C”

That was all ... just a line or two, but enough to remind her of what

she had forgotten--the awful sense of his patience, which seemed always

to say with a shrug that all life was merely a matter of waiting.

The solid voice of Robert roused her.

“Here we are,” he said, and stepping from the cab, she was washed for an

instant by the brilliant white glare of electricity and then vanished

through the whirling doors into the Ritz.

* * * * *

In all the hubbub of those busy, noisy days there were intervals when,

for a moment, she found time for reflection ... odd moments between tea

and dinner, or in the hours after midnight when the roar of the city and

the small revealing sounds of the great hotel had abated a little; or

moments when Rebecca, buoyant, triumphant and full of business

interviewed in the sitting room the men who came from musical papers

suggesting a sort of polite blackmail. Rebecca handled them all

beautifully because she had in her the blood of a hundred generations

who had lived by barter. So Ellen escaped them, save when it was

necessary for her to be interviewed. Rebecca arranged the concerts that

were to be given. She was busy, she was happy, she was content in her

possession of Lilli Barr.

It occurred to Ellen after a time that she had not seen Mr. Wyck. In all

the confusion there had been no mention of her mother’s lodger. He had

not been about. So when her mother came to lunch the next day in her

sitting room at the Ritz, she asked, after the usual warm kisses had

been exchanged, concerning the mysterious lodger.

“He went away the week before you arrived,” said Hattie. “I could never

understand why. He had seemed to be so satisfied.”

Ellen endeavored to conceal her sense of pleasure at his disappearance.

“Perhaps,” she suggested, “he was leaving town.”

Hattie frowned. “No. It wasn’t that,” she replied. “He said that he must

have a room nearer his work.... It seemed a silly reason.”

Ellen called Hansi to her side and the big black dog threw himself down

with his head against her knee, his green eyes fastened on her face with

a look of adoration. She stroked the fine black head and murmured, “You

never told me his name.”

“His name was Wyck,” said Hattie. “We grew to be very fond of him. He

was no trouble at all, though he did sometimes talk too much concerning

his family. Still, I can see that he had nothing else to talk about. He

didn’t seem to have any friends but us. Fergus was the only one who

didn’t like him.”

Ellen looked up suddenly. She had forgotten Fergus. She had forgotten

that Wyck had seen him on the morning when Clarence lay dead on the

divan in the Babylon Arms. Perhaps they did not remember each other.

Certainly it was clear that Hattie knew nothing. Fergus must have known

and, distrusting the nasty little man, have kept his secret. It was a

strange world.

There was champagne that day for lunch because Rebecca had asked her

uncle Raoul and his daughter, a handsome dark Jewess. Together they sat

about a table laden with food which was rich and bizarre to Hattie

Tolliver. The sunlight streamed in at the windows and the waiters bobbed

in and out of the room serving her daughter. The champagne she refused

to drink and when the diamond merchant filled Ellen’s glass, she frowned

and said, “I wish you wouldn’t drink, Ellen. You never know what it

leads to.”

And when Mr. Schönberg, after telling one or two risqué stories, held a

match to Ellen’s cigarette, Hattie frowned again and the old look of

suspicion came into her eyes. It was Lily Shane who had taught her

daughter to behave like a fast woman. She knew that.

* * * * *

It was only when the first excitement of Ellen’s return had worn away

that Hattie began to feel the dull ache of an unhappiness which she

could neither understand nor define. With all the vast optimism of her

nature she had fancied the return of Ellen as something quite different

from the reality. A hundred times during the long years while her

daughter was away, she lived through the experience in her imagination;

she saw Ellen taking her place once more in the midst of the family,

quarreling cheerfully with Robert, helping her mother about the house,

going and coming as the mood struck her. She fancied that Ellen would

be, as in the old days, sullen and sometimes unhappy but always

dependent just the same, always a rather sulky little girl who would

play the piano by the hour while her mother saw to it that there was no

work, no annoyance to disturb her.

And now it was quite different. She scarcely saw Ellen save when she

went to the Ritz to eat a hurried lunch of fancy, rich foods under the

bright eyes of the cheerful Miss Schönberg. The old piano stood in the

apartment, silent save when Hattie herself picked out her old tunes in a

desperate attack of nostalgia. Ellen had played for her a half dozen

times but always on the great piano in her sitting room at the Ritz; it

was not the same as in the sentimental, happy days when Hattie, as ruler

of her household, sat darning with her family all about her. There was

no time for anything. And Ellen herself ... she had become slippery

somehow, happier than in the old days, but also more remote, more

independent, more “complete” as Lily had said. She had no need of any

one.

There were days too when Hattie felt the absence of Mr. Wyck. Of all

those who had at one time or another depended upon her ... old Julia,

Fergus, Ellen, Wyck and all the others ... none remained save her

husband. And somehow she had come to lose him too. Here in the city,

living in his farm papers and in his memories, he had escaped her in a

way she failed to understand. He slept more and more so that there were

times when she was worried lest he might really be ill. Robert and The

Everlasting were aloof and independent; they were no help whatever. But

Mr. Wyck had come to her, wanting desperately all the little attentions

which she gave so lavishly. And now he was gone, almost secretly and

without gratitude. It hurt her because she could not understand why he

had run away.

At times it seemed that with no one to lean upon her, the very

foundations of her existence had melted away; there were moments when,

for the first time in all her troubled and vigorous life, she feared

that the world into which she had come might at last defeat her.

47

Scarcely a week after the landing of Ellen and Rebecca, Thérèse

Callendar landed in New York, almost willingly and with a sense of

relief. In the solid house on Murray Hill, the usual army of charwomen

arrived and put the place in order against her coming, but on her

arrival she closed most of the rooms and chose to live between her

bed-room and the library. She was, oddly enough, confused and a little

weary. She had been, all her life, a match and more for the shrewdest

of men; she had outwitted bankers and brokers and even swindlers, and

now she stood confronted by a catastrophe which she was unable to

dominate. A third or more of a vast fortune stood in danger ... that

part of it which she had been unable to save when the maelstrom broke

over Europe. Much of it, fortunately, was transferred into safety.

Through bits of information and advice picked up here and there in the

course of her wanderings, she had divined that one day there was certain

to be a war, and accordingly she had taken money out of Germany and

placed it in England, disposed of Russian bonds and reinvested the money

in America, shifted credits from Vienna to Paris. Yet there still

remained a great sum which, for the time being, was lost in the

confusion ... part of the fortune she had tended with the care of a

gardener for his most prized orchid.

In the midst of the turmoil she had stayed for days in the office of her

lawyer in Paris, wiring now to London, now to Trieste, now in New

York--sitting with him, a shrewd, bearded man, in conference with

bankers, brokers and men who simply juggled money into more money. And

in the end even she, Thérèse Callendar, had been no match for the war.

She wakened one morning to find the Germans at the gates of Paris and

the Government fled to Bordeaux. She was alone; Richard and Sabine and

little Thérèse were in England. So alone she had paced the tesselated

floors of the monstrous house in the Avenue du Bois, until all had been

done which could be done. And at last, glad to leave the Europe which

Ellen had called a madhouse, she turned back for the first time in her

life with pleasure and relief to the quiet of the brownstone house on

Murray Hill.

She had come to New York, as may be said of great people, incognita.

Only her banker and her lawyer knew she was in town--a strange state of

affairs for a woman who had lived always in public, going from one

capital to another, seeing scores of people day by day.

It was not the money alone which troubled her. There was the matter of

Sabine for which there seemed to be no solution. As she sat alone in the

dark library three days after her arrival, she turned the matter over in

her mind.

She thought of the interview which took place with Richard a day or two

before the Archduke was shot in Serajevo ... an interview which occurred

after lunch in the house in the Avenue du Bois before he took the

Boulogne express to join Sabine in Hertfordshire. Over her coffee, she

saw him again ... a dark handsome son of whom a mother might have been

proud if he had cared more for the things which were the foundation of

her life. There was bitter disappointment in all that ... his neglect of

business and his indifference to money. Here he was, a man of

thirty-five, who did nothing but amuse himself. He gambled a bit, he

bought a picture now and then, he had a passion for music, he fenced and

swam and rode beautifully. Yet there seemed to be no core to his

existence, no foundation, unless the satisfaction of his own desire for

pleasure might be called the dominant thread of his character. It was

satisfaction--no more than that: it was never satiation. If he had been

weak or dissipated or a waster, there would have been more to be said

against him; but he was none of these things. In this, fortunately, he

took after her own people. He had not, like young Americans who had

money, gone to pieces. He took good care of himself. He had no habit

which had become a vice. He had all the curious strength that comes of

an old race.

Sitting over her coffee, she saw him again as he stood with the old

mocking smile on his too red lips while she argued across the spaces of

Wolff’s house in the Avenue du Bois. He stood, rocking a bit on his

toes, with the easy grace which came of a supple strength, looking down

at her out of the mocking gray eyes.

“But there is no one whom I want to marry,” he had said, “even if Sabine

would divorce me.”

At which she had grown angry and retorted, “Women interest you. It would

be easy enough....”

“It would be a nasty, unpleasant business. She is not a bad wife. I

might do much worse. I am sorry that she can’t have more children, but

that is none of my doing. I do not want to hurt her. I might not have

another wife as satisfactory.”

To which Thérèse had replied, “She is unhappy. I know she is. She can’t

stand indifference forever, even if she is a cold woman. Besides she’s

in love with you. She can’t go on always living with you and yet not

living with you. She’d be happier free ... to marry some one else.”

Then he had mocked her out of the depths of his own security. “Do you

think love is such a simple thing that it can be turned on and off like

water from a tap?” (She knew that love with him was just that ...

something which could be turned on and off, like water from a tap.)

“Besides, it was _you_ who wanted me to marry her. I had other ideas.”

“You mean Ellen Tolliver?” she asked. And then, “You would not have

married her if you could have escaped it ... if you could have got her

in any other way.”

But she saw that the look of mockery had faded a little at the sound of

the girl’s name. (She was of course no longer a girl but a successful

woman of thirty or more.)

“I don’t know ...” he had said, “I don’t know what I should have done.

Only I fancy that if I had married her there would have been a great

many little heirs running about.”

She had delivered herself into his hands. As a woman of affairs she knew

that one could not argue sensibly about what might have happened; and

for what had happened she herself was responsible. In that he had been

right.

“Would you marry her to-day?”

“How can I answer that? Probably she wouldn’t have me. Why should she?

We’re both different now.... It’s been years.... She’s rich now ...

successful ... famous. It isn’t the same.”

“People don’t change as much as that ... especially if they not seen

each other. They are likely to keep a memory of that sort always fresh.

It’s likely to grow strong instead of weak.”

“I’ve seen her since ... several times ... at her concerts.”

She saw, with her small piercing eyes, that she had uncovered a weak

place in his armor ... a single chance on which to pin all her hopes.

“Have you talked to her?”

“No.”

She knew too that he was, in a sense, invincible. Sabine, so far as the

world was concerned, made an excellent wife. She was worldly,

distinguished, clever. So far as he was himself concerned, she gave him

no trouble. She did not make scenes and she did not indulge in

passionate outbreaks of jealousy. She did not even speak of the love

which he sought outside his marriage ... the intrigues that were always

taking place and now made him invincible in the face of her argument.

She effaced herself, and as she had done once before, waited. But on

that occasion she had waited for marriage, and had won. Now she was

waiting for love, which was quite a different matter.

“If it’s an heir you want, I have one already.” He smiled. “He must be

nearly twelve by now. Of course, he is the grandson of a janitor and the

son of a music hall singer.... Still, he is an heir. We might

legitimatize him.”

By this stroke he had won, for he had made her angry ... the thing he

had been seeking to do all the while.

“I hear from him twice a year ... when my lawyer sends his mother

money.”

“You’d do well to forget his existence.”

And then they had talked for a time without arriving anywhere.

As usual it was Richard who had won. He had gone back to Sabine as if

nothing at all had occurred.

* * * * *

Thérèse drank the last of her coffee and then laid her dumpy figure down

on the divan in the dark library. She was tired for the first time in

her life, as if she had not the strength to go on fighting. She might

have but a few years longer to live and she must hurry and settle this

matter. There must be an heir to whom she might pass on the fortune ...

not a sickly girl like little Thérèse but a man who could manage a

responsibility so enormous.

Though her body was weary, her mind was alert. There still remained a

chance. In the gathering darkness, she knew that the chance depended

upon two things ... the hope that Ellen Tolliver still loved Richard as

she had so clearly loved him on the night years earlier when the girl

had talked to her in this very room; and the hope that Lilli Barr was as

honest, as respectable, as bourgeois as Ellen Tolliver had been.

She got up and in the darkness made her way to the bell. When the butler

appeared and switched on the lights, she said, “Please get me a box for

the concert of Lilli Barr.... It’s a week from to-morrow.” And, as he

was leaving, she added, “I shall give a dinner that night. See to it

that the rest of the house is got ready.”

This was the first step.

48

On the very same night in her weathered house sheltered by lilacs and

syringas in the Town Miss Ogilvie, trembling and fluttering like a

canary set free and preening itself in the sun, packed her trunk for the

trip to the East. Any one looking on might have believed her, save for

the wrinkled rosy cheeks and the slight spare figure, a young girl on

the eve of her first party. After all, it was an event ... the first

trip she had made to the East since the Seventies when she had sailed as

a girl for Munich. And she was going East to hear Ellen Tolliver play

... Ellen who had been a chit of a girl when she had last seen her,

Ellen who was now Lilli Barr, whose name and picture appeared everywhere

in the papers, Ellen who had hidden on the night she fled the Town in

the nest-like parlor of this very house.

Miss Ogilvie, packing her best taffeta with its corals and cameos to

wear at the concert, indulged in an orgy of memories ... memories that

went back to the years before Ellen was born, to the days in Munich when

for a delirious week, until the heavy hand of her father intervened, she

had fancied she would become a great musician and play in public.

Pausing beside the old tin-bound trunk, she thought, “No, I never could

have done it. I was too much a coward. But Ellen has ... Ellen has....

And to think that I advised her to do it, that I told her to go ahead.”

In the long span of a gentle life in which there had been no heights and

no valleys, this occasion eclipsed all else ... even the day she had

herself sailed on the black _paquebot_ for Europe.

“_It happens like that ... in the most unexpected places, in villages,

in towns.... Why, even in a dirty mill town like this._”

It all came back to her now, all the conversation between herself and

Ellen on that last day when, weeping, she said to the girl, “I no longer

count for anything. You are beyond me. Who am I to instruct you?”

And she remembered too with a sudden warmth the old bond between them,

the hatred of this awful, sooty Town ... a desert from which Ellen had

boldly escaped, which Miss Ogilvie had accepted, hiding always in her

heart her loathing of the place.

“And to think that she remembered me ... a poor, insignificant old woman

like me! To think that she even paid my way!”

For Miss Ogilvie could not have come otherwise. As the years passed she

had grown poorer and poorer in her house behind the trees.

Her conscience pricked the old lady. “I wonder,” she thought, sitting on

the edge of her chair before the old trunk. “I wonder if I should

confess to Hattie Tolliver that it was I who helped them to escape. It

would be more honest, since I am going to stay with her.”

And then she grew worried for fear Ellen might be ashamed of her in her

old-fashioned taffeta with coral and cameo pins. Ellen had been living

in Paris with Lily Shane; she would know all about the latest thing in

clothes. And to convince herself that the dress was not too bad, she put

it on and pinning fast the coral and cameos, stood before her glass,

frizzing her hair and pulling the dress this way and that.

In the midst of these preparations, she was interrupted by the distant

jangle of the bell and the sound caused her to blush and start as if

she, an old dried-up woman, had been caught by an intruder coquetting

before her mirror.

She knew who was at the door. It was Eva Barr and May Biggs come to send

messages to Ellen, for they too shared a little her excitement. They

would talk, the three of them, about Ellen as they remembered her until

long after midnight; for all three hoped that Ellen might be induced to

play in the Town, especially since there was such a fine new auditorium.

They too had claims upon her, claims of friendship and blood and old

associations.

49

On the night of the concert Ellen wore a gown of crimson velvet,

according to a plan of Rebecca who determined that the occasion should

be a sensational one not to be forgotten. The house was filled and when

Lilli Barr came through the door at the back of the stage there was a

quick hush, a sudden breathlessness, caused not so much by her beauty

(for she was never really beautiful in the sense that Lily was

beautiful) but by the whole perfection of the picture. The crimson dress

fitted her tightly and was sleeveless and cut low to show the perfection

of her strong, handsome shoulders. Her black hair, so black that in the

brilliant light which showered upon her from overhead (a device of

Rebecca’s) it appeared blue as the traditional raven’s wing. She wore

it pulled back tightly from her smooth forehead and done in a small knot

at the nape of the neck. In her ears she wore old Portuguese rings of

paste and silver. She was superb, glittering, slender, strong, and

possessed of the old brilliant power to distract thought and concentrate

attention.

In that instant the battle was half won. There were those in the

audience who felt that the mere sight of her was enough.

In her box on the first tier, Mrs. Callendar sat up with a start, raised

her lorgnettes and said “Tiens! Quel chic!”

Beside her Mrs. Mallinson (the lady novelist) murmured, “Superb

creature!” and the Honorable Emma Hawksby (back again to live off the

Americans on the strength of being a niece to the disreputable Duke of

Middlebottom) thought again that the big feet of Englishwomen were a

serious hindrance and that perhaps her countrywomen went in too much for

walking. The elderly rake, Wickham Chase, sighed bitterly at the tragedy

of old age and the loss of vigor. Bishop Smallwood (whom Sabine had

dubbed the Apostle to the Genteel) thought, “She looks like my wa’am

friend, Mrs. Sigourney,” but, considering the impression, thought better

of it and said nothing, since Mrs. Sigourney had long since overplayed

her game and become utterly déclassée. And the third, a nondescript

bachelor, strove to peer between Mrs. Mallinson’s supporting dog-collar

and the bony back of the Honorable Emma Hawksby. If he had any thoughts

at all, they were not very interesting; for thirty years he had been

sitting in the back of boxes at plays, concerts and the opera, peering

between plump backs and skinny ones.

Below them the audience stretched away row upon row, in dim lines

marshaled into neat columns like an advancing army seen through a mist.

Mrs. Callendar thought, “Ah! She is magnificent. The transformation

scarcely seems possible.... Still, the girl had it in her always.” And a

little voice kept saying to her, “You will win. She is an admirable

pawn. You will succeed. You will get what you want if you work hard

enough and are clever about it.”

Down among the dim rows spread out below them sat Hattie Tolliver, in a

new gown chosen by Ellen. Large and vigorous she sat, looking a little

like a powerful and eccentric duchess, by the side of Miss Ogilvie in

her mauve taffeta with the corals and cameos, her thin hair done

elaborately in a fashion she had not worn since she was a girl. They sat

there, the eagle and the linnet, trembling with excitement, the tears

very close to the surface of the emotional Hattie.

Presently, as Ellen took her place at the piano and struck a few

crashing chords, Hattie could bear it no longer. She leaned toward the

stranger at her side, a woman with short hair and an umbrella, and said

in triumph, “That’s my daughter who’s playing.”

The stranger stared at her for an instant and murmured, “Is it indeed?”

And the music began.

Hattie really wanted to tell them all--the row upon row of strangers,

obscured now by the darkness.

Charles Tolliver at his end of the row closed his eyes and slipped

presently into the borderland between sleep and consciousness, a country

where there is no reality and all is covered by a rosy mist. Through

this the music came to him distantly. He fancied he was back once more

in the shabby living room with Ellen playing sullenly at the upright

piano. And for a little time he was happy.

Robert, who had no ear for music, felt uncomfortable and disapproved of

his sister’s low-cut gown. Robert was a prig; he took after his

grandfather Barr, “the citizen.”

The Everlasting was not to be seen. He had been left at home, because it

was impossible to say how he would behave on such an occasion. One dared

not take the risk.

* * * * *

In the mind of Hattie, sitting there in the shadows of the great hall,

there could be no question of failure. Was it not her Ellen, her little

girl whom she had once held upon her knee, who now sat, as it were, upon

a throne before a world which listened breathlessly? All those people

who filled the seats about her and above her might have risen and left,

but to Hattie the evening would have been a great success, a triumph in

which the judgment of the world had been wrong. They did not leave;

instead they sat, leaning forward a bit or slipped down in their seats

with closed eyes, bedazzled as much by the perfection and grace of this

new musician as by the music itself.

Rebecca, standing in the darkness at the back of the great hall,

understood all that. She knew that in part the triumph was her own, for

had she not tricked them, hypnotized them? They would not be able to

forget. She, like Hattie, felt with every fiber of her body, the very

sensations of all those people who listened--people from great houses of

the rich who had heard of Lilli Barr from friends in Europe, people from

the suburbs who would rush away in frantic haste for the last train

home, people--young people--like the one who sat next to Hattie, in

shabby clothes and worn shoes, who were fighting now desperately, as

Ellen had once fought, to reach that same platform, that same brilliant

shower of light. They listened, enchanted by the sound, caught by the

spell of one woman’s genius and another’s brilliant trickery. Possessed

they were, for the moment.

And presently the tears began to stream down Hattie’s face. They dropped

to the hands worn and red, concealed now by the expensive gloves which

cramped her uncomfortably.

The applause rose and fell in great waves, sweeping over her with the

roaring of a great surf heard far away, and through it the voice of Miss

Ogilvie, saying gently, “Who would have believed it?”

And then at length, when the sound of the last number had died away, an

overwhelming surf which would not die even when the woman in crimson

appeared again and again under the brilliant shower of light; until at

last Lilli Barr seated herself before the great satiny piano and the

crowd, which had pushed forward to the stage, grew quiet and stood

listening, waiting, silent and expectant ... the people from great

houses, the people from the suburbs, the young people with worn shoes

and shabby clothes. And into the air there rang a shower of spangled

notes, gay and sparkling, embracing a rhythm older than any of them. For

Lilli Barr--(or was it Ellen Tolliver)--was playing now The Beautiful

Blue Danube. It was not the old simple waltz that Hattie had picked out

upon the organ in her father’s parlor, but an extravagant, brilliant

arrangement which beneath the strong, white fingers became fantastical

and beautiful beyond description.

Hattie Tolliver wept because she understood. It was as if Ellen--the

proud, silent Ellen--had been suddenly stripped of all the old

inarticulate pride, as if suddenly she had grown eloquent and all the

barriers, like the walls of Jericho, had tumbled down. Hattie Tolliver

understood. Her daughter was speaking to her now across all the gulf of

years, across the hundred walls which stood between them. This was her

reward. She understood and wept at the sudden revelation of the

mysterious thread that ran through all life. All this triumph, this

beauty, all this splendor had its beginning long ago on the harmonium in

the parlor of old Jacob Barr’s farm.

When the lights went up and Hattie, drying her eyes and suffering her

hand to be patted by Miss Ogilvie, was able to look about her, she saw

with a feeling of horror among the figures crowded in a group before the

stage a coonskin coat and a sharp old face that was familiar. It was The

Everlasting. He had come, after all, alone, aloof, as he had always

lived. He stood with his bony old head tilted back a little, peering

through his steel rimmed spectacles at the brilliant figure of his

granddaughter.

For an instant Hattie thought, triumphantly, “Now he can see that my

child is great. That she is famous. He will see,” she thought, “what a

good mother I have been.”

But her sense of triumph was dimmed a little because she knew that

Ellen belonged also to him ... all that part which she had never been

able to understand. It was Gramp’s triumph as well as Hattie’s. To her

horror she heard him shouting, “Bravo! Bravo!” in a thin, cracked voice,

as if he were a young man again listening while Liszt played to an

audience of foreigners.

* * * * *

In the box, looking down on the crowd below, Thérèse Callendar waited to

the end. She sent Mrs. Mallinson, the Honorable Emma Hawksby, the

Apostle to the Genteel, Wickham Chase and the nondescript bachelor away

in her motor, bidding the driver return for her. She sat peering down

through her lorgnettes, plump and secure in her sables and dirty

diamonds, a little bedazzled like all the others but still enough in

control of her senses to be interested in the figures below. Among them

she too noticed the extraordinary figure of a skinny old man in a

coonskin coat, who stood a little apart from the others with a

triumphant smile on his sharp, wrinkled face.

At the moment she was in an optimistic mood because there had occurred

in the course of the concert an incident which, with all the rich

superstition of her nature, she interpreted as a good omen. Between the

two parts of the program when dozens of bouquets (mostly purchased by

Rebecca) were rushed forward to the platform, she saw that Lilli Barr

leaned down and chose a great bunch of yellow roses. It was the bouquet

which Thérèse had sent. It was an omen. If there had been any wavering

in the mind of Thérèse it vanished at once. Ellen could not consciously

have chosen it. She was sure now that she would succeed.

Behind the stage whither she turned her steps when the last of the

applause had died away and the lights were turned out, she found Ellen

standing surrounded by a noisy throng. Among them she recognized only

Sanson, who had grown feeble and white since last she saw him. And there

was an extraordinary, powerful woman, handsome in a large way, who wore

her white gloves awkwardly; and beside her a little old spinster in an

absurd gown of mauve taffeta adorned with cameos and coral pins. These

two stood beside the musician, the one proud and smiling, the other a

little frightened, as a bird might be.

It was all exciting. Thérèse waited on the edge of the throng until all

had gone save the big handsome woman and the little spinster in mauve.

Then she stepped forward and saw that Ellen recognized her.

“Ah,” said Ellen, coldly. “Mrs. Callendar! Were you here too?”

Thérèse did not say that the concert was magnificent. She knew better

than to add one more to the heap of garish compliments. She said, “It

was the first time I have been where I could hear you. I knew you would

do it some day.... You remember, I told you so.”

There was a look in Ellen’s eye which said, “Ah! You forgot me for

years. Now that I am successful everything is different.” Then drawing

her black cloak about her crimson dress, she laid a hand on the arm of

the big, handsome woman.

“This is my mother ... Mrs. Callendar,” she said. “And this is Miss

Ogilvie, my first music teacher.”

Mrs. Tolliver eyed Thérèse with suspicion, and Miss Ogilvie simpered and

bowed.

“I came back to ask you to come home to supper with me,” said Mrs.

Callendar to Ellen. “We could have a sandwich and a glass of sherry and

talk for a time. I’ve opened the house.”

For a moment the air was filled with a sense of conflict. The suspicion

of Hattie, as she saw her daughter slipping from her, rose into

hostility. In the end she lost, for Ellen said, “Yes, I’ll come for a

little time.” And then turning to her mother, she added, “You and Miss

Ogilvie go to the Ritz. I’ll come there later. Rebecca has ordered

supper.”

But it was not Thérèse Callendar who won. It was some one who was not

there at all ... a dark man of whose very existence Hattie Tolliver had

never heard.

50

Meanwhile in the front of the concert hall a little man whom none of

them had seen slipped away before the lights came up, into the

protecting darkness of the street. He had come in late to sit far back

in the shadow beneath the balcony. Rebecca had noticed him, for he sat

almost beside her and behaved in a queer fashion; but never having seen

him before, she gave the matter no further thought. In the midst of the

concert he had suddenly begun to weep, snuffling and drying his eyes

with a furtive shame. He was a small man with a sallow face and shifting

eyes which looked at you in a trembling, apologetic fashion (a trick

that had come over him in the years since he had been driven from the

comfortable flat on the top floor of the Babylon Arms). Rebecca, of

course, had never heard of Mr. Wyck, yet she noticed him now because he

fidgeted with his umbrella and because his hands trembled violently when

he held his handkerchief to his eyes. He appeared, in his sniveling,

frightened way, to be deeply affected by the music.

He went out quickly, among the first, looking behind him as if he stood

in terror of being recognized and accused before all those people. Once

in the street, he drew his shabby overcoat close about him, and turned

his steps southward with such speed that at times the passers-by glared

at him for jostling them at the crossings. They must have thought too,

when he looked at them, that there was a reflection of madness in the

staring eyes. He plunged south into the glare of light that pierced the

darkness above Broadway like a pillar of fire.

He had seen her again ... the one woman whom he hated above all persons

on earth. He would have killed her. It would have given him pleasure to

see her die, but as he ran, he knew that he had not the courage. He

thought, “I could not bear to face her even for the moment before I

struck. I could not bear the look in her eyes” ... (the old look of

contempt and accusation, as if she knew what it was he had told

Clarence)....

He was gone now ... Clarence. Perhaps one might find him on the other

side.

On and on he ran past brilliant pools of light, red and purple, green

and yellow; past lurid posters adorning movie palaces showing men in

death cells and women being carried down ladders in the midst of flames;

past billboards on which extravagantly beautiful women kicked naked legs

high in the air (they were not for him, whose only knowledge of love was

that feeble flicker of affection he had had for Clarence); past rich

motors filled with furs and painted women; past restaurants and hotels

glittering with light from which drifted faintly the sounds of wild

music; past all this until he emerged at last from the phantasmagoria in

which he had no part, into the protective murkiness of a street which

led west toward the North River ... a street which began in delicatessen

and clothing shops and degenerated slowly into rows of shabby brownstone

houses, down-at-the-heel and neglected, with the placards of

chiropractors and midwives and beauty doctors thrust behind dusty lace

curtains.

He hurried now, more rapidly than ever, with the air of a terrified

animal seeking its burrow, to hide away from all that world of success

and wealth and vigor that lay behind him.

She had come (he thought) out of the middle west, knowing nothing,

bringing nothing, to destroy Clarence and win all that he had seen

to-night. She had trampled them all beneath her feet. And what had he?

Mr. Wyck? Nothing! Nothing! Only the obscenities of a boarding house

into which she had driven him a second time. It was like all women. They

preyed upon men. They destroyed them. And she had been vulgar and stupid

and awkward....

At last he turned in at a house which bore a placard “Rooms to Let.”

There he let himself in with a key and hurried up the gas-lit stairs

pursued by a gigantic shadow cast by the flickering of a flame turned

economically low.

His room lay at the end of the top floor passage beyond the antiquated

bathroom with its tin tub. Once inside, he bolted the door and flung

himself down on the blankets of his bed to weep. A light, brilliant but

far away, cast the crooked outline of an ailanthus tree against the

faded greasy paper of the room. A cat, lean and adventurous, moved

across the sill, and a cat fifty times its size moved in concert across

the wall at the foot of the bed. Amid the faint odors of onions and

dust, Mr. Wyck wept pitifully, silently.

For a long time he lay thus, tormented by memories of what he had seen

... the crowd cheering and applauding, the woman in crimson and diamonds

(an evil creature, symbol of all the cruelties which oppressed him).

There were memories too that went back to the days at the Babylon Arms

before she had come out of the west to destroy everything, days when

Clarence, succumbing to the glamour of a name, had treated him as if he

were human ... days which had marked the peak of happiness. Since then

everything had been a decline, a slipping downward slowly into a harsh

world where there was no place for him....

After a time, he grew more calm and lay with the quiet of a dead man,

staring at the shadows on the wall until at last he raised himself and

sat on the edge of the bed, holding his head in his thin hands. It was

midnight ... (a clock somewhere in the distance among all those lights

sounded the hour slowly) ... when he again stirred and, taking up from

the bed an old newspaper, set himself to tearing it slowly into strips.

He worked with all the concentration of a man hypnotized, until at last

the whole thing had been torn into bits. Then he went to the window and

with great care stuffed each tiny crevice in the rattling frame. In the

same fashion he sealed the cracks about the sagging door. And when he

had done this he approached the jet on which he was accustomed to heat

the milk which made him sleep. But to-night the bottle of milk was left

in its corner, untouched. He glanced at it and, after a moment’s

thought, reached up and slowly turned the knob of the jet until the gas

began to hiss forth into the tiny room. When he had done all this he

returned to the bed and, wrapping himself in his overcoat, lay down in

peace. He did not weep now. He was quite calm. He came very close to

achieving dignity. He waited....

Outside the adventurous cat set up an amorous wail. The shadows danced

across the wall-paper in a fantastic procession, and presently as if by

a miracle their place was taken by another procession quite different--a

procession in which there were ladies in crinolines out of the portraits

which had once known the grandeur of a house on lower Fifth Avenue, and

men in trousers strapped beneath their boots and even a carriage or two

drawn by bright, prancing horses ... a dim procession out of the past.

And presently the second procession faded like the first. The walls of

the room melted away. There was a great oblivion, a peace, an endless

space where one stood alone, very tall and very powerful.... A great

light and through a rosy mist the sound of a tom cat’s amorous wail,

more and more distant, raised in an ironic hymn of love to accompany the

passing of Mr. Wyck, for whom there was no place in this world.

51

The sound of the same clock striking midnight failed to penetrate the

thick old curtains muffling the library on Murray Hill. Here Thérèse and

Ellen sat talking, almost, one might have said, as if nothing had

happened since Ellen last passed through the bronze door on her way to

the Babylon Arms. Under the long, easy flow of Thérèse’s talk her

irritation had dissolved until now, two hours after the concert, they

faced each other much as they had done long ago. It was Ellen who had

changed; Thérèse was older, a little weary, and a trifle more untidy but

otherwise the same--shrewd, talkative, her brisk mind darting now here,

now there, like a bright minnow, seeking always to penetrate the shiny,

brittle surfaces which people held before them as their characters. She

found, no doubt, that Ellen had learned the trick of the shiny, brittle

surface; she understood that it was by no means as easy as it had been

to probe to the depths the girl’s inmost thoughts. She had learned to

protect herself; nothing could hurt her now unless she chose to reveal a

weakness in her armor. Thérèse understood at once that if her plan was

to succeed, it must turn upon Ellen’s own volition; the girl (she was no

longer a girl but Thérèse still thought of her in that fashion) could

not be tricked into a bargain. Beyond all doubt she understood that

Richard was dangerous, that he had the power of causing pain.

As they talked, far into the night, Thérèse fancied that Ellen sat

there--so handsome in the long crimson gown, so self-possessed, so

protected by the shiny, brittle surface--weighing in her mind the

question of ever seeing him again. They did not approach the topic

openly; for a long time Thérèse chattered, in the deceptive way she had,

of a thousand things which had very little to do with the case.

“You have seen Sabine now and then,” she put forward, cautiously.

“Two or three times. She called on me.”

Thérèse chuckled quietly. “She must admire you. It is unusual for her to

make an advance of that sort.”

The observation drew just the answer she had hoped for, just the answer

which Ellen, thinking perhaps that the whole matter should be brought

out into the light, saw fit to give.

“It was not altogether admiration,” she said. “It was more fear. You

see, she had imagined a wonderful story ... a story that he had brought

me to Paris, and that I was his mistress.”

For a moment Ellen felt a twinge of conscience at breaking the pledge of

confidence she had given Sabine. Still, she must use the weapons at

hand. She understood perfectly that there was something they wanted of

her; she understood that any of them (save only Callendar himself)

would have sacrificed her to their own schemes. He would sacrifice her

only to himself.

“She was a little out of her head, I think ... for a long time after

little Thérèse was born. She grieved too because she could never have

another child. She wanted to give Dick an heir.... She was very much in

love with him ... then.” The last word she added, as if by an

afterthought.

At this Ellen thrust forward another pawn, another bit of knowledge

which had come to her from Sabine. “He neglects her badly, doesn’t he?”

Thérèse pursed her lips and frowned, as if for a moment the game had

gotten out of hand. “I don’t fancy it’s a case of neglect.... They’re

simply not happy. You see, it was not....” She smiled with deprecation.

“Shall I be quite frank? It was not a matter of love in the

beginning.... It was a _mariage de convenance_.”

“Yes. He told me that ... himself. Before the wedding took place.”

There was a light now in Ellen’s eye, a wicked gleam as if the game were

amusing her tremendously, as if she found a mischievous delight in

baiting this shrewd old woman with bits of knowledge which showed her

how little she really knew of all that had taken place.

“Of course,” Thérèse continued, “she fell in love with him after a

time.... But for him it was impossible.... You see, there is only one

person with whom he has ever really been in love. It was a case of

fascination....”

Ellen did not ask who this person was because she knew now, beyond all

doubt. She had a strange sense of having lived all this scene before,

and she knew that it was her sense of drama which was again giving her

the advantage; once before it had saved her when her will, her conscious

will, had come near to collapse. (Long ago it was ... in the

preposterous Babylon Arms which Clarence had thought so grand.)

“He gave me a dog,” she said, by way of letting Mrs. Callendar know

that she understood who the mysterious person was. “Just before I left

for Vienna.... I have him here with me, at the Ritz. He is very like

Richard....”

Mrs. Callendar poured out more sherry. She felt the need of something to

aid her. And then she emerged abruptly, after the law of tactics which

she usually followed, into the open.

“I don’t mind saying, my dear, that you’re the one who has fascinated

him ... always.”

Ellen smiled coldly. “He is not what one might call a passionate lover.”

“He is faithful.”

Ellen’s smile expanded into a gentle laugh. “One might call it, I

suppose, ... a fidelity of the soul, ... of the spirit, a sublimated

fidelity.” There crept into her voice a thin thread of mockery, roused

perhaps by the memory of Sabine’s confidences.

Thérèse shrugged her fat shoulders and the movement set the plastron of

dirty diamonds all a-glitter. “That is that,” she observed. “You know

him as well as I do.”

(“Better,” thought Ellen, “so much better, because I know how dangerous

he is.”) But she kept silent.

“I think he would marry you to-morrow ... if you would have him.”

For an instant Ellen came very near to betraying herself. She felt the

blood rise into her face. She felt a sudden faintness that emerged dimly

from the memories of him as a lover, so charming, so subtle, so given to

fierce, quick waves of passion.

“Did he send you to tell me that?” she asked in a low voice.

“No.... But I know it just the same. I have talked to him ... not

openly, of course.”

(“No,” thought Ellen, “not openly, but like this, like the way you are

talking to me.” It was dangerous, this business of insinuation.)

“It is remarkable that the feeling has lasted so long ... so many

years,” Thérèse continued. “It has not been like that with any other

woman. I think he is fascinated by your will, your power, your

determination.”

“You make me a great person,” observed Ellen with irony, “but not a very

seductive one.”

“There are ways and ways of seduction. What seduces one man passes over

the head of another.”

“It is a perverse attraction....”

“Perhaps.... But most attractions are.”

Thérèse had seen the sudden change at the mention of her son’s name,

just as she had seen the change in her son when Ellen’s name had been

brought into the light. She meditated for a time in silence and then

observed, “You are looking tired to-night.”

There were dark circles under Ellen’s eyes, pale evidences of the

strain, the excitement which had not abated for an instant since they

embarked for Vienna.

“I am tired,” she said, “very tired.”

“You should rest,” pursued Thérèse. “You could go to the place on Long

Island. You could be alone there, if you liked. I shouldn’t bother you.

I shall be busy in town until this tangle over money is settled.”

Ellen stirred and sighed. “No, that’s impossible. It’s good of you to

offer it, but I can’t accept.... I can’t stop now. You see the ball has

been started rolling. One must take advantage of success while it’s at

hand. Never let a chance slip past. I know that ... by experience. You

see, Miss Schönberg--she’s my manager--has arranged a great many

engagements.”

“Whenever you want a place to rest,” continued Thérèse, “let me know.”

It was true that she was tired, bitterly tired; and more troubling, more

enduring than the mere exhaustion was the obscure feeling that she had

passed from one period of her life into another, that she had left

behind somewhere in these three exciting years a milestone that marked

the borderland of youth, of that first, fresh, exuberant youth which,

at bottom, had been the source of all her success. It had slipped away

somehow, in the night, without her knowing it. She was still strong (she

knew that well enough), still filled with energy, but something was

gone, a faint rosy mist perhaps, which had covered all life, even in the

bitterest moments, with a glow that touched everything with a glamorous

unreality, which made each new turning seem a wild adventure. It was

gone; life was slipping past. Here she sat, a woman little past thirty,

and what had she gained in exchange? Fame, perhaps? And wealth, which

lay just around the next corner? Something had escaped her; something

which in her mind was associated dimly with Lily and the memory of the

pavilion silvered by the moon.

She stirred suddenly. “I must go. My mother and Miss Ogilvie are waiting

at the Ritz.”

She rose and Thérèse pulled herself with an heroic effort from the

depths of her chair. Together they walked through the bleak, shadowy

hall and at the door Mrs. Callendar said, “You will come to dinner with

me some night ... yes? I will ring you up to-morrow.”

And as Ellen moved away down the steps, she added, “Remember, you must

not overwork.... You must care for yourself. You are not as young as you

were once.”

It was that final speech _You are not as young as you were once_ which,

like a barbed arrow, remained in her mind and rankled there as she drove

in the Callendar motor through the streets to the Ritz where she found

her mother and Miss Ogilvie sitting sleepily with an air of disapproval

while Sanson and Rebecca and Uncle Raoul drank champagne and labored to

be gay in celebration of the triumph.

It was about this hour that the amorous wailing of the tom-cat died

forever upon the ears of Mr. Wyck.

* * * * *

In the morning the newspapers printed, in the column devoted to murders,

suicides and crimes of violence, a single paragraph----

“Herbert Wyck, aged forty-three, single, committed suicide last night by

inhaling gas in his room in a boarding house at ---- West 35th street.

The only existing relative is Miss Sophronia Wyck residing in Yonkers.

It is said that the dead man’s family once played a prominent part in

the life of New York in the Seventies.”

But no one saw it ... not Hattie Tolliver, nor her husband, nor Robert,

nor Ellen; they were all busy reading the triumphant notices of the

concert at which, more than one critic said, a new Tèresa Carreño had

arrived.

Thus passed Mr. Wyck whose one happiness was desolated because Lily

Shane had encountered Clarence Murdock in the dining car of a

transcontinental train. “Women like that,” Harvey Seton had said....

* * * * *

Ellen went to dine in the ugly dining room copied from the Duc de Morny

not once but many times and she met there those people--Mrs. Mallinson,

the Honorable Emma, the Apostle to the Genteel, Mr. Wickham Chase and

scores of others--who had once sat on the opposite side of the lacquered

screen waiting for the Russian tenor, the Javanese dancer and the

unknown young American girl. She sat at dinner between bankers and

bishops, between fashionable young men and elderly millionaires. She was

a success, for she possessed an indifference bordering upon rudeness

which allowed her dinner companions to talk as much as they pleased

about themselves and led them into extraordinary efforts to win a gleam

of interest from her clear blue eyes. And she learned that many things

had changed since she last dined in the Callendar house. She learned

that Mrs. Sigourney was no longer fashionable but merely material for

the newspapers, and that Mrs. Champion and her Virgins had sunk into a

brownstone obscurity in the face of a new age which no longer had a

great interest in virginity; and that artists, musicians and writers

were becoming the thing, that no dinner was complete without them. But

it was amazing how little the whole spectacle interested her. She knew

that it had all been arranged with a purpose; the indomitable Thérèse,

for all her fatigue and worry, was preparing for the next step. These

dinners gave Lilli Barr a place in the world of the Honorable Emma and

the Apostle to the Genteel; they fixed her.

52

The first letter from Lily since Ellen had left the house in the Rue

Raynouard for Vienna arrived on the eve of her departure from New York

for the West. It was a sad letter, tragic and strangely subdued for one

so buoyant, so happy as Lily to have written. Still, there were reasons

... reasons which piled one upon another in a crescendo of sorrow and

tragedy. It was, as Ellen remarked to Rebecca while they sat at

breakfast in the bright sitting room, as if the very foundations of

Lily’s life had collapsed.

César was missing. “I have given up hope,” wrote Lily, “of seeing him

again. Something tells me that he is dead, that even if he were a

prisoner I should have heard from him. I know he is gone. I saw him on

the night he went into action. His troop passed through Meaux in the

direction of the Germans and he stopped for five minutes ... five

precious minutes ... at Germigny. And then he rode away into the

darkness.... I am certain that he is dead.”

Nor was this all. Madame Gigon too was dead. With Lily she had been

trapped in the house at Germigny, too ill to flee. The Germans had

entered the park and the château and spent a night there. Before morning

they were driven out again. During that night Madame Gigon had died. She

was buried now in the family grave at Trilport, nearby.

And Jean ... the Jean (eighteen now) who was such a friend of Ellen’s,

who had ridden wildly through the Bois and through the fields at

Germigny, was in the hospital. He had been with César’s troop. César had

pledged himself to look out for the boy. But César had vanished during

the first skirmish with the Uhlans. Jean had lost him, and now Jean lay

in the hospital at Neuilly with his left leg amputated at the knee.

“I am back in the Rue Raynouard,” wrote Lily, “but you can imagine that

it is not a happy place. I am alone all day and when I go out, I see no

one because all the others are busy with the war, with their own friends

and relations. Many of them have gone to the country because living has

become very dear in Paris. We are safe again, but I am alone. There is

not much pleasure here. I too have been very ill. I know now what a

stranger I have always been. I am American still, despite everything.

They know it too and have left me alone.”

When Rebecca had gone, bustling and rather hard, out into the streets,

Ellen sat for a long time with Hansi beside her, holding the sad letter

in her hands. This, then, was what had happened to Lily’s world, a world

which, protected by wealth, had seemed so secure, so far beyond

destruction. In a single night it was gone, swept away like so much

rubbish out of an open door. Only Jean was left; and Jean, who loved

life and activity and movement, was crippled now forever.

Moved by an overwhelming sadness, Ellen reproached herself for having

been rude to old Madame Gigon, for having quarreled with César. She had

been unpleasant to them because (she considered the thing honestly now,

perhaps for the first time) because the one had been of no use to her

and the other had threatened to stand in her way. She knew too for the

first time how much Lily had loved her César. In her letter she made no

pretenses; she was quite frank, as if after what had happened it was

nonsense, pitiful nonsense, any longer to pretend. They were lovers;

they had loved each other for years ... it must have been nearly twelve

years of love which stood blocked by César’s sickly wife. There was,

Ellen owned, something admirable in such devotion, still more when there

was no arbitrary tie to bind them, the one to the other.

She rose presently and began to pace up and down the sunlit room, the

black dog following close at her heels, up and down, up and down, up

and down. And the weariness, the strange lack of zest, which she had

spoken of to Mrs. Callendar, took possession of her once more. She was,

in the midst of her triumph, surrounded by the very clippings which

acclaimed her, afraid with that curious fear of life which had troubled

her since the beginning. It was a hostile world in which one must fight

perpetually, only to be defeated in the end by some sinister thrust of

circumstance ... a thrust such as had destroyed all Lily’s quiet

security. It was well indeed to have humility.

She remembered too that Fergus was caught up in the torrent which had

swept away so much that Lily held dear.... Fergus and (she halted

abruptly in her restless pacing and grew thoughtful) Fergus and

Callendar, the two persons in all the world whom she loved best. In the

terror of the moment, she was completely honest. She loved Callendar. If

there had ever been any doubt, she knew it now. She did not, even to

save her own emotions, to shield her own vanity, put the thing out of

her mind. She gave herself up to the idea.

In her restless pacing, she fancied that she must do something. She must

save them--Callendar and Fergus--by some means; but like Thérèse in her

anxiety over her fortune, like Hattie in her desperation, she found

herself defeated. There was nothing to be done. This gaudy show, this

spectacle, this glittering circus parade which crossed the face of

Europe could not be blocked. She could not save them because they

preferred the spectacle to anything in all the world. Ah, she knew them

both!... She knew what it was in them that was captured and held fast by

the spectacle. She knew that if she had been a man, she too would have

been there by their side. They must be in the center of things, where

there was the most going on, the one aloof, the other fairly saturated

in the color, the feel, the very noise of the whole affair. It was a

thirst for life, for a sense of its splendor.... She knew what it was

because she too was possessed by it. It had nothing to do with

patriotism; that sort of emotion was good enough for the French.

Like Hattie, like Thérèse, like a million other women she was helpless,

and the feeling terrified her, who had never been really helpless

before. This war, which she had damned for a nuisance that interrupted

her own triumphant way, became a monster, overwhelming and bestial,

before which she was powerless. And in her terror she was softened by a

new sort of humanity. She became merely a woman whose men were at war, a

woman who could do nothing, who must sit behind and suffer in terror and

in doubt.

* * * * *

Rebecca found her there when she returned at three o’clock, still pacing

up and down, up and down, the great black dog following close at her

heels. She had not lunched; she had not thought of eating.

“The letter from Lily,” she told Rebecca, with an air of repression,

“has upset me. I don’t know what I’m to do. I want to go back to Paris.”

The statement so astounded Rebecca that she dropped the novels and

papers she was carrying and stood staring.

“What!” she cried, “Go back now? Sacrifice everything we have worked

for? Ruin everything? Give up all these engagements? You must be mad.”

It was plain that Ellen had thought of all this, that the struggle which

she saw taking form with Rebecca had already occurred in her own soul.

She knew what she was sacrificing ... if she returned.

“Lily is alone there, and in trouble. Some one should go to her.”

So that was it! Rebecca’s tiny, bright ferret’s eyes grew red with

anger. “Lily! Lily!” she said. “Don’t worry about Lily. I’ll wager by

this time she has found some one to console her.”

Ellen moved toward her like a thunder cloud, powerful, menacing in a

kind of dignity that was strange and even terrifying to Rebecca. “You

can’t say that of her. I won’t have you. How can you when it was Lily

who has helped me more than any one in the world? I won’t have it. Who

are you to speak like that of Lily ... my own cousin?”

“Lily who has helped you!” screamed Rebecca. “And what of me? What of

me?” She began to beat her thin breasts in a kind of fury. Her nose

became a beak, her small eyes red and furious. “Have I done nothing? Am

I no one, to be cast aside like this? What of the work I have done, the

slaving?”

For a moment they stood facing each other, silent and furious, close in

a primitive fashion to blows. There was silence because their anger had

reached a point beyond all words and here each held herself in check. It

was Ellen who broke the silence. She began to laugh, softly and

bitterly.

“Perhaps you’re right,” she said in a low voice. “I do owe you a great

deal ... as much, really, as I owe to Lily. It has given you the right

to a certain hold upon me.”

(But the difference, she knew, was this--that Lily would never exert her

right of possession.)

“You can’t go,” continued Rebecca, “not now. Think of it ... all the

years of sacrifice and work, gone for nothing. Can’t you see that fate

has delivered triumph into your hands. If you turn your back upon it

now, you’d be nothing less than a fool.” She saw in a sudden flash

another argument and thrust it into the conflict. “Always you have taken

advantage of opportunity.... You told me so yourself.... And now when

the greatest chance of all is at hand, you turn your back on it. I can’t

understand you. Why should you suddenly be so thoughtful of Lily?”

Ellen sat down and fell to looking out of the window. “Perhaps you’re

right,” she said. “I’ll think it out ... more clearly perhaps.”

There was, after all, nothing that she could do. The old despair swept

over her, taking the place of her pessimistic anger. She could not go to

the front, among the soldiers, to comfort Callendar. He would have been

the last to want her there.

“Perhaps you’re right,” she repeated, and then, “War is a rotten thing

for women.”

But Rebecca had, all the same, a feeling that it was not Lily whom she

was fighting but some one else--whom, she could not imagine. She could

not have known of course that Thérèse Callendar had already written her

son that she had seen Ellen Tolliver, that she was handsomer than ever

and more fascinating and sullen, and that in a sly postscript she had

remarked, “The strange thing is that I believe she is still in love with

you. I watched her, out of curiosity, and I am sure of it.”

And, of course, none of them knew that Callendar on reading the letter

somewhere in the mud near Loos, with the throbbing of the barrage in his

ears, had smiled at the trickery of women and thought, “Curiosity,

indeed!”

* * * * *

It was in the end Rebecca who won, not a victory perhaps but at least a

delay. The little Jewess was much too shrewd ever to suppose that Ellen

might be conquered so easily; if she had won a temporary advantage she

understood it was because Ellen chose to let her win, because Ellen had

weighed the question and decided that all things considered, Rebecca was

right. To turn back at this point was a folly which she could not deny.

Belonging now in a sense to the whole world she was no longer absolute

mistress of her own fortune; such freedom was, after all, the privilege

only of the obscure. She was in truth, she thought bitterly, still a

mountebank, an entertainer, who waited behind a painted screen to

entertain the public. The stage was greater now and the audience had

grown from the fashionable little group in the Callendar drawing-room to

all the world. That was the only difference.

But stronger than any sense of duty or obligation was the old terror of

a terrible poverty which forced one to keep up appearances. She had

tasted the security that comes of riches and she could not turn back.

There were memories which would not die, memories of the days when as a

girl she had put on a bold face before all the Town, memories, even

worse, of the drab petty economies she had known in the days at the

Babylon Arms. And even stronger than all these things was her fear of

failure, a passionate fear which might easily have driven her in some

circumstances to suicide. One who had been so ruthless, so arrogant, so

proud, dared not fail. That way too had been blocked.

So she found herself brought up sharply against the problem of the Town.

They wanted her there; they were, strangely enough, proud of her. Eva

Barr had written her, and Miss Ogilvie, and even May Biggs, whom she had

feared ever to see again. She had left them all believing that she would

never turn back, believing that by stepping aboard the express for the

East she had turned her back forever upon a place which, in honest

truth, she despised. But she had not escaped; there were ties,

intangible and tenuous, which bound her to the place. There were times

when she was even betrayed by a certain nostalgia for the sight of the

roaring black furnaces, the dark empty rooms of Shane’s Castle, closed

now and barren of all life; the decaying smoke-stained houses that stood

far back from the streets surrounded by green lawns and old trees.

She thought, “This again is a sign that something has gone from me,

something fierce and spirited. I am growing softer.”

They had, so May Biggs wrote, built a new concert hall, and what could

be so appropriate as to have it opened by a daughter of the Town? “A

daughter of the Town,” she reflected bitterly. “Yes, I am that. It, too,

claims me.”

And it was true. She was a daughter of the Town. There was in her the

same fierce energy, the same ruthlessness, the same pride. If she had

been born elsewhere, in some less harsh and vigorous community, she

would herself have been softer, less overwhelmingly successful. It was

true. She _was_ a daughter of the hard, uncompromising Town.

“_It happens like that ..._” Miss Ogilvie had said, “_in the most

unexpected places ... in villages, in towns.... Why, even in a dirty

mill town like this._”

But in the end, it was her pride which led her back. Because, a dozen

years ago, she had talked wildly and desperately, because she had

boasted of what she would one day do, she must return now to let them

see that she had done it. It was a triumph which in her heart she

counted as more than the triumphs of London, of Paris, of New York, of

all the world. For she had not yet escaped the Town. She would not be

free until they saw her fabulous success.

* * * * *

But Hattie could not go with her. Hattie’s triumph was spoiled. On the

night of the concert when The Everlasting had appeared without warning,

it was necessary for some one to see that the old man was returned

safely to the apartment, so to Charles Tolliver the task had been

assigned. Gramp, Heaven knows, could easily have found his way back; he

knew more of the world than any of them, but he chose never to interfere

with such plans lest he seem too active, too spry to require any

attention. To guard his security, he encouraged their assumption that he

was feeble and a bit childish. He had not forgotten the security which

comes of being a possession.

It is impossible to have known what thoughts passed through the crafty,

old mind as he walked by the side of his son through the dark streets.

They did not speak; they were as strange to each other as they had

always been, as remote as if there had been not the slightest bond

between them. Perhaps the old man scorned his son for his gentle

goodness, so misplaced in a world where there was so little use for that

sort of thing. Perhaps he understood that Ellen was after all much

closer to himself than to her father. Perhaps he knew that Charles

Tolliver, in his heart, had been saddened by the triumph, because it

stood as a seal upon his daughter’s escape. Perhaps he noticed the faint

weariness in the step of his son, the dark circles beneath his eyes, the

listlessness of his manner, as if he had grown weary of the confused,

tormented life all about him.

It was the old man ... the father ... whose step was light, whose eye

was shining as they entered the flat. It was the old man too who sat up

reading until he heard Hattie and Miss Ogilvie, returning from the Ritz,

come in at three in the morning. For Charles Tolliver had gone quickly

away to his bed and to the dreams that were his reality.

In the morning Hattie had called Ellen to say that her father was ill.

He had been drowsy. It was almost impossible to keep him awake. The

doctor had been there.

“He says,” Hattie told her, “that he must have been ill for a long time

without speaking of it. He has never complained. I don’t understand it.

And now he’s too drowsy to tell me anything. The doctor says he is badly

run down. He is worried because Papa seems to have no resistance.”

He had grown no better with the passing of time. Indeed, the drowsiness

seemed to increase, and there were times when he talked irrationally, as

if he had never left the Town at all. He held long, fantastic

conversations with Judge Wilkins and talked too of the Grand Circuit

races and Pop Geers.

And when Ellen left for the Midlands, Hattie remained behind to sit in

the rocking chair at her husband’s side caring for him and for Gramp who

had since the night when he ran away to the concert become troublesome

again as if there were something in the air.

53

In the Town the new concert hall of which Cousin Eva Barr and May Biggs

had written with such enthusiasm and detail raised its white Greek

façade a score of yards from the main street. Erected to the twin

worship of the muses of Music and the Theater it supplanted the dismal

opera house of an early, less sophisticated period, and so left the late

U. S. Grant architecture of that shabby, moth-eaten structure in an

undivided dedication to the bastard sister of Music and the Theater, a

shabby, commonplace child known as the Movies, whom Sabine had once

said should be christened Pomegranate. Though the new temple was barely

finished and the names of Shakespeare, Wagner (who would probably be

left out now that there was a war and the Germans, who were the very

backbone of the Town, had become blond beasts, professionally trained

ravishers, and other things), Beethoven (who would slip by the committee

because he had been dead so long), Verdi (whose Aïda many supposed to be

the high water mark of all opera), Molière (suggested by Eva Barr but

unknown to most of the committee), Racine (likewise), Weber (who was so

dead as to be a natural history specimen and therefore unlikely to

ravish any one, even spiritually), Goethe and Schiller (likewise, though

still under suspicion)--were not yet carven upon its limestone pediment,

the building was already streaked by the soot which drifted perpetually

over the city from the remote flats where the mills now worked all day

and all night in making shells. Yet the handsome temple could have had

no existence save for the soot; the very smudges upon its virgin face

were each one a symbol of the wealth which had made it possible. The

Town had known four stages in its development. In the beginning there

had been but a block house set down in a wilderness. Before many years

had passed this was succeeded by a square filled with farmers and lowing

cattle and heavy wagons laden with grain. Then in turn a community, raw

and rankly prosperous which grew with a ruthless savagery, crushing

everything beneath a passion for bigness and prosperity. And now,

creeping in toward its heart, stealthily and, as many solid citizens

believed, suspiciously, there came a softness which some called

degeneration--a liking for beauty of sound, of sight, and of color. It

stole up from the rear at the most unexpected moments upon men like

Judge Weissmann. The wives of leading manufacturers and wholesale

grocers had traitorously admitted lecturers and musicians into a

fortress dedicated hitherto to the business of making money. And then

with a sudden rush, the new forces had swept out of their hiding places

on every side and saddled upon the noble citizenry a concert hall, a

temple erected in the very heart of the citadel to the enemy.

So it stood there, bright and new, a few hundred yards from the Elks

Club--a symbol of a change that was coming slowly to pass, a sign that

the women and the younger generation had grown a little weary of a world

composed entirely of noise and soot and clouds of figures. Men like

Judge Weissmann saw it as the beginning of the end. Judge Weissmann

(himself an immigrant from Vienna) called it “a sign that the old

thrifty spirit of the pioneer was passing. The old opera house was good

enough for concerts and shows.” And secretly he calculated how much all

that white limestone and carving had cost him in taxes.

It was into this divided world that Ellen, who had known only a

community that was solid in its admiration for smoke and bigness and

prosperity, returned. They were good to her, despite all the things they

had to say regarding her affectations. They considered her dog

(Callendar’s dog) ridiculous, and they disapproved of the uncompromising

Miss Schönberg who demanded her cash guaranty for the concert almost as

soon as she stepped from the train. In certain benighted circles (which

is to say those not associated with the flamboyant Country Club set) it

was even whispered that she drank and smoked. They wondered how gentle

Miss Ogilvie received such behavior, for Ellen stayed with Miss Ogilvie,

who watched her bird’s-nest parlor grow blue with the smoke of Ellen’s

and Rebecca’s cigarettes without ever turning a hair. Was she not

entertaining a great artist? If she herself had had the courage, might

not she have been smoking cigarettes and drinking champagne? Had she

herself not failed because she was afraid of what people would say? None

of them knew the spirit of rebellion, smoldering for so many years, that

now leapt into flame beneath the mauve taffeta dress which she wore

every day during Ellen’s visit.

The bird’s-nest parlor, with all its pampas grass and coral and curios,

must have set fire to strange memories in the breast of Ellen. She sat

again in the same chair where she had sat, abashed but proud, awkward

yet possessed of her curious dignity, on the night of the elopement.

The little room was filled with memories of Clarence. She must have seen

him again as he had been on that first night (so lost now in the turmoil

of all that had gone between) ... sitting there, frightened of old

Harvey Seton, ardent and excited in his choked, inarticulate fashion, a

man who even then had seemed a little ridiculous and pitiful.

And once Miss Ogilvie had summoned him to life when she said to Ellen,

“Poor Mr. Murdock. If only he could be here to see your success.”

The little old woman had the best intentions in the world. The meager

speech was born of sympathy and kindness alone. She could not have known

that each word had hurt Ellen intolerably. Poor Clarence! He would not

have liked it. It would have made him even more insignificant and

wretched. _The husband of Ellen Tolliver. That’s what I’ll be!_ The

words echoed ironically in her ears. And Clarence had never known Lilli

Barr, who was born years after he died.... Lilli Barr who had nothing to

do with poor Clarence. So far as the world was concerned he had never

existed at all.

She had her triumph. There were set floral pieces with the words

“Welcome Home” worked in carnations and pansies. And there was a

welcoming speech by Mrs. McGovern, president of the Sorosis Club (who

had downed Cousin Eva Barr only after a fierce struggle for the honor).

And they had cheered her. It was a triumph and in a poor, inadequate

fashion it satisfied her. But she was not sure that it was worth all the

pain.

She did not go into the empty, echoing rooms of Shane’s Castle. She saw

it, distantly, veiled in the smoke and flame of the Flats, from Miss

Ogilvie’s back window on the hill, the one monument of her family in all

the Town. She could not have borne it to enter alone the door which on

each Christmas Day for so many years had admitted a whole procession.

And she came to understand that it was not alone the Town which she was

driven relentlessly to escape. It was the Babylon Arms, Thérèse

Callendar and all her world, even her own family, all save Fergus--she

must escape forever any tie that bound her, any bond which gave her into

possession.

* * * * *

On the day after the concert Miss Ogilvie gave a reception. Crowds of

women and a few intimidated men thronged the tiny parlor. They passed in

and out in an endless stream, until Rebecca, who could bear it no

longer, invaded the virgin privacy of Miss Ogilvie’s bedroom and fell

into a perfect orgy of smoking while she read Holy Living and Dying, the

only book at hand to divert her. Hansi, shut in an adjoining room,

howled and howled in his solitude.

Long after the winter twilight had descended, at a moment when Ellen

thought she could endure the procession no longer, it began to abate and

as the last guest departed she saw, coming up the neat brick walk

between the lilacs and syringas, the figure of a plump dowdy woman

surrounded by a phalanx of children. In truth there were but four in the

phalanx but in the fading light their numbers seemed doubled. As the

woman came nearer there rose about her an aura of familiarity ...

something in the way she walked, coquettish and ridiculous in a woman so

plump and loose of figure. And then, all at once in a sudden flash,

Ellen recognized the walk. The woman was May Biggs. Years ago May had

moved thus, giggling and flirting her skirts from side to side while she

walked with her arm about Ellen’s waist. Only now (Ellen reflected)

there was twice as much of her to wriggle and the effect was not the

same.

As she approached Ellen did not wait. Some memory was stirred by the

sight, something which she could no more control than she could

understand.... May Biggs, whom she had scorned always, coming up Miss

Ogilvie’s brick walk carrying one child and leading three others by the

hand, a May Biggs who was stout now and already middle-aged in her dowdy

clothes covered with feathers and buttons and bits of passementerie. It

was extraordinary, the feeling that overwhelmed her; it was a sensation

compounded of joy and melancholy, of guilt and a curious desire to

recapture something which had escaped her forever, perhaps that first

reckless youth which had slipped away in the night without her knowing

it.

She stood in the doorway, crying, “May ... May Seton!”

And then she was kissing May who blushed and held on awkwardly to the

youngest of the four little Biggses.

In the little parlor they were alone, for Miss Ogilvie under the stress

of the excitement and the failure of the local bakery to deliver the

macaroons had retired to her chamber with her smelling salts, where she

now sat in a cloud of blue smoke talking with Rebecca while the great

black dog howled in the adjoining room.

Once they were seated, May put forward her offspring, one by one, in

order on the descending scale. “This is Herman Junior ... and this

Marguerite ... and this Merton ... and the baby here is named after me.”

(All in order, thought Ellen, two boys and two girls, properly

alternated.)

The two boys shook hands awkwardly, Marguerite curtseyed and smirked

with all the coquetry descended from her now settled mother, and the

baby gurgled pleasantly and buried her head. They were all very neat and

clean. Their manners were excellent. They revealed glimpses of a little

world that was placid, orderly, comfortable and perhaps a little

monotonous.

“I brought the children,” said May. “I wanted them to meet you. This,”

she said, addressing the three who were able to walk, “is my girl friend

I told you about. She’s famous now. You can remember when you’re grown

up that you’ve met her.” And then abruptly, “Marguerite, put down that

cake until the lady tells you to have one.”

She had not changed much. Hers was the good-natured, pleasant sort of

face on which time leaves few traces, and since nothing could ever

happen to May, very little could happen to her face. It had grown more

plump, and less arch, for she was content and satisfied now with a solid

husband, and she showed every sign of presenting a new hostage to

fortune.

“Well,” she said, shyly. “A lot has happened, hasn’t it, Ellen.... I

suppose I can still call you Ellen.”

There was something in May’s shyness, in the awe which shone in her

eyes, that struck deep into Ellen’s humility. It made her feel

preposterous and absurd and a little nightmarish.

“Good Heavens!” she replied. “That’s my name. Of all the people in the

world, you have most right to use it.” And then. “But tell me the news.

I’ve been too busy to hear any of it. It’s been ten years since I went

away.”

She found herself blushing, perhaps at the sudden slip of the tongue

that betrayed her into recognition of the one unpleasantness that stood

between them. It was almost as if she had said, “since I ran away with

Clarence.”

May, it seemed, was no more eager to mention his name. She hastened past

it. “I tried to get Herman to come, but he wouldn’t go where there were

so many women. He wants to see you. He said to tell you that if you

would come to lunch, he’d come home from the works. You’d never know

him. He’s a father now,” she made a sweeping gesture to include the

restless troop that surrounded her, “and he has a mustache.”

Ellen declined, with a genuine regret. She wanted vaguely to enter the

mild, ordered world out of which these four children had come.

“I can’t come because I am leaving at eight. You see, I can’t do what I

like any more. I have engagements ... concerts which I must keep. But

thank him. Maybe he could run over to-night.”

May thought not. They were making an inventory at the Junoform factory

and Herman would be there until midnight. Harvey Seton (Lily’s arch

enemy) was dead.

“He died last June. We found him cold in the morning in his bed in the

spare room. You see he hadn’t slept in the same room with Ma since

Jimmy was born. She says if he had, he might be alive to-day.”

So Herman was head of the factory now and he was worried. The new

fashions had cut down the sale of corsets, and corsets made of rubber

were putting into the discard those built upon the synthetic whalebone

which old Samuel Barr had invented. Business wasn’t so good. Perhaps the

fashions would change. Perhaps they would put in a rubber corset

department. Ellen was fresh from Paris. Did she think there was any

chance of small waists coming in again?

“Of course,” said May, with an echo of the old giggle, “women with my

figure will always have to wear whalebone. Rubber is no good for me. And

then just now, I have to wear my corsets loose....” She sighed. “If only

I had a figure like yours.” And she swept Ellen’s straight gray clad

figure with an appraising and envious glance.

“And your grandfather is still alive?” asked May in astonishment. “Why,

he was an old man when you left. He must be nearly ninety now.”

“He’s ninety-one and very spry,” said Ellen. “He goes out to walk alone

in the city. He hasn’t changed at all.”

“Well, well,” echoed May, and there rose an awkward pause which neither

of them seemed able to break. Now that they had gone quickly through the

past there seemed to be nothing of which to speak. The sound of the

black dog’s howling came distantly into the little parlor. It was

Merton, the third child, who saved the situation. May cried, “Merton,

how many times have I told you not to touch things. Take your hand right

out of that goldfish bowl.... Here, come here now and wipe it on Momma’s

handkerchief.”

While this was being done Ellen reflected, a bit grimly, that perhaps it

was just as well that she could not lunch with May. If the conversation

had grown sterile in half an hour, how could one hope that it could be

spread over an hour? Sabine, perhaps, had been right, when she had said

once that it was a bad sign when a person had a great many _old_

friends. It meant that such a person had not much capacity for growth.

Here was May unchanged, exactly as she had always been, save that she

had now the satisfaction of a husband and was no longer restless and

coquettish. Perhaps she had been right when she said so long ago that

all May wanted was a man; it did not matter what man.

“There now,” May was saying. “Sit on the chair and don’t swing your

feet. You’ll scratch Miss Ogilvie’s furniture.” She turned to Ellen.

“Marguerite,” she said, “is now taking lessons from Miss Ogilvie. Maybe

some day you’ll be famous too, Marguerite. Maybe you’ll play for the

lady. Come now ... that’s a nice girl ... play your new piece, the one

called The Jolly Farmer.”

But Marguerite would not stir. She grew arch and hung her head. She

threatened to sob. Her mother coaxed and argued and pleaded but nothing

happened. Marguerite would have none of The Jolly Farmer. It was Rebecca

who saved the situation by coming in.

“My God!” she said, on entering, but the rest of her sentence was lost

forever because the sight of May and her offspring silenced her.

“Miss Schönberg,” said Ellen, “this is Mrs. Biggs.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said May, staring at the exotic figure of

Rebecca, and then after a strained silence, “I must go now. Baby wants

her supper.”

Ellen went with the party to the door and as she bade them farewell and

the little procession got under way, she saw that May hung behind with a

curious air of embarrassment until the three older children were half

way down the neat brick path. With only the baby left to hear her, she

turned abruptly to Ellen and with a blush, said, “There was one thing I

wanted to ask you and I never had a chance until now. It’s about

Clarence.” She hesitated and then with a supreme effort managed to say,

“There was a story that he shot himself.... That wasn’t true, was it?”

Ellen did not answer at once. She took the hand of the baby in hers, and

looking away, replied in a low voice, “No, it wasn’t true.... You

remember he had a weak heart. It was his heart that killed him.”

“I’m glad,” said May softly. “I always liked him. I wouldn’t want to

think he’d committed suicide.”

She stood in the doorway, unconscious of the cold until the figure of

May, swaying from side to side and surrounded by the phalanx of

offspring, had disappeared among the shadows of the lilacs.

In the hallway, Rebecca was awaiting her.

“Thank God, that’s over,” she said with a laugh, but she must have

noticed that Ellen did not respond.

“She was a friend of mine,” Ellen observed gravely. “I grew up with

her.”

Again Rebecca laughed in that same hard, worldly fashion. “I must say

she has been more abundant than you.”

This time Ellen made no answer at all. She was hypnotized by the memory

of the look that had come into May’s eyes at the mention of Clarence. It

was an embarrassed, shy look, but it glowed all the same with a fire

that had never burned for Herman Biggs. And Ellen understood then for

the first time that she had been wrong after all, for Clarence--poor,

meek, inarticulate Clarence, who had been dead for years--was to May a

romantic figure, a fascinating creature. May had thought of him always

... perhaps in the same fashion in which she herself thought of

Callendar.

It had been all wrong since the beginning. There was no longer any

doubt. It was May whom he should have married. And she wondered again

for the thousandth time what it was that had turned him toward herself.

But the dog was still howling in loneliness. She walked along the tiny

hall and as she opened the door he leapt at her in a frenzy of devotion.

“Hansi, old fellow,” she murmured and pressed her face against his sleek

black head.

54

It was six years now, through the evil chance that led them to pass each

other unknowingly in mid-Atlantic, since Fergus had seen his sister.

From afar, even in the turmoil and excitement of the war he had watched

her progress, now in the letters from his mother (which he discounted

because he knew she was inclined to exaggerate when her children were

concerned) now in the letters from Ellen, and sometimes in the

newspapers which filtered through, weeks old, to his escadrille at the

front. As Ellen had guessed, he understood the ascent perfectly; he saw

her working at it doggedly with one eye always upon the lucky chance.

From afar he had admired the whole campaign and developed a passionate

curiosity to know this Rebecca Schönberg who stood so cleverly in the

background of the whole affair. She too had genius.

The great distance which separated them--even the years which had passed

since he saw her, aboard the greasy old _City of Paris_, slip away into

the winter mists of the North River--had not altered the transcendent

quality of their understanding. Their tie was not, like the love of

Hattie, a thing which emotionally demanded a close and breathless

contact. It was less a matter of the senses and more a matter of the

mind. Each had known always what to expect from the other, above all

else a frank and unabashed honesty. They were very like each other, save

that Fergus (and he knew it ruefully) lacked his sister’s stiff,

inflexible wilfulness. It was these qualities, he understood well

enough, which had given her the advantage. It had made of her a

conqueror. The lack of it had left him a charming, happy-go-lucky

fellow. But it gave him too a savor in life, a wild enjoyment, which

she could never know.

The war suited him. As his mother had believed, it was to him a great

show, a sort of masquerade in which he was at once a participant and a

spectator; and it gave rein to impulses and inheritances which otherwise

might never have been awakened--such strains as a passion for adventure

that had its origin in wild cattle-thieving highland ancestors, and a

love for the excitement to be found in battle high in the air above a

world that lay spread out beneath him mapwise and miserably dwarfed. A

little of this he managed to pin down in the eager, hurried letters he

wrote to Ellen, so that she understood what it was that made him content

and happy. It was a satisfaction very like her own, the satisfaction of

triumph over great odds, of gambling for high stakes, of finding oneself

absorbed utterly and passionately in the thing at hand. It was that

queer streak again--the same queer streak which had made of Sam Barr a

pauper and of Old Julia Shane a woman fabulously rich, the streak to

which the clumsy perpetual motion machine rusting in a corn field of the

middle-west stood as an eternal monument. It was the old fever to gobble

up all of life, not alone mere stupid contentment, but danger and sorrow

and even tragedy--a strange unworldly greed to get the most of a life

which each of them knew in his very marrow was bitterly brief.

It was easy to see in the glowing letters of Fergus that he was wildly

happy in those days. It was easy to see that the old restlessness, so

long without a way to turn, at last had found its goal. The old

adventurous blood had come into its own.

From a great distance he had watched his sister’s triumphs but, unlike

the others, he had no awe of her imperious way of riding roughshod over

those who stood in her path. To him Ellen Tolliver would always exist,

concealed perhaps inside the shell of Lilli Barr, but alive none the

less and ready to be called forth. The core, the heart was eternal. It

did not change. He saw her still, in the rare moments when he had peace

enough for reflection, as he had always seen her--a wilful,

smolderingly brilliant, disagreeable sister with whom he could do as he

chose, no matter what her mood or temper. It did not occur to him that

she had grown older, in some ways more mellow and in some ways harder

than she had ever been.

It was from Ellen that he heard first of his father’s death. She wrote

him that the gentle man had gone to sleep on the night after her first

concert in America and that afterward he had never really awakened.

There had been moments when for a time he had recognized his wife and

talked to her, though he did not seem quite clear and mixed the past and

the present in a strange and touching confusion. And at the end she had

written, in her bold, sprawling hand, “None of the doctors appeared to

know what it was that killed him. But I knew what it was. He died simply

of homesickness. He hated the city. He was born to hate it. But you must

never say this to Ma, for it was she who forced him to leave the Town.

And it was our fault in the end ... yours and mine, because it was us

whom she was pursuing. She’ll never stop. She’s an extraordinary woman.

Time has no effect upon her, no more than it has upon The Everlasting.

He is ninety-four and though he looks as old as Methuselah, he is as

spry and as clear in the head as a boy. He has learned how to protect

himself. Oh! So admirably! Sometimes, I fancy he will outlive us all ...

sitting in his room, rocking and chuckling! He has discovered a secret

which none of us know! And he’ll never tell us.”

Thus Charles Tolliver had died, peacefully and without resentment,

indifferent to the triumphs of his children so long as they were lost to

him; for long ago he had recognized the loss, a thing his wife would

never do. And he had lost not only his children but the very life he had

loved. He had gone now from a sleep that had been fitful, from dreams

which had been awakened harshly each morning by the noises of a hostile

city, into a long unbroken sleep. Quietly and gently he had lived, a

friend to all the world, serving for his part as little more than the

father of Hattie’s children, passing on to them the qualities of old

Gramp to unite with the qualities of Hattie and produce such offspring

as Ellen and Fergus. They had never belonged to him, even for a moment.

They had been Hattie’s always, and old Gramp’s....

55

Nearly three years passed before Ellen, having meanwhile added Australia

and South America to the list of her triumphs, returned to the Paris

which she had not seen since the day she left with Rebecca for the

Vienna they had never reached and now never would reach; because, as

Rebecca said, the old Vienna was gone now, forever. Ellen would never

know it as it had been in the days when Rebecca had visited Uncle Otto

who owned a sapphire mine in Cambodia.

In the end she went back to Paris over the protests of her mother and

against the advice of Rebecca, who saw the return simply as a great

bundle of money thrown to the winds. But she could not have done

otherwise. She had to return. She was unable to explain the instinct,

but she trusted it shrewdly as wise persons trust instinct for its value

as accumulated experience over any mere process of logic. She had to see

Lily again and the beautiful house (so saddened and changed) in the Rue

Raynouard. And there were times too when she became obsessed by an

inexplicable fear that if she did not go at once, she might be too

late.... Too late for what? This she could not answer, save that vaguely

it must have to do with Fergus and Callendar. Lily was in no danger; she

lived quietly in the Rue Raynouard or in the white villa at Nice.

For two years she had allowed herself to be ruled by circumstance and by

Rebecca Schönberg, the high priestess of opportunity. She would wait no

longer now. And so, after a terrible scene with Rebecca in which they

both descended to the level of fishwives, she had embarked to return to

a city which could mean nothing now so far as her success was concerned,

a barren city that lay dark and blue with the coming of nightfall.

The old fear possessed her now for days at a time. Life was rushing past

her on and on.... She might be too late.

56

It was a wet night of the early spring when Fergus got down from the

Metro at Passy bound for the house in the Rue Raynouard. He had been

there before, many times, for Lily, pleased perhaps to have him in a

house which seemed now so empty and desolate, had given him one of the

rooms opening upon the long gallery to use as he saw fit. But the visits

had not been too cheerful. He had found Lily alone in the house,

mourning for old Madame Gigon and her nephew, the Baron. The old beauty

of the place had not faded; even Lily had not changed greatly. She was

still young, amazingly so, but she appeared saddened and more quiet than

in the days when, bedazzled, he had sat by her side at the family

dinners in Shane’s Castle. There was left of Madame Gigon’s pets only

Criquette, the Aberdeen, old and fat and quizzical, who followed at the

heels of Augustine, the maid, and sniffed continually at Madame Gigon’s

chair before the fire.

He had met there Lily’s son Jean, his own cousin, whom he had never seen

before--a tall, red haired boy, impatient and wild over the mutilation

that kept him in Paris shut up in the offices of the Ministry of War. It

was strange to see one’s own cousin (and Jean resembled Fergus amazingly

in many ways) a Frenchman, a foreigner who spoke English with an accent.

He had met there at tea a Monsieur de Cyon who seemed devoted to Lily

and who was connected in some way with the government--a distinguished,

white haired man recently become a widower. It was all very queer and

foreign, yet when one thought of it, not so different from Shane’s

Castle which in the midst of the Mills had always had its own strange

air of the old world. It was Lily, the sinner of the family, the one who

had surrounded herself with luxury and mystery, who explained it all.

Knowing her, you could understand how there could be a bond between that

smoky city of the Midlands and this quiet, beautiful house in the Rue

Raynouard. She belonged to both and yet in a way to neither ... a woman

of the sort which had existed since the beginning of time. Fergus knew

women rather better than most men, for they were attracted easily to

him, but he knew of none who approached Lily in the perfection of her

rôle. He understood Lily now.... He was no longer a little boy sitting

fascinated by her side in the gloomy dining room of Shane’s Castle. He

knew the world now. Experience had come his way.

He thought of all this for the hundredth time as he emerged from the

Metro into the drifting mist that obscured the tall white houses of the

Square Alboni. In one sense he had changed. He was a man now, though he

appeared little older than on the day he bade Ellen farewell. His

features were more firmly molded; he had grown more handsome. But he was

young still; it was the sense of youth which always impressed people, a

reckless, headlong youth, of the sort which has no value in a worldly

sense but glorifies all who are sensible to its glow. And he walked with

a slight swagger born not of any pomp but of an excess of animal

spirits, of a great vitality.

As he stepped out into the darkness the figure of the old flower woman

sitting beneath her umbrella in a mist of rain and mimosa blossoms took

form in the shadows. In the faint blue light from the darkened street

lamp he stooped and bought from her a great armful of golden, powdery

blossoms. (The mimosa was in full blossom now in Nice, showering Lily’s

white villa with its scented dust.)

Touched and warmed by his youth, the old woman chuckled. “Pour votre

marraine?” she asked. (She had sold him flowers before now.)

“No,” he told her. “Not this time. They are for my sister.”

It was Ellen whom he was to see in the Rue Raynouard, Ellen whom he had

not seen in years.... Ellen who was famous now, a great musician.

As he moved away, it struck him as luck that he had come by chance on

the flower woman. For a musician, an artist, flowers were the thing ...

an enormous bunch of flowers. Ellen would appreciate the gesture. She

would play up to it. She would, he fancied, even expect it.

In the blue darkness (it was an excellent night, he thought, for an air

raid) he turned the corner past the Café des Tourelles and the blind,

steel-shuttered magasin. The houses stood forbidding and black. The Rue

Raynouard between the magasin and the tobacconist’s shop gaped like the

mouth of Avernus. It would be difficult to find the house, turning its

deceptive, insignificant face to the street, so lost among its

commonplace neighbors. From far away, on the slope that led down toward

the Seine, the sound of footsteps, muffled by the damp, came to him

across the cobblestones. But the solitary walker turned away and the

sound died presently into silence.

A hundred paces from the square he halted before a house to search for

the number. In the darkness it remained invisible; it was impossible to

find it even by sense of touch. Puzzled, he stood for an instant looking

up and down the street, and then through the thick stillness there rose

the faint sound of music, distant and fragmentary. Listening, he found

presently that the melody took form: the fragments joined into a pattern

of sound. It was the Appassionata. Only the crescendos were swept toward

him through the damp night air, only the moments when the music rose

into a wild abandon. There could be no mistaking it ... the music was

Ellen’s, more magnificent than it had ever been.

As he stood there in the thin mist upon the doorstep the sound, coming

distantly from inside the house up the long paneled stairs, had upon him

an amazing effect. It was a sensation bordering upon clairvoyance; he no

longer stood on the dripping cobblestones before a solid door, his feet

upon solid earth. It was as if he existed in space alone at a great

height; rather as if he had died. There was in the feeling something of

terror at the immensity which surrounded him, an emotion which he had

known once or twice before when, flying at night, there had been for a

time no earth below him, nothing solid in all creation--a time when, if

he existed at all, it was as an atom lost in all time and space. It was,

he felt dimly, like being dead ... a reverent, humbled feeling.

And yet in a confused fashion all life had suddenly achieved an amazing

clarity. He knew himself suddenly, honestly, for what he was--a man who

had harmed none, who had achieved nothing, who had asked only to find

pleasure in living. And the others--He saw them too with the same

terrifying brilliance.... Ellen, who for all her faults was so much more

worthy, who had in her the elements of a great nobility; his mother,

passionate and bursting with vitality, a little somber and tragic save

that she would never recognize tragedy when it came her way; and Lily,

who had lived by some plan which she had never revealed, choosing

instead to hide it away among the other mysteries of her life; and Jean,

whom he scarcely knew until this moment, Jean who was neither French nor

American nor even an honest child. He saw Jean’s life too and its queer,

inarticulate tragedy. And Old Gramp, who stood outside them all, aloof

and cold, uncaught by the web that bound them all together.... Gramp

hugging his secret passionately to him. But it was Ellen whom he saw

more clearly than all the others, struggling, fighting with a strange

unconquerable courage, using the weapons which she found at hand,

weapons which were not always fair. Some day she would choose the honest

ones and then....

Far away, somewhere in the blanket of darkness the music died away and

presently he stood again before the door on the cobblestones, rubbing

the sleeve of his blue greatcoat across his face with the gesture of one

awaking from a profound sleep. The great bunch of mimosa lay at his

feet. It was amazing. He had been for a moment dead, quite outside this

world. The street was still again with a blue, dripping silence. Under

each lamp there was a pool of blue light that was not light at all, but

only another kind of darkness.

He gathered up the damp flowers and knocked loudly. It was too dark to

find the bell and he stood there for a long time before the door was

opened by Augustine who it seemed had gone to bed in the belief that no

one could be out on such a night. She stood in a sort of wrapper

ornamented with a gay design of Cupids, holding up her black hair with

one hand. He saw with an amazing clarity each tiny detail, even the

veins in her big red feet half-muffled in gigantic purple slippers.

“Ah!” she said. “It’s you, M’sieu Tolliver.... Madame Shane is not here.

She is in Nice.”

And again the sense of having returned from the dead swept over him.

Augustine was as astonished as if she had opened the door upon a

phantom. Yet there was nothing extraordinary in calling at ten o’clock

in the evening, even on a night like this.

“It is my sister I’ve come to see ... Miss Tolliver.”

“She is here ... in the salon. She told me I might go to bed. There is a

gentleman with her.”

Clearly it was impossible for Augustine, in her state of attire, to

announce him. He took off his greatcoat while the Breton girl, her eyes

shining in admiration for a young aviateur, stood by holding the mimosa.

He was straight and tall in his blue uniform with the silver wings

glittering on his breast. He had his effect upon Augustine ... the blue

eyes, the blond curling hair, the spoiled mouth.

“I’ll go in myself,” he said, taking the flowers from her once more.

“It’s all right, I know.”

And he started down the long stairs where the candles glowed dimly

against the satinwood paneling. Half way down, where the gallery led off

on both sides, the sound of music reached him once more. This time it

was different; there were no passionate crescendos of sound, no tides of

melody that swept high. The music was low and gentle and filled with

pathos. And presently he heard a voice--Ellen’s voice--begin to sing in

a clear contralto of unsuspected beauty. He went slowly, step by step,

his shoulders brushing the satinwood beneath the dull flare of the

candles. Out of the depths of the warm old room the sound came to him

with the same amazing clarity which seemed to affect all his senses....

_Nous n’avons plus de maisons,_

_Les ennemis ont tout pris, tout pris, tout pris_

_Jusqu’à notre petit lit._

_Ils ont brulé l’école et notre maître aussi._

_Ils ont brulé l’église et Monsieur Jésus Christ_

_Et le vieux pauvre qui n’a pas pu s’en aller!_

She sang gently, with an infinite sadness.... Ellen who had damned the

war, Ellen who had striven to ignore it, Ellen who had turned her back

and taken no part in all the vast parade. What could she have known of

it? What of Christmas and “les petits enfants qui n’ont plus de

maisons.”

_Les ennemis ont tout pris, tout pris, tout pris...._

_Noël! Écoutez-nous, nous n’avons plus de petits sabots._

_Noël! Noël!... Surtout pas de joujoux._

And yet, listening, Fergus understood that she did know. This new Ellen,

the artist, knew it as she knew all things because she was, in spite of

Rebecca Schönberg, in spite of shrewd lighting and bouquets sent by the

management, in spite of all the clap-trap, an artist. Standing there in

the shadows of the stair, he knew without having seen her that she was

changed. Something had happened to her.

_Les ennemis ont tout pris, tout pris, tout pris ..._

_Jusqu’à notre petit lit...._

The simple frail refrain echoed through the great rooms. It was a child

who sang it--a simple naïve child. He knew for an instant what a

strange, idiotic, pitiful affair this war had been. He had not known

until now.

_Mais donnez la victoire aux enfants de France!..._

Fergus moved down from the last step of the long stairs. The green music

of Debussy died away, and as he entered the room he saw that Ellen was

not alone. She sat at the piano in the far end near the bright fire

where she had sat on that first day when she had entered from the same

stairway to discover Madame Gigon, little Jean and the dogs. There was

only Criquette left now, lying fat and lonely before the fire, and

Hansi, the great black wolf. Beside her, with his back towards the

stairs, sat a man with dark hair in a uniform blue like the one Fergus

himself wore; and while he stood, silent in his surprise, he saw the

stranger lean forward and, taking Ellen in his arms, kiss her. He saw

too that her arms were about the stranger, but it was not the embrace

that astonished him; it was the sight of Ellen’s strong, white hand,

clenched as if in resistance, as if in pain. Yet she did not struggle.

It was only the hand ... clenched, white, as if all her will, all her

resistance were centered in it.