There was a revival of public interest in the destruction of Pleydon's
statue at Hesperia, the papers again printed accounts colored by a
variety of attitudes unembarrassed by fact; and the serious journals
united in a dignity of eminently safe praise. At first Linda made an
effort to preserve these; but soon their similarity, her inability to
find, among sonorous periods, any trace of Dodge's spirit--in reality
she knew so blindingly much more than the most penetrating critical
intellect--caused her to leave the reviews unread. No one else living
had understood Pleydon; and when descriptions of his life spoke of the
austerity in his later years, his fanatical aversion to women, Linda
thought of the brittle glove in the gilt-lacquer box.
Her own emotion, it seemed to her, was the most confused of all the
unintelligible pressures that had converted her life into an enigma.
She had a distinct sense of overwhelming loss--of something, Linda was
obliged to add, she had never owned. However, she realized that during
Pleydon's life she had dimly expected a happy accident of explanation;
until almost the last, yes--after she had returned from that ultimate
journey, she had been conscious of the presence of hope. The hope had
been for herself, created out of her constant baffled dissatisfaction.
But now the man in whom solely she had been expressed, the only possible
reason for her obstinate pride, had left her in a world that, but
for Arnaud's fondness, looked on her without remark. The loss of her
distinction had been finally evident at balls, in the dresses in which
Vigné had thought her so wonderful, and she dropped them. Here, she
repeated, was when affection, generously radiated through life, should
have reflected over her a tranquil and contented joy. She had never
given it, and she was without the ability to receive. She admitted to
herself, with a little annoyed laugh, that her old desire for inviolable
charm, for the integrity of a memorable slimness, was unimpaired. It
was, she thought, too ridiculously inappropriate for words.
Yet it had changed slightly into the recognition that what so often had
been called her beauty was all she now had for sustenance, all she had
ever had. Her mind returned continually to Pleydon, and--deep in the
mystery of his passion--she was suddenly invaded by an insistent desire
to see the monument at Cottarsport. She spoke to Arnaud at once about
this; and alone, through his delicacy of perception, Linda went to
Boston the following day.
The further ride to Cottarsport followed the sea--a brilliant serene
blue, fretted on the landward side by innumerable bare promontories,
hideous towns and factories, but bowed in a far unbroken arc at the
immaculate horizon. She left the train for a hilly cluster of houses,
gray and low like the rock everywhere apparent, dropping to a harbor
that bore a company of motionless boats with half-spread drying sails.
The day was at noon, and the sky, blue like the sea, held, still as the
anchored schooners, faint, chalky symmetrical clouds. Linda found the
Common without guidance; and at once saw, on its immovable base of
rugged granite, the bronze statue of Simon Downige. It stood well in
advance of what, evidently, was the court-house, the white steeple Dodge
had described. She found a bench by a path in the thin grass; and there,
her gloved hands folded, at rest in her lap, her gaze and longing were
lifted to the fixed aspiration.
From where she sat the seated figure was projected against the sky;
Simon's face was turned toward the west; the West that, for him, was the
future, but which for Linda represented all the past. This conviction
flooded her with unutterable sadness. A sense of failure weighed on her,
no less heavy for the fact that it was perpetually vague. Her thoughts
gathered about Dodge himself; and she recalled the curious vividness of
his vision of her as a child, perhaps ten. She, too, tried to remember
that time and age. It was almost in her grasp, but her realization was
spoiled by absurd mental fragments--the familiar illusion of a leopard
and a rider with bright hair, a forest with the ascending voices of
angels, and an ominous squat figure with a slowly nodding plumed head.
The vista of a hotel returned, a fleet recollection of marble columns
and a wide red carpet ... the white gleam and carbolized smell of a
drug-store ... a thick magazine in a brown cover. These, changed into
emotions of mingled joy and pain, shifted in bright or dim colors and
sensations. There was a slow heavy plodding of feet, now above her head,
the passage of a carried weight; and, in a flash of perception, she knew
it was a coffin. She raised her clasped hands to her breast, crying into
the sunny silence, to the figure of Simon Downige lost in dream:
“He died that night, at the Boscombe, after he had told me about the
meadows with silk tents--”
Her memory, thrilling with the echoed miraculous chord of the child of
ten, sitting gravely, alone, among the shrill satins and caustic voices
of a feminine throng, was complete. She saw herself, Linda Condon, as
objectively as Pleydon's described vision: there was a large bow on her
straight black hair, and, from under the bang, her gaze was clear and
wondering. How marvelously young she was! The vindictive curiosity of
the questioning women, intent on their rings, brought out her eager
defense of her mother, the effort to explain away the ugly fact
that--that Mr. Jasper was married.
She saw Linda descending the marble stairs to the lower floor where
the games were kept in a somber corridor, and heard a voice halting her
irresolute passage:
“Hello, Bellina.”
That wasn't her name, and she corrected him, waiting afterward to listen
to a strange fairy-like tale. The solitary, sick-looking man, with inky
shadows under fixed eyes, was so actual that she recaptured the pungent
drift of his burning cigarette. He talked about love in a bitter
intensity that hurt her. Yet, at first, he had said that she was lovely,
a touch of her ... forever in the memory. Mostly, however, he spoke of
a beautiful passion. It had largely vanished, his explanation continued;
men had come to worship other things. Plato started it.
She recalled Plato, as well, in connection with Dodge; now, it
appeared to her, that remote name had always been at the back of her
consciousness. There were other names, other men, of an age long ago in
Italy. Their ideal, religion, was contained in the adoration of a woman,
but not her body--it was a love of her spirit, the spirit their purity
of need recognized, perhaps helped to create. It was a passion as
different as possible in essence from all she had observed about her. It
was useless for common purposes, withheld from Arnaud Hallet.
The man, seriously addressing the serious uncomprehending interest of
ten, proceeded with a description of violins--but she had heard them
through all her life--and a parting that left only a white glove for
remembrance. Then he had repeated that line, in Italian, which, not long
back, her husband had recalled. The old gesture toward the stars, the
need to escape fatality--how she had suffered from that!
Yet it was a service of the body, a faith spiritual because, here, it
was never to be won, never to be realized in warm embrace. It had no
recognition in flesh, and it was the reward of no prayer or humility
or righteousness. Only beauty knew and possessed it. His image grew dim
like the blurring of his voice by pain and the shadow of death. Linda's
thoughts and longing turned again to Dodge; it seemed to her that he no
more than took up the recital where the other was silent.
Pleydon--was it at Markue's party or later?--talking about “Homer's
children” had meant the creations of great artists, in sound or color or
words or form, through that supreme love unrealized in other life. The
statue of Simon Downige, towering before her against the sky and above
the sea, held in immutable bronze his conviction. The meager bundle and
crude stick rested by shoes clogged with mud; Simon's body was crushed
with weariness; but under the sweat-plastered brow his gaze pierced
indomitable and undismayed to the vision of a place of truth.
She was choked by a sharp rush of joy at Dodge's accomplishment,
an entire understanding of the beauty he had vainly explained, the
deathless communication of old splendid courage, an unshaken divine
need, to succeeding men and hope. This had been hers. She had always
felt her presence in his success; but, until now, it had belonged
exclusively to him. Dodge had, in his love, absorbed her, and that
resulted in the statues the world applauded. She, Linda thought, had
been an element easily dismissed. It had hurt her pride almost beyond
endurance, the pride that took the form of an inner necessity for the
survival of her grace--all she had.
She had even asked him, in a passing resentment, why he had never
directly modeled her, kept, with his recording genius, the shape of her
features. She had gone to him in a blinder vanity for the purpose of
stamping her participation in his triumph on the stupid insensibility
of their world. How incredible! But at last she could see that he had
preserved her spirit, her secret self, from destruction. He had cheated
death of her fineness. The delicate perfection of her youth would
never perish, never be dulled by old age or corrupted in death. It had
inspired and entered into Pleydon's being, and he had lifted it on the
pedestal rising between the sea and sky.
She was in the Luxembourg, in that statue of Cotton Mather, the somber
flame, about which he had written with a comment on the changing
subjects of his creations. From the moment when he sat beside her on
the divan in that room stifling with incense, with the naked glimmer of
women's shoulders, she had been the source of his power. She had
been his power. Linda smiled quietly, in retrospect, at her years of
uncertainty, the feeling of waste, that had robbed her of peace. How
complete her mystification had been! And, all the while, she had had
the thrill of delight, of premonition, born in her through the forgotten
hour with the man who had died.
The sun, moving in celestial space, shifted the shadow about the base
of Simon Downige's monument. The afternoon was advancing. She rose and
turned, looking out over the sea to the horizon as brightly sharp as a
curved sword. The life of Cottarsport, below her, proceeded in detached
figures, an occasional unhurried passage. The boats in the harbor were
slumberous. It was time to go. She gazed again, for a last view, at the
bronze seated figure; and a word of Pleydon's, but rather it was Greek,
wove its significance in the placid texture of her thoughts. Its exact
shape evaded her, a difficult word to recall--_Katharsis_, the purging
of the heart. About her was the beating of the white wings of a Victory
sweeping her--a faded slender woman in immaculate gloves and a small
matchless hat--into a region without despair.