written a brochure on the subject; he thought it an evil; he would tell
you, asked, or unasked, that he had never seen a happy marriage, or even
many endurable ones. He didn’t believe in women being dependent; he
loathed domesticity; he revolted at the idea of vows and promises. And
now, at this moment, he became completely an apostate. What else could
be done with a creature like Andrée? Of course they must be married;
more than that, he voluntarily made to her then and there all those vows
he condemned; he promised to make her happier than he possibly could, he
promised eternal love and constancy, he promised that as this moment, so
should all their lives be; he believed it, and so did she.
“We’ll be friends, Andrée, always,” he said. “We’ll each have our own
life and our own interests. We’ll make it a different sort of marriage.”
“Oh, let’s!” said Andrée.
But while he was already envisaging the next ten years, she was held in
thrall by this one minute. She listened to him for some time, but the
intolerable feeling grew on her that he was wasting precious time.
“We don’t know how it’ll come out,” she said, impatiently. “Let’s not
bother about it, but just be as happy as we can.”
He was silenced by this admirable recklessness. He took her in his arms
and kissed her, and this time she kissed him; then he rather abruptly
said it was time for them to go home.
“No; why?” she said.
But he was quite firm about it. He knew himself better than she did. He
was alarmed at his total lack of views and opinions just then; he was
not as reasonable as he wished to be. He was mortally afraid that by
some expression of his ardour he might offend his glorious Diana. They
walked home with their arms about each other, through the fields and the
woods, a walk in a dream, in moonlight and shadow.
He went up to his hot little room and sat there in the dark, heart-sick
with the ecstasy of it. He was more troubled and unhappy than he had
ever been before in his cocksure existence. This thing, made up of
moonlight and Andrée’s dark eyes, had come crashing into his life, to
break it in two. He had not wanted or imagined anything of the sort; he
with his talk about biologic necessities. He was appalled at the idea of
going on, because everything within him had stopped.
He was not easily daunted, but it was a long time before his courage was
fully restored. He lighted a cigarette, and it tranquillized him.
“All right!” he said, aloud. “I made a new man of myself once. I’ll do
it again. I’ve got to.”
That was what he thought.
CHAPTER NINE
BERTIE
§ i
Claudine had put aside her philosophers that morning, and sat in her
little glade, listless and wretched. An insufferable, intolerable
summer, a summer altogether wrong and harmful. And inevitably six weeks’
more of it.
“It isn’t right to keep the children here in idleness,” she said to
herself. “Healthy, intelligent adults, wasting months and months....
They ought to be doing something. They ought to be busy and useful.... I
suppose I got these ideas from poor little Mr. Stephens, but they’re
good ideas. There was something very admirable about him....”
She smiled at the recollection of the “nice little beast,” but the smile
vanished instantly.
“They’re both so discontented and restless--begging me to take them
away. And I can’t do anything! I haven’t any power, any authority! I
can’t do the least thing--I can’t even leave this place without
Gilbert’s consent....”
A few miserable tears started to her eyes.
“That’s the reason I have no control over them. A mother ought to be
wise and firm and--free. But I can’t do what I think ought to be done.
I’ve never been able to. I have to argue with Gilbert, or deceive him.
That’s what it really is, although I like to call it tact. They ought to
go home, and study, or work. They don’t need a holiday! But I can’t make
him see that; not possibly. He sneers about ‘a lot of idle women,’ but
he won’t let us be anything else.... And the older I get, the
more--cowardly I become. I can’t bear to argue and argue with him. I
know I can’t win. I haven’t any influence over him. I can’t--charm him,
or coax him, and I can’t convince him. He’s so obstinate.”
She clasped her hands.
“Oh!” she cried. “If I could only, only have had my darling Andrée
alone, I could have done so much for her! So much! I could have been so
wise, so gentle, so patient, that she would have loved me with all her
heart! I could have influenced her and helped her--”
She hastily wiped her eyes, ashamed of her emotion.
“How did it happen? Why did I become so helpless? Whose fault is it?
Gilbert’s? No, I can’t think that. Other women with husbands just as bad
as Gilbert don’t allow themselves to be submerged. It’s my fault; it
must be. There’s something wrong with me, some horrible moral weakness.”
Her eye fell upon Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.
“No; they’re no use--only a drug. I call it training my mind, but it’s
only trying to dull my feelings. I ought to fight and struggle. I must!
I must! I must get hold of my children. Now when Bertie’s coming, when
he hasn’t seen me for two months.... I ought to be able to do something
with him. He adores me.”
She fell into a reverie upon her incorrigible boy. No doubt that Bertie
was lazy, frivolous, and something a little worse--“wild,” her friends
called him. And yet she never worried seriously about him. He was so
obviously the sort of person who always comes out on top. It was
impossible to imagine him defeated. He was the cleverest of all her
children, alarmingly clever, and he was also in some ways the finest of
them. He had more sensibility than his sisters, more heart. That was the
reason she was so shamefully indulgent toward his follies; she was
aware, almost by instinct, that they were of no significance.
She decided upon an attitude; she would not be so fond, and full of
half-playful remonstrances. No; she would be friendly, but firm and
wise; she would show him the significance of life.
§ ii
They went, one or the other of them, to meet all the reasonable trains.
“Why not?” said Andrée. “For mercy’s sake, what else have we to do?”
But he did not come by any of them. As a sort of punishment for his
shocking lack of industry during his late year at the Polytechnic
Institute, he had been banished to a solitary camp in Maine with Lance,
selected as a tutor of the most serious possible sort. And as Lance--who
was perfectly indifferent to the boy’s moral defects--wrote
encouragingly of his mental attainments, he was allowed a two weeks’
visit to his mother and sisters.
When he didn’t come by the five o’clock train, they gave him up for that
day. They were all dressed with an eye to his acutely critical taste,
and a little crestfallen at their unregarded condition. They came down
onto the veranda to wait until the bell rang for dinner, and sat there
patiently with the old ladies.... When there came, along the mountain
road, a terrific roaring, a dense cloud of dust, and a motor-car came up
at a hair-raising speed, an eccentric, purple car, very low, with a
gigantic engine. From this affair sprang out a figure in a duster,
wearing goggles and a plaid cap put on backward.
They all started up, joyfully, and Andrée rushed to meet him.
“Where did you get that thing?” she cried.
“It’s Pendleton’s. What do you think of it? It’s a French car.”
“It’s _très chic_. Come and see Mother!”
He sprang up the steps, pulled off cap and goggles, and kissed Claudine.
And try as she would, she couldn’t help looking at him indulgently,
instead of wisely. There was something about him.... He was a very
slight boy, barely eighteen, with an unusually dark skin and sleek black
hair; he had a trick of keeping his mouth open, which showed his
brilliantly white teeth, and gave him a stupid air; he had a smooth,
oval face, narrow eyes, a rather weak chin; he looked at first glance
like a silly young ass. But after you had looked again you were more
inclined to think him a most engaging young devil. He had an odd,
sidelong glance and a grimace of gamin impudence; he was never
bad-tempered or sullen, but sometimes a little malicious.
“How did you get on with Cousin Lance, my dear?” asked his mother.
“Splendidly!” he answered. “Aren’t you pretty, Mammy! But a bit spindly.
Why don’t you drink ale?”
“I’m very well, Bertie. Why did you take Mr. Pendleton’s car? Isn’t it
rather a risk?”
“His look out. He offered it. He’s a nice little playmate. He took me
out to dinner the first night I got home, because the old man said he
was busy. _Some_ dinner! Andrée, what is there to do here?”
“Lots! You can knit and embroider and play solitaire--”
“We’ll change all that, don’t worry! Here’s the latest thing in
evolution, as old Lance would say, come to put a little pep into the
fossils. Mammy, don’t you think I’ve evoluted a whole lot further than
Father? Lance says it takes two million years to grow a new toe, or lose
one, I forget which, but it seems to me--”
“That’s the dinner bell,” said Edna. “Come in just as you are. No one
dresses here.”
“_Noblesse oblige!_” said Bertie. “I’m going to dress. Tell them to keep
the kettle on the hob--whatever that is--for a few minutes.”
He came down again very promptly, with his black head sleek as a seal,
and a new and marvelous dark suit. He disdained all the various washable
materials; they were “a mess,” he said, no one had any business to be
hot enough to want them. He was absolutely correct in every detail, a
very model of fashion and deportment; how were they not to be proud of
him and delighted with him? He was very attentive to his mother, and
even if it were a rather ostentatious courtesy, it warmed her heart.
She grew annoyed, though, when he persisted in smoking cigarettes
between courses.
“It’s very bad manners,” she said. “It’s disrespectful to me and your
sisters. And what’s more, no one smokes here in the dining-room. It
isn’t a hotel.”
“I’ll teach it to be. And it’s not disrespectful, dear creatures. It’s
simply being done now.”
“And you’re too young to smoke. It’s very harmful at your age. I can’t
bear to see you, Bertie!”
“Mammy, don’t spoil my poor little holiday! Two weeks--that’s all! Up
there with old Lance, I neither smoke, chew, drink, spit nor cuss. Let
me have my brief day!”
When they went out onto the veranda after dinner, his quick ear caught
the sound of distant music.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Dancing down at the hotel,” answered Edna.
“Free for all, and leave your guns at the door?” he asked.
And after this, nothing would do, but that they must all stroll down to
“look it over,” and Bertie, entering ostensibly to buy a magazine in the
lobby, looked in at the ball-room and said it looked “good enough.”
“You and Edna sit out here on the piazza, and I’ll take a few turns with
Andrée,” he said. “The music’s not bad and the floor looks good.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Claudine. “They’re not at all a nice sort
of people here. I don’t think it’s quite the thing--”
Bertie fell back into Edna’s arms like a log.
“Oh--h--h!” he groaned. “Why?”
“It’s not dignified--”
“You don’t have to be dignified till you get married or inherit money.
Tell you what! You come, Mammy! You can dance some nice, old-fashioned
sort of waltz. Come on!”
“I ought to!” she thought. “It’s my duty to enter into their
amusements--as long as I can’t stop them.”
But after half an hour spent there, she was more than ever determined to
influence them--all of them--in an opposite direction, away from this
unpalatable and promiscuous vulgarity.
“Don’t you think it is better to be bored than to amuse yourselves in
such a way as this?” she asked, on the way home.
“No!” said Andrée and Bertie, simultaneously.
“It seems a pity to me that young people like you--intelligent and
well-bred, should be so mad about amusement,” she said. “I can’t
understand it! If you were brainless and dull, it would be different.
But there are so many really interesting things in the world, so many
wholesome and fine recreations--”
“Never heard of them, Mammy! What are they?”
“When I was a girl, we thought it a pleasure to take a country walk with
an interesting companion--”
“You wouldn’t like the companions that we’d think were interesting,”
said Andrée.
“No,” said Bertie, sadly. “There aren’t any nice amusements left, Mammy.
Evolution has done away with ’em.”
She looked at the three faces, at that clever and devilish Bertie, at
the sensible, clear-sighted Edna, at Andrée, filled with a strange and
wayward inner light.
“But you can’t enjoy that sort of thing!” she cried. “You can’t like to
be there, in a room crowded with vulgar, noisy people whom you don’t
even know! You must see that these new dances are--to say the very
least--ill-bred!”
“I accept!” said Bertie. “Lance was telling me about some fellow that
made that his motto, and I think it’s a gol-durned good one! I
accept--anything that comes my way.”
“But it doesn’t mean that, Bertie. It means resignation.”
“I know. And we are all resigned, except you. You want to--let’s
see--put back the clock of human progress. Very wrong Mammy!”
§ iii
The next morning Bertie went again to the big hotel, and came back
innocently with a new magazine for his mother. In the afternoon he went
down to the garage and drove back in the startling purple car, and asked
his mother to come for a drive. Filled with terror, she accepted, and
spent two hours in mortal anguish, flying perilously along the edge of
precipices, breathless from the terrific speed. There was no chance then
for the serious talk she wished to have with her son, and after dinner
he disappeared again, and didn’t return until midnight.
But she was waiting for him on the veranda.
“Bertie!” she said. “Where have you been?”
“Dancing around a little, Mammy!”
“With whom?”
“Some girls at the hotel. Very respectable and humble, Mammy. I didn’t
have any trouble with them at all.”
“I don’t like it. And I’m sure your father wouldn’t like it.”
“So am I. But I’m used to that. It’s crabbed age and youth--”
“Don’t be disrespectful to your father! Bertie ...! Did you--have
anything to drink?”
“Oh, yes! A couple of seltzer lemonades.”
“I mean--anything--intoxicating?”
“Nothing that intoxicated me, Mammy!”
“Don’t be so flippant and provoking! Bertie, I really feel in despair
about you. Haven’t you any serious or--worthy thoughts or ambitions?”
“They haven’t come yet. But I’m only a child. Give me a chance!”
“What do you expect to do with your life?”
“Don’t you know,” he said, solemnly, “that that’s really a ridiculous
question, Mammy? It doesn’t lie with me. I’m a puppet in the hands of
Nature. I’m going to be used by a Blind Force--”
“Please don’t joke!”
“I don’t think I am. It seems to me it really is like that. I don’t see
much use in spending all your life squirming. I’d rather go along with
the rest of the crowd--wherever they’re going. We don’t count much.
We’re just one more generation. It’ll take about a billion years to
change us or improve us. So what care I?”
“Bertie!” she cried, quite shocked. “Where did you get such ideas?”
“Lance has corrupted me. I was a poor innocent child who wanted to be an
engineer and build bridges. But when I was taught to think a million
years at a time, I lost interest.”
“But you’ve got to pass your life in some sort of work, dear.”
“I’ll go into Father’s office and show him how to run the show. Then
I’ll take a wad and buck the stock market and clean up a few millions
and never worry again.”
“Go to bed!” she said, half-laughing. “You’re too silly to talk to! I
suppose some time you’ll grow up and be a man. And I hope with all my
heart I’ll be able to be proud of you.”
His exploits that week, however, were certainly nothing to be proud of.
He took a golden-haired maiden from the hotel out one afternoon and
quite wrecked Mr. Pendleton’s car, leaving it helpless on a mountain
road to be taken back to the garage on a truck. He ran up a startling
bill at the hotel for cigarettes, candies, and “seltzer lemonades” which
she suspected strongly, and when she confronted him with it, he said,
with chagrin:
“Pshaw! I told ’em not to send it till after I’d gone!”
She paid this herself from her own allowance, but the bill for the
garage was beyond her. It was going to cost six hundred dollars to
repair Mr. Pendleton’s car.
“But he’ll pay it himself!” Bertie protested. “He’s a good sport. He
knows I’m a young and inexperienced driver, and sure to have accidents.”
“I’m ashamed of you, Bertie, to think of such a thing. I shall have to
tell your father, and I’m afraid he’ll be very angry.”
“I don’t believe in family rows. It might give him apoplexy. I should
think you’d rather sell your jewels.”
But she did tell Gilbert, and he was furious. It was not a pleasant
week-end, but it didn’t depress Bertie.
“I’m the reed, you know, Mammy, that bows its head to the storm,” he
said. And the very next day, told her he wanted to, and was socially
obliged to, give a dinner-party to some of his friends at the hotel.
“You can’t, my dear. Mrs. Dewey wouldn’t--”
“She says she will. I hinted at it. We can have it at eight, when the
others have finished. She says she’ll do it in grand style, for my
sake.”
“It would cost a great deal. Your father--”
“Andrée and Edna will pay for it, out of their little savings, like
sisters should, for their brother’s honour. All you have to do is to
look lovely and be dignified.”
“But I don’t care to encourage those hotel people!”
“They won’t bother you when I’ve gone. Besides, you can freeze ’em
thoroughly at the dinner. I don’t care how rude you are to them.”
It was a horrible dinner, of the sort that Claudine most thoroughly
detested. Silly, over-dressed girls and, one or two of their mothers,
and a handful of boys who seemed to her prejudiced eyes nothing but
cheap travesties on her fascinating son. She was quite perfect, with the
affability and politeness she never displayed so well as when among
people she disliked.
But after he had gone away, she was very glad she had done this for
Bertie. She missed him beyond measure; of all her children he was the
one who had most of her own detached and fatalistic point of view, and
he, like herself, could find but cold comfort in his own heart. She
understood him, how futile all achievement seemed to him, how terribly
necessary was happiness. He _must_ be happy; it was that alone which he
required from life, not success, like Andrée, not self-approbation, like
Edna, but joy in the moment, like herself.
She remembered him as a little boy, a beautiful child, a gay and
cajoling little thing, his grandmother’s favourite ... certainly a very
much spoilt child. She liked to remember his passionate admiration of
her, how she had always stopped in at the nursery to let him see her,
dressed for the evening. How he had called her “pretty Mammy,” quite
unabashed by his father’s disgust for his effeminacy.
Even now, with all his weaknesses, his petty vices seemed to her very
innocent, very unimportant. It was only his way of looking for
happiness. She felt sure that when he grew older, he would find a better
way. And if he remained as he was, frivolous, reckless, pleasure-loving,
wasn’t it better, after all, than being stolid, prudent, money-loving?
“My dear, dear boy!” she thought, with tears in her eyes, but a smile on
her lips. “Poor Bertie!”
§ iv
The long, long summer wore away; wasted and arid days they seemed to
her. She found but little pleasure in her flowers and birds, no more
consolation in her philosophers.
“I suppose I’m growing old!” she thought, and she allowed herself to
dally with the idea of growing really old, when nothing would be
expected of her, but dignity, which would be no trouble at all.
“But I’m barely forty!” she reflected. “I suppose there’ll be at least
twenty years more of this!”
And her heart sank.
“It’s peace I want!” she said. “I’m not made for struggling or
achieving. I’ve been a wretched failure.... I suppose I’ve even failed
Gilbert--in some sort of way. All I can do is to go on blundering and
trying--for all that terribly long time.... If I can only see the
children on the right road!... And I don’t even know what the right road
is!”
She was happy to see her daughters so full of new interest and energy
when the time came for going home.
“I can live in them!” she said. “If they’ll let me!”
_BOOK THREE_
THE CUP IS OFFERED
CHAPTER ONE
ANDRÉE’S RECITAL
§ i
Gilbert was certainly very nervous. His nervousness took its usual form
of a great rage and distress about his shirt, which he believed was
inclined to bulge, and therefore to ruin and destroy him in the eyes of
society. Moreover, his own image in the glass filled him with
resentment, that portly and ungainly figure, his grey hair, his
unromantic aspect. Nothing but a father, that’s all he was, a
money-maker. He strode around the bedroom, swearing bitterly and
scowling, but toward this exhibition of ill-temper Claudine was neither
frigid nor superior. She felt sorry for him. She chatted as she brushed
her hair, and she succeeded in soothing him a little.
“You look very distinguished, Gilbert!” she said, and she was ready to
believe it.
“Humph!” he said, hiding his pleasure. “That tailor’s a fool. The coat
wrinkles there, over the shoulders.”
“Not when you stand up straight. I suppose you do, when you’re being
fitted, you know.”
He straightened himself and looked again. It did look better.
“I hope she won’t get into one of her freakish humours,” he said. “Get
stage fright, or anything of that sort.”
“She won’t,” Claudine assured him. “She’s not nervous in public. She’s
not the least bit upset. Listen! She’s playing over her pieces now....
Oh, Gilbert! Isn’t she wonderful?”
He went over to open the door into the hall, so that the sound might
reach him better, and the great volume of it impressed him. It must
certainly betoken a remarkable skill to do that with such sureness;
Claudine had never played so loudly and majestically.
“You’d better hurry a little, Gilbert,” said his wife. “I told Mary to
serve dinner promptly at six, to give us plenty of time. I think I’ll go
and hurry Bertie a little.”
But really the vain woman wanted her son’s approval and admiration. She
went upstairs to the room Gilbert had occupied in his bachelor days, and
knocked at the door.
“It’s I, Bertie!”
“Come in, Mammy!” he called, cheerfully, and as soon as she had entered,
he cried:
“Oh, I say! Queen of them all! You _are_ lovely! You’ll be a riot!”
She smiled happily.
“You silly boy! Is it really a nice dress?”
“I wish you were going to sit up there on the platform and play. I’d
rather hear you, and look at you, Mammy!”
“It might have been I,” she thought to herself, with a shade of
bitterness. “I might have been a mother really to be proud of--a
musician--a somebody.”
But she smiled again, and glanced at herself in the mirror. It was the
most shockingly expensive dress she had ever had, a real Paris frock of
satin in an exquisite shade of green that became her perfectly, and set
off her coppery hair and pale skin to their best advantage. She was
proud of her small waist, her little feet, in spite of the fact that
they were old-fashioned, she was pleased with her miniature neatness and
delicacy.
She turned to her son. Gilbert had angrily insisted that a boy of
eighteen had no business in evening dress; a dinner jacket was the thing
for him. But Bertie had pointed out the fact that the thing had already
been ordered and fitted, and would have to be paid for.
“I never imagined you’d kick,” he had said, plaintively. “You’re always
so generous, Father.”
He finished scrupulously tying his white tie.
“Do I look like a monkey?” he asked. “Father said I would.”
He followed his mother downstairs into the dining-room, and the others
joined them promptly. There was an air of general satisfaction at the
dinner table. They were all pleased with themselves, individually and as
a family; they were all unusually festive and spirited. Andrée, the
heroine, was blazing with excitement.
“You’d better eat,” said Lance, warningly to her. Music was no more to
him than a passing phenomenon in the course of man’s history; it served
to show something of the development of his brain and æsthetic sense,
but it would, he felt, in the course of time be regarded as nothing
more than a frivolity. It was interesting to see how seriously it was
now regarded. Still, he was fond of Andrée, and he wished her to be
successful, if only for her mother’s sake. He had an unwavering loyalty
for Claudine, never expressed, never quite comprehended by her,
something which in a less preoccupied man might have been called
devotion.