Jack did not witness the revelation to Imogen of the ominous arrival, but
from her demeanor at lunch next day he could guess at how it had impressed
her. He felt in her an intense, a guarded, excitement, and knew that the
news had fallen upon her with a tingling concussion. The sound of the
thunder-bolt must reverberate all the louder in Imogen's ears from her
consciousness that to Mary's it was soundless, Mary, who had been the
only spectator of its falling. Her mother, too, was unconscious of such
reverberations, so that it must seem to her a ghost-like subjective
warning, putting into audible form all her old hauntings.
That she at once sought in him evidences of the same experience, Jack
felt, and all through the early lunch, where they assembled prior to his
departure with the two girls for the theater, he avoided meeting Imogen's
eyes. He was too sure that she felt their mutual knowledge as a bond over
the recent chasm. The knowledge in his own eyes was far too deep for him to
allow her to wade into it; she would simply drown. He was rather ashamed of
himself, but he resolutely feigned a cheerful unconsciousness.
"You are going with your friends, later?" he asked Valerie, who, he was
quite sure, also feigning something, said that since Imogen and Mary
dressed each other so well, and since he would be there to see that every
detail was right, she, with the Pakenhams and Sir Basil, would get her
impression from the stalls. Afterward, they would all meet here for tea.
"It was a surprise, you know, their coming," Imogen put in suddenly, from
her end of the table, fixing strangely sparkling eyes upon Jack.
"No," said her mother, in tones of leisurely correction, "I expected the
Pakenhams, as I told you."
"Oh, yes; it was only Sir Basil's surprise. You didn't expect him. Does he
like playing surprises on people, mama?"
"I don't know that he does."
"He only plays them on you."
"I knew that he was coming, at some time."
"Ah, but you didn't tell me that; it was, in the main, _my_ surprise, then;
but not so soon, I suppose."
"So soon? So soon for what?"
Imogen, at this, allowed her badly adjusted mask of lightness to fall and a
sudden solemnity overspread her features.
"Don't you feel it rather soon for friends to play pranks, mama?"
The words seemed to erect a catafalque before their eyes, but, facing the
nodding blackness with a calm in which Jack detected the glint of steel,
Valerie answered: "I am not aware that they have been playing pranks."
For all the way to the theater Imogen again assumed the mask, talking
exclusively to Mary. She talked of these friends of her mother's, of Sir
Basil, Mr. and Mrs. Pakenham, what she had heard of them; holding up, as if
for poor, frightened Mary's delectation, an impartial gaily sketched little
portrait of their oddities. It was as if she felt it her duty to atone
to Mary by her lightness and gaiety for the gloom that had overspread the
lunch; as if she wished to assure Mary that she wouldn't allow her to
suffer for other people's ill-temper,--Mrs. Upton had certainly been very
silent for the rest of that uncomfortable meal,--as if it were for Mary's
sake that she were assuming the mask, behind which, as Jack must know, she
was in torture.
"I'm glad you're to see them, Mary darling; they will amuse you. From your
standpoint of reality, the standpoint of Puritan civilization--the deepest
civilization the world has yet produced; the civilization that judges by
the soul--you will be able to judge and place them as few of our people
are, as yet, developed enough to do. They are of that funny English type,
Mary, the leisured; their business in life that of pleasure seeking; their
social service consisting in benevolent domination over the servile classes
beneath them. Oh, they have their political business, too; we mustn't be
unfair; though that consists, in the main, for people of their type, in
maintaining their own place as donors and in keeping other people in the
place of recipients. In their own eyes, I'm quite sure, they are useful,
as upholding the structure of English civilization. You'll find them
absolutely simple, absolutely self-assured, absolutely indifferent, quite
charming,--there's no reason why they shouldn't be; but their good manners
are for themselves, not for you,--one must never forget that with the
English. Do study them, Mary. We need to keep the fact of them clearly
before us, for what they represent is a menace to us and to what we mean.
I sometimes think that the future of the world depends upon which ideal
is to win, ours or the English. We must arm ourselves with complete
comprehension. Already they have infected the cruder types among us."
These were all sentiments that in the past, Mary felt sure, Jack must have
acquiesced in and approved of, and yet she felt surer that Imogen's manner
of enunciating them was making Jack very angry. She herself did not find
them as inspiring as she might have expected, and looking very much
frightened and flurried she murmured that as she was to go back to Boston
next day she would not have much opportunity for all this observation.
"Besides--I don't believe that I'm so--so wise--so civilized, you know, as
to be able to see it all."
"Oh, Imogen will tell you what to see!" said Jack.
"It's very kind of her, I'm sure," poor Mary faltered. She could have burst
into tears. These two!--these beloved two!
Meanwhile, at a little later hour, Valerie and Mrs. Wake made their way to
the theater, there to meet the group of friends from whom they had parted
in England six months before.
The Pakenhams, full of question and comment, were intelligently amassing
well-assorted impressions of the country that was new to them. Sir Basil,
though cheerfully pleased with all to which his attention was drawn, showed
no particular interest in his surroundings. His concentration was entirely
for his regained friend.
After her welcoming radiance of the day before, Valerie looked pale and
weary, and when, with solicitude, he asked her whether she were not tired,
she confessed to having slept badly.
"She's changed, you know," Sir Basil said to Mrs. Pakenham, when they were
settled in their seats, and Valerie, beside him, was engaged in pointing
out people to Tom Pakenham. "It's been frightfully hard on her, all this,
I'm sure."
"She's as charming as ever," said Mrs. Pakenham.
"Oh, well, that could never change. But what a shame that she should have
had, all along, such a lot to go through." Sir Basil, as a matter of
course, had the deepest antipathy for the late Mr. Upton.
The tableaux struck at once the note of success. Saved by Jack's skill from
any hint of waxwork or pantomime, their subtle color and tranquil light
made each picture a vision of past time, an evocation of Hellenic beauty
and dignity.
Cassandra in her car--her face (oh, artful Jack!) turned away,--awful
before the door of Agamemnon; Iphigenia, sleeping, on her way to the
sacrifice; Helen, before her husband and Hecuba; Alcestis, returning from
the grave, and Deianira with the robe. The old world of beauty and sorrow,
austere and lovely in its doom, passed before modern eyes against its
background of sky, grove, and palace steps.
"And now," said Valerie, when the lights sprang out for the interval, "now
for your introduction to Imogen. They have made her the climax, you see."
"He did, you mean. The young man."
"Yes, Jack arranged it all."
"He's the one you wrote of, of course, who admires her so tremendously."
"He is the one."
"In fact he'll carry her off from you some day, soon, eh?" Sir Basil
ventured with satisfaction in his own assurance. He, too, felt that Imogen
must be "settled."
"I suppose so," said Valerie. "I couldn't trust her to any one more
happily. He understands her and cares for her absolutely."
Sir Basil at this ventured a little further, voicing both satisfaction and
anxiety with: "So, then, you'll come back--to--to Surrey."
"Yes, then, I think, I can come back to Surrey," Valerie replied.
The heart of her feeling had always remained for him a mystery, and her
acquiescence now might mean a great deal, everything, in fact, or it might
mean only her gliding composure before a situation that she had power to
form as she would. He could observe that her color rose. He knew that she
blushed easily. He knew, too, that his own feeling was not hidden from her
and that the blush might be for her recognition only; yet he was occupied
with the most hopeful interpretations when the curtain rose. A moment after
its rising Valerie heard him softly ejaculate, "I say!" She could have
echoed the helplessly rudimentary, phrase. She, too, gazed, in a stupor
of delight; a primitive emotion in it. The white creature standing there
before them, with her forward poise, her downcast yet upgazing face, was
her child. Valerie, since her return to her home, had given little time
to analysis of her own feeling, the stress of her situation had been too
intense for leisurely self-observation. But in the upwelling of a strange,
a selfless, joy she knew, now, how often she had feared that all the joy of
maternity was dead in her; killed, killed by Imogen.
The joy now was a passing ray. The happy confusion of admiration, wonder,
and pride was blotted out by the falling gloom of reality. It was her
child who stood there, but the bond between them seemed, but for the ache
of rejected maternity at her heart, a pictorial one merely. Tears of
bitterness involuntarily filled her eyes as she looked, and Imogen's form
seemed to waver in a dim, an alien atmosphere.
When the curtain fell on the Antigone who kept her pose without a tremor,
the uproar of applause was so great that it had to rise, not only twice,
but three times. At the last, a faint wavering shook slightly the
Antigone's sculptured stillness and poor old Oedipus rocked obviously upon
his feet.
"What a shame to make her keep it up for so long!" murmured Sir Basil, his
face suffused with sympathy. The symptom of human weakness was a final
touch to the enchantment.
"Well, it makes one selfish, such loveliness!" said Mrs. Pakenham, flushed
with her clapping. "Valerie, dear, she is quite too lovely!"
"Extraordinarily Greek, the whole thing," said Tom Pakenham; "the
comparative insignificance of facial expression and the immense
significance of attitude and outline."
"But the face!" Sir Basil turned an unseeing eye upon him, still wrapped,
it was evident, in the vision that, at last, had disappeared. "The figure
is perfect; but the face,--I never saw anything so heavenly."
Indeed, in its slightly downcast pose, the trivial lines of Imogen's nose
and chin had been lost; the up-gazing eyes, the sweep of brow and hair, had
dominated and transfigured her somewhat tamely perfect countenance.
"Do you know, I'm more afraid of her than ever," said Sir Basil to Valerie
on their way home to tea, in the cab. "I wasn't really afraid before. I
could have borne up very well; but now--it's like knowing that one is to
have tea with a seraph."
Jack, Imogen, and Mary were not yet arrived when they reached the house;
but by the time the tea was on the table and Valerie in her place behind
the urn, they heard the cab drive up and the feet of the young people on
the stairs.
Jack entered alone, saying that Mary and Imogen were gone to take off their
wraps. Yes, he assured Valerie, they had promised to keep on their Grecian
robes for tea.
Valerie introduced him to the Pakenhams and led the congratulations on his
triumph. "For it really is yours, Jack, as much as if you had painted the
whole series of pictures."
Jack, looking shy, turned from one to the other as they seconded her
enthusiasm,--Mrs. Pakenham, with her elaborately formal head and china-blue
eyes; her husband, robust and heavy; Sir Basil, still with his benignant,
unseeing quality. Among them all, in spite of Mrs. Wake's keen, familiar
visage, in spite of Valerie's soft glow, he felt himself a stranger. He
even felt, with a little stab of ill-temper, that there had been truth
in Imogen's diagnosis. They were kindly, but they were tremendously
indifferent. They didn't at all expect you to be interested in them; but
that hardly atoned for the fact that they weren't interested in you. For
Jack, life was made up of vigilant, unceasing interest, in himself and in
everybody else.
"Ah, were they all taken from your pictures?" Sir Basil asked him,
strolling up to the mantelpiece to examine a photograph of Imogen that
stood there.
Jack explained that he could claim no such gallery of achievement. He had
made a few sketches for each tableau; his work had been, in the main, that
of stage-manager.
"Oh, I see," said Sir Basil, not at all abashed by his blunder. "Nicer than
lay figures to work with, eh? all those pretty young women."
"I don't use lay figures, at any time. I'm a landscape painter," Jack
explained, somewhat stiffly. He surmised that had he been introduced as
Velasquez Sir Basil would have been quite as unmoved, just as he would have
been quite as genially inclined had he been introduced as a scene-painter.
"I used to think I'd go in for something of that sort in my young days,"
said Sir Basil, holding Imogen's photograph; "and I dabbled a bit in
water-color for a time. Do you remember that little sketch of the Hall,
done from the beech avenue, Mrs. Upton? Not so bad, was it?"
"Not at all bad," said Valerie; "but we can't use such negatives for Jack's
work. It's very seriously good, you know. It's anything but dabbling."
"Oh, yes; I know that you are a real artist," Sir Basil smiled at Jack from
the photograph. "This doesn't do her justice, does it?"
"Imogen? No; it's a frightful thing," said Jack over-emphatically.
Mrs. Pakenham asked to see it and pronounced that, for her part, she
thought it excellent.
"You ought to paint her portrait," Sir Basil continued, looking at Jack,
who had, once more, to explain that landscape was his only subject. He
guessed from the something at once benign and faintly quizzical in Sir
Basil's regard, that to all these people he was significant, in the main,
as Imogen's lover, and the intuition vexed him still further.
Imogen's entrance, startling in its splendid incongruity, put an end to his
self-consciousness and absorbed him in contemplation.
Imogen revealed herself newly, even to him, to-day. It wasn't the old
Imogen of stateliness, graciousness, placidity, nor the later one of gloom
and anger. This Imogen, lovely, with her flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes,
was deeply excited, deeply self-forgetful. She, too, was absorbed in her
intense curiosity, her feverish watchfulness.
She said nothing while her mother introduced her to the new-comers, who all
looked a little taken aback, as though the resuscitated Grecian heroine
were indeed among them, and stood silently alert near the tea-table,
handing the cups of tea, the cakes and scones, for Jack and Sir Basil
to pass round. Her arms were bare and her slender bare feet, laced with
gold-clasped fastenings, showed on her white sandals. Jack saw that Sir
Basil's eyes were fixed on her with an expression of wonder.
He asked her, as he took the last cup from her, if she were not cold, and,
gentle, though unsmiling, Imogen replied, "Oh, no!" glancing at the roaring
wood fire, that illuminated her whiteness as if with a sacrificial glow.
"Do sit down and have your tea, Imogen; you must be very tired," her mother
said, with something of the chill that the scene at the lunch-table had
diffused still in her voice.
"Not very, thanks, mama dear," said Imogen; and, more incongruous in
loveliness than before, she sat down in a high-backed chair at some little
distance from the tea-table. Sir Basil, as if with a sort of helplessness,
remained beside her.
"Yes, it was a great success, wasn't it?" Jack heard her replying
presently, while she drank the tea with which Sir Basil had eagerly
supplied her. "I'm so glad."
"You liked doing it, didn't you? You couldn't have done it, like
that--looked like that, if you hadn't cared a lot about it," Sir Basil
pursued.
Imogen smiled a little and said that she didn't know that she had liked
doing her part particularly,--it was of her crippled children that she was
thinking. "We'll be able to get the Home now," she said.
"It was for cripple children?"
"Didn't you know? I should have thought mama would have told you. Yes, it
all meant that, only that, to me. We gave the tableaux to get enough money
to buy a country home for them."
"You go in a lot for good works, I know," said Sir Basil, and Imogen,
smiling again, with the lightness rooted in excitement, answered: "They go
in for me, rather. All the appeals of suffering seem to come to one and
seize one, don't they? One never needs to seek causes."
Jack watched them talk, Imogen, the daughter of the dead, rejected husband,
and Sir Basil, her mother's suitor.
Mary had come in now, late from changing her dress, which at the last
moment she had felt too shy to appear in. She was talking to Mrs. Wake and
the Pakenhams.
Standing, a somewhat brooding onlooker, becoming conscious, indeed, of the
sense, stronger than ever, of loneliness and bereavement, he heard Mrs.
Upton near him say, "Sit down here, Jack."
She showed him a chair beside her, in the corner, between her tea-table,
the window, and the fire. She, too, was for the moment isolated; she, too,
no doubt, had been watching; and now she talked to him, not at all as if
she had felt that he were lonely and were making it up to him, but, once
more, like the child happily gathering and holding out nosegays to another
child.
A controlled excitement was in her, too; and he felt still that slight
strain of the lunch-table, as if Imogen's catafalque had marred some
too-trustful assurance; but a growing warmth was diffused through it, and,
as her eyes turned once or twice on Imogen and Sir Basil, he saw the cause.
The possibility that her daughter might make friends with her suitor, the
solvent, soothing possibility that, if realized, would so smooth her path,
had come to her. And in their quiet fire-lit corner, shut the closer into
their isolation by the talk that made only a confused murmur about them, he
felt a new frankness in her, as though the hope of the hour effaced ominous
memories and melted her reserves and discretions, making it wholly natural
to draw near him in the implied avowal of shared outlooks.
"I believe that Imogen and Sir Basil are going to get on together," she
said; "I believe that she likes him already. I so want them to be friends.
He is such a friend of mine."
"They look friendly," said Jack; "I think I can always tell when Imogen is
going to like people." He did not add that, with his new insight about
Imogen, he had observed that it was people over whom she had power that
Imogen liked. And already he seemed to see that Imogen would have some sort
of power over Sir Basil.
"And I can always tell when he is going to like people. He thinks her
wonderful," said Valerie. She exchanged her knowledge with him; it was
touching, the way in which, blind to deep change in him, she took for
granted his greater claim to the interpretation of Imogen. She added: "It
is a very propitious beginning, I think."
"How long is Sir Basil going to stay here?" Jack asked.
"All summer. He goes to Canada with the Pakenhams, and out to the West, for
a glimpse of the changes since he was here years and years ago; and then I
want him to come to Vermont, to us. You and Imogen will both get to know
him well there. Of course you are coming; Imogen told me that she asked you
long ago."
"Yes; I shall enjoy that immensely," the young man answered, with, for his
own consciousness, a touch of irrepressible gloom. He didn't look forward
to the continuation of the drama, to his own lame and merely negative part
in it, at the close quarters of a house-party among the Vermont hills.
And as if Valerie bad felt the inner doubt she added suddenly, on a
different key, "You really will enjoy it, won't you?"
He looked up at her. Her face, illuminated by the firelight, though dimmed
against the evening blue outside, was turned on him with its sudden
intentness and penetration of gaze.
"Why, of course," he almost stammered, confused by the unexpected scrutiny.
"I shall love having you, you know," she said.
"I shall love being with you," he answered, now without a single inner
reserve.
Her intentness seemed to soften, there was solicitude and a sort of
persuasiveness in it. "And you will have a much better chance of really
adjusting things there--your friendship with Imogen, I mean. The country
smoothes things out. Things get sweet and simple."
He didn't know what to say. Her mistake, if it were one, was so inevitable.
"Imogen will have taken her bearings by then," she went on. "She has had so
much to get accustomed to, to bear with, poor child; her great bereavement,
and--and a mother who, in some ways, must always be a trial to her."
"Oh, a trial!"--Jack lamely murmured.
"I recognize it, Jack. I think that you do. But when she makes up her mind
to me, and discovers that, at all events, I don't interfere with anything
that she really cares about, she will be able to take up all her old
threads again."
"I--I suppose so," Jack murmured.
He had dropped his eyes, for he knew that hers were on him. And now, in a
lowered voice, he heard her say, "Jack, I hope that you will help me with
Imogen."
"Help you? How do you mean?" startled, he looked up.
"You know. Interpret me to her now and then, when you can, with kindliness.
You understand me so much more kindly than she does."
His eyes fixed on hers, deeply flushing--"Oh, but,"--he breathed out with
almost a long sigh,--"that's what I have done, you see, ever since--"
"Ever since what?"
"Since I came to understand you so much better than she does."
There was a long pause now and, the firelight flickering low, he could
hardly see her face. But he recognized change in her voice as she said:
"You have? I don't mean, you know, taking my side in disputes."
"I know; I don't mean that, either, though, perhaps, I can't help doing it;
for," said Jack, "it's on your side that I am, you know."
The change in her voice, but controlled, kept down, she answered quickly,
"Ah, but, dear Jack, I don't want to have a side. It's that that I want her
to realize. I want her to feel that my side is hers. I want you to help me
in making her feel it."
"But she'll never feel it!" Jack breathed out again. Behind the barrier
of the tea-table, in the flickering dimness, they were speaking suddenly
with a murmuring, yet so sharp a confidence; a confidence that in broad
daylight, or in complete solitude, might have seemed impossible. All sorts
of things must steal out in that persuasive, that peopled yet solitary,
twilight.
He knew that Valerie's eyes dwelt on him with anxiety and that it was with
a faint, forced smile that she asked him: "She doesn't think that I'll ever
reach her side?"
"_I_ don't believe you ever will," said Jack. Then, for he couldn't bear
that she should misunderstand him for another moment, misunderstanding
when they had come so far was too unendurable, he went on in a hurried
undertone: "You aren't on her side, really. You can never be on her side.
You can never be like her, or see like her. And I don't want you to. It's
you who see clearly, not she. It's you who are all right."
Her long silence, after this, seemed to him like the hovering of hands upon
him; as though, in darkness, she sought by touch to recognize some strange
object put before her.
"But then,--" she, too, only breathed it out at last,--"but then,--you are
not on _her_ side."
"That's just it," said Jack. He did not look at her and she was silent once
more before his confession.
"But," she again took up the search, "that is terrible for her, if she
feels it."
"And for me, too, isn't it?" he questioned, as if he turned the surfaces of
the object beneath her fingers.
The soft, frightened hover seemed to go all over it, to recognize it
finally, and to draw back, terrified, from recognition.
"Most terrible of all for me, if I have come between you," she said.
Her pain pierced him so, that he put out his hand and took hers. Don't
think that; you mustn't think that, not for a moment. It's not that you
came between us. It's only that, because of you, I began to see things--as
I hadn't seen them. It was just,--well, just like seeing one color change
when another is put beside it. Imogen's blue, now that your gold has come,
is turned to green; that's all that has happened."
"All that has happened! Do you know what you are saying, Jack! If my gold
were gone, would the blue come back again?"
"The blue will never come back," said Jack.
He felt, as her hand tightened on his, that he would have liked to put his
head down on her knees and sob like a little boy; but when she said, "And
the green you cannot care for?" his own hand tightened as if they clutched
some secret together, some secret that neither must dare look at. "You
mustn't think that--you mustn't. And I mustn't." He said it with all the
revolt and all the strength of his will and loyalty; with all his longing,
too. "The real truth is that the green can't care for me unless I will see
it back to blue again--and as I can't do that, and as it won't accept my
present vision, there is a sort of dead-lock."
For a long moment her hand continued to grasp his, before, as if taking in
the ambiguous comfort of his final definiteness, it relaxed and she drew it
away.
"Perhaps she will care enough," she said.
"To accept my vision? To forego blue? To consent that I shall see her as
green?"
"Yes, when she has taken up all the threads."
"Perhaps she will," said Jack.