It is four o’clock of a September afternoon and brightly still. Over on
the clean rolling golf course tiny figures in all combinations of white
and grey and brown move like insects soundlessly from one point to
another making odd motions. Even the jays which have been haggling and
shrieking all day are quiet. An occasional tree-toad or katydid creaks
from the false dusk of the Eastern woods. Locusts drone, and from a
long way off comes the faint click of a reaping machine at intervals,
but all these sounds only accentuate the silence. An eternal,
slow-breathing calm rests upon the treetops waiting patiently for the
cold of autumn.
With a murmur that grows into a rumble the stillness is broken by a
monstrous motor truck which swerves into the driveway from the road a
quarter of a mile away and comes tumbling down the white track, its
racket increasing with its nearness. The driver noisily shunts his
gears at the kitchen door, and Ellen Sydney comes out to superintend
the unloading and disposition of supplies. This done and the truckman
sent away with a laugh, she strolls into the garden on that side of the
house and is presently at work with a pair of shears snipping asters
and marigolds for the table. There are many of them, so many they must
be gathered in profusion. She has the air of one who is at home among
the beds, who has worked on them and cherished them with her own hands.
She is a handsomer woman than before. Her figure has decidedly taken
on dignity, and the colour of her face is a healthy brown pink. Her
cheeks, thanks to the best skill of the Blaydon dentist, have lost
their sunken hollows and her eyes have deepened from the effect
of well-being and contented activity. She bears herself with some
authority too, having taken a favoured place in her division of the
housework. Her hair is greying very slightly over the ears and temples,
but her step is as quick and her back as straight as a girl’s. She
wears a blue uniform with sleeves rolled up and a white apron.
As she reaches the entrance portico, her arms overflowing with the
yellow and brown and purple flowers, a little girl of six or so with
dark hair bursts from the screen door.
“Ellney, Ellney. Give me a cookie. I’m hungry.”
“Can’t you wait till dinner, Miss Moira? Your mother wouldn’t like it.”
“Oh, what’s one cookie? _Maman_ won’t mind just one.”
“She will if she finds out, and if you don’t eat your dinner. It’s me
that will get the lecture, not you!”--and with a look backward into the
past, Ellen thinks of a boy who was once always asking for something to
eat. The boy’s face has so dimmed in her mind now that if there is a
resemblance she does not notice it.
“_Maman_ shan’t lecture you, Ellney. I shan’t ever let her lecture you.”
Ellen laughs, not only at what Moira says, but at the way she says
it. She cannot ever get over the fact that her own child--who is now
no longer her child--speaks the King’s English quite as carefully as
her well-bred elders, and has adopted an air of superiority in her own
right. But in Ellen’s laughter there is no ridicule. It is the sheer
pleasure of maternal pride. Does not Moira, they say, speak French
almost as well as English?
“You little darling,” she cries, stooping and endeavouring to take the
child’s hand in spite of her overflowing burden, “I’ll give you just
one.”
“No, two, Ellney--but one is for Hal, on my word. Isn’t it funny, he’s
afraid to ask!”
Ellen thought there never had been a child whose laughter was more like
everything good and who laughed more often than Moira....
* * * * *
Turning in from the Marquette road to Sterling Blaydon’s new country
house, “Thornhill” as they called it, a visitor with a sculptor’s eye
might describe the formation of the land as the huge thigh of a woman,
resting horizontally on the earth. The private driveway ran along the
crest which sloped on both sides downward to gentle valleys, while the
whole ridge tapered in width gradually to a round end or knee on which
rested the house in a semi-circle of green. Beyond the house lay a few
hundred feet of clipped lawn and well spaced trees, and then the Titan
calf plunged into the earth, its declivitous sides covered with exposed
rock and a thick undergrowth of every imaginable scrub and bramble,
with a plentiful scattering of dogwood and plumb and thorn. It was holy
with blossoms in the Spring, beginning with the ghostly shad-bush. The
edge of the hill overlooked a broad meadow fifty yards below, as flat
as a lake.
Spread out in three directions from this crowning point lay Blaydon’s
land, perhaps a third of it in rocky knolls and wood, and the remainder
under cultivation by tenant farmers. The driveway to the site led
almost due west but the axis of the house itself, which was narrow and
long despite its irregularities, turned toward the south. It was built
to the shingle eaves of rubble-rock and dominated at either end by two
enormous chimneys of the same gorgeous, parti-coloured material, all
of which had been found on the place. Broad verandahs, a wide, tiled
terrace reached by French windows; a quaint Dutch Colonial door and
portico facing the road; screened balconies skilfully masked by the
eaves; the great living and dining rooms and library which took up
almost all of the lower floor; the correspondingly spacious chambers
overhead, attested its inhabitants’ means and love of comfort. The
entrance lawn and slopes to the north were laid out in series of
irregular, charming gardens. On the southeast the hill descended almost
horizontally from the tiled and parapeted terrace near the house, so
that from the living room windows one looked through the tops of trees
to the Country Club on another hill less than a mile away.
With greater spaces had come more movement, more things to be
interested in, more excitement and sound, all of which Ellen had
welcomed. She meddled in everything. She had become a creditable
sub-assistant gardener and something of a bee-keeper, having watched
the professionals at work. The four dogs were her especial care. Two
were morbidly shy collies called “Count” and “Countess” by Mathilda,
and Ellen won the privilege of touching their magnificent coats and
standing by while they fed, only after many months of gentleness and
coaxing. They seldom allowed the other members of the household to come
near them and ran wild in the woods. On the other hand the beagle and
setter were almost annoyingly chummy. The animals in the stable had
their daily histories also, which concerned her intimately. She was a
splendid milker in emergencies and would have liked to keep fowls, but
this Mathilda, who respected sleep in the mornings, would not permit.
Of the two boys in the house, Hal, nine and a half, was the
keener-witted and the more attractive. He was already at home among
the horses and rode bare-back as well as in the saddle. She often
felt sorry for Rob, who was left behind much of the time by his older
brother and the swift, tiny Moira, but she did not humour him as much
as she did Hal.
It was Hal, however, who had ridden a cow so successfully one day that
Moira pleaded to be helped up herself, and whether the beast thought
her a less formidable antagonist, or was frightened by her skirts,
the little girl was thrown off and severely jolted. Hal supported her
into the house, himself more frightened than she, and vowed to his
aunt solemnly that from that day he would never lead her into danger
again, and if she got into it he would get her out. Yet she and the
boy quarrelled too and sometimes went for days without speaking. Moira
would take up with Rob then, scheming with all her mind to devise
adventures that would make his brother envious. She often succeeded in
these stratagems, until a time came when he did not concern himself
with her at all, being grown beyond little girls.
The elaborate arrangements which had been made for Moira from the
first, and the increasing complexity of the child’s education, which
had been undertaken very early by Mrs. Seymour, made it easier for
Ellen to regard her as a member of the Blaydon family. It was only when
Moira misbehaved within her knowledge or in her sight, that the true
mother felt it hard to play her neutral rôle. While Moira was good she
was a Seymour, naturally, but when she was bad she seemed to Ellen
to be wholly her own. Ellen’s impulse then, in spite of the habit of
suppression, was to correct her as a mother would.
When these occasions had passed and she could reflect back on them,
she thought it a blessing that Moira’s correction was in the hands of
others than herself. One instance of Mrs. Seymour’s wise manner of
dealing with unusual conduct filled her mind with wonder and created
for her almost a new conception of life.
Aunt Mathilda was consulting with her in the kitchen when Moira burst
in and cried:
“_Maman_, oh, _Maman_, the calf came right out of the cow! I saw it. I
did.”
The child’s face was a study. She did not apparently know whether to
be very grave, or a little frightened or to laugh, and in one who
was so rarely puzzled it would have seemed pathetic had her sudden
announcement been less shocking than it was. As they learned afterward,
she had witnessed the birth, by sheer accident, while in the stables
with Harvey. Ellen blushed scarlet and was on the point of exclaiming
indignantly, but Mrs. Seymour checked her with a gesture and took the
child in her lap. Then she said in a tone the most natural in the world:
“Why, certainly, my dear. That is what happens when all animals are
born, and people too. First we are carried in our mothers. Then we walk
by ourselves, just as the calf will in a day or two. Now you won’t ever
forget that, will you?”
Beginning the middle of September and for eight months each year, Miss
Cheyney, the governess, came every morning at nine, and quiet reigned
while she went over the lessons with the three children shut up in the
library. After luncheon, Eberhard, the man, took her back by motor to
the train as he had brought her.
Ellen was always glad to see her visits begin, not only because Miss
Cheyney was very democratic and “nice” to her, and proud of Moira’s
progress, but because they ushered in the Fall. She loved the glorious
colours that spread out in widening and deepening hues over the wooded
hills, until all the world seemed to have put on a flaming cloak. She
and the children would fill the house with sumach and maple branches
then. And when the men began bringing up the heavy logs that had lain
drying in the woods all summer and sawing and splitting them for the
fireplaces in the house, she could see in anticipation the flames
leaping in the chimney and hear the crackling of the wood in the fierce
heat, and watch the glow of dancing light on the children’s faces. She
had not seen open fireplaces since the New Orleans days, when they
were lighted only for a few weeks in the year; and never had she seen
anything to compare with the one in the Blaydon living room which was
so high a woman could stand in it while she cleaned.
And then the parties began. There were nearly always two big ones each
Winter, and between them a constant stream of dinners and late motor
parties, and informal crowds who tramped over from the Club to dance.
Ellen loved to hear the music going at full tilt, the new jazz music
that was just coming in. She didn’t mind, as much as she should have,
the young men getting tipsy. She was thrilled to watch the couples
disappear down through the trees, laughing and chatting, eager to
escape the floods of light that poured from every window in the house;
or slip into their motors for a drive along the dark roads.
She had always thought of Sterling Blaydon as a reserved and serious
man, and she wondered how he stood so much excitement. Then she
realized that she was dealing with a new Sterling Blaydon, who not only
stood it but encouraged it. His pride in the place and his love of
filling it with people was like a boy’s.
A great part of the pleasure she took in these affairs arose from
the fact that her daughter was a favourite. Tall, important men and
dazzling young women were attentive to Moira and Moira enjoyed it as
much as they did. She was growing extraordinarily self-possessed,
particularly with her elders. Often enough the frank equality she
adopted toward them made Ellen gasp.
Only in the dead of winter, when the snow piled up a foot or two
everywhere and the drifts sometimes were up to a man’s middle, would
they be without company for many days at a time. During this brief
closed season--for it did not last long at the worst--Mr. Blaydon
usually lived in town, and sometimes Mrs. Seymour would join him there,
when engagements came in bunches or the theatres were particularly
interesting. And the children, freed from their teacher, would be idle.
Coming upon Moira alone at such times, with her constituted guardians
away and out of mind, Ellen experienced her moments of gravest
temptation. How she longed then to take the youngster in her arms and
pour out the floods of love pent up within her. These yearnings were
made all the more unbearable by the simple affection with which she
was nearly always greeted by her daughter; yet at the same time the
child’s own attitude strengthened her resistance. For Ellen stood in
awe of her. The force of training, the sedulously cultivated point of
view, the entirely different environment had already stamped her with
the mark of another caste. Ellen could not look upon her for more than
an instant as simply the object of possessive human feeling. It would
sweep over her at some childlike expression, some quaint, serious look.
It would be checked by some unlooked for sophistication of gesture or
remark.
Moira familiarly uttered the names of grown young men who to Ellen were
no more than shadows from an upper world, coldly courteous ghosts who
did not see her even when they looked at her. Every season the little
girl extended her interests and knowledge into a wider world and grew
more alien. And gradually as the years flew by even the servants who
had been in the old Trezevant place when they came there, and who
somehow seemed to preserve for her, by their presence, the actuality
of her motherhood, passed, until there was not one left. Gina, whose
sympathy she had felt most keenly, though the sprightly Italian said
nothing, was the last. And Gina went away to be married....
X
To be nearly sixteen; to have a great room all to oneself, with
high windows that looked upon surfs of close, glittering, talkative
leaves, and hills far off between them; to have a small library of
one’s favourite books, and a whole corner of the room devoted to the
paraphernalia of one’s dearest hobby, which was painting; to have a
square high bed, covered with a tester, and a wonderful, many-shelved
Sheraton table beside it, and candles in old green brass candlesticks;
to have a row of white, built-in armoires full of pretty dresses and
cloaks and shoes; to have all this and to know one has helped to create
it, was to possess a shrine where the thoughts of girlhood might
safely let themselves go to all the four winds of the imagination,
like many-coloured birds set free, unmindful of the traps and huntsmen
scouring the world beyond.
But Moira’s real favourite was not the lovely golden brown tapestry,
nor the stained little bas relief of the Child, nor even the drawings
of Michelangelo and Rembrandt, but a painting hung on the wall facing
the foot of her bed, where she could look at it the first thing in
the morning as she rose, and the last thing at night as she retired.
It was a portrait of Mathilda’s grandmother at eighteen, painted in
Virginia, a year before she crossed the plains with her young husband.
The smooth, dark red hair was parted and drawn about the head above
the ears like a cap, its gleam of colour apparent only in the gloss of
the high lights. The blue eyes and fresh complexion and fine, regular
features were done with infinite tenderness. She sat in a black gown,
opening wide at the neck, against a red background formed by a cloak
thrown over the chair. Moira knew it was good painting, of an exquisite
older style, though the name of the painter was unsigned and had long
been forgotten. She amused herself making little verses about it.
“My young great grandmother sits in her frame
And the red of her cloak burns warm as a flame....”
Many a time she sat up in her bed pretending to have conversations
about the stirring adventures of her grandmother’s early days, for she
had heard the whole story of the young woman’s arduous journey and
home-building--and also about the young men who came to Thornhill,
discussing their characters without reserve. One could do this in
perfect propriety with a dead great grandmother.
“Tommy McNutt wants to come over every day and ride with me,
Grandmother. But he squints out of doors, and he always wants to help
you on a horse and he talks like a newspaper piece. I’d rather have
somebody to talk to like old George Moore, wouldn’t you, dear? It’s a
pity you were born too early to read George Moore. I know you would
like him”--and she broke off for rhyme again:
“The courtly old painter I am sure wore lace
And the things he said brought a flush to her face.”
“But if I should like Tommy I’d have a whole house as big as this one
all my own. And if I should like Mark Sturm, the young brewer, I’d have
two.... I don’t care, _Maman_ will give me a house.”
“Then there’s Selden Van Nostrand. He’s tremendously popular because he
makes up verses about ‘Aphrodite in a nightie,’ but he sometimes does
better than that. The other day he said his heart was a leaf devoured
by the worm of Egotism, shrivelled in the fire of Sex, and trampled
by the feet of Virtue. I see you like that one, Grandma. Beautiful
Grandma, I have your eyes--
“Her wide blue eyes have a trace of play
And the day she sat was a fine bright day!”
Moira finished her morning cup of tea on the stand beside the bed
and recalled suddenly that this fine, bright day was one of special
significance, for Hal was coming home from his last year at prep
school. Hal was the one young man she never talked to her great
grandmother about, because, as she explained to herself, she was his
great grandmother also and would be prejudiced. She stood in the
sunlight pouring through the window, watching it gleam upon her firm
shoulders and flanks. She had not decided whether she would go to the
station with her mother and Uncle Sterling or not.
Hal had treated her pretty badly the summer before and been very
satirical, and the worst of it was she had found it hard to resent
because he had seemed suddenly to be much older and to have some right
to authority. He had been nicer at Christmas, taking her to two parties
and giving her a set of Verlaine bound in tooled leather, but even when
he tried to be nice to her he had somehow seemed condescending.
She was in great doubt. Nobody, of course, would attach any
significance to it, whichever she did, not even Hal, probably. It was
only important to herself. She knew something had happened to her
during the past year that was comparable to the change in Hal the year
before. She had evidence now under her hands and in her eyes as she
stood undressed, evidence that did not wholly please her, for she had
lately taken a fancy to dislike women. More satisfactory evidence was a
sense of mental growth.
She had just returned from a long Spring vacation in New York with
Mathilda, not her first visit but her most exciting one, and her
thoughts were awhirl with Pavlova and Rachmaninoff and the Washington
Square Players, bobbed hair and the operas at the Metropolitan, and a
dozen startling, vivifying, even violent art exhibitions. She felt that
she was probably much more splashed by the currents than Hal himself,
for certainly one did not really learn anything at a boy’s school. Such
places could only be high class stables for thoroughbred colts to pass
the awkward stage in, under trainers far less capable than those they
would have had if they were horses.
And now the question was whether to test the glamour of these mental
and physical acquisitions upon Hal by waiting to meet him alone, or
to go like a good fellow and see him with the family. There was, of
course, nothing personal about it; Hal was no more than an opportune
judge. He represented the best criticism the East had to send back to
them.
After her bath she decided for action. She would go with the others and
meet him. “Anyway, why attach so much importance to Hal? He’s quite
capable of attaching enough to himself.”
There was the possibility, too, of dramatic interest in his arrival.
The year before, on his return, at eighteen, he had boldly announced
to his father he was going to war. There wasn’t to be a day lost, he
wanted to go at once. Every man in his class was going somehow or
other. Sterling Blaydon opposed it, the argument dragged out for days,
and finally the family won. But it was only with the understanding
that if Hal would finish his last year at school he might make his own
decision. The country’s participation in the war was now over a year
old and the outlook was dismal, one German advance after another having
succeeded. There were plenty of youngsters of nineteen and twenty in
it, and Hal would insist upon enlisting. He had, as a matter of fact,
and as his letters showed, done almost no schooling at Fanstock that
year. The entire institution had been made over into a training camp.
Moira remembered how her cousin had chafed the summer before, hating
his idleness and the wretched fate of being in excessive demand to
entertain girls. Her sympathy with his groans had gone a long way to
help her forgive his ill treatment.
And yet she had never been worked up to a pitch of great excitement
about the war.
One failing had troubled her ever since she could remember--the
tendency to disagree with opinions as soon as an overwhelming majority
held them.
It was partly due to the example of Mathilda’s own fastidiousness and
independence of judgment, but she went farther than Mathilda, and
supposed that she must have inherited this inconvenient trait from that
mythical father of whom she had been told so little and longed to know
so much. At all events, she arrived at certain conclusions, by herself,
about the war: for example, that perhaps Germany was not entirely the
instigator, that cruelties were probably practised on both sides--war’s
horrors produced them--and that after all it did seem as though the
whole world was furiously pitted against two or three caged-in nations.
She did not entirely like herself for these heresies and kept silent
upon them. But she promised herself the fun of an argument with Hal.
How it would irritate him!
“He’ll think I’ve lost my mind. Perhaps he’ll surrender me to the
authorities. How wonderful--I wish he would!”
She took one final glimpse of herself and walked slowly out of the room
to face a hard day. She felt she would prove a formidable antagonist
for Hal.
But downstairs a surprise was waiting. She found Mathilda, suppressing
a few tears, and her Uncle sitting in a profound study. Their
disappointment communicated itself to her at once. Something had
happened about Hal.
Mrs. Seymour indicated the yellow night-letter on the table.
“Dear Father and Aunt [it read]: Offered chance to join aviation
training corps, Long Island, at once. No time to come home. Wish me
luck enough to get over soon. Love. Hal.”
Well, that was sensation enough for her. He had acted with divine
independence.
The months that followed until the Armistice were dull and tragic.
She would a hundred times rather have gone over herself, though it be
as a rank flag-waver. It was all stupid, cunning, criminal, got up by
old men to kill young ones. It would be stupid enough to take Hal, her
playmate. Night after night she saw him, mutilated or dead; she got
so she could picture exactly the way a small hole looked in a man’s
forehead, just the degree of red and blue about its tiny rim, and the
relaxed, livid expression of a face that had been dead several hours.
These pictures haunted her wakeful nights in many different guises, but
always with Hal’s features. She learned in imagination how flesh looked
when it was laid open or gangrened, and the appearance of the end of a
limb that had been taken off. And she grew so bitter that she found she
could not pray, though she had always experienced a soothing pleasure
from the language of the Book of Common Prayer. She never said those
pieces again. She would sit up suddenly in bed, as though she had been
wakened by a barrage, and talk by fitful candlelight to her portrait.