THE life of Mr. Wyck was no longer of interest to any one; yet there were times, usually after a stronger dose than usual of his wife’s power and independence, when Clarence sought the company of Wyck with the air of a man in need of refreshment and rest. For she had brought into the lives of both men a sense of strain which, during the days of their amiable companionship on the top floor of the Babylon Arms, had been utterly lacking. To Clarence, this new condition of affairs remained a mystery; but Wyck, with an intuition that was feminine, must sometimes have come close to the real reason.
He knew, beyond all doubt, that Ellen, for all her indifference, was his enemy—an enemy who never once considered her foe, an enemy who in her towering self-sufficiency had not troubled to include him in her reckoning. There were times, during the lunches the two men had together in a tiny restaurant in Liberty Street, when he came very close to speaking the truth, so close that Clarence, moved by a shadowy and pathetic loyalty, turned the talk of his companion into other channels. People said that a wife made a difference with one’s friends, that marriage ended old friendships and began new ones. There were, to be sure, old ones that had come very near to the end of the path, but in theirplace there were no new ones. It was wonderful how Ellen appeared to exist without friends.
“She is busy, I suppose,” he confided in admiration to Wyck over the greasy table, “and she is more independent than most women but still I don’t see how she stands it. She might have had Bunce’s wife for a friend.”
Wyck said, “Oh, no!She’snot good enough for her.” And then as if he had spoken too bitterly, he added, “I can understand that. Bunce’s wife is a vulgar woman.” He had never forgiven the contractor’s daughter the theft of Bunce. He hated her so strongly that in order to disparage her, it was necessary by comparison to reflect praise upon another enemy.
There were at times long silences when neither man spoke at all, for even their talk of shop came to an end after it had been turned over and over a hundred times. What thoughts occurred in those tragic silences neither one could have revealed to the other because they were in the realm of those things which friends, or even those who cling to the rags of friendship, cannot afford to tell each other.
Clarence with his nose-glasses and neat white collar drank his thin coffee and thought, “Wyck is a dull fellow. How could I ever have liked him? Funny how men grow apart.”
And across the table Wyck, finishing his apple sauce, thought, “Ah, if only there was some way to save him. That woman is destroying him slowly, bit by bit. He should never have married her. If only I could get him back where he would be happy again.”
There were in these thoughts the vestiges of truth. At one time they were more filled with truth than at another, for no thing is true persistently and unutterably. Yet in their truth Clarence was the happier of the two because he had discovered in his marriage a freedom of a new and different sort; through Ellen he was strong enough to yield nothing to the shabby little man who sat opposite him. In some way he had caught a senseof her independence, a knowledge that she was not as other women, or even as most men. She belonged to the ruthless and the elect. As for Wyck, he had only his sense of loss, for which there was no reward, and a pang which he was resolved one day to heal by some revenge, as yet vague and unplanned. And in his heart he believed that friendship between men was a bond far finer, far more pure than any relation between a man and woman.
“See!” he thought, over his apple sauce, “what it is doing to Clarence. It is destroying him. His love for her is consuming him.”
And when they had finished eating and had paid the yellow-haired cashier who sat enthroned behind the till, it was their habit to saunter into the streets and lose themselves in the noon crowds of lower Broadway. Sometimes they wandered as far as the Battery to sit on a bench and watch the fine ships going proudly across a bay of brilliant blue out to the open sea. But there was not much pleasure in their promenade. It ended always in the same fashion with Clarence looking at his watch to observe, “It’s time we started back.”
And so they would return, back the same way over the same streets and over the same doorstep. There were times when the sight of the blue sea and the great ships sliding silently through the green water filled the heart of Mr. Wyck with a wild turbulence which was beyond his understanding. Those were times when he hated both his friend and the woman who held him prisoner.
But no one was really interested in Mr. Wyck. In the evening when he returned to the gas-lit bed room in Lexington Avenue there was nothing for him to do. He read sometimes, but not frequently, and on warm nights he sat on the doorstep watching the passers-by and exchanging a word now and then with the grim woman who was his landlady. There were long hours in which there was nothing to do but to think, and not even the gray cat, watching the shadow of her tail against the decaying brownstone of the doorstep, could have guessed the dark trend of those secret thoughts.
His life, his happiness had been ruined by a stranger who scorned even to think of him.
Other changes came in the life of Clarence.
Once he had been a great one for organizations. He had been vice president of the Mutual Benefit Association of the Superba Electrical Company and a member of no less than three lodges. In the days before his marriage the duties concerned with all these organizations had required much of his time, but when Ellen arrived he came to stay more and more at home, and little by little these gaieties too lost their place in his life. It seemed that he was content to remain in the flat reading the newspaper, working over his accounts and now and then merely listening to his wife’s music with a strange expression of bewilderment as if it were impossible for him ever to understand her; and that little vein in his throat, which Lily had observed with such interest, throbbed and throbbed with a desire which sometimes must have terrified him.
Sitting there in the long evenings, silhouetted as she played, against the brilliant blue of a sky that stretched out interminably beyond the windows of the Babylon Arms, she had an air of lofty magnificence, an aloofness that was unconquerable. There were times when she seemed a very symbol of all that was unattainable; and always she was related to the wild dreams that became gradually less and less turbulent.
When she told him of these new engagements to play for Mrs. Callendar, he frowned and said, “But what of me? What am I to do?”
“It means more money for us ... and we need money. You see, Mrs. Callendar pays me well. My music will cost me nothing. Perhaps I shall be able to put something aside. Besides there is the experience which must not be overlooked.”
These things were true, and of late the mention of the money she might earn seemed not so unpleasant to Clarence as it had once been. He was, it appeared, more troubled by the fear of herescaping him, for he said, “I don’t think it’s wise to go too much with these people. They’re not our sort.... I’ve heard stories of how they live. They’re society people.”
At which Ellen mocked him, laughing, to say, “But I have nothing to do with them. I work for them. I entertain them ... that’s all.”
“And Wyck says that young Callendar has a reputation for being a bad one.”
Ellen laughed again, scornfully. “How does he know anything about young Callendar? Wyck and his boarding house. It’s because he hates me. I know what he’s like ... a mean, nasty little man who hates me.”
“He has friends.... His family was rich once in New York.”
What Clarence said was true. Wyck did know because, although he had long since ceased to have any existence for such people as the Callendars, there were channels by way of housemaids and distant relatives through which news of their world penetrated at last, somewhat distorted and magnified, to the spinster aunts in Yonkers, and so at length to Mr. Wyck himself. For the old ladies had known young Callendar’s father as a boy and they still lived in the world of those early days when, ensconced on lower Fifth Avenue behind plush curtains ornamented with ball fringe, they had received the Sunday procession of fashionables. The vulgar, new city of this early twentieth century, for all its noise and show, did not exist for them any more than they, for all their thin blooded pride, existed for the Callendars. It was after all an affair merely of dollars and cents. The Callendars had increased their fortune; the Wycks had lost theirs.
“I shall go to the Callendars’ and play for them because it is necessary,” said Ellen. “I am not a fool. I can take care of myself.”
To this abrupt statement, Clarence found no answer. He yielded quietly and, presently, on the nights when Ellen played in the great house on Murray Hill, he found himself going back once more to his three lodges and the Mutual Benefit Associationof the Superba Electrical Company. There were members of the latter organization who thought it queer that their vice president attended the annual ball, held that year in a Brooklyn Hotel, as he had always done, alone, without his wife. It happened that she played that night in the solid house on Murray Hill.
And what then of Ellen herself? She was not, surely, unconscious of all that was happening so slowly, so imperceptibly about her. It is true that she was one of those who are born to success, one for whom the past does not exist and the present has reality only in so far as it provides a step into the future. Indeed, during those years in the city, even the Town itself became a very distant and shadowy memory. She was concerned, desperately, with what lay before her, confused perhaps by a sense of imminent disaster so vague that it could have for her no real meaning or significance.
But of course she never spoke of these things to her husband, perhaps because she was conscious that he might not understand them. At times the old pity for him, the same pity which had seized her so unaccountably upon the night of their flight, overwhelmed her, and at such moments it was her habit to be tender with him in a fashion that sent him into extravagant flights of happiness. But these moments became, after a while, conscious things on the part of Ellen so that presently she used them cheaply to quiet his unhappiness as one might use a gaudy stick of candy to quiet an unhappy child. Such little things made him happy.
Sometimes in the night she would lie in one of the green beds ornamented with garlands of salmon pink roses, listening to the sounds of the city that lay far beneath them ... the distant rumble which rose and mingled somehow with the glow of light that filled all the dome of the sky, a rumble pierced sharply by the sudden shrill cry of a city child playing late in the streets, or the faint clop! clop! of hoofs upon asphalt blurred now andagain by the ghostly boom of a great ship’s whistle rising from the fog-veiled river ... marvelous, splendorous sounds of a great world close at hand. There lay in these sounds a wonderful sense of the crowd—in which she herself was not a part. Lying there, her fingers would clutch the bedclothes tightly and presently she would become conscious that in her listening she was not alone, that beside her, separated by the little chasm which divided the two green beds, Clarence too lay awake ... listening. She must have known in those hours an unreal consciousness of something that was waiting ... a Thing destined not to become clear until long afterward ... a Thing which waited silently and with a terrible patience. It was an experience that was not rare; it happened many nights, so that presently she came to be happy in the weeks when Clarence, traveling through the night hundreds of miles from her, was not there at all.
Sometimes her hand would steal out and in the darkness be touched and clasped by another hand that trembled and clung to hers in a sort of terror.
ELLEN’S awareness of Richard Callendar came over her slowly, a sensation neither desired nor anticipated, but one which stole upon her in some obscure fashion through the corridors of her own music. It would have been impossible to fix the moment at which this awareness took form; certainly it was not during that first damp drive through the park, when, wedged between his slim body and that of the yellow-clad Sabine, she had her first view of him. On that occasion she had remarked him merely as a young man perhaps of thirty (in this she was wrong by five years) who possessed a beauty of a kind new to her, a beauty of which there were traces to be found among certain of the workers in the Mills that hugged the dying hedges of Shane’s Castle. It was, in short, a kind of mystical, unearthlybeauty born of an old, old race that was sensual and filled with an intense capacity for suffering ... a kind of beauty never to be found among her own Scotch and English friends and relatives. It had its determining quality in the extraordinary blackness of his hair, the dark olive of his skin and the unreality of gray eyes so queerly placed in so much darkness.
Sabine Cane, so completely civilized, so disillusioned, understood this beauty with the mind of one capable of an amazing detachment and power of analysis, for she had an extraordinary power of pulling herself up short in the midst of her emotions and saying, “This is indeed interesting. Here am I giving way to a good wholesome passion. Well! Well!...” and then, “It’s all very good so long as I don’t allow myself to be hurt by it.” For Sabine had the sort of intelligence which is the equipment of every potential sensualist.
This awareness on the part of Ellen forced its way through a torrent of impressions and emotions into a consciousness never too well organized. At the “parties” of Mrs. Callendar, there were, as the amusing woman predicted, never more than three or four people. There was always herself and usually her son. Sometimes Sabine Cane, whose relationship to the older woman was that of one who shares a complete understanding, was present, and now and then an elderly beau or two, of the sort which appears at concerts and the opera where they sit in the rear of boxes obscured somewhat by bedizened dowagers.
These entertainments, referred to variously by Thérèse Callendar as musicales, parties and soirées, were held in the vast drawing room where Ellen appeared on that first evening. While she played, the others, flanked by brocade curtains of immense dimensions, rows of Callendar family portraits and cases filled with bronze Buddhas and jade tear bottles, sat about respectful, listening, prepared to speak only in hushed voices, for it was true that all of them were wholly devoted to music ... all perhaps, save Sabine who, it might be said, was present as much because she found Thérèse Callendar amusing and had a profound curiosityregarding the shy, handsome girl who came to entertain them.
Ellen had a capacity for “feeling her audience.” She had not played many times before she knew exactly the degree and quality of appreciation in each of those who listened. She came to know that Sabine neither understood music nor cared very greatly for it, and that Mrs. Callendar preferred the compositions which were a little wild and barbaric. In the dark young Richard Callendar there was a quality altogether different from any of the others. It was a kind of appreciation which she had experienced only twice before. Lily listened in that fashion and her own brother Fergus. It was as if they abandoned themselves completely to the sound, as if they became in all their senses quite immersed. For a long time after the music ceased it was difficult for them to return wholly to the world of reality. She herself knew the intoxication; it was an emotion quite beyond the realm of drunkenness; it might be perhaps comparable to the effect of certain drugs. Richard Callendar listened in that fashion, and understanding this she came at length to play for him alone, moved only by an instinct of profound gratitude.
Even Sabine Cane, with all her sharp intelligence, failed to understand what was happening before her green eyes. She knew, vaguely, that there were times when the girl outdid herself, when the sounds she made possessed a beauty unusual in degree and quality, but her penetration seldom progressed beyond this point, because, by virtue of that strange and mystical bond, the other two were raised into a world quite beyond her. If there was a difference it lay in this ... that to Sabine one would have said that nothing could ever happen, because she guarded herself so carefully.
In the beginning, Ellen had come in only to play in the evenings at nine o’clock when the others had finished dinner and were sitting in the walnut-paneled library over cigarettes, coffee and liqueurs. She came, as a mountebank, to entertain. It was her habit to arrive quietly, to greet Mrs. Callendar and then sit modestly a littleapart from the others until the moment came for her to play. They were kind to her, and sometimes quite cordial—even Sabine who, out of an awkwardness born of a nature really shy, talked with her in the most confused and disjointed fashion, sometimes, under the stress of temptation, striving even to pry into the details of her life. Perhaps Sabine, in the recesses of her clear intelligence, speculated regarding the origins, the background, the very surroundings of Ellen. Her own life had been one ordered and held in check by a rigid tradition ... a nurse, a day school kept by an affected and clever old harridan in impoverished circumstances, a year abroad and at last a coming-out ball. The independence she possessed lay altogether in her own thoughts, a thing hid away deeply. It moved like a mountain torrent confined placidly within the walls of a canal. It manifested itself only in a sharpness of tongue, a restless and malicious desire for gossip. She encouraged her imagination to rebuild the lives of her friends according to some pattern more exciting than that of the straight-laced world by which she was submerged. It was this, perhaps, which drew her to old Thérèse Callendar and her son. In them she found a freedom, a sophistication that elsewhere was lacking. Richard Callendar was not unwilling to discuss such things as mistresses. Thérèse did not treat her as if she were a spotless virgin to be protected against the realities of the world. They provided release to an intelligence bound in upon all sides by the corseted bejetted traditions of the day. They treated her with respect, as an individual. They possessed candor.
And so in the beginning her curiosity had seemed to Ellen, not understanding all this, an impudent thing, to be snubbed quietly in the proud way she had. She understood, well enough, that Sabine possessed the advantage ... at least in the world of Mrs. Callendar’s drawing-room. Sabine was at home there. She had lived always in such drawing-rooms. And yet there came a night when Sabine turned with her strange abruptness and said apropos of nothing, “I envy you.”
At which Ellen smiled and asked, “Why?”
“Because,” continued the abrupt Sabine, “you will always have the advantage over us (she was quite frank in admitting that they belonged to different worlds). It is always so with those who make their way by their wits.”
Once Ellen might have pondered such a speech, wondering whether she should consider herself insulted by it. But in the experience of many talks with Sabine, she came to understand that there lay at the bottom of the observation no more than a complete honesty. Indeed, the remark was so honest that in the very moment it was made, Ellen saw not only its honesty but its truth. Shewasmaking her way by her wits. Sabine had nothing to make ... nothing to expect save a marriage which would occur in due time according to the plan that controlled all Sabine’s life. And the artist in Ellen leapt at once to assume the rôle. She would make her way by her wits, from now on, consciously. That placed her. It provided her with a certain definiteness of personality.
“People like that are always more sure of themselves,” Sabine continued. “I’ve noticed it. Take Mrs. Sigourney. She’s done it. She’s outraged some people but she’s got what she wanted.... She was nobody and now she’s chic. It’s her wits, always her wits.... She never does the wrong thing ... never puts herself in a place where she can be hurt.”
At the end of the speech, Sabine’s voice dropped suddenly. There was even a little echo of something ... perhaps a faint sigh, as if it came somewhere from deep within her. Shehadbeen hurt then, perhaps a long time ago. Perhaps her flawless clothes, her sharp and witty tongue, her air of entering a room, were all no more than an armor she had raised about herself. She was not, like Ellen, isolated, independent, free ... belonging to nothing, to no one, save only herself. Her friendship with Richard Callendar may only have been a bit of bravado, to flaunt in the face of the others who desired him.
Ellen saw it, clearly now. In the Town she would have been like Sabine. There, in a community all her own, they couldhave hurt her. Here in this world there was no one who could do her any injury. Alone, isolated, she was stronger than she had been in the very midst of all those who had known her since the beginning.
“I wish,” continued Sabine, “that you would tell me about yourself some time.... Tell me and Richard. He’s interested in such things.”
“But I must play now,” said Ellen.
On the same night when the hour came for Ellen to be sent home in Mrs. Callendar’s cabriolet, the plump woman said, “The next time.... Let’s see, it’s Thursday, isn’t it?... You must come for dinner.... I’ll send Wilkes at twenty to eight.”
THAT there was any such thing as kindliness involved in all these complicated, new relationships had never occurred to Ellen, perhaps because she had never for a moment expected it. It was only with the invitation to dinner, in itself a tacit recognition of her individuality as something more than a mere music box, that the real state of affairs first became clear to her. It was as if she had progressed a step in the world, as if she had achieved a little already of the vast things she had set out to accomplish. She tried, in her direct, unsubtle way of speaking, to convey something of the idea to Clarence. She wanted him, as always, desperately to understand her actions. She wanted him, perhaps dishonestly, to believe that she could not help acting as she did, that it was not from choice but from a desire to brighten both their lives that she left him now and then to venture forth into regions which it was impossible for him to penetrate. And in her own fashion, as she had done so often with her mother, she told him the truth selectively, so that although she did not lie she managed to achieve an effect that was not the truth.
The great thing which she neglected to admit was this ... that she had come now to the point where it was no longer possible to take him with her. Even his fantastic dreams could not make him more than he was, and that was not enough. He had come to the end of his tether. She had barely begun. Imagine him in Mrs. Callendar’s drawing-room! Fancy the abrupt Sabine Cane talking to him as she talked to Ellen! He, she knew, would suffer more than any one.
She said to him, “I’m sorry, but on Thursday I shall be out for dinner.... I’ve got to dine with Mrs. Callendar.... It’s business, dear.... I must do these things.”
And at the speech, Clarence assumed that hurt and crestfallen look which touched her sense of pity. It was the one thing which could alter her determination; indeed there were times when she must have suspected that he used it consciously, as his only weapon. It moved her even now, so that she went so far as to kiss him and say, “It’s just one night.”
“But it’s a beginning.” He saw it perhaps, clearly enough, more clearly than she ever imagined. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
And then she explained to him again the things which it was necessary for her to do in order to win what she must have. She talked long and eloquently, for she was earnest and she pitied him. It was clear that her dishonesty arose not so much out of any evil calculation as out of a desire to have everything, to go her way and still leave Clarence unharmed and happy. It was a thing impossible, of course, yet it never seemed so to her. There was in her so much of her indomitable mother that she was never able to believe in the impossible.
So she talked eloquently and at length she even arranged it for him that he should dine on Thursday night with Mr. and Mrs. Bunce. Thus, by a single act, she accomplished another thing. She dined with the Bunces without having to dine with them.She knew too that they would be happier with Clarence there alone. It would be like the old days, without strain, an evening when the three of them,—Clarence and Harry Bunce and his rosy wife,—could dine, as one might say, in peace. There would be no strain, no sense of an intruder in their midst. For she was a stranger, always; they were never quite at ease with her.
Thus Clarence found the evening arranged, and he was content in his way, for he liked the Bunces.
Afterward Ellen’s clearest memory of the evening was the voice of Sabine drifting from the drawing-room as she entered the hall, saying, “The trouble with Boston people is that they are all descended from middle class immigrants and they’ve been proud of it ever since.”
This speech became fixed somehow in her brain as a symbol of Sabine’s queer worldliness, of a strangely cynical honesty that would color her whole point of view up to the very end. If Sabine thought it idiotic to take pride in being middle class, if she thought it absurd not to strive after distinction, she would say it, whether or not people thought her a snob. The world to her was thus and so; it moved according to an ancient pattern. All the orations in the world upon the subject of democracy could not alter the rule of things. Besides, it was a good enough rule. Why pretend it wasn’t? Sabine, of course, could afford to take such a position. In a worldly sense, she had nothing to strive for. She had been born to those things.
Ellen, removing the squirrel coat Clarence had given her, turned these considerations over in her mind as she entered the room. She was watching them all to-night as she had watched them once before through the crack in the lacquered screen, cautiously, with an air of an enemy laying siege to their fortress.
There was, beneath the gaze of the Callendar ancestors, only Mrs. Callendar in a dress of jet and sequins, Sabine in a brilliant green gown and Richard Callendar, handsome and dark in his black and white clothes. Richard rose and came forward to meet her.
“Mama,” he said, smiling, “has just been talking of you. She believes that one day you will be a great personality.”
“We are dining alone, the four of us,” said Mrs. Callendar abruptly. It was clear that she meant to keep Ellen forever in ignorance of what she had said.
The dining room was done in the grand manner of the Second Empire, a room copied at the behest of young Callendar’s grandfather from a house built by the Duc de Morny for one of his mistresses. It was grandiose, with columns of white and gilt, centering upon a massive table and a group of chairs with backs which ended a foot or two sooner than they should have ended. On the four panels of the walls there hung pictures of Venice in the dry, hard manner of Canaletto ... Venice at Dawn, Venice at Sunset, Venice at Carnival Time and Venice in Mourning for the Pope. On the huge table stood a silver épergne filled to overflowing with the most opulent of fruits ... mangoes, persimmons, red bananas, Homberg grapes and pomegranates. It was as if Thérèse Callendar had built this monument of fruit to recapture something of her own Oriental background—the rest of the room was so bad, so filled with the shadows of Cockney demi-mondaines and snuffbox adventures out of the Second Empire. At the four corners of the vast épergne stood four huge candelabra of silver.
Despite the air of depression given out by the monstrous room, it possessed a somber magnificence. To Ellen, the only magnificence approaching it lay in the drawing-room of that gloomy house known as Shane’s Castle, set in the midst of the smoking furnaces. Aunt Julia’s house was like it, filled with pictures and furniture and carpets which, like these, had been brought out of Europe.
There were wines for dinner, not one or two, but an array of port, madeira, sauterne, sherry and, at the place where Mrs. Callendar seated herself in a chair raised more than the others so that she might dominate the massive table, a pint of champagne forherself in a tiny silver bucket filled with ice. It was a schoolgirl’s dream of magnificence ... something out of the pages of a super-romantic novelette. In the beginning, the spectacle, proceeding through course after course, dazzled Ellen and made her shy. It was superb food, for in the veins of Thérèse there blended the blood of Frenchman and Greek. It was food that had a taste ... not the boiled stuff of Anglo-Saxons.
After dinner, when they had all gone into the dark library, the moment came at last when Ellen’s tongue was loosed. It may have been the wine she drank or it may have been the cigarette which, in her new freedom, she smoked over the coffee (for in a single evening she had broken two of Clarence’s rules); but it is more likely that it was the picture hanging over the mantelpiece, which changed everything.
She looked at it carefully and then said, “Is that by Turner? My aunt has one by him.”
And a moment later, under the subtle urgence of Sabine, she was telling them everything. She described, for example, the Town, its Mills, its desolation, the misery of the workers. She painted for them a picture of her own family, of the Red Scot who lay now, helpless and childish, in her own big bed. She told them of her other grandfather, cold and aloof, who had run away in his youth and lived in the Paris of the Second Empire, and now existed in a room walled in by books. She recreated before their eyes the gloomy color of Shane’s Castle, only to be interrupted in the midst by Thérèse Callendar, who turned to Sabine and observed, “She is a cousin, you know, of the Madame Shane we saw once at Madame de Cyon’s in Paris.... You remember Madame de Cyon, the Russian woman, whose husband was French minister to Bulgaria.... She lived in the Avenue du Bois. A Bonapartist. Madame Shane was the beauty with red hair.... Miss Tolliver’s Aunt Julia is her mother.”
And then she permitted Ellen to continue, and the girl meanwhile, even as she talked, understood that Mrs. Callendar had notforgotten Lily. She had even fixed the place and time of their meeting. It was clear that she had been thinking of Lily, as every one did.
She told the story simply enough, but with an earnestness that was moving. To her the canvas which she painted was not remarkable, but to the listeners it appeared to hold, perhaps because it was so new to them, the fascination of a world which was utterly strange and a little exotic. They listened, moved by the simplicity of her utterance, and Richard Callendar asked her questions about the mills and furnaces, about the foreign population. The recital was a success and out of it she learned something new,—that there was nothing of such power as simplicity, nothing of such interest as individuality. She understood all that from the way in which they listened. It was the first time in all her life when she had thrown caution to the winds. She was, for an hour, her complete self.
But there was one part of the story which she did not tell. It was that part which concerned her elopement and all that had followed it. She said simply, “And so I came to New York to study, and luckily fell into the hands of Sanson....”
Richard Callendar stood up suddenly and poked the fire. His mother said, “You could not have done better,” and Sabine observed, “Here in New York we forget that the rest of the country exists.... I’ve never been out of New York except to go to Europe or to some summer place.”
To-night, instead of being a performer, one who played in public, she was the guest, the center of the evening.
She played for them the Moonlight Sonata and while she played, she became conscious again of the curious, breathless way in which Richard Callendar listened. It seemed, for a time, that he existed only in a single spirit which somehow enveloped her and the music of Beethoven. All the evening he had been silent and watchful, as silent and as watchful as herself, save in the moment when she was carried away by her own story. When she had finished playing she was conscious of another fact, perhaps even more interesting. It was that Sabine had noticed a difference and was regarding the handsome Callendar with a look so intent that Ellen, turning sharply, caught her unaware.
This new world was a world of shadows, of hints, of insinuations, a world of curious restraints and disguises. Out of these, in the very instant she turned from the piano, she understood that the relation between Sabine and young Callendar was more than a casual friendship. Sabine was in love with him, passionately, perhaps without even knowing it, for it must have required a terrible force to lead a woman so circumspect into such a betrayal.
That night, for a second time, Ellen left the house in company with Sabine and Richard Callendar. It came about that, as they were preparing to leave, young Callendar proposed to accompany them and without further discussion entered the carriage. In the past it had been the custom to send Ellen home in the cabriolet while Callendar followed in the brougham with Sabine. Sometimes these two walked to Sabine’s house. She lived in Park Avenue, a half dozen blocks away, in a tall narrow house, exceedingly stiff and formal in appearance ... a house which one could not but say suited her admirably.
On the way, they talked music for a time and when the cabriolet approached Sabine’s corner, she said simply, “I am tired. You can drop me at home.”
So she bade them good night without further ado and disappeared into the narrow house. It was a strange thing for her to have done. Ellen and Callendar must have expected her to accompany them all the way to the Babylon Arms and to return alone with him; that would have been the order of things. But she was more subtle than they imagined. If she understood, as Ellen was certain she had, that there was some new thing come into the relations that existed among them all, she was clever. She did not attempt to change or even interrupt this new current; wise in the depths of her shrewd mind she saw that to be an obstacle wasnot the same as to be a goal. So she left Richard Callendar with the stranger who had become her rival. It may have caused her sleeplessness and torment; she may have felt a keen jealousy, but it was impossible to know. It may also have been that, knowing the continental ideas of Callendar, she was not concerned over her ultimate victory. By the rule of the very tradition which had shut her in, Callendar could notmarrythis stranger.
AS Callendar reëntered the cabriolet, Ellen settled back into her corner to wait. She watched, as always, but this time she was conscious that there was another who was watching. It seemed for the first time that there had risen up in her path a person, perhaps even an enemy, who played the same waiting game. Callendar sat in his corner, his dark face visible now and then as a streak of light from the lamps entered the door, and in that uncertain and shifting illumination, Ellen studied him closely for the first time.
It was a strangely pleasing face; the very dark pallor, so evenly distributed, so perfectly shaded caught her attention as a kind of beauty new to her. There was no ruddiness here, no boisterous energy. Rather it was a silent, subtle kind of beauty. The power behind it was not so much a crude energy as a strength that was placid yet possessed of the quality of steel. It was a strength that revealed itself in the firm, clean line of the jaw and in the square, almost hard modeling of the intelligent head. If there was a hint of passion it lay in the red lips that were so full and sensual beneath the fine black mustache. He wore the collar of his coat turned up a little, with his hat pulled well over his eyes so that the whole gave an impression of rakishness and adventure. Yet her instinct told her that here was something to be feared, something subtle and rather neat, of a sort strange to her.
They must have ridden several blocks in silence when he saidto her, in a voice that was warm and carried faint traces of an accent, “I say, you are a remarkable person. I’d never dreamed how much it took to bring you where you are.”
When she answered, Ellen felt a new and absurd inclination to become a helpless, almost arch, young girl. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’d never thought about it.”
“It was an entertaining story you gave us.... You see people like me and Sabine seldom get any idea of what the real world is like.” He paused for a moment and then continued as if to make clear what he meant—“I mean a world in which people have to fight for things. We just have them. We forget about the others. And we’re in the minority of about ... shall we say ... one to a thousand. I’ve always had what I wanted.... I suppose I’ll always have it.”
This was strange talk, in a queer philosophic vein, to which Ellen answered again, “I don’t know ... I’ve never thought about the difference. I know what I want and some day ... I suppose I’ll have it.”
“Youarean extraordinary musician ... you know,” he continued. “I wonder if you know how extraordinary.”
Ellen did know; she was sure of it. But she saw fit not to answer because she was a little puzzled. In a world bounded by Clarence and Herman Biggs, she had not met a man of this sort. He was younger than Clarence and not much older than Herman but that made no difference. It was something that had nothing to do with age. Rather it was a matter of experience. She knew she was an excellent musician; she must have believed it or she could not have gone her own way with such unswerving directness, but she chose to answer modestly. In the dim light of the cab, it was impossible to know whether or not she actually smirked.
“Perhaps I am. How is one to know?... About one’s self, I mean.”
“My mother and I know about such things,” he replied, and then for a time the cabriolet fell into silence. They turned fromthe avenue into the park, and presently out of his corner he spoke again.
“You’re sure you told us everything to-night? You didn’t leave out of the story anything that might interest us?”
There was in this an impertinence which Ellen sensed and considered for a time. He was looking out of the window at the bare trees of the park with a splendid air of indifference, which Ellen felt was not indifference at all. Far back in her consciousness an odd feeling of triumph came into existence, a queer, inexplicable feeling that she was the dominant one, that somehow she had caught him now off his guard, as if she found he was not so clever as he thought. She became aware of a genuine sense of conflict, vague and undefined, ... a sort of conflict between her own intelligence and one that was quite as powerful. She watched the clear-cut ivory profile for a time and then said, “No. I left out nothing that could possibly interest anybody but me.”
(That much for his curiosity about the little man he saw for an instant through the open door at the Babylon Arms!)
Callendar turned to her. “I sound impertinent, but I only ask because it seems to me that you are even more interesting than the story you tell.”
Again this was bold and even personal, as though he sought to assume possession of that part of her which should belong to no one ... the part which washerself, at which he had no right to pry. The temptation to become feminine seized her once more.
“I suppose,” she said, “that that is a compliment. I thank you for it. Of course, I don’t know how true it is.”
“Itistrue,” he replied abruptly. “You are admirable ... and courageous. Spirit is a fine thing ... the greatest in the world.”
There was one thing for which she was thankful. He did not treat her as if she were a silly girl, as a man might, for example,have treated May Seton. In years he was not much older than herself yet in reality she understood that he was centuries older. Of that, she was certain. What she did not understand was that his approach to life, down to the veriest detail, was one which, by the nature of things, was not only alien but incomprehensible. He had patience, a quality which in her was so utterly lacking as to be inconceivable; he could wait. It was this which puzzled her ... this and the sense of conflict, so complicated, that was always a little way off, just out of reach and not to be understood.
From a great distance, she watched him and even herself, confused, puzzled, but profoundly interested. That much she had gained from the blood that flowed in old Gramp Tolliver’s veins. She was always watching, waiting, learning.
The rest of their conversation was less interesting. It possessed, to be sure, a strange quality of leisure; there were long silences not in the least awkward and uncomfortable. On the contrary, despite that sense of conflict and watching, there was a certain calmness about them, as of the silences which fall between old friends immersed in a perfect understanding. It was perhaps the same friendliness which she neglected always to take into consideration, in which she would never quite believe.
At the Babylon Arms they passed between the Syrian Lions of cast iron and at the elevator he left her. There was no prying this time, no evidence of curiosity. As he bade her good night, he suggested that one day they might lunch together. Then the swaying elevator bore her upward to Clarence and out of sight of Callendar.
The sense of conflict disturbed her, even after Clarence came in from the Bunces’, murmuring apologies for having forgotten her and stayed so late. He apologized too for having, in the enthusiasm of a pinochle game, invited the Bunces to dinner four weeks later when he had returned from his western trip.
MRS. CALLENDAR stayed two months longer than usual in New York. She was kept by the only things which could have kept her away from the sunshine of her adored Cannes; that is to say, difficulties over stocks and bonds, adjustments of the Callendar fortune. She saw to it that there were no slips and no losses. Indeed, by missing the season at Cannes she turned a profit of several hundred thousand dollars which might have been lost in the hands of one in whose veins there flowed less Levantine blood.
Richard, of course, remained with her, though he exhibited a curious indifference toward the affairs which made upon his mother claims so passionate. When she reproached him, as she frequently did, he turned to her sometimes in the dark library of the house on Murray Hill and said, “My God! I’m too rich now. What should I do with any more money? Why should I worry?”
It was an attitude in which there was nothing of softness, nothing of degeneracy; it was not even the case of a son pampered by riches. His mother must have known that, better than any one, because she had encountered in him a will not unlike her own ... a will troubled in his case by a strange restlessness born perhaps of the bizarre mixture of blood. If he was possessed of any passions they were for women, and for music, which had an effect that was amazing; it was the one thing which held the power of quieting him. There were times when he would sit motionless in the presence of music as if enchanted by it. Its effect upon him was primitive and barbaric like the hypnotism which a tom-tom exerts upon a savage.
There came a night when, as they sat alone over their coffee, estranged and a little silent after her reproaches, she turned to him and without warning said, “What about thisjeune prodige... Miss Tolliver. I hear you’ve been lunching with her.”
At this direct sally, a smile appeared slowly on the dark faceof the son. It began gently at first on the sensual red lips, and then spread itself until the effect was utterly disarming. He had a way of smiling thus, after a fashion that was disconcerting because its implications were so profound, so subtle, and so filled with disillusionment. It was a smile in which the gray eyes, lighting suddenly, played a tantalizing rôle—a smile which seemed to envelop its subject and, clinging there for a time, to destroy all power of deceit by its very friendliness. It said, gently and warmly, “Come now, let’s be honest and generous with each other.” The red lips curved ever so gently beneath the dark mustache. It was the smile of a man born knowing much that others seldom ever learn.
He smiled at her and said, “Ah! Who could have told you that?... Who but Sabine ... who knows everything?”
The very tone of his voice appeared to caress and yet mock his mother. (Sabine ... indeed all women.) Before such an assault even Thérèse Callendar had no resistance. Shifting her plump body so that the heavy bangles on her wrists jangled and clattered, she waited a moment before answering. Then a faint blush, which appeared to arise from a real sense of guilt, spread slowly up to the edges of her bright small eyes.
“ItwasSabine who told me,” she said. “You can’t blame her for that.”
“No ... she always knows everything.” He laughed abruptly. “Sometimes I think she must be in communication with the birds ... or the mice.”
“You know what I think.... I think that it’s time you married. It’s a responsibility ... the money.... There ought to be heirs. We can’t give all that money to charity or some drafty museum.” While she knocked off the ashes from her cigarette, he watched her silently with the same caressing, mocking smile. “You’re past twenty-five, you know.... I want my grandchildren to be the children of young parents. I believe in it.”
Then suddenly, he pierced straight into the thing which shehad avoided mentioning. “I shan’t marry Sabine,” he said. “I’ll find some one. I haven’t found her yet.”
“Sabine is excellent. She is well brought up.... She is rich. She is one of the few American women we know who ismondaine. I want you to marry an American. We need new blood. She knows her way about. She dresses superbly.... She will make an excellent hostess. She will be at home everywhere.”
“But I am not in love with her,” he said smiling.
For an instant a glint of hard anger appeared in her eyes. “You are old enough ... or at least wise enough not to be romantic.”
“It is not a question of romance, Mama.... It is more a question of necessity. I should prefer to be faithful to my wife.”
At this speech, she clucked her tongue, and crushed out the end of her cigarette. “Ça ne marche pas,” she observed coldly. “You can’t expect me to believe such nonsense.”
Thérèse was by no means innocent. She had lived in the world, always. She knew what things went on about her and, being Levantine and French, she expected even less than most women of experience. She understood that there were such things as mistresses and that most men of her world were not unacquainted with them; so she could not for a moment have supposed that her son, smiling at her in his knowing fashion, possessed a purity that was virginal. Indeed, it might be said that she knew more of his adventures than he ever supposed. Once she had scandalized Mrs. Champion by saying, “My son has an intrigue with the wife of one of my best friends in Paris. It puts me in a most uncomfortable position.”
Nevertheless she had said this in a tone that implied satisfaction; the mistress of her son was, at least, a lady and not a woman of the streets. There was only one thing (she was accustomed to say) that she regarded as unforgivable; it was that he should make a fool of himself or waste great sums of money on any woman. And this, she must have known, was extremely unlikely.
After their disagreement they sat for a time in the sort of strained silence that envelops a conflict between two people of extraordinary will. It was Thérèse who, with a sudden embarrassed cough, interrupted the stillness.
“This girl ...” she said. “I hope you’re not entangling yourself with her.”
Again he smiled and replied, “No, I haven’t entangled myself.”
“Because, it is dangerous with a girl of that sort.... She’s an American, you know, and not the sort one finds among musicians in Paris....Autres choses.... She’s well brought up ...bourgeoisie, I should say, of the provinces.”
This time Richard laughed. “Not sobourgeoiseas you might think.”
She leaned forward a little. “That’s just it!” she said. “She’s not easy to win.... She’s not the ordinary sort. She’s a woman of character ... of will.” Then she moved back, folding the chubby hands, glittering with rings, on the brief expanse of her black satin lap. “No, you’d best keep clear of her.... Whatever happens is without my approval.”
“She is interesting,” the son replied. “I’ve never seen a woman quite like her.”
This, it appeared, was the cause for new alarm. After regarding him for a time curiously, she murmured, “You can’t marry her, of course. She’s too inexperienced.... Sometimes, she’sgauche. But that’s not the chief thing.... If you married her, I don’t think I should object ... not very greatly.... It’s new blood ... healthy blood. But I advise you against thinking of such a thing. Wherever she goes, trouble will follow. She’s born, like most people with a touch of genius, under a curse.” He would have interrupted her here, but she checked him with a gesture of her fat hand. “She is certain to affect the lives of every one about her ... because, well, because the threads of our lives are hopelessly tangled. Oh, don’t think I’m talking nonsense or saying this to discourage you.... I know it.... I’m sure of it.... Marry her if you will, but don’t expect happiness to come of it. She would doubtless bear you a son ... a fine strong son because she is a fine cold animal. But don’t expect any satisfaction from her. She knows too well exactly where she is bound.”
During this long speech the son stood smoking silently with a shadow of the mocking smile on his lips. When she had finished he did not answer her but sat, with a thoughtful air, looking out into the garden which Thérèse this year had not bothered to have planted.
After a time she spoke again to say, “Surely you don’t fancy you could ever control her.... She’s a wild young filly.... No man will ever control her ... not for long.”
“I’ve never thought of marrying her,” he replied quietly. “Why, she has a lover already.”
At this Mrs. Callendar’s countenance assumed an expression of passionate interest. “But she is not that sort ... not ademi-mondaine. She is an honest woman ... a cold woman. One can see that.”
He smiled, this time even more softly and mockingly and into the gray eyes there came a gleam of ironical humor. “It was Sabine who said she had a lover,” he said. “You remember, Miss Tolliver told us nothing of what has happened to her since she came here.... Besides, cold women are the most successful. They do not lose their heads.”
IF Ellen had ever had any use for such a creature as a confidante, she would have told her no doubt that life, at this moment, was an exasperating puzzle. Between the manners of Herman Biggs and Clarence and the manners of such a man as Richard Callendar, there lay a vast gulf, a sort of blank page in the book of her experience, an hiatus that left her uneasy and disturbed.
Clarence and Herman Biggs, she understood, represented to a great degree the husband and lover of her own country. They were the ones who came seeking, the ones who idolized the object of their affections. They were, if not fascinating, affectionate and docile. They were perhaps, even convenient, so long as they did not get under foot. There was in them a certain childlike innocence, complicated alone by a Quixotic code of chivalry and honor which allowed them to be despoiled. Either they overlooked or were innocent of the ways of the world and so clung to the sentimental image of women as pure, devoted creatures who were always good and generous. There were, of course, such things as “bad women” but these did not concern them; such women were of a class apart, without any real relation to good women, a third sex one might have said, with its own uses. The women of their world had changed abruptly, swiftly, in a generation or two, from helpmates on a rude frontier adventure into creatures of luxury; and men like Herman and Clarence had not kept pace. These were the men whom Ellen had always known. There had never been any one like Richard Callendar.
In the absence of Clarence among the factories of the middle west Ellen lunched, not once, but several times with Callendar. Out of the money she had earned by her playing she was able now to dress herself in a fashion which, if not smart, was at least simple and charming. With the approach of the warm days, they lunched at Sherry’s (for he made no effort to conceal his attentions) in an open window which gave out upon the Avenue and the stream of carriages, disordered now by increasing inroads of noisy automobiles. She must have understood, out of the depths of her mother’s teachings, that what she did was an improper and even a dangerous thing. It was, at least, a misstep, taken through lack of experience ... a step which later on she might not have risked.
There was Callendar himself to be considered. It was clear that, despite all her coolness, he had an effect upon her. There were times when she would blush as if suddenly overcome by asense of his presence, for he was charming to her—gentle, understanding, full of a fire which leapt up in sudden gusts to join the flame of her own triumph and zest in living. In the window overlooking Fifth Avenue there were moments when she must have forgotten everything save the future, hours when they talked of Europe, when he described to her with something very close to passion the brilliance of Paris or the smoky glow of London. Both were naïve, Ellen in the fashion of the inexperienced and Callendar, so dark, so charming, so utterly new, in the fashion of a man whose directness of action had nothing to do with the question of conventions. It was impossible for either to have understood the emotion that drew them together, for it was a romantic thing to which both were then insensible, the one because life had taught her not to expect such a thing as romance, the other because he had never believed in its existence.
One bright afternoon in May they walked all the way from Sherry’s through the park to the Babylon Arms. It was a soft day when the park appeared veritably to reflect its greenness upon the air itself, a day when the willows were softened by a haze of new leaves, and the rare clusters of cherry trees appeared in faint blurs of delicate pink. Along the edges of the lake, freed now of its burden of ice and not yet burdened anew with the old newspapers of sweltering August, the nursemaids divided the iron benches with vagabonds and old ladies who had come there simply to rest, to sit relaxed, silent, as if they were sustained somehow without effort by the very softness of the air. The quality of this pervading gentleness appeared to have its effect upon the two; for a time they were enveloped by a languor which drugged the intelligence and warmed the senses. They walked lazily, side by side, Ellen in a tight gray suit and a large picture hat, Callendar looking at her now and then out of his gray eyes and poking the fresh green grass with his malacca stick. At times they stopped and laughed, for Callendar was in a charming mood when he became ablagueur, irresistible and caressing. Under the influence of the day even the hardness of Ellen, which could be attimes almost pitiful, appeared to melt away. She laughed at him. She even watched him slyly from the corner of her eyes, but not in the old hostile fashion. It was more the way one would watch a charming little boy, fearful lest his knowledge of the admiration might give him an advantage.
It could not have been the weather alone which so changed her. There were other things, among them beyond all doubt Callendar himself and the friendship which he had given her, the same friendship which his mother and even Sabine in her brusque, shy way had offered. They were friends in a way no one, save Lily, had ever been before. It is possible that there came to her on this soft warm day a knowledge of her kinship with these people, of a bond which if undefinable was none the less certain and secure. They had nothing to gain from her and they were not concerned with subduing her; they did not seek to change her in any way at all. They were like her old Aunt Julia and the mysterious Lily, who had warned her not to let people make her fit a pattern, not to let them drag her down to the level of their own mediocrity; she understood now what Lily meant. These were people who, by some quality of honesty that was almost a physical thing, had attained an aristocracy of their own, a state which had its foundations in that very honesty. There was, too, a distinction about them of a sort beyond such individuals as the genteel, decayed Mr. Wyck, May Seton and her giggles, Mr. Bunce who was so robust and kind, and (this thought must have occurred to her) even Clarence whose kindly humbleness barred him forever. They were not muddled; they stood outlined, for all their strangeness, with a sharp clarity.
It was an understanding that had come to her over a long time dimly as through a mist. To-day she knew it. She began to understand why there were some people whom she admired and some for whom she could have in her heart contempt or at best an emptiness that bordered upon pity.
So she walked very happily with the fascinating, dark young man, content perhaps that she might go on thus forever, that shemight always have him and Sabine and Thérèse quite as they were, without any change. And in the depths of her heart it would have given her a sharp, leaping pleasure to have encountered suddenly on one of those asphalt paths May Seton and others of her townspeople. It would have pleased her to have had them witness her triumph. For she had not yet escaped the Town.
Into the midst of this a new knowledge came, sharp and unforeseen.
Under the shadow of Daniel Webster in the bronze attitude of a pouter pigeon, Callendar halted sharply and turned toward her with a swift directness, looking at her so closely that for an instant she blushed.
“Might I come in with you this afternoon?” he asked. “Will you be alone?”
Faced by the disarming gaze of the gray eyes, she forgot for a moment her game of watching. She answered, “Why, yes. I’ll be alone.” And then, as if she could not control herself, she looked away and started walking once more.
He did not speak again until they had reached the outer barrier of the park when he said,
“I’d like to have you play for me ... alone. I’ve never heard you save in a crowd. I fancy you would play best for an audience of one.”
They turned presently between the Syrian Lions of the Babylon Arms and, after being borne silently aloft in the swaying elevator, they climbed the two flights of stairs to the door of the tiny apartment which Ellen opened with her key. The room was in darkness until she lifted the shades which (on the advice of that passionate housekeeper, her mother) were drawn to protect the cheap, bright carpet from the sharp rays of the spring sun, and then the light revealed a shabby little room stuffed with the things which Clarence had bought her. There were chairs and sofas and pillows, pictures, ornaments and little tables. In one corner the grand piano stood somewhat apart in a little bay cleared offurniture. Richard, leaning on his stick and viewing the confusion gravely, must have thought her lover a poor sort, who could offer her only a great profusion of things in the poorest of taste. Yet he did not smile, perhaps because he was not greatly interested in the room. In the midst of all the stuff, Ellen, taking off her picture hat and blushing still with a hazy sense of confusion, possessed an air of aloofness, of being detached from all the shabby things. She rose above them as once before she had risen above the furniture in the Setons’ dismal parlor.
The gaiety that had flourished in the bright park became dampened now by a queer sense of strain, an awkwardness which made itself apparent in the silence of both. They were no longer in the bright open park: the walls which shut them in had changed everything, sharpened in some indefinable way the power of their senses. For an instant they stood regarding each other shyly, and presently Ellen said, “Do sit down there.... And I’ll play for you. What do you want to hear?”
Richard told her that the choice must be hers, and then he seated himself in Clarence’s leather arm chair and lighted a cigarette with the matches from Clarence’s smoking table in the Mission style. Without speaking again she began to play. It was as if she had said, “I will talk to you in this fashion,” and after the first few chords had fallen the sense of strain and conflict disappeared, swallowed up again, this time in the man’s attitude of passionate listening.
She played for him, first of all, some Schumann which was so like the shadowy, soft consciousness of this new feeling born with such abruptness there in the park; and then she played some of his beloved Chopin and turned at last into the Sonata Appassionata. She played as she played only for Fergus who listened in the same fashion, slumped down in his chair, his eyes half closed, his curling, golden hair all rumpled, with the air of one intoxicated by sound. It must have occurred to her, for the first time, that there was between her brother and this stranger a certain likeness, a capacity for wild abandonment that was terrifying. To-dayall the things which for so long a time had been shut up within the walls of her bitter secrecy poured forth and overflowed into the music; and with this there was united a new fire, a sudden warmth that was strange to her. She knew a strange desire to share all that she possessed, a curious, aching desire close to the border of tears. It was so, perhaps, because love would always be to her like this ... a wild and passionate heightening of the senses which found its manifestation in an unearthly unity of spirit. For a time she carried Richard with her into the ecstasy she was able to invoke.
And when at length the last chords drifted slowly away, they permitted the silence to remain unbroken for a long time while he sat, still slumped in his chair, his eyes half closed, watching her with the air of one on whom a spell has been cast.
He sat there in Clarence’s chair in Clarence’s place, magnificent like herself in all that desert of commonplace things. There was a sense of unreality about the whole scene. She must have known, deep within that hard intelligence of hers, that what she saw was at best an illusion since between them both there lay differences, circumstances, facts that were not to be overcome.
He went presently, after they had exchanged a few stupid phrases drawn by sheer force from the depths of an emotion which neither was willing to betray save by their silence. They did not even speak of another meeting; nothing happened; upon the surface their parting was strangely empty and bare. And when the door had closed behind him, Richard halted for a moment in the dark hallway and leaned against the wall. Perhaps he remembered what his mother, so old in her wisdom and so shrewd, had told him.She’s not the ordinary sort.... You’d best keep clear of her.
The mocking look had gone out of his eyes. Something had happened to him, an experience that was altogether new in a life by no means limited in such matters ... a thing which opened the fancy to a new magnificence, a new rapture, a new intoxication. It was a vision which he may have doubted because he hadnever believed in its existence. But between him and this wild adventure there stood a barrier against which he could make no progress. It was an invisible wall of a sort he had never encountered in any woman, not even in the terrible serenity of Sabine. Hard it was, and clear like crystal, protecting something which he might see but never touch.She’s not the ordinary sort.... You’d best keep clear of her.
On the opposite side of the door Ellen flung herself down on the ugly divan and wept, silently and horribly, as she had wept once before in the dark solitude of her own virginal room, while the autumn rain drenched the garden outside. And again she could not have told why she wept. It was a passionate sensuous weeping which exhausted itself presently and left her weary and quiet until long after the lights had begun to twinkle through the smoke along the river.
Yet nothing had happened—nothing at all of which she could say, “It is this or that.”