Before turning into bed that night Tom had fought to a finish his
battle with himself. The victory rested, he hoped, with common sense.
He could no longer doubt that before very long an extraordinary offer
would be made to him. To repulse it would be insane.
"As far as my personal preferences go," he wrote to Hildred, "I would
rather remain as I am. Remaining as I am would be easier. I'm free;
I've no one to consider; I know my own way of life, and can follow it
pretty surely. But I'm not adaptable. You yourself must often have
noticed that my mind works stiffly, and that I find it hard to see the
other fellow's point of view. I'm narrow, solitary, concentrated, and
self-willed. But as long as I've no one to consult I can get along.
"To enter a family of which I know nothing of the ways or traditions
or points of view is going to be a tough job. It will be much tougher
than if I merely married into it. In that case I should be only an
adjunct to it, whereas in what may happen now I shall have to become an
integral part of it. I must be as a leg instead of as a crutch. I don't
know how I shall manage it.
"I'm not easily intimate with anyone. Perhaps that's the reason why,
as you say, I haven't enough of the lover in me. I'm not naturally a
lover. I'm not naturally a friend. I'm a solitary. A solitude _à deux_,
with the servants, as you always like to stipulate, is my conception of
an earthly paradise.
"To you the normal of life is a father, a mother, a brother, a sister.
To me it isn't. To have a father seems abnormal to me, or to have a
sister or a brother. If I can see myself with a mother it's because of
a poignant experience of the kind that burns itself into the memory.
But I can't see myself with _another_ mother, and that's what I've
got to do. Mind you, it isn't a stepmother I must see, nor an adopted
mother, nor a mother-in-law; it's a real mother of my own flesh and
blood. I must see a real brother, a real sister. They think that all
they have to do is to fling their doors open, and that it will be a
simple thing for me to walk in. But I must fling open something more
tightly sealed than any door ever was--my life, my affections, my point
of view. They are four, and need only make room for one. I'm only one,
and must make room for four.
"But I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it for a number of reasons
which I shall try to give you in their order.
"First, for your sake. You want it. For me that is enough. I see your
reasons too. It will help us with your father and mother, and all our
future life. So that settles that.
"Then, I want to conform to what those who care anything about me
would expect. I don't want to seem a fool. It's what I should seem if
I turned such an offer down. Nobody would understand my emotional and
sentimental reasons but myself; and when it comes to the emotional and
sentimental there is a pro side as well as a con to the whole situation.
"Because if I _must_ have a father there's no one whom I could so
easily accept as a father as this very man. He seems to me like my
father; I think I seem to him like his son. More than that, he looks
like my father, and I must look like the kind of son he would naturally
have. I'm sure he likes me, and I know I like him. If I was choosing a
father he's the very one I should pick out.
"Next, and you may be surprised to hear me say it, I could do very well
with Tad as a brother. That he couldn't do with me is another thing;
but there's something about the chap which has bewitched me from the
day I first laid eyes on him. I haven't liked him exactly; I've only
felt for him a kind of responsibility. I've tried to ignore it, to
laugh at it, to argue it down; but the thing wouldn't let me kill it.
If there's such a thing as an instinct between those of the same flesh
and blood I should say that this was it. I've no doubt that if we come
to living in one menagerie we shall be the same sort of friends as a
lion and a tiger--but there it is.
"The women appall me. I can't express it otherwise. With the father I
could be a son as affectionate as if I'd never left the family. With
Tad I could establish--I've established already--a sort of fighting
fraternity. To neither the mother nor the daughter could I ever be
anything, so far as I can see now. They wouldn't let me. They wouldn't
want me. If they yield to the extent of admitting me into the family
they'll always bar me from their hearts. The limit of my hope is
that, since I generally get along with those I have to live with, the
hostility won't be too obvious. I also have the prospect that when you
and I are married--and that's my motive in the whole business--I shall
get a measure of release."
He purchased next morning a pair of gloves and an inexpensive walking
stick so as to look as nearly as might be like the smart young men
he saw on the pavements of Fifth Avenue. It was not his object to be
smart; it was to be up to the standard of the house at which he was to
lunch.
To reach that house he went on the top of a bus like the one on
which he had ridden with Honey nearly ten years earlier. He did this
with intention, to make the commemoration. Honey's suspicions and
predictions had then seemed absurd; and here they were on the eve of
being verified.
He got off at the corner at which, as he remembered, Honey and he had
got off on that August Sunday afternoon. He crossed the road to see
if he could recognize the home of the Whitelaw baby as it had been
pointed out to him. Recognition came easily enough because in the whole
line of buildings it was the only one which stood detached, with a bit
of lawn on all sides of it. A spacious brownstone house, it had the
cheery, homey aspect which comes from generous proportions, and masses
of spring flowers, daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths, banked in the
bow-windows.
Being a little ahead of his time, he walked up the street, trying
to compose himself and recapture his nerve. The story, first told
to him by Honey, and repeated in scraps by many others, returned to
him. Too far away to be noticed by anyone who chanced to be looking
out, he stood and gazed back at the house. If he was really Harry
Whitelaw he had been born there. The last time he had come forth from
it he had been carried down those steps by two footmen. He had been
wheeled across the street and into the Park by a nurse in uniform.
Within the glades of the Park a change had somehow been wrought in his
destiny, after which there was a blank. He emerged from that blank into
consciousness sitting on a high chair in a kitchen, beating on the
table with a spoon, and asking the question: "Mudda, id my name Gracie,
or id it Tom?" The memory was both vague and vivid. It was vague
because it came out from nowhere and vanished into nowhere. It was
vivid because it linked up with that bewilderment as to his identity
which haunted his early childhood. The discovery that he was a little
boy forced on a woman craving for a little girl was the one with which
he first became aware of himself as a living entity.
To his present renunciation of that woman he tried to shut his mind.
There was no help for it. He had long kept a veil before this sad holy
of holies; he would simply hang it up again. He would nail it up, he
would never loosen it, and still less go behind it. What was there
would now forever be hidden from any sight, even from his own.
At a minute before one he recrossed the avenue, and went down the
little slope. In the rôle of Harry Whitelaw which he was trying
to assume going up the steps was significant. The long, devious,
apparently senseless odyssey had brought him back again. It was only to
himself that the odyssey seemed straight and with a purpose.
The middle-aged man who opened the door raised his eyebrows and opened
his eyes wide in a flash of perturbation. It was only for an instant;
in the half of a second he was once more the proper stiffened image
of decorum. And yet as he took from the visitor the hat, stick, and
gloves, Tom could see that the eyes were scanning his face furtively.
It was a big dim hall, impressive with a few bits of ancient massive
furniture, and a stairway in an alcove, partially hidden by a screen
which might have been torn from some French cathedral. Tom, who
had risen to the modest standard of the Ansleys, again felt his
insufficiency.
Following the butler, he went down the length of the hall toward a door
on the right. But a door on the left opened stealthily, and stealthily
a little figure darted forth.
"So you've come! I knew you would! I knew I shouldn't go down to my
grave without seeing you back in the home from which twenty-three years
ago you were carried out. I've said so to Dadd times without number,
haven't I, Dadd?"
"You have indeed, Miss Nash," Dadd corroborated, "and none of us didn't
believe you."
"Dadd was the second footman," Miss Nash explained further. "He was one
of the two who lifted you down that morning. Now he's the butler; but
he's never had my faith."
She glided away again. Dadd threw open a door. Tom found himself in a
large sunny room, of which the bow-window was filled with flowers.
There was no one there, which was so far a relief. It gave him time to
collect himself. Except for apartments in museums, or in some château
he had visited in France, he had never been in a room so stately or so
full of costly beauty. He knew the beauty was costly in spite of his
lack of experience.
On the wall opposite the bow-window stretched a blue-green Flemish
tapestry, with sad-eyed, elongated figures crowding on one another
within an intricate frame of flowers, foliage, and fruits. A
white-marble mantelpiece, bearing in shallow relief three garlanded
groups of dancing Cupids, supported a clock and a pair of candelabra in
_biscuit de Sèvres_ mounted in ormolu. Above this hung a full-length
eighteenth-century lady--Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough--he was only
guessing--looking graciously down on a cabinet of European porcelains,
on another of miniatures, and another of old fans. Bronzes were
scattered here and there, with bits of iridescent Spanish luster, and
two or three plaques of Limoges enamel intense in color. Since there
was room for everything, the profusion was without excess, and not too
carefully thought out. A work-basket filled with sewing materials and
knitting stood on a table strewn with recent magazines and books.
He was so long alone that he was growing nervous when Lily dropped into
the room as if she had happened there accidentally. She sauntered up to
him, however, offering her hand with a long, serpentine lifting of the
arm, casual and negligent.
"How-d'ye-do? Mamma's late. I don't know whether she's in the house or
not. Perhaps she's forgotten. She often does." She picked up a silver
box of cigarettes. "Have one?"
On his declining she lighted one for herself, dropping into a big
upright chair and crossing her legs. It was the year when young ladies
liked to display their ankles and calves nearly up to the knee. Lily,
whose skirt was of unrelieved black, wore violet silk stockings,
with black slippers which had bright red buckles set in paste. Over
her shoulders a violet scarf, with bright red bars, hung loosely. In
sitting, her sinuous figure drooped a little forward, the elbow of the
hand which held the cigarette supported on her knee.
Though she hadn't asked him to sit down, he took a chair of his own
accord, waiting for her to speak again. When she did so, after an
interval of puffing out tiny rings of blue smoke, her voice was languid
and monotonous, and yet with overtones of passionate self-will.
"You've been in the army, haven't you?"
He said he had been.
"Did you like it?"
"I never had time to think as to whether I did or not. I just had to
stick it out."
"Did you ever see Tad over there?"
"No, I never did."
As she was laconic he too would be laconic. She didn't look at him, or
show an interest in his personality. If she thought him the brother
who after long disappearance was coming home again she betrayed no hint
of the possibility. He might have been a chance stranger whom she would
never see again. Lapses of silence did not embarrass her. She sat and
smoked.
He decided to assume the right to ask questions on his own side.
"You've been married since I saw you last, haven't you?"
"Yes." She didn't resent this, apparently, and after a long two minutes
of silence, added: "and divorced." There was still a noticeable passage
of time before she continued, in her toneless voice: "I've a baby too."
"Do you like him?"
A flicker of a smile passed over a profile heavy-browed, handsome,
and disdainful. "He's an ugly little monster so far." She had a way
of stringing out her sentences as after-thoughts. "I daresay he's all
right."
There followed a pause so long and deep that in it you could hear
the ticking of the clock. He was determined to be as apathetic as
herself. She had no air of thinking. She scarcely so much as moved.
Her stillness suggested the torrid, brooding calm before volcanic or
seismic convulsion. Without a turning of the head or a change in her
languid intonation, she said, casually:
"You're our lost brother, aren't you?"
The emotion from which she was so free almost strangled him. He could
barely breathe the words, "Would you care if I were?"
"What would be the use of my caring if papa was satisfied?"
"Still, I should think, that one way or the other, you might care."
To this challenge she made no response. She was not hostile in
any active sense; he was sure of that. She impressed him rather
as exhausted after terrific scenes of passion, waywardness, and
disillusion. A little rest, and she would be ready for the same again,
with himself perhaps to take the consequence.
Mrs. Whitelaw came in with the rapid step and breathless, syncopated
utterance he remembered.
"So sorry to be late. I'd been for a long drive. I wanted to think. I
had no idea what time it was. I suppose you must be hungry."
She gave him her hand without looking him in the face, helped over the
effort of the meeting by the phrases of excuse.
"So this is my mother!"
It was his single thought. In the attempt to realize the fact he had
ceased to be troubled or embarrassed. He could only look. He could only
wonder if he would ever be able to make himself believe that which he
did not believe. He repeated to himself what he had already written to
Hildred: he could believe the man to be his father; but that this woman
was his mother he rejected as an impossibility.
Not that there was anything about her displeasing or unsympathetic.
On the contrary, she had been beautiful, and still had a lovely
distinction. Features that must always have been soft and appealing had
gained by the pathos of her tragedy, while a skin that could never
have been anything but delicate and exquisite was kept exquisite and
delicate by massage and cosmetics. Veils protected it from the sun and
air; gauntlets, easy to pull on and off, preserved the tenderness of
hands wearing many jeweled rings, but a little too dimpling and pudgy.
The eyes, limpid, large, and gray with the lucent gray of moonstones,
had lids of the texture of white rose petals just beginning to shrivel
up and show little _bistré_ stains. The lashes were long, dark, and
curling like those of a young girl. Tom couldn't see the color of her
hair because she wore a motoring hat, with a sweeping brown veil draped
over it and hanging down the back. Heather-brown, with a purplish
mixture, was the Harris tweed of her coat and skirt. The blouse of
a silky stuff, was brown, with blue and rose lights in it when she
moved. A row of great pearls went round her neck, while the rest of the
string, which was probably long, disappeared within the corsage.
Dadd appeared on the threshold, announcing lunch.
"Come on," Mrs. Whitelaw commanded, and Lily rose listlessly. "Is Tad
to be at home?"
Lily dragged her frail person in the wake of her mother. "I don't know
anything about him."
Tom followed Lily, since it seemed the only thing to do, crossing the
hall and passing through the door by which Miss Nash had darted out to
speak to him.
The dining room, on the north side of the house, was vast, sunless, and
somber. Tom was vaguely aware of the gleam of rich pieces of silver, of
the carving of high-backed chairs as majestic as thrones. One of these
thrones Dadd drew out for Mrs. Whitelaw; a footman drew out a second
for Lily; another footman a third for himself.
"Sit there, will you?" Mrs. Whitelaw said, in her offhand, breathless
way, as if speaking caused her pain. "This room is chilly."
She pulled her coat about her, though the room had the temperature
suited to the great plant of Cattleya, on which there might have been
thirty blooms, which stood in the center of the table. With rapid,
nervous movements she picked up a spoon and tasted the grapefruit
before her. A taste, and she pushed it away, nervously, rapidly.
Nervously, rapidly, she glanced at Tom, glancing off somewhere else as
if the sight of him hurt her eyes.
"How long have you been back?"
He gave her the dates and places connected with his recent movements.
"Did you like it over there?"
He made the reply he had given to Lily.
"Were you ever wounded?"
He said he had once received a bad cut on the shoulder which had kept
him a month in hospital, but otherwise he had not suffered.
"Tad's lost his right arm. Did you know that?"
He had first got this news from Guy Ansley. He was very sorry. At the
same time, when others had been so horribly mangled, it was something
to escape with only the loss of a right arm.
She gave him another of her hurried, unwilling glances. "How did you
come to know the Ansleys so well?"
He told the story of his early meetings with the fat boy on the
sidewalk of Louisburg Square.
"Wasn't it awful living with that burglar?"
Tom smiled. "No. It seemed natural enough. He was a very kind burglar.
I owe him everything."
To Tom's big appetite the lunch was frugal, but it was ceremonious. He
was oppressed by it. That three strong men should be needed to bring
them the little they had to eat and drink struck him as ridiculous. And
this was his father's house. This was what he should come to take as
a matter of course. He would get up every morning to eat a breakfast
served with this magnificence. He would sit every day on one of these
thrones, like an apostle in the Apocalypse. He thought of breakfasts in
the tenements, at the Tollivants', at the Quidmores', or with Honey in
the grimy eating-places where they took their meals, and knew for the
first time in many years a pang something like that of homesickness.
It was not altogether the ceremony against which he was rebellious. It
had elements of beauty which couldn't be decried. What he felt was the
old ache on behalf of the millions of people who had to go without, in
order that the few might possess so much. It was the world's big wrong,
and he didn't know what caused it. His economic studies, taken with a
view to helping him in the banking profession, had convinced him that
nobody knew what caused it, and that the cures proposed were worse than
the disease. Without thinking much of it actively, it was always in
the back of his mind that he must work to eliminate this fundamental
ill. Sitting and eating commonplace food in this useless solemn
stateliness, the conviction forced itself home. Somewhere and somehow
the world must find a means between too much and too little, or mankind
would be driven to commit suicide.
During the meal, which was brief, Lily scarcely spoke. As they
recrossed the hall to go back to the big sunny room, she sloped away
to some other part of the house. Tom and his mother sat down together,
embarrassed if not distressed.
Pointing to the box of cigarettes, she said, tersely, "Smoke, if you
like."
In the hope of feeling more at ease he smoked. Still wearing her hat
and coat, she drew her chair close to the fire, which had been lighted
while they were at lunch, holding her hands to the blaze.
"Do you think you're our son?"
The question was shot out in the toneless voice common to Lily and
herself, except that with the mother there was the staccato catch of
breathlessness between the words.