The heat dragged through the remainder of August and filled September
with steaming days and heavy nights, followed by driving grey storms and
premonitory, chill dawns. A period of sunny tranquillity succeeded, but
crimson blots of sumach, the warmer tone of maples, made it evident that
summer had lapsed. Honduras mulched the strawberries, and set new teeth
in his lawn rakes. The days passed without feature, or word from
Mariana, and Howat Penny fell into an almost slumberous monotony of
existence. It was not unpleasant; occupied with small duties, intent on
his papers, or wandering in a past that seemed to grow clearer, rather
than fade, as time multiplied, he maintained his erect, carefully
ordered existence. Then, among his mail, he found a large,
formal-appearing envelope which he opened with a mild curiosity. His
attitude of detachment was soon dispelled.
Mrs. Corinne de Barry desired the pleasure of his attendance at the
wedding of her daughter, Harriet, to James Polder. Details, a church and
hour, were appended. The headlong young man, he thought, with a smile,
Mariana was well out of that. He had been wise in saying nothing to
Charlotte; the thing had expired naturally. But, irrationally, he
thought of Polder with a trace of contempt--a man who had,
unquestionably, possessed Mariana Jannan's regard marrying the
pink-faced understudy to a second-rate emotional actress! In a way it
made him cross; the fellow should have shown a--a greater appreciation,
delicacy. "Commonplace," he said decisively, aloud. The following day
Mariana herself appeared, with a touch of sable and a small, wickedly
becoming hat.
He was at lunch; and, without delay, she took the place smilingly laid
for her by Rudolph. It was characteristic that she made no pretence of
concealing the reason that had brought her to Shadrach. "Jim's going to
marry that Harriet de Barry," she said at once, nicely casual. "I had a
card," he informed her. "It's to be on the thirtieth," Mariana
proceeded, "at eight o'clock and in church. Of course you are going."
"Not at all of course," he replied energetically. "And you'll stay away
for the plainest decency."
"We will go together," she proceeded calmly. "I want to see Jim married,
happy." She gazed at him with narrowed eyes.
"Mariana," he told her, "that's a shameful lie. It is cold, feminine
curiosity. It's worse--the only vulgar thing I can remember your
considering. I won't hear of it." He debated the wisdom of recounting
James Polder's last visit to Shadrach and decided in the negative. "Let
the young man depart with his Harriet in peace."
"It's sickening, isn't it?" she queried. "And yet it is so like Jim. He
had a very objectional idea of his dignity; he was sensitive in a way
that made me impatient. He couldn't forget himself, you see. That helped
to make it difficult for me; I wasn't used to it; his feelings were
always being damaged."
Howat Penny nodded. "You'll recall I emphasized that." Mariana looked
worn by her gaiety, he decided, white; for the first time in his memory
she seemed older than her actual years. Her friends, he knew, her
existence, bore the general appellation, fast; Howat had no share in the
condemnatory aspect of the term, but he realized that it had a literal
application. Their pace was feverish, and Mariana plainly showed its
effects. Her voice, already noted as more mature, had, he was sure,
hardened. She dabbled her lips thickly with a rouge stick. "Mariana," he
said querulously, "I wish, you'd stop this puppet dance you're leading.
I wish you would marry."
"I tried to," she coolly replied, "but you spoiled my young dream of
happiness."
"That isn't true," he asserted sharply, perturbed. "Anything that
happened, or didn't happen, was only the result of yourself, of what you
are. I am extremely anxious to have you settled, and your legs out of
the Sunday papers. I--I am opposed to your present existence; it's gone
on too long. I believe I'd rather see you orating on the streets, like
Eliza Provost. And, by thunder, I never thought I should come to that!
Champagne and those damnable syncopated tunes played by hysterical
niggers make a poor jig." He spoke impetuously, unconscious of any
reversal of previous judgments, opinions.
"You are so difficult to please, Howat," she said wearily; "you were
aghast at the thought of my marrying James, and now you are complaining
of the natural alternative. The truth is," she added brutally, "you are
old-fashioned; you think life goes on just as it did when the Academy of
Music was the centre of your world. And nothing is the same." She rose,
and, with a lighted cigarette and half-shut eyes, fell into a rhythmic
step of sensuous abandon. "You see," she remarked, pausing. An
increasing dread for her filled his heart. He felt, in response to her
challenge, a sudden bewilderment in the world of to-day. Things, Howat
Penny told himself, were marching to the devil. He said this irritably,
loud, and she laughed. "I'm going in by an early train," she proceeded.
"We have left the country. Will you stop for me on the thirtieth? Early,
Howat, so we can be sure of a good place."
His helplessness included the subject of her remarks; he would, he
realized, be at James Polder's wedding, but he persisted in his opinion.
"A low piece of business," Howat declared. When she had gone he felt
that he had not penetrated her actual attitude toward Polder's
deflection. He had not for a moment got beneath her casual manner, her
lightness, pretended or actual. He wished vehemently that he were back
again in the past he comprehended, among the familiar figures that had
thronged the notable dinner to Patti, the women who had floated so
graciously through the poetry of departed waltzes. He got out his albums
once more, scrutinized through his polished glass the programmes of
evenings famous in song. But he went to bed a full two hours earlier
than customary; his feet positively dragged up the stairs; above he sat
strangely exhausted, breathing heavily for, apparently, no reason
whatever.
He retraced, with Mariana, the course over the broad, asphalt way into
the north end of the city early on the evening of the thirtieth. They
found the church easily, by reason of a striped canvas tunnel stretched
out to the curb; and a young man with plastered hair and a gardenia led
them, Mariana on his arm, to a place on the centre aisle. The church had
a high nave newly vaulted in maple, and stained glass windows draped
with smilax, garish in colour against electric lights. Above the altar a
great illuminated cross maintained an unsteady flickering; and--it was
unseasonably cold--heating steam pipes gave out an expanding racket.
The pews through the centre filled rapidly; there was a low, excited
chatter of voices, and a spreading tropical expanse of the dyed
feathers and iridescent foliage of womens' hats. An overpowering scent
of mingled perfumes rose and filled the interior. The strains of an
organ grew audible, contesting with the rattle of the steam pipes. Howat
Penny was detached, critical. Mariana, in a dull, black satin wrap of
innumerable soft folds and wide paisley collar slipping from a
sheath-like bodice of gleaming, cut steel beading, was silent,
incurious. He turned to her, to point out an extravagant figure, but he
said nothing. She was, evidently, in no mood for the enjoyment of the
ridiculous. This disturbed him; he had not thought that she would be
so--so concerned. He suppressed an impatient exclamation, and returned
to the scrutiny of the culminating ceremony.
Here was a sphere, vastly larger than his own, to the habits and
prejudices of which he was complete stranger. It was as James Polder had
said--as if one or the other spoke Patagonian. He had no wish to acquire
the language about him; a positive antagonism to his surrounding
possessed him, beyond reason. He thought--how different Mariana is from
all this, and was annoyed again at her serious bearing. Then he was
surprised by his presence there at all; confound the girl, why didn't
she play with her own kind! Yet only the other day the glimpse she had
given him of her natural associates had filled him with dread. His mind,
striving to encompass the problem of Mariana's existence, failed to
overcome the walls built about him by time, by habit. He gave it up. The
louder pealing of the organ announced immediate developments.
There was a stir in the front of the church, a clergyman in white
vestment advanced; and, at a sudden murmurous interest, a twisting of
heads, the wedding procession moved slowly up the aisle. The ushers,
painstakingly adopting various lengths of stride to the requirements of
the organ, passed in pairs; then followed an equal number of young
women, among whom he instantly recognized the handsome presence of Kate
Polder, in drooping blue bonnets, with prodigious panniers of
celestial-hued silk, carrying white enamelled shepherd's crooks from
which depended loops of artificial buttercups. An open space ensued, in
the centre of which advanced a child with starched white skirts
springing out in a lacy wheel about spare, bare knees, her pale yellow
hair tied in an overwhelming blue bow; and holding outstretched, in a
species of intense and quivering agony, a white velvet cushion to which
were pinned two gold wedding bands.
After that, Howat Penny thought, the prospective bride could furnish
only the diminished spectacle of an anti-climax. Led by the virginal
presence of Isabella Polder she floated forward in a foam of white tulle
and dragging satin attached below her bare, full shoulders. A floating
veil, pinned with a wreath of orange blossoms, manifestly wax, covered
the metallic gold of her hair. Her countenance was unperturbed,
statuesque, and pink. As the sentimental clamour of the organ died the
steam pipes took up, with renewed vigour, their utilitarian noise. "Why
don't they turn them off?" Mariana exclaimed in his ear. Personally he
enjoyed such an accompaniment to what he designated as the performance.
He cast the participants in their inevitable rôles--the bride as prima
donna, James Polder the heroic tenor. Mrs. Corinne de Barry, a thin,
concerned figure in glistening lavender, supported a lamenting mezzo,
the bulky, masculine figure at her side, with an imposing diamond on a
hand like two bricks, was beautifully basso--
His train of thought was abruptly upset by James Polder's familiar,
staccato utterance. The precipitant young man! It stamped out all Howat
Penny's humorous condescension; his sensitive ear was conscious of a
note, almost, of desperation. He avoided looking at Mariana. Damn it,
the thing unexpectedly cut at him like a knife. James Polder said, "I
will." The clear, studied tones of Harriet de Barry, understudy to
Vivian Blane, were spoiled by the crackling of steam. Howat moved
uneasily; he had an absurd sense of guilt; he hated the whole
proceeding. What was that Polder, whose voice persisted so darkly in his
hearing, about, getting himself into such a snarl? He recalled what the
younger had said on his porch--"women with better hearts." He had
implored him, Howat Penny, to be "more human." The memory, too, of the
shaken tone of that request bothered him. Now it appeared that he might
have been, well, more human. He composed himself, facing such
sentimental illusions, into a savage indifference to what remained of
the ceremony; he ignored the passage of Polder, with Harriet Polder on
his arm; the relief of the unspeakable child carrying the white velvet
cushion no longer in the manner of a hot plate; the united bridesmaids
and ushers. "Thank heaven, that's over!" he ejaculated in the
deeply-comfortable space of the Jannan's motor laundalet. "But it
isn't," Mariana said briefly. She sat silent, with her head turned from
him, through the remainder of the short drive about Rittenhouse Square.
Then she went abruptly to her room.
Charlotte Jannan and her oldest child, Sophie Lewis, were above in the
living room. The former was handsome in a rigid way; her countenance,
squarely and harshly formed, with grey hair exactly waved and pinned,
had an expression of cold firmness; her voice was assertive and final.
Sophie, apparently midway in appearance between Kingsfrere and Mariana,
was gracefully proportioned, and gave an impression of illusive beauty
by means of a mystery of veils, such as were caught up on her hat now.
They were discussing, he discovered, the family.
"It's an outrage, Howat," Charlotte told him, "you never married, and
that the name will go. Here's Mariana at twenty-seven, almost, and
nothing in sight; and Sophie flatly refuses, after only one, to have
another child. I wish now I'd had a dozen. It is really the duty of the
proper people. And Eliza Provost won't hear of a man! I tell Sophie it's
their own fault when they complain about society to-day. It's the fault
of this charity work and athletics, too; both extremely levelling.
Hundreds of women wind bandages or go to the hunt races and gabble about
votes for no reason under heaven but superior associates."
"Howat will feelingly curse the present with you," Sophie said rising.
"I must go. Borrow the motor, if you don't mind. I saw in the paper a
Polder was married." Howat Penny lit a cigarette, admirably stolid. "A
name I never repeat," Charlotte Jannan said when her daughter had left.
He heard again the echo of James Polder's intense voice, "I will."
Something of his dislike for him, he discovered, had evaporated. Howat
thought of Mariana, in her room--alone with what feelings? He realized
that Charlotte would never have forgiven her for any excursion in that
direction. He himself had been, was, entirely opposed to such a
connection. However, he could now dismiss it into the past that held a
multitude of similarly futile imaginings.
Charlotte, he inferred, had no elasticity; it was a quality the absence
of which he had not before noted. She was a little narrow in her
complacency. Her patent satisfaction in Sophie was a shade too--too
worldly. Sam Lewis was, of course, irreproachably situated; but he was,
at the same time, thick-witted, an indolent appendage for his name.
Suddenly he felt poignantly sorry for Mariana; in a way she seemed to
have been trapped by life. James Polder resembled her in that he had
been caught in an ugly net of circumstance. A great deal had been upset
since his day, when the boxes and pit had been so conveniently
separated; old boundaries no longer defined, limited, their content;
social demarcations were being obliterated by a growing disaffection. It
was very unfortunate, for, as he was seeing, unhappiness ensued. It was
bound to. An irritability seized him at being dragged into such useless
conjecturing; into, at his age, confusing complications; and he greeted
with relief the long, low front of his dwelling at Shadrach, its old
grey stone a seeming outcropping of the old green turf, the aged,
surrounding trees.