She got up and in the darkness made her way to the bell. When the butler appeared and switched on the lights, she said, “Please get me a box for the concert of Lilli Barr.... It’s a week from to-morrow.” And, as he was leaving, she added, “I shall give a dinner that night. See to it that the rest of the house is got ready.”
This was the first step.
ON the very same night in her weathered house sheltered by lilacs and syringas in the Town Miss Ogilvie, trembling and fluttering like a canary set free and preening itself in the sun, packed her trunk for the trip to the East. Any one looking on might have believed her, save for the wrinkled rosy cheeks and the slight spare figure, a young girl on the eve of her first party. After all, it was an event ... the first trip she had made to the East since the Seventies when she had sailed as a girl for Munich. And she was going East to hear Ellen Tolliver play ... Ellen who had been a chit of a girl when she had last seen her, Ellen who was now Lilli Barr, whose name and picture appeared everywhere in the papers, Ellen who had hidden on the night she fled the Town in the nest-like parlor of this very house.
Miss Ogilvie, packing her best taffeta with its corals and cameos to wear at the concert, indulged in an orgy of memories ... memories that went back to the years before Ellen was born, to the days in Munich when for a delirious week, until the heavy hand of her father intervened, she had fancied she would become a great musician and play in public.
Pausing beside the old tin-bound trunk, she thought, “No, I never could have done it. I was too much a coward. But Ellen has ... Ellen has.... And to think that I advised her to do it, that I told her to go ahead.”
In the long span of a gentle life in which there had been no heights and no valleys, this occasion eclipsed all else ... even the day she had herself sailed on the blackpaquebotfor Europe.
“It happens like that ... in the most unexpected places, in villages, in towns.... Why, even in a dirty mill town like this.”
It all came back to her now, all the conversation between herself and Ellen on that last day when, weeping, she said to the girl, “I no longer count for anything. You are beyond me. Who am I to instruct you?”
And she remembered too with a sudden warmth the old bond between them, the hatred of this awful, sooty Town ... a desert from which Ellen had boldly escaped, which Miss Ogilvie had accepted, hiding always in her heart her loathing of the place.
“And to think that she remembered me ... a poor, insignificant old woman like me! To think that she even paid my way!”
For Miss Ogilvie could not have come otherwise. As the years passed she had grown poorer and poorer in her house behind the trees.
Her conscience pricked the old lady. “I wonder,” she thought, sitting on the edge of her chair before the old trunk. “I wonder if I should confess to Hattie Tolliver that it was I who helped them to escape. It would be more honest, since I am going to stay with her.”
And then she grew worried for fear Ellen might be ashamed of her in her old-fashioned taffeta with coral and cameo pins. Ellen had been living in Paris with Lily Shane; she would know all about the latest thing in clothes. And to convince herself that the dress was not too bad, she put it on and pinning fast the coral and cameos, stood before her glass, frizzing her hair and pulling the dress this way and that.
In the midst of these preparations, she was interrupted by the distant jangle of the bell and the sound caused her to blush and start as if she, an old dried-up woman, had been caught by an intruder coquetting before her mirror.
She knew who was at the door. It was Eva Barr and May Biggs come to send messages to Ellen, for they too shared a little her excitement. They would talk, the three of them, about Ellen as they remembered her until long after midnight; for all three hoped that Ellen might be induced to play in the Town, especially since there was such a fine new auditorium. They too had claims upon her, claims of friendship and blood and old associations.
ON the night of the concert Ellen wore a gown of crimson velvet, according to a plan of Rebecca who determined that the occasion should be a sensational one not to be forgotten. The house was filled and when Lilli Barr came through the door at the back of the stage there was a quick hush, a sudden breathlessness, caused not so much by her beauty (for she was never really beautiful in the sense that Lily was beautiful) but by the whole perfection of the picture. The crimson dress fitted her tightly and was sleeveless and cut low to show the perfection of her strong, handsome shoulders. Her black hair, so black that in the brilliant light which showered upon her from overhead (a device of Rebecca’s) it appeared blueas the traditional raven’s wing. She wore it pulled back tightly from her smooth forehead and done in a small knot at the nape of the neck. In her ears she wore old Portuguese rings of paste and silver. She was superb, glittering, slender, strong, and possessed of the old brilliant power to distract thought and concentrate attention.
In that instant the battle was half won. There were those in the audience who felt that the mere sight of her was enough.
In her box on the first tier, Mrs. Callendar sat up with a start, raised her lorgnettes and said “Tiens! Quel chic!”
Beside her Mrs. Mallinson (the lady novelist) murmured, “Superb creature!” and the Honorable Emma Hawksby (back again to live off the Americans on the strength of being a niece to the disreputable Duke of Middlebottom) thought again that the big feet of Englishwomen were a serious hindrance and that perhaps her countrywomen went in too much for walking. The elderly rake, Wickham Chase, sighed bitterly at the tragedy of old age and the loss of vigor. Bishop Smallwood (whom Sabine had dubbed the Apostle to the Genteel) thought, “She looks like my wa’am friend, Mrs. Sigourney,” but, considering the impression, thought better of it and said nothing, since Mrs. Sigourney had long since overplayed her game and become utterly déclassée. And the third, a nondescript bachelor, strove to peer between Mrs. Mallinson’s supporting dog-collar and the bony back of the Honorable Emma Hawksby. If he had any thoughts at all, they were not very interesting; for thirty years he had been sitting in the back of boxes at plays, concerts and the opera, peering between plump backs and skinny ones.
Below them the audience stretched away row upon row, in dim lines marshaled into neat columns like an advancing army seen through a mist.
Mrs. Callendar thought, “Ah! She is magnificent. The transformation scarcely seems possible.... Still, the girl had it in her always.” And a little voice kept saying to her, “You will win. She is an admirable pawn. You will succeed. You willget what you want if you work hard enough and are clever about it.”
Down among the dim rows spread out below them sat Hattie Tolliver, in a new gown chosen by Ellen. Large and vigorous she sat, looking a little like a powerful and eccentric duchess, by the side of Miss Ogilvie in her mauve taffeta with the corals and cameos, her thin hair done elaborately in a fashion she had not worn since she was a girl. They sat there, the eagle and the linnet, trembling with excitement, the tears very close to the surface of the emotional Hattie.
Presently, as Ellen took her place at the piano and struck a few crashing chords, Hattie could bear it no longer. She leaned toward the stranger at her side, a woman with short hair and an umbrella, and said in triumph, “That’s my daughter who’s playing.”
The stranger stared at her for an instant and murmured, “Is it indeed?” And the music began.
Hattie really wanted to tell them all—the row upon row of strangers, obscured now by the darkness.
Charles Tolliver at his end of the row closed his eyes and slipped presently into the borderland between sleep and consciousness, a country where there is no reality and all is covered by a rosy mist. Through this the music came to him distantly. He fancied he was back once more in the shabby living room with Ellen playing sullenly at the upright piano. And for a little time he was happy.
Robert, who had no ear for music, felt uncomfortable and disapproved of his sister’s low-cut gown. Robert was a prig; he took after his grandfather Barr, “the citizen.”
The Everlasting was not to be seen. He had been left at home, because it was impossible to say how he would behave on such an occasion. One dared not take the risk.
In the mind of Hattie, sitting there in the shadows of the great hall, there could be no question of failure. Was it nother Ellen, her little girl whom she had once held upon her knee, who now sat, as it were, upon a throne before a world which listened breathlessly? All those people who filled the seats about her and above her might have risen and left, but to Hattie the evening would have been a great success, a triumph in which the judgment of the world had been wrong. They did not leave; instead they sat, leaning forward a bit or slipped down in their seats with closed eyes, bedazzled as much by the perfection and grace of this new musician as by the music itself.
Rebecca, standing in the darkness at the back of the great hall, understood all that. She knew that in part the triumph was her own, for had she not tricked them, hypnotized them? They would not be able to forget. She, like Hattie, felt with every fiber of her body, the very sensations of all those people who listened—people from great houses of the rich who had heard of Lilli Barr from friends in Europe, people from the suburbs who would rush away in frantic haste for the last train home, people—young people—like the one who sat next to Hattie, in shabby clothes and worn shoes, who were fighting now desperately, as Ellen had once fought, to reach that same platform, that same brilliant shower of light. They listened, enchanted by the sound, caught by the spell of one woman’s genius and another’s brilliant trickery. Possessed they were, for the moment.
And presently the tears began to stream down Hattie’s face. They dropped to the hands worn and red, concealed now by the expensive gloves which cramped her uncomfortably.
The applause rose and fell in great waves, sweeping over her with the roaring of a great surf heard far away, and through it the voice of Miss Ogilvie, saying gently, “Who would have believed it?”
And then at length, when the sound of the last number had died away, an overwhelming surf which would not die even when the woman in crimson appeared again and again under the brilliant shower of light; until at last Lilli Barr seated herself before thegreat satiny piano and the crowd, which had pushed forward to the stage, grew quiet and stood listening, waiting, silent and expectant ... the people from great houses, the people from the suburbs, the young people with worn shoes and shabby clothes. And into the air there rang a shower of spangled notes, gay and sparkling, embracing a rhythm older than any of them. For Lilli Barr—(or was it Ellen Tolliver)—was playing now The Beautiful Blue Danube. It was not the old simple waltz that Hattie had picked out upon the organ in her father’s parlor, but an extravagant, brilliant arrangement which beneath the strong, white fingers became fantastical and beautiful beyond description.
Hattie Tolliver wept because she understood. It was as if Ellen—the proud, silent Ellen—had been suddenly stripped of all the old inarticulate pride, as if suddenly she had grown eloquent and all the barriers, like the walls of Jericho, had tumbled down. Hattie Tolliver understood. Her daughter was speaking to her now across all the gulf of years, across the hundred walls which stood between them. This was her reward. She understood and wept at the sudden revelation of the mysterious thread that ran through all life. All this triumph, this beauty, all this splendor had its beginning long ago on the harmonium in the parlor of old Jacob Barr’s farm.
When the lights went up and Hattie, drying her eyes and suffering her hand to be patted by Miss Ogilvie, was able to look about her, she saw with a feeling of horror among the figures crowded in a group before the stage a coonskin coat and a sharp old face that was familiar. It was The Everlasting. He had come, after all, alone, aloof, as he had always lived. He stood with his bony old head tilted back a little, peering through his steel rimmed spectacles at the brilliant figure of his granddaughter.
For an instant Hattie thought, triumphantly, “Now he can see that my child is great. That she is famous. He will see,” she thought, “what a good mother I have been.”
But her sense of triumph was dimmed a little because sheknew that Ellen belonged also to him ... all that part which she had never been able to understand. It was Gramp’s triumph as well as Hattie’s. To her horror she heard him shouting, “Bravo! Bravo!” in a thin, cracked voice, as if he were a young man again listening while Liszt played to an audience of foreigners.
In the box, looking down on the crowd below, Thérèse Callendar waited to the end. She sent Mrs. Mallinson, the Honorable Emma Hawksby, the Apostle to the Genteel, Wickham Chase and the nondescript bachelor away in her motor, bidding the driver return for her. She sat peering down through her lorgnettes, plump and secure in her sables and dirty diamonds, a little bedazzled like all the others but still enough in control of her senses to be interested in the figures below. Among them she too noticed the extraordinary figure of a skinny old man in a coonskin coat, who stood a little apart from the others with a triumphant smile on his sharp, wrinkled face.
At the moment she was in an optimistic mood because there had occurred in the course of the concert an incident which, with all the rich superstition of her nature, she interpreted as a good omen. Between the two parts of the program when dozens of bouquets (mostly purchased by Rebecca) were rushed forward to the platform, she saw that Lilli Barr leaned down and chose a great bunch of yellow roses. It was the bouquet which Thérèse had sent. It was an omen. If there had been any wavering in the mind of Thérèse it vanished at once. Ellen could not consciously have chosen it. She was sure now that she would succeed.
Behind the stage whither she turned her steps when the last of the applause had died away and the lights were turned out, she found Ellen standing surrounded by a noisy throng. Among them she recognized only Sanson, who had grown feeble and white since last she saw him. And there was an extraordinary, powerful woman, handsome in a large way, who wore her whitegloves awkwardly; and beside her a little old spinster in an absurd gown of mauve taffeta adorned with cameos and coral pins. These two stood beside the musician, the one proud and smiling, the other a little frightened, as a bird might be.
It was all exciting. Thérèse waited on the edge of the throng until all had gone save the big handsome woman and the little spinster in mauve. Then she stepped forward and saw that Ellen recognized her.
“Ah,” said Ellen, coldly. “Mrs. Callendar! Were you here too?”
Thérèse did not say that the concert was magnificent. She knew better than to add one more to the heap of garish compliments. She said, “It was the first time I have been where I could hear you. I knew you would do it some day.... You remember, I told you so.”
There was a look in Ellen’s eye which said, “Ah! You forgot me for years. Now that I am successful everything is different.” Then drawing her black cloak about her crimson dress, she laid a hand on the arm of the big, handsome woman.
“This is my mother ... Mrs. Callendar,” she said. “And this is Miss Ogilvie, my first music teacher.”
Mrs. Tolliver eyed Thérèse with suspicion, and Miss Ogilvie simpered and bowed.
“I came back to ask you to come home to supper with me,” said Mrs. Callendar to Ellen. “We could have a sandwich and a glass of sherry and talk for a time. I’ve opened the house.”
For a moment the air was filled with a sense of conflict. The suspicion of Hattie, as she saw her daughter slipping from her, rose into hostility. In the end she lost, for Ellen said, “Yes, I’ll come for a little time.” And then turning to her mother, she added, “You and Miss Ogilvie go to the Ritz. I’ll come there later. Rebecca has ordered supper.”
But it was not Thérèse Callendar who won. It was some onewho was not there at all ... a dark man of whose very existence Hattie Tolliver had never heard.
MEANWHILE in the front of the concert hall a little man whom none of them had seen slipped away before the lights came up, into the protecting darkness of the street. He had come in late to sit far back in the shadow beneath the balcony. Rebecca had noticed him, for he sat almost beside her and behaved in a queer fashion; but never having seen him before, she gave the matter no further thought. In the midst of the concert he had suddenly begun to weep, snuffling and drying his eyes with a furtive shame. He was a small man with a sallow face and shifting eyes which looked at you in a trembling, apologetic fashion (a trick that had come over him in the years since he had been driven from the comfortable flat on the top floor of the Babylon Arms). Rebecca, of course, had never heard of Mr. Wyck, yet she noticed him now because he fidgeted with his umbrella and because his hands trembled violently when he held his handkerchief to his eyes. He appeared, in his sniveling, frightened way, to be deeply affected by the music.
He went out quickly, among the first, looking behind him as if he stood in terror of being recognized and accused before all those people. Once in the street, he drew his shabby overcoat close about him, and turned his steps southward with such speed that at times the passers-by glared at him for jostling them at the crossings. They must have thought too, when he looked at them, that there was a reflection of madness in the staring eyes. He plunged south into the glare of light that pierced the darkness above Broadway like a pillar of fire.
He had seen her again ... the one woman whom he hated above all persons on earth. He would have killed her. It would have given him pleasure to see her die, but as he ran, he knew thathe had not the courage. He thought, “I could not bear to face her even for the moment before I struck. I could not bear the look in her eyes” ... (the old look of contempt and accusation, as if she knew what it was he had told Clarence)....
He was gone now ... Clarence. Perhaps one might find him on the other side.
On and on he ran past brilliant pools of light, red and purple, green and yellow; past lurid posters adorning movie palaces showing men in death cells and women being carried down ladders in the midst of flames; past billboards on which extravagantly beautiful women kicked naked legs high in the air (they were not for him, whose only knowledge of love was that feeble flicker of affection he had had for Clarence); past rich motors filled with furs and painted women; past restaurants and hotels glittering with light from which drifted faintly the sounds of wild music; past all this until he emerged at last from the phantasmagoria in which he had no part, into the protective murkiness of a street which led west toward the North River ... a street which began in delicatessen and clothing shops and degenerated slowly into rows of shabby brownstone houses, down-at-the-heel and neglected, with the placards of chiropractors and midwives and beauty doctors thrust behind dusty lace curtains.
He hurried now, more rapidly than ever, with the air of a terrified animal seeking its burrow, to hide away from all that world of success and wealth and vigor that lay behind him.
She had come (he thought) out of the middle west, knowing nothing, bringing nothing, to destroy Clarence and win all that he had seen to-night. She had trampled them all beneath her feet. And what had he? Mr. Wyck? Nothing! Nothing! Only the obscenities of a boarding house into which she had driven him a second time. It was like all women. They preyed upon men. They destroyed them. And she had been vulgar and stupid and awkward....
At last he turned in at a house which bore a placard “Rooms to Let.” There he let himself in with a key and hurried up thegas-lit stairs pursued by a gigantic shadow cast by the flickering of a flame turned economically low.
His room lay at the end of the top floor passage beyond the antiquated bathroom with its tin tub. Once inside, he bolted the door and flung himself down on the blankets of his bed to weep. A light, brilliant but far away, cast the crooked outline of an ailanthus tree against the faded greasy paper of the room. A cat, lean and adventurous, moved across the sill, and a cat fifty times its size moved in concert across the wall at the foot of the bed. Amid the faint odors of onions and dust, Mr. Wyck wept pitifully, silently.
For a long time he lay thus, tormented by memories of what he had seen ... the crowd cheering and applauding, the woman in crimson and diamonds (an evil creature, symbol of all the cruelties which oppressed him). There were memories too that went back to the days at the Babylon Arms before she had come out of the west to destroy everything, days when Clarence, succumbing to the glamour of a name, had treated him as if he were human ... days which had marked the peak of happiness. Since then everything had been a decline, a slipping downward slowly into a harsh world where there was no place for him....
After a time, he grew more calm and lay with the quiet of a dead man, staring at the shadows on the wall until at last he raised himself and sat on the edge of the bed, holding his head in his thin hands. It was midnight ... (a clock somewhere in the distance among all those lights sounded the hour slowly) ... when he again stirred and, taking up from the bed an old newspaper, set himself to tearing it slowly into strips. He worked with all the concentration of a man hypnotized, until at last the whole thing had been torn into bits. Then he went to the window and with great care stuffed each tiny crevice in the rattling frame. In the same fashion he sealed the cracks about the sagging door. And when he had done this he approached the jet on which he was accustomed to heat the milk which made him sleep. But to-night the bottle of milk was left in its corner, untouched. He glanced at it and, after a moment’s thought, reached up and slowly turned the knob of the jet until the gas began to hiss forth into the tiny room. When he had done all this he returned to the bed and, wrapping himself in his overcoat, lay down in peace. He did not weep now. He was quite calm. He came very close to achieving dignity. He waited....
Outside the adventurous cat set up an amorous wail. The shadows danced across the wall-paper in a fantastic procession, and presently as if by a miracle their place was taken by another procession quite different—a procession in which there were ladies in crinolines out of the portraits which had once known the grandeur of a house on lower Fifth Avenue, and men in trousers strapped beneath their boots and even a carriage or two drawn by bright, prancing horses ... a dim procession out of the past. And presently the second procession faded like the first. The walls of the room melted away. There was a great oblivion, a peace, an endless space where one stood alone, very tall and very powerful.... A great light and through a rosy mist the sound of a tom cat’s amorous wail, more and more distant, raised in an ironic hymn of love to accompany the passing of Mr. Wyck, for whom there was no place in this world.
THE sound of the same clock striking midnight failed to penetrate the thick old curtains muffling the library on Murray Hill. Here Thérèse and Ellen sat talking, almost, one might have said, as if nothing had happened since Ellen last passed through the bronze door on her way to the Babylon Arms. Under the long, easy flow of Thérèse’s talk her irritation had dissolved until now, two hours after the concert, they faced each other much as they had done long ago. It was Ellen who had changed; Thérèse was older, a little weary, and a trifle more untidy but otherwise the same—shrewd, talkative, her brisk minddarting now here, now there, like a bright minnow, seeking always to penetrate the shiny, brittle surfaces which people held before them as their characters. She found, no doubt, that Ellen had learned the trick of the shiny, brittle surface; she understood that it was by no means as easy as it had been to probe to the depths the girl’s inmost thoughts. She had learned to protect herself; nothing could hurt her now unless she chose to reveal a weakness in her armor. Thérèse understood at once that if her plan was to succeed, it must turn upon Ellen’s own volition; the girl (she was no longer a girl but Thérèse still thought of her in that fashion) could not be tricked into a bargain. Beyond all doubt she understood that Richard was dangerous, that he had the power of causing pain.
As they talked, far into the night, Thérèse fancied that Ellen sat there—so handsome in the long crimson gown, so self-possessed, so protected by the shiny, brittle surface—weighing in her mind the question of ever seeing him again. They did not approach the topic openly; for a long time Thérèse chattered, in the deceptive way she had, of a thousand things which had very little to do with the case.
“You have seen Sabine now and then,” she put forward, cautiously.
“Two or three times. She called on me.”
Thérèse chuckled quietly. “She must admire you. It is unusual for her to make an advance of that sort.”
The observation drew just the answer she had hoped for, just the answer which Ellen, thinking perhaps that the whole matter should be brought out into the light, saw fit to give.
“It was not altogether admiration,” she said. “It was more fear. You see, she had imagined a wonderful story ... a story that he had brought me to Paris, and that I was his mistress.”
For a moment Ellen felt a twinge of conscience at breaking the pledge of confidence she had given Sabine. Still, she must use the weapons at hand. She understood perfectly that there was something they wanted of her; she understood that any of them(save only Callendar himself) would have sacrificed her to their own schemes. He would sacrifice her only to himself.
“She was a little out of her head, I think ... for a long time after little Thérèse was born. She grieved too because she could never have another child. She wanted to give Dick an heir.... She was very much in love with him ... then.” The last word she added, as if by an afterthought.
At this Ellen thrust forward another pawn, another bit of knowledge which had come to her from Sabine. “He neglects her badly, doesn’t he?”
Thérèse pursed her lips and frowned, as if for a moment the game had gotten out of hand. “I don’t fancy it’s a case of neglect.... They’re simply not happy. You see, it was not....” She smiled with deprecation. “Shall I be quite frank? It was not a matter of love in the beginning.... It was amariage de convenance.”
“Yes. He told me that ... himself. Before the wedding took place.”
There was a light now in Ellen’s eye, a wicked gleam as if the game were amusing her tremendously, as if she found a mischievous delight in baiting this shrewd old woman with bits of knowledge which showed her how little she really knew of all that had taken place.
“Of course,” Thérèse continued, “she fell in love with him after a time.... But for him it was impossible.... You see, there is only one person with whom he has ever really been in love. It was a case of fascination....”
Ellen did not ask who this person was because she knew now, beyond all doubt. She had a strange sense of having lived all this scene before, and she knew that it was her sense of drama which was again giving her the advantage; once before it had saved her when her will, her conscious will, had come near to collapse. (Long ago it was ... in the preposterous Babylon Arms which Clarence had thought so grand.)
“He gave me a dog,” she said, by way of letting Mrs. Callendarknow that she understood who the mysterious person was. “Just before I left for Vienna.... I have him here with me, at the Ritz. He is very like Richard....”
Mrs. Callendar poured out more sherry. She felt the need of something to aid her. And then she emerged abruptly, after the law of tactics which she usually followed, into the open.
“I don’t mind saying, my dear, that you’re the one who has fascinated him ... always.”
Ellen smiled coldly. “He is not what one might call a passionate lover.”
“He is faithful.”
Ellen’s smile expanded into a gentle laugh. “One might call it, I suppose, ... a fidelity of the soul, ... of the spirit, a sublimated fidelity.” There crept into her voice a thin thread of mockery, roused perhaps by the memory of Sabine’s confidences.
Thérèse shrugged her fat shoulders and the movement set the plastron of dirty diamonds all a-glitter. “That is that,” she observed. “You know him as well as I do.”
(“Better,” thought Ellen, “so much better, because I know how dangerous he is.”) But she kept silent.
“I think he would marry you to-morrow ... if you would have him.”
For an instant Ellen came very near to betraying herself. She felt the blood rise into her face. She felt a sudden faintness that emerged dimly from the memories of him as a lover, so charming, so subtle, so given to fierce, quick waves of passion.
“Did he send you to tell me that?” she asked in a low voice.
“No.... But I know it just the same. I have talked to him ... not openly, of course.”
(“No,” thought Ellen, “not openly, but like this, like the way you are talking to me.” It was dangerous, this business of insinuation.)
“It is remarkable that the feeling has lasted so long ... so many years,” Thérèse continued. “It has not been like that withany other woman. I think he is fascinated by your will, your power, your determination.”
“You make me a great person,” observed Ellen with irony, “but not a very seductive one.”
“There are ways and ways of seduction. What seduces one man passes over the head of another.”
“It is a perverse attraction....”
“Perhaps.... But most attractions are.”
Thérèse had seen the sudden change at the mention of her son’s name, just as she had seen the change in her son when Ellen’s name had been brought into the light. She meditated for a time in silence and then observed, “You are looking tired to-night.”
There were dark circles under Ellen’s eyes, pale evidences of the strain, the excitement which had not abated for an instant since they embarked for Vienna.
“I am tired,” she said, “very tired.”
“You should rest,” pursued Thérèse. “You could go to the place on Long Island. You could be alone there, if you liked. I shouldn’t bother you. I shall be busy in town until this tangle over money is settled.”
Ellen stirred and sighed. “No, that’s impossible. It’s good of you to offer it, but I can’t accept.... I can’t stop now. You see the ball has been started rolling. One must take advantage of success while it’s at hand. Never let a chance slip past. I know that ... by experience. You see, Miss Schönberg—she’s my manager—has arranged a great many engagements.”
“Whenever you want a place to rest,” continued Thérèse, “let me know.”
It was true that she was tired, bitterly tired; and more troubling, more enduring than the mere exhaustion was the obscure feeling that she had passed from one period of her life into another, that she had left behind somewhere in these three exciting years a milestone that marked the borderland of youth, of that first, fresh,exuberant youth which, at bottom, had been the source of all her success. It had slipped away somehow, in the night, without her knowing it. She was still strong (she knew that well enough), still filled with energy, but something was gone, a faint rosy mist perhaps, which had covered all life, even in the bitterest moments, with a glow that touched everything with a glamorous unreality, which made each new turning seem a wild adventure. It was gone; life was slipping past. Here she sat, a woman little past thirty, and what had she gained in exchange? Fame, perhaps? And wealth, which lay just around the next corner? Something had escaped her; something which in her mind was associated dimly with Lily and the memory of the pavilion silvered by the moon.
She stirred suddenly. “I must go. My mother and Miss Ogilvie are waiting at the Ritz.”
She rose and Thérèse pulled herself with an heroic effort from the depths of her chair. Together they walked through the bleak, shadowy hall and at the door Mrs. Callendar said, “You will come to dinner with me some night ... yes? I will ring you up to-morrow.”
And as Ellen moved away down the steps, she added, “Remember, you must not overwork.... You must care for yourself. You are not as young as you were once.”
It was that final speechYou are not as young as you were oncewhich, like a barbed arrow, remained in her mind and rankled there as she drove in the Callendar motor through the streets to the Ritz where she found her mother and Miss Ogilvie sitting sleepily with an air of disapproval while Sanson and Rebecca and Uncle Raoul drank champagne and labored to be gay in celebration of the triumph.
It was about this hour that the amorous wailing of the tom-cat died forever upon the ears of Mr. Wyck.
In the morning the newspapers printed, in the column devoted to murders, suicides and crimes of violence, a single paragraph——
“Herbert Wyck, aged forty-three, single, committed suicide last night by inhaling gas in his room in a boarding house at —— West 35th street. The only existing relative is Miss Sophronia Wyck residing in Yonkers. It is said that the dead man’s family once played a prominent part in the life of New York in the Seventies.”
But no one saw it ... not Hattie Tolliver, nor her husband, nor Robert, nor Ellen; they were all busy reading the triumphant notices of the concert at which, more than one critic said, a new Tèresa Carreño had arrived.
Thus passed Mr. Wyck whose one happiness was desolated because Lily Shane had encountered Clarence Murdock in the dining car of a transcontinental train. “Women like that,” Harvey Seton had said....
Ellen went to dine in the ugly dining room copied from the Duc de Morny not once but many times and she met there those people—Mrs. Mallinson, the Honorable Emma, the Apostle to the Genteel, Mr. Wickham Chase and scores of others—who had once sat on the opposite side of the lacquered screen waiting for the Russian tenor, the Javanese dancer and the unknown young American girl. She sat at dinner between bankers and bishops, between fashionable young men and elderly millionaires. She was a success, for she possessed an indifference bordering upon rudeness which allowed her dinner companions to talk as much as they pleased about themselves and led them into extraordinary efforts to win a gleam of interest from her clear blue eyes. And she learned that many things had changed since she last dined in the Callendar house. She learned that Mrs. Sigourney was no longer fashionable but merely material for the newspapers, and that Mrs. Champion and her Virgins had sunk into a brownstone obscurity in the face of a new age which no longer had a great interest in virginity; and that artists, musicians and writers were becoming the thing, that no dinner was complete without them. But it was amazing how little the whole spectacle interested her. She knew that it had all been arranged with a purpose; the indomitableThérèse, for all her fatigue and worry, was preparing for the next step. These dinners gave Lilli Barr a place in the world of the Honorable Emma and the Apostle to the Genteel; they fixed her.
THE first letter from Lily since Ellen had left the house in the Rue Raynouard for Vienna arrived on the eve of her departure from New York for the West. It was a sad letter, tragic and strangely subdued for one so buoyant, so happy as Lily to have written. Still, there were reasons ... reasons which piled one upon another in a crescendo of sorrow and tragedy. It was, as Ellen remarked to Rebecca while they sat at breakfast in the bright sitting room, as if the very foundations of Lily’s life had collapsed.
César was missing. “I have given up hope,” wrote Lily, “of seeing him again. Something tells me that he is dead, that even if he were a prisoner I should have heard from him. I know he is gone. I saw him on the night he went into action. His troop passed through Meaux in the direction of the Germans and he stopped for five minutes ... five precious minutes ... at Germigny. And then he rode away into the darkness.... I am certain that he is dead.”
Nor was this all. Madame Gigon too was dead. With Lily she had been trapped in the house at Germigny, too ill to flee. The Germans had entered the park and the château and spent a night there. Before morning they were driven out again. During that night Madame Gigon had died. She was buried now in the family grave at Trilport, nearby.
And Jean ... the Jean (eighteen now) who was such a friend of Ellen’s, who had ridden wildly through the Bois and through the fields at Germigny, was in the hospital. He had been with César’s troop. César had pledged himself to look out for the boy. But César had vanished during the first skirmish with theUhlans. Jean had lost him, and now Jean lay in the hospital at Neuilly with his left leg amputated at the knee.
“I am back in the Rue Raynouard,” wrote Lily, “but you can imagine that it is not a happy place. I am alone all day and when I go out, I see no one because all the others are busy with the war, with their own friends and relations. Many of them have gone to the country because living has become very dear in Paris. We are safe again, but I am alone. There is not much pleasure here. I too have been very ill. I know now what a stranger I have always been. I am American still, despite everything. They know it too and have left me alone.”
When Rebecca had gone, bustling and rather hard, out into the streets, Ellen sat for a long time with Hansi beside her, holding the sad letter in her hands. This, then, was what had happened to Lily’s world, a world which, protected by wealth, had seemed so secure, so far beyond destruction. In a single night it was gone, swept away like so much rubbish out of an open door. Only Jean was left; and Jean, who loved life and activity and movement, was crippled now forever.
Moved by an overwhelming sadness, Ellen reproached herself for having been rude to old Madame Gigon, for having quarreled with César. She had been unpleasant to them because (she considered the thing honestly now, perhaps for the first time) because the one had been of no use to her and the other had threatened to stand in her way. She knew too for the first time how much Lily had loved her César. In her letter she made no pretenses; she was quite frank, as if after what had happened it was nonsense, pitiful nonsense, any longer to pretend. They were lovers; they had loved each other for years ... it must have been nearly twelve years of love which stood blocked by César’s sickly wife. There was, Ellen owned, something admirable in such devotion, still more when there was no arbitrary tie to bind them, the one to the other.
She rose presently and began to pace up and down the sunlit room, the black dog following close at her heels, up and down, upand down, up and down. And the weariness, the strange lack of zest, which she had spoken of to Mrs. Callendar, took possession of her once more. She was, in the midst of her triumph, surrounded by the very clippings which acclaimed her, afraid with that curious fear of life which had troubled her since the beginning. It was a hostile world in which one must fight perpetually, only to be defeated in the end by some sinister thrust of circumstance ... a thrust such as had destroyed all Lily’s quiet security. It was well indeed to have humility.
She remembered too that Fergus was caught up in the torrent which had swept away so much that Lily held dear.... Fergus and (she halted abruptly in her restless pacing and grew thoughtful) Fergus and Callendar, the two persons in all the world whom she loved best. In the terror of the moment, she was completely honest. She loved Callendar. If there had ever been any doubt, she knew it now. She did not, even to save her own emotions, to shield her own vanity, put the thing out of her mind. She gave herself up to the idea.
In her restless pacing, she fancied that she must do something. She must save them—Callendar and Fergus—by some means; but like Thérèse in her anxiety over her fortune, like Hattie in her desperation, she found herself defeated. There was nothing to be done. This gaudy show, this spectacle, this glittering circus parade which crossed the face of Europe could not be blocked. She could not save them because they preferred the spectacle to anything in all the world. Ah, she knew them both!... She knew what it was in them that was captured and held fast by the spectacle. She knew that if she had been a man, she too would have been there by their side. They must be in the center of things, where there was the most going on, the one aloof, the other fairly saturated in the color, the feel, the very noise of the whole affair. It was a thirst for life, for a sense of its splendor.... She knew what it was because she too was possessed by it. It had nothing to do with patriotism; that sort of emotion was good enough for the French.
Like Hattie, like Thérèse, like a million other women she was helpless, and the feeling terrified her, who had never been really helpless before. This war, which she had damned for a nuisance that interrupted her own triumphant way, became a monster, overwhelming and bestial, before which she was powerless. And in her terror she was softened by a new sort of humanity. She became merely a woman whose men were at war, a woman who could do nothing, who must sit behind and suffer in terror and in doubt.
Rebecca found her there when she returned at three o’clock, still pacing up and down, up and down, the great black dog following close at her heels. She had not lunched; she had not thought of eating.
“The letter from Lily,” she told Rebecca, with an air of repression, “has upset me. I don’t know what I’m to do. I want to go back to Paris.”
The statement so astounded Rebecca that she dropped the novels and papers she was carrying and stood staring.
“What!” she cried, “Go back now? Sacrifice everything we have worked for? Ruin everything? Give up all these engagements? You must be mad.”
It was plain that Ellen had thought of all this, that the struggle which she saw taking form with Rebecca had already occurred in her own soul. She knew what she was sacrificing ... if she returned.
“Lily is alone there, and in trouble. Some one should go to her.”
So that was it! Rebecca’s tiny, bright ferret’s eyes grew red with anger. “Lily! Lily!” she said. “Don’t worry about Lily. I’ll wager by this time she has found some one to console her.”
Ellen moved toward her like a thunder cloud, powerful, menacing in a kind of dignity that was strange and even terrifying to Rebecca. “You can’t say that of her. I won’t have you. How can you when it was Lily who has helped me more thanany one in the world? I won’t have it. Who are you to speak like that of Lily ... my own cousin?”
“Lily who has helped you!” screamed Rebecca. “And what of me? What of me?” She began to beat her thin breasts in a kind of fury. Her nose became a beak, her small eyes red and furious. “Have I done nothing? Am I no one, to be cast aside like this? What of the work I have done, the slaving?”
For a moment they stood facing each other, silent and furious, close in a primitive fashion to blows. There was silence because their anger had reached a point beyond all words and here each held herself in check. It was Ellen who broke the silence. She began to laugh, softly and bitterly.
“Perhaps you’re right,” she said in a low voice. “I do owe you a great deal ... as much, really, as I owe to Lily. It has given you the right to a certain hold upon me.”
(But the difference, she knew, was this—that Lily would never exert her right of possession.)
“You can’t go,” continued Rebecca, “not now. Think of it ... all the years of sacrifice and work, gone for nothing. Can’t you see that fate has delivered triumph into your hands. If you turn your back upon it now, you’d be nothing less than a fool.” She saw in a sudden flash another argument and thrust it into the conflict. “Always you have taken advantage of opportunity.... You told me so yourself.... And now when the greatest chance of all is at hand, you turn your back on it. I can’t understand you. Why should you suddenly be so thoughtful of Lily?”
Ellen sat down and fell to looking out of the window. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “I’ll think it out ... more clearly perhaps.”
There was, after all, nothing that she could do. The old despair swept over her, taking the place of her pessimistic anger. She could not go to the front, among the soldiers, to comfort Callendar. He would have been the last to want her there.
“Perhaps you’re right,” she repeated, and then, “War is a rotten thing for women.”
But Rebecca had, all the same, a feeling that it was not Lily whom she was fighting but some one else—whom, she could not imagine. She could not have known of course that Thérèse Callendar had already written her son that she had seen Ellen Tolliver, that she was handsomer than ever and more fascinating and sullen, and that in a sly postscript she had remarked, “The strange thing is that I believe she is still in love with you. I watched her, out of curiosity, and I am sure of it.”
And, of course, none of them knew that Callendar on reading the letter somewhere in the mud near Loos, with the throbbing of the barrage in his ears, had smiled at the trickery of women and thought, “Curiosity, indeed!”
It was in the end Rebecca who won, not a victory perhaps but at least a delay. The little Jewess was much too shrewd ever to suppose that Ellen might be conquered so easily; if she had won a temporary advantage she understood it was because Ellen chose to let her win, because Ellen had weighed the question and decided that all things considered, Rebecca was right. To turn back at this point was a folly which she could not deny. Belonging now in a sense to the whole world she was no longer absolute mistress of her own fortune; such freedom was, after all, the privilege only of the obscure. She was in truth, she thought bitterly, still a mountebank, an entertainer, who waited behind a painted screen to entertain the public. The stage was greater now and the audience had grown from the fashionable little group in the Callendar drawing-room to all the world. That was the only difference.
But stronger than any sense of duty or obligation was the old terror of a terrible poverty which forced one to keep up appearances. She had tasted the security that comes of riches and she could not turn back. There were memories which would not die, memories of the days when as a girl she had put on a bold facebefore all the Town, memories, even worse, of the drab petty economies she had known in the days at the Babylon Arms. And even stronger than all these things was her fear of failure, a passionate fear which might easily have driven her in some circumstances to suicide. One who had been so ruthless, so arrogant, so proud, dared not fail. That way too had been blocked.
So she found herself brought up sharply against the problem of the Town. They wanted her there; they were, strangely enough, proud of her. Eva Barr had written her, and Miss Ogilvie, and even May Biggs, whom she had feared ever to see again. She had left them all believing that she would never turn back, believing that by stepping aboard the express for the East she had turned her back forever upon a place which, in honest truth, she despised. But she had not escaped; there were ties, intangible and tenuous, which bound her to the place. There were times when she was even betrayed by a certain nostalgia for the sight of the roaring black furnaces, the dark empty rooms of Shane’s Castle, closed now and barren of all life; the decaying smoke-stained houses that stood far back from the streets surrounded by green lawns and old trees.
She thought, “This again is a sign that something has gone from me, something fierce and spirited. I am growing softer.”
They had, so May Biggs wrote, built a new concert hall, and what could be so appropriate as to have it opened by a daughter of the Town? “A daughter of the Town,” she reflected bitterly. “Yes, I am that. It, too, claims me.”
And it was true. She was a daughter of the Town. There was in her the same fierce energy, the same ruthlessness, the same pride. If she had been born elsewhere, in some less harsh and vigorous community, she would herself have been softer, less overwhelmingly successful. It was true. Shewasa daughter of the hard, uncompromising Town.
“It happens like that ...” Miss Ogilvie had said, “in the most unexpected places ... in villages, in towns.... Why, even in a dirty mill town like this.”
But in the end, it was her pride which led her back. Because, a dozen years ago, she had talked wildly and desperately, because she had boasted of what she would one day do, she must return now to let them see that she had done it. It was a triumph which in her heart she counted as more than the triumphs of London, of Paris, of New York, of all the world. For she had not yet escaped the Town. She would not be free until they saw her fabulous success.
But Hattie could not go with her. Hattie’s triumph was spoiled. On the night of the concert when The Everlasting had appeared without warning, it was necessary for some one to see that the old man was returned safely to the apartment, so to Charles Tolliver the task had been assigned. Gramp, Heaven knows, could easily have found his way back; he knew more of the world than any of them, but he chose never to interfere with such plans lest he seem too active, too spry to require any attention. To guard his security, he encouraged their assumption that he was feeble and a bit childish. He had not forgotten the security which comes of being a possession.
It is impossible to have known what thoughts passed through the crafty, old mind as he walked by the side of his son through the dark streets. They did not speak; they were as strange to each other as they had always been, as remote as if there had been not the slightest bond between them. Perhaps the old man scorned his son for his gentle goodness, so misplaced in a world where there was so little use for that sort of thing. Perhaps he understood that Ellen was after all much closer to himself than to her father. Perhaps he knew that Charles Tolliver, in his heart, had been saddened by the triumph, because it stood as a seal upon his daughter’s escape. Perhaps he noticed the faint weariness in the step of his son, the dark circles beneath his eyes, the listlessness of his manner, as if he had grown weary of the confused, tormented life all about him.
It was the old man ... the father ... whose step was light, whose eye was shining as they entered the flat. It was the old man too who sat up reading until he heard Hattie and Miss Ogilvie, returning from the Ritz, come in at three in the morning. For Charles Tolliver had gone quickly away to his bed and to the dreams that were his reality.
In the morning Hattie had called Ellen to say that her father was ill. He had been drowsy. It was almost impossible to keep him awake. The doctor had been there.
“He says,” Hattie told her, “that he must have been ill for a long time without speaking of it. He has never complained. I don’t understand it. And now he’s too drowsy to tell me anything. The doctor says he is badly run down. He is worried because Papa seems to have no resistance.”
He had grown no better with the passing of time. Indeed, the drowsiness seemed to increase, and there were times when he talked irrationally, as if he had never left the Town at all. He held long, fantastic conversations with Judge Wilkins and talked too of the Grand Circuit races and Pop Geers.
And when Ellen left for the Midlands, Hattie remained behind to sit in the rocking chair at her husband’s side caring for him and for Gramp who had since the night when he ran away to the concert become troublesome again as if there were something in the air.
IN the Town the new concert hall of which Cousin Eva Barr and May Biggs had written with such enthusiasm and detail raised its white Greek façade a score of yards from the main street. Erected to the twin worship of the muses of Music and the Theater it supplanted the dismal opera house of an early, less sophisticated period, and so left the late U. S. Grant architecture of that shabby, moth-eaten structure in an undivided dedication to the bastard sister of Music and the Theater, a shabby, commonplace child known as the Movies, whom Sabine had once said should be christened Pomegranate. Though the new temple was barely finished and the names of Shakespeare, Wagner (who would probably be left out now that there was a war and the Germans, who were the very backbone of the Town, had become blond beasts, professionally trained ravishers, and other things), Beethoven (who would slip by the committee because he had been dead so long), Verdi (whose Aïda many supposed to be the high water mark of all opera), Molière (suggested by Eva Barr but unknown to most of the committee), Racine (likewise), Weber (who was so dead as to be a natural history specimen and therefore unlikely to ravish any one, even spiritually), Goethe and Schiller (likewise, though still under suspicion)—were not yet carven upon its limestone pediment, the building was already streaked by the soot which drifted perpetually over the city from the remote flats where the mills now worked all day and all night in making shells. Yet the handsome temple could have had no existence save for the soot; the very smudges upon its virgin face were each one a symbol of the wealth which had made it possible. The Town had known four stages in its development. In the beginning there had been but a block house set down in a wilderness. Before many years had passed this was succeeded by a square filled with farmers and lowing cattle and heavy wagons laden with grain. Then in turn a community, raw and rankly prosperous which grew with a ruthless savagery, crushing everything beneath a passion for bigness and prosperity. And now, creeping in toward its heart, stealthily and, as many solid citizens believed, suspiciously, there came a softness which some called degeneration—a liking for beauty of sound, of sight, and of color. It stole up from the rear at the most unexpected moments upon men like Judge Weissmann. The wives of leading manufacturers and wholesale grocers had traitorously admitted lecturers and musicians into a fortress dedicated hitherto to the business of making money. And then with a sudden rush, the new forces had swept out of their hiding places on every side and saddled upon the noble citizenry a concert hall,a temple erected in the very heart of the citadel to the enemy.
So it stood there, bright and new, a few hundred yards from the Elks Club—a symbol of a change that was coming slowly to pass, a sign that the women and the younger generation had grown a little weary of a world composed entirely of noise and soot and clouds of figures. Men like Judge Weissmann saw it as the beginning of the end. Judge Weissmann (himself an immigrant from Vienna) called it “a sign that the old thrifty spirit of the pioneer was passing. The old opera house was good enough for concerts and shows.” And secretly he calculated how much all that white limestone and carving had cost him in taxes.
It was into this divided world that Ellen, who had known only a community that was solid in its admiration for smoke and bigness and prosperity, returned. They were good to her, despite all the things they had to say regarding her affectations. They considered her dog (Callendar’s dog) ridiculous, and they disapproved of the uncompromising Miss Schönberg who demanded her cash guaranty for the concert almost as soon as she stepped from the train. In certain benighted circles (which is to say those not associated with the flamboyant Country Club set) it was even whispered that she drank and smoked. They wondered how gentle Miss Ogilvie received such behavior, for Ellen stayed with Miss Ogilvie, who watched her bird’s-nest parlor grow blue with the smoke of Ellen’s and Rebecca’s cigarettes without ever turning a hair. Was she not entertaining a great artist? If she herself had had the courage, might not she have been smoking cigarettes and drinking champagne? Had she herself not failed because she was afraid of what people would say? None of them knew the spirit of rebellion, smoldering for so many years, that now leapt into flame beneath the mauve taffeta dress which she wore every day during Ellen’s visit.
The bird’s-nest parlor, with all its pampas grass and coral and curios, must have set fire to strange memories in the breast of Ellen. She sat again in the same chair where she had sat, abashed but proud, awkward yet possessed of her curious dignity, on the nightof the elopement. The little room was filled with memories of Clarence. She must have seen him again as he had been on that first night (so lost now in the turmoil of all that had gone between) ... sitting there, frightened of old Harvey Seton, ardent and excited in his choked, inarticulate fashion, a man who even then had seemed a little ridiculous and pitiful.
And once Miss Ogilvie had summoned him to life when she said to Ellen, “Poor Mr. Murdock. If only he could be here to see your success.”
The little old woman had the best intentions in the world. The meager speech was born of sympathy and kindness alone. She could not have known that each word had hurt Ellen intolerably. Poor Clarence! He would not have liked it. It would have made him even more insignificant and wretched.The husband of Ellen Tolliver. That’s what I’ll be!The words echoed ironically in her ears. And Clarence had never known Lilli Barr, who was born years after he died.... Lilli Barr who had nothing to do with poor Clarence. So far as the world was concerned he had never existed at all.
She had her triumph. There were set floral pieces with the words “Welcome Home” worked in carnations and pansies. And there was a welcoming speech by Mrs. McGovern, president of the Sorosis Club (who had downed Cousin Eva Barr only after a fierce struggle for the honor). And they had cheered her. It was a triumph and in a poor, inadequate fashion it satisfied her. But she was not sure that it was worth all the pain.
She did not go into the empty, echoing rooms of Shane’s Castle. She saw it, distantly, veiled in the smoke and flame of the Flats, from Miss Ogilvie’s back window on the hill, the one monument of her family in all the Town. She could not have borne it to enter alone the door which on each Christmas Day for so many years had admitted a whole procession.
And she came to understand that it was not alone the Town which she was driven relentlessly to escape. It was the Babylon Arms, Thérèse Callendar and all her world, even her own family,all save Fergus—she must escape forever any tie that bound her, any bond which gave her into possession.
On the day after the concert Miss Ogilvie gave a reception. Crowds of women and a few intimidated men thronged the tiny parlor. They passed in and out in an endless stream, until Rebecca, who could bear it no longer, invaded the virgin privacy of Miss Ogilvie’s bedroom and fell into a perfect orgy of smoking while she read Holy Living and Dying, the only book at hand to divert her. Hansi, shut in an adjoining room, howled and howled in his solitude.
Long after the winter twilight had descended, at a moment when Ellen thought she could endure the procession no longer, it began to abate and as the last guest departed she saw, coming up the neat brick walk between the lilacs and syringas, the figure of a plump dowdy woman surrounded by a phalanx of children. In truth there were but four in the phalanx but in the fading light their numbers seemed doubled. As the woman came nearer there rose about her an aura of familiarity ... something in the way she walked, coquettish and ridiculous in a woman so plump and loose of figure. And then, all at once in a sudden flash, Ellen recognized the walk. The woman was May Biggs. Years ago May had moved thus, giggling and flirting her skirts from side to side while she walked with her arm about Ellen’s waist. Only now (Ellen reflected) there was twice as much of her to wriggle and the effect was not the same.
As she approached Ellen did not wait. Some memory was stirred by the sight, something which she could no more control than she could understand.... May Biggs, whom she had scorned always, coming up Miss Ogilvie’s brick walk carrying one child and leading three others by the hand, a May Biggs who was stout now and already middle-aged in her dowdy clothes covered with feathers and buttons and bits of passementerie. It was extraordinary, the feeling that overwhelmed her; it was asensation compounded of joy and melancholy, of guilt and a curious desire to recapture something which had escaped her forever, perhaps that first reckless youth which had slipped away in the night without her knowing it.
She stood in the doorway, crying, “May ... May Seton!”
And then she was kissing May who blushed and held on awkwardly to the youngest of the four little Biggses.
In the little parlor they were alone, for Miss Ogilvie under the stress of the excitement and the failure of the local bakery to deliver the macaroons had retired to her chamber with her smelling salts, where she now sat in a cloud of blue smoke talking with Rebecca while the great black dog howled in the adjoining room.
Once they were seated, May put forward her offspring, one by one, in order on the descending scale. “This is Herman Junior ... and this Marguerite ... and this Merton ... and the baby here is named after me.”
(All in order, thought Ellen, two boys and two girls, properly alternated.)
The two boys shook hands awkwardly, Marguerite curtseyed and smirked with all the coquetry descended from her now settled mother, and the baby gurgled pleasantly and buried her head. They were all very neat and clean. Their manners were excellent. They revealed glimpses of a little world that was placid, orderly, comfortable and perhaps a little monotonous.
“I brought the children,” said May. “I wanted them to meet you. This,” she said, addressing the three who were able to walk, “is my girl friend I told you about. She’s famous now. You can remember when you’re grown up that you’ve met her.” And then abruptly, “Marguerite, put down that cake until the lady tells you to have one.”
She had not changed much. Hers was the good-natured, pleasant sort of face on which time leaves few traces, and since nothing could ever happen to May, very little could happen to her face.It had grown more plump, and less arch, for she was content and satisfied now with a solid husband, and she showed every sign of presenting a new hostage to fortune.
“Well,” she said, shyly. “A lot has happened, hasn’t it, Ellen.... I suppose I can still call you Ellen.”
There was something in May’s shyness, in the awe which shone in her eyes, that struck deep into Ellen’s humility. It made her feel preposterous and absurd and a little nightmarish.
“Good Heavens!” she replied. “That’s my name. Of all the people in the world, you have most right to use it.” And then. “But tell me the news. I’ve been too busy to hear any of it. It’s been ten years since I went away.”
She found herself blushing, perhaps at the sudden slip of the tongue that betrayed her into recognition of the one unpleasantness that stood between them. It was almost as if she had said, “since I ran away with Clarence.”
May, it seemed, was no more eager to mention his name. She hastened past it. “I tried to get Herman to come, but he wouldn’t go where there were so many women. He wants to see you. He said to tell you that if you would come to lunch, he’d come home from the works. You’d never know him. He’s a father now,” she made a sweeping gesture to include the restless troop that surrounded her, “and he has a mustache.”
Ellen declined, with a genuine regret. She wanted vaguely to enter the mild, ordered world out of which these four children had come.
“I can’t come because I am leaving at eight. You see, I can’t do what I like any more. I have engagements ... concerts which I must keep. But thank him. Maybe he could run over to-night.”
May thought not. They were making an inventory at the Junoform factory and Herman would be there until midnight. Harvey Seton (Lily’s arch enemy) was dead.
“He died last June. We found him cold in the morning in his bed in the spare room. You see he hadn’t slept in the sameroom with Ma since Jimmy was born. She says if he had, he might be alive to-day.”
So Herman was head of the factory now and he was worried. The new fashions had cut down the sale of corsets, and corsets made of rubber were putting into the discard those built upon the synthetic whalebone which old Samuel Barr had invented. Business wasn’t so good. Perhaps the fashions would change. Perhaps they would put in a rubber corset department. Ellen was fresh from Paris. Did she think there was any chance of small waists coming in again?
“Of course,” said May, with an echo of the old giggle, “women with my figure will always have to wear whalebone. Rubber is no good for me. And then just now, I have to wear my corsets loose....” She sighed. “If only I had a figure like yours.” And she swept Ellen’s straight gray clad figure with an appraising and envious glance.
“And your grandfather is still alive?” asked May in astonishment. “Why, he was an old man when you left. He must be nearly ninety now.”
“He’s ninety-one and very spry,” said Ellen. “He goes out to walk alone in the city. He hasn’t changed at all.”
“Well, well,” echoed May, and there rose an awkward pause which neither of them seemed able to break. Now that they had gone quickly through the past there seemed to be nothing of which to speak. The sound of the black dog’s howling came distantly into the little parlor. It was Merton, the third child, who saved the situation. May cried, “Merton, how many times have I told you not to touch things. Take your hand right out of that goldfish bowl.... Here, come here now and wipe it on Momma’s handkerchief.”
While this was being done Ellen reflected, a bit grimly, that perhaps it was just as well that she could not lunch with May. If the conversation had grown sterile in half an hour, how could one hope that it could be spread over an hour? Sabine, perhaps, had been right, when she had said once that it was a bad signwhen a person had a great manyoldfriends. It meant that such a person had not much capacity for growth.