I
The girls marched into chapel singing Jerusalem the Golden. Some of
the voices were shrill and piping, and some were clear and sweet; but
all had that peculiar young freshness which always makes old hearts
ache, and which now drew tears to the eyes of many visiting parents
looking down from the gallery, and trying not to crane their necks
conspicuously when their own offspring appeared in the aisle below.
On Sundays the whole school came out in blue serge and black velvet
tam-o'-shanters. The little girls marched first--some as young as
eleven years--and as they came from the main school buildings and
marched up the long aisle they were holding the high notes, "Jerusalem
the golden," and their voices sounded like young birds', before the
older girls came crashing in with the next line, "With milk and honey
blest." They marched quickly--it was a tradition of the school--divided
to right and left, and filed into their appointed places.
Last of all came the tall senior president, and beside her a little
figure that hardly reached her shoulder, and seemed as if one of
the younger children were out of place; yet this was an important
figure in the life of the school--Lita Hazlitt, the chairman of the
self-government committee.
Her face was almost round except for a small point that was her chin;
her hair--short curls, not ringlets--curved up on her black velvet tam,
and was blond, but a dusky blond. There was something alert, almost
naughty in her expression, although at the moment this was mitigated
by an air of discretion hardly avoidable by the chairman of the
self-government committee in church.
In this, her last year at Elbridge Hall, she had come to love the
chapel. Its gray stone and dark narrow windows of blue or amethyst,
the organ and the voices, gave her a sense of peace almost mystic--a
mood she could never have attained unaided, for hers was a nature
essentially practical. Like most practical people, she was kind. It was
so easy for Lita to see what was needed--to do a problem in geometry
or mend a typewriter or knit a sweater--that she was always doing such
things for her friends, not so much from unselfishness as from sheer
competence.
The seniors sat in the carved stalls against the wall, and Lita liked
to rest her hand on the rounded head of a dragon which made the arm of
her chair. It had a polished surface and the knobs of the ears fitted
into her fingers.
"Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us, in sundry places, to
acknowledge and confess--"
Lita loved the words of the service, and she noted that part of
their beauty was the needless doubling of words--dissemble and
cloak--assemble and meet together--requisite and necessary. Yet Miss
Fraser, who taught English at Elbridge, would call that tautology in a
theme.... She sank on her knees, burying her small nose in her hands
for the general confession.
As they rose from their knees and the choir broke out into O Come,
let us sing unto the Lord, Lita allowed herself one glance at the
gallery, where her lovely mother was just rising, slim and erect, with
a bearing polite rather than devout. Lita could see one immaculate gray
glove holding her prayerbook. She was a beautifully dressed person.
The whole school had an orgy of retrimming hats and remaking dresses
after Mrs. Hazlitt had spent a Sunday at Elbridge. She was as blond as
her daughter, except that somehow in the transmission of the family
coloring she had acquired a pair of enormous black eyes from some
contradictory ancestor. Even across the chapel Lita could see the dark
splotches that were her mother's eyes. It was great fun--the Sundays
that Mrs. Hazlitt came to the school, and yet Lita was always a little
nervous. Her mother said anything that came into her head--simply
anything, commenting on teachers and making fun of rules. The girls
loved it, of course, but sometimes-- The First Lesson had begun.
The service went on. It was not until the Second Lesson was being
read that Lita, glancing idly toward the ante-chapel, saw that a
terrible thing had happened: Her father had arrived too--unexpected
and unannounced. He was standing there under the gallery, his hat and
stick and gloves all held in one hand, and his mouth just not smiling
as he at last contrived to meet her eyes. There they were--her mother
looking down at her so calmly from the gallery and her father waiting
so confidently for her below, each unaware of the other's presence.
What in thunder was she going to do?
Their divorce had taken place a great many years before, when Lita was
so young that her mother was not much more important to her than her
nurse, and her father very much less so. She was accustomed to the idea
of their divorce; but she did wish they were divorced as Aurelia's
parents were--quite amicably, even meeting now and then to talk over
questions of Aurelia's welfare. Or the way Carrie Waldron's were--each
remarried happily to someone else, so that Carrie had two amusing sets
of half brothers and sisters growing up in different parts of the
country. But Lita was aware of a constrained bitterness, a repressed
hatred between her parents. When they said, "Perhaps your father does
not quite take in, my dear--" or "I would not interfere with any plan
of your mother's; but I must say--" Lita was conscious of a poisoned
miasma that seemed to rise from old battlegrounds.
And now, in a few minutes, these two people who had not spoken for
thirteen years would come face to face in the cheerful group of parents
which every Sunday brought to the school. The few minutes after the
service when everyone stood about on the grass outside the church and
chatted was a time of public friendliness between three inharmonious
classes--parents, teachers and pupils; and there these two dear foes
of hers would be, each waiting so confidently to claim her undivided
attention. She must prevent it.
She had the sermon to think it out, and for the first time in her life
she hoped it would be a long sermon. The preacher, a fine-looking old
missionary bishop, with a long upper lip like a lawyer, and a deep-set
eye like a fanatic, was going up into the pulpit, turning on the
reading light, shaking back the fine frills of his episcopal sleeves.
"My text," he was saying, "will be taken from the eleventh chapter of
Isaiah, the sixth verse: 'The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and
the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young
lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.' The
eleventh chapter of Isaiah, the sixth verse."
Well, the text was not inappropriate, Lita thought; but she had
no intention of listening. The situation, besides its practical
difficulties, brought all the emotion of her childhood's worries and
confusions. One of her very earliest recollections went back to a time
when her parents still loved each other. She and her mother had been
sitting on the floor playing with paper dolls, and suddenly her father
had appeared unexpectedly in the doorway--returned ahead of time from a
journey. What Lita specially remembered was the way her mother sprang
up in one single long motion and flung herself into his arms, and how
they had clung together and gone out of the room without a word to her,
leaving her conscious, even at four, that she was forgotten. Presently
her mother had sent her nurse, Margaret, to finish the game; but the
game was already over. Margaret was desirable when one was tired or
hungry or sleepy, but absolutely useless at games of the imagination.
After that Lita could just remember days when she would see her mother
crying--peculiar conduct for a grown-up person, since grown-up people
were never naughty or afraid and could do anything they wanted to do,
and did. It shocked Lita to see her mother cry; it was contrary to the
plan of the universe. And then, soon after this, her father, as far
as she was concerned, ceased to be; and it must be owned she did not
greatly miss him.
He ceased to be as a visible presence; but at immensely long
intervals--that is to say, once a year, at Christmas--magical presents
arrived for her, which she knew came from him. The first was the
largest doll she had ever seen. It came from Paris and brought a
trousseau in a French trunk. It was an incredible delight. She dreamed
about it at night, and could hardly believe each morning on waking
that it was reality. The only mitigation of her delight was that her
mother did not admire the doll. She said it had an ugly, stary face.
Lita, beginning the stupendous task of writing a letter of thanks,
with a lead pencil on ruled paper, wrote, "Dear Father: Mother thinks
the doll has a stary face, but I love her--" Only Margaret said that
wouldn't do, and she had to begin all over again, her round, cramped
hand pressing on the pencil until her nails were white.
When she was eight a gold bracelet arrived, set with red stones. This
time her mother was even more outspoken. She said to Aunt Minnie, "Of
course, she bought it! Isn't it just what you'd expect?" Lita guessed
that "she" meant her father's new wife, for she knew vaguely that
he had married again and was living abroad. She herself thought the
bracelet beautiful; but it was put away, and she was never allowed to
wear it. And now, only a little while before, she had seen it in an old
jewelry case of her mother's and had been surprised to find it was just
what her mother had said it was.
Then two years later a set of sables had come. This, too, her mother
had utterly condemned.
"Sables for a child of ten!"
Aunt Minnie had suggested that Lita's mother wear them herself and
had been well scolded for the suggestion. Lita was content that these
should be confiscated. She preferred her own little ermine set.
Until she was sixteen, except for presents, she lived the life of a
child with only one parent, and a very satisfactory life it was. Even
when her father was in the United States he did not always take the
trouble to see her. Perhaps it was not made too easy for him to do so.
But within the last two years things had changed. His second wife had
died and he had come back to New York to live. He was older, he was
lonely, and a pretty daughter almost grown up was very different from
a troublesome child who couldn't walk as fast as he did, who required
meals at strange hours and could eat only innocuous food. In his own
silent way Mr. Hazlitt began to bid for his daughter's affection.
Lita liked the process and she liked him, although she felt immediately
that the feeling was a betrayal of her lovely, devoted mother. It
wasn't right, she reflected, that her father, who had forgotten her
existence for so many years, should come back, and just because he was
nice looking and well off and knew the art of life should be able to
capture her affection as much or more than if he had stayed at home and
been a good parent. It wasn't right, but it was a fact.
For two years the struggle had been going on, steadily rising in
intensity. Her father had begun by asking for very little--hardly more
than an outlawed parent could ask--but Lita knew that she was becoming
dearer and dearer to him, and that her parents were now contending for
first place in her heart. Soon it would be for her exclusive love.
The pain of the situation to her was that she was to them not only
a battlefield but a weapon and the final trophy of the war. As they
never met, and wrote only through their lawyers, she was their most
vivid channel of communication. She loved her mother the best--much
the best--but her mother was a presupposition of her life, part of the
background, whereas her father was an excitement, a stranger, a totally
new experience.
When she dined with her mother, that was the solid comfort of
everyday life; but when she went out to a restaurant to dine with her
father--that was a party.
When her mother told her she was looking well the compliment often
meant only that Mrs. Hazlitt approved of her own taste in clothes; but
if her father said so it was the reaction of an outsider, a critic, a
man of the world; it raised the whole level of her self-esteem. She
couldn't help valuing it more.
The sermon was nearing its end. Twice already the bishop had begun a
sentence, "And now in conclusion--" The next time, Lita thought, it
might take. If only Aurelia were about! Aurelia was an authority on
the management of divorced parents, though usually with mercenary
intent. Aurelia had studied the art of intimating to one parent
that the other did you rather better. It brought Aurelia great
affluence; but Lita did not quite approve. She thought it too easy to
be sportsmanlike; the poor dears were so innocent. But Aurelia was
stern. She said children ought to get something out of the situation.
Unfortunately, this Sunday, of all Sundays, Aurelia was laid up in the
infirmary with a strange and violent form of indigestion which Lita
was afraid would turn out to be appendicitis. Miss Barton, the head
of the school, believed it to be indigestion merely because she had
discovered that Aurelia the night before had eaten peanuts, peanut
butter, chocolate cake and tomato mayonnaise. What of course one could
not tell Miss Barton was that Aurelia had been eating just such illicit
Saturday-night suppers ever since she came to Elbridge.
Lita had only said very gently "I'm afraid it's more than indigestion,"
and Miss Barton had just glanced at her as if she were a silly ass.
If Aurelia had been about she would have been sent bounding up the
gallery stairs to detain Mrs. Hazlitt, while Lita herself would have
run out and explained the situation to Mr. Hazlitt. Well, as it was,
she would have a minute or two. The gallery stairs were narrow and it
took people a little while to come down.
The sermon was over. The organ rolled out into Praise God, from whom
all blessings flow, an anthem which Lita in her childhood had always
supposed was introduced at this point in order to express gratitude
that the sermon was over.
The girls sprang up as if on wires. Presently they were all marching
down the aisle again. Lita looked up in the gallery and smiled at her
mother, looked down and smiled at her father; and then, as soon as she
was back again in the main school building, she turned and ran as fast
as she could go to the main door of the chapel.
A crowd of parents and teachers had already gathered, all being as
civil to one another as if they were not naturally hostile. Lita had
once overheard Miss Barton exclaiming, "Of course, anyone could keep a
good school if it weren't for these parents!" Her father was standing
a little apart, waiting. He had put on his hat at the slight angle at
which he wore it--a sort of defiance to his forty-two years. She ran up
to him and flung herself into his arms.
"Pat, darling," she said--Mr. Hazlitt's name was James; Pat was a
corruption of Lita's early attempts upon the Latin tongue--"it's simply
great to see you back; but--"
"I only got back last night," said Mr. Hazlitt, as if he himself were
surprised at his own eagerness. "I have Miss Barton's permission for
you to lunch with me--"
"Pat dear!"
"--and spend the afternoon."
"Father!"
Out of the narrow doorway that led from the gallery stairs Lita could
now see her mother emerging. She was dressed in soft blues and grays
like a pigeon's breast, and her eyes, dazzled by the March sunlight,
were darting about in search of her daughter among all the other
figures in blue serge. Then Lita saw that Miss Barton had stopped her
and introduced the bishop. That meant another minute or two; her mother
would feel she simply must be civil to the bishop.
"Father."
"Don't interrupt me, Lita. You're just like--it's a very disagreeable
habit."
"But you see mother's here, too, father."
Every trace of expression vanished from Mr. Hazlitt's face--his own way
of expressing emotion.