The tableaux were not to come off until the end of April, and Jack, having
set things in motion, was in Boston at the beginning of the month. It was
at this time that Mrs. Upton, too, was in Boston, with her old friend and
his great-aunt, and it was at this time that he came, as he phrased it to
himself, really into touch with her.
Jack's aunt lived in a spacious, peaceful house on the hill, and the
windows of Jack's large flat, near by, looked over the Common, the Gardens,
the Charles River, a cheerful, bird's-eye view of the tranquil city,
breathed upon now by the first, faint green of spring.
Jack was pleased that Mrs. Upton and his aunt--a mild, blanched old lady
with silvery side-curls under the arch of an old-fashioned bonnet-should
often come to tea with him, for in the arrangement of his rooms-that
looked so unarranged--he felt sure that she must recognize a taste as fine
and fastidious as her own. He suspected Mrs. Upton of finding him merely
ethical and he was eager that she should see that his grasp on life was
larger than she might imagine. His taste was fine and fastidious; it was
also disciplined and gracefully vagrant; she must see that in the few but
perfect pictures and mezzotints on his walls; the collection of old white
Chinese porcelain standing about the room on black carved stands; in his
wonderful black lacquer cabinets and in all the charming medley of the rare
and the appropriate.
Certainly, whatever was Mrs. Upton's impression of him, she frequently
expressed herself as delighted with his rooms, and as they sat in the deep
window-seat, which commanded the view of the city, he felt more and more
sure that whatever that impression of him might be, it rested upon an
essential liking. It was pleasant to Jack to feel sure of this, little as
he might be able to justify to himself his gratification. Somehow, with
Mrs. Upton, he didn't find himself occupied with justifying things. The
ease that she had always made for him shone out, now, uninterruptedly, and
as they talked, while the dear old aunt sat near, turning the leaves of a
book, joining in with a word now and then, it was, in the main, the soft,
sweet sense of ease, like the breath of violets in the air, that surrounded
him. They talked of all sorts of things, or rather, as he said to himself,
they babbled, for real talk could hardly be so discursive, so aimless,
so merely merry. She made him think of a child playing with a lapful of
flowers; that was what her talk was like. She would spread them out in
formal rows, arrange them in pretty, intricate posies, or, suddenly, gather
them into generous handfuls which she gave you with a pleased glance and
laugh. It was queer to find a person who took all "talk" so lightly and who
yet, he felt quite sure, took some things hard. It was like the contrast
between her indolent face and her clear, unbiased gaze, that would not
flinch or deceive itself from or about anything that it met. Apparently
most of the things that it met she didn't take solemnly. The world, as far
as he could guess, was for her mainly made up of rather trivial things,
whether hours or people; but, with his new sense of enlightenment, he
more and more came to realize that it might be so made up and yet, to her
apprehension, be very bad, very sad, and very worth while too. And after
seeing her as a child playing with flowers he could imagine her in some
suddenly heroic rôle--as one of the softly nurtured women of the French
Revolution, for instance, a creature made up of little gaieties, little
griefs; of sprigged silk and gossamer, powder and patches; blossoming,
among the horrors of a hopeless prison, into courageous graces. She would
smile, talk, play cards with them, those doomed ones, she herself doomed;
she would make life's last day livable, in every exquisite sense of the
word. And he could see her in the tumbril, her arm round a terrified girl;
he could see her mounting the steps of the guillotine, perhaps with no
upward glance to heaven, but with a composure as resolute and as serene as
any saint's.
These were strange visions to cross his mind as they sat and talked, while
she made posies for him, and even when they did not hover he often found
himself dwelling with a sort of touched tenderness upon something vaguely
pathetic in her. Perhaps it was only that he found it pathetic to see her
look so young when, measured beside his own contrasted youth, he felt how
old she was. It was pathetic that eyes so clear should fade, that a cheek
so rounded should wither, that the bloom and softness and freshness that
her whole being expressed should be evanescent. Jack was not given to such
meditations, having a robust, transcendental indifference to earthly gauds
unless he could fit them into ethical significances. It was, indeed, no
beauty such as Imogen's that he felt in Mrs. Upton. He was not consciously
aware that her loveliness was of a subtler, finer quality than her
daughter's. She did not remind him of a Madonna nor of anything to do with
a temple. But the very fact that he couldn't tabulate and pigeon-hole her
with some uplifting analogy made her appeal the most direct that he had
ever experienced. The dimness of her lashes; the Japanese-like oddity of
her smile; the very way in which her hair turned up from her neck with an
eddy of escaping tendrils,--these things pervaded his consciousness. He
didn't like to think of her being hurt and unhappy, and he often wondered
if she wasn't bound to be both. He wondered about her a great deal. He
received, on every day they met, hints and illuminations, but never the
clear revealment that he hoped for. The thing that grew surer and surer
for him was her essential liking, and the thing that became sweeter and
sweeter, though the old perplexity mingled with it, was the superficial
amusement he caused her. One of the things that, he began to see, amused
her a little was the catholicity of taste displayed in the books scattered
about his rooms, the volumes of French and Italian that the great-aunt
would take up while they talked. They were books that she felt, he was
quite sure, as funnily incongruous with his whole significance, and that
their presence there meant none of the things that in another environment
they would have stood for; neither cosmopolitanism nor an unbiased
connoisseurship interested in all the flowers--_du mal_ among the rest--of
the human intelligence. That they meant for him his own omniscient
appreciation, unshakenly sure of the ethical category into which he could
place each fruit, however ominous its tainted ripeness; each flower,
however freaked with perverse tints, left her mildly skeptical; so
that he felt, with just a flicker of his old irritation, that the very
plentifulness of esthetic corruption that he could display to her testified
for her to his essential guilelessness, and, perhaps, to a blandness and
narrowness of nature that lacked even the capacity for infection. Jack had
to own to himself that, though he strove to make it rigorously esthetic,
his seeing of d'Annunzio--to take at random one of the _fleurs du mal_--was
as a shining, a luridly splendid warning of what happened to decadent
people in unpleasant Latin countries. Such lurid splendor was as far from
him as the horrors of the Orestean Trilogy. In Mrs. Upton's eyes this
distance, though a distinct advantage for him, was the result of no choice
or conflict, but of environment merely, and she probably thought that the
problems of Nietzschean ethics were not to be solved and disposed of by
people whom they could never touch. But all the same, and it was here that
the atoning softness came in, he felt that she liked him the better for
being able to see a _fleur du mal_ only as if it were a weird pressed
product under a glass case. And if he amused her it was not because of
any sense of superior wisdom; she didn't deny her consciousness of wider
contrasts, but she made no claim at all for deeper insight;--the very way
in which she talked over the sinister people with him showed that,--asking
him his opinion about this or that and opening a volume here and there to
read out in her exquisite French or Italian some passage whose full beauty
he had never before so realized. Any criticism or comment that she offered
was, evidently, of the slightest weight in her own estimation; but, there
again one must remember, so many things seemed light to Mrs. Upton, so
light, indeed, that he had often with her a sense of pressures removed and
an easier world altogether.
"The trouble with him--with all his cleverness and beauty--is that his
picture isn't true," Mrs. Upton said of d'Annunzio, standing with a volume
in her hand in the clear afternoon light.
"True to him," Jack amended, alert for the displayal of his own
comprehension.
"I can't think it. Life is always, for everybody, so much more commonplace
than he dares make it. He is afraid of the commonplace; he won't face it;
and the revenge life takes on people who do that, people who are really
afraid, people who attitudinize, is to infect them in some subtle, mocking
way with the very thing they are trying to escape."
"Well, but he isn't commonplace."
"No; worse; he's silly." She had put down the book and taken up another,
an older one. "Clough,--how far one must travel from d'Annunzio to come to
him.
'It fortifies my soul to know
That though I perish, Truth is so.'"
She meditated the Stoic flavor.
"The last word of heroism, of faith," Jack said, thinking of the tumbril.
But Valerie turned the leaf a little petulantly. "Heroism? Why?"
"Why,"--as usual he was glad to show her that, if she really wanted to see
clearly, he could show her where clearness, of the best sort, lay,--"why,
the man who can say that is free. He has abdicated every selfish claim to
the Highest."
"Highest? Why should it fortify my soul to know that truth is 'so' if 'so'
happens to be some man-devouring dragon of a world-power?"
"Clough assumed, of course, that the truth was high--as it might be, even
if it devoured one."
"I've no use for a truth that would have no better use for me," smiled
Valerie, and on this he tried to draw her on, from her rejection of such
heroism, to some exposal of her own conception of truth, her own opinions
about life, a venture in which he always failed. Not that she purposely
eluded. She listened, grave, interested, but, when the time came for her to
make her contribution, fingering about, metaphorically, in a purse, which,
though not at all empty, contained, apparently, a confused medley of
coinage. If she could have found the right coin, she would have tendered
it gladly; but she seemed to consider a vague chink as all that could be
really desired of her, to take it for granted that he knew that he had lost
nothing of any value.
* * * * *
Sometimes he and Mrs. Upton, Tison trotting at their heels, took walks
together, passing down the steep old streets, austere and cheerful, to the
gardens and along the wide avenue with its lines of trees and broad strip
of turf, on and out to the bridge that spanned the river. They enjoyed
together the view of the pale expanse of water, placidly flowing in the
windless sunshine, and, when they turned to come back, their favorite
aspect of the town. They could see it, then, silhouetted in the vague grays
and reds of its old houses, climbing from the purplish maze of tree-tops in
the Common, climbing with a soft, jostling irregularity, to where the dim
gold bubble of the State House dome rounded on the sky. It almost made one
think, so silhouetted, of a Dürer etching.
"Dear place," Mrs. Upton would sigh restfully, and that she was resting in
all her stay here, resting from the demands, the adjustments, of her new
life, he was acutely aware. Resting from Imogen. Yes, why shouldn't he very
simply face that fact? He, too, felt, for the first time, that Imogen had
rather tired him and that he was glad of this interlude before taking up
again the unresolved discord where they had left it. Imogen's last word
about her mother had been that very ominous "Wait and see," and Jack felt
that the discord had grown, more complicated from the fact that, quite
without waiting, he saw a great deal that Imogen, apparently, did not. He
had seen so much that he was willing to wait for whatever else he was to
see with very little perturbation of mind, and that, in the meanwhile, as
many Sir Basils as it pleased Mrs. Upton to have write to her should do so.
But Mrs. Upton talked a great deal about Imogen, so much that he came
to suspect her of adjusting the conversation to some supposed craving
in himself. She had never asked a question about his relations with her
daughter, accepting merely with interest any signs they might choose to
give her, but insinuating no hint of an appeal for more than they might
choose to give. She probably took for granted what was the truth of the
situation, that it rested with Imogen to make it a definite one. She
did not treat him as an accepted lover, nor yet as a rejected one; she
discriminated with the nicest delicacy. What she allowed herself to see,
the ground she went upon, was his deep interest, his deep attachment. In
that light he was admitted by degrees to an intimacy that he knew he could
hardly have won so soon on his own merits. She had observed him; she had
thought him over; she liked him for himself; but, far more than this, she
liked him for Imogen. He often guessed, from a word or look, at a deep core
of feeling in her where her repressed, unemphatic, yet vigilant, maternity
burned steadily. From her growing fondness for him he could gage how fond
she must be of Imogen. The nearness that this made for them was wholly
delightful to Jack, were it not embittered by the familiar sense, sharper
than ever now, of self-questioning and restlessness. A year ago, six months
ago--no, three months only, just before her own coming--how exquisitely
such sympathy, such understanding would have fitted into all his needs. He
could have talked to her, then, by the hour, frankly, freely, joyously,
about Imogen. And the restlessness now was to feel that it was just
because of her coming, because of the soft clear light that she had so
unconsciously, so revealingly, diffused, that things had, in some odd way,
taken on a new color, so that the whole world, so that Imogen especially,
looked different, so that he couldn't any longer be frank, altogether. It
would have been part of the joy, three months ago, to talk over his loving
perception of Imogen's little foibles and childishnesses, to laugh, with
a loving listener, over her little complacencies and pomposities. He had
taken them as lightly as that, then. They had really counted for nothing.
Now they had come to count for so much, and all because of that clear,
soft light, that he really couldn't laugh at them. He couldn't laugh at
them, and since he couldn't do that he must keep silence over them, and
as a result the talks about Imogen with Imogen's mother were, for his
consciousness, a little random and at sea. Imogen's mother confidently
based their community on a shared vision, and that he kept back his real
impression of what he saw was made all the worse by his intuition that she,
too, kept back hers, that she talked from his supposed point of view, as
it were, and didn't give him a glimmer of her own. She loved Imogen, or,
perhaps, rather, she loved her daughter; but what did she think of Imogen?
That was the question that had grown so sharp.
* * * * *
On the day before he and Mrs. Upton went back together to New York, Jack
gave a little tea that was almost a family affair. Cambridge had been one
of their expeditions, in Rose Packer's motor-car, and there Eddy Upton had
given them tea in his room overlooking the elms of the "Yard" at Harvard.
Jack's tea was in some sort a return, for Eddy and Rose both were there and
that Rose, in Eddy's eyes, didn't count as an outsider was now an accepted
fact.
Eddy had taken the sudden revelation of his poverty with great coolness,
and Jack admired the grim resolution with which he had cut down expenses
while relaxing in no whit his hold on the nonchalant beauty. Poverty would,
to a certain extent, bar him out from Rose's sumptuous world, and Rose did
not seem to take him very seriously as a suitor; but it was evident that
Eddy did not intend to remain poor any longer than he could possibly help
it and evident, too, that his assurance in regard to sentimental ambitions
had its attractions for her. They chaffed and sparred with each other and
under the flippant duel there flashed now and then the encounters of a real
one. Rose denied the possession of a heart, but Eddy's wary steel might
strike one day to a defenceless tenderness. She liked him, among many
others, very much. And she was, as she frequently declared, in love with
his mother. Jack never took Rose seriously; she remained for him a pretty,
trivial, malicious child; but to-day he was pleased by the evidences of her
devotion.
The little occasion, presided over by Valerie, bloomed for him. Everybody
tossed nosegays, everybody seemed happy; and it was Rose, sitting in a
low chair beside Mrs. Upton's sofa, who summed it up for him with the
exclamation, "I do so love being with you, Mrs. Upton! What is it you do
to make people so comfortable?"
"She doesn't do anything, people who do things make one uncomfortable,"
remarked Eddy, lounging in his chair and eating sandwiches. "She is, that's
all."
"What is she then," Rose queried, her eyes fixed with a fond effrontery on
Valerie's face. "She's like everything nice, I know; nice things to look
at, to hear, to taste, to smell, to touch. Let us do her portrait, Eddy,
you know the analogy game. What flower does she remind you of? and what
food? Acacia; raspberries and cream. What musical instrument? What animal?
Help me, Jack."
"The musical instrument is a chime of silver bells," said Jack, while
Valerie looked from one to the other with amused interest. "And the animal
is, I think, a bird; a bright, soft-eyed bird, that flits and poises on
tall grasses."
"Yes; that does. And now we will do you, Jack. You are like a very nervous,
very brave dog."
"And like a Christmas rose," said Valerie, "and like a flute."
"And the food he reminds me of," finished Eddy, "is baked beans."
"Good," said Rose. "Now, Imogen. What flower is she like? Jack, you will
tell us."
Jack looked suddenly like the nervous dog, and Rose handsomely started the
portrait with, "Calla lily."
"That's it," Eddy agreed. "And the food she's like is cold lemon-shape, you
know the stuff I mean; and her animal,--there is no animal for Imogen; she
is too loftily human."
"Her instrument is the organ," Rose finished, as if to end as handsomely as
she had begun; "the organ playing the Pilgrims' March from 'Tannhäuser.'"
"Excellent," said Eddy.
These young people had done the portrait without help and after the slight
pause with which their analogies were received Jack swiftly summed up Rose
as _Pâte-de-foie-gras_, gardenia, a piano, and a toy Pomeranian.
"Thanks," Rose bowed; "I enjoy playing impudence to your dignity."
"What's Imogen up to just now?" Eddy asked, quite unruffled by Jack's
reflections on his beloved. "When did you see her last, Jack?"
"I went down for a dress-rehearsal the day before yesterday." Jack had
still the air of the nervous dog, walking cautiously, the hair of its back
standing upright.
"Oh, the Cripple-Hellenic affair. How Imogen loves running a show."
"And how well she does it," said Rose. "What a perfect queen she would have
made. She would have laid corner-stones; opened bazaars; visited hospitals,
and bowed so beautifully from a carriage--with such a sense of
responsibility in the quality of her smile."
"How inane you are, Rose," said Jack. "Nothing less queen-like, in that
decorative sense, than Imogen, can be imagined. She works day and night for
this thing in which you pretty young people get all the sixpences and she
all the kicks. To bear the burden is all she does, or asks to do."
"Why, my dear Jack," Rose opened widely candid eyes, "queens have to work
like fun, I can tell you. And who under the sun would think of kicking
Imogen?"
"Besides," said Eddy, rising to saunter about the room, his hands in his
pockets, "Imogen isn't so superhuman as your fond imagination paints her,
my dear Jack. She knows that the most decorative rôle of all is just that,
the weary, patient Atlas, bearing the happy world on his shoulders."
Mrs. Upton, in her corner of the sofa, had been turning the leaves of a
rare old edition, glancing up quietly at the speakers while the innocent
ripples slid on from the afternoon's first sunny shallows to these
ambiguous depths. It was now in a voice that Jack had never heard from her
before that she said, still continuing to turn, her eyes downcast:
"How excessively unkind and untrue, Eddy."
If conscious of unkindness, Eddy, at all events, didn't resort to artifice
as Rose,--Jack still smarted from it,--had done. He continued to smile,
taking, up a small, milky vase to examine it, while he answered in his
chill, cheerful tones: "Don't be up in arms, mama, because one of your
swans gives the other a fraternal peck. Imogen and I always peck at each
other; it's not behind her back alone that I do it. And I'm saying nothing
nasty. It's only people like Imogen who get the good works of the world
done at all. If they didn't love it, just; if they didn't feel the delight
in it that an artist feels in his work, or that Rose feels in dancing
better and looking prettier than any girl in a ball-room,--that any one
feels in self-realization,--why, the cripples would die off like anything."
"It's a very different order of self-realization"; Mrs. Upton continued to
turn her leaves.
Jack knew that she was deeply displeased, and mingled with his own baffled
vexation was the relief of feeling himself at one with her, altogether
at one, in opposition to this implied criticism of Imogen. Together they
shared the conviction--was it the only one they shared about Imogen?--that
she simply cared about being good more than about anything else in the
world; together they recognized such a purpose and such a longing as a high
and an ennobling one.
The tone of her last remark had been final. The talk passed at once away
from Imogen and turned on Jack's last acquisitions in white porcelain and
on his last piece of work, just returned from a winter exhibition. Eddy
went with him into the studio to see it and Mrs. Upton and Rose were left
alone. It was then that Mrs. Upton, touching the other's shoulder so that
she looked up from the fur she was fastening, said, "You are not a nice
little girl, Rose."
The "little girl" stared. Anything so suave yet so firmly intended as
unpleasant had never been addressed to her. For once in her life she was at
a loss; and after the stare she flushed scarlet, the tears rushing to her
eyes.
"Oh, Mrs. Upton," she faltered, "what do you mean?"
"Hitting in the dark isn't a nice thing to do."
"Hitting in the dark?"
"Yes. You know quite well."
"Oh, but really, really,--I didn't mean--" Rose almost wailed. There was no
escape from those clear eyes. They didn't look sad or angry; they merely
penetrated, spreading dismay within her.
Mrs. Upton now took the flushed face between her hands and gravely
considered it. "_Didn't_ you?" she asked.
Rose could look back no longer. Before that gaze a sense of utter darkness
descended upon her. She felt, helplessly, like a naughty, cowering child.
Her eyes dropped and the tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Please, please forgive me. I didn't dream you'd understand. I didn't mean
anybody to understand, except, perhaps, Eddy. I don't know why, it's odious
of me--but Imogen does irritate me, just a little, just because she is so
good, you know--so lovely."
But this, too, Mrs. Upton penetrated. "Whether Imogen is so good and lovely
that she irritates you is another matter. But, whatever you may think of
her, don't,"--and here she paused a little over the proper expressing of
Rose's misdeed,--"don't call her a calla lily," she found. And she
finished, "Especially not before her mother, who is not so blind to your
meaning as we must hope that Jack is."
Poor Rose looked now like the naughty child after a deserved chastisement.
"Oh, I am so miserable"; this statement of smarting fact was all she found
to say. "And I do care for you so. I would rather please you than any
one.--Can't you forgive me?"
But at this point the darkness was lifted, for Mrs. Upton, smiling at last,
put her arms around her, kissed her, and said, "Be a nice little girl."