XIII.
BALTIMORE—the conductor called it out as the train ground its way into the station.
Kate Clephane, on her feet in the long swaying Pullman, looked about her at the faces of all the people in the other seats—the peoplewho didn’t know. The whole world was divided, now, between people such as those, and the only two who did know: herself and one other. All lesser differences seemed to have been swallowed up in that....
She pushed her way between the seats, in the wake of the other travellers who were getting out—she wondered why!—at Baltimore. No one noticed her; she had no luggage; in a moment or two she was out of the station. She stood there, staring in a dazed way at the meaningless traffic of the streets. Where were all these people going, what could they possibly want, or hope for, or strive for, in a world such as she now knew it to be?
There was a spring mildness in the air, and presently, walking on through the hurrying crowd, she found herself in a quiet park-like square, with budding trees, and bulbs pushing up in the mounded flower-beds. She sat down on a bench.
Strength had been given her to get through that first hour with Anne ... she didn’t know how, butsomehow, all at once, the shabby years of dissimulation, of manœuvring, of concealing, had leapt to her defence like a mercenary army roused in a righteous cause. She had to deceive Anne, to lull Anne’s suspicions, though she were to die in the attempt. And she had not died—
That was the worst of it.
She had never been more quiveringly, comprehensively alive than as she sat there, in that alien place, staring out alone into an alien future. She felt strong and light enough to jump up and walk for miles and miles—if only she had known where to go! They said grief was ageing—well, this agony seemed to have plunged her into a very Fountain of Youth.
No one could possibly know where she was. She had told her daughter that one of the aunts at Meridia was very ill; dying, she believed she had said. To reach Meridia one passed through Baltimore—it had all been simple enough. Luckily she had once or twice talked of the aunts to Anne; had said vaguely: “There was never much intimacy, but some day I ought to go and see them”—so that now it seemed quite natural, and Anne, like all her generation, was too used to sudden comings and goings, and violent changes of plan, to do more than ring up the motor to take her mother to the first train, and recommend carrying a warm wrap.
The hush, the solitude, the sense of being aloneand unknown in a strange place to which no one knew she had gone, gradually steadied Kate Clephane’s mind, and fragments torn from the last hours began to drift through it, one by one. Curiously enough, it was Anne’s awkward little speech about giving her the house that came first—perhaps because it might so easily be the key to the rest.
Kate Clephane had never thought of money since she had been under her daughter’s roof, save on the one occasion when she had refused to have her allowance increased. Her disregard of the matter came not so much from conventional scruples as from a natural gay improvidence. If one were poor, and lived from hand to mouth, one had to think about money—worse luck! But once relieved from the need of doing so, she had dismissed the whole matter from her thoughts. Safely sheltered, becomingly arrayed, she cared no more than a child for the abstract power of possession. And the possession of money, in particular, had always been so associated in her mind with moral and mental dependence that after her break with Hylton Davies poverty had seemed one of the chief attributes of freedom.
It was Anne’s suggestion of giving her the house which had flung a sudden revealing glare on the situation. Anne was rich, then—very rich! Such a house—one of the few surviving from the time when Fifth Avenue had been New York’s fashionablequarter—must have grown greatly in value with the invasion of business. What could it be worth? Mrs. Clephane couldn’t conjecture ... could only feel that, to offer it in that way (and with it, of course, the means of living in it), Anne, who had none of her mother’s improvidence, must be securely and immensely wealthy. And if she were—
The mother stood up and stared about her. What she was now on the verge of thinking was worse, almost, than all the dreadful things she had thought before. If it were the money he wanted, she might conceivably buy him off—that was what she was thinking! And a nausea crept over her as she thought it; for he had never seemed to care any more for money than she did. His gay scorn of it, not only expressed but acted upon, had been one of his chief charms to her, after all her years in the Clephane atmosphere of thrifty wealth, and the showy opulence of the months with Hylton Davies. Chris Fenno, quite simply and naturally, had laughed with her at the cares of the anxious rich, and rejoiced that those, at least, would never weigh on either of them. But that was long ago; long at least in a life as full of chances and changes as his. Compared with the reckless boy she had known he struck her now as having something of the weight and prudence of middle-age. Might not his respect for money have increased with the increasing need of it? At any rate, she had to think of him, to believe it of him, ifshe could, for the possibility held out her one hope in a welter of darkness.
Her mind flagged. She averted her sickened eyes from the thought, and began to turn once more on the racking wheel of reiteration. “I must see him.... I must see him.... I must see him.”... That was as far as she had got. She looked at her watch, and went up to a policeman to ask the way.
He was not to be found at Horace Maclew’s, and to her surprise she learned that he did not live there. Careless as he had always been of money in itself, he was by no means averse to what it provided. No one was more appreciative of the amenities of living when they came his way without his having to take thought; and she had pictured him quartered in a pleasant corner of Horace Maclew’s house, and participating in all the luxuries of his larder and cellar. But no; a super-butler, summoned at her request, informed her that Major Fenno had telephoned not to expect him that day, and that, as for his home address, the fact was he had never given it.
A new emotion shot through her, half sharper anguish, half relief. If he were not lodged under the Maclew roof, if his private address were not to be obtained there, might it not be because he was involved in some new tie, perhaps actually living with some unavowable woman? What a solution—Kate Clephane leapt on it—to be able to return toAnne with that announcement! It seemed to clear the way in a flash—but as a hurricane does, by ploughing its path through the ruins it makes. She supposed she would never, as long as she lived, be able to think evil of Chris without its hurting her.
She turned away from the wrought-iron and plate-glass portals that were so exactly what she had known the Maclew portals would be. Perhaps she would find his address at a post-office. She asked the way to the nearest one, and vainly sought for his name in the telephone book. Well, it was not likely that he would proclaim his whereabouts if what she suspected were true. But as her eye travelled down the page she caught his father’s name, and an address she remembered. Chris Fenno, though so habitually at odds with his parents, was fond of them in his easy way—especially fond of his mother. Kate had often posted letters for him to that address. She might hear of him there—if necessary she would ask for Mrs. Fenno.
A trolley carried her to a Quakerish quarter of low plain-faced brick houses: streets and streets of them there seemed to be, all alike. Here and there a tree budded before one; but the house at which she rang had an unbroken view of its dispirited duplicates. Kate Clephane was not surprised at the shabbiness of the neighbourhood. She knew that the Fennos, never well-off according to Clephane standards,had of late years been greatly straitened, partly, no doubt, through their son’s own exigencies, and his cheerful inability to curtail them. Her heart contracted as she stood looking down at Mrs. Fenno’s dingy door-mat—the kind on which only tired feet seem to have wiped themselves—and remembered her radiant idle months with Mrs. Fenno’s son.
She had to ring twice. Then the door was opened by an elderly negress with gray hair, who stood wiping her hands on a greasy apron, and repeating slowly: “Mr. Chris?”
“Yes. I suppose you can tell me where he lives?”
The woman stared. “Mr. Chris? Where’d he live? Why, right here.”
Kate returned the stare. Through the half-open door came the smell of chronic cooking; a mournful waterproof hung against the wall. “Major Fenno—here?”
Major Fenno; yes; the woman repeated it. Mr. Chris they always called him, she added with a toothless smile. Of course he lived there; she kinder thought he was upstairs now. His mother, she added gratuitously, had gone out—stepped round to the market, she reckoned. She’d go and look for Mr. Chris. Would the lady please walk in?
Kate was shown into a small dull sitting-room. All she remembered of it afterward was that there were funny tufted armchairs, blinds half down, arosewood “what-not,” and other relics of vanished ease. Above the fireless chimney stood a too handsome photograph of Chris in uniform.
After all, it was natural enough to find that he was living there. He had always hated any dependence on other people’s plans and moods; she remembered how irritably he had spoken of his servitude as Mr. Maclew’s secretary, light as the yoke must be. And it was like him, since he was settled in Baltimore, to have returned to his parents. There was something in him—on the side she had always groped for, and occasionally known in happy glimpses—that would make him dislike to live in luxury in the same town in which his father and mother were struggling on the scant income his own follies had reduced them too. He would probably never relate cause and effect, or be much troubled if he did; he would merely say to himself: “It would be beastly wallowing in things here, when it’s such hard sledding for the old people”—in the same tone in which he used to say to Kate, on their lazy Riviera Sundays: “If I were at home now I’d be getting ready to take the old lady to church. I always go with her.” And no doubt he did. He loved his parents tenderly whenever they were near enough to be loved.
There was a step in the passage. She turned with a start and he came in. At sight of her he closed the door quickly. He was very pale. “Kate!” hesaid, stopping on the threshold. She had been standing in the window, and she remained there, the width of the room between them. She was silenced by the curious deep shock of remembrance that his actual presence always gave her, and began to tremble lest it should weaken her resolve. “Didn’t you expect me?” she finally said.
He looked at her as if he hardly saw her. “Yes; I suppose I did,” he answered at length in a slow dragging voice. “I was going to write; to ask when I could see you.” As he stood there he seemed like some one snatched out of a trance. To her surprise she felt him singularly in her power. Their parts were reversed for the first time, and she said to herself: “I must act quickly, before he can collect himself.” Aloud she asked: “What have you got to say?”
“To say—” he began; and then, suddenly, with a quick change of voice, and moving toward her with outstretched hands: “For God’s sake don’t take that tone. It’s bad enough....”
She knew every modulation; he had pleaded with her so often before! His trying it now only hardened her mind and cleared her faculties; and with that flash of vision came the sense that she was actually seeing him for the first time. There he stood, stripped of her dreams, while she registered in a clear objective way all the strength and weakness, the flaws and graces of his person, marked thepremature thinning of his smooth brown hair, the incipient crows’-feet about the lids, their too tender droop over eyes not tender enough, and that slight slackness of the mouth that had once seemed a half-persuasive pout, and was now only a sign of secret uncertainties and indulgences. She saw it all, and under the rich glaze of a greater prosperity, a harder maturity, a prompter self-assurance and resourcefulness, she reached to the central failure.
That was what she became aware of—and aware too that the awful fact of actually seeing another human being might happen to one for the first time only after years of intimacy. She averted her eyes as from a sight not meant for her.
“It’s bad enough,” she heard him repeat.
She turned back to him and her answer caught up his unfinished phrase. “Ah—you do realize how bad it is? That’s the reason why you’ve given up your job? Because you see that you must go? Are you going now—going at once?”
“Going—going?” He echoed the word in his flat sleep-walking voice. “How on earth can I go?”
The question completely hardened whatever his appearance, the startled beaten look of him, had begun to soften in her. She stood gazing at him and laughed.
“How can you go? Are you mad? Why, what else on earth can you do?”
As he stood before her she began to be awarethat he had somehow achieved the attitude of dignity for which she was still struggling. He looked like an unhappy man, a cowed man; but not a guilty one.
“If you’d waited I should myself have asked you to let me explain—” he began.
“Explain? What is there to explain?”
“For one thing, why I can’t go away—go for good, as you suggest.”
“Suggest? I don’t suggest! I order it.”
“Well—I must disobey your order.”
They stood facing each other while she tried to gather up the shattered fragments of her authority. She had said to herself that what lay before her was horrible beyond human imagining; but never once had she imagined that, if she had the strength to speak, he would have the strength to defy her. She opened her lips, but no sound came.
“You seem ready to think the worst of me; I suppose that’s natural,” he continued. “The best’s bad enough. But at any rate, before ordering me to go, perhaps you ought to know that Ididgo—once.”
She echoed the word blankly. “Once?”
He smiled a little. “You didn’t suppose—or did you?—that I’d drifted into this without a fight; a long fight? At the hospital, where I first met her, I hadn’t any idea who she was. I’m not a New Yorker; I knew nothing of your set of people inNew York. You never spoke to me of her—I never even knew you had a daughter.”
It was true. In that other life she had led she had never spoken to any one of Anne. She had never been able to. From the time when she had returned to Europe, frustrated in her final attempt to get the child back, or even to have one last glimpse of her, to the day when her daughter’s cable had summoned her home, that daughter’s name had never been uttered by her except in the depths of her heart.
A darkness was about her feet; her head swam. She looked around her vaguely, and put out her hand for something to lean on. Chris Fenno moved a chair forward, and she sat down on it without knowing what she was doing.
He continued to stand in front of her. “You do believe me?” he repeated.
“Oh, yes—I believe you.” She was beginning to feel, now, the relief of finding him less base than he had at first appeared. She lifted her eyes to his. “But afterward—”
“Well; afterward—” He stopped, as if hoping she would help him to fill in the pause. But she made no sign, and he went on. “As I say, we met first in the hospital where she nursed me. It began there. Afterward she asked me to come and see her at her grandmother’s. It was only then that I found out—”
“Well, and then—?”
“Then I went away; went as soon as I found out.”
“Of course—”
“Yes; of course; only—”
“Only—you came back. You knew; and yet you came back.”
She saw his lips hardening again to doggedness. He had dropped into a chair facing hers, and sat there with lowered head, his hands clenched on his knees.
“Naturally you’re bound to think the worst of me—”
She interrupted him. “I’m still waiting to know what to think of you. Don’t let it be the worst!”
He made a hopeless gesture. “What is the worst?”
“The worst is that, having gone, you should ever have come back. Why did you?”
He stood up, and this time their eyes met. “You have the right to question me about my own feelings; but not about any one else’s.”
“Feelings?Yourfeelings?” She laughed again. “And my own daughter’s—ah, but I didn’t mean to name her even!” she exclaimed.
“Well, I’m glad you’ve named her. You’ve answered your own question.” He paused, and then added in a low voice: “You know what she is when she cares....”
“Ah, don’tyouname her—I forbid you! You say you loved her, not knowing. I believe you.... Ipity you.... I want to pity you.... But nothing can change the facts, can change the past. There’s nothing for you now but to go.”
He stood before her, his eyes on the ground. At last he raised them again, but only for the length of a quick glance. “You think then ... a past like that ... irrevocable?”
She sprang to her feet, strong now in her unmitigated scorn. “Irrevocable? Irrevocable? And you ask me this ... withherin your mind? Ah—but you’re abominable!”
“Am I? I don’t know ... my head reels with it. She’s terribly young; she feels things terribly. She won’t give up—she wouldn’t before.”
“Don’t—don’t! Leave her out of this. I’m not here to discuss her with you, I’m here to tell you to go, and to go at once.”
He made no answer, but turned and walked across the room and back. Then he sank into his chair, and renewed his study of the carpet. Finally he looked up again, with one of the tentative glances she knew so well: those glances that seemed to meet one’s answer half-way in their desire to say what one would expect of him. “Is there any use in your taking this tone?”
Again that appeal—it was too preposterous! But suddenly, her eyes on the huddled misery of his attitude, the weakness of his fallen features, she understood that the cry was real; that he was in agony,and had turned to her for help. She crossed the room and laid her hand on his shoulder.
“No; you’re right; it’s of no use. If you’ll listen I’ll try to be calm. I want to spare you—why shouldn’t I want to?”
She felt her hand doubtfully taken and laid for a moment against his cheek. The cheek was wet. “I’ll listen.”
“Well, then; I won’t reproach you; I won’t argue with you. Why should I,” she exclaimed with a flash of inspiration, “when all the power is mine? If I came in anger, in abhorrence ... well, I feel only pity now. Don’t reject it—don’t reject my pity. This awful thing has fallen on both of us together; as much on me as on you. Let me help you—let us try to help each other.”
He pressed the hand closer to his face and then dropped it. “Ah, you’re merciful.... I think I understand the abhorrence better. I’ve been a cad and a blackguard, and everything else you like. I’ve been living with the thought of it day and night. Only, now—”
“Well, now,” she panted, “let me help you; let me—Chris,” she cried, “let me make it possible for you to go. I know there may be all sorts of difficulties—material as well as others—and those at least—”
He looked up at her sharply, as if slow to grasp her words. Then his face hardened and grew red.“You’re bribing me? I see. I didn’t at first. Well—you’ve the right to, I suppose; there’s hardly any indignity you haven’t the right to lay on me. Only—it’s not so simple. I’ve already told you—”
“Don’t name her again! Don’t make me remember.... Chris, I want to help you as if this were ... were any other difficulty.... Can’t we look at it together in that way?”
But she felt the speciousness of her words. How could one face the Gorgon-image of this difficulty as if it were like any other? His silence seemed to echo her thought. Slowly he rose again from his chair, plunged his hands deeply into his pockets, with a gesture she remembered when he was troubled, and went and leaned in the jamb of the window. What was he thinking, she wondered, as he glanced vacantly up and down the long featureless street? Smiling inwardly, perhaps, at the crudeness of her methods, the emptiness of her threats. For, after all—putting the case at its basest—if the money were really what had tempted him, how, with that fortune at his feet, could any offer of hers divert his purpose?
A clock she had not noticed began to tick insistently. It seemed to be measuring out the last seconds before some nightmare crash that she felt herself powerless to arrest. Powerless, at least—
She saw his expression change, and he turned and moved back quickly into the room. “There’s mymother coming down the street. She’s been to market—my mother does her own marketing.” He spoke with a faint smile of irony. “But you needn’t be afraid of meeting her. She won’t come in here; she never does at this hour. She’ll go straight to the kitchen.”
Kate had begun to tremble again. “Afraid? Why should I be afraid of your mother? Or she of me? It’s you who are afraid now!” she exclaimed.
His face seemed to age as she watched it. “Well, yes, I am,” he acknowledged. “I’ve been a good deal of a nuisance to her first and last; and she’s old and ill. Let’s leave her out too, if we can.”
As he spoke, they heard, through the thin wall, the fumbling of a latch-key in the outer lock. Kate moved to the door; her decision was taken.
“You want to leave her out? Then promise me—give me your word that you’ll go. You know you can count on me if you need help. Only you must promise now; if not, I shall call your mother in—I shall tell her everything.” Her hand was on the doorknob when he caught it back.
“Don’t!”
The street door opened and closed again, a dragging step passed through the narrow hall, and a door was opened into the region from which the negress with the greasy apron had emerged in a waft of cooking.
“Phemia!” they heard Mrs. Fenno call in a tired elderly voice.
“I promise,” her son said, loosening his hold on Kate’s wrist.
The two continued to stand opposite each other with lowered heads. At length Mrs. Clephane moved away.
“I’m going now. You understand that you must leave at once ... tomorrow?” She paused. “I’ll do all I can for you as long as you keep your word; if you break it I won’t spare you. I’ve got the means to beat you in the end; only don’t make me use them—don’t make me!”
He stood a few feet away from her, his eyes on the ground. Decidedly, she had beaten him, and he understood it. If there were any degrees left in such misery she supposed that the worst of it was over.