The jealously guarded truth was that, by her daughter at least, Mrs.
Condon was adored. Linda observed that she was not like an ordinary
mother, but more nearly resembled a youthful companion. Mrs. Condon's
gaiety was as genuine as her fair hair. Not kept for formal occasion, it
got out of bed with her, remained through the considerable difficulties
of dressing with no maid but Linda, and if the other were not asleep
called a cheerful or funny good night.
Their rooms were separated by a bath, but Linda was scarcely ever in her
own--her mother's lovely things, acting like a magnet, constantly drew
her to their arrangement in the drawers. When the laundry came up, crisp
and fragile webs heaped on the bed, Linda laid it away in a sort of
ritual. Even with these publicly invisible garments a difference
of choice existed between the two: Mrs. Condon's preference was for
insertions, and Linda's for shadow embroidery and fine shell edges. Mrs.
Condon, shaking into position a foam of ribbon and lace, would say with
her gurgle of amusement, “I want to be ready when I fall down; if I
followed your advice they'd take me for a nun.”
This brought out Linda's low clear laugh, the expression of her extreme
happiness. It sounded, for an instant, like a chime of small silver
bells; then died away, leaving the faintest perceptible flush on her
healthy pallor. At other times her mother's humor made her vaguely
uncomfortable, usually after wine or other drinks that left the elder's
breath thick and oppressive. Linda failed completely to grasp the
allusions of this wit but a sharp uneasiness always responded like the
lingering stale memory of a bad dream.
Once, at the Boscombe, her mother had been too silly for words: she had
giggled and embraced her sweet little girl, torn an expensive veil to
shreds and dropped a French model hat into the tub. After a distressing
sickness she had gone to sleep fully dressed, and Linda, unable to move
or wake her, had sat long beyond dinner into the night, fearful of the
entrance of the chambermaid.
The next day Mrs. Condon had been humble with remorse. Men, she said,
were too beastly for description. This was not an unusual opinion. Linda
observed that she was always condemning men in general and dressing for
them in particular. She offered Linda endless advice in an abstracted
manner:
“They're all liars, Lin, and stingy about everything but their pleasure.
Women are different but men are all alike. You get sick to death of
them! Never bother them when they are smoking a cigar; cigarettes
don't matter. Leave the cigarette-smokers alone, anyhow; they're not
as dependable as the others. A man with a good cigar--you must know
the good from the bad--is usually discreet. I ought to bring you up
different, but, Lord, life's too short. Besides, you will learn more
useful things right with mama, whose eyes are open, than anywhere else.
“Powder my back, darling; I can't reach. If I'm a little late to-night
go to sleep like a duck. You think Mr. Jasper's nice, don't you? So does
mother. But you mustn't let him give you any more money. It'll make him
conceited.”
Linda wondered what she meant by the last phrase. How could it make Mr.
Jasper conceited to give her a gold piece? However, she decided that she
had better not ask.
It was like that with a great many of her mother's mysterious
remarks--Linda had an instinctive feeling of drawing away. The other
kissed her warmly and left a print of vivid red on her cheek.
She examined the mark in the mirror when her mother had gone; it was,
she decided, the kiss made visible. Then she laid away the things
scattered about the room by Mrs. Condon's hasty dressing. Her own
belongings were always in precise order.
A sudden hesitation seized her at the thought of going down to the crowd
at the music. The women made her uncomfortable. It wasn't what they
said, but the way they said it; and the endless questions wearied her.
She was, as well, continually bothered by her inability to impress upon
them how splendid her mother was. Some of them she was certain did not
appreciate her. Mrs. Condon at once admitted and was entertained by
this, but it disturbed Linda. However, she understood the reason--when
any nice men came along they always liked her mother best. This made the
women mad.
The world, she gathered, was a place where women played a game of men
with each other. It was very difficult, she couldn't comprehend the
rules or reason; and Linda was afraid that she would be unsuccessful
and never have the perfect time her mother wanted for her. In the first
place, she was too thin, and then she knew that she could never talk
like her dearest. Perhaps when she had had some wine it would be
different.
She decided, after all, to go down to the assemblage; and, by one of
the white marble pillars, Mrs. Randall captured her. “Why, here's
Linda-all-alone,” Mrs. Randall said. “Mama out again?” Linda replied
stoutly, “She has a dreadful lot of invitations.”
Mrs. Randall, who wore much brighter clothes than her mother, was called
by the latter an old buzzard. She was very old, Linda could see, with
perfectly useless staring patches of paint on her wrinkled cheeks, and
eyes that look as though they might come right out of her head. Her
frizzled hair supported a dead false twist with a glittering diamond
pin, and her soft cold hands were loaded with jewels. She frightened
Linda, really, although she could not say why. Mrs. Randall was a great
deal like the witch in a fairy-story, but that wasn't it. Linda hadn't
the belief in witches necessary for dread. It might be her scratching
voice; or the way she turned her head, without any chin at all, like a
turtle; or her dresses, which led you to expect a person very different
from an old buzzard.
“Of course she does,” said Mrs. Randall, “any number of invitations, and
why shouldn't she? Your mother is very pleasant, to be sure.” She nodded
wisely to the woman beside her, Miss Skillern.
Miss Skillern was short and broad and, in the evening, always wore
curled ostrich plumes on tightly filled gray puffs. She reminded Linda
of a wadded chair. Mrs. Randall, after the other's slight stiff assent,
continued:
“Your mama would never be lonely, not she. All I wonder is she doesn't
get married again--with that blondine of hers. Wouldn't you rather have
one papa than, in a way of speaking, a different one at every hotel?”
Linda, completely at a loss for answer, studied Mrs. Randall with her
direct deep blue gaze. Miss Skillern again inclined her plumes. With the
rest of her immobile she was surprisingly like one of those fat china
figures with a nodding head. Linda was assaulted by the familiar
bewildered feeling of not understanding what was said and, at the same
time, passionately resenting it from an inner sensitive recognition of
something wrong.
“How could I have that?” she finally asked.
“How?” repeated Miss Skillern, breathing loudly.
“Yes, how?” Mrs. Randall echoed. “You can ask your mama. You really can.
And you may say that, as a matter of fact, the question came from us,”
she included her companion.
“From you,” Miss Skillern exactly corrected her.
“Indeed,” the other cried heatedly, “from me! I think not. Didn't you
ask? Answer me that, if you please. I heard you with my own ears say,
'How?' While now, before my face, you try to deny it.” It was plain to
Linda that Miss Skillern was totally unmoved by the charge. She moved
her lorgnette up, gazing stolidly at the musical programme. “From you,”
she said again, after a little. Mrs. Randall suddenly regained her
equilibrium.
“If the ladies of this hotel are afraid to face that creature I--I--am
not. I'll tell her in a minute what a respectable person thinks of
her goings-on. More than that, I shall complain to Mr. Rennert. 'Mr.
Rennert,' I'll say, 'either she leaves or me. Choose as you will. The
reputation of your hotel--'” she spluttered and paused.
“Proof,” Miss Skillern pronounced judicially; “proof. We know, but
that's not proof.”
“He has a wife,” Mrs. Randall replied in a shrill whisper; “a wife
who is an invalid. Mrs. Zoock, she who had St. Vitus' dance and left
yesterday, heard it direct. George A. Jasper, woolen mills in Frankford,
Pennsylvania. Mr. Rennert would thank me for that information.”
They had forgotten Linda. She stood rigid and cold--they were blaming
her mother for going out in a rolling chair with Mr. Jasper because he
was married. But her mother didn't know that; probably Mr. Jasper had
not given it a thought. She was at the point of making this clear, when
it seemed to her that it might be better to say that her mother knew
everything there was about Mr. Jasper's wife; she could even add that
they were all friends.
Linda would have to tell her mother the second she came in, and then,
of course, she'd stop going with Mr. Jasper. Men, she thought in the
elder's phrase, were too beastly for words.
“After all,” Mrs. Randall was addressing her again, “you needn't say
anything at all to your mama. It might make her so cross that she'd
spank you.”
“Mother never spanks me,” Linda replied with dignity.
“If you were my little girl,” said Miss Skillern, with rolling lips,
“I'd put you over my knee with your skirts up and paddle you.”
Never, Linda thought, had she heard anything worse; she was profoundly
shocked. The vision of Miss Skillern performing such an operation as
she had described cut its horror on her mind. There was a sinking at her
heart and a misty threat of tears.
To avert this she walked slowly away. It was hardly past nine o'clock;
her mother wouldn't be back for a long while, and she was too restless
and unhappy to sit quietly above. Instead, she continued down to the
floor where there were various games in the corridor leading to the
billiard-room. The hall was dull, no one was clicking the balls about
the green tables, and a solitary sick-looking man, with inky shadows
under fixed eyes, was smoking a cigarette in a chair across from the
cigar-stand.
He looked over a thick magazine in a chocolate cover, his gaze arrested
by her irresolute passage. “Hello, Bellina,” he said.
She stopped. “Linda,” she corrected him, “Linda Condon.” Obeying a
sudden impulse, she dropped, with a sigh, into a place beside him.
“You're bored,” he went on, the magazine put away. “So am I, but my term
is short.”
She wondered, principally, what he was doing, among so many women, at
the Boscombe. He was different from Mr. Jasper, or the other men with
fat stomachs, the old men with dragging feet. It embarrassed her to meet
his gaze, it was so--so investigating. She guessed he was by the sea
because he felt as badly as he looked. He asked surprisingly:
“Why are you here?”
“On the account of my mother,” she explained. “But it doesn't matter
much where I am. Places are all alike,” she continued conversationally.
“We're mostly at hotels--Florida in winter and Lake George in summer.
This is kind of between.”
“Oh!” he said; and she was sure, from that short single exclamation, he
understood everything.
“Like all true beauty,” he added, “it's plain that you are durable.”
“I don't like the seashore,” she went on easily; “I'd rather be in a
garden with piles of flowers and a big hedge.”
“Have you ever lived in a garden-close?”
“No,” she admitted; “it's just an idea. I told mother but she laughed at
me and said a roof-garden was her choice.”
“Some day you'll have the place you describe,” he assured her. “It is
written all over you. I would like to see you, Bellina, in a space
of emerald sod and geraniums.” She decided to accept without further
protest his name for her. “You are right, too, about the hedge--the
highest and thickest in creation. I should recommend a pseudo-classic
house, Georgian, rather small, a white façade against the grass. A
Jacobean dining-room, dark certainly, the French windows open on dipping
candle flames. You'd wear white, with your hair low and the midnight
bang as it is now.”
“That would be awfully nice,” Linda replied vaguely. She sighed.
“But a very light drawing-room!” he cried. “White panels and arches and
Canton-blue rugs--the brothers Adam. A fluted mantel, McIntires, and a
brass hod. Curiously enough, I always see you in the evening ... at the
piano. I'm not so bored, now.” Little flames of red burned in either
thin cheek. “What nonsense!” Suddenly he was tired. “This is a practical
and earnest world,” his voice grew thin and hurt her. “Yet beauty is
relentless. You'll have your garden, but I shouldn't be surprised at
difficulties first.”
“It won't be so hard to get,” she declared confidently. “I mean to
choose the right man. Mother says that's the answer. Women, she says,
won't use their senses.”
“Ah.”
Linda began to think this was a most unpleasant monosyllable.
“So that's the lay! Has she succeeded?”
“She has a splendid time. She's out tonight with Mr. Jasper in a rolling
chair, and he has loads and loads of money. It makes all the other women
cross.”
“Here you are, then, till she gets back?”
“There's no one else.”
“But, as a parent, infinitely preferable to the righteous,” he murmured.
“And you--”
“I think mother's perfect,” she answered simply.
He shook his head. “You won't succeed at it, though. Your mother, for
example, isn't dark.”
“The loveliest gold hair,” she said ecstatically. “She's much much
prettier than I'll ever be.”
“Prettier, yes. The trouble is, you are lovely, magical. You will stay
for a lifetime in the memory. The merest touch of you will be more
potent than any duty or fidelity. A man's only salvation will be his
blindness.”
Although she didn't understand a word of this, Linda liked to hear
him; he was talking as though she were grown up, and in response to the
flattery she was magnetic and eager.
“One time,” he said, “very long ago, beauty was worshiped. Men, you
see, know better now. They want their dollar's worth. The world was
absolutely different then--there were deep adventurous forests with holy
chapels in the green combe for an orison, and hermits rising to Paradise
on the _Te Deum Laudamus_ of the angels and archangels. There were black
castles and, in the broad meadows, silk tents with ivory pegs and poles
of gold.
“The enchantments were as thick as shadows under the trees: perhaps the
loveliest of women riding a snow-white mule, with a saddle cloth of red
samite, or, wrapped in her shining hair, on a leopard with yellow eyes,
lured you to a pavilion, scattered with rushes and flowers and magical
herbs, and a shameful end. Or a silver doe would weep, begging you to
pierce her with your sword, and, when you did, there knelt the daughter
of the King of Wales.
“But I started to tell you about the worship of beauty. Plato started it
although Cardinal Pietro Bembo was responsible for the creed. He lived
in Italy, in an age like a lily. It developed mostly at Florence in
the Platonic Academy of Cosomo and Pico della Mirandola. Love was the
supreme force, and its greatest expression a desire beyond the body.”
He gazed at Linda with a quizzical light in his eyes deep in shadow.
“Love,” he said again, and then paused. “One set of words will do
as well as another. You will understand, or not, with something far
different from intellectual comprehension. The endless service of
beauty. Of course, a woman--but never the animal; the spirit always.
Born in the spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A direct
contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality and the
sacred symbol of the dollar.
“It wouldn't please your Mr. Jasper, with his heaps and heaps of money.
Mr. Jasper would consider himself sold. But Novalis, not so very long
ago, understood.... A dead girl more real than all earth. You mustn't
suppose it to be mere mysticism.”
Linda said, “Very well, I won't.”
He nodded. “No one could call Michelangelo hysterical. Sometime in the
history of man, of a salt solution, this divinity has touched them.
Touched them hopefully, and perhaps gone--banished by the other
destination. Or I can comprehend nature killing it relentlessly, since
it didn't lead to propagation. Then, too, as much as was useful was
turned into a dogma for politics and priests.
“You saw in the rushlight a woman against the arras; there was a
humming of viola d'amore from the musicians' balcony; she smiled at you,
lingering, and then vanished with a whisper of brocade de Lyons on a
sanded floor. Nothing else but a soft white glove, eternally fragrant,
in your habergeon, an eternally fragrant memory; the dim vision in stone
street and coppice; a word, a message, it might be, sent across the
world of steel at death. And then, in the last flicker of vision, the
arras and the clear insistent strings, the whispering brocade de Lyons
on the landing.
“The philosophy of it,” he said in a different tone, “is exact, even
a scientific truth. But men have been more concerned with turning lead
into gold; naturally the spirit has been neglected. The science of love
has been incredibly soiled:
“The old gesture toward the stars, the bridge of perfection, the escape
from the fatality of flesh. Yet it was a service of the body made
incredibly lovely in actuality and still never to be grasped. Never to
be won. It ought to be clear to you that realized it would diminish into
quite a different thing--
“'_La figlia della sua mente, l'amorosa idea._'”
His voice grew so faint that Linda could scarcely distinguish articulate
sounds. All that he said, without meaning for her, stirred her heart.
She was used to elder enigmas of speech; her normal response was
instinctively emotional, and nothing detracted from the gravity of her
attention.
“Not in pious men,” he continued, more uncertain; “nor in seminaries of
virtue. They have their reward. But in men whose bitterness of longing
grew out of hideous fault. The distinction of beauty--not a payment for
prayers or chastity. The distinction of love ... above chests of linen
and a banker's talent and patents of nobility.... Divine need. Idiotic.
But what else, what better, offers?”
He was, she saw, terribly sick. His hands were clenched and his entire
being strained and rigid, as though he were trying to do something
tremendously difficult. At last, with infinite pain, he succeeded.
“I must get away,” he articulated.
Linda was surprised at the effort necessary for this slight
accomplishment when he had said the most bewildering things with
complete ease. Well, the elevators were right in front of him. He rose
slowly, and, with Linda standing at his side, dug a sharp hand into her
shoulder. It hurt, but instinctively she bore it and, moving forward,
partly supported him. She pressed the bell that signaled for the
elevator and it almost immediately sank into view. “Hurry,” he said
harshly to the colored operator in a green uniform; and quite suddenly,
leaving a sense of profound mystery, he disappeared.