Mary's visit took place about six weeks later, when Jack Pennington was
again in New York, and Mrs. Wake, returned from Europe, had been for some
time established in her little flat not very far away in Washington Square.
The retrenchments in the Upton household had taken place and Mary found
her friend putting her shoulder to the wheel with melancholy courage. The
keeping up of old beneficences meant redoubled labor and, as she said to
Mary, with the smile that Mary found so wonderful: "It seems to me now that
whenever I put my hand out to help, it gets caught and pinched." Mary,
helper and admirer, said to Jack that the way in which Imogen had gathered
up her threads, allowing hardly one to snap, was too beautiful. These young
people, like the minor characters in a play, met often in the drawing-room
while Imogen was busy up-stairs or gone out upon some important errand.
Just now, Miss Bocock's lectures having been set going, the organization
of a performance to be given for the crippled children's country home was
engaging all her time. Tableaux from the Greek drama had been fixed on, the
Pottses were full of eagerness, and Jack had been pressed into service as
stage-manager. The distribution of rôles, the grouping of the pictures, the
dressing and the scenery were in his hands.
"It's really extraordinary, the way in which, amidst her grief, she goes
through all this business, all this organization, getting people together
for her committee, securing the theater," said Mary. "Isn't it too bad that
she can't be in the tableaux herself? She would have been the loveliest of
all."
Jack, rather weary, after an encounter with a band of dissatisfied
performers in the library, said: "One could have put one's heart into
making an Antigone of her; that's what I wanted--the filial Antigone,
leading Oedipus through the olive groves of Colonus. It's bitter, instead
of that, to have to rig Mrs. Scott out as Cassandra; will you believe it,
Mary, she insists on being Cassandra--with that figure, that nose! And she
has fixed her heart on the scene where Cassandra stands in the car outside
the house of Agamemnon. She fancies that she is a tragic, ominous type."
"She has nice arms, you know," said the kindly Mary.
"Don't I know!" said Jack. "Well, it's through them that I shall circumvent
her. Her arms shall be fully displayed and her face turned away from the
audience."
"Jack, dear, you mustn't be spiteful," Mary shook her head a little at him.
"I've thought that I felt just a touch of--of, well--flippancy in you once
or twice lately. You mustn't deceive poor Mrs. Scott. It's that that is so
wonderful about Imogen. I really believe that she could make her give up
the part, if she set herself to it; she might even tell her that her nose
was too snub for it--and she would not wound her. It's extraordinary her
power over people. They feel, I think, the tenderness, the
disinterestedness, that lies beneath the truth."
"I suppose there's no hope of persuading her to be Antigone?"
"Don't suggest it again, Jack. The idea hurt her so."
"I won't. I understand. When is Rose coming?"
"In a day or two. She is to spend the rest of the winter with the Langleys.
What do you think of for her?"
"Helen appearing between the soldiers, before Hecuba and Menelaus. I only
wish that Imogen had more influence over Rose. Your theory about her power
doesn't hold good there."
"Ah, even there, I don't give up hope. Rose doesn't really know Imogen. And
then Rose is a child in many ways, a dear, but a spoiled, child."
"What do you think of Mrs. Upton, now that you see something of her?" Jack
asked abruptly.
"She is very sweet and kind, Jack. She is working so hard for all of us.
She is going to make my robe. She is addressing envelopes now--and you know
how dull that is. I am sure I used to misjudge her. But, she is very queer,
Jack."
"Queer? In what way queer?" Jack asked, placing himself on the sofa, his
legs stretched out before him, his hands in his pockets.
"I hardly know how to express it. She is so light, yet so deep; and I can't
make out why or where she is deep; it's there that the queerness comes in.
I feel it in her smile, the way she looks at you; I believe I feel it more
than she does. She doesn't know she's deep."
"Not really found herself yet, you think?" Jack questioned; the phrase was
one often in use between these young people.
Mary mused. "Somehow that doesn't apply to her--I don't believe she'll ever
look for herself."
"You think it's you she finds," Jack suggested; voicing a dim suspicion
that had come to him once or twice of late.
"What do you mean, exactly, Jack?"
"I'm sure I don't know," he laughed a little. "So you like her?" he
questioned.
"I think I do; against my judgment, against my will, as it were. But that
doesn't imply that one approves of her."
"Why not?"
"Why, Jack, you know the way _you_ felt about it, the day you and I and
Rose talked it over."
"But we hadn't seen her then. What I want to know is just what _you_ feel,
now that you have seen her."
Mary had another conscientious pause. "How can one approve of her while
Imogen is there?" she said at last.
"You mean that Imogen makes one remember everything?"
"Yes. And Imogen is everything she isn't."
"So that, by contrast, she loses."
"Yes, and do you know, Jack," Mary lowered her voice while she glanced up
at Mrs. Upton's portrait, "I can hardly believe that she has suffered,
really suffered, about him, at all. She is so unlike a widow."
"I suppose she felt herself a widow long ago."
"She had no right to feel it, Jack. His death should cast a deeper shadow
on her."
As Jack, shamefully, could see Mr. Upton as shadow removed, he only said,
after a slight pause: "Perhaps that's another of the things she doesn't
obviously show--suffering, I mean."
"I'm afraid that she's incapable of feeling any conviction of sin," said
Mary, "and that wise, old-fashioned phrase expresses just what I mean as to
a lack in her. On the other hand, in a warmhearted, pagan sort of way, she
is, I'm quite sure, one of the kindest of people. Her maid, when she went
back to England the other day, cried dreadfully at leaving her, and Mrs.
Upton cried too. I happened to find them together just before Felkin went.
Now I had imagined, in my narrow way, that a spoilt beauty was always a
tyrant to her maid."
"Oh, so her maid's gone! How does she do her hair, then?"
"Do her hair, Jack? What a funny question. As we all do, of course, with
her wits and her hands, I suppose. Any one with common-sense can do their
hair."
Jack kept silence, reflecting on the picture that Imogen had drawn for
him--the child bereft of its toy. Had it given it up willingly, or had it
been forced to relinquish it by the pressure of circumstance? Remembering
his own stringent words, he felt a qualm of compunction. Had he armed
Imogen for this ruthlessness?
The lustrous folds of Mrs. Upton's hair, at lunch, reassured him as to her
fitness to do without Felkin in that particular, but his mind still dwelt
on the picture of the crying child and he asked Imogen, when he was next
alone with her, how the departure of Felkin had been effected.
"You couldn't manage to let her keep the toy, then?"
"The toy?" Imogen was blank.