AS the weeks passed in the quiet of the big house in the Rue Raynouard, they did not annoy her. To Hattie, Ellen’s mood—her sulkiness, her silence—had a familiarity that was comforting; Ellen had been silent and sulky as a girl, she had behaved thus throughout that last happy winter before she escaped forever in company with poor Clarence. Hattie, in the midst of caring for a big house which ran much better when left to itself, went about mothering Ellen, respecting her silences, happy that for a little time her daughter seemed to have some need of her.
And Lily ... Lily was far too wise ever to pry into the affairs of any one. In time, she knew, everything became clear, everything would stand revealed. Besides there had been for her no element of surprise in the whole trouble. She had known men like Callendar; indeed, it was men like Callendar who had always been attracted to her (save only in the case of de Cyon with whom it was not a question of love). What puzzled her was the reason why a man like Callendar—a man capable of such intense passion, a man of such fascination and elusive masculinity—should ever have loved so persistently and in the end married a creature so independent, so fierce-willed as her cousin. One might as well have expected César to love Ellen; and César had hated her always with a passion which she returned. The whole affair had been wrong since the beginning ... perverse and unnatural. Any one could have known that they would be unhappy. And in a quiet, gentle fashion Lily found satisfaction in the spectacle of a humbled, unhappy Ellen married to a man who was a match for her, perhaps more than a match—a man who stood aside and watched her coldly in the way she had watched people all her life. It was almost as if the first poor, pale husband, whom Lily had met so long ago on the crowded train bound for the Town, was by some turn of circumstances being avenged.
Callendar, she knew, had come to the house not once but several times. He had talked with Ellen while they walked up and down the long garden beneath the mottled plane trees. She had watched them, secretly, wondering at the calm fashion in which they talked and at the inhuman hardness of Ellen. (She herself would have weakened and yielded long ago.) And each time he had gone away defeated, she knew, for the time being.
And then, slowly, bit by bit, the story came to her. She heard it even before Hattie heard it, how they had quarreled and how he had even gone so far as to strike her in a sudden gust of wild and unsuspected anger. She heard too of the women in the hotel at Tunis and of another woman, the wife of a French official living in a villa near them. Ellen had seen them walking together one night when she had stolen from the house to follow him.
“Think of it!” she cried to Lily. “I descended even to that ... even to spying. Oh, he is a monster. You have no idea the sort of a man he is.”
And yet (thought Lily) she loves him, or she would not feel so violently. And Lilydidhave an idea what sort of a man he was; she knew far more than Ellen imagined, for she was a woman of great experience, however discreet she may have been. That was perhaps the reason why every one bore their confidences to Lily first of all.
“And yet,” continued Ellen as they sat late one night in the long drawing-room, “there are times when for a moment I can see how perfect a husband, how perfect a lover he could be, if he but chose to be. Once we could have been happy, for I was the stronger then and I know that I could have changed him. He is in love with me in a queer fashion. He has behaved like this with no other woman.... I am certain of it.... I could have changed him once, but it is too late now.” And she, Ellen Tolliver, began to weep. “I am crying,” she said, “because I have missed so much. I know that I shall never have another chance at happiness ... of that sort.”
She is crying (thought Lily) because she is a child who wantseverything in the world, a child who will never be satisfied.
“None of us,” she said aloud, “has everything. No one life is long enough to encompass it all. We can only try to have as much as possible.”
She might have added, “You have fame and wealth. Is not that enough?” But she kept silent because she knew that Ellen had taken account of these things and would, just then, have given them all in exchange for this other happiness. For Ellen could not bear the thought of having failed.
Lily was busy too in those days with her own affairs, for in the collapse of de Cyon’s party she found it necessary to entertain, to go about, to meet new people, to make new friends. She gave dinner after dinner and invited Americans who might be of importance to her husband; and because she was a woman whose life existed only in relation to the men who surrounded her, she did it all gladly, though it ran against all the indolence of her nature. It would help de Cyon and it would be good too for Jean. Lily, who no longer put up bulwarks against age—Lily, who had allowed the gray to come into her tawny hair, was stepping aside to make way for others.
In her tactful fashion she managed somehow to coördinate all the coming and going in the big house. When Ellen told her about the baby, she insisted that it be born in her house.
“It is the center of the family now and it has been my home for so long that I seem always to have lived here. It will be no trouble to any one. We will move de Cyon’s books out of the pavilion and turn it over to you. Jean used it for his own when he came home from school. De Cyon will not mind. He can have a room on the second floor.”
Indeed the news of the child altered the life of the entire household until the preparations took on the proportions of a royal arrival. Callendar sent flowers daily (which Ellen could not be forever sending away) and she accepted them because the child was his too. This thought saddened her and made hergentle with him when he came sometimes to call, respectfully, with a new tenderness of manner which she had never suspected. It might have weakened her will in the end and defeated her if she had not understood, as Sabine had done before her, that it was born in reality of his own vanity. He was being gentle with her now because she was the potential mother ofhischild, ofhisheir. At other times it maddened her to think that he should treat her gently and tenderly because there was the child to be considered. He had never thought of her at all. There had never been any real tenderness. She had suspicions too that it was only another way of attacking her will.
As for Hattie, the news appeared to change the whole tone and color of her life. Besides running the house she began to fuss and fidget over her Ellen. She recommended this and that; she was always advising her on the subject of prenatal influence. “You must remember,” she said, “that I planned you should be a musician long before you were born. You can mold the whole life of the child.”
She did not care whether the child was a girl or a boy. It was enough that she was to have a grandchild.
On the other side of the Atlantic, old Thérèse received only the calamitous news that there had been a separation. Instantly she had wound up her affairs, closed the house on Murray Hill and engaged a cabin. There was no time to be lost. Richard and Ellen must be reconciled at once. They must be brought together again. If this last chance failed, it would be the end of everything. There would be no more Callendars and no more men to care for the Callendar fortune and the ancient banking firm of Leopopulos et Cie. In an agony of uncertainty, the fat, bedizened, energetic old woman crossed the Atlantic and rushed by motor from Havre to Paris. In her heart, she had known all along that the marriage could not endure. She had played all her stakes on the chance that it would endure long enough to accomplish her purpose.
Still in ignorance of the prospects, she arrived in Paris late in the afternoon and went straight to the house in the Avenue du Bois where her son waited her in the small sitting room. Black and untidy, with her precious reticule swung over her fat arm, she closed the door behind her and faced him in a fury. She did not greet him. She did not even wait for him to speak.
“What is it you have done now? I know it is your fault. You have ruined everything.” Her beady eyes glittered and she panted for breath as she flung herself down, thinking “After I work for years to accomplish this marriage.”
He smiled at her. “I have done nothing,” he said. “I do not know why she ran away.”
But she knew he was lying. “Youdoknow,” she cried. “Youdoknow. It is another woman.... Why can’t you leave women alone? You,” she mocked, “who thought yourself so wise, so clever with women, have ruined everything again.” Her fury mounted and she began to shriek at him incoherently like a mad woman. “She will never divorce you as Sabine did.... Of what use are you to any one? Who would regret it if you died? You are worthless.... You are a waster ... a devil.” She beat her reticule with her fat bejeweled hands and gasped for breath. “I spend all my life caring for your fortune and you only waste it and run after women.... What sort of a man are you? You cannot even give me an heir.... There is a curse on you.”
Callendar stood by the open window looking out, his back the picture of a cold and maddening indifference. It must have been clear to him that she cared more for her fortune than for her son. Her fortune.... It was the one thing left her now, and what could she do with it? She could not take it into her grave. She could not even rest there knowing that it was being wasted and would in the end be broken up into small bits and distributed among obscure cousins she had never seen ... the fortune which her family, the family of the green-eyed old banker of Pera, had built up over centuries....
“Does all that mean nothing to you? Does nothing have any meaning for you?” she cried.
They were in open warfare now, the mother and the son, and after all that had been said nothing would ever again be the same between them. They stood there naked in combat, stripped of all pretense and intriguing.
Presently the old woman became more calm and in a low voice, that was strangely soft after all her harsh catalogue of accusations, murmured, as if speaking to herself, “I do not see how you can be the son of your father.... If I did notknow.... If I did notknow, I could never believe it.”
And then Callendar turned from the window and looked at her with an insolent smile.
“Where is Ellen?” she asked. “Where is she?”
“She is in the Rue Raynouard with Madame de Cyon. If you had waited,” he spoke slowly now, with a tantalizing slowness. “If you had given me a moment or allowed me to speak, I should have told you.... Ellen is with child.”
For a moment the old woman, gasping, peered at him in silence, and then she began to weep. It was the first time that any one had ever seen tears flow from those shrewd, glittering eyes. She took her reticule and pressed it against her breast as if it had been a child. “My little boy!” she said, through her tears. “My little boy.... My Richard.... Forgive me.... Everything then is saved.” Brightening, she continued, “And it will be a boy,hein? I have prayed, I have burned candles ... I must go to Madame de Thèbes and find out for certain. I cannot wait.... I cannot wait.... She can tell everything by reading the crystal. I cannot wait.”
Still clutching her reticule, she rose and, drying her tears on a dirty handkerchief of exquisite texture, she waddled to the door. As she opened it, the plump figure of Victorine vanished around a corner of the great hall. She had heard everything this time, for Thérèse and her son spoke French when they were together.
In the drawing-room at the Rue Raynouard, Ellen sat with her mother and Lily having tea when Thérèse was announced. To them she said, “If you don’t mind, I’d best see her alone.... I don’t know what it means. She has come perhaps to persuade me to return. She won’t give up easily.”
So Lily and Hattie left and a moment later at the foot of the stairs the figure of old Thérèse appeared, hot and untidy, peering with her eyes squinted, in search of her daughter-in-law. For a time Ellen waited in the cool shadows, watching. It was incredible (she thought) how Thérèse had changed. She was a figure of fun as she stood there, clutching her precious reticule, disheveled and bizarre, peering into the dim room. This was not the eccentric, worldly Thérèse of the house on Murray Hill. It was an old harridan, obsessed by a single idea—her fortune and what would become of it.
“Mrs. Callendar,” she said softly, moving forward.
“Ah, there you are.... My dear! My darling!” She waddled toward her daughter-in-law and embraced her.
(She has taken to oiling her hair, thought Ellen. She will be running a fruit stand soon.)
“I have heard the news.... I have heard the news.... You are to have a leetle baby.”
She sat down, her fat old face all soft and beaming now, her diamonds glittering dimly as they had always glittered.
“Did Richard tell you?” asked Ellen.
“I only landed yesterday.... I motored all the way from Le Havre. I did not know the news then. I only knew that you had run away from him. What is it? What has happened?”
Ellen, watching her, knew that in the recesses of her Oriental mind the old woman thought her a fool for running away. Thérèse believed that any woman could make a good wife. It was a woman’s duty to put up with anything, as Sabine had done until she was thrust aside as barren and useless. As Sabinehad said, Thérèse could have protected herself from a man like Callendar. She had been born old and wise, expecting nothing. She could not argue with Thérèse. The old woman would have thought her crazy.
“I have left him,” she said. “I shall not go back.”
“Perhaps the baby....” And Thérèse put her head on one side in a queer foreign fashion and smirked. “Perhaps the baby will change things.” Then she leaned forward and patted Ellen’s hand. “Never mind, we won’t speak of it now, my darling.... It would disturb you ... in your condition.” She kept returning again and again to the idea of the baby.
Then, settling back in her chair, she took a biscuit from the reticule and began to nibble it. “We need not worry now,” she continued. “To think of it ... a baby ... a grandson.”
Ellen could not resist the perverse temptation. It was this old woman who, after all, had forced the marriage. She said, “Perhaps it will be a granddaughter.”
But Thérèse was confident. “No, I have said prayers. I have burned candles. I have done everything.... I have paid an astrologer.... I have overlooked nothing. I am sure it will be a grandson. It is all arranged. You have made me happy, my child. I must arrange to reward you.”
(So Ellen had made two women fantastically happy ... her own mother and old Thérèse.)
“I will make a settlement on you. I will give you a present ... a magnificent present.” And she began to finger her reticule again as if she might draw from it a bag of great gold pieces. “I will send to-morrow for a lawyer. We will arrange it.”
And then, like Hattie, she began to offer piece after piece of advice, bits of good sense and weird snatches of ancient, tribal superstition. Ellen must do thus and so to make certain the child was a boy. She musteat this and that. And she must have the proper doctors ... the very best. They must take no risks. “I will pay for everything ...” she repeated. “You can charge it all to me. What is a little money to Thérèse Callendar?”
And at last she left, still excited and chattering. At the foot of the stairs, she turned, “I am going now to Madame de Thèbes to find out if it will be a boy.... But I am certain ... I am sure.” And she waddled up the long stairs and climbed again into the motor which drove her away on a round of fortune tellers.
The next morning she returned bringing her lawyer and with Ellen they sat for an hour in de Cyon’s study arranging the settlement. It was shrewdly managed. Thérèse made a fine gift, but with many strings to it. Ellen was not to be allowed to touch the principal. The income would be hers whether the child was a boy or a girl. If it was a boy the principal would go to him on the death of his mother; if a girl it would return to the estate. The money, whatever became of it, was never to escape from the Callendar-Leopopulos fortune; but the income was large enough to support Ellen in comfort for the rest of her life. She accepted it because it made her position impregnable; it protected her, it gave her possession over the boy (for she too was certain it would be a boy) to do with as she saw fit. And she need never again know the old terror of being poor.
It was not until two days later, when she examined the settlement carefully, that she discovered a part of it was in real estate and included the flamboyant Babylon Arms, fallen now upon evil days, grown shabby and no longer respectable. The house where poor Clarence had lived until he destroyed himself was to be the property of her child ... a child whose father was Richard Callendar.
Slowly the whole life in the big house came to revolve about Ellen and the coming child. June passed and July. The gentle de Cyon was moved with all his books and files and papers fromthe pavilion into a room on the second floor. (No man save one with the resistance of old Gramp had any chance in this household of women.) Thérèse, untidy, her eyes brighter and brighter with the reassurance given her by Madame de Thèbes and a dozen other soothsayers, came daily and bore Ellen away to a variety of doctors. Callendar came sometimes on calls which grew more and more formal as time passed; and Sabine called and sent baskets of fruit. Musicians, actresses, composers passed in and out. Through it all, Hattie moved in her triumphant way, older now but scarcely less subdued than she had been in the days when she sat darning, surrounded by her family in the shabby sitting room on Sycamore street. In Hattie there were elements of the eternal which took no account of changes in the life about her. It is possible that nothing in the whole spectacle seemed in the least strange to her. She appeared to accept its absurdity as a matter of course ... the presence of Lily’s French husband, of Jean who had had no father, the glittering dinners given in the Louis Quinze dining room which she never attended, the comings and goings of the untidy old woman who ate biscuits out of a handbag, the visits of the fastidious and fashionable Sabine, and even the occasional calls of Callendar himself, a man whom she regarded as a sinister and immoral creature, who would have ruined the life of any one of less character than a child of hers. She was busy. She had no time for memories. She had no longer to invent tasks for herself, and so she was happy. She was caught up again in the wild scurry and confusion of life.
Only Lily and old Gramp took the affair with calmness, the one gently with the air of knowing that in all the confusion some one must keep her head and smooth out all the little difficulties which arose from so strange a mélange of characters, the old man with an indifference which placed small value upon the arrival of one more child in a world already too well filled, a world in which there could no longer be any solitude save in one’s own soul. He came and went as he chose through the garden gate opening intothe Rue de Passy, encountering on his way now Sabine, now old Thérèse, now de Cyon, now a doctor or two, all of whom regarded him with the air of looking upon a specter. It was impossible to believe that so old a man could still be alive. He passed them all without so much as a glance, absorbed always in his search for the youth which had escaped him forever. In him too there were elements of the eternal, which nothing could alter or change in any way. To Gramp, Sycamore Street and the Rue Raynouard were in the end the same.
And then one morning a taxicab appeared at the door and discharged into the midst of the confusion a triumphant Rebecca Schönberg, bustling and with a new light in her ferrety eyes, her mind full of schemes for fresh triumphs and new concert tours; for the news of the débâcle had come to her through the gentle and forgotten Schneidermann in Vienna where she had gone to visit Uncle Otto and Aunt Lina. Already, before even she had seen Ellen, she had started under way news of the return of Lilli Barr to the concert stage. (She knew well enough that Ellen would never return to Callendar. She knew that in the end he had defeated himself. He had hung himself with his own rope; but he had done it so much sooner than she expected.)
She bribed Augustine to let her know when Callendar came to the house, and when he arrived she took care that he did not escape without seeing her. She met him at the foot of the stairs. She did not flaunt her triumph; she was far too subtle for that. The same blood flowed in her veins and she understood how best to mock him.
She said, “Ah! It’s you. I hadn’t expected to seeyouhere.” And holding out her hand with the air of a mourner, she murmured with sad looks and a bogus sincerity, “I’msosorry it turned out badly. I had hoped you would be successful this time. I wanted you to know that I am full of sympathy.... But, of course, Ellen could not have done otherwise.”
And so she left him nothing to say. She sent him away, bedraggled and a little ridiculous, in defeat; for by the light inher eye he could not fail to see that she was jeering him. He had not subdued Lilli Barr. She belonged once more to Rebecca and to the world. And in the end it was women who defeated him—women who had always been his obsession, the women who surrounded Ellen—Lily and Hattie and Rebecca, the subtle Sabine and even Thérèse with her gift that made Ellen unpregnably secure. He had not broken her spirit, for he had never possessed her even for a moment; it was her awareness which had baffled him, standing like a wall across his path.
The perverse experiment had failed; there had not even been much pleasure in it. Youth lay behind him. What lay ahead? As he stepped from Lily’s door there were lines in the handsome, insolent face which no amount of exercise or massage could ever smooth away.... He was growing old. It was as if these women had banded together and, placing Ellen in their midst, now mocked him.... Women.... Women.... Women.... One could come to hate them all in the end.
So Rebecca too, in the wholly false supposition that she had come for a brief visit, was given a room that opened off the gallery and so joined all the colony which centered about Ellen in a world founded upon dividends from the black Mills in the Midlands.
And Ellen waited, growing more and more calm as her time approached. She found pleasure in the fantastic spectacle of Lily’s house. She was the center of it, and the old intoxication, so familiar to Lilli Barr, began slowly to claim her again.
THE thing happened on a hot breathless night in September when the shimmer of heat dying away with the fall of evening left the garden cool and dark save for the light that streamed from the windows of the long drawing room and from a single window of the white pavilion. The English nurse was there, waiting, and the doctor had come and gone to return in a little while. Everything went well, save that the patient (so the nurse explained to Hattie and Thérèse) was not accepting the ordeal in the proper mood. She had insisted upon playing bridge, when she should have been walking up and down, up and down, to hasten the birth of the child. She sat now in the drawing-room at a table with Lily, Jean and Rebecca, angry at not being allowed to smoke, desperate that she had no control over what was happening to her. She sat, holding her cards stiffly before her, clad in a peignoir of coral silk, her black hair drawn tightly back as she had worn it at her concerts.
“Two spades,” she said, and glared at Rebecca when the latter doubled. There was a dew of perspiration on her high smooth forehead and she bit her lips from time to time. She was magnificent and dominating (thought Lily). Really it was an amazing kind of fierce beauty.
In one corner de Cyon, ousted from the pavilion, sat reading his foreign newspapers—the threads which kept him in touch with the world of foreign politics. They lay spread out before him ...Le Journal de Genève,Il Seccoloof Milan,La Tribunaof Rome, theLondon Post, theLondon Times, theNew York Times,Le Figaro,L’Echo de Paris,Le Petit Parisien,Le Matin,L’Œuvre... in a neat pile, from which he lifted them calmly in turn, to read them through and clip now here, now there, with the long silver scissors a bit of news, a king’s remarks, a prime minister’s speech or the leader of some Socialist editor. Ensconced behind the gilt table, he appeared cool and aloof, with his white hair and his pink face. What was going on almost at his side had no interest for him. His first wife had been barren and his second he had married too late. He clipped and clipped, the lean scissors snipping their way through words in Italian, Spanish, German, French and English. Snip ... snip ... snip ... they ran....
A dozen feet from him and well away from the bridge tablewhere at the command of Ellen the others played in a disheartened fashion, Hattie and Thérèse sat side by side, the one knitting energetically at a blue and white carriage robe, the other nibbling at a biscuit. They both waited ... they both fidgeted, not daring to risk an explosion from Ellen. She was not to be crossed at this moment.
“When Richard was born,” Thérèse was saying ... “I suffered for twenty-six hours ... but they do things better nowadays.”
And then Hattie, in a low voice lest she disturb the bridge players, “I’m not sure that nature’s way isn’t the best. I don’t believe in hurrying things.” And then in the hot silence, the click, click, click of her knitting needles.
“She ought to be walking up and down,” said Thérèse anxiously. “Do you think we ought to speak to her?”
“It will do no good.... In a moment she won’t be able to sit there playing bridge. She’ll have to walk up and down.... I remember when my last child was born, the doctor said....”
And so they went on, turning over and over again incidents appropriate to the occasion, two prospective grandmothers, each of them passionately interested in what lay ahead. Thérèse, despite her swarthy skin, looked pale, and her fat hand trembled as she nibbled the biscuit.... Hattie only knit more and more furiously, raising her head from time to time to glance at her daughter who sat like a Spartan playing with Jean as a partner and winning steadily from Lily and Rebecca.
Snip! Snip! Snip! ran the silver scissors. Click! Click! Click! the knitting needles. Hattie halted for a moment to wipe her red, hot face. And then the cool, desperate voice of Ellen again, saying, “Five tricks and thirty-six in honors.”
“It’s our rubber,” said Jean, white and nervous with the strain. And in his blue eyes the old light of admiration appeared. Ellen had always been like this even in the days when she had taken him, a little boy, to the Bois.
It was ten o’clock when Ellen at last pushed back her chairand rose as the doctor entered the room. “I will walk for a time,” she said and went with him out on to the terrace.
In their corner Hattie and old Thérèse grew silent and fell simply to watching for the figures of Ellen, in the coral peignoir, the doctor and the black dog, to pass and repass the tall windows. Jean smoked and quarreled in a low voice with Rebecca, and Lily going over to the side of de Cyon sat down and fell to reading the lace-like remnants of the newspapers that her husband tossed aside with the regularity of a machine. Presently, Augustine, her peasant’s face beaming with the significance of the occasion, brought champagne which all save Hattie, who refused it sternly, drank against the heat.
The sounds in the distant street began to die away and the echo of the boat whistles on the Seine grew fainter and fainter. On the terrace Ellen and the doctor were joined by a second nurse, still in her cape, who had come in by the garden side.
And at half-past ten Callendar appeared at the foot of the long stairs, looking worn and old, but cool despite all the heat. At his entrance Hattie ignored him, Thérèse nodded, and the others, save de Cyon who did not notice him at all, bowed without any trace of warmth. He was an enemy; it was clear that they looked upon him thus, even old Thérèse whose only interest lay now in the child. He seated himself and fell to talking with Lily, who could not for long be disagreeable to any man, and presently Ellen appeared in one of the windows and said, “Rebecca, you and Jean play the piano ... I can’t bear to look at you all sitting like statues.” And then she beckoned to Callendar who rose and went over to her.
As he left the room, Rebecca watched him with a queer expression of apprehension in her eyes. She did not trust him. He might turn the circumstances to his own advantage. He might cast a spell over Ellen at the moment when she was least able to resist. With Jean she went reluctantly to the piano where they fell to playing with four hands and with a mathematical precision they had long since perfected a variety of music hall songs. Andas she played she stole a glance now and then over her shoulders at the tall windows past which Ellen and Callendar moved with a clock-like regularity. But she was not the only one who watched. There was Hattie too and even old Thérèse. Each of them desired from Ellen a different thing, and each of them was resolved to have her own will in the matter.
Outside the windows the husband and the wife with the black dog at their heels walked up and down while Ellen, looking tall and pale and desperate, talked earnestly.
“The child,” she said firmly, “is to be mine. I will fight until the end for that. I have made up my mind. I will not have him go to you.... You are not fit.”
He said nothing in reply. It was not possible to argue at such a time. She was fighting now, as he had always done, unscrupulously, to achieve what she desired. They turned at the end of the terrace and moved back once more past the windows where Rebecca and Hattie and Thérèse kept peering out. It was (thought Ellen in a peaceful moment) like bearing one’s child in public ... as the French Queens had done, with a whole crowd looking on.... (But she must bring her mind back to the business at hand.)
“And if anything happens to me,” she said to Callendar, “if I should die and the child live ... he is to be brought up by my mother. I have talked to my lawyers. It is possible to arrange all that. There is plenty of evidence against you ... even a French court—” She gasped for breath and turned again. “Even a French court would uphold me in that. Besides Rebecca has promised me that she will carry on the fight. I tell you all this, because I want you to know that I am finished forever.” She was walking rapidly now and made a sudden passionate gesture in the direction of the windows. “Rebecca need not look at us so anxiously. There is no question about it.... And I will not leave a child of mine in such an atmosphere as you and your mother are able to provide.” She drew another quick, sharpbreath and added, “I gave you every chance ... and you were a rotter always. I loved you and I would love you still if I thought there was any chance of redemption ... but there is none.”
And then, before turning toward the pavilion, she said, “You did not win in the end, you see.... It was I who won.... I and Sabine too.... And I will go on fighting, even if I should die. It has all been arranged. And now,” she said, dismissing him, “will you tell my mother to come with me to the pavilion? I want none of the others ... only her.”
So it was Callendar who summoned Hattie at the moment Ellen needed her most. In the end she belonged to Hattie alone of all those people who sat waiting ... Hattie, whose whole life had been concerned with love and birth and death.
When they had gone away, Callendar sat on the stone balustrade smoking in silence, conquered now beyond all doubt. He had been dismissed once and for all. Ellen would return now into the world out of which she had come to him ... a world in which she belonged to Rebecca and her public. Perhaps as he sat there in the hot, still air, waiting for his child to be born, he knew the last of his adventures to which there was any savor had come to an end.
Through the windows he saw de Cyon rise presently and go up the long stairs. He saw Lily (a fascinating woman, he thought, who must have been very beautiful in her youth) talking to his mother who still nibbled at her biscuit. Jean and Rebecca had ceased their music and sat now playing double patience with a fierce, unnatural absorption.
Augustine came in presently with a message. Mrs. Cane Callendar (Sabine) would like to know if there was any news. She went away again with the message Lily gave her: Everything was going well, but there was no news yet.
They were all waiting, waiting, waiting....
Callendar held tight the heavy collar of Hansi, who squirmedand moaned pitifully because he could not follow his mistress.
Rebecca found him there when at last she tired of her game and wandered out into the garden to smoke. She passed him without speaking and as he looked after her, he saw that she had taken to walking round and round the white pavilion as if she had set herself to guard it from him.
Presently he returned to the drawing-room and opening another bottle of champagne, sat silently by the side of Lily, who alone behaved with any kindliness toward him. Old Thérèse watched him, desperately, as the time drew nearer and nearer. She was pale now with terror lest Madame de Thèbes had been wrong. If the child were a girl it would be the end of everything.... She had even stopped nibbling her biscuits. The reticule had fallen to the floor. Her fat body rested on the edge of her chair ... tense and strained in her passionate anxiety.
The whole room, the whole house, the whole garden stood breathless in the heat with the terrible stillness that surrounded the waiting....
Somewhere in the direction of the Trocadéro a clock struck midnight, booming faintly, each stroke hanging on the hot still air to confuse the stroke which followed. The sound swam in the big room. Callendar rose and went again into the garden, into a distant corner well away from Rebecca whose progress round and round the pavilion was marked by the tiny glow at the end of her cigarette.
Thérèse, unable to bear the silence any longer, rose too and went out onto the terrace to watch the light in the pavilion. A breeze came up and the leaves of the plane trees fell to rustling. Lily and Jean talked together quietly in the corner by de Cyon’s desk. From the window on the second floor which opened into Gramp’s room there was a light still burning. Rebecca, looking up at it from her vigil, saw the figure of the old man show black and thin against the glow, as he leaned out and peered over the garden.
An hour passed and the distant clock struck one. A bell sounded faintly in the house and Augustine appeared. It was Mrs. Cane Callendar once more. Was there any news?
“She must have a violent curiosity,” thought Lily, “to be staying up all night.”
Thérèse, in the black shadow of the house, began to pray, as if it were still not too late for a miracle. She had never been religious, but like Voltaire she believed in trying everything.... After she had prayed for a time she grew hungry, took another biscuit from the reticule and went into the drawing-room for a glass of champagne. So it happened that before she was able to return to her watching and praying the door of the pavilion opened and the tiny lights that in the darkness marked the positions of Callendar and Rebecca moved hastily in its direction.
In the doorway stood Hattie, larger than either of them, red-faced, triumphant and with a wild light in her eyes. As first Rebecca and then Callendar emerged from the shadows, she said, “It is all over.... Everything is fine.... It is a boy!”
The news was borne by Rebecca into the drawing-room where Thérèse in her excitement put down her glass of champagne into sheer space instead of on the table, leaving it to break and spill its contents over the Aubusson carpet. On short fat legs she waddled through the window to the pavilion where Hattie, who had in the excitement of the moment forgotten her hatred, was delivering to Callendar a detailed and vivid account of the accouchement.
Thérèse forgot even her English. “Eet ees a boy,” she squealed. “Eet ees a boy. God is good. He has answered my prayers ... and what is it he weighs?”
“Seven pounds,” replied Hattie. “A fine baby, though none of my children weighed less than ten.”
A kind of hysteria swept them all. The waiting was over. Thérèse had an heir, Hattie had a grandchild and Callendar, at last, a son whom he would perhaps never possess as his own.From a window above their heads, the sound of a cracked shrill voice shot at them.
“Is the child born? What is it?” ... And then with irritation. “For Heaven’s sake!”
It was Gramp. Lily answered him, and the bony head was withdrawn again, the light extinguished and the room left to silence.
They must all see the child. They must come to the very door of the pavilion where Hattie, holding them at bay like a royal nurse exhibiting the heir to the populace, thrust toward them a lusty, tomato-colored child which appeared to cry, “Ala-as! Ala-as! Ala-as!” over and over again, monotonously. She allowed no one to touch it, not even old Thérèse who, kept at bay by the threatening manner of the royal nurse, bent over it murmuring, “The darling! Isn’t he beautiful? The precious darling!Qu’il est mignon!And he looks for all the world like Richard, the precious darling.”
“You can’t tell what he looks like,” said Hattie with a savage indignation. “That’s nonsense! You can’t tell for a long time!”
Callendar, thrust aside by this regiment of women, regarded his son with a faint light in his gray eyes. He said nothing. He waited. Perhaps for an instant he wished that he might see Ellen, as a father, a husband should have done. But he was given no chance, for Hattie said, “She wants to see Lily. The doctor says she may see no one else.”
Ensconced in the pavilion Hattie became a despot, a tyrant. The child at the moment it entered the world became a part of her family, swallowed up by it remorselessly.
Inside the pavilion, a pale, handsome Ellen looked up at Lily and murmured, smiling a little, “You must call Sabine. Tell her that she was right. Just tell I am a good gambler. I have been successful. Old Thérèse is satisfied.”
One by one they drifted away until only Callendar was left sitting in the darkness, smoking and thinking. A little way offin the shadow where she could not be seen Rebecca waited too, watching him; and when at length he rose and went out of the gate into the Rue de Passy, she followed and stood looking after him as he climbed the slope and disappeared around a corner beneath the glare of a street lamp. He seemed not so tall and not so formidable as he had once been. The fine shoulders sagged a little; and Rebecca, looking after him, knew whither he was bound. For she had taken the trouble to find out. She had herself hunted down his infidelity. Ellen, she knew, would never forgive him and she (Rebecca) had the proof. It was the seal upon his defeat.
And as she stood there she looked not down the Rue de Passy but down the corridor of the years, and at the end she saw a defeated and bitter sensualist buying with money what had once come to him through beauty and charm and the glow of youth.
She closed the gate and turned back into the garden. The dawn had begun to filter in through the trees and to turn the pavilion from gray to white. To-morrow she must begin to work on the plans for Ellen’s return. It must be triumphant, spectacular, worthy of such an artist as Lilli Barr. For Ellen belonged again to Rebecca Schönberg.
ON a night, five months after the breathless waiting in the garden of the house in the Rue Raynouard, Lilli Barr, under the management of the energetic and now happy Rebecca, returned in triumph. She played with the Pasdeloup Orchestra in the Theatre Champs-Elysées, a new concerto written by one of the young composers who came so often to disturb the quiet of Lily’s house. From the great spaces of the dim theatre they saw her enter, making her way slowly and with a great dignity through the players of the orchestra; and as she passed them, one by one the musicians appeared to draw from her a queer inexplicable fire, a new, strange vitality. She was dressed as she had been on that first night in New York—in crimson velvet and diamonds with her black hair drawn back tightly from the pale, handsome face.
At sight of her, a faint hush fell upon the audience and then the slow, subdued murmur of admiration. The white faces, row upon row, extended far back into the dim reaches of the theatre until at length they became blurred and misty, indistinguishable. It was all more than she had imagined in the days when she had played savagely and sullenly in the shabby room on Sycamore Street.
The conductor rose, a black slim figure against the lights of the orchestra. He raised his baton and Lilli Barr touched the first chords of the barbaric concerto. There was no doubt any longer. She reached out in some mysterious fashion and took possession of the great audience. She was more magnificent than she had ever been, for in this performance there was no longer any trickery. It was the music of a great artist.
The orchestra swept into a great crescendo, triumphant, overwhelming, above which the sound of the piano rose clear and crystalline....
Afterward in the big reception room lined with the mirrors used by the dancers of the ballet before a performance, she waited to receive all those who came to welcome her back into their world. There were actresses and millionaires, demi-mondaines and composers, musicians and painters, the Duc de Guermantes and M. de Charlus, patrons of art and adventuresses who came and went under the brilliant, triumphant glitter of Rebecca’s ferrety eyes. And last of all there was Thérèse, untidy and covered with diamonds, and her friend, Ella Nattatorini, and Sabine who had in tow Janey Champion whom, as one of the Virgins, Ellen had seen so long ago through the crevice of the lacquered screen in the Callendar drawing-room. Janey was breathless and excitednow, her hair all in disarray; for Sabine had kept her promise and Janey, for the first time in all her forty-six barren years, had escaped and was seeing life.
Ellen received them all with something of the old savor of triumph, but it was not the same. As Gramp had known, she had passed the peak of all her existence. All this array, this chatter, this confusion had begun a little to bore her.
And when they had gone she sat down to wait for Lily who had gone to the Gare de Lyon to speed a party consisting of Hattie and Old Gramp and the baby, Augustine and a gigantic Breton wet nurse with the preposterous name of Frédegonde, on their journey to the white villa in Nice where Lily had gone so many times while César was alive. For Lily, who had always followed the sun, no longer had any use for the white villa. Her place now was in damp and chilly Paris by the side of her husband.
Wrapped in her sable cloak, Ellen leaned back in her chair and closing her eyes, lost herself in this new and comfortable peace which had enveloped her since that hot terrible night in the pavilion. It seemed to her that she had never really rested before in all her life. It was over and finished. She had begun to forget a little what Callendar had been, to remember only what she desired to remember. She thought of him as dead; and it is true that the Callendar who came to her in the Babylon Arms had died long ago. She had done her duty, the one thing that she could have done, the one thing that had remained. She had borne a child and delivered it to Hattie for her own, to possess until she died or the child grew up and escaped from her. But by that time, Hattie would be so old that it would not greatly matter. She would be willing to sit by the fire in the long drawing-room as old Madame Gigon had done. And presently she rose and throwing off her cloak seated herself at the big piano in the corner of the room. She began to play softly, marvelously, and the wild savage fire which had persisted through everything began once more to shine in hereyes. The Town, the black Mills, the Callendars, poor Clarence and the green-eyed Mr. Wyck ... all these were forgotten. She was freed at last of all those old bonds, possessed now only by the beauty of the sounds she made. But, on the high pinnacle she had built with her own hands, she was alone ... the woman whom Fergus had seen for a moment in a queer flash of clairvoyance on the night of his death.
She was playing thus when Lily came in quietly to stand listening in the shadows....
The white villa, as old Madame Gigon had said, was not in Nice proper but in Cimiez, high on the slope overlooking Villefranche and the Bay of Angels. To approach it one was forced to descend from the carriage and climb past the statue of Queen Victoria, carved in the manner of Thorvaldsen with an umbrella in one hand and a reticule in the other—a reticule which Gramp believed was the one (embroidered with a poodle-dog in gold thread) which she had carried on the visit that was designed to make Eugènie respectable in the eyes of royal Europe. Beyond the Queen, there was a little flight of steps leading to a gateway covered with bougainvillea and shaded by an ancient tree of mimosa.
It was up this exotic path that the little procession made its way two days after Lily bade it farewell in the Gare de Lyon. Jean went ahead and after him Hattie, with her grandson in her arms, followed closely by The Everlasting, the gigantic, abundant Frédegonde and her child. At the approach of evening they were settled and under the mimosa tree Hattie sat by the side of little Fergus, triumphant and content, singing him to sleep as she had once done with her own Fergus. Nothing had changed, for in Hattie there was a quality of the eternal concerned only with love and birth and death.
While she sang thus in a low voice, The Everlasting, with a great book under his arm, appeared in the doorway and moved toward her. By the side of the baby he halted for a moment,adjusted his spectacles and peered closely. He said nothing and presently his thin old lips expanded into a grin—a grin which said, “You’ve a lot of trouble before you, but what a good time you will have!” It was a grin, strange to say, of envy.
And as he stood there, he saw dimly the figure of a fat, untidy, bedizened old woman making her way painfully up the slope past the statue of Queen Victoria. It was Thérèse, who had altered the whole course of her journey to Trieste in order to see this precious, incomparable grandchild. Silently, lest she rouse the infant, she took her place by the side of the cradle. But little Fergus showed no signs of falling asleep. He was a fine baby. He lay looking up at them with the inscrutable gray eyes which had come from Callendar. But he had a fine pretty nose, that showed every sign of developing those handsome curves which gave Ellen and, before her, Old Julia Shane a proud look of domination. Presently in the hope of diverting him Thérèse bent down and took from her fat old fingers the carved emerald which, legend had it, had been saved during the Sack of Constantinople. The baby turned it round and round, peering at it with his wise gray eyes, until at last, letting it slip from his chubby fingers, he fell asleep under the jealous guard of the two powerful women who had called him into existence almost by the very force of will. They stood there in adoring silence, the one so primitive, the other so old and wise, that in the end they were very like each other.
Meanwhile The Everlasting, having turned his steps up the hill, sat now among the ruins of the ancient Roman arena overlooking the bay. As a substitute for his rocking chair, he had chosen an overturned stone and there he sat, his book open on his knees, peering out over the Mediterranean. After a time he took from his pocket an apple and bit into it with teeth that were still strong despite the approach of his hundredth birthday. It was a small bitter apple from Brittany, and not half so good as the apples which grew in the orchards of Ohio. Scornfully hespat the pieces from his mouth and, adjusting his spectacles once more, he bent over with a peering look and began again to read in triumph the Decline and Fall.
Ispswich, Mass.August 6, 1923.Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island.May 15, 1925.