VII.
EVERY one noticed how beautifully it worked; the way, as Fred Landers said, she and Anne had hit it off from their first look at each other on the deck of the steamer.
Enid Drover was almost emotional about it, one evening when she and Kate sat alone in the Clephane drawing-room. It was after one of Anne’s “young” dinners, and the other guests, with Anne herself, had been whirled off to some form of midnight entertainment.
“It’s wonderful, my dear, how you’ve done it. Poor mother didn’t always find Anne easy, you know. But she’s taken a tremendous fancy to you.”
Kate felt herself redden with pride. “I suppose it’s the novelty, partly,” Mrs. Drover continued, with her heavy-stepping simplicity. “Perhaps that’s an advantage, in a way.” But she pulled up, apparently feeling that, in some obscure manner, she might be offending where she sought to please. “Anne admires your looks so much, you know; and your slightness.” A sigh came from her adipose depths. “I do believe it gives one more hold over one’s girls to have kept one’s figure. One can at least go on wearing the kind of clothes they like.”
Kate felt an inward glow of satisfaction. The irony of the situation hardly touched her: the fact that the youth and elasticity she had clung to so desperately should prove one of the chief assets of her new venture. It was beginning to seem natural that everything should lead up to Anne.
“This business of setting up a studio, now; Anne’s so pleased that you approve. She had a struggle with her grandmother about it; but poor mother wouldn’t give in. She was too horrified. She thought paint so messy—and then how could she have got up all those stairs?”
“Ah, well”—it was so easy to be generous!—“that sort of thing did seem horrifying to Mrs. Clephane’s generation. After all, it was not so long before her day that Dr. Johnson said portrait-painting was indelicate in a female.”
Mrs. Drover gave her sister-in-law a puzzled look. Her mind seldom retained more than one word in any sentence, and her answer was based on the reaction that particular word provoked. “Female—” she murmured—“is that word being used again? I never thought it very nice to apply it to women, did you? I suppose I’m old-fashioned. Nothing shocks the young people nowadays—not even the Bible.”
Nothing could have given Kate Clephane greater confidence in her own success than this little talk with Enid Drover. She had been feeling her wayso patiently, so stealthily almost, among the out-works and defences of her daughter’s character; and here she was actually instated in the citadel.
Anne’s “studio-warming” strengthened the conviction. Mrs. Clephane had not been allowed to see the studio; Anne and Nollie and Joe Tresselton, for a breathless week, had locked themselves in with nails and hammers and pots of paint, sealing their ears against all questioning. Then one afternoon the doors were opened, and Kate, coming out of the winter twilight, found herself in a great half-lit room with a single wide window overlooking the reaches of the Sound all jewelled and netted with lights, the fairy span of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the dark roof-forest of the intervening city. It all seemed strangely significant and mysterious in that disguising dusk—full of shadows, distances, invitations. Kate leaned in the window, surprised at this brush of the wings of poetry.
In the room, Anne had had the good taste to let the sense of space prolong itself. It looked more like a great library waiting for its books than a modern studio; as though the girl had measured the distance between that mighty nocturne and her own timid attempts, and wanted the implements of her art to pass unnoticed.
They were sitting—Mrs. Clephane, the Joe Tresseltons and one or two others—about the tea-cups set out at one end of a long oak table, when thedoor opened and Lilla Gates appeared, tawny and staring, in white furs and big pendulous earrings. She brought with her a mingled smell of cigarettes and Houbigant, and as she stood there, circling the room with her sulky contemptuous gaze, Kate felt a movement of annoyance.
“Why must one forever go on being sorry for Lilla?” she wondered, wincing a little as Anne’s lips touched her cousin’s mauve cheek.
“It was nice of you to come, Lilla.”
“Well—I chucked something bang-up for you,” said Lilla coolly. It was evidently her pride to be perpetually invited, perpetually swamped in a multiplicity of boring engagements. She looked about her again, and then dropped into an armchair. “Mercy—youhavecleared the decks!” she remarked. “Ain’t there going to be any more furniture than this?”
“Oh, the furniture’s all outside—and the pictures too,” Anne said, pointing to the great window.
“What—Brooklyn Bridge? Lord!—Oh, but I see: you’ve kept the place clear for dancing. Good girl, Anne! Can I bring in some of my little boys sometimes? Is that a pianola?” she added, with a pounce toward the grand piano in a shadowy corner. “I like this kindergarten,” she pronounced.
Nollie Tresselton laughed. “If you come, Anne won’t let you dance. You’ll all have to sit for her—for hours and hours.”
“Well, we’ll sit between the dances then. Ain’t I going to have a latch-key, Anne?”
She stood leaning against the piano, sipping the cock-tail some one had handed her, her head thrown back, and the light from a shaded lamp striking up at her columnar throat and the green glitter of her earrings, which suggested to Kate Clephane the poisonous antennæ of some giant insect. Anne stood close to her, slender, erect, her small head clasped in close braids, her hands hanging at her sides, dead-white against the straight dark folds of her dress. There was something distinctly unpleasant to Kate Clephane in the proximity of the two, and she rose and moved toward the piano.
As she sat down before it, letting her hands drift into the opening bars of a half-remembered melody, she saw Lilla, in her vague lounging way, draw nearer to Anne, who held out a hand for the empty cock-tail glass. The gesture brought them so close that Lilla, slightly drooping her head, could let fall, hardly above her breath, but audibly to Kate: “He’s back again. He bothered the life out of me to bring him here today.”
Again Kate saw that quick drop of her daughter’s lids; this time it was accompanied by a just-perceptible tremor of the hand that received the glass.
“Nonsense, Lilla!”
“Well, what on earth am I to do about it? I can’t get the police to run him in, can I?”
Anne laughed—the faintest half-pleased laugh of impatience and dismissal. “You may have to,” she said.
Nollie Tresselton, in the interval, had glided up and slipped an arm through Lilla’s.
“Come along, my dear. There’s to be no dancing here today.” Her little brown face had the worn sharp look it often took on when she was mothering Lilla. But Lilla’s feet were firmly planted. “I don’t budge till I get another cock-tail.”
One of the young men hastened to supply her, and Anne turned to her other guests. A few minutes later the Tresseltons and Lilla went away, and one by one the remaining visitors followed, leaving mother and daughter alone in the recovered serenity of the empty room.
But there was no serenity in Kate. That half-whispered exchange between Lilla Gates and Anne had stirred all her old apprehensions and awakened new ones. The idea that her daughter was one of Lilla’s confidants was inexpressibly disturbing. Yet the more she considered, the less she knew how to convey her anxiety to her daughter.
“If I only knew how intimate they really are—what she really thinks of Lilla!”
For the first time she understood on what unknown foundations her fellowship with Anne was built. Were they solid? Would they hold? Was Anne’s feeling for her more than a sudden girlishenthusiasm for an agreeable older woman, the kind of sympathy based on things one can enumerate, and may change one’s mind about, rather than the blind warmth of habit?
She stood musing while Anne moved about the studio, putting away the music, straightening a picture here and there.
“And this is where you’re going to work—”
Anne nodded joyously.
“Lilla apparently expects you to turn it into a dance-hall for her benefit.”
“Poor Lilla! She can’t see a new room without wanting to fox-trot in it. Life, for her, wherever she is, consists in going somewhere else in order to do exactly the same thing.”
Kate was relieved: there was no mistaking the half-disdainful pity of the tone.
“Well—don’t give her that latch-key!” she laughed, gathering up her furs.
Anne echoed the laugh. “There are to be only two latch-keys—yours and mine,” she said; and mother and daughter went gaily down the steep stairs.
The days, after that, moved on with the undefinable reassurance of habit. Kate Clephane was beginning to feel herself part of an old-established routine. She had tried to organize her life in such a way that it should fit into Anne’s without awkwardoverlapping. Anne, nowadays, after her early canter, went daily to the studio and painted till lunch; sometimes, as the days lengthened, she went back for another two hours’ work in the afternoon. When the going was too bad for her morning ride she usually walked to the studio, and Kate sometimes walked with her, or went through the Park to meet her on her return. When she painted in the afternoon, Kate would occasionally drop in for tea, and they would return home together on foot in the dusk. But Mrs. Clephane was scrupulously careful not to intrude on her daughter’s working-hours; she held back, not with any tiresome display of discretion, but with the air of caring for her own independence too much not to respect Anne’s.
Sometimes, now that she had settled down into this new way of life, she was secretly aware of feeling a little lonely; there were hours when the sense of being only a visitor in the house where her life ought to have been lived gave her the same drifting uprooted feeling which had been the curse of her other existence. It was not Anne’s fault; nor that, in this new life, every moment was not interesting and even purposeful, since each might give her the chance of serving Anne, pleasing Anne, in some way or another getting closer to Anne. But this very feeling took a morbid intensity from the fact of having no common memories, no shared associations,to feed on. Kate was frightened, sometimes, by its likeness to that other isolated and devouring emotion which her love for Chris had been. Everything might have been different, she thought, if she had had more to do, or more friends of her own to occupy her. But Anne’s establishment, which had been her grandmother’s, still travelled smoothly enough on its own momentum, and though the girl insisted that her mother was now the head of the house, the headship involved little more than ordering dinner, and talking over linen and carpets and curtains with old Mrs. Clephane’s house-keeper.
Then, as to friends—was it because she was too much engrossed in her daughter to make any? Or because her life had been too incommunicably different from that of her bustling middle-aged contemporaries, absorbed by local and domestic questions she had no part in? Or had she been too suddenly changed from a self-centred woman, insatiable for personal excitements, into that new being, a mother, her centre of gravity in a life not hers?
She did not know; she felt only that she no longer had time for anything but motherhood, and must be content to bridge over, as best she could, the unoccupied intervals. And, after all, the intervals were not many. Her daughter never appeared without instantly filling up every crevice of the present,and overflowing into the past and the future, so that, even in the mother’s rare lapses into despondency, life without Anne, like life before Anne, had become unthinkable.
She was revolving this for the thousandth time as she turned into the Park one afternoon to meet Anne on the latter’s way homeward. The days were already much longer; the difference in the light, and that premature languor of the air which comes, in America, before the sleeping earth seems to expect it, made Mrs. Clephane feel that the year had turned, that a new season was opening in her new life. She walked on with the vague sense of confidence in the future which the first touch of spring gives. The worst of the way was past—how easily, how smoothly to the feet! Where misunderstanding and failure had been so probable, she was increasingly sure of having understood and succeeded. And already she and Anne were making delightful plans for the spring....
Ahead of her, in a transverse alley, she was disagreeably surprised by the sight of Lilla Gates. There was no mistaking that tall lounging figure, though it was moving slowly away from her. Lilla at that hour in the Park? It seemed curious and improbable. Yet Lilla it was; and Mrs. Clephane’s conclusion was drawn immediately. “Who is she waiting for?”
Whoever it was had not come; the perspectivebeyond Lilla was empty. After a moment she hastened her step, and vanished behind a clump of evergreens at the crossing of the paths. Kate did not linger to watch for her reappearance. The incident was too trifling to fix the attention; after all, what had one ever expected of Lilla but that she might be found loitering in unlikely places, in quest of objectionable people? There was nothing new in that—nor did Kate even regret not having a glimpse of the objectionable person. In her growing reassurance about Anne, Lilla’s affairs had lost whatever slight interest they once offered.
She walked on—but her mood was altered. The sight of Lilla lingering in that deserted path had called up old associations. She remembered meetings of the same kind—but was it her own young figure she saw fading down those far-off perspectives? Well—if it were, let it go! She owned no kinship with that unhappy ghost. Serene, middle-aged, respected and respectable, she walked on again out of that vanishing past into the warm tangible present. And at any moment now she might meet Anne.
She had turned down a wide walk leading to one of the Fifth Avenue entrances of the Park. One could see a long way ahead; there were people coming and going. Two women passed, with some noisy children racing before them, a milliner’s boy, whistling,his boxes slung over his shoulder, a paralytic pushing himself along in a wheeled chair; then, coming toward her from the direction of Fifth Avenue, a man who half-stopped, recognized her, and raised his hat.