The faint ringing of the bell from outside that probably announced
Arnaud sounded unreal, futile, to Linda. He came into the studio, and
at once a discussion began between the two men of the difference in
the surfaces of clay and bronze. The talk then shifted to the pictorial
sources of the heroic Simon Downige before them, and Linda declared,
“Dodge, you have never made a head of me. How very unflattering!”
“You're an affair for a painter,” he replied; “Goya or Alfred Stevens.
No one but Goya could have found a white for you, with the quality of
flower petals; and Stevens would have fixed you in an immortality of
delicate color, surrounded by your Philadelphia garden.” He stood quite
close to her, with his jacket dragged forward by hands thrust into its
pockets, and he added at the end of a somber interrogation, “But if you
would really like to know why--”
In a moment more, she recognized, Dodge would explain his feeling for
her--to Arnaud, to any one who might be present. The gleam in his
eyes, his remoteness from earthly concern, were definitely not normal.
Pleydon, his love, terrified her. “No,” she said with an assumed hurried
lightness, “don't try to explain. I must manage to survive the injury to
my vanity.”
They left New York almost immediately, Pleydon suddenly determining to
go with them; and later were scattered through the Hallet household.
Vigné and her husband were temporarily living there; with their heads
close together they were making endless computations, numerous floor
plans and elevations. Linda, at the piano in the drawing-room, could
hear them through the hall. Pleydon was lounging in a chair beyond her.
She couldn't play but she was able, slowly, to pick out the notes
of simple and familiar airs--echoes of Gluck and blurred motives of
Scarlatti. It was for herself, she explained; the sounds, however crude
and disconnected, brought things back to her. What things, she replied
to Pleydon's query, she didn't in the least know; but pleasant.
The fact that she understood so little depressed her with increasing
frequency. It was well enough to be ignorant as a girl, or even as a
young woman newly married; but she had left all that behind; she had
lost her youth without any compensating gain of knowledge. Linda could
not assure herself that life was clearer than it had been to her serious
childhood. It had always been easily measured on the surface; she
had had a very complete grasp of its material aspects almost at once,
accomplishing exactly what she had planned. Perhaps this was all;
and her trouble an evidence of weakness--the indecision, she saw
with contempt, that kept so many people in a constant agitation of
disappointment.
Perhaps this was enough; more than the majority had or accomplished. She
made, again, a resolute effort to be contented, at rest. Her straying
fingers clumsily wrought a fragmentary refrain that mocked her
determination. It wasn't new, this--this dissatisfaction; but it had
grown sharper. As she was older her restlessness increased at the
realization that life, opportunity, were slipping from her. Soon she
would be forty.
The conviction seized her that most lives reflected hers in that their
questioning was never answered. The fortunate, then, were the incurious
and the hearts undisturbed by a maddening thrill. She said aloud, “The
ones who never heard music.” Pleydon was without a sign that she had
spoken. Her emotions were very delicate, very fragile, and enormously
difficult to perceive. They were like plants in stony ground. Where had
she heard that--out of the Bible? Then she thought of her failure to get
anything from religion--a part of her inability to drink at the springs
which others declared so refreshing. Linda pressed her hands more
sharply on the keys and the answering discord had the effect of waking
her to reality.
Pleydon remained until the following afternoon, and then was lost--in
the foundry casting his statue--for six months. Arnaud went over to view
the completion of the bronze and returned filled with enthusiasm. “Its
simplicity is the surprising part,” he told her. “The barest statement
possible. But Pleydon himself is in a disturbing condition; I can't
decide if it is mental or physical. The fever of course; yet that
doesn't account for his distance from ordinary living. The truth is, I
suppose, that men weren't designed for great arts, and nature, like
the jealous God of the Hebrews, retaliates. It is absurd, but Pleydon
reminds me of you; you're totally different. I suppose it's because of
the detachment you have in common.” He veered to a detail of Lowrie's
first year at a university, and exhibited, against a decent endeavor to
the contrary, his boundless pride in their son.
The boy was, Linda acknowledged, more than commonly dependable and
able. He was heavy, like his father, and so diffident that he almost
stuttered; but his mental processes flashed in quick intuitive
perceptions. Lowrie was an easy and brilliant student; and, perhaps
because of this, of his mental certainty, he was not intimate with
her as Arnaud had hoped and predicted. It seemed to Linda that he
instinctively penetrated her inner doubt and regarded it without
sympathy. In this he was her son. Lowrie was a confident and
unsympathetic critic of humanity.
Even now, so soon, there was no question of his success in the law his
fitness had elected. The springs of his being were purely intellectual,
reasoning. In him Linda saw magnified her own coldness; and, turned on
herself, she viewed it with an arbitrary feminine resentment. He was
actually courteous to her; but under all their intercourse there was a
perceptible impatience. His scorn of other women, girls, however, was
openly expressed and honest; it had no trace of the mere affectation
of pessimism natural to his age. Arnaud, less thoughtful than she, was
vastly entertained by this, and drew Lowrie out in countless sly sallies
and contradictions.
Yes, he would succeed, but, after all, what would his success be
worth--placed, that was, against Vigné's radiant happiness, Bailey
Sandby's quiet eyes and the quality of his return home each evening?
Her thoughts came back to Pleydon--she had before her a New York paper
describing the ceremony of unveiling his Simon Downige at Hesperia.
There was a long learned article praising its beauty and emphasizing
Pleydon's eminence. He was, it proceeded, an anomaly in an age of
momentary experimental talents--a humanized Greek force. He didn't
belong to to-day but to yesterday and to-morrow. This gave her an
uncomfortable vision of Dodge in space, with no warm points of contact.
She, too, was suspended in that vague emptiness. Linda had the sensation
of grasping at streamers, forms, of sparkling mist. A strange position
in view of her undeniable common sense, the solid foundations of her
temperament and experience. She saw from the paper, further, that the
Downige who had commissioned the monument was dead.