Alston Choate went home much later consciously to his mother, and she
comforted him though he could not tell her why he needed it. She and
Mary were sitting on the back veranda, looking across the slope of the
river, doing nothing, because it was dusk, and dropping a word here and
there about the summer air and the night. Alston put down his hat and,
as he sat, pushed up his hair with the worried gesture both women knew.
Mary at once went in to get him a cool drink, her never-failing service,
and his mother turned an instant toward him expectantly and then away
again. He caught the movement. He knew she was leaving him alone.
"Mother," he said, "you never were disgusted through and through. With
yourself."
"Oh, yes," said she. "It's more or less my normal state. I'm disgusted
because I haven't courage. If I'd had courage, I should have escaped all
the things that make me bad company for myself now."
Alston, in his quickened mood, wondered what it was she had wanted to
escape. Was it Addington? Was it his father even, a courteous Addington
man much like what Alston was afraid he might be in the end, when he was
elderly and pottered down town with a cane? He hated to be what he was
afraid he inevitably must. It came upon him with renewed impetus, now
that he had left Esther with a faint disgust at her, and only a wearied
acquiescence in the memory that she had once charmed him. He wished he
were less fastidious even. How much more of a man he should have felt
if he had clung to his passion for her and answered Jeffrey with the
oath or blow that more elemental men found fitting in their rivalry.
"Mother," said he, "does civilisation rot us after all? Have we got to
be savages to find out what's in us?"
"Something seems to rot us round the edges," said the mother. "But
that's because there don't appear to be any big calls while we're so
comfortable. You can't get up in the midst of dinner and give a war-cry
to prove you're a big chief. It would be silly. You'd be surprised,
dear, to know how I go seething along and can't find anything to burn
up--anything that ought to be burned. Sometimes when Mary and I sit
crocheting together I wonder whether she won't smell a scorch."
He thought of the night when she had lain in bed and told how she was
travelling miles from Addington in her novel.
"You never owned these things before, mother," he said. "What makes you
now?"
"That I'm a buccaneer? Maybe because you've got to the same point
yourself. You half hate our little piffling customs, and yet they've
bound you hand and foot because they're what you're used to. And they're
the very devil, Alston, unless you're strong enough to fight against 'em
and live laborious days."
"What's the matter with us? Is it Addington?"
"Good old Addington! Not Addington, any more than the world. It's grown
too fat and selfish. Pretty soon somebody's going to upset the balance
and then we shall fight and the stern virtues will come back."
"You old Tartar," said Alston, "have we really got to fight?"
"We've got to be punished anyhow," said his mother. "And I suppose the
only punishment we should feel is the punishment of money and blood."
"Let's run away, mother," said Alston. "Let's pick up Mary and run away
to Europe."
"Oh, no," said she. "They're going to fight harder than we are. Don't
you see there's an ogre over there grinning at them and sharpening his
claws? They've got to fight Germany."
"England can manage Germany," said Alston, "through the pocket.
Industrial wars are the only ones we shall ever see."
"If you can bank on that you're not so clever as I am," said his mother.
"I see the cloud rising. Every morning it lies there thick along the
east. There's going to be war, and whether we're righteous enough to
stand up against the ogre, God knows."
Alston was impressed, in spite of himself. His mother was not given to
prophecy or passionate asseveration.
"But anyhow," said she, "you can't run away, for they're going to ask
you to stand for mayor."
"The dickens they are! Who said so?"
"Amabel. She was in here this afternoon, as guileless as a child. Weedon
Moore told her they were going to ask you to stand and she hoped you
wouldn't."
"Why?"
"Because Moore's the rival candidate, and she thinks he has an influence
with the working-man. She thinks the general cause of humanity would be
better served by Moore. That's Amabel."
"She needn't worry," said Alston, getting up. "I shouldn't take it."
"Alston," said his mother, "there's your chance. Go out into the
rough-and-tumble. Get on a soap box. Tell the working-man something that
will make him think you haven't lived in a library all your life. It
may not do him any good, but it'll save your soul alive."
She had at last surprised him. He was used to her well-bred acquiescence
in his well-bred actions. She knew he invited only the choice between
two equally irreproachable goods: not between the good and evil. Alston
had a vague uncomfortable besetment that his mother would have had a
warmer hope for him if he had been tempted of demons, tortured by
doubts. Then she would have bade him take refuge on heights, even have
dragged him there. But she knew he was living serenely on a plain.
Alston thought there ought to be some sympathy accorded men who liked
living on a plain.
"Good Lord!" said he, looking down at her and liking her better with
every word she said. "You scare me out of my boots. You're a firebrand
on a mountain."
"No," said his mother. "I'm a decent Addington matron with not a
hundredth part of a chance of jolting the earth unless you do it for me.
I can't jolt for myself because I'm an anti. There's Mary. Hear the ice
clink. I'll draw in my horns. Mary'd take my temperature."
Alston stayed soberly at home and read a book that evening, his nerves
on edge, listening for a telephone call. It did not come, but still he
knew Esther was willing him to her.
Esther sat by the window downstairs, in the dusk, in a fever of desire
to know what, since the afternoon, he was thinking of her, and for the
first time there was a little fleeting doubt in her heart whether she
could make him think something else. As to Alston, she had the
hesitations of an imperfect understanding. There were chambers where he
habitually dwelt, and these she never entered at all. His senses were
keenly yet fastidiously alive. They could never be approached save
through shaded avenues she found it dull to traverse, and where she
never really kept her way without great circumspection. The passion of
men was, in her eyes, something practically valuable. She did not go out
to meet it through an overwhelming impetus of her own. It was a way of
controlling them, of buying what they had to give: comforts and pretty
luxuries. She would have liked to live like an adored child, all her
whims supplied, all her vanities fed. And here in this little circle of
Addington Alston Choate was the one creature who could lift her out of
her barren life and give her ease at every point with the recognition of
the most captious world.
And she was willing him. As the evening wore on, she found she was
breathing hard and her wrists were beating with loathing of her own
situation and hatred of those who had made it for her, if she could
allow herself to think she hated. For Esther had still to preserve the
certainty that she was good. Madame Beattie, up there with her
night-light and her book, she knew she hated. Of Jeff she did not dare
to think, he made her wrists beat so, and of Alston Choate she knew it
was deliberately cruel of him not to come. And then as if her need of
something kind and unquestioning had summoned him, a step fell on the
walk, and she saw Reardon, and went herself to let him in. There he was,
florid, large, and a little anxious.
"I felt," said he, "as if something had happened to you."
She stood there under the dim hall-light, a girlish creature in her
white dress, but with wonderful colour blooming in her cheeks. He could
not know that hate had brought it there. She seemed to him the flower of
her own beauty, rich, overpowering. She held the door open for him, and
when he had followed her into the library, she turned and put both her
hands upon his arm, her soft nearness like a perfume and a breath. To
Reardon, she was immeasurably beautiful and as far as that above him.
His heart beating terribly in his ears, he drew her to him sure that, in
her aloofness, she would reprove him. But Esther, to his infinite joy
and amazement, melted into his arms and clung there.
"God!" said Reardon. She heard him saying it more than once as if
entirely to himself and no smaller word would do. "You don't--" he said
to her then, "you don't--care about me? It ain't possible." Reardon had
reverted to oldest associations and forgotten his verb.
She did not tell him whether she cared about him. She did not need to.
The constraining of her touch was enough, and presently they were
sitting face to face, he holding her hands and leaning to hear her
whispered words. For she had immediately her question ready:
"Do you think I ought to live like this--afraid?"
"Afraid?" asked Reardon. "Of him?"
"Yes. He came this afternoon. There is nobody to stand between us. I am
afraid."
Reardon made the only answer possible, and felt the thrill of his own
adequacy.
"I'll stand between you."
"But you can't," she said. "You've no right."
"There's but one thing for you to do," said Reardon. "Tell what you're
telling me to a lawyer. And I'll--" he hesitated. He hardly knew how to
put it so that her sense of fitness should not be offended. "I'll find
the money," he ended lamely.
The small hands stayed willingly in his. Reardon was a happy man, but at
the same time he was curiously ashamed. He was a clean man who ate
moderately and slept well and had the proper amount of exercise, and
this excess of emotion jarred him in a way that irritated him. He did
blame Jeff, who was at the bottom of this beautiful creature's misery.
Still, if Jeff had not left her, she would not be sitting here now with
the white hands in his. But he was conscious of a disturbing element of
the unlawful, like eating a hurtful dish at dinner. Reardon had lived
too long in a cultivating of the middle way to embark with joyousness on
illicit possessing. As the traditions of Addington were wafting Alston
Choate away from this primitive little Circe on her isle, so his
acquired habits of safe and healthful living were wafting him. If his
inner refusals could have been spoken crudely out they would have
amounted to a miserable plea:
"Look here. It ain't because I don't want you. But there's Jeff."
For Reardon was not only a good fellow, but he had gazed with a wistful
awe on the traditions of Addington's upper class. He had tried honestly
to look like the men born to it; he never owned even to himself that he
felt ill at ease in it. Yet he did regard it with a reverence the men
that made it were far from feeling, and he knew something was due it. He
drew back, releasing gently the white hands that lay in his. He wanted
to kiss them, but he was not even yet sure they were enough his to
justify it. He cleared his throat.
"The man for you to go to," said he, "is Alston Choate. I don't like
him, but he's square as a die. And if you can get yourself where it'll
be possible to speak to you without knowing there's another man stepping
between--" he hesitated, his own heart beating for her and the decencies
of Addington holding him back. "Hang it, Esther," he burst forth, "you
know where I stand."
"Do I?" said Esther.
She rose, and, looking wan, gave him her hand. And Reardon got out of
the room, feeling rather more of a sneak than Alston had when he went
away. Esther stood still until she heard the door close behind him. Then
she ran out of the room and upstairs, to hide herself, if she could,
from the exasperated thought of the men who had failed her. She hated
them all. They owed her something, protection, or cherishing tenderness.
She could not know it was Addington that had got hold of them in one way
or another and kept them doggedly faithful to its own ideals. As she was
stepping along the hall, Madame Beattie called her.
"Esther, stop a minute. I want you."
Esther paused, and then came slowly to the door and stood there. She
looked like a sulky child, with the beauty of the child and the charm.
She hated Madame Beattie too much to gaze directly at her, but she knew
what she should see if she did look: an old woman absolutely brazen in
her defiance of the softening arts of dress, divested of every
bewildering subterfuge, sitting in a circle of candlelight in the
adequate company of her book.
"Esther," said Madame Beattie, "you may have the necklace."
Then Esther did glance quickly at her. She wondered what Madame Beattie
thought she could get out of giving up the adored gewgaw into other
hands.
"I don't want it," said Madame Beattie. "I'd much rather have the money
for it. Get the money and bring it to me."
Esther curled her lip a little in the scorn she really felt. She could
not conceive of any woman's being so lost to woman's perquisites as to
confess baldly her need of money above trinkets.
"But you'd better go to the right man for it," said Madame Beattie. "It
isn't Alston Choate. Jeff's the man, my dear. He's cleverer than the
devil if you once get him started. Not that I think you could. He's
done with you, I fancy."
Esther, still speechless, wondered if she could. It was a challenge of
precisely the force Madame Beattie meant it to be.