VI

When Jack went away, after tea, Imogen remained sitting on the sofa,

looking up from time to time at the two portraits, while thoughts, quiet

and mournful, but not distressing, passed through her mind. An interview

with Jack usually left her lapped about with a warm sense of security; she

couldn't feel desolate, even with the greatness of her loss so upon her,

when such devotion surrounded her. One deep need of her was gone, but

another was there. Life, as she felt it, would have little meaning for her

if it had not brought to her deep needs that she, and she alone, could

satisfy. With Jack's devotion and Jack's need to sustain her, it wasn't

difficult to bear with a butterfly. One had only to stand serenely in one's

place and watch it hover. It was, after all, as if she had strung herself

to an attitude of strength only to find that no weight was to come crushing

down upon her. The pain was that of feeling her mother so light.

"Poor papa," Imogen murmured more than once, as she gazed up into the

steady eyes; "what a fate it was for you--to be hurt all your life by a

butterfly." But he had been far, far too big to let it spoil anything. He

turned all pain to spiritual uses. What sorrow there was had always been,

most of all, for her.

And then--and here was the balm that had perfumed all her grief with

its sacred aroma--she, Imogen, had been there to fill the emptiness for

him. She had always been there, it seemed to her, as, in her quiet, sad

retrospect, she looked back, now, to the very beginnings of consciousness.

From the first she had felt that her place was by his side; that, together

they stood for something and against somebody. In this very room, so

unchanged--she could even remember the same dull thump of the bronze clock,

the blazing fire, the crimson curtains drawn on a snowy street,--had

happened the earliest of the episodes that her memory recalled as having

so placed her, so defined her attitude, even for her almost babyish

apprehension. She had brought down her dolls from her nursery, after tea,

and ranged them on the sofa, while her father walked up and down the room,

his hands in his pockets, his head thrown back, reciting something to

himself, some poem, or stately fragment of antique oratory. He paused now

and then as he passed her and laid his hand upon her head and smiled down

at her. Then the lovely lady of the portrait,--just like the portrait

in Imogen's recollection,--had come, all in white, with wonderful white

shoulders, holding a fan and long white gloves in her hand, and, looking

round from her dolls, small Imogen had known in a moment that displeasure

was in the air. "You are not dressed!" Those had been her mother's first

words as she paused on the threshold; and then, echoing her father's words

with amazement and anger, "You are not coming!"

The dialogue that followed, vivid on her mother's side as sparks struck

from steel, mild as milk on her father's, had been lost upon her; but

through it all she had felt that he must be right, in his gentleness, and

that she, in her vividness, must be wrong. She felt that for herself, even

before, turning as if from an unseemly contest, her father said, looking

down at her with a smile that had a twinge of tension, "_You_ would rather

go and see sick and sorry people who wanted you, than the selfish, the

foolish, the overfed,--wouldn't you, beautiful little one?"

She had answered quickly, "Yes, papa," and had kept her eyes on him, not

looking at her mother, knowing in her childish soul that in so answering,

so looking, she shared some triumph with him.

"I'll say you're suddenly ill, then?" had come her mother's voice, but with

a deadened note, as though she knew herself defeated.

"Lie? No. I must ask you, Valerie, never to lie for me. Say the truth, that

I must go to a friend who needs me; the truth won't hurt them."

"But it's unbelievable, your breaking a dinner engagement, at the last

hour, for such a reason," the wife had said.

"Unbelievable, I've no doubt, to the foolish, the selfish, the over-fed.

Social conventions and social ideals will always go down for me, Valerie,

before realities, such realities as brotherhood and the need of a lonely

human soul."

While he spoke he had lifted, gently, Imogen's long, fair curls, and

smoothed her head, his eyes still holding her eyes, and when her mother

turned sharply and swept out of the room, the sense of united triumph

had made him bend down to her and made her stretch her arms tip to him,

so that, in their long embrace, he seemed to consecrate her to those

"realities" that the pretty, foolish mother flouted. That had been her

initiation and her consecration.

After that, it could not have been many years after, though she had brought

to it a far more understanding observation, the next scene that came up for

her was a wrangle at lunch one day, over the Delancy Pottses--if wrangle it

could be called when one was so light and the other so softly stern. Imogen

by this time had been old enough to know for what the Pottses counted. They

were discoveries of her father's, Mr. Potts a valuable henchman in that

fight for realities to which her father's life was dedicated. Mr. Potts

wrote articles in ethical reviews about her father's books--they never

seemed to be noticed anywhere else--and about his many projects for reform

and philanthropy. Both he and Mrs. Potts adored her father. He lent them,

indeed, all their significance; they were there, as it were, only for

the purpose of crystallizing around his magnetic center. And of these

good people her mother had said, in her crisp, merry voice, "I hate

'em,"--disposing of the whole question of value, flipping the Pottses away

into space, as it were, and separating herself from any interest in them.

Even then little Imogen had comprehendingly shared her father's still

indignation for such levity. Hate the excellent Pottses, who wrote so

beautifully of her father's books, so worshiped all that he was and did,

so tenderly cherished her small self? Imogen felt the old reprobation as

sharply as ever, though the Pottses had become, to her mature insight,

rather burdensome, the poor, good, dull, pretentious dears, and would be

more so, now that their only brilliant function, that of punctually,

coruscatingly, and in the public press, adoring her father, had been taken

from them. One need have no illusion as to the quality of their note;

it lacked distinction, serving only, in its unmodulated vehemence, the

drum-like purpose of calling attention to great matters, of reverberating,

so one hoped, through lethargic consciousness.

But Imogen loved the Pottses, so she told herself. To be sure of loving

the Pottses was a sort of pulse by which one tested one's moral health.

She still went religiously at least twice in every winter to their

receptions--funny, funny affairs, she had to own it--with a kindly smile

and a pleasant sense of benign onlooking at oddity. One met there young

girls dressed in the strangest ways and affecting the manners of budding

Margaret Fullers--young writers or musicians or social workers, and funny

frowsy, solemn young men who talked, usually with defective accents, about

socialism and the larger life over ample platefuls of ice-cream. Sweetness

and light, as Mrs. Potts told Imogen, was the note she tried for in her

reunions, and high endeavor and brotherly love.

Mrs. Potts was a small, stout woman, who held herself very straight indeed;

her hands, on festive occasions, folded on a lace handkerchief before her.

She had smooth, black hair, parted and coiled behind, and a fat face, pale

fawn-color in tint, encompassing with waste of cheek and chin such a small

group of features--the small, straight nose, the small, sharp eyes, the

small, smiling mouth--all placed too high, and spanned, held together, as

it were, by a _pince-nez_ firmly planted, like a bow-shaped ornament

pinning a cluster of minute trinkets on a large cushion.

Mr. Delancy Potts was tall, limp, blond, and, from years of only dubious

recognition, rather querulous. He had a solemn eye under a fringe of

whitened eyebrow, a long nose, that his wife often fondly alluded to as

"aristocratic" (they were keen on "blood," the Delancy Pottses), and a very

retreating chin that one saw sometimes in disastrous silhouette against the

light. Draped in the flowing fullness of hair and beard, his face showed a

pseudo-dignity.

Imogen saw the Pottses with a very candid eye, and her mind drifted from

that distant disposal of them to the contrast of the recent meeting,

recalling their gestures and postures as they sat, with an uneasy

assumption of ease, before her mother, of whom, for so many years, they had

disapproved more, almost, than they disapproved of municipal corruption and

"the smart set." As onlooker she had been forced to own that her mother's

manner toward them had been quite perfect. She had accepted them as her

husband's mourners; had accepted them as Imogen's friends; had, indeed, so

thoroughly accepted them, in whatever capacity they were offered to her,

that Imogen felt that a slight enlightenment would be necessary, and that

her mother must be made to feel that her own, even her father's acceptance

of the Pottses, had had always its reservations.

And some acceptances, some atonements, came too late. The Pottses had not

been the only members of the little circle gathered about her father who

had called forth her mother's wounding levity. She had taken refuge on many

other occasions in the half-playful, half-decisive, "I hate 'em," as if

to throw up the final barrier of her own perversity before pursuit. Not

that she hadn't been decent enough in her actual treatment, it was rather

that she would never take the Pottses, or any of the others--oddities she

evidently considered them-seriously; it was, most of all, that she would

never let them come near enough to try to take her seriously. She held

herself aloof, not disdainful, but indifferently gay, from her father's

instruments, her father's friends, her father's aims.

Later on, as Imogen grew into girlhood, her mother lost most of the gaiety

and all of the levity. Imogen guessed that storms, more violent than any

she was allowed to witness, intervened between young rebellion and the

cautious peace, the hostility that no longer laughed and no longer lost

its temper, but that, quiet, kind, observant, went its own way, leaving

her father to go his. The last memory that came up for her was of what had

followed such a storm. It seemed to mark an epoch, to close the chapter of

struggle and initiate that of acceptance. What the contest had been she

never knew, but she remembered in every detail its sequel, remembered lying

in bed in her placid, fire-lit room and hearing in her mother's room next

hers the sound of violent sobbing.

Imogen had felt, while she listened, a vague, alarmed pity, a pity

mingled with condemnation. Her father never lost his self-control and had

taught her that to do so was selfish; so that, as she listened to the

undisciplined grief, and thought that it might be well for her to go in to

her mother and console her, she thought, too, of the line that, tenderly,

she would say to her--for Imogen, now, was fourteen years old, with an

excellent taste in poetry:

"The gods approve

The depth, but not the tumult, of the soul."

It was a line her father often quoted to her and she always thought of him

when she thought of it.

But, just as she was rising to go on this errand of mercy, her father

himself had come in. He sat down in silence by her bed and put out his hand

to hers and then she seemed to understand all from the very contrast that

his silence made. The sobs they listened to were those of a passionate, a

punished child, of a child, too, who could use unchildlike weapons, could

cut, could pierce; she must not leave her father to go to it. After a

little while the sobs were still and, as her father, without speaking, sat

on, stroking her hair and hand, the door softly opened and her mother came

in. Imogen could see her, in her long white dressing-gown, with her wide

braids falling on either side, all the traces of weeping carefully effaced.

She often came in so to kiss Imogen good-night, gently, and with a slight

touch of shyness, as though she knew herself shut away from the inner

chamber of the child's heart, and the moment was their tenderest, for

Imogen, understanding, though powerless to respond, never felt so sorry

or so fond as then. But to-night her mother, seeing them there together

hand in hand, seeing that they must have listened to her own intemperate

grief,--their eyes gravely, unitedly judging her told her that,--seeing

that her husband, as at the very beginning, had found at once his ally,

drew back quickly and went away without a word. Whatever the cause of

contest, Imogen knew that in this silent confrontation of each other in her

presence was the final severance. After that her mother had acquiesced.

She acquiesced, but she yielded nothing, confessed nothing. One couldn't

tell whether she, too, judged, but one suspected it, and the dim sense

of an alien standard placed over against them more and more closely drew

Imogen and her father together for mutual sustainment. If, however, her

mother judged, she never expressed judgment; and if she felt the need of

sustainment, she never claimed it. It would, indeed, have been rather

fruitless to claim it from the fourth member of the family group. Eddy

seemed so little to belong to the group. As far as he went, to be sure,

he went always with her and against his father, but then Eddy never went

far enough to form any sort of a bulwark. A cheerful, smiling, hard young

pagan, Eddy, frankly bored by his father, coolly fond of his mother,

avoiding the one, but capable of little effective demonstration toward the

other. Eddy liked achievement, exactitude, a serene, smiling outlook, and

was happily absorbed in his own interests.

So it had all gone on,--Imogen traced it, sitting there in her quiet

corner, holding balances in fair, firm hands,--her mother drifting into a

place of mere conventionality in the family life; and Imogen, even now,

could not see quite clearly whether it had been she who had judged and

abandoned her husband, or he who had judged and put her aside. In either

case she could sum it up, her eyes lifted once more to the portrait's

steady eyes, with, "Poor, wonderful papa."

He was gone, the dear, the wonderful one, and she was left single-handed

to carry on his work. What this work was loomed largely, though vaguely,

for her. The three slender volumes, literary and ethical, were the only

permanent testament that her father had given to the world; and dealing, as

in the main they did, with ultimate problems, their keynote an illumined

democracy that saw in most of the results as yet achieved by his country a

base travesty of the doctrine, the largeness of their grasp was perhaps a

trifle loose. Imogen did not see it. Her appreciation was more of aims than

of achievements; but she felt that her father's writings were the body,

only, of his message; its spirit lived--lived in herself and in all those

with whom he had come in fruitful--contact. It was to hand on the meaning

of that spirit that she felt herself dedicated. Perfect, unflinching truth;

the unfaltering bearing witness to all men of his conception of right;

the seeing of her own personality as but an instrument in the service of

good--these were the chief words of the gospel. Life in its realest sense

meant only this dedication. To serve, to love, to be the truth. Her eyes

on her father's pictured eyes, Imogen smiled into them, promising him and

herself that she would not fail.