The two young men looked at each other rather helplessly. Then “Marty”
Martin drew a few ragged words over his helplessness. “I’m sorry,
Peter--really, awfully. I’ll be back in an hour. And do buck up. But you
have bucked up, you really have. You look ever so much better than you
did when we went to lunch. And I’ll be back. Oh, you can depend on me.”
He drifted off through the door. His muscles were tense with haste, but
he fingered chairs and tables as he went--as if trying to put clogs of
decency on feet indecorously winged. Even so, he was soon out of sight,
and Peter Wayne was alone.
“There’s no point in saying it isn’t rum, because it is,” he murmured to
himself. “And _here_,” he added, looking about. There was no moral
support in those crimson walls, those great pier-glasses, those
insignificant writing-tables with red-shaded electric lights, those
uncomfortable tapestried armchairs. It wasn’t the setting to help you
through a crisis. He was in the quietest corner of the most essentially
respectable hotel in New York. There were plenty of them--scores--that
were incidentally respectable; but at the St. Justin respectability had
been cherished through years for its own sake, as more important than
the register, the cuisine, or the unimpeachable location that no
metropolitan progress could render inconvenient. As a very young
bachelor with virtually no family ties, he was not familiar with the St.
Justin. It wasn’t a place where you would expect to get the kind of
thing his kind of human being wanted. He couldn’t, for example, have
induced Marty to lunch there. They had lunched at Plon’s. It was a hotel
where you might be perfectly sure your grandparents had stopped. It was
natural that his mother should have selected it for their meeting, as
she hadn’t been in America for well over twenty years. But there was
less backing than he had expected, somehow.
Sitting uncomfortably in one of the corners by a writing-table (his back
to the window so that the familiar streets shouldn’t lure him too much
to flight), he took the privilege of the consciously crucial moment. He
reviewed his life. It was so very short, after all, that it was easily
reviewed. He was only a few months out of the university, and he was
just twenty-two. The insoluble was there to the point of being either
romantic or absurd, he didn’t know which. He had what so many young
people long for in vain, a mystery. He had amused himself occasionally
with monstrous hypotheses. But what real account could he give of
himself? What account, that is, of the sort that Marty Martin and his
like had by heart before they could spell? The most that he knew about
his parents--except that they were alive and in the tropics--was that
they banked in Honolulu and had some natural hold or other on Marty
Martin’s uncle. Marty Martin’s uncle had picked out Peter’s school and
his college for him, and was telegraphed for when Peter had
appendicitis. That was as near the parental relation as anything he had
known from experience. Lonely? Well, any fellow was lonely when the
other fellows all went trooping home for holidays; but loneliness he had
always frankly diagnosed as three-quarters pride. The fellows were
always glad to get back to school or college, he noticed. In any case,
he had stopped thinking about it much--his plight. That saved his
dignity. What he sat now vaguely dreading was the immense, the
cataclysmic downfall of his dignity. He tried to put the facts to
himself so simply that they should be as reassuring as a primer.
Ollendorf, he had once complained to a teacher, would take the zest out
of a murder, the sense out of a scandal. Tragedy was a verbal matter.
Put a crime into any foreign language, and it sounded like a laundry
list. He would try, as it were, to find the French for his situation.
“Oh, rot!” he began, taking his own advice quite seriously. “It isn’t so
Sudermannish as all that. My father and my mother chose to go to the
tropics to live, a year after I was born. They did not take me with
them. They have never sent for me; but they have supported me; they have
written to me occasionally; they have got Marty Martin’s uncle to keep
me out of the hands of the S.P.C.C., and trained me generally to do
without them. I’ve never been invited to go to Tahiti. And Tahiti isn’t
like London--if you know any one there, you can’t go without an
invitation. They can’t have turned against me, when I was eleven months
old, on account of my vices. I’ve kept pretty jolly and managed to
regularize the situation with my friends. Now my mother has written that
she’s coming to America to see me. Indeed, she has actually come. I
wasn’t allowed to meet her at a steamer, decently. I have to meet her
here--here.” (He looked gloomily around at the conventional walls.) “Yet
she doesn’t seem to be staying here. I don’t know whether she will want
tea, or where to take her to dinner. I don’t know her when I see her. I
don’t know--oh, hang it, I don’t know anything! And if I could funk it,
like Marty, I would. But what can you do when a lady takes the trouble
to bring you into the world? If it had been my father, now, I
wouldn’t--I positively wouldn’t--have consented to meet him. It’s--it’s
no way to treat a fellow.”
His vain attempt at Ollendorfian flatness broke down: the mere facts
seemed so very much against him. He had often complained to Marty Martin
that it was dashed awkward, this being the only original changeling;
but, in point of fact, he had never been so uncomfortable in his life as
now, at the prospect of playing the authentic filial rôle. “I’ll make
her dine here,” he muttered. He could think of nothing worse without
being actually disrespectful. An old lady in a gray shawl walked slowly
down the hall past the door, and it suddenly struck him that his mother
would perhaps like to dine at the St. Justin. “I ought to have cabled to
ask what color _her_ shawl would be,” he began, in a flippant whisper,
to himself. The flippant whisper stopped. He was much too genuinely
nervous to be flippant any longer without an audience. At the same time,
he found himself wondering--oh, insincerely, theatrically, rhetorically
wondering--why he had not bought an etiquette book. There was
something--well, to be honest, something like an extra gland in his
throat, something like a knot in his healthy young nerves--that kept him
from putting the question to himself audibly. “If she cries--” he
reflected, with anticipatory vindictiveness. What he really meant was:
“If she makes me so much as sniff.” For your mother was really the one
person in the world who had you necessarily at a disadvantage. Even if
you hadn’t the habit of her, you couldn’t count on yourself for
reticence. You might be as bored as possible, but that wouldn’t save
you. There might be treacheries of the flesh, disloyalties of the
cuticle--all manner of reversions to embryonic helplessness. She somehow
had your nerves, your physical equilibrium, at her mercy. Old Stein,
prodding at you with instruments in the psychological laboratory, was a
mere joke in comparison. Even the most deceived, the most docile and
voluble student ended respectably in a card catalogue. Peter felt
suddenly an immense tenderness for the decencies, the unrealities of
“science.” But to meet your mother in conditions like these was the real
thing: the naked horror of revelation. “It’s literature,” thought Peter
to himself, “and what is literature but just the very worst life can
do?” He came back to his familiar conclusive summary. It _was_ rum.
The next quarter of an hour passed more mercifully. The mere empty lapse
of time helped him, half duped him into thinking that the scene might
not come off at all. It was foolish to be there ahead of time, but what
could a man in his predicament do, or pretend to do, between luncheon
and an interview like that? They had had, he and Marty, a civilized
meal at Plon’s; but he had not been hungry, and to smoke among the
stunted box-trees afterward had been--well, impossible. They had got to
the St. Justin ridiculously early, and then Marty had bolted. Peter
didn’t bear him any grudge for that; of course it was perfectly proper
for Marty to bolt. It would have been worse, he began to think, to face
her first before a witness.
By this time he had accepted the smallest writing-room of the St. Justin
as the predestined scene of the great encounter; accepted it as, perhaps
divinely, perhaps diabolically, but at all events supernaturally,
appointed. These walls had been decorated by dead people to be
unsympathetic and grossly unfit witnesses of Peter Wayne’s
embarrassment. To that extent they belonged to him. The sudden
superstition was genuine; so genuine that he found himself resenting a
bit of chatter that sprang up outside the door and, even more, the
immediate quick entrance into the writing-room of one of the chatterers.
Why hadn’t his mother given him an appointment in her own sitting-room,
at her own hotel--whatever that might be? He didn’t know; he knew
nothing of her since the wireless message that had made the
appointment; and of course since she was managing the thing that way, he
hadn’t even tried to meet her at her steamer, though it had actually
docked at some unearthly hour that morning. But she was likely to pay,
too, for her perversity, since the lady who had just come in and had sat
down rather aimlessly at one of the tables would probably annoy her as
much as she did him. He had owned--or pretended?--to Marty Martin a
furtive curiosity as to this mother of his, whom he had virtually never
seen, of whom he hadn’t so much as a photograph. Now something quite
different stirred within him: the instinct to protect her against
anything she would not like. He suddenly saw her frail and weary and
overwrought and quite old--pathetically, not ironically, like the little
old lady who had hobbled past the door--and he resented any detail that
might crown her long effort at reunion with an extra thorn. He was sure
she would hate this other woman’s being there--the younger woman who had
just come in, and sat down so nonchalantly.
This lady obviously intended to stop long enough for their
discomfiture, since--just here he got up and looked at his watch as he
did so--it lacked scarce two minutes of the appointed hour. He looked at
the intruder a little impatiently. She wasn’t writing. Perhaps he could
suggest, by some flicker of expression, some implication of gesture,
that he wasn’t there in that ridiculous galley for nothing, and still
less there for casual company. She was slim and smartly veiled and
outrageously made up. That was all he saw out of the corner of his eye,
but it was enough to make him feel that she had no such rights at the
St. Justin as a reunited mother and child. She wasn’t waiting for a
parent, he knew; only for some frivolous friend or other. He was so
nervous as to wonder if there were any conceivable way in which one
could ask her to go into one of the other rooms. A depopulated chain of
them stretched down the corridor. He threw another glance at her. She
was well dressed. Peter, though he might know as little as a poodle
about the nature of the current fashion, could, like most men, pounce
unerringly on the unfashionable. Her exuberance wasn’t a matter of
gewgaws; it was all in the meretricious harmonies of her features and
complexion. And yet--Peter caught himself away from staring, as he
passed her, but one glance was enough to show him that--it was a
perfectly honest mask; her paint and powder were as respectable as blue
glasses. Again he knew it unerringly. He was glad to recognize it. For
at that moment he became so nervous that he did, without a qualm, the
most preposterous thing he had ever done, even at two and twenty.
His mother was imminent; he knew it in a hundred ways. The atmosphere
was charged with more than the mere prospect, was charged with the
actual certainty of her. He found that he was going to put it to the
lady who sat there. He stood in the door of the writing-room and looked
down the dark hall. It was empty, save for a woman who sat humbly near,
bonneted, veiled, faithfully clasping some kind of bag--obviously a
servant. Remembering the bit of chatter, he fancied it the maid of the
intruding lady. No one else was in sight. Yet somehow he knew that his
mother would be on time: the crispness of her earlier cablegrams
promised it. The lady really must go elsewhere, and the maid--old and
“colored” and manifestly respectable--must move down the hall and sit
outside another door. He went back, and this time walked straight across
to the stranger.
“Will you pardon me, madam” (“madam” was a deplorable word, but the
powder somehow demanded an extravagant formality), “if I speak to you,
to ask you something very odd?”
She stared at him through her fantastically patterned veil.
“I have been put in the position of having to meet an elderly lady--a
near relative--here for a more or less intimate conversation. I don’t
think she realized, in making the appointment, how little privacy you
have a right to in a hotel. It is very long since she has been in a
great city. Will you pardon the--the really unpardonable--liberty of my
asking if you are likely to be here much longer? I mean--ought I to
arrange to take her elsewhere in the hotel when she comes? She will be
here in a moment.”
It was a dreadful thing to have had to do, and, if he judged by what the
veil showed of the lady’s face, it couldn’t have been worse done. She
looked dismayed. Peter was angry: so angry that he managed to stop just
where he had stationed himself before her; so angry that he didn’t
deprecate, that he simply set his teeth and waited. There was nothing he
could do now, he felt, to convince her that she hadn’t been insulted.
She lifted her veil ever so little, just freeing her lips, slightly
constricted by its tight-drawn mesh. As she did so, she both rose and
spoke.
“Aren’t you Peter Wayne?”
He bowed, relieved. If they had a ground of acquaintance, he could
perhaps cover it all up, make it plausible, get rid of her on some
dishonest, hilarious pretext. “I am.” He waited; there was no use in
pretending that he remembered her.
The veil was lifted farther, then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a
voice sounded in his astonished ears. “Turn to the light, my son, and
let me look at you. I’ve not had a photograph, you remember, since you
were a child.”
Even as he faced the light, he was saying to himself that it was rummer
than ever; but it was rummest when he turned for his legitimate look at
her. She was older than he had assumed the strange lady to be; but she
was a long way from the little old lady in the gray shawl. This was his
mother, and it was over--he felt it as those sinking for the third time
may feel. In another instant he saw his mistake. He had been pulled up
out of the surge into the terrible air--this was his mother, and it had
just begun! He mastered his breath--his breath that under the water had
been playing tricks with him. He looked her over, searching stare for
searching stare. Her fair hair had lost what must once have been a
golden lustre, but it was carefully, elaborately arranged, waved,
curled, braided. It was as fashionable as her clothes. The white mask of
powder left clear the contour of the fine, thin nose but cloaked the
subtler modellings of the face. The blue eyes, idle yet intent, looked
at him from behind it; below them it was rent, once, by the scarlet stab
of the mouth. Peter remembered vaguely having heard that the tropical
sun necessitated such protection. It was the northern dimness and
drizzle that turned make-up into a moral question. Even for the _grands
boulevards_, to be sure, Mrs. Wayne’s make-up would have been overdone.
This was the chief result of his searching stare. She wasn’t like one’s
mother at all, confound it!--not like any one’s mother. He would have
been glad of a little more sophistication than even at wise
two-and-twenty he was conscious of possessing.
“Your maid?” he asked, remembering the figure outside the door.
“Oh, yes; my old Frances. She recalls you as a baby. She’ll want to see
you. You must speak to her before we go.”
“But you’re not going----”
“I find I’d better get off to-night. I’ve learned since landing, that if
I do, I can just get a boat at Vancouver. It’s not as if I had any
business to do. You’ll take me to dinner somewhere--some restaurant. I
don’t like hotels.”
“But--you don’t mean you’ve come for only twenty-four hours--across all
that?”
The straight red mouth elongated itself into a smile. “If there weren’t
so much of it to cross, I could, perhaps, stay longer. I came only to
say one or two things.”
She spoke as if she had run up from her country place for the day. Peter
suddenly revolted against this careless treatment of his plight. He was
glad if his prayers had succeeded in averting tragedy. At the same time,
he didn’t intend to be turned into farce. He hadn’t let himself in for
all this only to be shirked as he had been shirked for more than twenty
years. He meant to know things, hang it! He had been afraid of a scene;
afraid of twenty years’ emotion expressed in an hour; of a creation of
human ties as violent and sudden as the growth of the tree from the
mango-seed in the fakir’s hands. “In ten minutes you eat the ripe
mango,” a globe-trotting friend had told him. If he hadn’t the fakir’s
miracle to fear, well and good; but neither was he going to suffer the
other extreme, the complete dehumanizing of the experience. After all,
she was his mother, hang it! If she wasn’t going to make him pay--well,
he would make her pay. Somebody had to get something out of so
preposterous a situation. He leaned forward.
“Things you couldn’t write? Or have you just funked it, on the way?”
“Funked it?” Her vocabulary apparently did not hold the word.
“I mean--oh, I mean, let us talk straight. You’ve let it all go for more
than twenty years. Now you take it all up again. I’m a gentleman, I
hope. I didn’t bolt, though you can bet I wanted to. It would have been
easier never to have seen you at all.”
“You’ve never wanted to see your mother?”
Peter looked out of the window into the familiar street. If it hadn’t
been for the utter detachment of her tone, he would have felt that she
was hitting below the belt.
“What do you take me for? I’ve nearly died of--well, call it interest,
more times than I can count up. No little boy likes to have no mother;
likes to have his mother care nothing for him. But I’ve grown perfectly
used to it. And I know--I _know_ now, mind you--that you don’t care.
Well, it may not be what I should have chosen, but at least it lets me
out. It’s too late, now, to make me care.”
It was by no means the whole truth. But it was what he had been trying,
and in vain, to say to himself an hour since about it all. There was
some triumph in being able to say it now to her.
Her blue eyes turned on him a stranger’s sudden kindness. “Were those
years bad, Peter? I thought they’d be less bad if you began them very
young. You see, they had to begin some time.”
“Oh, they began--and they lasted. Now, they’re not bad at all. So why
rake it all up now?”
If she had been little and old and shaking, he couldn’t have pressed the
question, he knew. The powdered cheeks, the elaborate hair, the
vermilion lips gave him a kind of sanction. There was a pitiful way of
wearing rouge, no doubt; this wasn’t pitiful in the least. He didn’t
know what she looked like underneath the mask, but he could almost have
sworn she didn’t need it.
“I’m not trying to do that. If I’ve come so late, it’s because I feel
quite sure that it’s too late to undo any of it. I am not trying”--her
brilliant, dyed smile was extraordinarily little in the maternal
tradition--“to get a single claw into you. I’ve come to pay damages,
Peter, not to claim them. But you must be very, very, very polite to me.
I’m not used to anything else. And America rather frightens me.”
“I don’t want to be anything but polite,” murmured Peter, abashed. “And
the freer you really are, the more it’s up to you to play the game,
don’t you think?”
She smiled vaguely, and he saw at once that she belonged to the
generation that preceded slangy paradox. She might almost have worn a
fluffy gray shawl.
“I am sure you don’t wish to be anything but polite,” she brought out,
still vaguely. “But--I’ve odd things to say, and I’ve come a long way to
say them; and you, my son, must listen.”
“It’s what I’m here for.”
“_Evidemment._ How much has Spencer Martin told you?”
“Old Martin? Nothing at all, ever--except the figure of my allowance.”
“Not why we first went to Hawaii?”
“Good Lord, no! I might have been a foundling.”
“You didn’t ask?” She had taken off her gray glove; and pushed her veil
up farther on her forehead, with beautiful white fingers.
“No,” answered Peter curtly. “A fellow wouldn’t ask. You can see that.”
She seemed to muse. “He would have told you that, I think, if you had.
There was no reason why you shouldn’t know.”
“I naturally supposed, if there was no reason why I shouldn’t know,
you’d have seen to it that I was told.”
“So you thought there was something disgraceful--something that drove us
out of America?”
“It has occurred to me. But I never let myself worry about it. And old
Martin himself was a kind of proof that there wasn’t.”
“There wasn’t.” She echoed his words in a disdainful, emphatically
affirmative tone. “No, Peter, not that.” She paused for a moment,
staring out into the gray street. “These women are very ugly, aren’t
they?” she asked irrelevantly. “On the boat, they were horrors. And they
jerked about so--_did_ so many things. Do the men like them that way?”
Her tone was desultory.
“I suppose so.” He felt a mischievous desire to tell her how little the
men he knew would probably like them _her_ way; but, in fact, the slow
conviction was encroaching on his mind--not so much penetrating it as
fluidically enwrapping it--that she was compounded of many graces. Her
gestures, for example: they were all slow, and each showed off
something, if only, for an instant, some lesser, some negligible
contour. She had the air of not having stirred a limb or a feature for
years, except to please, and of being now in the practice infallible.
She was very feminine--no, hang it! that dairymaid word wouldn’t do.
(Peter had been, in college, the proudest product of his several
“theme-courses,” and the quest of the epithet was not unknown to him.)
She was very simple and very sophisticated. He had to leave it at that.
“I’ll tell you about our leaving America. You ought to have known long
since. And yet--perhaps it was better your sympathies shouldn’t have
been touched. If you thought we were brutes, that would leave you free,
wouldn’t it?”
“It did.”
“Ah, yes--exactly!” She seemed to triumph for an instant. Then she
looked out of the window again, and again spoke irrelevantly. “Are you
in love?”
Peter frowned. “No.” He was too young not to be stiff about it.
“That’s rather a pity. I could have explained better.”
“Oh, I know what it stands for.”
She corrected him gently. “It ‘stands for’ nothing whatever. Either
you’ve loved or you haven’t. It might have helped me--that’s all.” Then
she seemed to brace herself for difficult exposition.
“Listen, Peter. You must know this first. In the months just
following your birth, everything changed. Your father developed
tuberculosis--alarmingly, it was then supposed. That meant another
climate. He owned property in Honolulu. It occurred to him to go there.
In not taking you we acted on physicians’ advice. There was no telling
what sort of life we might have to live. You were best off here. You
were under expert care, and in those days we had news of you constantly.
I am quite well aware”--her voice grew surer as she went on; she seemed
less fantastically feminine, more simply human--“that many women would
have chosen differently. For me there could be no question. You had been
brought into the world in the belief that there would be no choice to
make. We never dreamed, when you were born, of anything but the normal
American life. I insist on your realizing that.”
Peter bowed. It already began to change his vision of himself a little,
though he wasn’t sure he liked his mystery to be merely tubercular.
Though if that was all, why in the world--but he saw that he could only
listen and wait.
“Then--Honolulu didn’t serve very long. We had to go farther away from
life. Now we’re in Tahiti. It’s--it’s a very wonderful climate.”
Mrs. Wayne rose, drew the crimson curtain to one side, and looked out.
It was a moment before she spoke, and as she spoke she sat down again
with helpless grace.
“I find it very hard to tell. I don’t think I can tell you it all.”
“I don’t see why you should have come at all, unless you are going to
tell me everything there is to tell. But if you’ve really funked it, I
don’t care, you know.” Thus Peter, maintaining his bravado.
“You don’t help me out.” The blue eyes rested on him critically. “But I
suppose it’s not your fault. Since you don’t know anything about
anything----”
“I can’t give you a leg up. No.”
She frowned a little, as if troubled by his phrasing, but resigned
herself to it. “No; you can’t give me a leg up.”
“I say--” He leaned forward with a sudden impulse. “Why don’t I go back
with you? Or come out later? Lots of people going to Tahiti now, you
know, since they’ve exhausted the Spanish Main. Plenty of attractions:
drives round the island, perfect scenery, native customs on tap--ordeal
by fire and hot stones. It’s in the advertisements along with the rates
and sailings. No reason why I shouldn’t come.”
She had drawn back while he spoke with a perfectly obvious terror. With
parted lips, and coiled hair, and her very blood (it seemed) turned
white, she looked like Greek tragic masks that he had seen in museums.
These he had always thought grinning prevarications; now, he
acknowledged their authenticity. His jauntiness faded into a stare. Then
she pulled herself together, as Peter would have said, by slow,
difficult degrees, like a kaleidoscope turned too slowly--pitiful to
see.
“No, Peter, you must never come to Tahiti. He--he couldn’t bear it.”
“He?”
“Your father.”
“Oh--my father.” His imagination had not yet evoked his father. “I had
forgotten him, for the moment.”
“Forgotten him! What extraordinary things you say!”
“Well, why shouldn’t I forget him? He hasn’t even taken the trouble to
spend twenty-four hours in America to make my acquaintance.” Something
acrid _had_ risen in the cup, and Peter’s lips were bitter.
Her white fingers moved again to the folds of her veil, as if the frail
mesh weighed intolerably upon her brows.
“If you forget him, of course I can never explain. He is all there is.”
She indulged then in an appraising glance. “You look kind and good. I
didn’t think you would be undutiful.”
Undutiful! It was her turn to introduce an unfamiliar vocabulary.
“Undutiful!” Peter repeated. “What do you mean? That I’m expected to be
grateful to him for being my father?”
She smiled. She lifted her hands. She all but applauded him. “Yes, just
that!”
Peter stared. He had two favorite words with which to describe the
legitimately surprising. One of them was “rum.” But such an idea as this
called for the other. It was--positively--“rococo.”
She went on then. Apparently his ironic question had smitten the rock,
for the fluent tale gushed forth, watering all the arid past. But to
Peter it was as if a man blinded and drenched with spray should try to
drink of it. The first sentences came too quickly. In all his two and
twenty years they found no context. He had still to learn the way of
them. He supposed it was because he was finding out at last what it was
to have a real mother.
“It wasn’t always Tahiti,” he heard her saying after a little. “We’ve
tried everything south of the equator, I’ve sometimes thought.
Valparaiso, for a long time. Perhaps you knew? Spencer Martin----”
“Never even told me when you changed your continent.” He was blandly
bitter. Somehow it did hurt, as she went on.
“The climate,” Mrs. Wayne murmured again. And then she named other
stages of their progress--all places, Peter reflected, that were in the
geographies and in Kipling, and nowhere else. It made his parents sound
like vagabonds of fiction. Her trailing narrative did not add to their
reality. The details she mentioned were wildly exotic, and those she
took for granted he could not supply. Her careful English was
interlarded with strange scraps of Spanish and native names for things
which left the objects, for him, unrecognizable. He made nothing out of
it except that it wasn’t what he should call a life at all. He didn’t
even see whether it was whim or necessity that controlled them. As soon
as anything in her story became coherent or comprehensible, she doubled
on her tracks. At first he threw in occasional questions, but the
answers didn’t explain; and soon he stopped asking them. A foreignness
like that left his very curiosities unphraseable. He came to the point
where he didn’t even know what it was that he wanted to know. There was,
to be sure, the irregularly recurrent stress on the hope of health, an
obsession, apparently, under which they had faintly struggled and madly
rambled; but it didn’t make much more sense than what he had learned in
childhood about Ponce de Leon. You might as well ask a firefly to show
you your way. Clearly, she hadn’t the gift of biography. He sat very
still and intent, trying to make a pattern out of it; but she merely
succeeded in dazing him. Then suddenly, when he was most bewildered, it
came to an end, ran out in a mere confession of failure.
“And nowhere, at any time, has the miracle happened. He has never been
well enough to come back. We have always had to stay away.”
“It must have been a strange life,” Peter mused.
“Strange? It may be. Strange for him, no doubt: so fitted for
civilization--for your world.”
“You speak as if it weren’t yours.”
“Oh, mine,” she said simply; “_he_ was mine. I don’t ask for more
civilization than that--than my husband.”
It was the most sentimental speech that Peter had ever heard from human
lips, and he stared incredulously. But incredulity faded. Her tone of
voice worked on him even after she fell silent. He still felt its
vibration in the air while the mask shifted subtly before his eyes.
Somehow, as she sat there, breathing such simple passion from her
intricate adornments, she became at once more astounding and more
intelligible. One saw it all--even Peter, in his young and untutored
heart, knew infallibly. She had loved her husband supremely, and she had
chucked everything for him. She had chucked so much, in fact, that she
had even lost all sense of the worth of what she had cast away. She had
nothing left to measure it by. Peter felt that America itself was a good
deal to have chucked. It soothed his pride a little, to be sure, to have
her treat New York so cavalierly. She hadn’t so much as looked at it;
and she had circumnavigated the globe for him. It was clear, too, that
every moment of the journey was a kind of torture to her. Her very look
round the room divulged an agony of strangeness and suspense. She was
just longing to be back on her island. Peter thrilled a little foolishly
to it. He fancied it was a _grande passion_. The only _grande passion_
Peter had hitherto known had been that of a sophomore friend for his
landlady’s daughter. That, though it had been enhanced by proper detail
of elopement, disinheritance, and threats of suicide, had disappointed
them all in the end. The bride was rather silly and tried to borrow
money; and when Peter and Marty, in their senior year, had re-read
Lawrence’s sonnet-sequence, they had found that it didn’t scan. But
this--this was different. Whatever his mother had undertaken, she had
obviously put it through. After all those years of marriage, to have
your voice vibrate like that! It had never occurred to Peter that a
fellow’s mother could still be in love with his father. Even in novels
mothers weren’t. As for life: he recalled the parents that he knew. He
had never seen another woman with just that look, the look of a
dedicated being, of some one whose bloom had been, first and last, both
jealously hoarded and lavishly spent. She was like a woman out of a
harem: a million graces for one man, but a mere veiled bundle to all the
rest. That was the secret of her uniqueness. She was a charming woman to
whom the notion of charming the world at large would be blasphemous. Her
mood had been slowly orientalized to match her exterior, which had
gradually grown exotic. She would die in suttee. Peter felt her quality
no less poignantly because his words for it were unsure. Of course she
didn’t want to stay in America! Of course she was off to Vancouver at
midnight! And yet--why, why had she come? Would she never explain?
She had been looking out of the window while he soliloquized--it was
part of the whole sub-tropical spectacle of her that she should limit
herself to so few hours, and then be as languid as if she had leased a
suite at the St. Justin for life. She turned just as Peter had made up
his mind to speak.
“There was one summer when you wanted to go to the Caucasus, I
remember--a rather queer trip that was going to cost a great deal. We
were sorry--I was dreadfully sorry--that you couldn’t go.”
Peter frowned. There you were! She crammed the supreme interview of a
lifetime into an hour, and then had the audacity to be irrelevant.
“We couldn’t afford it just then. It--it was a very expensive year. I
had to tell Spencer we couldn’t. I hope you didn’t hate us for it.”
Peter laughed. “I didn’t even know you had anything to do with it. Old
Martin didn’t tell me it was funds. He just wet-blanketed the whole
thing--said it wasn’t safe and he couldn’t hear of it. I didn’t mind
much. I went to Murray Bay to visit another chap. But, I say--do you
mean old Martin asked you?”
“He cabled.”
“And you?”
“I cabled back.”
“Has he been consulting you about me all these years? In cases like
that, when I didn’t dream of it?”
“Oh, only occasionally,” she hastened to say. “We haven’t been spying on
you.”
“No, I should hope not.” Then he called himself a queer duck, aggrieved
for twenty years because he hadn’t been spied on, and now aggrieved at
the thought that he might be.
“Was it you, by the way,” he asked, “who were interested in my affairs,
or my father?” Her pronouns had been a little confusing.
“Your father has had, more and more, to leave all correspondence to me.”
For the first time, her words came glibly. She had evidently packed that
sentence in her trunk before starting.
“Is he so very ill?” Peter had veered at last to an interest in his
other parent; it was clear that his other parent was the real clue to
the mystery.
“Oh, horribly--horribly!” It was almost a cry. She bent forward. “So
ill, Peter, so ill that you mustn’t come now, ever. He loathes it
so--being so ill. And he is so very proud--as why shouldn’t he be? Can’t
you see how he would mind? Do you think I’d have come if it had been
possible to send for you? Do you think I’d have left him if there had
been any other way? I’m not sure, as it is, that I ought to have come.
It has been terrible, to be getting farther away every day; to know that
I’m as far away from him as it is possible to be on this earth. And
think what it must be for him, alone--and _there_!”
Well, she was as pathetic now as any little old lady in a gray shawl
could be; only she was, somehow, tragic too. Her face was like the white
grave of beauty. Peter was stupefied.
“There?” he repeated.
She flung out her hands. “On a savage island. Think of him on a savage
island!”
“I can’t, very well,” murmured Peter inaudibly. Then: “But has he always
been so ill? For twenty years? Or”--he fixed her a little more
directly--“is there something besides illness?”
She did not answer. She rose and looked out of the window, and as Peter
rose and stood beside her, she lifted one hand to his shoulder. There
was something ineffably gracious in the gesture. She seemed to be making
it all up to him. “Such a patched life, Peter,” she murmured. “You can’t
blame him for not having wanted me to come.”
“Oh, he didn’t want you to come?”
She hesitated for an instant. “No. And now I must go.”
“Now?” he asked stupidly.
“Oh, yes, at once. I shan’t have time to dine with you.” She looked
helplessly about for a scarf that she had thrown down.
“But no!” Peter broke out. “It’s preposterous. To come like this and go
like this! Your train doesn’t go for hours--if you will go to-night.”
“But I haven’t arranged for it. I haven’t packed.”
“Why, you haven’t unpacked!” he cried.
“Oh, I think Frances may have. And I mustn’t fail to get off. There are
the tickets to get, too. Peter, I _must_ go.” She spoke as if to delay
were unspeakable treason; and, as she spoke, she turned to cross the
room to the door.
“I say,” said Peter, standing squarely in her way, “why did you come?
You shan’t go without telling me that.” It wasn’t the way to speak to
one’s mother, but she had chosen to discard the maternal code.
She broke off in the act of withdrawal and turned to him. Her blue eyes
were tearless but very sad. “I loved you dearly when you were very
little,” she said simply. “I’ve never quite forgotten that. I suddenly
realized that, if I waited any longer, I could never come. I think it
was a cruel and foolish thing for me to do, and I’m a little ashamed of
it; but--kiss me, Peter.”
Before he obeyed, he clutched at one more straw. “You won’t see old
Martin?”
“I said good-bye to him a great many years ago.” She smiled. “I had no
one to see in America except you. No--there’s a cab waiting. Good-bye.”
He kissed her then. It was clear to him that he might only watch her go.
He saw her stop to rouse the old servant who waited in the hall. Then
she passed, with strange grace, out of his life.
* * * * *
There was only one tone to take with Marty, who arrived, as always, late
and breathless. “She’s the most charming woman I’ve ever met, and it’s
the devil’s own luck that she had to go straight on to Vancouver to get
a steamer back. My father--who is apparently a charmer, by the way--is
very ill. She’s wonderful. It’s the biggest thing that has ever happened
to me. She’s made everything as right as right. But I can’t tell you
about it. After twenty years--you understand, old man----”
It was less the loyal friend than the loyal son; but he was still,
dining that night at Plon’s (he wondered where the deuce she was
dining), very much under her dominion. She had brought with her a rare
illumination. He would never forget her voice and her veiled eyes. He
hadn’t dreamed a woman could suggest her love in so many silent ways.
She just _was_ adoration, implicit and incarnate. It was tremendous to
have seen it. The white light it threw on Lawrence’s bride! The white
light it threw, for that matter, on all the women he knew! He felt
himself bursting with knowledge.
It was not until after dinner, indeed, that he realized just how
wonderful in another way she had been, and with how little knowledge of
another sort she had left him. She had told him absolutely nothing. So
far as he was concerned, her narrative had only concealed events. He
couldn’t remember whether New Zealand had followed or preceded Chile;
and his sincere impression was that it didn’t matter, even to them.
Anything that in all those years _had_ mattered, had been dropped away
out of sight between her sentences. If he had been by his hour both
racked and inebriated (for that was what his state of tension amounted
to), it was not because of any facts she had given him. She had not even
answered his plain questions. She had left him in dismay as soon as he
had begun to ask them. He saw that now, though in his simplicity he
hadn’t seen it before. He had been sacrificed again, as he had always
been sacrificed. His mystery was still his mystery, and he was still
left alone with his monstrous hypotheses. He wouldn’t have missed it for
anything--not even for good old Marty. But he turned to Marty at last
with compunction.
“Marty, old man,” he said, “it _was_ rum.”