It was fall, October, and the day was a space of pale gold foliage
wreathed in blue garlands of mist. The gardener was busy with a wooden
rake and wheelbarrow in which he carted away dead leaves for burning.
The fire was back of the low fence, in the rear, and Linda, at the
dining-room window, could hear the fierce small crackle of flames; the
drifting pungent smoke was like a faint breath of ammonia. Arnaud had
left for the day, Lowrie was at the university, while Vigné and her
husband--moving toward their ultimate colonial threshold--had taken a
small house. She was alone.
As usual.
However, in her present state her solitude had lost its inevitability;
she failed to see why it must continue until the end of time. She could
no longer discover a sufficient reason for her limitless endurance,
her placid acceptance of all that chance, or any inconsiderable person,
happened to dictate. She wasn't like that in the least. Her temper had
solidified as though it were ice, taking everywhere the form in which
it was held. It was a reality. She determined, as well, that her feeling
should not melt back into the familiar acceptance of a routine that had
led her blindfolded across such an extent of life.
She understood now, in a large part, her disturbance at the indignity
to Dodge's monument--he had assured her that she was its inspiration;
except for her it would never have been realized, he would have kept
on modeling those Newport fountains, continued with the Susanna Nodas,
spending himself ignobly. He loved her, and that love had resulted in a
statue the world of art, of taste, honored. But it was she all the while
they were approving, discussing, writing about, Linda Condon.
She had always been that, Pleydon had informed her, never Linda
Hallet--in spite of Arnaud and their children. It sounded like nonsense;
but, at the bottom, it was truth. Of course it couldn't be explained,
for example, to the man who had every right, every evidence, to consider
himself her husband. Nothing was susceptible of explanation. Absolutely
nothing! There was the earth, which appeared to be everything, the
houses you entered, the streets you passed over, the people among whom
you lived, yet that wasn't all. Heavens, no! It was quite unimportant
compared with--with other facts latent in the mind and blood.
Dodge Pleydon's love was one of those other facts; it was simply
impossible to deny its existence, its power. Dodge had been totally
changed by it, born over again. But she, who had been the source, had
had no good from it, nothing except the thrill that had always been
hers. No one knew of it, counted it as her achievement, paid the
slightest attention to her. Arnaud smiled indulgently, Lowrie scoffed.
When the statue had been thrown down they thought of it merely as a
deplorable part of the day's news. They hadn't seen that she, Linda
Condon, was unspeakably insulted.
She doubted if she could bring them to comprehend what had happened--to
her. Or if Arnaud understood, if she made it plain, what good would be
done! That wouldn't save her, put her back again on the pedestal. The
latter was necessary. Linda recognized that a great deal of her feeling
was based on pride; but it was a pride entirely justified. She had no
intention of submitting to the coarse hands and ropes of public affront.
Throughout her life she had rebelled against any profanation of her
person, she had hated to be touched.
Every instinct, she found, every delicate self-opinion, was bound into
Pleydon's success; the latter had kept her alive. Without it existence
would have been intolerable. It was unbearable now.
She discharged the small daily duties of her efficient housekeeping with
a contemptuous exactness; for years she had accomplished, in herself,
nothing more. But at last a break had come. Linda recognized this
without any knowledge of what reparation it would find. She wasn't
concerned with that, a small detail. It would be apparent. Arnaud
was silent through dinner; tired, it seemed. She saw him as if at the
distant end of a dull corridor--as she looked back. There was no change
in her liking for him. Mechanically she noticed the disorder of his
scant hair and rumpled sleeves.
Not until, waking sharply, in the middle of the night, did she have a
glimpse of a possible course--she might live with Dodge and perfectly
express both her retaliation and her accomplishment. In that way she
would reestablish herself beside him and place their vision in bronze on
an elevation beyond the spite of the envious and the blind.
It was so directly simple that she was surprised it hadn't occurred
to her before. The possibility had always been a part, unsuspected and
valuable, of her special being; the largely condemned faults of
her character and experience had at least brought her this--a not
inconsiderable freedom in a world everywhere barred by the necessity
for upholding a hypocritical show of superiority to honest desire. The
detachment that deprived her of life's conventional joys released
her from its common obligations. That conviction, however, was too
intimately connected with all her inheritance to bring her any conscious
dramatic sense of rebellion or high feeling of justified indignation.
Sleep had deserted her, and she waited for the dawn in the windows that
would bring her escape. It was very slow coming; the blackness took on
a grayer tone, like ink with added faint infusions of water. Slowly the
blackness dissolved and she heard the stir of the sparrows in the ivy.
There was the passing rumble of an early electric car on the paved aged
street, the blurred hurried shuffle of a workman's clumsy shoes. The
brightening morning was cool with a premonitory touch of frost; at the
window she saw a vanishing silver sheen on the lawn and board fence.
A sensation of youth pervaded her; and while, perhaps, it was out of
keeping with her years, she had still her vitality unspent; she was
without a trace of the momentary frost on the grass. She was tranquil,
leisurely; her heart evenly sent its life through her unflushed body.
Piece by piece she put on her web-like garments, black and white;
brushing the heavy stream of her hair and tying the inevitable sash
about her supple waist.
Below she met Arnaud with an unpleasant shock--she hadn't given him
a thought. Her feeling now was hardly more than annoyance at her
forgetfulness. He would be terribly distressed at her going, and she was
genuinely sorry for this, poised at the edge of an explanation of her
purpose. Arnaud was putting butter and salt into his egg-cup, after
that he would grind the pepper from a French mill--pure spices were a
precision of his--and she waited until the operation was completed.
Then it occurred to her that all she could hope to accomplish by
admitting her intention was the ruin of his last hour alone with her.
He was happier, gayer, than usual. But his age was evident in his voice,
his gestures. Linda marveled at her coldness, her ruthless disregard of
Arnaud's claim on her, of his affection as deep as Pleydon's, perhaps no
less fine but not so imperative. Yet Arnaud had had over twenty years of
her life, the best; and she had never deceived him about the quality
of her gift. It was right, now, for Dodge to have the remainder.
But whether it were right or wrong, there was no failure of her
determination to go to Pleydon in the vindication of her existence.
She delayed speaking to Arnaud until, suddenly, breakfast was over. He
seldom went to the law office where he had been a partner, but stayed
about the lower floor of his house, in the library or directing small
outside undertakings. Either that or he left, late, for the Historical
Society, with which his connection and interest were uninterrupted.
As Linda passed him in the hall he was fumbling in the green bag that
accompanied all his journeyings into the city; and she gathered that he
intended to make one of his occasional sallies. She proceeded above,
to her room, where with steady hands she pinned on her hat. It would
be impossible to take any additional clothes, and she'd have to content
herself with something ready-made until she could order others in
the establishment of her living with Dodge. Her close-fitting jacket,
gloves, and a short cape of sables were collected; she gazed finally,
thoughtfully, about the room, and then, with a subdued whisper of
skirts, descended the stair. Arnaud was in the library, bending over
the table that bore his accumulation of papers and serious journals. A
lingering impulse to speak was overborne by the memory of what, lately,
she had endured--she saw him at the dusty end of that long corridor
through which she had monotonously journeyed, denied of her one triumph,
lost in inconsequential shadows--and she continued firmly to the door
which closed behind her with a normal mute smoothness, an inanimate
silence.