Linda without a conscious reason suddenly stopped the investigation of
her feeling for Pleydon. Even in the privacy of her thoughts an added
obscurity kept her from the customary clear reasoning. After dinner,
out in the close gloom of the garden, she watched the flicker of the
cigarettes. There was thunder, so distant and vague that for a long
while Linda thought she was deceived. She had a keen rushing sensation
of the strangeness of her situation here--Linda Hallet. The night was
like a dream from which she would stir, sigh, to find herself back again
in the past waiting for the return of her mother from one of her late
parties.
But it was Arnaud who moved and, accompanying Elouise Lowrie, went into
the house for his interminable reading. Pleydon's voice began in a low
remembering tone:
“What a fantastic place the Feldt apartment was, with that smothered
room where you said you would marry me. You must have got hold of Hallet
in the devil of a hurry. I've often tried to understand what happened;
why, all the time, you were upset--why, why, why?”
“In a way it was because a ridiculous hairdresser burned out some of my
mother's front wave,” she explained.
“Of course,” he replied derisively, “nothing could be plainer.”
She agreed calmly. “It was very plain. If you want me to try to tell you
don't interrupt. It isn't a happy memory, and I am only doing it because
I was so rotten to you.
“Yes, I can see now that it was the hairdresser and a hundred other
things exactly the same. My mother, all the women we knew, did nothing
but lace and paint and frizzle for men. I used to think it was a game
they played and wonder where the fun was. There were even hints about
that and later they particularized and it made me as sick as possible.
The men, too, were odious; mostly fat and bald; and after a while, when
they pinched or kissed me, I wanted to die.
“That was all I knew about love, I had never heard of any other--men
away from their families for what they called a good time and women
plotting and planning to give it to them or not give it to them. Then
mother, after her looks were spoiled, married Mr. Moses Feldt, and I
met Judith, who only existed for men and men's rooms and told me worse
things, I'm sure, than mother ever dreamed; and, on top of that, I met
you and you kissed me.
“But it was different from any other; it didn't shock me, and it brought
back a thrill I have always had. I wanted, then, to love you, and have
you ask me to marry you, more than anything else in the world. I was
sure, if you would only be patient, that I could change what had hurt
me into a beautiful feeling. I couldn't tell you because I didn't
understand myself.” She stopped, and Pleydon repeated, bitterly and
slow:
“Fat old bald men; and I was one with them destroying your exquisite
hope.” She heard the creak of the basket chair as he leaned forward, his
face masked in darkness. “Perhaps you think I haven't paid.
“You will never know what love is unless I can manage somehow to make
you understand how much I love you. Hallet will have to endure your
hearing it. This doesn't belong to him; it has not touched the earth.
Every one, more or less, talks about love; but not one in a thousand,
not one in a million, has such an experience. If they did it would tear
the world into shreds. It would tear them as it has me. I realize the
other, the common thing--who experimented more! This has nothing to do
with it. A boy lost in the idealism of his first worship has a faint
reflection. Listen:
“I can always, with a wish, see you standing before me. You
yourself--the folds of your sash, the sharp narrow print of your
slippers on the pavement or the matting or the rug, the ruffles about
your hands. I have the feeling of you near me with your breathing
disturbing the delicacy of your breast. There is the odor and shimmer of
your hair ... your lips move ... but without a sound.
“This vision is more real than reality, than an opera-house full of
people or the Place Vendôme; and it, you, is all I care for, all I think
about, all I want. I find quiet places and stay there for hours, with
you; or, if that isn't possible, I turn into a blind man, a dead man
warm again at the bare thought of your face. Listen:
“I've been in shining heaven with you. I have been melted to nothing and
made over again, in you, good. We have been walking together in a new
world with rapture instead of air to breathe. A slow walk through dark
trees--God knows why--like pines. And every time I think of you it is
exactly as though I could never die, as though you had burned all the
corruption out of me and I was made of silver fire. And listen:
“Nothing else is of any importance, now or afterward, you are now and
the hereafter. I see people and people and hear words and words, and I
forget them the moment they have gone, the second they are still. But I
haven't lost an inflection of your voice. When I work in clay or stone I
model and cut you into every surface and fold. I see you looking back at
me out of marble and bronze. And here, in this garden, you tried to give
me more--”
The infinitely removed thunder was like the continued echo of his voice.
There was a stirring of the leaves above her head; and the light that
had shone against the house in Elouise Lowrie's window was suddenly
extinguished. All that she felt was weariness and a confused dejection,
the weight of an insuperable disappointment. She could say nothing.
Words, even Pleydon's, seemed to her vain. The solid fact of Arnaud, of
what Dodge, more than seven years before, had robbed her, put everything
else aside, crushed it.
She realized that she would never get from life what supremely
repaid the suffering of other women, made up for them the failure of
practically every vision. She was sorry for herself, yes, and for Dodge
Pleydon. Yet he had his figures in metal and stone; his sense of the
importance of his work had increased enormously; and, well, there were
Lowrie and Vigné; it would be difficult, every one agreed, to find
better or handsomer children. But they seemed no more than shadows or
colored mist. This terrified her--what a hopelessly deficient woman she
must be! But even in the profundity of her depression the old vibration
of nameless joy reached her heart.