III.
AS Kate Clephane stood on deck, straining her eyes at the Babylonian New York which seemed to sway and totter toward her menacingly, she felt a light hand on her arm.
“Anne!”
She barely suppressed the questioning lift of her voice; for the length of a heart-beat she had not been absolutely certain. Then ... yes, there was her whole youth, her whole married past, in that small pale oval—her own hair, but duskier, stronger; something of her smile too, she fancied; and John Clephane’s straight rather heavy nose, beneath old Mrs. Clephane’s awful brows.
“But the eyes—you chose your own eyes, my darling!” She had the girl at arms’-length, her own head thrown back a little: Anne was slightly the taller, and her pale face hung over her mother’s like a young moon seen through mist.
“So wise of you! Such an improvement on anything we had in stock....” How absurd! When she thought of the things she had meant to say! What would her child think her? Incurably frivolous, of course. Well, if she stopped to considerthatshe was lost.... She flung both arms about Anne and laid a long kiss on her fresh cheek.
“My Anne ... little Anne....”
She thirsted to have the girl to herself, where she could touch her hair, stroke her face, draw the gloves from her hands, kiss her over and over again, and little by little, from that tall black-swathed figure, disengage the round child’s body she had so long continued to feel against her own, like a warmth and an ache, as the amputated feel the life in a lost limb.
“Come, mother: this way. And here’s Mr. Landers,” the girl said. Her voice was not unkind; it was not cold; it was only muffled in fold on fold of shyness, embarrassment and constraint. After all, Kate thought, it was just as well that the crowd, the confusion and Fred Landers were there to help them over those first moments.
“Fred Landers! Dear old Fred! Is it you, really? Known me anywhere? Oh, nonsense! Look at my gray hair. Butyou—” She had said the words over so often in enacting this imagined scene that they were on her lips in a rush; but some contradictory impulse checked them there, and let her just murmur “Fred” as her hand dropped into that of the heavy grizzled man with a red-and-yellow complexion and screwed-up blue eyes whom Time had substituted for the thin loose-jointed friend of her youth.
Landers beamed on her, silent also; a common instinct seemed to have told all three that for the moment there was nothing to say—that they must just let propinquity do its mysterious work without trying to hasten the process.
In the motor Mrs. Clephane’s agony began. “What do they think ofme?” she wondered. She felt so sure, so safe, so enfolded, with them; or she would have, if only she could have guessed what impression she was making. She put it in the plural, because, though at that moment all she cared for was what Anne thought, she had guessed instantly that, for a time at least, Anne’s view would be influenced by her guardian’s.
The very tone in which he had said, facing them from his seat between the piled-up bags: “You’ll find this young woman a handful—I’m not sorry to resign my trust—” showed the terms the two were on. And so did Anne’s rejoinder: “I’m not a handful now to any one but myself—I’m in my own hands, Uncle Fred.”
He laughed, and the girl smiled. Kate wished her daughter and she had been facing each other, so that she could have seen the whole stretch of the smile, instead of only the tip dimpling away into a half-turned cheek. So much depended, for the mother, on that smile—on the smile, and the motion of those grave brows. The whole point was, how far did the one offset the other?
“Yes,” Mr. Landers assented, “you’re a free agent now—been one for just three weeks, haven’t you? So far you’ve made fairly good use of your liberty.”
Guardian and ward exchanged another smile, in which Kate felt herself generously included; then Landers’s eye turned to hers. “You’re not a bit changed, you know.”
“Oh, come! Nonsense.” Again she checked that silly “look at my gray hair.” “I hope one never is, to old friends—after the first shock, at any rate.”
“There wasn’t any first shock. I spotted you at once, from the pier.”
Anne intervened in her calm voice. “I recognized mother too—from such a funny old photograph, in a dress with puffed sleeves.”
Mrs. Clephane tried to smile. “I don’t know, darling, if I recognized you.... You were just there ... in me ... where you’ve always been....” She felt her voice breaking, and was glad to have Mr. Landers burst in with: “And what do you say to our new Fifth Avenue?”
She stood surveying its upper reaches, that afternoon, from the window of the sitting-room Anne had assigned to her. Yes; Fred Landers was right, it was a new, an absolutely new, Fifth Avenue; but there was nothing new about Anne’s house. Incongruously enough—in that fluid city, where the stoutest buildings seemed like atoms forever shaken intonew patterns by the rumble of Undergrounds and Elevateds—the house was the very one which had once been Kate’s, the home to which, four-and-twenty years earlier, she had been brought as a bride.
Her house, since she had been its mistress; but never hers in the sense of her having helped to make it. John Clephane lived by proverbs. One was that fools built houses for wise men to live in; so he had bought a fool’s house, furniture and all, and moved into it on his marriage. But if it had been built by a fool, Kate sometimes used to wonder, how was it that her husband found it to be planned and furnished so exactly as he would have chosen? He never tired of boasting of the fact, seemingly unconscious of the unflattering inference to be drawn; perhaps, if pressed, he would have said there was no contradiction, since the house had cost the fool a great deal to build, and him, the wise man, very little to buy. It had been, he was never tired of repeating, a bargain, the biggest kind of a bargain; and that, somehow, seemed a reason (again Kate didn’t see why) for leaving everything in it unchanged, even to the heraldic stained glass on the stairs and the Jacobean mantel in a drawing-room that ran to Aubusson.... And here it all was again, untouched, unworn—the only difference being that she, Kate, was installed in the visitor’s suite on the third floor (swung up to it in a little jewel-box of a lift), instead of occupying the rooms below whichhad once been “Papa’s and Mamma’s”. The change struck her at once—and the fact that Anne, taking her up, had first pressed the wrong button, the one for the floor below, and then reddened in correcting her mistake. The girl evidently guessed that her mother would prefer not to go back to those other rooms; her having done so gave Kate a quick thrill.
“You don’t mind being so high up, mother?”
“I like it ever so much better, dear.”
“I’m so glad!” Anne was making an evident effort at expansiveness. “That’s jolly of you—like this we shall be on the same floor.”
“Ah, you’ve kept the rooms you had—?” Kate didn’t know how to put it.
“Yes: the old nursery. First it was turned into a schoolroom, then into my den. One gets attached to places. I never should have felt at home anywhere else. Come and see.”
Ah, here, at last, in the grim middle-aged house, were youth and renovation! The nursery, having changed its use, had perforce had to change its appearance. Japanese walls of reddish gold; a few modern pictures; books; a budding wistaria in a vase of Corean pottery; big tables, capacious armchairs, an ungirlish absence of photographs and personal trifles. Not particularly original; but a sober handsome room, and comfortable, though so far from “cosy.” Kate wondered: “Is it her own idea, or is this what the new girl likes?” She recalled the pinkand white trifles congesting her maiden bower, and felt as if a rather serious-minded son were showing her his study. An Airedale terrier, stretched before the fire, reinforced the impression. She didn’t believe many of the new girls had rooms like this.
“It’s all your own idea, isn’t it?” she asked, almost shyly.
“I don’t know—yes. Uncle Fred helped me, of course. He knows a lot about Oriental pottery. I called him ‘Uncle’ after father died,” Anne explained, “because there’s nothing else to call a guardian, is there?”
On the wall Kate noticed a rough but vivid oil-sketch of a branch of magnolias. She went up to it, attracted by its purity of colour. “I like that,” she said.
Anne’s eyes deepened. “Do you? I did it.”
“You, dear? I didn’t know you painted.” Kate felt herself suddenly blushing; the abyss of all she didn’t know about her daughter had once more opened before her, and she just managed to murmur: “I mean, not likethis. It’s very broad—very sure. You must have worked....”
The girl laughed, caught in the contagion of her mother’s embarrassment. “Yes, I’ve worked hard—I care for it a great deal.”
Kate sighed and turned from the picture. The few words they had exchanged—the technical phrases she had used—had called up a time when the vocabularyof the studio was forever in her ears, and she wanted, at that moment, to escape from it as quickly as she could.
Against the opposite wall was a deep sofa, books and a reading-lamp beside it. Kate paused. “That’s just where your crib used to stand!” She turned to the fireplace with an unsteady laugh. “I can see you by the hearth, in your little chair, with the fire shining through your bush of hair, and your toys on the shelf in front of you. You thought the sparks were red birds in a cage, and you used to try to coax them through the fender with bits of sugar.”
“Oh, did I? You darling, to remember!” The girl put an arm about Kate. It seemed to the mother, as the young warmth flowed through her, that everything else had vanished, and that together they were watching the little girl with the bush of hair coaxing the sparks through the fender.
Anne had left her, and Mrs. Clephane, alone in her window, looked down on the new Fifth Avenue. As it surged past, a huge lava-flow of interlaced traffic, her tired bewildered eyes seemed to see the buildings move with the vehicles, as a stationary train appears to move to travellers on another line. She fancied that presently even the little Washington Square Arch would trot by, heading the tide of sky-scrapers from the lower reaches of the city.... Oppressed and confused, she rejected the restlessvision and called up in its place the old Fifth Avenue, the Fifth Avenue still intact at her marriage, a thoroughfare of monotonously ugly brown houses divided by a thin trickle of horse-drawn carriages; and she saw her mother-in-law, in just such a richly-curtained window, looking down, with dry mental comments, on old Mrs. Chivers’s C-spring barouche and Mrs. Beaufort’s new chestnut steppers, and knowing how long ago the barouche had been imported from Paris, and how much had been paid for the steppers—for Mrs. Clephane senior belonged to the generation which still surveyed its world from an upper window, like the Dutch ancestresses to whom the doings of the street were reported by a little mirror.
The contrast was too great; Kate Clephane felt herself too much a part of that earlier day. The overwhelming changes had all happened, in a whirl, during the years of her absence; and meanwhile she had been living in quiet backwaters, or in the steady European capitals where renewals make so little mark on the unyielding surface of the past. She turned back into the room, seeking refuge in its familiar big-patterned chintz, the tufted lounge, the woolly architecture of the carpet. It was thoughtful of Anne to have left her.... They were both beginning to be oppressed again by a sense of obstruction: the packed memories of their so different pasts had jammed the passages between them. Anne hadvisibly felt that, and with a light kiss slipped out. “She’s perfect,” her mother thought, a little frightened....
She said to herself: “I’m dead tired—” put on a dressing-gown, dismissed the hovering Aline, and lay down by the fire. Then, in the silence, when the door had shut, she understood how excited she was, and how impossible it would be to rest.
Her eyes wandered about the unchanged scene, and into the equally familiar bedroom beyond—the “best spare-room” of old days. There hung the same red-eyed Beatrice Cenci above the double bed. John Clephane’s parents had travelled in the days when people still brought home copies of the Old Masters; and a mixture of thrift and filial piety had caused John Clephane to preserve their collection in the obscurer corners of his house. Kate smiled at the presiding genius selected to guard the slumbers of married visitors (as Ribera monks and Caravaggio gamblers darkened the digestive processes in the dining-room); she smiled, as she so often had—but now without bitterness—at the naïve incongruities of that innocent and inquisitorial past. Then her eye lit on the one novelty in the room: the telephone at her elbow. Oh, to talk to some one—to talk to Fred Landers, instantly! “There are too many things I don’t know ... I’m too utterly in the dark,” she murmured. She rushed through the directory, found his number, and assailed his parlour-maidwith questions. But Mr. Landers was not at home; the parlour-maid’s inflexion signified: “At this hour?” and a glance at the clock showed Kate that the endless day had barely reached mid-afternoon. Of course he would not be at home. But the parlour-maid added: “He’s always at his office till five.”
His office! Fred Landers had an office—had one still! Kate remembered that two-and-twenty years ago, after lunching with them, he used always to glance at his watch and say: “Time to get back to the office.” And he was well-off—always had been. He needn’t—needn’t! What on earth did he do there, she wondered? What results, pecuniary or other, had he to show for his quarter-century of “regular hours”? She remembered that his profession had been legal—most of one’s men friends, in those remote days, were lawyers. But she didn’t fancy he had ever appeared in court; people consulted him about investments, he looked after estates. For the last years, very likely, his chief business had been to look after Anne’s; no doubt he was one of John Clephane’s executors, and also old Mrs. Clephane’s. One pictured him as deeply versed in will-making and will-interpreting: he had always, in his dry mumbling way, rather enjoyed a quibble over words. Kate thought, by the way, that he mumbled less, spoke more “straight from the shoulder,” than he used to. Perhaps it was experience, authority, thefact of being consulted and looked up to, that had changed the gaunt shambling Fred Landers of old days into the four-square sort of man who had met her on the pier and disentangled her luggage with so little fuss. Oh, yes, she was sure the new Fred Landers could help her—advice was just what she wanted, and what, she suspected, he liked to give.
She called up his office, and in less than a minute there was his calm voice asking what he could do.
“Come at once—oh, Fred, you must!”
She heard: “Is there anything wrong?” and sent him a reassuring laugh.
“Nothing—exceptme. I don’t yet know how to fit in. There are so many things I ought to be told. Remember, I’m so unprepared—”
She fancied she felt a tremor of disapproval along the wire. Ought she not to have gone even as far as that on the telephone?
“Anne’s out,” she added hastily. “I was tired, and she told me to rest. But I can’t. How can I? Can’t you come?”
He returned, without the least acceleration of the syllables: “I never leave the office until—”
“Five. I know. But just today—”
There was a pause. “Yes; I’ll come, of course. But you know there’s nothing in the world to bother about,” he added patiently. (“He’s saying to himself,” she thought, “‘that’s the sort of fuss that used to drive poor Clephane out of his wits’.”)
But when he came he did not strike her as having probably said anything of the sort. There was no trace of “the office”, or of any other preoccupation, in the friendly voice in which he asked her if she wouldn’t please stay lying down, and let him do the talking.
“Yes, I want you to. I want you to tell me everything. And first of all—” She paused to gather up her courage. “What does Anne know?” she flung at him.
Her visitor had seated himself in the armchair facing her. The late afternoon light fell on his thick ruddy face, in which the small eyes, between white lids, looked startlingly blue. At her question the blood rose from his cheeks to his forehead, and invaded the thin pepper-and-salt hair carefully brushed over his solidly moulded head.
“Don’t—don’t try to find out, I beg of you; I haven’t,” he stammered.
She felt his blush reflected on her own pale cheek, and the tears rose to her eyes. How was he to help her if he took that tone? He did not give her time to answer, but went on, in a voice laboriously cheerful: “Look forward, not back: that’s the thing to do. Living with young people, isn’t it the natural attitude? And Anne is not the kind to dig and brood: thank goodness, she’s health itself, body and soul. She asks no questions; never has. Why should I have put it into her head that there wereany to ask? Her grandmother didn’t. It was her policy ... as it’s been mine. If we didn’t always agree, the old lady and I, we did onthat.” He stood up and leaned against the mantel, his gaze embracing the pyramidal bronze clock on which a heavily-draped Muse with an Etruscan necklace rested her lyre. “Anne was simply given to understand that you and her father didn’t agree; that’s all. A girl,” he went on in an embarrassed tone, “can’t grow up nowadays without seeing a good many cases of the kind about her; Lord forgive me, they’re getting to be the rule rather than the exception. Lots of things that you, at her age, might have puzzled over and thought mysterious, she probably takes for granted. At any rate she behaves as if she did.
“Things didn’t always go smoothly between her and her grandmother. The child has talents, you know; developed ’em early. She paints cleverly, and the old lady had her taught; but when she wanted a studio of her own there was a row—I was sent for. Mrs. Clephane had never heard of anybody in the family having a studio; that settled it. Well, Anne’s going to have one now. And so it was with everything. In the end Anne invariably gets what she wants. She knew of course that you and her grandmother were not the best of friends—my idea is that she tried to see you not long after her father died, and was told by theold lady that she must wait till she was of age. They neither of them told me so—but, well, it was in the air. And Anne waited. But now she’s doubly free—and you see the first use she’s made of her freedom.” He had recovered his ease, and sat down again, his hands on his knees, his trouser-hem rather too high above wrinkled socks and solemn square-toed boots. “I may say,” he added smiling, “that she cabled to you without consulting me—without consulting anybody. I heard about it only when she showed me your answer. That ought to tell you,” he concluded gaily, “as much as anything can, about Anne. Only take her for granted, as she will you, and you’ve got your happiest days ahead of you—see if you haven’t.”
As he blinked at her with kindly brotherly eyes she saw in their ingenuous depths the terror of the man who has tried to buy off fate by one optimistic evasion after another, till it has become second nature to hand out his watch and pocket-book whenever reality waylays him.
She exchanged one glance with that lurking fear; then she said: “Yes; you’re right, I suppose. But there’s not only Anne. What do other people know? I ought to be told.”
His face clouded again, though not with irritation. He seemed to understand that the appeal was reasonable, and to want to help her, yet tofeel that with every word she was making it more difficult.
“What they know? Why ... why ... what theyhadto ... merely that....” (“What you yourself forced on them,” his tone seemed to imply.)
“That I went away....”
He nodded.
“With another man....”
Reluctantly he brought the words out after her: “With another man.”
“With Hylton Davies....”
“Hylton Davies....”
“And travelled with him—for nearly two years.”
He frowned, but immediately fetched a sigh of relief. “Oh, well—abroad. And he’s dead.” He glanced at her cautiously, and then added: “He’s not a man that many people remember.”
But she insisted: “After that....—”
Mr. Landers lifted his hand in a gesture of reassurance; the cloud was lifted from his brow. “After that, we all know what your life was. You’ll forgive my putting it bluntly: but your living in that quiet way—all these years—gradually produced a change of opinion ... told immensely in your favour. Even among the Clephane relations ... especially those who had glimpses of you abroad ... or heard of you when they were there. Some of the family distinctly disapproved of—of John’s attitude; his persistent refusal ... yes, the Tresseltonseven, and the Drovers—I know they all did what they could—especially Enid Drover—”
Her blood rushed up and the pulses drummed in her temples. “If I cry,” she thought, “it will upset him—” but the tears rose in a warm gush about her heart.
“Enid Drover? I never knew—”
“Oh, yes; so that for a long time I hoped ... we all hoped....”
She began to tremble. Even her husband’s sister Enid Drover! She had remembered the Hendrik Drovers, both husband and wife, as among the narrowest, the most inexorable of the Clephane tribe. But then, it suddenly flashed across her, if it hadn’t been for the episode with Chris perhaps she might have come back years before. What mocking twists fate gave to one’s poor little life-pattern!
“Well—?” she questioned, breathless.
He met her gaze now without a shadow of constraint. “Oh, well, you know what John was—always the slave of anything he’d once said. Once he’d found a phrase for a thing, the phrase ruled him. He never could be got beyond that first vision of you ... you and Davies....”
“Never—?”
“No. All the years after made no difference to him. He wouldn’t listen. ‘Burnt child dreads the fire’ was all he would say. And after he died hismother kept it up. She seemed to regard it as a duty to his memory.... She might have had your life spread out before her eyes, day by day, hour by hour ... it wouldn’t have changed her.” He reddened again. “Some of your friends kept on trying ... but nothing made any difference.”
Kate Clephane lay silent, staring at the fire. Tentatively, fearfully, she was building up out of her visitor’s tones, his words, his reticences, the incredible fact that, for him and all her husband’s family—that huge imperious clan—her life, after she had left them, had been divided into two sharply differentiated parts: the brief lapse with Hylton Davies, the long expiation alone. Of that third episode, which for her was the central fact of her experience, apparently not a hint had reached them. She was the woman who had once “stooped to folly”, and then, regaining her natural uprightness, had retained it inflexibly through all the succeeding years. As the truth penetrated her mind she was more frightened than relieved. Was she not returning on false pretences to these kindly forgiving relations? Was it not possible, indeed almost certain, that a man like Frederick Landers, had he known about Chris, would have used all his influence to dissuade Anne from sending for her, instead of exerting it in the opposite sense, as he avowedly had? And, that being so, was she not taking them all unawares, actually abusing their good faith, inpassing herself off as the penitential figure whom the passage of blameless years had gradually changed from the offending into the offended? Yet was it, after all, possible that the affair with Chris, and the life she had led with him, could so completely have escaped their notice? Rumour has a million eyes, and though she had preserved appearances in certain, almost superstitious, ways, she had braved them recklessly in others, especially toward the end, when the fear of losing Chris had swept away all her precautions. Then suddenly the explanation dawned on her. She had met Chris for the first time less than a year before the outbreak of the war, and the last of their months together, the most reckless and fervid, had been overshadowed, blotted out of everybody’s sight, in that universal eclipse.
She had never before thought of it in that way: for her the war had begun only when Chris left her. During its first months she and he had been in Spain and Italy, shut off by the safe Alps or the neutral indifference; and the devouring need to keep Chris amused, and herself amusing, had made her fall into the easy life of the Italian watering-places, and the careless animation of Rome, without any real sense of being in an altered world. Around them they found only the like-minded; the cheerful, who refused to be “worried”, or the argumentative and paradoxical, like Chris himself, who thought ittheir duty as “artists” or “thinkers” to ignore the barbarian commotion. It was only in 1915, when Chris’s own attitude was mysteriously altered, and she found him muttering that after all a fellow couldn’t stand aside when all his friends and the chaps of his own age were getting killed—only then did the artificial defences fall, and the reality stream in on her. Was his change of mind genuine? He often said that his opinions hadn’t altered, but that there were times when opinions didn’t count ... when a fellow just had toact. It was her own secret thought (had been, perhaps, for longer than she knew); but with Chris—could one ever tell? Whatever he was doing, he was sure, after a given time, to want to be doing something else, and to find plausible reasons for it: even the war might be serving merely as a pretext for his unrest. Unless ... unless he used it as an excuse for leaving her? Unless being withherwas what it offered an escape from? If only she could have judged him more clearly, known him better! But between herself and any clear understanding of him there had hung, from the first, the obscuring mist of her passion, muffling his face, touch, speech (so that now, at times, she could not even rebuild his features or recall his voice), obscuring every fold and cranny of his character, every trick of phrase, every doubling and dodging of his restless mind and capricious fancy. Sometimes, in looking back, shethought there was only one sign she had ever read clearly in him, and that was the first sign of his growing tired of her. Disguise that as she would, avert her eyes from it, argue it away, there the menace always was again, faint but persistent, like the tiny intermittent pang which first announces a mortal malady.
And of all this none of the people watching her from across the sea had had a suspicion. The war had swallowed her up, her and all her little concerns, as it had engulfed so many million others. It seemed written that, till the end, she should have to be thankful for the war.
Her eyes travelled back to Fred Landers, whose sturdy bulk, planted opposite her, seemed to have grown so far off and immaterial. Did he really guess nothing of that rainbow world she had sent her memory back to? And what would he think or say if she lifted the veil and let him into it?
“He’ll hate me for it—but I must,” she murmured. She raised herself on her elbow: “Fred—”
The door opened softly to admit Anne, with the Airedale at her heels. They brought in a glow of winter air and the strange cold perfume of the dusk.
“Uncle Fred? How jolly of you to have come! I was afraid I’d left mother alone too long,” the girl said, bending to her mother’s cheek. At the caress the blood flowed back into Kate’s heart. Shelooked up and her eyes drank in her daughter’s image.
Anne hung above her for a moment, tall, black-cloaked, remote in the faint light; then she dropped on her knees beside the couch.
“But you’retired... you’re utterly done up and worn out!” she exclaimed, slipping an arm protectingly behind her mother. There was a note of reproach and indignation in her voice. “You must never be tired or worried about things any more; I won’t have it; we won’t any of us have it. Remember, I’m here to look after you now—and so is Uncle Fred,” she added gaily.
“That’s what I tell her—nothing on earth to worry aboutnow,” Mr. Landers corroborated, getting up from his chair and making for the door with muffled steps.
“Nothing, nothing—ever again! You’ll promise me that, mother, won’t you?”
Kate Clephane let her hand droop against the strong young shoulder. She felt herself sinking down into a very Bethesda-pool of forgetfulness and peace. From its depths she raised herself just far enough to say: “I promise.”