The Project Gutenberg eBook ofPossessionThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Possessiona novelAuthor: Louis BromfieldRelease date: March 17, 2024 [eBook #73188]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: NYC: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1924Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POSSESSION ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Possessiona novelAuthor: Louis BromfieldRelease date: March 17, 2024 [eBook #73188]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: NYC: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1924Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Title: Possession
a novel
Author: Louis Bromfield
Author: Louis Bromfield
Release date: March 17, 2024 [eBook #73188]
Language: English
Original publication: NYC: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1924
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POSSESSION ***
FOREWORDCHAPTER 1,2,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67.
A NOVELBYLOUIS BROMFIELDAuthor of “The Green Bay Tree"NEW YORKFREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANYMCMXXVICopyright, 1925, byFrederick A. Stokes CompanyAll rights reserved
ToMARY
“Life is hard for our children. It isn’t as simple as it was for us. Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins, only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand—these children of ours—with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and their faces set toward Europe and the East and they belong to neither. They are lost somewhere between.”
“Wherever she goes, trouble will follow. She’s born like most people with a touch of genius, under a curse. She is certain to affect the lives of every one about her ... because, well, because the threads of our lives are hopelessly tangled.... Marry her if you will, but don’t expect happiness to come of it. She would doubtless bear you a son ... a fine strong son, because she’s a fine cold animal. But don’t expect satisfaction from her. She knows too well exactly where she is bound.”
“Possession” is in no sense a sequel to “The Green Bay Tree.” The second novel does not carry the fortunes of the characters which appeared in the first; it reveals, speaking chronologically, little beyond the final page of the earlier book. On the contrary both novels cover virtually the same period of time, from the waning years of the nineteenth century up to the present time. The two are what might be called panel novels in a screen which, when complete, will consist of at least a half-dozen panels all interrelated and each giving a certain phase of the ungainly, swarming, glittering spectacle of American Life.
Those who read “The Green Bay Tree” must have felt that one character—that of Ellen Tolliver—was thrust aside in order to make way for the progress of Lily Shane. With the publication of the present novel, it is possible to say that the energetic Miss Tolliver was neglected for two reasons; first, because she was a character of such violence that, once given her way, she would soon have dominated all the others; second, because the author kept her purposely in restraint, as he desired to tell her story in proportions worthy of her.
In Ellen’s story, the author, knowing that much which pertains to the life of a musician is boring and of little interest to any one outside the realm of music, has endeavored to eliminate all the technical side of her education. He does this not because he lacks knowledge of the facts but because they are in themselves uninteresting. Ellen Tolliver might have been a sculptor, a painter, an actress, a writer; the interest in her lies not in the calling she chose but in the character of the woman herself. She would, doubtless, have been successful in any direction she saw fit to direct her boundless energy.
“Possession” is the second of several novels in which familiar characters will reappear and new ones will make their entrance.
L. B.
Cold Spring HarborMay 1, 1925Long Island.
IN the fading October twilight Grandpa Tolliver sat eating an apple and reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The ponderous book (volume III) lay spread open upon his bony knees, for it was too heavy to be supported in any other way, and he read by leaning far over and peering at the pages through steel rimmed spectacles which were not quite clear, as they never were. The dimness of lens, however, did not appear to annoy him; undisturbed he read on as if the spectacles sharpened his vision instead of dimming it. Things were, after all, what you believed them to be; therefore the spectacles served their purpose. He was not one to be bothered by such small things....
The room in which he sat was square and not too large. On two sides there were windows and in one corner an enormous and funereal bed of black walnut (the nuptial bed of three generations in the Tolliver family) which bore at the moment the imprint of the perverse and angular old body. He had lain there to think. Sometimes he lay thus for hours at a time in a sort of coma, ruminating the extraordinary and imbecile diversity of life. But it was the number of books which contributed the dominating characteristic of the room. There was row upon row of them rising from floor to ceiling, rows added year by year out of Grandpa’s infinitesimal income until at last they had walled him in. There were books bound in fine leather and books in cheap leather, worn and frayed at the corners, books in cheap boards and an immense number of books bound in yellow paper.Pressed close against the books on the north wall of the room there stood an enormous desk of the same funereal black walnut—a desk filled with innumerable pigeonholes into which had been stuffed without order or sequence bits of paper scribbled over with a handwriting that was fine and erratic like the tracks of a tiny bird strayed into an inkpot. The papers ranged through every variety of shade from the yellowish bisque of ancient documents to the gray white of comparatively new ones. Of all the room it was the desk alone that had an appearance of untidiness; it lay under a pall of dust save for two small spots rubbed clean by the sharp elbows of Grandpa Tolliver.
What did he write? What was contained in this immense collection of documents? No one knew that; not even the curiosity of his daughter-in-law Hattie, who entered the room each morning to throw open the windows (an action he detested) and force the old man out into the chill air of the streets, had been able to penetrate the mysteries of the extraordinary bird tracks. A word with luck, here or there.... Nothing more. And she had examined them often enough in a fierce effort to penetrate the secret of his strength. From years of breathless, headlong writing the words had lost all resemblance to combinations of letters. The letters themselves were obscured; they flowed into one another until each one, in the fashion of the Chinese, had become a symbol, a mystery to which the old man alone held the key. It was the writing of a man whose pen had never been able to keep pace with the lightning speed of his thoughts. It may have been that the old man himself could not have deciphered the writing on those sheets which long since had turned to a yellow bisque. So far as any one could discover, he never took them from the pigeonholes and read them a second time. They were simply thrust away to turn yellow and gather dust, for Grandpa Tolliver had suffered for years from a sense of the immense futility of everything.
As he sat in the fading light in his decrepit rocking chair the appearance of the old man struck faintly a note of the sinister.Something in the shape of his great, bony head, in the appearance of his unkempt gray beard, in the remarkable angularity of his lean body gave him the appearance of one in alliance with the powers of darkness. The peculiar gray green of his glittering eyes had a way of piercing through pretense, through barriers of reserve and secrecy. They were the eyes of one who knew far too much. They were the eyes that got somehow at the core of things, so that a person—even his bitterest enemy, the vigorous and unsubtle Hattie—winced before the shattering light that gathered in their depths. They looked out from under shaggy brows with a knowledge bred of solitude that was something more than human. And he had a terrible way of using them, of watching people, of silently and powerfully prying open their shells. For Grandpa Tolliver there were no longer any illusions; he was therefore a horrid and intolerable old man.
At length when the light grew too dim even for the unearthly eyes of the old man, he closed The Decline and Fall and devoted himself to finishing his apple, absorbed for the time being in reflecting triumphantly upon passages in the ponderous work which proved without any doubt that the human race lay beyond the possibility of improvement.
When his strong pointed teeth had finished with the apple, he cast it aside for Hattie to sweep out in the morning and, lifting The Decline and Fall as high as possible, he dropped it to the floor with a resounding crash. As the echo died there rose from belowstairs the sound of clattering pans shaken by the crash from the startled hands of Hattie, and then an inarticulate rumble of exasperation at this latest bit of minute deviltry.
The old man leaned back in his chair and chuckled, wickedly. It was one more skirmish in the state of war which had existed between him and his daughter-in-law over a period of years.
Through the closed window the homely sounds of a dozen backyards filtered into the room ... the sharp slam of a refrigerator door, the sudden mad barking of a dog playing with achild, the faint whicker of a horse in one of the stables and then the sound of Hattie’s vigorous voice, still carrying a persistent, unmistakable note of irritation, summoning her small sons from the far reaches of the neighborhood.
The sound of the voice rose and hung in the autumn night, rich, full-blooded, vigorous, redolent of energy, beautiful in its primitive strength. At the faint note of irritation Grandpa Tolliver, rubbing his teeth with a skinny finger, chuckled again.
The voice wavered, penetrating the remote distances of the back yards, and presently there came an answering cry in the shrill, high treble of a boy of twelve arrested suddenly in the midst of his play.
“Yay-us! Yay-us! We’re coming!”
Primitive it was, like a ewe calling to her lambs, or more perhaps (thought the old man) like a lioness summoning her cubs. It was Robert who answered, the younger of the two. It was difficult for Fergus to yell in the same lusty fashion; his voice had reached the stage where it trembled perilously between a treble and a bass. The sounds he made shamed him. Fergus, like his father, disliked making a spectacle of himself. (Too sensitive, thought Grandpa Tolliver. Like his father he would be a failure in life, because he had no indifference.)
The room grew darker and after a time the sweet, acrid odor of smoldering leaves, stirred into flame by the children who played beneath the window, drifted through the cracks in the glass. As if the scent, the soft twilight, the sound of Hattie’s voice, had set fire to a train of memories, Grandpa Tolliver began to rock gently. The chair made a faint squeaking sound which filled the room as if it had been invaded by a flock of bats which, circling wildly above the old man’s head, uttered a chorus of faint shrill cries.... The old man chuckled again. It was a bitter, unearthly sound....
The room in which Grandpa Tolliver sat had been added tothe Tolliver house during one of those rare intervals, years ago, when his son had prospered for a time. The house itself stood back from the street in the older part of a town which within a generation had changed from a frontier settlement into a bustling city whose prosperity centered about the black mills and the flaming furnaces of a marshy district known as The Flats, a district black and unsightly and inhabited by hordes of Italians, Poles, Slovaks and Russians who never emerged from its sooty environs into the clear air of the Hill where the old citizens had their homes. Among these houses the Tollivers’ was marked by the need of paint, though this shameful fault was concealed somewhat by masses of vines—roses, honeysuckle, ivy—which overran all the dwelling and in summer threw a cloud of beauty over the horrid, imaginative trimmings conceived by some side-whiskered small town architect of the eighties. There was in the appearance of the house nothing of opulence. It was gray, commonplace and ornamented with extravagant jig-saw decorations. Also it suffered from a slate roof of a depressing shade of blue gray. But it was roomy and comfortable.
Houses occupied for a long period by the same family have a way of taking on imperceptibly but surely the characteristics of their owners. The Tollivers, Hattie and Charles, had come into the house as bride and bridegroom, in the days when Charles Tolliver had before him a bright future, years before he gave up, at the urging of his powerful wife, a commonplace adequate salary for a more reckless and extravagant career in the politics of the growing county. By now, twenty years after, the house, the lawn and the garden expressed the essence of the Tolliver family. The grass sometimes went in grave need of cutting. The paint had peeled here and there where it lay exposed to the middle-western winter. At the eaves there were streaks of black made by soot which drifted from the roaring Mills in the distant Flats. The shrubs were unpruned and the climbing roses would have been improved by a little cutting; yet these things,taken all in all, produced an effect of charm far greater than any to be found in the other neat, painted, monotonous houses that stood in unspectacular rows on either side of Sycamore Street. In the careless growth of the shrubs and vines there was a certain wildness and inspiring vigor, something full-blooded and lush which elsewhere in the block was absent. There was nothing ordered, pruned or clipped into a state of patterned mediocrity. Here, within the hedge that enclosed the Tolliver property there reigned a marked abandon, a sense of life lived recklessly with a shameless disregard for smug security. The Tollivers clearly had no time for those things which lay outside the main current.
Yet there was no rubbish in evidence. The whole was spotlessly clean from the linden trees which stood by the curb to the magenta-colored stable at the end of the garden. You might have walked the length of the block without consciousness of the other houses; but in front of the Tollivers’ you would have halted, thinking, “Here is a difference indeed. Some careless householder without proper pride in his grounds!”
Yet you would have stopped to notice it. At least it would have interested you by the wild, vigorous, disheveled character of its difference.
In the beginning the room which Gramp occupied had been built for a servant and through its doors, in the spasmodic periods of Tolliver prosperity, had passed a procession of weird and striking “hired girls” ... country maidens come to town in search of excitement, Bohemian and Russian girls, the offspring of the Flat-dwellers; one or two who had been, to Hattie’s shocked amazement, simply daughters of joy. With the passing of Myrtle, the last of these, who was retired in order to bear a child of uncertain paternity, the Tollivers’ ship of fortune had slipped into one of the periodical doldrums and the stormy, unsatisfactory era of the hired girl came to an end forever. Almost as if he had divined the event, Grandpa Tolliver appeared onthe same day seated beside the driver on a wagon laden with books, to announce that he had come to take up his abode with the family of his son. There was nothing to be done. The books were moved into the room above the kitchen and there the old man settled himself. He had been there now for ten years, a gadfly to torment the virtuous, bustling existence of his daughter-in-law. He seldom stirred from his room. He had, indeed, done nothing in all his life which might be scored under the name of accomplishment. As a young man he had been trained for the church, but when his education had been completed, he discovered that he had learned too much and so believed nothing. He bothered no one. His crime was inertia. He possessed an indifference of colossal proportions.
As the room fell into a thick blackness, the rocking chair, under the urge of flooding memories, acquired a greater animation. It may have been that there was something in the homely sounds of the backyard vista and the pleasant smell of burning leaves that pierced by way of his senses the wall of the old man’s impregnable solitude. Presently he chuckled again in a triumphant fashion, as if the memory of Hattie Tolliver’s irritation still rang in his ears.
Ah, how she hated him! How they all scorned him! Even on his rare and solitary ramblings along the sidewalks of the Town, prosperous citizens regarded him with hostile looks. “Old Man Tolliver ... The Failure!” They pointed him out to their children as the awful example of a man without ambition, a man who drifted into a lonely and desolate old age, abhorred and unwanted, a burden to his own children and grandchildren. That’s what came of not having energy and push!
Old Man Tolliver ... The Failure! At the thought, the wicked old man chortled more loudly than ever. Failure! Failure! What did they know of whether he was a failure or not. Failure! That was where he had the joke on the lot of them. Healone had fixed his ambition, captured his ideal; he had done always exactly what he wanted to do.
In sudden satisfaction over his secret triumph the old man was very nearly overcome by his own chuckling.
Old? Yes, he felt very old to-night. Perhaps he hadn’t many years before him. Maybe it was only a matter of months. Then he would die. What was it like to die? Just a passing out probably, into something vast and dark. Oblivion! That was it. Why wasn’t that the ideal end? Oblivion, where you were nothing and had no mind and no memory and no books, where you simply did not exist. Just nothingness and eternal peace. Aratu, that kingdom where reigned mere oblivion. He wasn’t looking forward to Heaven and harps. (Imagine Hattie strumming a harp!) He was filled with a sense of great completeness, of having done everything there was to do, of having known all of life that it was possible for one man to know. Sin? What was sin? He didn’t regret anything he had done. He had no remorse, no regrets. On the contrary he was glad of all the things he had done which people called sin. It gave him a satisfactory feeling of completeness. Now when he was so old, he needn’t wish he had done this or done that. He had. To be sure, he hadn’t murdered any one! He hadn’t been guilty of theft. It was very satisfactory ... that feeling of completeness.
Nothing remained. Death.... Deadness.... Why he was dead already. Death must be like this room, blank, dark, negative, neither one thing nor the other. He had been dead for weeks, for months, for years; and here he was walled up in a tomb of books. “La Pucelle” (a rare edition). What would become of it? Like as not Hattie would burn it, never knowing its value. Think how she would suffer if ever she discovered she had burned up a great pile of banknotes! Candide, The Critique of Pure Reason, Spinoza, Montaigne, Darwin, Huxley. (What a row they’d caused! How well he remembered the chatter.) Plato. And there was Verlaine and George Sand and all of Thackeray. Colonel Newcome and Rebecca Sharp with herpointed nose and green eyes. What an amusing creature she was! Amelia Sedley, that tiresome, uninteresting, virtuous bore! And Charles Honeyman. (Ah! He knew things they didn’t dream of in this town!) And there in the corner by the old desk, Emma Bovary tearing voluptuously at her bodice.
But they were not all ghosts of books. There were ghosts too of reality, ghosts born of memories, which came dimly out of the past, out of a youth that, dried now at its source, had been hot-blooded and romantic and restless; such ghosts as one called Celeste (in a poke bonnet with a camelia pinned just above the brim) who seemed forever peeping round the corner of a staircase as she had once peeped, in a glowing reality round the corner of a staircase in the Rue de Clichy. Nina who was more alive now than she had ever been.... And they thought him a failure!
Yes, they were amusing ghosts. He had lived with them so many years. Lonely? How was it possible to be lonely among such fascinating companions? He had lived with them too long. He knew them too well, inside and out. They kept him company in this tomb of books. He seldom left it. Once a week, perhaps, to walk around the block; and then the children ran from him as if they saw the Devil himself.
Grandpa Tolliver began to rock more gently now. Yes, he’d been wicked enough. He’d known everything there was to know and didn’t regret it. They shut him up in this room and didn’t address him for days at a time, but he had Emma Bovary and Becky Sharp to amuse him; and Celeste who belonged to him alone. Grandpa Barr didn’t even have them. His children had left him—all but his daughter Hattie—to go to Iowa, to Oregon, to Wyoming, always toward the open country. Your friends might die and your children might go away, but your memories couldn’t desert you, nor such friends as Emma and Becky.
Outside it began presently to rain, at first slowly with isolate, hesitating drops, and then more and more steadily until at last the whole parched earth drank up the autumn downpour.
IN the sound of rain falling through soft darkness there is a healing quality of peace. Its persistence—the very effortless unswerving rhythm of the downpour—have the power of engulfing the spirit in a kind of sensuous oblivion. Even upon one of so violent and unreflective a nature as Ellen Tolliver, one so young, so impatient and so moody, the sound of the autumn rain falling on the roof and in the parched garden had its effect. It created a music of its own, delicate yet primitive, abundant of the richness of earth and air, so that presently in a room a dozen feet from her grandfather, Ellen stopped sobbing and buried her face in the pillow of her great oak bed, soothed, peaceful; and presently in the darkness of her room she lay at last silent and still, her dark hair tossed and disheveled against the white of the pillowcase. She lay thus in a solitude of her own, separated only by the thinness of a single wall from the solitude in which her grandfather sat enveloped. If the sound of her sobbing had been audible, there was another wall that would have stopped it ... the wall of warm autumn rain that beat upon the earth and shut her away from all the world.
She knew no reason for this outburst of weeping. If there had been a reason she would not have locked herself in her room to weep until she had no more tears. She could not say, “I weep because some one has been unkind to me,” or “I weep because I have suffered a sudden disappointment.” She wept because she could not help herself; because she had been overcome by a mood that was at once melancholy and heroic, sad yet luxuriously sensuous. After a fashion, her weeping gave her pleasure. Now that the sound of the rain had quieted her, she lay bathing her soul in the darkness. Somehow it protected her. Here in a locked room where no splinter of light penetrated, she was for a little time completely herself. That was the great thing.... She washerself.... There was no one about her.... Sometimes this same triumphant aloofness came to her from music.... It too was able to set her apart where she was forced to share nothing of herself with any one. In the darkness people couldn’t pry their way into your soul. All this she understood but vaguely, with the understanding of a sensitive girl who has not learned to search her own soul. And this understanding she kept to herself. None knew of it. The face she showed to the world betrayed nothing of loneliness, of wild and turbulent moods, of fierce exasperation. To the world she was a girl very like other girls, rather more hasty and bad-tempered perhaps, but not vastly different—a girl driven alone by a wild vague impulse hidden far back in the harassed regions of her impatient soul. It is one of the tragedies of youth that it feels and suffers without understanding.
For an hour she lay quite still listening to the rain; and at the end of that time, hearing sounds from below stairs which forecast the arrival of supper, she rose and lighted the gas bracket above her dressing table.
At the first pin point of flame, the world of darkness and rain vanished and in its place, as if by some abracadabra, there sprang into existence the hard, definite walls of a room, square and commonplace, touched with quaint efforts to create an illusion of beauty. The walls were covered with wall paper bearing a florid design of lattices heavily laden with red roses on anemic stalks. Two Gibson pictures, faithfully copied by an admirer, hung on either side of the oak dresser. They were “The Eternal Question” and “The Queen of Hearts.” The bed, vast and ugly, and still bearing in the white counterpane the imprint of Ellen’s slim young body, fitted the room as neatly as a canal barge fits a lock. The chairs varied in type from an old arm chair of curly maple, brought across the mountains into the middle-west by Ellen’s great-grandfather and now relegated to the bedroom, to a damaged patent rocker upholstered in red plush with yellow tassels. On the top of the dressing table lay a cover made elaborately of imitation Valenciennes and fine cambric, profusely ornamented by bow knots of pink baby ribbon.
By the flickering light, the girl arranged her hair before the mirror. It was dark, heavy, lustrous hair with deep blue lights. Hastily tossing it into a pompadour over a wire rat, she washed her eyes with cold water to destroy the redness. She was preparing the face she showed the world. It was not a beautiful face though it had its points. It was too long perhaps and the nose was a trifle prominent; otherwise it was a pleasant face, with large dark eyes, fine straight lips and a really beautiful chin. It held the beginnings of a beauty that was fine and proud. The way the chin and throat leapt from her shoulders was a thing at which to marvel. The line was clear, triumphant, determined. Even Ellen was forced to admire it. What she lacked in beauty was amply compensated by the interest which her face inspired. The pompadour, to be sure, was ridiculous. It was but a week or two old, the sign of her emancipation from the estate of a little girl.
For a long time she studied the reflection in the mirror. This way and that she turned her proud head, admiring all the while the line of the throat and tilted chin. It delighted her as music sometimes delighted her, with a strange leaping sensation of triumph over people about her.
She thought, “Am I to be great one day? Am I to be famous? Is it written in my face? I will be or die ... I must be!”
Early in the afternoon, before the long rain settled in for the night, she had walked out of Miss Ogilvie’s little house down the brick path under the elms with a heart singing in triumph. Before she arrived home, the sense of triumph had faded a little, and by the time she reached her room it was gone altogether, submerged by a wave of despair. It seemed that her triumph only made life more difficult; instead of being an end it was only a beginning. It created the most insuperable difficulties, the most perilous and agitating problems.
Miss Ogilvie lived in a weathered old house that withdrewfrom the street behind a verdant bulwark of lilacs, syringas, and old apple trees abounding in birds,—wrens, blackbirds, finches and robins. In the warm season, as if the wild birds were not enough, a canary or two and a pair of love-birds hung suspended from the roof of the narrow piazza high above the scroll-work of the jig-saw rail. There were those who believed that Miss Ogilvie, in some earlier incarnation, was herself a bird ... a wren perhaps, or a song sparrow flitting in and out of hedges and tufts of grass, shaking its immaculate tail briskly in defiance of a changing world.
When she sat in her big rocker listening to the horrible exercises of her pupils, she resembled a linnet on a swaying bough. She rocked gently as if she found the motion soothing to some wildness inside her correct and spinsterish little body. Always she rocked, perhaps because it helped her to endure the horrible renderings of Schumann and Mendelssohn by the simpering daughters and the sullen sons of the baker, the butcher, the candle-stick maker. For Miss Ogilvie understood music and she was sensitive enough. In her youth, before her father failed in the deluge that followed the Civil War, she had been abroad. She had heard music, real music, in her day. In all the Town she and Grandpa Tolliver alone knew what real music could be. She had even studied for a time in Munich where she lived in her birdlike way in a well chaperonedpension. The other girls fluttered too, for in her day women were all a little birdlike; it was a part of their training.
In the early afternoon when Ellen Tolliver came for her weekly lesson, Miss Ogilvie, dressed in a tight-fitting basque of purple poplin ornamented with pins of coral and cameo, received her formally into the little drawing-room where she lived in a nest of pampas grass, conch shells, raffia baskets, and spotless bits of bric-a-brac. There was in the reception nothing unusual; Miss Ogilvie permitted herself no relaxation, even in the privacy of her own bed-chamber. She remained a lady, elegantly so, who supported herself in a genteel fashion by giving music lessons. But with Ellen a certain warmth and kindliness, seldom to be found in her contact with other pupils, occasionally tempered the formality. To-day her manner carried even a hint of respect.
Ellen sat at the upright piano and played. She played with a wild emotionalism unhampered by problems of technique. She poured her young, rebellious soul into the music until the ebony piano rocked and the ball-fringe of the brocade piano-cover swayed. Miss Ogilvie sat in her big rocking chair in a spot of sunlight and listened. It was significant that she did not rock. She sat quite still, her tiny feet barely touching the floor, her thin blue-veined hands lying quietly like little birds at rest in her purple poplin lap. The canaries too became still and listened. A hush fell upon the garden.
“And now,” said Miss Ogilvie, when Ellen paused for a moment, “some Bach,” and the girl set off into the tortuous, architectural beauties of a fugue. She played without notes, her eyes closed a little, her body swaying with a passionate rhythm which arose from something far more profound than the genteel precepts of Miss Ogilvie. It was savage. It must have terrified the gentle little old woman, for she knew that to play Bach savagely was sacrilege. And yet ... somehow it didn’t matter, when Ellen did it. There was in the music a smoldering, disturbing magnificence.
Then she played some Chopin, delicately, poetically; and at last she finished and turned about on the piano stool to await the criticism of her teacher.
Miss Ogilvie said nothing. Her blue eyes winked a bit in embarrassment and down one withered cheek ran a tear which had escaped her dignity and self-possession. The sunlight flickered across her thin hands, and presently she stirred.
“My child,” she said, “there is nothing for me to say.”
And Ellen’s heart leapt so suddenly that she grew faint with joy.
“I no longer count for anything,” said Miss Ogilvie gently. “You are beyond me....” She smiled suddenly and dabbed hereyes politely. “Who am I to instruct you? My child, you are an artist. You frighten me!” She leaned forward a little, confidingly, and whispered. “It happens like that ... in the most unexpected places, in villages, in ugly towns ... why, even in a dirty mill town like this.”
Between the two there was a bond, a thing which neither ever mentioned but which, in the silence that followed Miss Ogilvie’s undignified outburst, took possession of both and drew them together. Both scorned the Town, a treason which none had discovered; and now when Miss Ogilvie spoke again she dragged the secret bond into the glaring light of day.
“Artists occur,” she said, “without respect for places.” And then after a little pause.... “But you must never let any one here suspect you’re an artist. It would make you unhappy.” Recovering herself a little she began again to rock gently. “For a long time I’ve known you were escaping me.... It was no use hiding it from myself.... I know it now....”
She smiled triumphantly a withered, rosy smile, a bit like the smile one might see on the bright face of a lady apple, and began pulling at the lace on her handkerchief. “It’s wonderful,” she said, “to think I have discovered it.... Poor me! But you must work, Ellen, there are hard days ahead ... harder than you guess.
“D’you know?” she continued, in her excitement leaning forward once more, “when I was a girl, I played well ... I was like you ... not so independent, not so strong, because I was always a little woman ... even then,” she added as if she were conscious that age had shriveled her. “Sometimes I thought I would like to be a great pianist ... a great artist.... But women didn’t do such things in my day. My father would never have listened to it for a moment. It wasn’t a ladylike thing to do. It was like being a circus rider. He let me take lessons so that I could play in the drawing-room and accompany my young men when they sang. My father even let me study in Munich, but when he found out I wasmore interested in music than in young men ... he brought me home. I never got very interested in young men ... I always liked music better.”
Ellen listened respectfully, moved as much by her feeling for Miss Ogilvie in the rôle of a friend as by her respect for older people in general. She was carefully brought up and had good manners. But, secretly, the tale bored her a little. There was nothing interesting in it, nothing to seize one’s imagination, nothing to soothe her impatience, nothing which fed that wild ambition. All that Miss Ogilvie told her had happened so long ago.
“I suppose I ought to have got married,” continued Miss Ogilvie. “But I waited too long.... I had chances!” she added proudly, “good ones.... Maybe I would have been happier to-day.... I don’t know, though,” she added doubtfully, puckering her withered lips as if she could come to no decision in the matter. “There’s so much to be said on both sides. But what I mean to say is, that you must go ahead.... You mustn’t let anything stop you.... It’s easier now than it was in my day. At least there’s no one to oppose you.... It’s a gift that doesn’t come to every one.... You see I didn’t marry and I didn’t become an artist.” And a note of wistfulness entered her voice. “So now I’m just an old spinster who gives music lessons. Maybe,” she said, “you can manage both. I don’t know ... and you don’t.... But don’t let anything stop you.... Don’t die without having done what you wanted to do. There’s no more for me to tell you.... I can teach you nothing, but I hope you’ll come sometimes and play for me.... I’d like it.”
By the time she finished Miss Ogilvie’s eyes were again bright with tears, as much from pity of herself as in a benevolent envy of the impetuous Ellen’s youth and independence.
“It won’t be easy....” the girl said presently. “There’s my mother.... She thinks I ought to get married.... She had me take music lessons because she thought it would make me more marriageable if I could play the piano.... Of course she’s proud that I play so well. She’s proud of anything I can do.”
“Perhaps she’ll come round,” suggested Miss Ogilvie. “But it’ll be a struggle.... I know your mother, Ellen.... She’s made you ambitious.... That’s where she made a mistake.” She coughed suddenly with embarrassment. “But I don’t want to interfere. She’s your own mother.... It’s for her to decide.” And Miss Ogilvie abased herself and her high hopes for Ellen before the altar of her generation’s respect for the position of a mother.
“And there’s no money ...” said Ellen sullenly. “There never is.”
“Perhaps we could work that out.... I could let you take some of the pupils ... I have too many now ... I’d be willing to help ... to sacrifice if necessary.” It was clear that Miss Ogilvie meant to say nothing directly; she had no desire to be responsible for the actions of the impetuous girl. Yet she continued to hint, to imply that she would do her part if a crisis arose.
“I want to,” said Ellen, “I want to more than anything in the world.... I want to be great and famous.... I’ve got to be.” She became so savage, so intense that in her great rocking chair Miss Ogilvie trembled.
At last Ellen put on her hat, which perched well up on the absurd pompadour, bade Miss Ogilvie good-by, and went out to the piazza, where her bicycle rested against the fancy railing under the cages of the canaries and love-birds. As she turned down the brick path, the voice of Miss Ogilvie followed her.
“If the chance comes,” she said, “look to me. I’ll do what I can to help you.” The words came out in little gasps as if she were unable to keep them—bold though they were—imprisoned any longer. Ellen smiled back at her over her shoulder and the old lady retired into the weathered house.
As Ellen pedaled over the brick streets between rows of maple trees, her delight faded slowly before the assaults of her common sense. In these skirmishes, wild hope and inspiration went down in defeat. There were too many obstacles ... poverty, prejudice, even her own sense of provinciality. Yet underneath a little voice kept saying, “You’ll do it ... you’ll do it.... Nothing can stop you. You’ll be able to get what you want if you want it hard enough.”
And by the time she turned into the block where the Tolliver family lived, clinging like grim death to a respectability which demanded a brave face turned toward the world, her mind began once more to work in its secret way, planning how it would be possible.
Miss Ogilvie’s timid, frightened offer of help she had quite forgotten. Miss Ogilvie was so old, so gentle, so ineffectual ... like her own caged canaries. Ellen’s mind had begun already to turn toward her cousin Lily. The glamorous Lily must know some way out.
3
It was Lily who still dominated her thoughts when she descended at last to find her mother setting the table for the family supper. This was an operation into which Mrs. Tolliver threw all the great energy and force of her character. It was impossible for her to do things easily; the placing of each fork involved as much precision, as much thoroughness and intensity as the building of a bridge or a skyscraper. It was the gesture of an ardent housekeeper burning incense before the Gods of Domesticity, the abandoned devotion of an artist striving for perfection.
For an instant Ellen stood in the doorway watching her mother as if somewhere in the recesses of her clever brain she considered this parent as she might consider a stranger, marking the woman’s strong face, her vigorous black hair, the rosiness of her healthycheeks. Ellen, her mother said, had a disconcerting way of studying people, of prying into their lives, even of imagining things about them that could not possibly have been true. This was exactly what Ellen did as she waited in the doorway. She regarded silently the figure that stood before her, swathed in durable serge and ornamented with a gold chain and a tiny Swiss watch out of all proportion with the size and vigor of her body.
Then suddenly Mrs. Tolliver became aware of her daughter’s presence. She straightened her back and stood with the knives and forks poised in her hand beneath the glare of the ornate chandelier.
“Well,” she said. “You might speak when you come into a room.” Then after a slight pause, “You can finish the table. I’ve got to watch the pies.”
Listlessly the daughter took the silverware and absently she began laying it at the places to be occupied by her father, by Fergus, by Robert. There was no place for Gramp Tolliver. He ate in the solitude of his own room meals which were placed on the bottom step of the “back way” to be carried up by him in response to a loud knock on the door of his hermitage. For eight years he had eaten thus in exile.
“Ma,” began Ellen, “when does Lily arrive?”
The mother continued to pour water into the shining glasses. “In a week or two ... I don’t know exactly,” she said, and then raised her blue eyes to regard her daughter with a long and penetrating look. Between the two there was a sort of constant and secret warfare which went on perpetually as if, failing to understand each other, there could be no grounds between them for trust. Now Mrs. Tolliver saw nothing but the top of Ellen’s dark head, secretive, silent, as she bent over the table.
“Why do you want to know?” she asked with an air of suspicion. “You’ve been talking a great deal about Lily lately....”
“I don’t know,” came the evasive answer. “I like her.... I’d like to be like Lily some day.”
Mrs. Tolliver resumed her task in silence but with an air of thoughtfulness. Again it was Ellen who broke the silence.
“I suppose there’s no money ... now that everything is settled.” She put this forward tentatively, as if the matter was of no great interest to her.
“There’s nothing over ...” replied her mother. “You knew there wouldn’t be.... If Papa is elected, things will be all right again ... for a time at least.” This last she added with a profound sigh—a signal that at any moment consideration of the trials brought upon her by an easy-going husband might loose all the torrent of an emotional, primitive nature. “Why do you ask?”
“I just wondered,” said Ellen. “I’d hoped things might be a little better.”
“They won’t be ... for a time....”
The significance of this conversation lay not so much in what was said as in what was not said. Neither the mother nor the daughter approached the real subject of the conversation openly. They hovered about it, descending for a time on the edge of it, flitting away again coyly, with backward glances. The fault may have been Ellen’s. Certainly the ways of the honest, emotional Mrs. Tolliver were neither dark nor devious. Presently the mother made an effort to strike at the heart of the situation.
“I wish,” she said, “that you would settle down and be content, Ellen.... I thought you were better for a time.... What is it you want? Is it to go away just when you’re old enough to be a comfort to me? Is that the reward a mother has for her care and sacrifices? That she loses her only daughter as soon as she is old enough to think she is grown up?”
She was slipping into one of the most unbearable of her emotional moods, a mood of self-pity, when she threw herself as the Pope before the Visigoths upon the mercy of her husband and children. All the signs of its approach were at hand—the pathos, the slightly theatrical tone. The mood was aggravating becausefundamentally it was reasonable. You could not argue the rightness of her position. She had sacrificed everything for her husband and her children. Day by day she continued to sacrifice everything. She would go on sacrificing herself until she died. She would have given her life for them without a regret. To wait upon her amiable unsuccessful husband and her three superlatively wonderful children was her idea of love, of perfect service. They were her world, her life, the beginning, the very core, the end of her passionate existence. The only reward she asked was possession; they must belong to her always.
And then it struck Ellen suddenly that the position of the mother was pitiable. It was pitiable because she knew so little of what was in her daughter’s heart ... so precious little of all the things stirring there so wildly, so savagely. She could never know, at least until after it was done—whatever it was that was to be done. Even then she could not understand that there were stronger things than love, things which were more profound and more important.
“And why are you so interested in Lily?” began her mother. “Why do you say you want to be like her?”
“I don’t know,” replied Ellen in a low voice. “I don’t know except that I don’t want to be like the others.”
Her mother considered her for a moment and then shook her head, as if silently she had reached a decision.
“I can’t understand your restlessness,” she said. “I don’t know where you get it.”
Ellen stood now leaning against the mantelpiece above the gas log. Outside the rain still fell heavily.
“Well,” she said, “it’s not my fault that one grandfather ran away from home as a boy and went to California to dig gold.... And it’s not my fault that the other left his wife and ran away to live in Europe for thirteen years.”
Mrs. Tolliver turned sharply. “Who told you that? I mean about your grandfather Tolliver....”
Ellen smiled in her silent, proud way. “I’m not deaf, Mama, nor blind.... I’ve been about the house now for nearly nineteen years. I know about Gramp Tolliver.”
Again Ellen was smitten by amazement at her mother’s ignorance of how much she knew, at how little the older woman understood of the shrewd knowledge she had hoarded away.
“I’m sorry you know it,” said Mrs. Tolliver. “It would have been just as well if you hadn’t known.” Again she nodded her head with that same air of reaching a secret decision. “But now that you know it, you might as well know some other things.... You’re old enough now, I guess.” She sat down on one of the stiff-backed chairs and beckoned to her daughter. “Come here,” she said, “and sit on my lap.... I’ll tell you other things.”
Ellen came to her and sat upon her lap, rather awkwardly, for to her it seemed a silly thing. She had not the faintest understanding of all that this small gesture meant to her mother. And secretly she hardened herself against a treacherous attack upon her affections. It was the habit of her mother to attack her through love. Always it had been a sure method of reducing Ellen’s fortress of secrecy and hardness.
“It’s about Lily,” began Mrs. Tolliver. “I know Lily is beautiful. She’s very kind and pleasant ... but there are things about her that aren’t nice. In some ways Lily is a loose woman.... She’s laid herself open to talk.... People smirch her good name.... Perhaps she isn’t really bad.... Nobody really knows anything against her, but she is free with men.... There’s been talk, Ellen, and when there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
Here Ellen interrupted her. “I don’t believe it.... I don’t believe any of it,” she exclaimed stubbornly. “It’s the way people talk. I know how they do.... I’ve heard.... It’s one reason why I hate the Town.”
And then Ellen saw her mother assume a great calmness, deliberately and with a certain ostentation, in order to impress Ellen with her sense of justice. It was like taking a cloak from acloset and putting it gravely about her. “I’ve never mentioned it to any one,” she said (never once guessing the thoughts in her daughter’s mind), “not to a soul.... Nothing could induce me to.... After all, Lily is my first cousin, the daughter of Aunt Julia, my own mother’s sister.... I wouldn’t permit any one to befoul her name in my presence.... But here we are alone, together, you and I.... It’s in the family. That makes a difference.... Sometimes, in the family, one has to face the facts. And the facts are that Lily hasn’t behaved well.... She’s lived in Paris for years, alone in the wickedest city in the world.... There’s even talk about her having had a baby ... and she’s never been married.... Nobody knows ... and Aunt Julia wouldn’t tell me.... You can’t get a word out of her.... You wouldn’t want to be like that, now would you?”
Ellen fell to pleating the folds of her cheap dress. Her dark brows drew closer together. She was sullen, awkward.
“I don’t see that it makes any difference ... not to Lily. She’s free.... She’s happy.”
“But she’s rich,” said her mother. “That’s why she’s free ... and only God knows whether she’s happy.... A woman like that can’t be happy.... I don’t want my daughter, my pure, lovely little daughter to be contaminated.”
The tide of Mrs. Tolliver’s emotions displayed all the signs of bursting the dam of her restraint. Ellen knew these signs. Her mother was beginning to drag in God. She was beginning to use words like “pure,” and “lovely.” And for the first time in her life, Ellen found herself instead of softening, growing harder and harder. Strangely enough, it was the words of the gentle, birdlike Miss Ogilvie which gave her a new power. This time, she was not to be defeated.
“Well, it doesn’t make any difference,” she said, rising from her mother’s lap. “I like Lily better than any one in this town ... I always will ... and nothing can change me.” The fine line of her young chin grew stubborn and there rose between mother and daughter the old impregnable wall.
It is impossible to imagine what ruse Mrs. Tolliver would have used next, impossible to calculate the depths of emotion into which she might have plunged, had she not been halted by so small a thing as the ringing of a doorbell. The sound jangled noisily through the house and Ellen, finding in it the opportunity for escape, sped away to open the door.
Outside on the doorstep, drenched, tow-headed and grinning, stood Jimmy Seton, the little brother of May Seton. In one grubby hand he held a note.
“It’s from May,” he grinned. “I guess it’s an invitation to a party.”
And without another word, he vanished like an imp into the dark wall of pouring rain.
THE father of May Seton was rich according to standards. He was not so wealthy as the Harrison family which owned the Mills, or as Julia Shane, Mrs. Tolliver’s Aunt Julia, a great and proud lady who lived in Shane’s Castle, a gloomy house, relic of a past day, which stood isolated now upon a low hill in the midst of the clamorous and ascendant Mills. There were some who said that Harvey Seton was richer than Julia Shane, but it was impossible to know. The Seton wealth was public property. The wealth of Julia Shane, except for the land which she owned, lay concealed in the vaults of banks in Paris, in New York, in Pittsburgh, in Chicago. No one could gage it; and from the old woman’s mode of living, it was impossible to make any estimate. There had been a day when Shane’s Castle was the great house of the Town, even of the state. Great people stopped there, politicians, artists, musicians, even a President or two. But for years now, ever since Lily went to live in Paris, the famous drawing-room, glittering with crystal and silver and glowing with tapestries and paintings, had been closed and muffledin cheese-cloth. In the big house, beneath the unceasing fall of soot from the furnaces, Julia Shane with her spinster daughter, Irene, lived in three rooms. It was this state of affairs which led people in the Town to believe that her fortune had decreased in some mysterious way. The old woman alone knew that she could have bought up Harvey Seton, tossed his corset factory into the midst of the Atlantic Ocean and never missed the money. She lived upon the income of her income. The Town, so far as she was concerned, no longer existed.
These things played an important part in the life of the Town. No one ever tired of discussing them. It was by these standards that citizens were judged; and there were no better standards in a town which had emerged less than a century before from a complete wilderness. There was nothing unusual in them, for it is the man of property after all whom most people, in their heart of hearts, honor most profoundly.
The success of Harvey Seton was, in itself, not especially interesting. It paralleled very closely the tale of any successful middle-western manufacturer. The interest lay in what he manufactured and in his character. He was born and brought up in what people call straitened circumstances. At twenty-one he entered a pharmaceutical school and upon being graduated, started life as a clerk in a pharmacy of the Town. For eight years he lived rigorously and saved his money. He was a Methodist and attended church regularly, despising card-playing and the theater as implements of the devil. In this there is nothing unusual. It is here that the bizarre makes its appearance.
There came a day when he learned that Samuel Barr, a brother of Julia Shane and of Mrs. Tolliver’s father, had invented a combination of gutta percha and steel which served as an admirable substitute for whalebone. Now Samuel Barr was always inventing something. He invented a cash-carrier, a patent rocker, and had even meddled with the idea of perpetual motion. He had invented a machine which he set up in a field on the farm of his brother-in-law, because he said the contrivance, once it was started, wouldnot stop until it flew into pieces of its own velocity; therefore one must have an open space about it so that no one might be injured by the flying fragments. With his brother-in-law, Colonel John Shane, he waited behind a tree for the machine to fly to bits. It revolved a few times and presently came to an abrupt halt. No fragments flew through space. The machine was a failure.
It is standing there to-day, in the midst of a field now cultivated by Bohemian immigrants. It is too bulky to be moved. It remains, like a gigantic rock, in the midst of waving corn, the single monument to Samuel Barr’s inventive genius. The other things,—the cash-carrier, the patent rocker, the synthetic whalebone have survived. With a few variations they whiz coins through gigantic department stores in a hundred cities; they support the tired backs of a million exhausted housewives; and they enclose the swelling forms of even more millions of too plump women. But Samuel Barr made no money out of these things. Others made the money and stole the credit. It was the perpetual motion machine which was the apple of his eye, the great creative effort of his soul. No one wanted that, so no one stole it from him. It remained, the single possession of his trusting soul. The weather is eating it slowly away. Sometimes people stop along the road and walk into the field to regard the strange Gargantuan engine. “Sam Barr’s Perpetual Motion Machine” exists, the only monument to his name.
Samuel Barr is important to this tale because it was he who founded Harvey Seton’s fortune, and because it was his machine which stands as a superb symbol for the taint which ran through all his family. It was the taint of a family of great energy which had fantastic visions, which gambled high, staking everything to win or lose. It was a curious taint, rare and unhappy, but out of it there sometimes rose a sudden genius—an artist, an adventurer, a philosopher, an inventor. The taint was in all of them. His sister Julia risked her fortune a dozen times and, winning, increased it a dozen times. His niece Hattie Tolliver never ceasedto plan great undertakings which would make her husband rich. She risked her fortune a dozen times and, losing, saw it vanish into a mass of debts. His great-niece Ellen Tolliver had it strongly, though few would have suspected it. She was subtle like old Julia Shane. She told her affairs to no one.
When Harvey Seton, twenty-nine, rather pallid and ambitious in a cold-blooded fashion, heard of Samuel Barr’s invention, he set about to gain possession of it. This he accomplished in time, by methods not entirely honest, at the cost of one hundred and fifty dollars. Then he secured a partner and the Eureka Reinforced Corset Factory came to raise its walls in the factory district under the windows of Shane’s Castle.
In justice to Harvey Seton, it must be said that he struggled for a time with his conscience. He was not a bad man. His fault lay in a too great desire for wealth; that is to say, wealth in the abstract, for its own sake alone, and not for what it could bring to him of this world’s pleasures. He had some pangs over his treatment of Samuel Barr, but they were as nothing to the pangs he endured from the nature of his enterprise.... A Methodist corset manufacturer might seem a contradiction in terms, a combination of two elements which are in no way soluble, the one in the other; but somehow, Harvey Seton—perhaps because he was really shrewd—managed to unite them. He continued to sing in the church choir; and, on the left hand, he manufactured corsets. He knew, no doubt, that some of the most devout of his Methodist sisters wore stays beneath their clothes. Perhaps if they had been forced to wear them on the outside, the corset business would have suffered. The world being what it is, Harvey Seton prospered. His corsets became known in remote lands for their durability and their restrictive values. Eureka Reinforced Corsets came to be worn by the great ladies of New York and London, by the housewives of the Middle West, by the demi-mondaines of Paris and Brussels, by professors’ fat wives inGermany. They were introduced at length even among the bisque ladies of Polynesia and the black ladies of brothels in Mozambique. In 1897 Harvey Seton opened a branch factory at St. Denis on the outskirts of Paris. It brought him nearer to his continental markets.
Meanwhile Harvey Seton’s life followed a narrow path to and from the corset factory, and presently he married one of the plumpest of Methodist sisters who presented him after a hesitation of three years with a daughter, May. Then followed an hiatus of ten years and there appeared a thin anemic little boy. These are the facts of Harvey Seton’s life. There was nothing more and nothing less. It was the thin sickly little boy, now grown precocious and somewhat spiteful, who brought the note through the pouring autumn rain to Ellen’s doorstep and thus played his tiny, anemic part in the drama of her life.
But May and Ellen were friends, or as near friends as it was possible for any one to be with such a girl as Ellen. May frankly adored her. She admired her straight, slim figure, so different from her own vague softness, and her handsome dark hair. She envied her ability to play the piano. What Ellen said or believed, to May was gospel. And in this there was nothing extraordinary. It was the worship of a weak, good-natured soul for a strong, self-willed one. May was pretty in a plump, blonde, pale fashion. She giggled a great deal and liked the companionship of the Town boys. Ellen did neither of these things. In fact she hated the boys with a kind of savage resentment, as if it were presumptuous of them even to fancy they might interest her. She permitted May to worship her, since there seemed nothing to be done about it; yet the adoration annoyed her at times so profoundly that she wanted to strike the blonde, silly girl, to really hurt her, to destroy her as she might destroy some pale, stupid worm. She hated her because May had those things which would have made her own way easy. Buther pride kept her silent. She smiled at May in her cold, aloof fashion and permitted her to continue worship.