I
Mrs. Lidcote, as the huge menacing mass of New York defined itself far
off across the waters, shrank back into her corner of the deck and sat
listening with a kind of unreasoning terror to the steady onward drive
of the screws.
She had set out on the voyage quietly enough,--in what she called her
"reasonable" mood,--but the week at sea had given her too much time to
think of things and had left her too long alone with the past.
When she was alone, it was always the past that occupied her. She
couldn't get away from it, and she didn't any longer care to. During
her long years of exile she had made her terms with it, had learned
to accept the fact that it would always be there, huge, obstructing,
encumbering, bigger and more dominant than anything the future could
ever conjure up. And, at any rate, she was sure of it, she understood
it, knew how to reckon with it; she had learned to screen and manage and
protect it as one does an afflicted member of one's family.
There had never been any danger of her being allowed to forget the past.
It looked out at her from the face of every acquaintance, it appeared
suddenly in the eyes of strangers when a word enlightened them: "Yes,
_the_ Mrs. Lidcote, don't you know?" It had sprung at her the first day
out, when, across the dining-room, from the captain's table, she had
seen Mrs. Lorin Boulger's revolving eye-glass pause and the eye behind
it grow as blank as a dropped blind. The next day, of course, the
captain had asked: "You know your ambassadress, Mrs. Boulger?" and she
had replied that, No, she seldom left Florence, and hadn't been to Rome
for more than a day since the Boulgers had been sent to Italy. She was
so used to these phrases that it cost her no effort to repeat them. And
the captain had promptly changed the subject.
No, she didn't, as a rule, mind the past, because she was used to it and
understood it. It was a great concrete fact in her path that she had to
walk around every time she moved in any direction. But now, in the
light of the unhappy event that had summoned her from Italy,--the sudden
unanticipated news of her daughter's divorce from Horace Pursh and
remarriage with Wilbour Barkley--the past, her own poor miserable past,
started up at her with eyes of accusation, became, to her disordered
fancy, like the afflicted relative suddenly breaking away from nurses
and keepers and publicly parading the horror and misery she had, all the
long years, so patiently screened and secluded.
Yes, there it had stood before her through the agitated weeks since the
news had come--during her interminable journey from India, where Leila's
letter had overtaken her, and the feverish halt in her apartment in
Florence, where she had had to stop and gather up her possessions for a
fresh start--there it had stood grinning at her with a new balefillness
which seemed to say: "Oh, but you've got to look at me _now_, because
I'm not only your own past but Leila's present."
Certainly it was a master-stroke of those arch-ironists of the shears
and spindle to duplicate her own story in her daughter's. Mrs. Lidcote
had always somewhat grimly fancied that, having so signally failed to
be of use to Leila in other ways, she would at least serve her as a
warning. She had even abstained from defending herself, from making
the best of her case, had stoically refused to plead extenuating
circumstances, lest Leila's impulsive sympathy should lead to deductions
that might react disastrously on her own life. And now that very thing
had happened, and Mrs. Lidcote could hear the whole of New York saying
with one voice: "Yes, Leila's done just what her mother did. With such
an example what could you expect?"
Yet if she had been an example, poor woman, she had been an awful one;
she had been, she would have supposed, of more use as a deterrent than
a hundred blameless mothers as incentives. For how could any one who
had seen anything of her life in the last eighteen years have had the
courage to repeat so disastrous an experiment?
Well, logic in such cases didn't count, example didn't count, nothing
probably counted but having the same impulses in the blood; and that was
the dark inheritance she had bestowed upon her daughter. Leila hadn't
consciously copied her; she had simply "taken after" her, had been a
projection of her own long-past rebellion.
Mrs. Lidcote had deplored, when she started, that the _Utopia_ was a
slow steamer, and would take eight full days to bring her to her unhappy
daughter; but now, as the moment of reunion approached, she would
willingly have turned the boat about and fled back to the high seas. It
was not only because she felt still so unprepared to face what New York
had in store for her, but because she needed more time to dispose of
what the _Utopia_ had already given her. The past was bad enough,
but the present and future were worse, because they were less
comprehensible, and because, as she grew older, surprises and
inconsequences troubled her more than the worst certainties.
There was Mrs. Boulger, for instance. In the light, or rather the
darkness, of new developments, it might really be that Mrs. Boulger
had not meant to cut her, but had simply failed to recognize her.
Mrs. Lidcote had arrived at this hypothesis simply by listening to the
conversation of the persons sitting next to her on deck--two lively
young women with the latest Paris hats on their heads and the latest
New York ideas in them. These ladies, as to whom it would have been
impossible for a person with Mrs. Lidcote's old-fashioned categories to
determine whether they were married or unmarried, "nice" or "horrid," or
any one or other of the definite things which young women, in her
youth and her society, were conveniently assumed to be, had revealed
a familiarity with the world of New York that, again according to Mrs.
Lidcote's traditions, should have implied a recognized place in it. But
in the present fluid state of manners what did anything imply except
what their hats implied--that no one could tell what was coming next?
They seemed, at any rate, to frequent a group of idle and opulent people
who executed the same gestures and revolved on the same pivots as Mrs.
Lidcote's daughter and her friends: their Coras, Matties and Mabels
seemed at any moment likely to reveal familiar patronymics, and once
one of the speakers, summing up a discussion of which Mrs. Lidcote had
missed the beginning, had affirmed with headlong confidence: "Leila? Oh,
_Leila's_ all right."
Could it be _her_ Leila, the mother had wondered, with a sharp thrill of
apprehension? If only they would mention surnames! But their talk leaped
elliptically from allusion to allusion, their unfinished sentences
dangled over bottomless pits of conjecture, and they gave their
bewildered hearer the impression not so much of talking only of their
intimates, as of being intimate with every one alive.
Her old friend Franklin Ide could have told her, perhaps; but here was
the last day of the voyage, and she hadn't yet found courage to ask him.
Great as had been the joy of discovering his name on the passenger-list
and seeing his friendly bearded face in the throng against the taffrail
at Cherbourg, she had as yet said nothing to him except, when they had
met: "Of course I'm going out to Leila."
She had said nothing to Franklin Ide because she had always
instinctively shrunk from taking him into her confidence. She was sure
he felt sorry for her, sorrier perhaps than any one had ever felt;
but he had always paid her the supreme tribute of not showing it. His
attitude allowed her to imagine that compassion was not the basis of his
feeling for her, and it was part of her joy in his friendship that it
was the one relation seemingly unconditioned by her state, the only one
in which she could think and feel and behave like any other woman.
Now, however, as the problem of New York loomed nearer, she began to
regret that she had not spoken, had not at least questioned him about
the hints she had gathered on the way. He did not know the two ladies
next to her, he did not even, as it chanced, know Mrs. Lorin Boulger;
but he knew New York, and New York was the sphinx whose riddle she must
read or perish.
Almost as the thought passed through her mind his stooping shoulders
and grizzled head detached themselves against the blaze of light in the
west, and he sauntered down the empty deck and dropped into the chair at
her side.
"You're expecting the Barkleys to meet you, I suppose?" he asked.
It was the first time she had heard any one pronounce her daughter's
new name, and it occurred to her that her friend, who was shy and
inarticulate, had been trying to say it all the way over and had at last
shot it out at her only because he felt it must be now or never.
"I don't know. I cabled, of course. But I believe she's at--they're
at--_his_ place somewhere."
"Oh, Barkley's; yes, near Lenox, isn't it? But she's sure to come to
town to meet you."
He said it so easily and naturally that her own constraint was relieved,
and suddenly, before she knew what she meant to do, she had burst out:
"She may dislike the idea of seeing people."
Ide, whose absent short-sighted gaze had been fixed on the slowly
gliding water, turned in his seat to stare at his companion.
"Who? Leila?" he said with an incredulous laugh.
Mrs. Lidcote flushed to her faded hair and grew pale again. "It took
_me_ a long time--to get used to it," she said.
His look grew gently commiserating. "I think you'll find--" he paused
for a word--"that things are different now--altogether easier."
"That's what I've been wondering--ever since we started." She was
determined now to speak. She moved nearer, so that their arms touched,
and she could drop her voice to a murmur. "You see, it all came on me in
a flash. My going off to India and Siam on that long trip kept me
away from letters for weeks at a time; and she didn't want to tell me
beforehand--oh, I understand _that_, poor child! You know how good she's
always been to me; how she's tried to spare me. And she knew, of course,
what a state of horror I'd be in. She knew I'd rush off to her at once
and try to stop it. So she never gave me a hint of anything, and she
even managed to muzzle Susy Suffern--you know Susy is the one of the
family who keeps me informed about things at home. I don't yet see how
she prevented Susy's telling me; but she did. And her first letter, the
one I got up at Bangkok, simply said the thing was over--the divorce, I
mean--and that the very next day she'd--well, I suppose there was no
use waiting; and _he_ seems to have behaved as well as possible, to have
wanted to marry her as much as--"
"Who? Barkley?" he helped her out. "I should say so! Why what do you
suppose--" He interrupted himself. "He'll be devoted to her, I assure
you."
"Oh, of course; I'm sure he will. He's written me--really beautifully.
But it's a terrible strain on a man's devotion. I'm not sure that Leila
realizes--"
Ide sounded again his little reassuring laugh. "I'm not sure that you
realize. _They're_ all right."
It was the very phrase that the young lady in the next seat had applied
to the unknown "Leila," and its recurrence on Ide's lips flushed Mrs.
Lidcote with fresh courage.
"I wish I knew just what you mean. The two young women next to me--the
ones with the wonderful hats--have been talking in the same way."
"What? About Leila?"
"About _a_ Leila; I fancied it might be mine. And about society in
general. All their friends seem to be divorced; some of them seem
to announce their engagements before they get their decree. One of
them--_her_ name was Mabel--as far as I could make out, her husband
found out that she meant to divorce him by noticing that she wore a new
engagement-ring."
"Well, you see Leila did everything 'regularly,' as the French say," Ide
rejoined.
"Yes; but are these people in society? The people my neighbours talk
about?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "It would take an arbitration commission a
good many sittings to define the boundaries of society nowadays. But
at any rate they're in New York; and I assure you you're _not_; you're
farther and farther from it."
"But I've been back there several times to see Leila." She hesitated
and looked away from him. Then she brought out slowly: "And I've never
noticed--the least change--in--in my own case--"
"Oh," he sounded deprecatingly, and she trembled with the fear of having
gone too far. But the hour was past when such scruples could restrain
her. She must know where she was and where Leila was. "Mrs. Boulger
still cuts me," she brought out with an embarrassed laugh.
"Are you sure? You've probably cut _her_; if not now, at least in the
past. And in a cut if you're not first you're nowhere. That's what keeps
up so many quarrels."
The word roused Mrs. Lidcote to a renewed sense of realities. "But the
Purshes," she said--"the Purshes are so strong! There are so many of
them, and they all back each other up, just as my husband's family did.
I know what it means to have a clan against one. They're stronger than
any number of separate friends. The Purshes will _never_ forgive Leila
for leaving Horace. Why, his mother opposed his marrying her because
of--of me. She tried to get Leila to promise that she wouldn't see me
when they went to Europe on their honeymoon. And now she'll say it was
my example."
Her companion, vaguely stroking his beard, mused a moment upon this;
then he asked, with seeming irrelevance, "What did Leila say when you
wrote that you were coming?"
"She said it wasn't the least necessary, but that I'd better come,
because it was the only way to convince me that it wasn't."
"Well, then, that proves she's not afraid of the Purshes."
She breathed a long sigh of remembrance. "Oh, just at first, you
know--one never is."
He laid his hand on hers with a gesture of intelligence and pity.
"You'll see, you'll see," he said.
A shadow lengthened down the deck before them, and a steward stood
there, proffering a Marconigram.
"Oh, now I shall know!" she exclaimed.
She tore the message open, and then let it fall on her knees, dropping
her hands on it in silence.