IV.
ANNE, withdrawing from her mother’s embrace, had decreed, in a decisive tone: “And now I’m going to ring for Aline to tuck you up in bed. And presently your dinner will be brought; consommé and chicken and champagne. Is that what you’ll like?”
“Exactly what I shall like. But why not share it with you downstairs?”
But the girl had been firm, in a sweet yet almost obstinate way. “No, dearest—you’re really tired out. You don’t know it yet; but you will presently. I want you just to lie here, and enjoy the fire and the paper; and go to sleep as soon as you can.”
Where did her fresh flexible voice get its note of finality? It was—yes, without doubt—an echo of old Mrs. Clephane’s way of saying: “We’ll consider thatsettled, I think.”
Kate shivered a little; but it was only a passing chill. The use the girl made of her authority was so different—as if the old Mrs. Clephane in her spoke from a milder sphere—and it was so sweet to be compelled, to have things decided for one, to be told what one wanted and what was best for one. For years Kate Clephane had had to orderherself about: to tell herself to rest and not to worry, to eat when she wasn’t hungry, to sleep when she felt staring wide-awake. She would have preferred, on the whole, that evening, to slip into a tea-gown and go down to a quiet dinner, alone with her daughter and perhaps Fred Landers; she shrank from the hurricane that would start up in her head as soon as she was alone; yet she liked better still to be “mothered” in that fond blundering way the young have of mothering their elders. And besides, Anne perhaps felt—not unwisely—that again, for the moment, she and her mother had nothing more to say to each other; that to close on that soft note was better, just then, than farther effort.
At any rate, Anne evidently did not expect to have her decision questioned. It was that hint of finality in her solicitude that made Kate, as she sank into the lavender-scented pillows, feel—perhaps evoked by the familiar scent of cared-for linen—the closing-in on her of all the old bounds.
The next morning banished the sensation. She felt only, now, the novelty, the strangeness. Anne, entering in the wake of a perfect breakfast-tray, announced that Uncle Hendrik and Aunt Enid Drover were coming to dine, with their eldest son, Alan, with Lilla Gates (Lilla Gates, Kate recalled, was their married daughter) and Uncle Fred Landers. “No one else, dear, on account of this—” the girltouched her mourning dress—“but you’ll like to begin quietly, I know—after the fatigue of the crossing, I mean,” she added hastily, lest her words should seem to imply that her mother might have other reasons for shrinking from people. “No one else,” she continued, “but Joe and Nollie. Joe Tresselton, you know, married Nollie Shriner—yes, one of the Fourteenth Street Shriners, the one who was first married to Frank Haverford. She was divorced two years ago, and married Joe immediately afterward.” The words dropped from her as indifferently as if she had said: “She came out two years ago, and married Joe at the end of her first season.”
“Nollie Tresselton’s everything to me,” Anne began after a pause. “You’ll see—she’s transformed Joe. Everybody in the family adores her. She’s waked them all up. Even Aunt Enid, you know—. And when Lilla came to grief—”
“Lilla? Lilla Gates?”
“Yes. Didn’t you know? It was really dreadful for Aunt Enid—especially with her ideas. Lilla behaved really badly; even Nollie thinks she did. But Nollie arranged it as well as she could.... Oh, but I’m boring you with all this family gossip.” The girl paused, suddenly embarrassed; then, glancing out of the window: “It’s a lovely morning, and not too cold. What do you say to my running you up to Bronx Park and back before lunch, justto give you a glimpse of what Nollie calls ourNewYork? Or would you rather take another day to rest?”
The rush through the vivid air; the spectacle of the new sumptuous city; of the long reaches above the Hudson with their showy architecture and towering “Institutions”; of the smooth Boulevards flowing out to cared-for prosperous suburbs; the vista of Fifth Avenue, as they returned, stretching southward, interminably, between monumental façades and resplendent shop-fronts—all this and the tone of Anne’s talk, her unconscious allusions, revelations of herself and her surroundings, acted like champagne on Kate Clephane’s brain, making the world reel about her in a headlong dance that challenged her to join it. The way they all took their mourning, for instance! She, Anne, being her grandmother’s heiress (she explained) would of course not wear colours till Easter, or go to the Opera (except to matinées) for at least another month. Didn’t her mother think she was right? “Nollie thinks it awfully archaic of me to mix up music and mourning; what have they got to do with each other, as she says? But I know Aunt Enid wouldn’t like it ... and she’s been so kind to me. Don’t you agree that I’d better not?”
“But of course, dear; and I think your aunt’s right.”
Inwardly, Kate was recalling the inexorable laws which had governed family affliction in the New York to which she had come as a bride: three crape-walled years for a parent, two for sister or brother, at least twelve solid months of black for grandparent or aunt, and half a year (to the full) for cousins, even if you counted them by dozens, as the Clephanes did. As for the weeds of widowhood, they were supposed to be measured only by the extent of the survivor’s affliction, andthatwas expected to last as long, and proclaim itself as unmistakably in crape and seclusion, as the most intolerant censor in the family decreed—unless you were prepared to flout the whole clan, and could bear to be severely reminded that your veil was a quarter of a yard shorter than cousin Julia’s, though her bereavement antedated yours by six months. Much as Kate Clephane had suffered under the old dispensation, she felt a slight recoil from the indifference that had succeeded it. She herself, just before sailing, had replaced the coloured finery hastily bought on the Riviera by a few dresses of unnoticeable black, which, without suggesting the hypocrisy of her wearing mourning for old Mrs. Clephane, yet kept her appearance in harmony with her daughter’s; and Anne’s question made her glad that she had done so.
The new tolerance, she soon began to see, applied to everything; or, if it didn’t, she had not yetdiscovered the new prohibitions, and during all that first glittering day seemed to move through a millennium where the lamb of pleasure lay down with the lion of propriety.... After all, this New York into which she was being reinducted had never, in any of its stages, been hers; and the fact, which had facilitated her flight from it, leaving fewer broken ties and uprooted habits, would now, she saw, in an equal measure simplify her return. Her absence, during all those years, had counted, for the Clephanes, only in terms of her husband’s humiliation; there had been no family of her own to lament her fall, take up her defence, quarrel with the clan over the rights and wrongs of the case, force people to take sides, and leave a ramification of vague rancours to which her return would give new life. The old aunts and indifferent cousins at Meridia—her remote inland town—had bowed their heads before the scandal, thanking fortune that the people they visited would probably never hear of it. And now she came back free of everything and every one, and rather like a politician resuming office than a prodigal returning to his own.
The sense of it was so rejuvenating that she was almost sure she was looking her best (and with less help than usual from Aline) when she went down to dinner to meet the clan. Enid Drover’s appearance gave a momentary check to her illusion:Enid, after eighteen years, seemed alarmingly the same—pursed-up lips, pure vocabulary and all. She had even kept, to an astonishing degree, the physical air of her always middle-aged youth, the smooth complexion, symmetrically-waved hair and empty eyes that made her plump small-nosed face like a statue’s. Yet the mere fact of her daughter Lilla profoundly altered her—the fact that she could sit beaming maternally across the table at that impudent stripped version of herself, with dyed hair, dyed lashes, drugged eyes and unintelligible dialect. And her husband, Hendrik Drover—the typical old New Yorker—that he too should accept this outlawed daughter, laugh at her slang, and greet her belated entrance with the remark: “Top-notch get-up tonight, Lil!”
“Oh, Lilla’s going on,” laughed Mrs. Joe Tresselton, slipping her thin brown arm through her cousin’s heavy white one.
Lilla laughed indolently. “Ain’tyou?”
“No—I mean to stay and bore Aunt Kate till the small hours, if she’ll let me.”
Aunt Kate!How sweet it sounded, in that endearing young voice! No wonder Anne had spoken as she did of Nollie. Whatever Mrs. Joe Tresselton’s past had been, it had left on her no traces like those which had smirched and deadened Lilla. Kate smiled back at Nollie and loved her. She was prepared to love Joe Tresselton too, if only forhaving brought this live thing into the family. Personally, Joe didn’t at first offer many points of contact: he was so hopelessly like his cousin Alan Drover, and like all the young American officers Kate had seen on leave on the Riviera, and all the young men who showed off collars or fountain-pens or golf-clubs in the backs of American magazines. But then Kate had been away so long that, as yet, the few people she had seen were always on the point of being merged into a collective American Face. She wondered if Anne would marry an American Face, and hoped, before that, to learn to differentiate them; meanwhile, she would begin by practising on Joe, who, seating himself beside her with the collective smile, seemed about to remark: “See that Arrow?”
Instead he said: “Anne’s great, isn’t she, Aunt Kate?” and thereby acquired an immediate individuality for Anne’s mother.
Dinner was announced, and at the dining-room door Kate wavered, startled by the discovery that it was still exactly the same room—black and gold, with imitation tapestries and a staring white bust niched in a red marble over-mantel—and feeling once more uncertain as to what was expected of her. But already Anne was guiding her to her old seat at the head of the table, and waiting for her to assign their places to the others. The girl did it without a word; just a glance and the least touch.If this were indeed a mannerless age, how miraculously Anne’s manners had been preserved!
And now the dinner was progressing, John Clephane’s champagne bubbling in their glasses (it seemed oddest of all to be drinking her husband’s Veuve Clicquot), Lilla steadily smoking, both elbows on the table, and Nollie Tresselton leading an exchange of chaff between the younger cousins, with the object, as Kate Clephane guessed, of giving her, the newcomer, time to take breath and get her bearings. It was wonderful, sitting there, to recall the old “family dinners”, when Enid’s small censorious smile (Enid, then in her twenties!) seemed as inaccessible to pity as the forbidding line of old Mrs. Clephane’s lips; when even Joe Tresselton’s mother (that lazy fat Alethea Tresselton) had taken her cue from the others, and echoed their severities with a mouth made for kissing and forgiving; and John Clephane, at the foot of the table, proud of his house, proud of his wine, proud of his cook, still half-proud of his wife, was visibly saying to himself, as he looked about on his healthy handsome relatives: “After all, blood is thicker than water.”
The contrast was the more curious because nothing, after all, could really alter people like the Drovers. Enid was still gently censorious, though with her range of criticism so deflected by the huge exception to be made for her daughter that her fault-finding had an odd remoteness: and HendrikDrover, Kate guessed, would be as easily shocked as of old by allusions to the “kind of thing they did in Europe”, though what they did at home was so vividly present to him in Lilla’s person, and in the fact of Joe Tresselton’s having married a Fourteenth Street Shriner, and a divorced one at that.
It was all too bewildering for a poor exile to come to terms with—Mrs. Clephane could only smile and listen, and be thankful that her own case was so evidently included in the new range of their indulgence.
But the young people—what did they think? That would be the interesting thing to know. They had all, she gathered, far more interests and ideas than had scantily furnished her own youth, but all so broken up, scattered, and perpetually interrupted by the strenuous labour of their endless forms of sport, that they reminded her of a band of young entomologists, equipped with the newest thing in nets, but in far too great a hurry ever to catch anything. Yet perhaps it seemed so only to the slower motions of middle-age.
Kate’s glance wandered from Lilla Gates, the most obvious and least interesting of the group, to Nollie Shriner (one of the “awful” Fourteenth Street Shriners); Nollie Shriner first, then Nollie Haverford, wife of a strait-laced Albany Haverford, and now Nollie Tresselton, though she still looked, with her brown squirrel-face and slim littlebody, like a girl in the schoolroom. Yes, even Nollie seemed to be in a great hurry; one felt her perpetually ordering and sorting and marshalling things in her mind, and the fact, Kate presently perceived, now and then gave an odd worn look of fixity to her uncannily youthful face. Kate wondered when there was ever time to enjoy anything, with that perpetual alarm-clock in one’s breast.
Her glance travelled on to her own daughter. Anne seemed eager too, but not at such a pace, or about such a multiplicity of unrelated things. Perhaps, though, it was only the fact of being taller, statelier—old-fashioned words still fitted Anne—which gave her that air of boyish aloofness. But no; it was the mystery of her eyes—those eyes which, as Kate had told her, she had chosen for herself from some forgotten ancestral treasury into which none of the others had dipped. Between olive and brown, but flecked with golden lights, a little too deep-set, the lower lid flowing up smooth and flat from the cheek, and the black lashes as evenly set as the microscopic plumes in a Peruvian feather-ornament; and above them, too prominent, even threatening, yet melting at times to curves of maiden wonder, the obstinate brows of old Mrs. Clephane. What did those eyes portend?
Kate Clephane glanced away, frightened at the riddle, and absorbed herself in the preoccupying fact that the only way to tell the Drovers from theTresseltons was to remember that the Drovers’ noses were even smaller than the Tresseltons’ (butwouldthat help, if one met one of either tribe alone?). She was roused by hearing Enid Drover question plaintively, as the ladies regained the drawing-room: “But after all, whyshouldn’tAnne go too?”
The women formed an interrogative group around Mrs. Clephane, who found herself suddenly being scrutinized as if for a verdict. She cast a puzzled glance at Anne, and her daughter slipped an arm through hers but addressed Mrs. Drover.
“Go to Madge Glenver’s cabaret-party with Lilla? But there’s no real reason at all why I shouldn’t—except that my preference, like Nollie’s, happens to be for staying at home this evening.”
Mrs. Drover heaved a faint sigh of relief, but her daughter, shrugging impatient shoulders out of her too-willing shoulder-straps, grumbled: “Then why doesn’t Aunt Kate come too? You’ll talk her to death if you all stay here all the evening.”
Nollie Tresselton smiled. “So much for what Lilla thinks of the charm of our conversation!”
Lilla shrugged again. “Notyourconversation particularly. I hate talking. I only like noises that don’t mean anything.”
“Does that rule out talking—quite?”
“Well, I hate cleverness, then; you and Anneare always being clever. You’ll tire Aunt Kate a lot more than Madge’s party would.” She stood there, large and fair, the features of her small inexpressive face so like her mother’s, the lines of her relaxed inviting body so different from Mrs. Drover’s righteous curves. Her painted eyes rested curiously on Mrs. Clephane. “You don’t suppose she spent her time in Europe sitting at home like this, do you?” she asked the company with simplicity.
There was a stricken pause. Kate filled it by saying with a laugh: “You’ll think I might as well have, when I tell you I’ve never in my life been to a cabaret-party.”
Lilla’s stare deepened; she seemed hardly able to take the statement in. “Whatdidyou do with your evenings, then?” she questioned, after an apparently hopeless search for alternatives.
Mrs. Drover had grown pink and pursed-up; even Nollie Tresselton’s quick smile seemed congealed. But Kate felt herself carrying it off on wings. “Very often I just sat at home alone, and thought of you all here, and of our first evening together—this very evening.”
She saw Anne colour a little, and felt the quick pressure of her arm. That they should have found each other again, she and Anne!
The butler threw open the drawing-room door with solemnity. “A gentleman has called in hismotor for Mrs. Gates; he sends word that he’s in a hurry, madam, please.”
“Oh,” said Lilla, leaping upon her fan and vanity bag. She was out of the room before the butler had rounded off his sentence.
Mrs. Drover, her complacency restored, sank down on a plump Clephane sofa that corresponded in richness and ponderosity with her own person. “Lilla’s such a baby!” she sighed; then, with a freer breath, addressed herself to sympathetic enquiries as to Mrs. Clephane’s voyage. It was evident that, as far as the family were concerned, Anne’s mother had been born again, seven days earlier, on the gang-plank of the liner that had brought her home. On these terms they were all delighted to have her back; and Mrs. Drover declared herself particularly thankful that the voyage had been so smooth.