In the middle of the festive period that connected Christmas with the
new year Arnaud turned animatedly from his breakfast scanning of the
news. “It seems,” he told her, “that a big rumpus has developed in
Hesperia over the Pleydon statue--the present Downige omnipotence, never
friendly with our old gentleman, has condemned its bronze founder.
You know what I mean. It's an insult to their pride, their money and
position, to see him perpetuated as a tramp. On the contrary he was a
very respectable individual from a prominent family and town.
“They have been moving the local heavens, ever since the monument was
placed, to have it set aside. I suppose they would have succeeded,
too, if a large amount given to the city were not contingent on its
preservation. But then they can always donate more money in the cause of
their sacred respectability.”
Linda had never, she exclaimed, heard of anything more disgusting. It
was plain that Hesperia knew nothing of art. “Every one,” she ran on
in the heat of her resentment, “every one, that is, who should decide,
agrees it's magnificent. They were frightfully lucky to get it--Dodge's
finest work.” She wrote at once to Pleydon commanding his presence and
expressing her contempt of such depravity of opinion. To her surprise he
was undisturbed, apparently, by the condemnation of his monument.
He even laughed at her energy of scorn. She was hurt, perceptibly
silenced, with a feeling of having been misunderstood or rather
undervalued. Her disturbance at any blame attached to the statue of
Simon Downige was extremely acute. But, she thought, if it failed to
worry Dodge why should she bother. She did, in spite of this philosophy;
Simon was tremendously important to her.
He stood for things: she had watched his evolution from the clay sketch,
and in Pleydon's mind, to the final heroic proportions; and she had
taken for granted that a grateful world would see him in her light.
A woman, she decided, had made the trouble; and she hated her with a
personal vigor. Pleydon said:
“I told you that old Simon was unbalanced; now you can see it by his
reception in a successful city. The sculptor--do you remember him, a
Beaux-Arts graduate?--admits that he had always opposed it, but that
political motives overbore his pure protest. There is a scheme now to
build a pavilion, for babies, and shut out the monument from open view.
They may do that but time will sweep away their walls. If I had
modeled Simon Downige, yes, he would go; but I modeled his vision, his
aspiration--the hope of all men for release and purity.
“Downige and the individual babies are unimportant compared to a vision
of perfection, of escape. As long as men live, if they live, they'll
reach up; and that gesture in itself is heaven. Not accomplishment. The
spirit dragging the flesh higher; but spirit alone--empty balloons. A
dream in bronze, harder even than men's heads, more durable than their
prejudices, so permanent that it will wear out their ignorance; and in
the end--always in the end--they'll bring their wreath.
“A replica has gone to Cottarsport, from me; and you ought to see
it there, on a block of New England granite. It's in the Common, a
windswept reach with low houses and a white steeple and the sea. It
might have been there from the beginning, rising on rock against the
pale salt day. They can go to hell in Hesperia.”
Still Linda's hurt persisted; she saw the unfortunate occurrence as a
direct blow at her pride. Arnaud, too, failed her; he was splendid in
his assault upon such rapacious stupidity; but it was only an impersonal
concern. His manner expressed the conviction that it might have been
expected. He was blind to her special enthusiasm, her long intimate
connection with the statue. Exasperated she almost told him that it was
more real to her than their house, than Vigné and Lowrie, than he. She
was stopped, fortunately, by the perception that, amazingly, the statue
was more actual than Dodge Pleydon. It touched the center of her life
more nearly.
Why, she didn't know.
If her mental confusion increased by as much as a feeling, Linda
thought, she would be close to madness. It was unbearable at practically
forty.
Lowrie said, at the worst possible moment, that he found the entire
episode ridiculously overemphasized. A statue more or less was of small
importance. If the Downige family were upset why didn't they employ
an able lawyer to dispose of it? There were many ways for such a
proceeding--
“I have no desire to hear them,” she interrupted. “You seem to know a
tremendous lot, but what good it will do you in the end who can say!
And, with all your cleverness, you haven't an ounce of appreciation for
art. Besides, I hate to see any one as young as you so sure of himself.
Often I suspect you are patronizing your father and me. It's not pretty
nor polite.”
Lowrie was obviously embarrassed by her attack, and managed the abrupt
semblance of an apology. Arnaud, who had put down his eternal book, said
nothing until the boy had vanished. “Wasn't that rather sharp?” he
asked mildly. “Perhaps,” she replied in a tone without warmth or regret.
“Somehow I am never comfortable with Lowrie.”
“You are too much alike,” he shrewdly observed. “It is laughable at
times. Did you expect your children to be fountains of sentiment?
And, look here--if I can get along in comfort with you for life you in
particular ought to put up peacefully with Lowrie. He is a damned sight
more human than, at bottom, you are; a woman of alabaster.”
“I loathe quarrels,” she admitted; “they are so vulgar. You know that
they are not like me and just said so. Oh, Arnaud, why does life get
harder instead of easier?”
He put his book aside completely and gazed at her in patient thought.
“Linda,” he said finally, “I have never heard anything that stirred me
so much; not what you said, my dear, but the recognition in your voice.”
A wistfulness of love for her enveloped him; an ineffable desire as vain
as the passion she struggled to give him in return. She smiled in an
unhappiness of apology.
“Perhaps--” he stopped, waiting any assurance whatever, his face eager
like a dusty lamp in which the light had been turned sharply up. She was
unable to stir, to move her gaze from his hopeful eyes, to mitigate by a
breath her slender white aloofness. A smile different from hers,
tender with remission, lingered in his fading irradiation. The dusk was
gathering, adding its melancholy to his age--sixty-five now. Why that
was an old man! Her sympathy vanished in her shrinking from the twilight
that was, as well, slowly, inevitably, deepening about her.
It was laughable that, as she approached an age whose only resource
was tranquillity, she grew more restless. Her present vague agitation
belonged ridiculously to youth. The philosophy of the evident that had
supported her so firmly was breaking at the most inopportune time. And
it was, she told herself, too late for anything new; the years for
that had been spent insensibly with Arnaud. Linda was very angry with
herself, for, in all her shifting state of mind, she preserved an inner
necessity for the quality of exactness expressed in her clothes. There
were literally no neglected spaces in her conscious living.
Her thoughts finally centered about the statue in Hesperia--it presented
an actual mark for her fleeting resentments. She wondered why it so
largely occupied her thoughts, moved her so personally. She watched the
papers for the scattered reports of the progress of the contention it
had roused, some ill-natured, others supposedly humorous, and nearly
all uninformed. She became, Arnaud said, the champion of the esthetic
against Dagon. He elaborated this picture until she was forced to smile
against her inclination, her profound seriousness. Linda had the feeling
that she, too, was on the pedestal that held the bronze effigy of Simon
Downige challenging the fog that obscured men. Its fate was hers. She
didn't pretend to explain how.
As time passed it seemed to her that it took her longer and longer to
dress in the morning, while her preparations couldn't be simpler; her
habit of deliberation had become nearly a vice, the precision of her
ruffles, her hair, a tyranny. She never quite lost the satisfaction of
her mirror's faultless reflection; and stopped, now, for a moment's
calm interrogation of the being--hardly more silvery cool than the
reality--before her.
Arnaud was at the table, and the gaze with which he met her was
troubled. The morning paper, she saw, was, against custom, at her place,
and she picked it up with an instinctive sense of calamity. The blackly
printed sensational headline that immediately established her fear sank
vivid and entire into her brain: an anonymous inflamed mob in Hesperia
had pulled down and destroyed Pleydon's statue. Their act was described
as a tribute to the liberality of the present Downige family in the
light of its objection to the monument.
As if in the development of her feeling Linda had a sensation of
crashing with a sickening violence from a pedestal to the ground.
Actually, it seemed, the catastrophe had happened to her. She heard,
with a sense of inutility, Arnaud denouncing the outrage; he had a
pencil in his hand for the composition of a telegram to Dodge. He
paid--but perhaps only naturally--no attention to her, suffering dully
from her fall. She shuddered before the recreated lawless approaching
voice of the mob; the naked ugly violence froze her with terror; she
felt the gross hurried hands winding ropes about her, the rending
brutality of force--
She sat and automatically took a small carved glass of orange-juice
from a bed of ice, and her chilled fingers recalled a dim image of her
mother. Arnaud was speaking, “I'm afraid this will cut through Pleydon's
security, it was such a wanton destruction of his unique power. You see,
he worked lovingly over the cast with little files and countless finite
improvements. The mold, I think, was broken. What a piece of luck the
thing's at Cottarsport.” He paused, obviously expecting her to comment;
but suddenly phrases failed her.
In place of herself she should be considering Dodge; her sympathy even
for him was submerged in her own extraordinary injury. However, she
recovered from her first gasping shock, and made an utterly commonplace
remark. Never had her sense of isolation been stronger. “I must admit,”
her husband continued, “that I looked for some small display of concern.
I give you my word there are moments when I think Pleydon himself cut
you out of stone. He isn't great enough for that, though; in the way
of perfection you successfully gild the lily. A thing held to be
impossible.”
Linda told him with amazing inanity that his opinion of her was
unreliable; and, contented, he lightly pursued his admiration of what
he called her boreal charm. At intervals she responded appropriately
and proceeded with breakfast. She had entered a region of dispassionate
consideration, her characteristic detachment, she thought, regained. She
mentally, calmly, reconstructed the motives and events that had led to
the destruction of the statue; they, at least, were evident to her.
She reaffirmed silently her conviction that it had resulted from the
stupidity, the vanity, of a woman. The limitations of men, fully as
narrow, operated in other directions.
Then, with an incredulous surprise, she was aware that the clear space
of her reason was filling with anger. Never before had such a flood
of emotion possessed her; and she surrendered herself, in an
enormous relief, to the novelty of its obliterating tide. It deepened
immeasurably, sweeping her far from the security of old positions of
indifference and critical self-possession. Linda became enraged at
a world that had concentrated all its degraded vulgarity in one
unspeakable act.