CHAPTER XXAN EVENING’S ENTERTAINMENT
CHAPTER XX
AN EVENING’S ENTERTAINMENT
The dinner parties, so Paul told Lydia one evening a few days later, would certainly be as successful and with but little more trouble. “Just think of the dinners Ellen’s been giving us for the last two months! I don’t believe there’s another such cook in Ohio—within our purse, of course.”
Lydia did not visibly respond to this enthusiasm. Indeed, she walked away from the last half of it, and leaned out of a window to look up at the stars. When she came back to take up the tiny dress on which she was sewing, she said: “I don’t think I can stand more than this one dinner party, Paul. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel at all well, and this dreadful nausea troubles me a good deal.”
“Well, you look lovelier than ever before in your life,” Paul reassured her tenderly, and felt a moment’s pique that her face did not entirely clear at this all-important announcement. “Come, let’s go over to the Derby’s for a game of bridge, will you, Lydia?”
This conversation took place on a Tuesday late in May. The dinner party was set for Thursday. On Wednesday morning, after Paul’s usual early departure, Lydia went to her writing desk to send a note to Madeleine Hollister. Paul had intimated that she and Madeleine were seeing less of each other than he had expected from their girlhood acquaintance, and Lydia, in her anxiety to induce Paul to talk over with her and plan with her the growth of their home life, was eager to adopt every casual suggestion he threw out. She began, therefore, a cordial invitation to Madeleine to spend several days with them. She would try again to be more intimate with her husband’s sister.
She had not inherited her mother’s housekeeping eye, and was never extremely observant of details. Being more than usually preoccupied this morning, she had no suspicion that someone else had been using the conveniences for writing on her desk until she turned over the sheet of paper on which she had begun her note, and saw with surprise that the other side was already covered with a coarse handwriting, unfamiliar to her.
As she looked at this in the blankest astonishment, a phrase leaped out at her comprehension, like a serpent striking. And then another. And another.
She tried to push back her chair to escape, but she was like a person paralyzed.
With returning strength to move came an overwhelming wave of nausea. She crept up to her own room and lay motionless and soundless for hour after hour, until presently it was noon, and the pleasant tinkling of gongs announced that lunch was served.
Lydia rose, and made her way down the stairs to the well-ordered table, set with the daintiest of perfectly prepared food, and stood, holding on to the back of a chair, while she rang the bell. The little second girl answered it—one of the flitting, worthless, temporary occupants of that position.
“Tell Ellen to come here,” said her mistress.
At the appearance of the cook, Lydia’s white face went a little whiter. “Did you use my writing desk last evening?” she asked.
Ellen looked up, her large, square-jawed face like a mask through which her eyes probed her mistress’ expression. “Yes, Mrs. Hollister; I did,” she said in the admirable “servant’s manner” she possessed to perfection. “I ought to ask your pardon for doing it without permission, but someone was wanting Mr. Hollister on the telephone, and I thought best to sit within hearing of the bell until you and Mr. Hollister should return, and as—”
“You left part of your letter to Patsy O’Hern,” saidLydia, and sat down suddenly, as though her strength were spent.
The woman opposite her flushed a purplish red. There was a long silence. Lydia looked at her servant with a face before which Ellen finally lowered her eyes.
“I am sure, Mrs. Hollister, if you don’t think I’m worth the place, and if you think you can manage without me to-morrow night, I’ll go this minute,” she said coolly.
Lydia did not remove her eyes from the other’s flushed face. “You must go far away from Bellevue,” she said. “You must not take a place anywhere near here.”
Ellen looked up quickly, and down again. The color slowly died out of her face. After a sullen silence, “Yes,” she said.
“That is all,” said Lydia.
Paul found his wife that evening still very white. She explained Ellen’s disappearance with a dry brevity. “That we should have continued to give that—that awful—to give her opportunity to work upon a boy of—” she ended brokenly. “Suppose he had been my brother!”
Paul was aghast. “But, mydear! To-morrow is the night of the dinner! Couldn’t you have put off a few days this sudden fit of—”
Lydia broke from her white stillness with a wild outcry. She flung herself on her husband, pressing her hands on his mouth and crying out fiercely: “No, no, Paul! Not that! I can’t bear to have you say that! I hoped—I hoped you wouldn’t think of—”
Paul was fresh from an interview with Dr. Melton, and in his ears rang innumerable cautions against excitement or violent emotions. With his usual competent grasp on the essentials of a situation that he could not understand at all, he put aside for the time his exasperated apprehensions about the next day’s event, and picking Lydia up bodily he carried her to a couch, closing her lips with gentle hands and soothing her with caresses, like a frightened child.
“Oh, you are good to me!” she murmured finally, quieted. “I must try not to get so excited. But, Paul—Ican’ttell you—about—about that letter—and later, when I saw Ellen, it was as though we fought hand to hand for Patsy, though she never—”
“There, there, dearest! Don’t talk about it—just rest. You’ve worked yourself into a perfect fever.” If there was latent in the indulgent accent of this speech the coda, “All about nothing,” it escaped Lydia’s ear. She only knew that the long nightmare of her lonely, horrified day was over. She clung to her husband, and thanked heaven for his pure, clean manliness.
But in a vastly different way the next day was almost as much of a nightmare. Lydia’s father and mother were temporarily out of town and their at least fairly satisfactory cook was enjoying her vacation at an undiscoverable address. Lydia was cut off from asking her sister to come to her aid by the fact that Paul had prevailed upon her to omit Marietta and her husband from her guests. “If you won’t give but one, we’ve justgotto invite the important ones,” he had said. “Your sister can take dinner with us any day, and you know her husbandisn’tthe most—”
Lydia had picked up in the school of necessity a fair knowledge of cooking, for which she had discovered in herself quite a liking; but she had been too constantly in social demand to have the leisure for advancing far into culinary lore, and she now found herself dismayed before the elaborate menu that Ellen had planned, for which the materials were gathered together. She was still shaken with the emotions of the day before, and subject to sudden giddy, sick turns, which, although lasting but an instant, left her enormously fatigued.
She went furiously at the task before her, beginning by simplifying the dinner as much as she dared and could with the materials at hand, and struggling with the dishes she was obliged to retain. For years afterward, the sight of chicken salad affected her to acute nausea. The inexperienced and careless little second girl lost her head in thecrisis, and had to be repeatedly calmed and assured that all that would be asked of her would be to serve the dinner to the waiters for whom Lydia had arranged hastily by telephone with Endbury’s leading caterer. Ellen had planned to serve the meal with the help of a waitress friend or two, without other outside help; a feature of the occasion that had met with Paul’s hearty approval. He told Lydia that those palpably hired-for-the-occasion nigger waiters were very bad form, and belonged to a phase of Endbury’s social gaucheries as outgrown now as charade parties. But now, of course, nothing else was possible.
In the intervals of cooking, Lydia left her makeshift help in the kitchen, to see that nothing burned, and in a frenzy of activity flew at some of the manifold things to be done to prepare the house for the festivity. She swept and wiped up herself the expansive floors of the two large parlors, set the rooms in order, dusted the innumerable wedding present knickknacks, cleaned the stairs, wiped free from dust the carved balustrades, ordered the bedrooms that were to serve as dressing rooms in the evening, answered the ’phone a thousand times, arranged flowers in the vases, received a reportorial call from Miss Burgess, gave cut glass and china its final polish, laid out Paul’s evening clothes and arranged her own toilet ready—it was five o’clock! There were innumerable other tasks to accomplish, but she dared no longer put off setting the table.
It was to be a large dinner—large, that is, for Endbury—of twenty covers, and Lydia had never prepared a table for so many guests. The number of objects necessary for the conventional setting of a dinner table appalled her. She was so tired, and her attention was so fixed on the complicated processes going on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her brain reeled over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates and glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal occasion. They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal them into order. She discovered that she had put forks for the soup—that in some inexplicable way at the plate destined for an important guest there was a largekitchen spoon of iron—a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety. When Paul came in, looking very grave, she told him with a wavering laugh, “If I tried as hard for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I’ve tried all day to have this dinner right, I’d certainly have a front seat in the angel choir. If anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it’ll be because he’s harder to please than St. Peter himself.”
“My Aunt Alexandra will be here,” said Paul, the humorous side of her speech escaping him.
Lydia set down a tray of glasses, and broke into open, shaking, hysterical laughter. Paul surveyed her grimly. Her excitement had flushed her cheeks and darkened her eyes, and her sudden, apparently light-hearted, mirth put the finishing touch to a picture that could seem to her husband nothing but a care-free, not to say childish, attitude toward a situation of grave concern to him and his prospects and ambitions in the world. His inborn and highly cultivated regard for competence and success in any enterprise undertaken, drowned out, as was by no means infrequent with him, any judicial inquiry into the innate importance of the enterprise. He had an instant of bitter impatience with Lydia. He felt that he had a right to hold her to account for the outcome of events. If she were well enough to have rosy cheeks and to laugh at nothing, she was well enough to have satisfactory results expected from her efforts.
“I hope very much that everything will go well,” he said curtly, turning away. “Our first dinner party means a good deal.”
But everything did not go well. Indeed, it is scarcely too much to say that nothing went well. From the over-peppered soup (Lydia had forgotten to caution her rattle-brained assistant that she had already seasoned the bouillon) to the salad which, although excellent, gave out frankly, beyond any possibility of disguise, while five people were still unserved, the meal was a long procession of mishaps.Paul took up sorrily his wife’s rather hysterical note of self-mockery, and laughed and joked over the varied eccentricities of the pretentious menu. But there was no laughter in his heart.
Never before, in all his life, from babyhood up, had he been forced to know the acrid taste of failure, and the dose was not sweetened by his intense consciousness that he was not in any way responsible. No such fiasco had ever resulted from anything hehadbeen responsible for, he thought fiercely to himself, leaning forward smilingly to talk to the president of the street-railway company, who, having nothing in the shape of silverware left before his place but a knife and spoon, was eating his salad with the latter implement. “Lydia has no right to act so,” he thought.
The hostess gave the effect of flushed, bright-eyed animation usual with her on exciting occasions.
“Your wife is a beauty,” said the street-railway magnate, looking down the disorganized table toward her.
Paul received this assurance with the proper enthusiastic assent, but something else gleamed hotly in his face as he looked at her. “I havesomerights,” thought the young husband. “Lydia owes me something!” He never before had been moved to pity for himself.
Lydia seemed to herself to be in an endless bad dream. The exhausting efforts of the day had reduced her to a sort of coma of fatigue through which she felt but dully the successive stabs of the ill-served, unsuccessful dinner. At times, the table, the guests, the room itself, wavered before her, and she clutched at her chair to keep her balance. She did not know that she was laughing and talking gaily and eating nothing. She was only conscious of an intense longing for the end of things, and darkness and quiet.
After the meal the company moved into the double parlor. The plan had been to serve coffee there, but as people stood about waiting and this did not appear, Paul drew Lydia to one side to ask her about it. She looked at himwith bright, blank eyes, and spoke in an expressionless voice: “The grocery boy forgot to deliver the coffee,” she said. “There isn’t any, I remember now.”
He turned away silently, and the later part of the entertainment began.
There was to be music, one of the guests being Endbury’s favorite amateur soprano, another a pianist much thought of. The singer took her place by the piano, assuming carefully the correct position. Lydia watched her balance on the balls of her feet, lean forward a little, throw up her chest and draw in her abdomen. As the preliminary chords of the accompaniment sounded, she was almost visibly concentrating her thoughts on the tension of her vocal chords, on the position of the soft palate and the resonance of the nasal cavities. The thoughts of her auditors followed her own. It came to Lydia some time after the performance was over that the words of the song told of love and life and tragic betrayal.
A near-by guest leaned to her and said, during the hand-clapping: “I couldn’t make out what it was all about—never can understand a song—but, say! can’t she put it all over the soprano that sings in the First Methodist.”
His hostess gave the speaker a rather disconcerting stare, hardly explained, he thought, by the enigmatical statement that came after it: “Why, that is how we are living, all of us!”
The pianist was an old German, considered eccentric by Endbury. He had a social position on account of his son, a prosperous German-American manufacturer of buggies, and was invited because of his readiness to play on any occasion. The old man looked about him at the company with a fatherly smile, and, sitting down to his instrument, waited pointedly until all the cheerful hum of conversation had died away. The room was profoundly silent as he brought his hands down on the keys in a startling, thrilling chord. Lydia’s heart began to beat fast. She felt a chill run among the roots of her hair. She was so moved she could have wept aloud, and yet, almost at once, as the musicianpassed on to the rich elaboration of his theme, she lost herself in a groping bewilderment. She had heard so little music! Her straining attention mocked her with its futility.
She and Paul had been married for eight months, but they had found no time for the serious study of music from which she had hoped so much. When Paul was at home for an evening he was too tired and worn for anything very deep, he said, and preferred to anything else the lighter pieces of Nevin. She now gave ear despairingly to the mighty utterance of a master, catching only now and then a tantalizing glimpse of what it might mean to her. At times, there emerged from the glorious tumult of sound some grave, earnest chord, some quick, piercing melody, some exquisite sudden cadence, which reached her heart intelligibly; but through most of it she felt herself to be listening with heartsick yearning to a lovely message in an unknown tongue. Her feeling of desolate exile from a realm of beauty she longed to enter, was intensified, as was natural in so sensitive a nature, by the strange power of music to heighten in its listeners whatever is, for the time, their predominant emotion. She felt like crying out, like beating her hands against the prison bars suddenly revealed to her. She was almost intolerably affected before the end of the selection.
“That’s an awfully long piece for anybody to learn by heart!” commented her neighbor admiringly, as the old pianist finished, and stood up wiping his forehead. “Say, Mr. Burkhardt, what’s the name of that selection?” he went on, leaning forward.
The old German turned toward him, and answered gravely: “That is the feerst mofement of Beethoven’s Opus Von Hundred and Elefen.”
“Oh, it is, is it?” said Lydia’s guest, with a facetious intonation. “All of that?”
After that the soprano sang again, someone else sang a humorous negro song, there was more piano music, rendered by the prosperous son of the old pianist, who played dashinglysome bright comic-opera airs. The furniture was pushed back and a few dancers whirled over the costly, hardwood waxed floors, which Lydia had cleaned that morning. She felt vaguely that everyone was being most kind and that her good-natured guests were trying to make up for the failure of the dinner by unusual efforts to have the evening pass off well. She was very grateful for this humane disposition of theirs. It was the bright spot of the experience.
But Paul, who also saw the kindly efforts of his guests, felt that this was the last intolerable dagger-thrust. Their amused compassion suffocated him. He wanted people to envy him, not pity him, he thought in mortified chagrin.
After an eternity, the hour of departure arrived. As the door shut out the last of the smiling, lying guests, the host and hostess turned to face each other.
Paul spoke first, in an even, restrained tone: “You would better go to bed, Lydia; you must be very tired.”
With this, he turned away to shut up the house. He had determined to preserve at all costs the appearance of the indulgent, non-critical, over-patient husband that he intensely felt himself to be. No force, he thought grimly, shutting his jaws hard, should drag from him a word of his real sentiments. Fanned by the wind of this virtuous resolution, his sentiments grew hotter and hotter as he walked about, locking doors and windows, and reviewing bitterly the events of the evening. If he was to restrain himself from saying anything, he would at least allow himself the privilege of feeling all that was possible to a man so deeply injured.
Lydia sat quietly waiting for him to finish, her face in her hands, conscious of nothing but fatigue, in her ears a wild echo of the inexplicable, haunting Beethoven chords.
Suddenly she started and raised her head, her face transfigured. Her eyes shone, a smile was on her lips like that of someone who hears from afar the sound of a beloved voice. She made a gesture of yearning toward her husband.“Oh, Paul—Paul!” she cried to him softly, in a tremulous voice of wonder.
He turned, the light for the first time on his black, loveless face. “What is it?” he enunciated distinctly, looking at her hard.
Before his eyes Lydia shrank back. She put up her hands instinctively to hide her face from him. Finally, “Nothing—nothing—” she murmured.
Without comment, Paul went back to his conscientious round of the house.
Lydia had felt for the first time the quickening to life of her child. And during all that day, until then, she had forgotten that she was to know motherhood.
CHAPTER XXIAN ELEMENT OF SOLIDITY
CHAPTER XXI
AN ELEMENT OF SOLIDITY
Lydia dated the estrangement from Marietta, which grew so rapidly during the next year, from the conversation on the day after the dinner party. She was cruelly wounded by her sister’s attack on her, but she could never remember the scene without one of her involuntary laughs so disconcerting to Paul, who only laughed when he felt gay, certainly at nothing which affected him seriously. But Lydia’s sense of humor was so tickled at the grotesque contrast between Marietta’s injured conception of the brilliant social event from which she had been excluded and the leaden fiasco which it had really been, that even at the time, in the midst of denying hotly her sister’s charges of snobbishness and social ambition, she was unable to keep back a shaky laugh or two as she cried out: “Oh, Etta! If you could know how things went, you’d be too thankful to have escaped it. It was awful beyond words!”
Marietta answered her by handing her with a grim silence a copy of that morning’s paper, open atSociety Notes. Loyal Flora Burgess had lavished on “Miss Lydia’s” first dinner party her entire vocabulary of deferential, not to say reverential, encomiums. The “function had inaugurated a new era of cosmopolitan amplitude of social life in Endbury,” was the ending of the lengthy paragraph that described the table decorations, the menu, the costume of the hostess, the names of the music-makers afterward.
Lydia burst into a hysterical laugh. “Flora Burgess is too killing!” she cried. “She was here in the afternoon to get details, and I just let her wander around and see what she could make out. I was too busy to pay any attentionto her—Oh, Etta! I was dead and buried with fatigue before the people even began to come. I can’t even remember much about it except that every single thing was wrong. That about ‘cosmopolitan amplitude—’ Oh, isn’t Flora too funny!—means having music after dinner, I suppose. I don’t know what else.”
“Of course,” said Marietta, rising to go, “it doesn’t make any difference what it was really like! Only the people that were there know that. The report in the paper—”
“Oh, Marietta, what a thing to say—that it’s all pretense, every bit—and not—”
Marietta went on steadily and mordantly: “I don’t know how you feel about it, butIshouldn’t be very easy in my mind to have my only sister’s name not on the list of guests at my most exclusive social function.”
Dr. Melton, who made Lydia a professional call that morning, found her with reddened eyes, slowly washing and putting away innumerable dirty dishes. She told him that the second girl, apparently overcome by the events of the day before, had disappeared during the night. Dr. Melton thrust out his lips and said nothing, but he took off his coat, put on an apron, and, pushing his patient away from the dishpan, attacked a huge pile of sticky plates. He worked rapidly and silently, with a surgeon’s deftness. Lydia sat quiet for some time, looking at him. Finally, “I hadn’t been crying because of dirty dishes,” she told him; “I’m not such a child as that. Marietta has been here. She said some things pretty hard to bear about her not having been invited to that awful dinner party. I didn’t know what she was talking about a good deal of the time—it was all about what a snob and traitor to my family I was growing to be.”
“You mustn’t blame Marietta too much,” said the doctor, rinsing and beginning to dry the plates with what seemed to Lydia’s fatigued languor really miraculous speed. “It’s true that she watches your social advance with the calm disinterestedness of a cat watching somebody pour cream out of a jug. She wants her saucerful. But look here.Did I ever tell you about the man Montaigne speaks of who spent all his life to acquire the skill necessary to throw a grain of millet through the eye of a needle? Well, that man was proud of it, but poor Marietta’s haunted by doubts as to whether in her case it’s been worth while. It makes her naturally inclined to be snappy.”
He was so used to delighting in Lydia’s understanding of his perversely obscure figures of speech that he turned about, surprised to hear no appreciative comment. She was looking away with troubled eyes.
“Paul will think I ought not to have let Marietta talk to me like that—that I ought to have resented it. I never can remember to resent things.”
The doctor began setting out polished water glasses on a tray. “It is the glory of a man to pass by an offense,” he quoted. “Ah, don’t you suppose if we knew all about things we’d feel as relieved at not having resented an injury as if we had held our hands from striking a blind man who had inadvertently run against us?”
There was no response. It was the second time that one of his metaphors, far-fetched as he loved them, but usually intelligible to Lydia, had missed fire. He turned on her sharply. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.
She raised her tragic eyes to his. “About the mashed potatoes last night—they didn’t have a bit of salt in them—they were too nasty for—”
“Oh, pshaw! It makes no difference whether your dinner party was a success or not! You know that as well as I do. A dinner party is a relic of the Dark Ages, anyhow—if not of the Stone Age! As a physician, I shudder to see people sitting down to gorge themselves on the richest possible food, all carefully rendered extra palatable in order that they may put upon their bodies the burden of throwing off an enormous amount of superfluous food. A hundred years from now people will be as ashamed of us for our piggishness as we are of our eighteenth-century forbears for their wine-swilling to the detriment of theirdescendants. A dinner party of to-day bears no more relation to a rational gathering of rational people for the purpose of rational social intercourse than—”
He had run on with his usual astonishing loquacity without drawing breath, overwhelming Lydia with a fresh flood of words when she tried to break in; but she now sprang up and motioned him peremptorily to silence.
“Please, please, Godfather, don’t! I asked you not to unsettle me—you’re not kind to do it! You’re not kind! I must think it’s important and, and—the necessary thing to do. Imust!” She put her hands over her eyes as she spoke. She was trying to shut out a vision of Paul’s embittered face of wrathful chagrin. “That’s the trouble with me,” she went on. “Something in me makes it hard for me to think it important enough to give up everything else for it—and I—”
“Why ‘must’ you?” asked the doctor bluntly, crumpling his damp dishcloth into a ball.
Lydia looked at him and saw Paul so evidently that the doctor saw with her. “I must! Imust!” she only repeated.
Dr. Melton opened his mouth wide, closed it again with a snap, and threw the tightly wadded ball in his hand passionately upon the floor with the gesture of an angry child. Lydia was standing now, looking down at the red-faced little man as he peered up at her after his silent outbreak. His attitude of fury so contrasted with the pacific white apron which enveloped him, that she broke out into a laugh. Even as she laughed and turned away to answer a knock at the door, she was acutely thankful that it was not with Paul that she had been set upon by that swiftly mobile change of humor, that it was not at Paul that she had launched that disrespectful mirth.
The person who knocked proved to be a very large, rosy-cheeked female, who might be a big, overgrown child or a preposterously immature woman for all Lydia, looking at her in perplexity, could make out. She felt no thrill of premonition as this individual advancedinto the kitchen, a pair of immense red hands folded before her.
“I’m Anastasia O’Hern, ma’am,” she announced with a thick accent of County Clare and a self-confident, good-humored smile, “though mostly I’m called ’Stashie—and I’m just over from th’ old country to my Aunt Bridgie that washed for you till the rheumatism got her, and when she told me about what you’d done for her and Patsy—how you’d sent off that ould divil where she couldn’t torment Patsy no more, and him as glad of it as Aunt Bridgie herself, just like she knew he would be, and what an awful time you do be havin’ with gurrls, and a baby comin’, I says to myself and to Aunt Bridgie, ‘There’s the lady I’m goin’ to worrk for if she’ll lave me do ut,’ and Aunt Bridgie was readin’ to me in the paper about your gran’ dinner party last night and I says to her and to myself, ‘There’ll be a main lot of dishes to be washed th’ day and I’d better step over and begin.’”
She pulled off the shawl that had covered her head of flaming hair, and smiled broadly at her two interlocutors, who remained motionless, staring at her in an ecstasy of astonishment.
As she looked into Lydia’s pale face and reddened eyes, the smile died away. She clasped her big hands with a pitying gesture, and cried out a Gaelic exclamation of compassion with a much-moved accent; then, “It’s time I was here,” she told herself. She wiped her eyes, passed the back of her hand over her nose with a sniff, picked up the dishcloth from the floor, and advanced upon a pile of dirty silver. Her massive bulk shook the floor.
“I don’t know no more about housework than Casey’s pig,” she told them cheerfully, “but Aunt Bridgie says in America they don’t none of the gurrls know nothing. They just hold their jobs because their ladies know they couldn’t do no better to change, and maybe I can learn. I want to help.”
She emptied the silver into the dishwater with a splash, and set to work, turning her broad face to them to sayfamiliarly over her shoulder to Lydia, “Now, just you go and lie down and send the little ould gentleman about his business. You need to be quiet—for the sake of the one that’s coming; and don’t you forget I’m here. I’m—here!”
Dr. Melton drew Lydia away silently, and not until they had put two rooms between them and the kitchen did they dare face each other. With that first interchange of looks came peals of laughter—Lydia’s light, ringing laughter—to hear which the doctor offered up heartfelt thanksgivings.
“That is your fate, Lydia,” he said finally, wiping his eyes.
“Don’t you just love her?” Lydia cried. “Isn’t she the mosthumanthing!”
“Do you remember Maeterlinck’s theory that every soul summons—”
Lydia interrupted to say with a wry, humorous mouth, “You know I don’t know anything. Don’t ask me if I remember things.”
“Well, Maeterlinck has one of his fanciful theories that everybody calls to him from the unknown those elements that he most needs, which are most in harmony with—”
“I caught a good solid element that time,” cried Lydia, laughing again.
“She’s embodied Loyalty,” said the doctor. “It breathes from every pore.”
“She’s going to smash my cut glass and china something awful,” Lydia foretold.
Dr. Melton took his godchild by the shoulders and shook her. “Now, Lydia Emery, you listen to me! I don’t often issue an absolute command, if I am your physician, but I do now. Youlether smash your china and cut glass, and all the rest of your devastating trash she can lay her hands on, rather than lose her—until after September, anyhow! It’s a direct reward of virtue for your having shipped the ‘ould divil’!”
Lydia’s face clouded. “I’m afraid Paul won’t thinkher much of a substitute for Ellen,” she murmured, “and we’ll have to find a cook somehow even if this one learns enough to be second girl.”
“Second girl!” ejaculated the doctor. “She’s a human being with a capacity for loyalty.”
“She’s evidently awfully incompetent—”
The doctor snorted. “Competence—I loathe the word! It’s used now to cover all imaginable sins, as folks used to excuse all manner of rascality in a good swordsman. We’re beyond the frontier period now when competence was a matter of life and death. We ought to begin to have some glimmering realization that there are other—”
“Oh, what a hand for talk!” said Lydia.
The doctor rejoiced at her laughing impatience. He thought to himself, as he looked at her standing in the doorway and waving good-by to him, that she seemed a very different creature from the drooping and tearful—he interrupted his chain of thought as he boarded his car, to exclaim, “May she live long, that heavy-handed, vivifying Celt!”
CHAPTER XXIITHE VOICES IN THE WOOD
CHAPTER XXII
THE VOICES IN THE WOOD
Lydia had not been mistaken in her premonition of Paul’s attitude toward the new maid. He found her quite unendurable, but the direful stories told by their Bellevue acquaintances about the literal impossibility of keeping servants during the hot season induced him to postpone his wrath against the awkward, irreverent, too familiar Irishwoman until after Lydia should feel more herself. Paul’s wrath lost nothing by keeping.
To Lydia, on the contrary, Anastasia’s loyalty and devotion were inexpressibly comforting during the trying days of that summer. Her servant’s loving heart radiated warmth and cheer throughout all her life. One day, when her mother protested against ’Stashie’s habit of familiar conversation with the family (they had all soon adopted the Irish diminutive of her name), Lydia said: “I can not be too thankful for ’Stashie’s love and kindness.”
Mrs. Emery was outraged. “Good gracious, Lydia! What things you do say.”
“Why not? Because she hasn’t been to college? Neither have I. She’s as well educated as I am, and a great deal better woman.”
“Why, what are you talking about? She can’t read!”
“I don’t,” said Lydia. “That’s worse.”
Her mother turned the conversation, thinking she would be glad when this period of high-strung nerves and fancies should be over. She told Dr. Melton that it seemed to her that “Lydia took it very hard,” and she supposed they couldn’t expect her to be herself until after September.
The doctor answered: “Oh, there’s a great deal ofnonsense about that kind of talk. A normal woman—and, thank Heaven, Lydia’s that to the last degree—has the whole universe back of her. Lydia’s always balanced on a hair trigger, it’s true, but sheisbalanced! And now all nature is rallying to her like an army with banners.”
“Ah, you never went through it yourself!” Mrs. Emery retreated to the safe stronghold of matronhood. “You don’t know! I had strange fancies, like Lydia’s. Women always do.”
Another one of Lydia’s fancies of that summer drove her to a strange disregard of caste rules. It came through a sudden impulse of compassion one hot midsummer day when Miss Burgess hobbled up the driveway in the hope of gleaning some Bellevue society notes.
“It’s a terrible time of year, Miss Lydia,” she said, sinking into a chair with a long, quavering sigh. “One drops from thirty and sometimes forty dollars a week to twenty or less; and it’s so hard on one’s feet, being on them in hot weather. I assure you mine ache like the toothache. And expenses are as high as in winter, or worse, when you have an invalid to look out for. Out here in breezy Bellevue you’ve no conception how hot it is on Main Street. And Motherfeelsthe heat!”
All this she said, not complainingly, but in her usual twittering manner of imparting information, as though it were an incident of a five-o’clock tea, but Lydia felt a pang of remorse for her usual thoughtless attitude of exasperated hilarity over Miss Burgess’ peculiarities. She noticed that the kind, vacuous face was beginning to look more than middle-aged, and that the scanty hair above it was whitening rapidly.
“Why, bring your mother out here for the day, why don’t you, any time!” she said impulsively. “I can’t have any social engagements, you know, the way I am, and Paul’s away a good deal of the time, and ’Stashie and I can get you tea and eggs and toast, at least. I’d love to have her. Now, any morning that threatens heat, just you telephone you’re both coming to spend the day.”
She felt quite strange at the thought that she had never seen the mother of this devoted, unselfish, affectionate, lifelong acquaintance.
But Miss Burgess, though moved almost to tears at Lydia’s “kind thoughtfulness,” clung steadfastly to her standards. She had always known that she must not presume on her “exceptional opportunities for acquaintance with Endbury’s social leaders,” she told Lydia, nor take advantage of any inadvertent kindness of theirs. Her mother would be the first one to blame her if she did; her mother knew the world very well. She went away, murmuring broken thanks and protestations of devotion.
Lydia looked after her, disappointed. She had been quite stirred by the hope of giving some pleasure. There was little to break the long, lonely, monotonous expectancy of her life. And yet nothing surprised those who knew her better than her equable physical poise during this time of trial and discomfort. Everyone had expected so high-strung a creature to be “half-wild with nerves.” But Lydia, although she continued to say occasional disconcerting things, seemed on the whole to be gaining maturity and firmness of purpose. Paul was away a great deal that summer and she had many long, solitary hours to pass—a singular contrast to the feverish hurry of the winter “season.” Her old habit of involuntary questioning scrutiny came back and it is possible that her motto of “action at all costs” was passed under a closer mental review than during the winter; but though she went frequently to see her godfather and Mrs. Sandworth, she did not break her silence on whatever thoughts were occupying her mind, except in one brief, questioning explosion. This was on the occasion of her last visit to Endbury before her confinement, a few days after her call from Flora Burgess. It had occurred to her that they might know something about the reporter’s family and she stopped in after her shopping to inquire.
She found her aunt and her godfather sitting in the deeply shaded, old grape arbor in their back yard; Dr.Melton with a book, as always, Mrs. Sandworth ungirdled and expansive, tinkling an ice-filled cup and crying out upon the weather.
“Sit down, Lydia, for mercy’s sake, and cool off. Yes; we know all about her; she’s a patient of Marius’. Have some lemonade! Isn’t it fearful! And Marius keeps reading improving books! It makes me so much hotter! She’s English, you know.”
Dr. Melton looked up from his book to remark, with his usual judicial moderation, “I could strangle that old harridan with joy. She has been one of the most pernicious influences the women of this town have ever had.”
“Flora Burgess’ mother? Why, I never heard of her in the world until the other day.”
“You can’t smell sewer gas,” said the doctor briefly.
Mrs. Sandworth laughed. “Marius almost killed himself last winter to pull her through pneumonia. He worked over her night and day. Oh, Marius is a great deal better than he talks—strangle—!”
“I’m a fool, if that’s what you mean,” said the doctor.
“What is the matter with Flora Burgess’ mother?” asked Lydia.
“She’s been a plague spot in this town for years—that lower-middle-class old Briton, with her beastly ideas of caste—ever since she began sending out her daughter to preach her damnable gospel to defenseless Endbury homes.”
“Marius—mydear!” chided Mrs. Sandworth—“The Gospel—damnable! You forget yourself!”
The doctor did not laugh. “They’re the ones,” he went on, “who first started this idiotic idea of there being a social stigma attached to living in any but just such parts of town.”
“You live in just such a part of town yourself,” said Lydia.
“My good-for-nothing, pretentious, fashionable patients wouldn’t come to me if I didn’t.”
“Why do you have to have that kind of patients?”
Occasionally, of late, with her godfather, Lydia had displayed a certain uncompromising directness, rather out of character with her usual gentleness, which the doctor found very disconcerting. He was silent now.
Mrs. Sandworth’s greater simplicity saw no difficulties in the way of an answer. “Because, Lydia, he’s one of the Kentucky Meltons, and because, as I said, he talks a great deal worse than he is.”
“Because I am a fool,” said the doctor again. This time he flushed as he spoke.
“He doesn’t like things common around him,” went on Mrs. Sandworth, “any more than any gentleman does. And as for strangling old Mrs. Burgess, what good would that do? It can’t be she who’s influencing Endbury, because all it’s trying to do is to be just like every other town in Ohio.”
“In the Union!” amended Dr. Melton grimly. He subsided after this into one of his fidgety, grimacing, finger-nail-gnawing reveries. He was wondering whether he dared tell Lydia of a talk he had had that morning with her father. After a look at Lydia’s flushed, tired face, he decided that he would better not; but as the two women fell into a discussion of the layette, the conversation, Mr. Emery’s nervous voice, his sharp, impatient gestures, came back to him vividly. He looked graver and graver, as he did after each visit to his old friend, and after each fruitless exhortation to “go slow and rest more.” Mr. Emery was in the midst of a very important trial and, as he had very reasonably reminded his physician, this was not a good time to relax his grasp on things. “Now I’m back in practice, in competition with younger men, Ican’tsag back! It’s absurd to ask it of me.”
“You were a fool to go back into practice at your age.”
“A fool! I’ve doubled my income.”
“Yes; and your arteries—look here, suppose you were dead. The bar would get along without you, wouldn’t it?”
“But I’m not dead,” the other truthfully opposed to this fallacious supposition, and turned again to his papers.
The doctor shut his medicine case with a spiteful snap. “Don’t fool yourself that it’s devotion to the common weal that drives you ahead! Don’t make a pretty picture of yourself as working to the last in heroic service of your fellow-man! You know, as I know, that if you dropped out this minute, American jurisprudence would continue on its triumphant, misguided way quite as energetically as now.”
Mr. Emery looked up, dropping for once the mask of humorous tolerance with which he was accustomed to hide any real preoccupation of his own. “Look here, Melton, I’m too nervous to stand much fooling these days. If you want to know the reason why I’m going on, I’ll tell you. I’ve got to. I need the money.”
“Gracious powers! Did you get caught in that B. and R. slump?”
The Judge smiled a little bitterly. “No; I haven’t lost any money—for a very good reason. I never was ahead enough to have any to lose. Haven’t you any idea of what the cost of living the way we do—”
Dr. Melton interrupted him, wild-eyed: “Why, Nat Emery! You have yourself and your wife to feed and clothe and shelter—and you tell me that costs so much that you can’t stop working when there’s—”
“Oh, go away, Melton; you make me tired!” The Judge made a weary gesture of dismissal. “You’re always talking like a child, or a preacher, about how thingsmightbe! You know what an establishment like ours costs to keep up, as well as I do. I’m in it—we’ve sort of gradually got in deeper and deeper, the way folks do—and it would take a thousand times more out of me to break loose than to go on. You’re an old fuss, anyhow. I’m all right. Only for the Lord’s sake leave me quiet now.”
The doctor shivered and put his hand over his eyes as he remembered how, to his physician’s eye, the increasing ill health of his old friend gleamed lividly from his white face.
Mrs. Sandworth brought him back to the present withan astonished “Good gracious! how anybody can evenpretendto shiver on a day like this!” She added: “Look here, Marius, are you going to sit there and moon all the afternoon? Here’s Lydia going already.”
Seasoned to his eccentricities as she was, she was startled by his answer. “Julia,” he said solemnly, “did you ever consider how many kinds of murder aren’t mentioned in the statute books?”
“Marius! What ideas! Remember Lydia!”
“Oh, I remember Lydia!” he said soberly. He went to lay a hand fondly on her shoulder. “Are you really going, my dear? I’ll walk along to the waiting-room with you.”
“Don’t talk her to death!” cried Mrs. Sandworth after them.
“I won’t say a word,” he answered.
It was a promise that he almost literally kept. He was in one of the exaggeratedly humble moods which alternated with his florid, talkative, cock-sure periods.
Lydia, too, was quite thoughtful and subdued. They descended in a complete silence the dusty street, blazing in the late afternoon sun, and passed into the inferno of a crowded city square in midsummer. As they stood before the waiting-room, Lydia asked suddenly: “Godfather, how can we, any of us, do any better?”
“God knows!” he said, with a gesture of impotence, and went his way.
Lydia entered the waiting-room and went to ask a man in uniform when the next car left for Bellevue.
“There’s been an accident in the power-house, lady,” he told her, “and that line ain’t runnin’.”
Lydia gave an exclamation of dismay. “But I must get back to Bellevue to-night!”
Paul was out of town, but she knew the agonies of anxiety ’Stashie would suffer if she did not appear. “Oh, but I can telephone,” she reminded herself.
“You kin get out there if you don’t mind takin’ the long way around,” the man explained with a friendly interest.“If you take the Garfield line and change at Ironton to the Onteora branch, it’ll bring you back on the other side of Bellevue, and Bellevue ain’t so big but what it won’t be a very long walk to where you live.”
Lydia thanked him, touched, as she so often was, with the kind and, to her, welcome absence of impersonality in working people; and, assuring herself that she had time enough to eat something before her car’s departure, betook herself to a dairy lunch-room where she ate a conscientiously substantial supper. The heat of the day had left her little appetite; but to “take care of herself” now seemed at last one of the worth-while things to do which she had always had so eager a longing.
At seven o’clock she took the trolley pointed out to her by her friend, the starter, who noticed and remembered her when she returned to the waiting-room. The evening rush was over, and for some time she was the only passenger. Then a very tired-looking, middle-aged man, an accountant perhaps, in a shabby alpaca coat, boarded the car and sank at once into a restless doze, his heat-paled face nodding about like a broken-necked doll’s. Lydia herself felt heavy on her the death-like fatigue which the last weeks had brought to her, but she was not sleepy. She looked out intently at the flat, fertile, kindly country, gradually darkening in the summer twilight. She was very fond of her home landscape. She had not taken so considerable a journey on a trolley for a long time—perhaps not since the trip to the Mallory house-party. That was a long time ago.
At the edge of thick woods the car came to a sudden stop. The lights went out. The conductor disappeared, twitched at the trolley, and went around for a consultation with the motorman, who had at once philosophically pulled off his worn glove and sat down on the step. “Power’s off!” he called back casually into the car to the accountant, who had started up wildly, with the idea, apparently, that he had been carried past his station. “We’ve got to wait till they turn her on again.”
“How long’ll that be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The whole system is on the bum to-day. Maybe half an hour; maybe more. Better take another nap.”
The accountant looked around the car, encountered Lydia’s eyes, and smiled sheepishly. After a time of silent waiting, enlivened only by the murmur of the conversation between the motorman and the conductor outside, the gray-haired man suggested to Lydia that it would be cooler out under the trees, and if she would like to go he would be glad to help her. When he had her established on a grassy bank he forbore further talk, and sat so still that, as the quiet moments slipped by, Lydia almost forgot him.
It was singularly pleasant there, with the rustling blackness of the wood behind them, and before them the sweep of the open farming country, shimmering faintly in the light of the stars now beginning to show in the great unbroken arch of the heavens.
Here the talk of the two men on the steps of the car was distinctly audible, and Lydia, with much interest, pieced together a character and life-history for each out of their desultory, friendly chat; but presently they too fell silent, listening to the stir of the night breezes in the forest. Lydia leaned her head against a tree and closed her eyes.
She never knew if it were from a doze, or but from a reverie that she was aroused by a sudden thrilling sound back of her—the clear, deep voice of a distant ’cello. Her heart began to beat faster, as it always did at the sound of music, and she sat up amazed, looking back into the intense blackness of the wood. And then, like a waking dream, came a flood of melody from what seemed to her an angel choir—fresh young voices, throbbing and proclaiming through the summer night some joyous, ever-ascending message. Lydia felt her pulses loud at her temples. Almost a faintness of pleasure came over her. There was something ineffably sweet about the disembodied voices sending their triumphant chant up to the stars.
The sound stopped as suddenly as it began. The motorman stirred and drew a long breath. “They do fine, don’t they?” he said. “My oldest girl’s learning to sing alto with them.”
“He ain’t musical himself, is he?” asked the conductor.
“No;heain’t. It’s some Dutch friends that does the playing. But he got the whole thing up, and runs the children. It’s a nawful good thing forthem, let me tell you.”
“What’d he do it for, I wonder,” queried the conductor idly.
“Aw, I don’t know. He’s kind o’ funny, anyhow. Said he wanted to teach young folks how to enjoy ’emselves without spending money. That kind of talk hits theirfolksin the right spot, you bet. He owns a slice of this farm, you know, and he’s given some of the younger kids pieces of ground for gardens, and he’s got up a night class in carpentering for young fellows that work in town all day. He’s a crack-a-jack of a carpenter himself.”
“He’ll run into the unions if he don’t look out,” prophesied the conductor.
“I guess likely,” assented the motorman. “They got after Dielman the other day, did you hear, because he—” The talk drifted to gossip of the world of work-people.
It stopped short as the ’cello again sent out its rich, vibrant introduction to the peal of full-throated joy. There seemed to be no other sound in all the enchanted, starlit world than this fervid harmony.
This time it did not stop, but went on and on, swelling and dying away and bursting out again into new ecstasies. In one of the pauses, when nothing but the ’cello’s chant came to her ears, Lydia suddenly heard mingling with it the sweet, faint voice of a little stream whispering vaguely, near her. It sounded almost like rain on autumn leaves. The lights in the car flared up, blinding white, but the two men on the step did not stir. The conductor sat with his arms folded on his knees, his head on his arms. The motorman leaned against the end of the car. When themusic finally died, after one long, ringing, exultant shout, no one moved for a time.
Then the motorman stood up, drawing on his glove.
“Quite a concert!” said the conductor, starting for the back platform.
“They dofine!” repeated the motorman.
The accountant came forward from the shadow and helped Lydia up the steps. There were traces of tears on his tired face.
In September, when her mother leaned over her to say in a joyful, trembling voice, “Oh, Lydia, it’s a girl, a darling little girl!” Lydia opened her white lips to say, “She is Ariadne.”
“What did you say?” asked her mother.
“We must see that she has the clue,” said Lydia faintly.
Mrs. Emery tiptoed to the doctor. “Keep her very quiet,” she whispered; “she is a little out of her head.”