WHEN Ellen arrived at the Setons’ on the night following the visit of Jimmy, she found that the family had not yet finished supper. They sat about the table, Setonpèreat the head, thin, bloodless, bearded, looking like one of the more austere of the saints, rather than a corset manufacturer. Setonmère, fat, fleshy, good-natured, occupied a seat at the far end. Between them sat disposed little Jimmy, anemic and insignificant, May plump and pale, and last of all, a stranger.
“This,” said May Seton, giggling and indicating the young man at her left, “is Mr. Clarence Murdock. I’ve been wanting you to meet him, Ellen. I’m sure you’ll like each other. He’s from New York ... here to see Papa on business.”
The young man rose and bowed a little stiffly but with a flattering deference.
“May has told me so much about you ... I’m delighted to know you.”
“Sit down until we finish,” said May. “We’re just eating the last of our dessert.”
Now May’s introduction of Mr. Clarence Murdock was not altogether straightforward. From the phrases she chose, it could be gathered that it was the first time she had ever seen Mr. Murdock and that Ellen had never heard of him before. In this there was no truth for he had seen May many times. They even called each other by their Christian names. And May had given Ellen elaborately detailed descriptions of the young man, having gone even so far as to hint that there was more between them than mere friendship. But May could not resist doingthings of this sort where a man was concerned. It was impossible for her to be honest. The mere shadow of a man upon the horizon goaded her into a display of dimples and coquetry. She bridled, grew arch and mysterious. She was taught by an aspiring mother that these things were a part of a game. Ellen might have replied, “Yes. I’ve heard a great deal concerning you, Mr. Murdock,” but she did not. She said, “I’m so glad to know you,” gave him a faint smile and a look which seemed not so much concerned with Mr. Murdock as with the dead fish and boiled lobsters in the ornamental print on the wall behind him. All the same she began quietly examining the points of the stranger.
He was not bad looking and he had nice manners. To be sure he might have been taller. He was not quite so tall as Ellen. He had nice brown hair sleekly brushed back from a high forehead, and he wore a starched collar of the high, ungainly sort which was the fashion in those days. His eyes were brown and gentle and near-sighted, his face well-shaped and his nose straight, though a trifle thin so that it gave his countenance a look of insignificance which one might expect in a perpetual clerk. He was not, Ellen decided, the sort of romantic figure which could sweep her off her feet. Still, he came from New York. That was something. He had lived in the world.
“My, what a rain we’ve been having,” observed Mrs. Seton. “I suppose it’s what you’d call the equinoctial storms.”
Yes, her spouse replied, it was just that. And he launched into a dissertation upon equinoctial storms, their origin, their effect, their endurance, their manifestations in various quarters of the globe,—in short all about them. Fifteen precious minutes passed beyond recall into eternity while Harvey Seton discussed equinoctial storms. No one else spoke, for it was the edict of this father that no one should interrupt him until he had exhausted his subject. He was indeed a King among Bores. And when he had finished, his wife, instead of going further with thistopic or one of similar profundity, struck out in the exasperating fashion of women upon some new and trivial tangent.
“Herman Biggs is coming in, Ellen,” she observed brightly. “Right after supper.” And she beamed on Ellen with the air of a great benefactress. Her thoughts were not uttered, yet to one of Ellen’s shrewdness they were clear. The smile said, “Of course a poor girl like you could not aspire to a New Yorker like Mr. Murdock, but I am doing my best to see that you get a good husband. Herman Biggs is respectable and honest. He’ll make a good husband. We must look higher for May. She must have something like Mr. Murdock.”
And even as she spoke the doorbell rang and the anemic Jimmy sped away to open it as if on the doorstep outside stood not the freckled Herman Biggs but some wild adventure in the form of a romantic stranger.
ItwasHerman Biggs. He came in as he had come in a thousand times before, and stood with his dripping hat in his hand, awkwardly, while he was introduced to Mr. Clarence Murdock. But he did not sit down. The lecture upon equinoctial storms had claimed the remainder of the time allotted to dessert. The little group rose and distributed itself through the house. Mr. Seton went into a room known as his den. Mrs. Seton went into the kitchen and the young people disappeared into the cavernous parlor, followed by Jimmy, still filled with the same expectancy of stupendous adventure, intent upon harassing the little party for the rest of the evening by the sort of guerilla warfare in which he excelled.
It was a gaunt house constructed in a bad period when houses broke out into cupolas, unusual bay windows and variations of the mansard roof. Outside it was painted a liverish brown; inside the effect was the same. In the parlor there was an enormous bronze chandelier with burners constructed in imitation of the lamps found during the excavation of Pompeii, an event whichconsiderably agitated the world of the eighties. The walls were covered with deep red paper of a very complicated design of arabesques upon which was superimposed a second design in very elegant gold, even more complicated. Against this hung engravings of Dignity and Impudence, The Monarch of the Forest, and The Trial of Effie Deans. Pampas grass in vases ornamented with realistic pink porcelain roses, waved its dusty plumes above a bronze clock surmounted by a bronze chariot driver and horses which rushed headlong toward a collision with a porcelain rosebud. By the side of the clock stood a large conch shell bearing in gilt lettering the legend, “Souvenir of Los Angeles, Cal.”
“Shall we play hearts?” asked May, with appropriate glances, “or shall we just talk?... There’s no moon and the piazza is all wet.”
Ellen said nothing; she continued to regard Mr. Murdock with a curious, speculative air.
“Let’s play hearts,” said the anemic Jimmy, fidgeting and climbing over the sofa. “I kin play, Mr. Murdock,” he added proudly.
Upon the pride of the Seton family, Ellen turned a withering glance, charged with homicidal meaning. It said, “What are you doing here?... If you were my brother you’d be in bed where you belong.”
“Ellen wants to play hearts!... Ellen wants to play hearts!” sang out Jimmy, pulling awry the shade of the imitation bronze lamp.
Herman Biggs blushed and stammered that it made no difference to him. Mr. Murdock was gentle and polite. “Let’s talk,” he suggested mildly, “we might as well get acquainted.” As the oldest by nearly ten years and the most sophisticated by virtue of his residence in New York, he took the lead.
“I think so too,” replied Ellen and a curious flash of understanding passed between them, a glance which implied a mutual superiority founded upon something deep in Ellen’s nature andupon Mr. Murdock’s superior age and metropolitan bearing.
So they talked, rather stupid talk, punctuated by May’s giggles, the guffaws of Herman Biggs, and the pinches of the anemic Jimmy, who was never still. Now this pale pest swung himself from the curtains, now he climbed the back of a chair, now he sought the top of the oak piano, menacing lamps and vases and pictures. And after a while Ellen was induced to sit at the piano and play for the party. It was ragtime they wanted, so she played “I’m afraid to go home in the dark” and “Bon-bon Buddy” and other favorites which Mr. Murdock sang in a pleasant baritone voice. After that he gave imitations of various vaudeville artists singing these same ballads.
At length May and Herman Biggs retired, accompanied by Jimmy, to bring in the refreshments, and Ellen was left alone with the stranger.
“I suppose,” she began, “you find it dull here after New York.”
Mr. Murdock coughed. “No, it’s pleasant enough.... Mr. Seton has been very kind to me.... I’ll be here another week or two installing the electrical equipment.”
Ellen raised her head proudly. “I’m going to New York myself soon ... probably this winter.... I’m going to study music.”
Mr. Murdock was very ready. “Well, we must meet again there.... It’s a lonely place for a girl without family or friends.”
“But I don’t get homesick,” said Ellen, with the sophisticated air of an experienced traveler. “I certainly wouldn’t be homesick in New York.”
From that moment Mr. Murdock began to regard her with a deeper interest. Perhaps he saw that by her side May had no points to be compared with Ellen’s air of quiet assurance, her youthful dignity, her curiously apparent respect for herself as an individual. She sat in the plush rocker within the glow from the bronze lamp. At the moment she was not awkward at all; she was tall, graceful, dark, even a little imposing. The essence ofher individuality rose triumphant above the plush rocker, the engravings that hung against the elaborate wall paper, above even the cheap dress which concealed her young slenderness. She stirred the imagination. Certainly her face was interesting.
“I didn’t know,” began Mr. Murdock, “that you were a professional musician.... I don’t suppose you like playing ragtime.... Maybe you’d play me something good ... something classical, really good, I mean like Nevin or MacDowell.”
And Mr. Murdock, growing communicative, went on to say that his sister played too. She lived in Ogdensburg, New York. He had come from Ogdensburg to make his fortune in the city. That was the reason, he said, that he understood how lonely a person could be.
“Of course, it’s different now,” he continued, “I have lots of friends.... Homer Bunce and Herbert Wyck.... But you’ll meet them when you come to New York.”
He was very pleasant, Mr. Murdock. And he was nice looking in a rather spiritless way. His eyes were kind and his hands nice. To Ellen hands were important features. Shrewd beyond her years, she saw people by their hands and their mouths. Mr. Murdock’s mouth was a trifle small and compressed, but otherwise all right. He might be a prig, but underneath the priggishness there lay a character nice enough.
“And now won’t you play for me?” he persisted, “something of Nevin or MacDowell?”
Ellen went to the piano and played a Venetian Sketch and To a Waterlily. She and Miss Ogilvie considered such music pap. From choice she would not have played it, but she understood at once that Mr. Murdock would like this music. Indeed he had asked for it. She knew he would like what the people in the Town liked. Mr. Murdock listened with his eyes closed and when she had finished he said, “My, that’s fine.... I like soft, sweet music.”
She was still playing when May and Herman returned bearing the hot chocolate and plates of cakes, followed closely by the simian Jimmy, his mouth stuffed to overflowing. Mr. Murdock still listened, lying back in his chair with closed eyes.
It was Mr. Murdock who outmaneuvered thegaucheHerman Biggs and escorted her home. They talked stiffly, walking very close to each other through the pouring rain beneath the Tolliver family umbrella.
On the steps of the porch, Ellen bade him good-night.
“We must meet again before I go away.”
“Certainly,” said Ellen; but in her heart she had resolved against it, for she considered Mr. Murdock slightly boring. It was possible, she could see now, for people to live in a city and still never leave their home towns.
It was like Mr. Seton, thought Ellen. Every two years he went to Europe to visit the Junoform Reinforced Corset branch factory at St. Denis near Paris, but he really never left the Town at all. He carried it with him.
If only she could go to Paris....
MR. MURDOCK stayed a week longer than he had planned, and before he left he managed to see Ellen not once, but many times. Always May was present, giggling and admiring, though toward the end, under the prodding of a shrewd mother who saw a concealed menace in the situation, she betrayed a slight and refreshing coldness toward her friend. Before he left, Ellen called him Mr. Murdock no longer, but Clarence.
In the weeks that followed she received from him two post cards, one a colored picture of lower New York photographed from Brooklyn Bridge against the sunset and the other a view of the Reservoir at Forty-Second street which, he wrote, had been demolished a little while before. On them he recalled her promise to let him know when she came to New York. May, however, received a dozen post cards and a half-dozen letters, so his correspondence with Ellen must have signified nothing at all. Certainly it did not excite her deeply.
“Clarence writes me,” said May one day, “that you are going to New York. Why didn’t you tell me?... I should think you’d tell your best friend a thing like that.”
And Ellen slipped into a cloud of evasions. “I may have told him that,” she replied airily. “I don’t know how he could have found out.... It was a secret, I haven’t mentioned it to any-one.” And she made a number of vague excuses, which seemed neither logical nor founded upon fact. It was as if she considered May too stupid to understand such things or thought her too unimportant to consider at all.
“It’s funny,” said May, “that you’d tell such a thing to a stranger like Clarence....” For a moment the suspicions planted in her complacent mind by an aspiring mother stirred with life and raised their heads. But she succumbed again quickly to the domination of her companion and thrust an arm about Ellen’s waist.
“It’s only because I’m interested,” she said. “I know that you’re going to be great and famous some day.... We’re all going to be proud of you.”
At which Ellen sniffed, not without an air of scorn, as if she cared not a fig whether the Town was proud of her or not.
At home, however, May received another warning from her mother. “Mr. Murdock,” said the plump Mrs. Seton, “is not a young man to be passed up lightly.... There aren’t many like him.... He suits your father to a T, and hewould fit in fine at the factory. Your father needs some one like that to help him out, until Jimmy is big enough to take hold.... Don’t trust Ellen too far.... She’s too quiet to be trusted.”
At which May only laughed. “Why, Ellen wouldn’t think of marrying him,” she said, “she won’t marry anybody in this town.... It isn’t likely she’ll ever marry ... at least for a long time. Besides, she doesn’t think he’s good enough.”
Mrs. Seton snorted angrily and put down the Ladies’ Home Journal. “Good enough for her ...! Who is she to be so choosey?... Why, the Tollivers can’t pay their bills.... They’re just out of bankruptcy.... Good enough for her ...! If she ever gets as fine and upstanding a young man as Mr. Murdock ... a man so industrious and hardworking and well-behaved, she can thank her stars....” For a moment Mrs. Seton paused to recover her breath, greatly dissipated by this indignant outburst. That Ellen should scorn Mr. Clarence Murdock was not a thing to be borne lightly. Then she continued, “And this talk about going to New York.... How’s she going to get to New York? Who’s to put up the money, I’d like to know? Old Julia Shane, I suppose.... It’s not likely the old woman would part with a cent even if she could.”
It was, in the Seton family, a cherished fiction that Julia Shane was stricken by an overwhelming poverty: it was a fiction that increased the confidence of a fortune founded upon reinforced corsets.
“Julia Shane!” continued the ambitious mother, “Julia Shane! What’s she got to be proud about?... With a daughter as fast and loose as Lily?... I suppose she’s proud of living in that filthy old house in the midst of the Flats.”
And so the ashes of the feud between the Setons and the Barr-Shane-Tolliver clan, lighted accidentally by the chance appearance of the guiltless and model Mr. Murdock, showed signs of flaming up again after a peace of twenty years.
THE Christmas holidays arrived; the Tollivers sold the last of their horses, and went on showing brave and indifferent faces to the world. Ellen, going her secret way, awaited the arrival of her cousin Lily, still certain that Lily would have a solution. She no longer argued with her mother. Instead she took refuge in silence and if she spoke at all it was in a docile and pleasant fashion. She permitted herself to be petted and admired, so that Mrs. Tolliver in the eternal optimism of her nature believed that Ellen had forgotten or out-grown her restlessness, and was content.
But the girl spent hours at her piano, playing wildly, as if the sound of her music in some way eased the fierce restlessness of her spirit. At times she attacked a polonaise with such violence and fire that the spangled notes soared through the air and penetrated even the stillness of Gramp Tolliver’s solitary chamber. At such moments the old man paused in his reading, permitted his book to slip to the floor and sat in his rocking chair motionless, listening with his lean old head cocked a little on one side, a wild and dancing light in his eye. For hours at a time he listened thus, muttering occasionally to himself.
(That granddaughter of his had something which none of them suspected, something that was rare and precious in this world.) When the music at last died away, losing itself in the maze of walls which shut him into exile, it was his habit to sink back with a clucking sound and begin to rock, gently at first and then more and more savagely, until at last he became submerged by the stream of shrewd, malicious thoughts which swept through his old brain.
“She’s got something none of them understand.... And I’m the only one who knows it. But they’ll kill it in her. They’ll pull her down until she’s on the level with the rest of them. I know.... I know.... Haven’t I heard Liszt himself, in Parisin the heyday of his fame? And Rubinstein? They’ll destroy her if they can with all their little tricks and deceits.... Mean they are, meaner than dirt, trying to drag her down to the rest of them.... The girl doesn’t know it herself.... How good she is no one has ever told her.... She doesn’t know the power that’s in her. They’ll never let her free. They’ll clip her wings. They’ve clipped the wings of greater ones....”
And then with a cascade of wicked chuckles the old man settled back to his reading. “They’ve never clipped my wings. They can’t because I don’t live in their world. They can’t come close enough to catch me. They can’t fly high enough....”
And slowly the rocking decreased in violence until at last the chair became quite still and the skinny arm reached down to recover the heavy book. Belowstairs the last echoes of the turbulent music died away until the silence was broken only by the distant cries of children playing in the streets and the faint muttering of the old man....
“It’s best that she doesn’t know.... It wouldn’t help her ... only make her miserable ... only give them a chance to tear her to pieces, nerve by nerve....”
Again the persistent rocking until at last the room grew dark, and the old man rose in response to a loud knock on the door of the stairs, stirred himself and lighted an oil lamp so that he might find his way to the tray of food that Mrs. Tolliver thrust in at the door of his cell. There was no gas in this room beneath the roof; Gramp Tolliver had been an expense for too many years. It would have cost twenty dollars to fit his room with gas lights. And in ten years he had produced nothing save the scraps of paper covered with bird track handwriting that were stowed away in the pigeonholes of the desk.
In those days there came to Grandpa Tolliver, more by some obscure instinct than by any communication with those outsidehis cell, the certainty that his granddaughter’s behavior was a source of irritation to the people of the Town. True, he occasionally overheard from the kitchen below snatches of reproachful conversation which drifted upward by way of the ventilator ... strange remarks which appeared to come out of the blue, yet when pieced together they provided a coherent story. Reproaches of sulkiness, of silence, of secrecy, cast by a mother, who desired nothing so much as confidences, against a daughter who was incapable of anything but secrecy. They were an ill-matched pair. This the old man understood, with a sort of wicked satisfaction, because the things which in Ellen were incomprehensible to her mother were the things which had come down to the girl from himself. It was another mark in the long score between Grandpa Tolliver and his daughter-in-law; another, in which nature herself took a hand, in the long battle between two fiercely antagonistic temperaments.
He could not have known that the people in the Town likewise had reproaches for Ellen. He could not have known that they said it was her duty to begin giving music lessons in order to prop up the fortunes of a proud and bankrupt family. Yet in his unearthly way, he did know; and in some vague way he was pleased. Even in his isolation so impregnable, so defiant, his heart was warmed by the thought of an ally. The enemy was driving Ellen, a neutral, into his camp; and into his icy heart there came drop by drop a warm trickle of unaccustomed sympathy. Not that Gramp Tolliver planned active aid; that would have been too much to expect, for Gramp Tolliver had discovered half a century earlier the idiocy of mixing in the affairs of other people.
Instead he chuckled and read in triumph and vindication The Decline and Fall.
ON the morning of the third day before Christmas, Clarence Murdock, bearing a neat handbag packed with those things which he would need during a journey of three weeks through the middle-western country, turned his back on the Babylon Arms and made his way toward the railway station and the transcontinental express. Behind him he left the two young men whom, in the fashion of bachelors who have migrated without root or connection from the provinces into a great city, he had picked up as companions somewhere amid the flotsam and jetsam of Manhattan life. They had come to him separately, each drawn perhaps in his own way by the smug neatness which marked the life and character of Clarence. Yet the two men were in no way alike. Their difference was manifested in the very reasons for their attachment to Clarence. The one, an adventurous boisterous soul, had fastened upon Clarence because Clarence had a talent for keeping things in order, a perfect genius indeed for pigeonholing the very emotions of his own life. Out of the mighty chaos which was the essence of the wholehearted Homer Bunce, there emerged a pathetic need for order and comfort; and this Clarence supplied to superb satisfaction. Even the books and pillows of their tiny apartment were kept in scrupulous order. Disorder made Clarence nervous.
Mr. Wyck, on the other hand, had found strength in Clarence, a thing which Bunce himself never even thought of finding in the orderly depths of Clarence’s soul. For Mr. Wyck’s family was old and Mr. Wyck himself lacked vitality. There was in the lower Manhattan in those days a street named for the Wycks, a street renamed long since, in the hasty fashion of a great city, for a Tammany politician. His family was so old (as age went in New York) that there remained only himself and two spinster aunts who lived at Yonkers. It was this antiquity of blood which the pale Mr. Wyck counted upon as the very rod and staff ofhis existence. At his first meeting with Clarence, at an annual outing on Staten Island of the employees of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc., Mr. Wyck had sensed in Clarence a certain un-American and shameful respect for an old family name, the strange yearning in a man with no tradition for a name which carried with it memories, even though they were very distant and virtually obsolete, of coaches and country estates. Theyweredistant, for seventy years had gone the way of eternity since there had been money in the Wyck family, and the descendant of the patroons, the last of the Wycks, now followed his fortune as a clerk in the accounting department of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc.
On the rock of this respect for tradition, Wyck had fastened his hope. At length, he discovered in Clarence a man who was impressed; and the self-respect of Mr. Wyck, for all the insignificance of his world, increased in direct proportion with the awe produced in Clarence Murdock by the awful sound of the name Wyck.
Thus the three had come together, living in a fashion contented enough, in a tiny apartment filled with beaded portières bought at a Seventh Avenue emporium and leather cushions decorated with pyrographic Indian heads by loving sisters and aunts. Yet a spirit of unrest hovered over the place, an uneasiness which none save Mr. Wyck discerned with any degree of clarity. He alone knew that the day would come when, one after the other with fatal precision, his two companions would find their present mode of life unendurable. In turn each was certain to choose, from among the hordes of girls that swarmed the streets of New York, a mate. Only the gods knew who these two women might be or where they were at that moment. There was only one certainty, and that Mr. Wyck, with the sensitiveness of an effeminate man of low vitality, admitted to himself. Clarence and Bunce would marry, Bunce no doubt for love because his animalspirits were high, Clarence perhaps because he would be trapped by the glamour of a tradition.
Oh, Mr. Wyck understood this. It troubled him in the moments when he was left in solitude. It disturbed his digestion of the greasy meals which he ate alone each day in some hole-in-the-wall restaurant far downtown near the offices of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc. It was impossible that he should ever marry. Women had never interested him; the very idea filled him with a faint disgust. He would not only be left alone in the world; he would no longer possess even Clarence who respected his name. He knew that any woman was stronger than himself.
The Babylon Arms raised its twelve stories in one of the Eighties just east of Riverside Drive. Among the brownstone fronts of the early part of this century its gaunt sides gave it an overpowering appearance of height, loneliness, even grandeur. In those days great apartments were rare in that part of New York, and the Babylon Arms stood as a solitary outpost of the army of apartment houses which since have ranged their extravagant bulks in a solid face along the North River and eastward to the Park. The Babylon Arms is still there, rather shabby anddémodé, a belle of the early nineteen hundreds, out of fashion, overpainted, with electric bulbs fitted into gas brackets and the once somber red walls of its hallways painted over in grotesque imitation of the more ostentatious marble of its newer sisters. But its pride is gone. It stands jostled now and a little battered, like the bedizened women who came in from the streets to flit through its gloomy corridors. It is shabby genteel, like the two old ladies who live in the parlor bed-room of the first floor. It is jolly and good-natured, like the clerk and his family who climb the two flights of worn stairs above the point where the antiquated elevator rocks uncertainly to its final stop. It iscomic, respectable, quaint, vulgar, tragic, common and happy ... all these things; and so after a fashion, in the way of old houses, it is like life itself.
But it was new and elegant in the early nineteen hundreds. The Babylon Arms! It was a name known throughout the growing Upper West Side! It was the first of the skyscraping apartment houses. And among the pioneer cliff dwellers were Clarence Murdock and two companions who shared among them the expenses of the apartment two floors above where the elevator jolted uncertainly to a final stop. It was not so expensive—living two floors above the elevator; and the name “Babylon Arms” looked impressive, even a little flamboyant, on one’s card. To Bunce the name signified opulence, a certain grandiose triumph of success; to Clarence it meant that people would say, “Ah, the Babylon Arms! He must have a good background to live there!” To Mr. Wyck, it meant simply that he was keeping up one of the traditions of his name; yet there were times too when he was a little ashamed of the Babylon Arms as an institution touched by vulgarity.
As Clarence on the third day before Christmas closed the door behind him on the bead portières and burnt leather cushions, he left Bunce singing lustily as he rubbed his great healthy body in the chilly air of the bathroom, and Mr. Wyck, still lying in bed, his thin, slightly yellow nose peeping above the blankets against the hour when it would be painfully necessary for him to rise. As the door closed, Bunce’s rendition of “I’m afraid to go home in the dark” was interrupted for an instant while he shouted after Clarence, “Look out now and don’t come home married to that fat, pretty Seton girl!”
At the shout Clarence hastened away, shocked a little by the vulgarity of Bunce. As for Mr. Wyck the words struck terror into his heart. He saw the breaking up of his home. He saw himself, a timid, frightened little man, lost once more among the obscenities of a cheap boarding house.
ANUMBER of things made necessary this trip of Clarence; there were the usual customers to be visited; the new equipment of the Junoform Corset Factory was in need of inspection, and finally there was an engagement to spend Christmas and several days of the holiday season as the guest of the Seton family; and this he looked upon with relief because life in hotels had come to weary him inexpressibly. He longed for a home, with a wife who would put by his slippers for him and sit by his fireside. The prospect of one dreary hotel after another burdened his soul; so the acceptance of Mr. Seton’s invitation had been even colored by a subdued enthusiasm.
It was, after all, ambition which had betrayed him into city life and the wretched, fly-by-night existence of a drummer. He was ambitious to be wealthy, to be admired, to be honored in a community.
There were times, but these were rare and isolated moments, when his ambitions rose for an instant beyond even these things, times when, in an ecstasy of intoxication, they soared dizzily among the pinnacles of hope far beyond the reach of one whose place in the structure of life was clearly somewhere in the foundations. It was then that he caught for an instant glimpses of a life in which he saw himself not only wealthy and respectable but distinguished and glamorous, one whose character captured the imagination, who gave himself and his life to the great world.
All this was perhaps not clearly thought out in his mind; yet he sensed its presence a little way beyond his reach as a small boy searches in the darkness of a jam closet for something which he knows is there but cannot see.
In these lurid, almost ecstatic moments, he saw his future wife not so much in the rôle of a domestic paragon, as a brilliant and beautiful creature, fit to walk through the avenues of thegreat world by the side of a clever and worldly man. To be sure, such things were never mentioned to fellow-drummers, yet they were there, shut up in his heart, quiet save for rare moments. His companions in the smoking car may have had their secrets too. It is impossible to say. If such secrets existed, they were too well hidden beneath their suspicions of each other.
It was in one of his placid, normal moods that he boarded the train for the west. He took off his brown overcoat with the half-belt at the back, his brown fedora hat, adjusted his eyeglasses, and settled himself in his chair. At the moment he permitted his thoughts to hover about the picture of May Seton, pale, blonde, good-natured and pretty in her plump way. There was nothing in the least carnal in these thoughts, for he was a young man who might have served as a model for those institutions which concern themselves with the morals of young men and preach the doctrine that complete purity of mind is possible by sheer perseverance alone. He was innocent of women. He had worked hard and had no time for them. Indeed the very thought of them in that way gave him a faintly squeamish feeling. He was one of those in whom desire follows in the wake of timid experience, who cannot in the beginning conceive passion otherwise than abstractly. So now he conceived May Seton more as an idea, a sort of stepping stone to comfort and warmth, than as a woman to be desired. That he might be a sensual man had never occurred to him.
As the train moved across the Jersey Flats he fell to considering his prospects as a son-in-law of Harvey Seton and the certainty of an interest in the Junoform Reinforced Corset Company, a thing already hinted at by his suppositions mother-in-law. He thought of the Town. He pictured, quite clearly and placidly, a small and pleasant house surrounded by shrubs and trees, a comfortable front porch. He even pictured Mrs. May Seton Murdock in a rocking chair, far more attractive than she wasin the flesh, darning his socks. In fact, he saw his future bounded on four sides by Junoform Reinforced Corsets, by May Seton, by the Town and by hard work. It was this placid and uneventful path that his feet were to follow.
The car in which Clarence sat, like all cars bound from the East across the mountains into the fertile and prosperous Midlands, was crowded. He was not a man gifted with great curiosity and rarely indulged himself in speculation concerning his fellow travelers. Indeed, from his manner one soon understood that he observed very little about him. And now as the wheels clicked along the smooth track he settled himself to reading. He had brought with him against the monotonous agony of the trip a book by Richard Harding Davis and a copy of theSaturday Evening Post, and these absorbed his attention until the train had passed Philadelphia and turned northward a bit in the direction of Altoona. Presently his interest flagged and he fell to watching the scenery; but before long this too wearied him and he fell asleep. Slumber was a state which he welcomed, for there were long periods when his mind grew exhausted with turning over the same frayed thoughts. There were times when it might have been said that he existed in a state of suspended animation.
So between slumber and a bored wakefulness, the hours passed in a succession of dreary towns and monotonous winter-dead farms, punctuated by signs advertising patent medicines and cheap hotels. As the train swept through Johnstown, he was for a moment diverted by the sight of so much smoke and desolation, by the gigantic slag heaps and the flaming furnaces. The spectacle was not a new one. He must have seen it twenty times, by day when it was sordid, and by night when it became wild and fantastically magnificent. Yet it interested him as it always interested him, tugging at some part of his soul which failed to fit the neat pattern of his universal conformity.
“What a great country!” he reflected. “By George! It’s aprivilege to be a citizen of a country so energetic and prosperous!”
A curious light came suddenly into his nice brown eyes, and for a time the corset factory and May Seton were forgotten in the face of a new emotion, so much more profound and stirring. Even the rawness, the barren crudity of the picture exalted him. For a moment his ambitions threatened to gain the upper hand—those wild unruly ambitions which sometimes bore him beyond the round of thoughts which wearied him.
“To own mills like these!” he thought. “To be a power in industry. To go to Europe every year. To have a great house and one of these new automobiles.”
And Johnstown disappeared behind the train, lost in a gigantic and all-enveloping cloud of smoke and soot through which the flames of the furnaces flashed dimly.
The monotonous mountains, seamed with black rivers flowing between crags of blue ice, succeeded the smutty town, and Clarence settled back in his chair. But he did not read. He sat staring out of the window, thinking, thinking, thinking. Perhaps he tried to nurse his sense of importance, to persuade himself that he possessed the stuff which went into the accomplishments of great ambitions.
The roaring train sped on and on, and presently he went into the smoking compartment where he fell into conversation with other traveling salesmen. They exchanged stories of a broad nature, until Clarence, by nature a nice young man, found the flavor growing too strong and returned to his seat.
Then it was for the first time that he noticed his fellow passengers. He did not notice all of them, or even two or three. He noticed only one, a woman who sat in the chair beside him reading a novel with a yellow paper back called “Chèri” by a person with the queer name of Colette.
He sat down and tried to read but, for some obscure reason, the figure of the woman kept getting between him and the story of the great open spaces. He found himself reading paragraphs which meant nothing to him. He read an entire page withoutknowing what had happened in the tale. Such a thing had never happened to him before.
The woman who kept thrusting herself between him and the story was dressed all in black, though she did not appear to be in mourning. Rather it seemed that she wore black because it became her. Across one shoulder was thrown a stole of black fox and from the brim of her small hat hung a froth of black lace which obscured her dark eyes and permitted her to regard her companions without receiving in return the force of their stares. From beneath the hat there escaped a bit of tawny hair, so dark that in some lights it appeared almost red. She appeared to take full advantage of the shield made by the lace, for from time to time she put down her yellow-backed novel and fell to observing the people about her ... a middle-aged woman with a little boy in a sailor suit, a fat man who lay back in his seat and snored quietly, a pair of college girls, one reading ponderously the essays of Emerson and the other absorbed (self-consciously) in the pages of Boccacio; another traveling salesman and a pair of old women returning from a funeral who vied with each other in a talking race.
“And then I said to her....” “She said, ‘Mabel, he’ll never be well again ... even if he didn’t die, he’ll never be well again’”... and “What do you think of such behavior?... Unpardonable, I thought....” “I quite agree with you, unpardonable....” “Well, that’s what I told Mabel.”
Snatches of the old women’s talk, projected in voices pitched high enough to override the clamor of the train, were tossed about them like jagged fragments of glass.
The woman with the veil put down her book and, smiling quietly, listened to them. She turned away from Clarence a little so that he was able to shift his position and thus obtain a clearer view of her.
She was beautiful, and even to Clarence, unskilled in such fine distinctions, it was clear that she was a lady. This fact was conveyed beyond all doubt by the way she sat, poised witha neat and easy grace, in the way her slender hands clasping her book lay against the black of her dress, the way she carried her head and wore her fine clothes, even by the veil which somehow stood as a symbol of all that was gently bred in her character. There seemed between her and the others in the car an invisible veil which shielded her while she looked out upon them from a different world.
At her feet stood a smart black handbag, covered with bright labels. Clarence read them one after another in a kind of intoxication—Sorrento, Cannes, Dieppe, Hotel Ruhl, Hotel Royal Splendide, Hotel Ritz-Carlton. And, surely yet imperceptibly, just as an hour or two earlier the sight of the Johnstown furnaces had captivated his moderate imagination, the woman began to take possession of him. Somehow these two impressions became blended, and out of them there came to Clarence glimpses of a brilliant world which he never before penetrated, even in the wildest flights of ambition.
Presently the stranger, wearied of listening to her companions, resumed her reading and Clarence, still fascinated, continued to watch her until, becoming conscious of his gaze, she turned suddenly and dismissed him by the faintest movement of her shoulder. At the gesture, which from her seemed a command, he turned quickly away and blushed as if she had spoken to him in rebuke. Yet it seemed to him that as she glanced in his direction, her lovely mouth was arched for an instant by the faintest of smiles—a smile which said: “Staring does not disturb me. It is nothing new to me.” It may even have been that she mocked him. It was impossible to say. Only one thing remained certain: Clarence had been disturbed by something entirely new in his experience.
In his own way he tried to discover what it was that suddenly shattered all his peace. The woman was beautiful, yet he in no sense desired her. Indeed, in the dull purity of his mind, it is probable that no such unclean thought even occurred to him.Beyond all doubt she fascinated him, yet it was not this which destroyed his ease. Rather it was something in her manner, something in her very bearing and personality which overwhelmed him ... that sudden glimpse of another world, in which people lived lives as different from his as day is different from night, a sudden terror at her self-possession, at the unseen, impregnable barrier by which she protected herself from those others in the car. There was in her manner too a certain veiled but terrifying recklessness.
With an air of infinite absorption, she continued to read the yellow-backed novel, as if she had forgotten that the man in the seat beside her existed. Beyond her, the two old women continued, “And I said to her when she rang me up the next morning....” “It’s shameful what some women will do!” ... “Since that day he’s been an invalid, unable to stir!” And they clucked and wagged their crêpe-clad heads like a pair of crows on a fence.
The train roared on through the blue-white mountains, into the west toward Pittsburgh. Upon the hills the early winter darkness had already begun to descend.
Still Clarence did not read. The novel and theSaturday Evening Postslipped to the floor and lay there unnoticed. The characters in his book failed to hold their own against the woman in the adjoining seat. He even had a faint sense of being on the edge of the romantic and exciting.
And at the same moment, the thoughts of May Seton and a comfortable house in the Town were swept away like so much rubbish into oblivion, carrying with them the sense of peace and certainty which a little time before made the future so pleasant and comfortable.
Presently he rose and went into the smoking compartment where he remained for a time. When he emerged, it was quite dark, and high up on the barren mountains an occasional warm yellow light indicated the existence of a lonely house. Returning to his chair he found the mysterious woman had vanished. Only the somber handbag covered with bright labels remained. The names glittered ... Sorrento, Cannes, Firenze, Beau Rivage, Royal Splendide, Claridge’s, Berkeley....
He glanced at his gold watch (the gift of Uncle Henry) and decided to dine. Making his way toward the dining car, he found the passageway blocked by other passengers, college girls and boys, drummers like himself, old women, children, all swaying with the motion of the speeding train. It was a bad time to travel, on the eve of a holiday; yet the crowd was pleasant enough, good-natured, laughing, on the whole gay with the holiday spirit.
Slowly the door of the dining car devoured the thin line, casting out others who fought their way back in an opposing column, until at last Clarence stood at the entrance of the bright car, surveying the groups of heads bent over swaying soup and underdone chops.
Still harassed and unaccountably miserable, he stood first on one foot and then the other, surveying the crowd until at length he discovered far down the aisle his friend of the paper-backed novel. She sat at a table for two opposite an elderly man in a black frock coat who, quite properly, did not address her although he seemed not unconscious of her presence, for he stole from time to time glances at her tawny hair and fine throat until she dismissed him suddenly with a frank stare in which there was a great deal more than a hint of amusement. After that a wall, invisible as it was impenetrable, separated them, as was proper between two victims of a system which threw harassed travelers arbitrarily into each other’s company. As she ate the woman continued to look about her as if she were profoundly amused by the friendly spectacle of the rocking car. Still she appeared to use the film of lace as a perpetual shield.
He had been watching her thus for a long time when, to hissudden horror, he saw the elderly man wipe his thin mouth with his napkin, pay his check and, followed by the steward, move fatally toward the end of the car. At the sight Clarence was tempted suddenly to run. Yet it was impossible to run. The best one could do was to turn back and squeeze slowly and painfully past the fat encumbrances of the corridor. Besides, how could one make a spectacle of one’s self? What would people think? He stood frozen with horror, filled with the sensations of one about to be dragged forward to torture. As in a nightmare he felt himself borne forward by a steward who grinned maliciously and said, “Place for one? Certainly! Right this way.”
Without effort he floated through space until suddenly, with a tormented and unuttered groan, he sank into the seat opposite the woman with the delicate black veil.
He felt the pulses beating in his throat. He bent over the menu card, but even this did not protect him. Again the unreality of a nightmare smote him. This time he was naked and horribly embarrassed at his improper predicament. He sensed the woman examining him as she examined the others, with a detached and curious smile of appraisal.
These were his sensations, various, confused, terrifying. As though there were eyes in the top of his neatly brushed head, he saw all this happening. What he did not see, what he could not have known were the thoughts of the woman—that she watched him, that she saw the throbbing vein in his throat stand out suddenly and knew well enough its meaning. By the aid of that agitated vein she saw, with a sophistication beyond his wildest imaginings, in this mild little drummer a man of a sensual, passionate nature. The thing which amused her was a speculation, absurd to be sure, but none the less clear. She wondered whether this little man knew himself, whether he had ever been aroused.
“Chops,” Clarence found himself writing on the check. “Chops. Mashed potatoes. Lima beans. Coffee.”
Then the sound of a voice reached him, warm, low, insinuating. “I advise you against the chops. They are atrocious. I was forced to send them back and order something else.”
The woman had spoken to him of her own accord and his suspicions arose in sudden array, bristling and fully armed. Yet he knew that he must answer. Heroically he looked up and asked,
“What do you advise?”
“The roast beef is very good....”
Though he detested it, he wrote down roast beef and then straightened in his chair, pulling at his collar and cravat. For the life of him, he could find nothing to say. It was impossible to overcome that fragile, invisible barrier.
“Don’t think me impertinent,” she said, “for speaking ... but I’m almost bored to death.... I hate traveling.... I’d like always to stay in one spot.”
For an instant he suspected the faintest trace of a foreign accent in her voice, though he could not be certain.
“I know,” he said politely, “I hate it too....”
She laughed softly.
“It’s the first time I’ve traveled any distance in years.... I couldn’t talk to the old crow who sat there before you.... It would have frightened him to death.”
It was impossible for Clarence to say that it also frightened him to death, so he coughed and buttered a bit of roll.
“You don’t mind my speaking, do you?” she pursued.
For a moment Clarence fancied he had lost his mind. It was queer enough that a strange woman should speak to him, but even queerer that she should sweep past all the procedure of good manners and ask him directly whether he minded it. And she was neither brazen nor embarrassed.
“No, of course not,” he managed to say, “I mean I’m awfully glad. I hate traveling alone.”
Then it occurred to him that he had made an indelicate, perhaps a suggestive remark, and the blushes once more swept his face.
After hours the waiter arrived with the roast beef and lima beans.
“I haven’t much farther to go,” continued the woman. “Thank God, I’m not bound for Chicago.”
Clarence found it impossible to eat beneath her gaze.
“I get off at eleven something ...” he said, “I’ve forgotten exactly....”
The woman laughed. “Why, so do I! We must be bound for the same place.”
For an instant he succumbed to a terrifying suspicion that, in truth, she had marked him for her own. But this idea he dismissed quickly, as utterly improbable. The woman was clearly a lady. She was terribly sure of herself, of keeping things just where she wanted them. She might be a spy, an adventuress. (Ghosts of a thousand cheap magazine stories danced through his brain.) Yet a woman like that, if she were bad, wouldn’t be bothering herself with insignificant game like himself. He began to believe that she had been speaking the truth, that she had been driven to address him only out of a vast boredom.
“Perhaps we are,” he said, and told her that he was bound for the Town.
“So am I,” she replied. “It’s the first time I’ve been back there in years.... Maybe you come from the Town?” she continued.
The discovery of this bond helped matters a little. It furnished at least some ground for the stumbling feet of Clarence.
“No, I’m going on business.... I’ve been there before.... It’s a nice progressive Town, full of booming factories ... a place to be proud of.”
But he found abruptly that he had taken the wrong turning. The stranger was not proud of the Town. “I suppose you might be proud of it, if you like that sort of thing.... I find it abominable.” For a moment, the bantering, charming, humorous look went out of the eyes behind the veil, supplanted by a sudden sadness. “No,” she continued, “I don’t like it, though I’ve no doubt it’s very prosperous.”
For a moment Clarence was baffled. He understood suddenly that this new strange world was more remote, more unfamiliar than he had imagined. It was not perhaps made out of factories and roaring furnaces. The discovery increased his awkwardness and in some strange way distended the glamour with which he surrounded her. He struggled for words.
“I’m going to spend Christmas with the Setons,” he said. “Probably you know them. They’ve always lived in the Town.”
The woman frowned slightly. “Seton?” she repeated, “Seton?” Then it appeared that the light dawned upon her. “To be sure.... I know.... They own a corset factory.... But they’re new people. Yes, I know who they are although I don’t know them.”
She made the statement simply and without a trace of condescension. She made it as a simple observation. If she had said, “I know who the King of England is ... but I don’t know him,” the intonation, the inflection would have been identical. She had answered his question, but she had answered it more profoundly than she knew, more profoundly, more tragically than even Clarence knew until years afterward. “I know who they are although I don’t know them.”
Before the eyes of Clarence there rose suddenly the image of May Seton, good-natured, trivial, blonde, commonplace. It was almost as if she had entered the train by some obscure miracle and stood there beside the mysterious stranger, awkward, silly, ungainly.
The woman was rising now. “I must go back to my seat,” she said. “It isn’t fair to keep the others waiting.” She pulled the stole of black fox about her handsome shoulders and lowered the veil. “Thank you,” she said, “for saving a poor helpless traveler from boredom.”
And with that she closed the adventure.
When he returned to his seat, he found her sitting absorbed inher yellow-backed novel. Greeting him with a faint smile, she returned to her reading. After an hour she rested her head against the back of the chair and appeared to fall asleep. It was not until the train roared into the Town that she again addressed him.
Snow filled the air as they got down from the train at midnight. The big flakes, tormented by a rising wind, fell heavily, obscuring the yellow lights of the dirty brick station. They were the only passengers to descend and Clarence offered to take charge of her luggage. There were two large trunks and another handbag. The trunks she left at the station. She would send for them. The two handbags she would take with her.
The great train, spouting steam, got under way with a vast uproar. The brightly lighted cars moved away into the snowstorm and the pair of them were left alone beneath the yellow glare of the station lamps. A little way off two horse drawn cabs stood by the curb, the heads of the beasts hanging, their backs bent against the storm. From the warm station emerged a pair of drivers, muffled to the ears. To one of them, the lady called out.
“Oh, Jerry,” she said, “I’m glad you’re here.... There’s no one to meet me.... I didn’t send word ahead.”
The plumper of the two old men took off his hat and peered at her for a moment while the snow fell on his bald head. Slowly recognition came to him. “Sure, Miss Lily.... It’s a pleasure.... Back again, after so many years ... and not a day older, if you’ll let me say so.”
At this the stranger laughed softly. The cabby took the bags from Clarence, who had bestirred himself briskly to do the proper thing.
“It’s late,” he said. “Perhaps I’d better go with you to see that nothing happens.”
“Thank you,” replied his companion, “but I’ll be safe.... Ihaven’t far to go ... and I’ve known Jerry all my life.... He has driven me ever since I was a little girl.... You see I only live a little way off.” She laughed again, “Right in the midst of the Mills.” She made a little gesture with her big muff to indicate the direction of the Mills. There, above the encircling flames of the furnaces, rose dimly the silhouette of a great house crowning the top of a low hill. But for the flames of the furnaces it would have remained invisible. Now it stood out against the red, snow-dimmed glare, black, mysterious.
The woman stepped into the swaying, moth-eaten cab and the driver climbed to the seat. Suddenly she leaned out of the window and addressed Clarence. “Before we part,” she said, “I suppose we ought to know each other’s names,pour sauver les convenances. I’m Miss Shane,” she added, “Miss Lily Shane.”
Clarence took off his hat and bowed. “I’m Mr. Murdock.... Mr. Clarence Murdock.”
“And you won’t think me wicked, I know,” she added, “for speaking to a strange man.... I’m careful who I speak to.... I knew I would be safe with you.”
And the cab drove off through the snowstorm in the direction of Shane’s Castle, leaving Clarence on the platform mumbling a polite answer, his face scarlet, his pulses beating faster than they had ever beaten before.
After a moment he climbed into the other cab and bade the driver take him to the residence of Mr. Harvey Seton. The contentment, the holiday spirit had oozed out of him. He was no longer glad to be spending Christmas with the Setons. Reflecting upon his recent encounter, it occurred to him suddenly what it was that was familiar about the woman. Lily Shane! To be sure, she was the cousin of Ellen Tolliver! The rich cousin ...! There was something about her that reminded him of Ellen as she sat talking to him in the Setons’ parlor, something withdrawn and contained, rather distinguished and proud. In one of those moments of insight, so rare to him, he saw all at once that there wasin the girl and her cousin something which set them aside from the others.
This thought he turned over and over in his mind as the musty cab, smelling faintly of ammonia, bore him through the blowing storm further and further into the smug future that lay spread out before him in a suburban panorama of little white houses with “artistic” piazzas and shutters ornamented by cut-out hearts and diamonds; and after a time he became once more almost content. The wild disturbance caused by the sudden encounter with the stranger appeared to have quieted, when another thought, entering suddenly his tired brain, made him miserable once more. He fell to considering the final speech of Miss Lily Shane.... “I’m careful who I speak to. I knew I should be safe with you.”....
He could not make out whether or not the speech was meant as a tribute to him. Something in the memory of the stranger’s manner implied that he was a poor thing.
And then it occurred to him that at this very moment he must be passing the Tollivers’ house, and poking his head out of the cab window, he saw that there was still a light in the windows. For an instant he fancied that the wind bore toward him the strains of wild music, surging and passionate; but of this he could not be certain, for the wind howled wildly and snow fell in a thick blanket. It may have been, after all, only his imagination; it had been playing him queer tricks since the very moment he raised his eyes and saw Miss Lily Shane sitting there beside him.
THE same evening was for Mrs. Tolliver one of rare peace and happiness—an evening when, warmed by the glow from the open fire, she sat surrounded by her family while the blizzard howled and tore at the eaves, setting the limbs of the gnarled old apple tree to scratch against the frozen panes.At such times there was in her appearance something grand and majestic; she sat in her ample chair like a triumphant Niobe, a sort of enthroned maternity the borders of whose narrow kingdom ended with the walls of the Tolliver living room.
It was a large square room, infinitely clean, although shabby and worn, for the dominant rules of the Tolliver household were cleanliness and comfort. It was this room which was the core of the Tolliver existence, the shrine of the sacred Lares and Penates, such a room as has existed rarely in each generation of the world since the beginning of time. With her family assembled about her, the cares and worries of the day slipped from her shoulders softly, beautifully into oblivion. She rested herself by darning the family stockings.
Near her Ellen sat at the piano playing, playing endlessly, in the wild and passionate fashion which sometimes overwhelmed them all, causing the mother to cease her darning for an instant, young Fergus to look up from his book, and even Charles Tolliver to stir himself sleepily and forget in the surge of her music the cares which he sought to drown each evening in sleep. The great shabby sofa was his. There it was that he lay for hours every night, until at length and after much effort, he was shepherded off to bed by his energetic wife. Perhaps he slept because in sleep he found a solace for the complacent failure of his life.
Robert, the younger brother, lay on his stomach beside the fire, his short nose wrinkled in an effort to decipher the mysteries of a picture puzzle. He had a passion for problems, and a persistence which had come to him from his mother.
Ah! They were a family in which to take pride! What was money compared to such a good husband and such fine children? So ran the thoughts of Mrs. Tolliver; and presently her face became wreathed in smiles, but she did not know she was smiling. If she had looked at that moment into a mirror, she would have been astounded. Her happiness at such moments ceased to be a conscious emotion.
Outside the windows the wind howled and the snow, fallingin the first real blizzard of the winter, whished against the rattling panes.
The fire crackled and presently beneath the great blanket her husband stirred slowly and murmured, “Ellen, play the one I like so much.... I don’t know the name but you know what I mean.”
And slowly Ellen turned into the melodies of one of Liebesträume—the one which is written about the lovers lost on a lake during a black storm.
In her strange way the girl loved her father best, perhaps because in his gentle impersonal way he made upon her none of those savage demands which her mother, in all the ferocity of her affection, constantly exacted. With Mrs. Tolliver love implied endearments, constant manifestations of affection. To her love between people separated by hundreds of miles was inconceivable. It was a thing to be touched, to be fondled and treasured. Those whom she loved must always be at hand, under her eye, full of protesting affection. Perhaps in this she was right; she was, after all, a primitive woman who trusted her instincts. There was no reason in her. Perhaps loveisonly fanned into life by close and breathless contacts.
Mr. Tolliver was so different. There was in him something of his father, a touch of the terrible philosophic aloofness of the gaunt old man who lived above the kitchen in another part of the house. But he lacked Gramp Tolliver’s strength, as well as that implacable resistance of the old man to all the assaults of emotion. Where the old man was aloof, powerful, and independent through the very quality of his indifference, the son had failed by some weakness of character. There was in him too much of humanity. People liked him. Farmers in their fields stopped their horses and abandoned their plows to talk with Charlie Tolliver. At the elections they had supported him to a man; but there were not enough of them. The Town was too powerful.
In the world Charles Tolliver failed because of his very gentleness. He had a way of regarding life with a fine sense of proportion, of seeing things in their proper relation. It was as if he stood already at the end of his own existence and looked back through it as through a long tunnel, seeing that those things which others labeled as mountains were after all but mole-hills, and those things which others would have called trivial possessed the most uncanny importance. And this was a weakness, for it led one into the paths of philosophic acceptance; and it was a weakness which none recognized more shrewdly than his own direct and vigorous wife.
Ah (she thought) if only he would see things in the proper light. If only I could make him fight as I would fight in his place! He’s innocent, like a little child; but it’s not his fault. That old man abovestairs is to blame; that old devil who never cared for his own children. And, goaded by these thoughts, a kind of baffled rage at Gramp Tolliver swept the honest woman. She had no subtle way of combating his deviltries, because to a woman of so violent a nature, indifference was an unconquerable barrier. Gramp Tolliver lived, in his sinister fashion, in a world which she not only failed to understand but even to imagine.
Suddenly Ellen ceased her music; it died away in a faint, diminishing breath, disappearing slowly into silence beneath the strong beautiful fingers. The girl leaned forward on the piano and buried her face silently in her hands. She did not sob, and yet one could be sure that she was miserable. In her silence there was something far more terrible than weeping. It rose up and filled all the room, so that Mrs. Tolliver, lost in her angry thoughts of the old man in the lonely room overhead, sensed it suddenly and ceased her darning. This thing had come so often of late to break in upon the happiness of their lives. It was a monster, savage, insatiable. Something more powerful than all of them.
For a time she watched her daughter and slowly there spread over her face a look of trouble and bewilderment. It was an expression which of late had come to Mrs. Tolliver so often thatit had begun already to leave its mark in the fine lines about her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. It was at times like this that her heart ceased all at once to beat and a coldness swept through her body; for love with her was really an intense and physical thing.
On the sofa her husband slept peacefully, quieted at last by the Liebestraum; and again she resented his indifference, all his willingness to accept life, his refusal to struggle against fate. “Things come out right in the end,” he always said when she assailed him. “There is no use in struggling.”
Ah, she thought bitterly, but thereisuse in struggling. There is a satisfaction to the spirit. But this, of course, her husband could never have known.
“Ellen,” she murmured, “Ellen.” And the girl raised her head with a look in her eyes so terrible that it appalled her mother. “Are you tired?”
“No.”
Again a little pause. “Why are you unhappy?”
For an instant the face of the girl softened. There were signs of a sudden collapse, of sobbing, of yielding utterly. Perhaps if it had come in that moment—a sudden abrupt bursting of all restraint—the lives of all the people in that warm and comfortable room would have been changed. But it did not come, for one so young does not yield so easily. The girl sighed, stiffened her body and sat upright.
“I don’t know,” she answered dully. And yet she lied, because she did know, perfectly. In that moment life for her was an awful thing, baffling, suffocating, overwhelming. It was impossible to say so, because her mother would not have understood. It would have been the same as when Mrs. Tolliver said, “It is beautiful, your music ... lovely,” when she did not understand it at all, when she said such things simply because she loved her daughter and was proud of her cleverness.
Outside the storm persisted, increasing steadily in fury. And presently, Ellen said, “To-night Cousin Lily arrives, doesn’t she?”
At which her mother regarded her sharply and paused in her darning to say, “Yes. But why do you ask? You talk of nothing but Lily.”
And again Ellen answered, “I don’t know. I simply want to see her.”
Into the proud reflections of Mrs. Tolliver there entered from time to time thoughts of the most profound satisfaction over the part she had played in the existence of her children. In the beginning, even before they were born, she had determined for them careers which were to follow clearly demarcated lines. As a bride, after she had brought up her eight brothers and sisters and married at last the patient Charles Tolliver, she went, driven by eager duty, to a lecture given by a bearded man upon the things every mother should know. This doctor had told her that it was possible to begin even before birth to influence the characters of one’s children, and so she had begun on that very night to plan their lives.
The first, she had decided, was to be a musician. It was a story which went back a long way into the days of Hattie Tolliver’s own youth when she had longed in her passionate way to be a musician. But always there had been something to intervene—an invalid mother; and after her death the cares of a family of brothers and sisters and the management of her father’s household, no easy task in those early days of great farms and broad lands. Yet in spite of these things she had managed to learn by sheer persistence something of the mysteries of the keyboard, and out of these she had woven on the melodeon of the old farmhouse the tunes of a few hymns, the Ninety and Nine, and snatches of The Blue Danube. So before Ellen was born, these fragments were revived and brought into service once more to be played over and over again on the upright piano purchased in the early years of her husband’s prosperity. Thus, with the support of avast energy and an overwhelming optimism, she had begun to plan the future of Ellen long before the girl was born.