In the morning there was a telegram from Judith Feldt, saying that her
mother was dangerously sick, and she had lunch on the train for New
York. The apartment seemed stuffy; there was a trace of dinginess,
neglect, about the black velvet rugs and hangings. Her mother, she
found, had pneumonia; there was practically no chance of her recovering.
Linda sat for a short while by the elder's bed, intent upon a totally
strange woman, darkly flushed and ravished in an agonizing difficulty of
breathing. Linda had a remembered vision of her gold-haired and gay
in floating chiffons, and suddenly life seemed shockingly brief. A
serious-visaged clergyman entered the room as she left and she heard the
rich soothing murmur of a confident phrase.
The Stella Condon who had become Mrs. Moses Feldt had had little time
for the support of the church; although Linda recalled that she had
uniformly spoken well of its offices. To condemn Christianity, she had
asserted, was to invite bad luck. She treated this in exactly the way
she regarded walking under ladders or spilling salt or putting on a
stocking wrong. Linda, however, had disregarded these possibilities of
disaster and, with them, religion.
A great many people, she noticed, talked at length about it; women in
their best wraps and with expensive little prayer books left the hotels
for various Sunday morning services, and ministers came in later for
tea. All this, she understood, was in preparation for heaven, where
everybody, who was not in hell, was to be forever the same and yet
radiantly different. It seemed very vague and far away to Linda, and,
since there was such a number of immediate problems for her to consider,
she had easily ignored the future. When now, with her mother dying, it
was thrust most uncomfortably before her.
She half remembered sentences, admonitions, of the godly--a woman had
once told her that dancing and low gowns were hateful in the sight of
God, some one else that playing-cards were an instrument of the devil.
Pleasure, she had gathered, was considered wrong, and she instinctively
put these opinions, together with a great deal else, aside as envious.
That expressed her whole experience. She had never keenly associated the
thought of death with herself before, and she was unutterably revolted
by the impending destruction of her fine body, the delicate care
of which formed her main preoccupation in life. Age was supremely
distasteful, but this other ... she shuddered.
Linda wanted desperately to preserve the whiteness of her skin, the
flexible black distinction of her hair, yes--her beauty. Here, again,
with other women the vicarious immortality of children would be
sufficient. But not for her. She was in the room that had been hers
before marriage, with her infinite preparations for the night at an
end; and, her hair loose across the blanched severity of her attire,
her delicately full arms bare, she clasped her cold hands in stabbing
apprehension.
She would do anything, anything, to escape that repulsive fatality to
her lavished care. It was only to be accomplished by being good; and
goodness was in the charge of the minister. She saw clearly and at once
her difficulty--how could she go to a solemn man in a clerical vest and
admit that she was solely concerned by the impending loss of her beauty.
The promised splendor of heaven, in itself, failed to move her--it
threatened to be monotonous; and she was honest in her recognition that
charity, the ugliness of poverty, repelled her. Linda was certain that
she could never change in these particulars; she could only pretend.
A surprising multiplication of such pretense occurred to her in people
regarded as impressively religious. She had seen men like that--she
vaguely thought of the name Jasper--going off with her mother in cabs
to dinners that must have been “godless.” She wondered if this mere
attitude, the public show, were enough. And an instinctive response told
her that it was not. If all she had been informed about the future were
true she decided that her mother's chance was no worse than that of any
false display of virtue.
She, Linda, could do nothing.
The funeral ceremony with its set form--so inappropriate to her mother's
qualities--was even more remote from Linda's sympathies than was common
in her encounters. But Mr. Moses Feldt's grief appeared to her actual
and affecting. He invested every one with the purity of his own spirit.
She left New York at the first possible moment with the feeling that she
was definitely older. The realization, she discovered, happened in
that way--ordinarily giving the flight of time no consideration it was
brought back to her at intervals of varying length. As she aged they
would grow shorter.
The result of this experience was an added sense of failure; she tried
more than ever to overcome her indifference, get a greater happiness
from her surroundings and activity. Linda cultivated an attention to
Lowrie and Vigné. They responded charmingly but her shyness with them
persisted in the face of her inalienable right to their full possession.
She insisted, too, on going about vigorously in spite of Arnaud's
humorous groans and protests. She forced herself to talk more to the
men attracted to her, and assumed, with disconcerting ease, an air of
sympathetic interest. But, unfortunately, this brought on her a rapid
increase of the love-making that she found so fatiguing.
She studied her husband thoughtfully through the evenings at home,
before the Franklin stove, or, in summer, in the secluded garden.
Absolutely nothing was wrong with him; he had, after several deaths,
inherited even more money; and, in his deprecating manner where it was
concerned, devoted it to her wishes. Except for books, and the clothes
she was forced to remind him to get, he had no personal expenses. In
addition to the money he never offended her, his relationships and
manner were conducted with an inborn nice formality that preserved her
highest self-opinion.
Yet she was never able to escape from the limitations of a calm
admiration; she couldn't lose herself, disregard herself in a flood of
generous emotion. When, desperately, she tried, he, too, was perceptibly
ill at ease. Usually he was undisturbed, but once, when she stood beside
him with her coffee cup at dinner, he disastrously lost his equanimity.
Tensely putting the cup away he caught her with straining hands.
“Oh, Linda,” he cried, “is it true that you love me! Do you really
belong to us--to Vigné and Lowrie and me? I can't stand it if you won't
... some day.”
She backed away into the opening of a window, against the night, from
the justice of his desire; and she was cold with self-detestation as her
fingers touched the glass. Linda tried to speak, to lie; but, miserably
still, she was unable to deceive him. The animation, the fervor of his
longing, swiftly perished. His arms dropped to his side. An unbearable
constraint deepened with the silence in the room, and later he lightly
said:
“You mustn't trifle with my ancient heart, Linda, folly and age--”