and a headache weighed on her with a leaden pain. Dodge, too, had been unusually considerate; he talked about the future—tied up, he asserted, in her—of his work; and suddenly, at the signal of her rare tears, Linda agreed to a wedding.
In the middle of the night she had wakened oppressed by a dread resulting in an uncontrollable chill. She thought first that her mother was bending a malignant face over her; and then realized that her feeling was caused by her promise to Dodge Pleydon. It had grown worse instead of vanishing, waves of nameless shrinking swept over her; and in the morning, further harrowed by the actualities of being, she had sent a telegram to Arnaud Hallet—to Arnaud's kindness and affection, his detachment not unlike her own.
They were married immediately; and through the ceremony and the succeeding days she had been almost entirely absorbed in a sensation of escape. At the death of Amelia Lowrie, soon after, Arnaud had suggested a temporary period in the house she remembered with pleasure; and, making small alterations with the months and years, they had tacitly agreed to remain.
Linda often wondered, walking about the lower floor, why it seemed so familiar to her: she would stand in the dining-room, with its ceiling of darkened beams, and gaze absent-minded through the long windows at the close-cut walled greenery without. The formal drawing-room, at the right of the street entrance, equally held her—a cool interior with slatted wooden blinds, a white mantelpiece with delicately reeded supports and a bas-relief of Minerva on the center panel, a polished brass scuttle for cannel-coal and chairs with wide severely fretted backs upholstered in old pale damask.
The house seemed familiar, but she could never grow accustomed to the undeniable facts of her husband, the children and her completely changed atmosphere. She admitted to herself that her principal feeling in connection with Lowrie and Vigné was embarrassment. Here she always condemned herself as an indifferent, perhaps unnatural, mother. She couldn't help it. In the same sense she must be an unsatisfactory wife. Linda was unable to shake off the conviction that it was like a play in which she had no more than a spectator's part.
This was her old disability, the result of her habit of sitting, as a child, apart from the concerns and stir of living. She made every possible effort to overcome it, to surrender to her new conditions; but, if nothing else, an instinctive shyness prevented. It went back further, even, she thought, than her own experience, and she recalled all she had heard and reconstructed of her father—a man shut in on himself who had, one day, without a word walked out of the door and left his wife, never to return. These realizations, however, did little to clarify her vision; she was continually trying to adjust her being to circumstances that persistently remained a little distant and blurred.
In appearance, anyhow, Linda told herself with a measure of reassurance, she was practically unchanged. She still, with the support of Arnaud, disregarding current fashion, wore her hair in a straight bang across her brow and blue gaze. She was as slender as formerly, but more gracefully round, in spite of the faint characteristic stiffness that was the result of her mental hesitation. Her clothes, too, had hardly varied—she wore, whenever possible, white lawns ruffled about the throat and hem, with broad soft black sashes, while her more formal dresses were sheaths of dull unornamented satin extravagant in the perfection of their simplicity.
Arnaud Hallet stirred, sharply closing his book. He had changed—except for a palpable settling down of grayness—as little as Linda. For a while she had tried to bring about an improvement in his appearance, and he had met her expressed wish whenever he remembered it; but this was not often. In the morning a servant polished his shoes, brushed and ironed his suits; yet by evening, somehow, he managed to look as though he hadn't been attended to for days. She would have liked him to change for dinner; other men of his connection did, it was a part of his inheritance. Arnaud, however, in his slight scoffing disparagement, declined individually to annoy himself. He was, she learned, enormously absorbed in his historical studies and papers.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asked politely of his reading. “Extremely,” he replied. “The American Impressions of Tyrone Power, the English actor, through eighteen thirty-three and four. His account of a European packet with its handbells and Saratoga water and breakfast of spitch-cock is inimitable. I'd like to have sat at Cato's then, with a julep or hail-storm, and watched the trotting races.”
Elouise Lowrie rose unsteadily, confused with dozing; but almost immediately she gathered herself into a relentless propriety and a formal goodnight.
“What has been running through that mysterious mind of yours?”
“I had a letter from Dodge,” she told him simply; “and I was thinking a little about the past.” He exhibited the nice unstrained interest of his admirable personality. “Is he still in France?” he queried. “Pleydon should be a strong man; I am sure we are both conscious of a little disappointment in him.” She said: “I'll read you his letter, it's on the table.
“'You will see, my dear Linda, that I have not moved from the Rue de Penthièvre, although I have given up the place at Etretat, and I am not going to renew the lease here. Rodin insists, and I coming to agree with him, that I ought to be in America. But the serious attitude here toward art, how impossible that word has been made, is charming. And you will be glad to know that I have had some success in the French good opinion. A marble, Cotton Mather, that I cut from the stone, has been bought for the Luxembourg.
“'I can hear you both exclaim at the subject, but it is very representative of me now. I am tired of mythological naiads in a constant state of pursuit. Get Hallet to tell you something about Mather. What a somber flame! I have a part Puritan ancestry, as any Lowrie will inform you. Well, I shall be back in a few months, very serious, and a politician—a sculptor has to be that if he means to land any public monuments in America.
“'I hope to see you.'”
The letter ended abruptly, with the signature, “Pleydon.”
“Are you happy, Linda?” Arnaud Hallet asked unexpectedly after a short silence. So abruptly interrogated she was unable to respond. “What I mean is,” he explained, “do you think you would have been happier married to him? I knew, certainly, that it was the closest possible thing between us.” Now, however, she was able to satisfy him:
“I couldn't marry Dodge.”
“Is it possible to tell me why?”
“He hurt me very much once. I tried to marry him, I tried to forget it, but it was useless. I was dreadfully unhappy, in a great many ways—”
“So you sent for me,” he put in as she paused reflectively. “I didn't hurt you, at any rate.” It seemed to her that his tone was shadowed. “You have never hurt me, Arnaud,” she assured him, conscious of the inadequacy of her words. “You were everything I wanted.”
“Except for my hats,” he said in a brief flash of his saving humor. “It would be better for me, perhaps, if I could hurt you. That ability comes dangerously close to a constant of love. You mustn't think I am complaining. I haven't the slightest reason in the face of your devastating honesty. I didn't distress you and I had the necessary minimum—the fifty thousand.” His manner was so even, so devoid of sting, that she could smile at the expression of her material ambitions. “I realize exactly your feeling for myself, but what puzzles me is your attitude toward the children.”
“I don't understand it either,” she admitted, “except that I am quite afraid of them. They are so different from all my own childhood; often they are too much for me. Then I dread the time when they will discover how stupid and uneducated I am at bottom. I'm sure you already ask questions before them to amuse yourself at my doubt. What shall I do, Arnaud, when they are really at school and bring home their books?”
“Retreat behind your dignity as a parent,” he advised. “They are certain to display their knowledge and ask you to bound things or name the capital of Louisiana.” She cried, “Oh, but I know that, it's New Orleans!” She saw at once, from his entertained expression, that she was wrong again, and became conscious of a faint flush of annoyance. “It will be even worse,” she continued, “when Vigné looks to me for advice; I mean when she is older and has lovers.”
“She won't seriously; they never do. She'll tell you when it's all over. Lowrie will depend more on you. I may have my fun about the capital of Louisiana, Linda, but I have the greatest confidence in your wisdom. God knows what an unhappy experience your childhood was, but it has given you a superb worldly balance.”
“I suppose you're saying that I am cold,” she told him. “It must be true, because it is repeated by every one. Yet, at times, I used to be very different—you'd never imagine what a romantic thrill or strange ideas were inside of me. Like a memory of a deep woods, and—and the loveliest adventure. Often I would hear music as clearly as possible, and it made me want I don't know what terrifically.”
“An early experience,” he replied. Suddenly she saw that he was tired, his face was lined and dejected. “You read too much,” Linda declared. He said: “But only out of the printed book.” She wondered vainly what he meant. As he stood before the glimmering coals, in the room saturated in repose, she wished that she might give him more; she wanted to spend herself in a riot of feeling on Arnaud and their children. What a detestable character she had! Her desire, her efforts, were wasted.
He went about putting up the windows and closing the outside shutters, a confirmed habit. Linda rose with her invariable sense of separation, the feeling that, bound on a journey with a hidden destination, she was only temporarily in a place of little importance. It was like being always in her hat and jacket. Arnaud shook down the grate; then he gazed over the room; it was all, she was sure, as it had been a century ago, as it should be—all except herself.
Yet her marriage had realized in almost every particular what she had—so much younger—planned. The early suggestion, becoming through constant reiteration a part of her knowledge, had been followed and accomplished; and, as well, her later needs were served. Linda told herself that, in a world where a very great deal was muddled, she had been unusually fortunate. And this made her angry at her pervading lack of interest in whatever she had obtained.
Other women, she observed, obviously less fortunate than she, were volubly and warmly absorbed in any number of engagements and pleasures; she continually heard them, Arnaud's connections—the whole superior society, eternally and vigorously discussing servants and bridge, family and cotillions, indiscretions and charities. These seemed enough for them; their lives were filled, satisfied, extraordinarily busy. Linda, for the most part, had but little to do. Her servants, managed with remote exactness, gave no trouble; she had an excellent woman for the children; her dress presented no new points of anxiety nor departure ... she was, in short, Arnaud admitted, perfectly efficient. She disposed of such details mechanically, almost impatiently, and was contemptuous, no envious, of the women whose demands they contented.
At the dinners, the balls, to which Arnaud's sense of obligation both to family and her took them against his inclination, it was the same—everyone, it appeared to Linda, was flushed with an intentness she could not share. Men, she found, some of them extremely pleasant, still made adroit and reassuring efforts for her favor; the air here, she discovered, was even freer than the bravado of her earlier surroundings. This love-making didn't disturb her—it was, ultimately, the men who were fretted—indeed, she had rather hoped that it would bring her the relief she lacked.
But again the observations and speculation of her mature childhood, what she had heard revealed in the most skillful feminine dissections, had cleared her understanding to a point that made the advances of hopeful men quite entertainingly obvious. Their method was appallingly similar and monotonous. She liked, rather than not, the younger ones, whose confidence that their passion was something new on earth at times refreshed her; but the navigated materialism of greater experience finally became distasteful. She discussed this sharply with Arnaud:
“You simply can't help believing that most women are complete idiots.”
“You haven't said much more for men.”
“The whole thing is too silly! Why is it, Arnaud? It ought to be impressive and sweep you off your feet, up—”
“Instead of merely behind some rented palms,” he added. “But I must say, Linda, that you are not a very highly qualified judge of sentiment.” He pronounced this equably, but she was conscious of the presence of an injury in his voice. She was a little weary at being eternally condemned for what she couldn't help. Any failure was as much Arnaud Hallet's as hers; he had had his opportunity, all that for which he had implored her. Her thoughts returned to Dodge Pleydon. April was well advanced, and he had written that he'd be back and see them in the spring. Linda listened to her heart but it was unhastened by a beat. She would be very glad to have him at hand, in her life again, of course.
Then the direction of her mind veered—what did he still think of her? Probably he had altogether recovered from his love for her. It had been a warm day, and Arnaud had opened a window; but now she was aware of a cold air on her shoulder and she asked him abruptly to lower the sash. Linda remembered, with a lingering sense of triumph, the Susanna Noda whom Dodge had left at a party for her. There had been a great many Susannas in his life; the reason for this was the absence of any overwhelming single influence. It might be that now—he had written of the change in the subjects of his work—such a guide had come into his existence. She hoped she had. Yet, in view of the announced silliness of women, she didn't want him to be cheaply deluded.
He was an extremely human man.
But she, Linda, it seemed, was an inhuman woman. The days ran into weeks that added another month to spring; a June advanced sultry with heat; and, suddenly as usual, a maid at the door of her room announced Pleydon. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, she had to dress, and she sent him a message that he mustn't expect her in a hurry. She paused in her deliberate preparations for a long thoughtful gaze into a mirror; there was not yet a shadow on her face, the trace of a line at her eyes. The sharp smooth turning and absolute whiteness of her bare shoulders were flawless.
At first it appeared to Linda that he, too, had not changed. They were in the library opening into the dining-room, a space shut against the sun by the Venetian blinds, and faintly scented by a bowl of early tea roses. He appeared the same—large and informally clad in gray flannels, with aggressive features and sensitive strong hands. He was quiet but plainly happy to be with her again and sat leaning forward on his knees, watching her intently as she chose a seat.
Then it slowly dawned on her that he had changed, yes—tragically. Pleydon, in every way, was years older. His voice, less arbitrary, had new depths of questioning, his mouth was more repressed, his face notably sparer of flesh. He was immediately aware of the result of her scrutiny. “I have been working like a fool,” he explained. “A breath of sickness, too, four years ago in Soochow. One of the damnable Asiatic fevers that a European is supposed to be immune from. You are a miracle, Linda. How long has it been—nearly eight years; you have two children and Arnaud Hallet and yet you are the girl I met at Markue's. I wanted to see you different, just a little, a trace of something that should have happened to you. It hasn't. You're the most remarkable mother alive.”
“If I am,” she returned, “it is not as a success, or at least for me. Lowrie and Vigné are healthy, and happy enough; but I can't lose myself in them, Dodge; I can't lose myself at all.”
He was quiet at this, the smoke of his cigarette climbing bluely in a space with the aqueous stillness of a lake's depths. “The same,” he went on after a long pause; “nothing has touched you. I ought to be relieved but, do you know, it frightens me. You are relentless. You have no right, at the same time, to be beautiful. I have seen a great many celebrated women at their best moments, but you are lovelier than any. It isn't a simple affair of proportion and features—I wish I could hold it in a phrase, the turn of a chisel. I can't. It's deathless romance in a bang cut blackly across heavenly blue.” He was silent again, and Linda glad that he still found her attractive. She discovered that the misery his presence once caused her had entirely vanished, its place taken by an eager interest in his affairs, a lightness of spirit at the realization that, while his love for her might have grown calm, no other woman possessed it.
At the dinner-table she listened—cool and fresh, Arnaud complained, in spite of the heat—to the talk of the two men. By her side Elouise Lowrie occasionally repeated, in a voice like the faint jangle of an old thin piano, the facts of a family connection or a commendation of the Dodges. Arnaud really knew a surprising lot, and his conversation with Pleydon was strung with terms completely unintelligible to her. It developed, finally, into an argument over the treatment of the acanthus motive in rococo ornament. France was summoned against Spain; the architectural degrading of Italy deplored.... It amazed her that any one could remember so much.
Linda without a conscious reason suddenly stopped the investigation of her feeling for Pleydon. Even in the privacy of her thoughts an added obscurity kept her from the customary clear reasoning. After dinner, out in the close gloom of the garden, she watched the flicker of the cigarettes. There was thunder, so distant and vague that for a long while Linda thought she was deceived. She had a keen rushing sensation of the strangeness of her situation here—Linda Hallet. The night was like a dream from which she would stir, sigh, to find herself back again in the past waiting for the return of her mother from one of her late parties.
But it was Arnaud who moved and, accompanying Elouise Lowrie, went into the house for his interminable reading. Pleydon's voice began in a low remembering tone:
“What a fantastic place the Feldt apartment was, with that smothered room where you said you would marry me. You must have got hold of Hallet in the devil of a hurry. I've often tried to understand what happened; why, all the time, you were upset—why, why, why?”
“In a way it was because a ridiculous hairdresser burned out some of my mother's front wave,” she explained.
“Of course,” he replied derisively, “nothing could be plainer.”
She agreed calmly. “It was very plain. If you want me to try to tell you don't interrupt. It isn't a happy memory, and I am only doing it because I was so rotten to you.
“Yes, I can see now that it was the hairdresser and a hundred other things exactly the same. My mother, all the women we knew, did nothing but lace and paint and frizzle for men. I used to think it was a game they played and wonder where the fun was. There were even hints about that and later they particularized and it made me as sick as possible. The men, too, were odious; mostly fat and bald; and after a while, when they pinched or kissed me, I wanted to die.
“That was all I knew about love, I had never heard of any other—men away from their families for what they called a good time and women plotting and planning to give it to them or not give it to them. Then mother, after her looks were spoiled, married Mr. Moses Feldt, and I met Judith, who only existed for men and men's rooms and told me worse things, I'm sure, than mother ever dreamed; and, on top of that, I met you and you kissed me.
“But it was different from any other; it didn't shock me, and it brought back a thrill I have always had. I wanted, then, to love you, and have you ask me to marry you, more than anything else in the world. I was sure, if you would only be patient, that I could change what had hurt me into a beautiful feeling. I couldn't tell you because I didn't understand myself.” She stopped, and Pleydon repeated, bitterly and slow:
“Fat old bald men; and I was one with them destroying your exquisite hope.” She heard the creak of the basket chair as he leaned forward, his face masked in darkness. “Perhaps you think I haven't paid.
“You will never know what love is unless I can manage somehow to make you understand how much I love you. Hallet will have to endure your hearing it. This doesn't belong to him; it has not touched the earth. Every one, more or less, talks about love; but not one in a thousand, not one in a million, has such an experience. If they did it would tear the world into shreds. It would tear them as it has me. I realize the other, the common thing—who experimented more! This has nothing to do with it. A boy lost in the idealism of his first worship has a faint reflection. Listen:
“I can always, with a wish, see you standing before me. You yourself—the folds of your sash, the sharp narrow print of your slippers on the pavement or the matting or the rug, the ruffles about your hands. I have the feeling of you near me with your breathing disturbing the delicacy of your breast. There is the odor and shimmer of your hair ... your lips move ... but without a sound.
“This vision is more real than reality, than an opera-house full of people or the Place Vendôme; and it, you, is all I care for, all I think about, all I want. I find quiet places and stay there for hours, with you; or, if that isn't possible, I turn into a blind man, a dead man warm again at the bare thought of your face. Listen:
“I've been in shining heaven with you. I have been melted to nothing and made over again, in you, good. We have been walking together in a new world with rapture instead of air to breathe. A slow walk through dark trees—God knows why—like pines. And every time I think of you it is exactly as though I could never die, as though you had burned all the corruption out of me and I was made of silver fire. And listen:
“Nothing else is of any importance, now or afterward, you are now and the hereafter. I see people and people and hear words and words, and I forget them the moment they have gone, the second they are still. But I haven't lost an inflection of your voice. When I work in clay or stone I model and cut you into every surface and fold. I see you looking back at me out of marble and bronze. And here, in this garden, you tried to give me more—”
The infinitely removed thunder was like the continued echo of his voice. There was a stirring of the leaves above her head; and the light that had shone against the house in Elouise Lowrie's window was suddenly extinguished. All that she felt was weariness and a confused dejection, the weight of an insuperable disappointment. She could say nothing. Words, even Pleydon's, seemed to her vain. The solid fact of Arnaud, of what Dodge, more than seven years before, had robbed her, put everything else aside, crushed it.
She realized that she would never get from life what supremely repaid the suffering of other women, made up for them the failure of practically every vision. She was sorry for herself, yes, and for Dodge Pleydon. Yet he had his figures in metal and stone; his sense of the importance of his work had increased enormously; and, well, there were Lowrie and Vigné; it would be difficult, every one agreed, to find better or handsomer children. But they seemed no more than shadows or colored mist. This terrified her—what a hopelessly deficient woman she must be! But even in the profundity of her depression the old vibration of nameless joy reached her heart.
In the morning there was a telegram from Judith Feldt, saying that her mother was dangerously sick, and she had lunch on the train for New York. The apartment seemed stuffy; there was a trace of dinginess, neglect, about the black velvet rugs and hangings. Her mother, she found, had pneumonia; there was practically no chance of her recovering. Linda sat for a short while by the elder's bed, intent upon a totally strange woman, darkly flushed and ravished in an agonizing difficulty of breathing. Linda had a remembered vision of her gold-haired and gay in floating chiffons, and suddenly life seemed shockingly brief. A serious-visaged clergyman entered the room as she left and she heard the rich soothing murmur of a confident phrase.
The Stella Condon who had become Mrs. Moses Feldt had had little time for the support of the church; although Linda recalled that she had uniformly spoken well of its offices. To condemn Christianity, she had asserted, was to invite bad luck. She treated this in exactly the way she regarded walking under ladders or spilling salt or putting on a stocking wrong. Linda, however, had disregarded these possibilities of disaster and, with them, religion.
A great many people, she noticed, talked at length about it; women in their best wraps and with expensive little prayer books left the hotels for various Sunday morning services, and ministers came in later for tea. All this, she understood, was in preparation for heaven, where everybody, who was not in hell, was to be forever the same and yet radiantly different. It seemed very vague and far away to Linda, and, since there was such a number of immediate problems for her to consider, she had easily ignored the future. When now, with her mother dying, it was thrust most uncomfortably before her.
She half remembered sentences, admonitions, of the godly—a woman had once told her that dancing and low gowns were hateful in the sight of God, some one else that playing-cards were an instrument of the devil. Pleasure, she had gathered, was considered wrong, and she instinctively put these opinions, together with a great deal else, aside as envious.
That expressed her whole experience. She had never keenly associated the thought of death with herself before, and she was unutterably revolted by the impending destruction of her fine body, the delicate care of which formed her main preoccupation in life. Age was supremely distasteful, but this other ... she shuddered.
Linda wanted desperately to preserve the whiteness of her skin, the flexible black distinction of her hair, yes—her beauty. Here, again, with other women the vicarious immortality of children would be sufficient. But not for her. She was in the room that had been hers before marriage, with her infinite preparations for the night at an end; and, her hair loose across the blanched severity of her attire, her delicately full arms bare, she clasped her cold hands in stabbing apprehension.
She would do anything, anything, to escape that repulsive fatality to her lavished care. It was only to be accomplished by being good; and goodness was in the charge of the minister. She saw clearly and at once her difficulty—how could she go to a solemn man in a clerical vest and admit that she was solely concerned by the impending loss of her beauty. The promised splendor of heaven, in itself, failed to move her—it threatened to be monotonous; and she was honest in her recognition that charity, the ugliness of poverty, repelled her. Linda was certain that she could never change in these particulars; she could only pretend.
A surprising multiplication of such pretense occurred to her in people regarded as impressively religious. She had seen men like that—she vaguely thought of the name Jasper—going off with her mother in cabs to dinners that must have been “godless.” She wondered if this mere attitude, the public show, were enough. And an instinctive response told her that it was not. If all she had been informed about the future were true she decided that her mother's chance was no worse than that of any false display of virtue.
She, Linda, could do nothing.
The funeral ceremony with its set form—so inappropriate to her mother's qualities—was even more remote from Linda's sympathies than was common in her encounters. But Mr. Moses Feldt's grief appeared to her actual and affecting. He invested every one with the purity of his own spirit.
She left New York at the first possible moment with the feeling that she was definitely older. The realization, she discovered, happened in that way—ordinarily giving the flight of time no consideration it was brought back to her at intervals of varying length. As she aged they would grow shorter.
The result of this experience was an added sense of failure; she tried more than ever to overcome her indifference, get a greater happiness from her surroundings and activity. Linda cultivated an attention to Lowrie and Vigné. They responded charmingly but her shyness with them persisted in the face of her inalienable right to their full possession. She insisted, too, on going about vigorously in spite of Arnaud's humorous groans and protests. She forced herself to talk more to the men attracted to her, and assumed, with disconcerting ease, an air of sympathetic interest. But, unfortunately, this brought on her a rapid increase of the love-making that she found so fatiguing.
She studied her husband thoughtfully through the evenings at home, before the Franklin stove, or, in summer, in the secluded garden. Absolutely nothing was wrong with him; he had, after several deaths, inherited even more money; and, in his deprecating manner where it was concerned, devoted it to her wishes. Except for books, and the clothes she was forced to remind him to get, he had no personal expenses. In addition to the money he never offended her, his relationships and manner were conducted with an inborn nice formality that preserved her highest self-opinion.
Yet she was never able to escape from the limitations of a calm admiration; she couldn't lose herself, disregard herself in a flood of generous emotion. When, desperately, she tried, he, too, was perceptibly ill at ease. Usually he was undisturbed, but once, when she stood beside him with her coffee cup at dinner, he disastrously lost his equanimity. Tensely putting the cup away he caught her with straining hands.
“Oh, Linda,” he cried, “is it true that you love me! Do you really belong to us—to Vigné and Lowrie and me? I can't stand it if you won't ... some day.”
She backed away into the opening of a window, against the night, from the justice of his desire; and she was cold with self-detestation as her fingers touched the glass. Linda tried to speak, to lie; but, miserably still, she was unable to deceive him. The animation, the fervor of his longing, swiftly perished. His arms dropped to his side. An unbearable constraint deepened with the silence in the room, and later he lightly said:
“You mustn't trifle with my ancient heart, Linda, folly and age—”