After Mrs. Maitland had had an interview with the Dean, she went off
across the yard, under the great elms dripping in the rainy January
thaw. Following his directions, she found her way through the corridors
of a new building whose inappropriate expensiveness was obvious at
every turn. Blair had rooms there, as had most of the sons of rich
fathers. The whole place smelt of money! In Blair's apartment money was
less obvious than beauty--but it was expensive beauty. He had a few
good pictures, and on one wall a wonderful tapestry of forest foliage
and roebucks, that he had picked up in Europe at a price which added to
the dealer's affection for traveling Americans. The furnishing was in
quiet and, for that period, remarkably good taste; masculine enough to
balance a certain delicacy of detail--exquisite Tanagra figures,
water-colors and pastels of women in costumes of rose and violet gauze,
incense smoldering in an ivory jar, and much small bijouterie that
meant an almost feminine appreciation of exquisite and costly
prettiness.
Mrs. Maitland came tramping down the hall, her face set and stern; but
suddenly, almost at Blair's door, she paused. Some one was singing; she
knew the voice--beautiful, joyous, beating and pulsating with life:
"Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine."
She moved over to a window that lit the long corridor, and listened:
"Or leave a kiss . . ."
Sarah Maitland stared out into the rain; the bare branches of the trees
whipped against one another in the wind, but she did not see them. She
leaned her forehead on the glass, listening to the golden voice. A warm
wave seemed to rise in her breast, a wave of cosmic satisfaction in
this vitality that was _hers_, because he was hers! Her eyes blurred so
with emotion that she did not see the rocking branches in the rain. All
the hardness of her face melted, under those melting cadences into
exultant maternity:
"Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine;
The thirst that from the soul--"
She smiled, then turned and knocked peremptorily at her son's door.
Blair, pausing in his song to comment on a thirst that rises otherwhere
than in the soul, roared out a jolly command to "come in!" but for an
instant he did not realize who stood on the threshold; nor was his
mother able to distinguish him in the group of men lounging about a
room dim with tobacco smoke. He was standing with his back to the door,
pulling a somewhat reluctant cork from a bottle of sherry gripped
between his knees.
Blair was immensely popular at college, not only because of the easy
generosities of his wealth,--which were often only a pleasant form of
selfishness that brought the fellows about him as honey brings flies,
but because of a certain sympathetic quality of mind, a genius for
companionship that was almost a genius for friendship. Now, his room
was full of men. One of his guests was sitting on the window-sill,
kicking his heels and swaying rhythmically back and forth to the twang
of his banjo. One had begun to read aloud with passionate emphasis a
poem, of which happily Mrs. Maitland did not catch the words; all of
them were smoking. The door opened, but no one entered. One of the
young men, feeling the draught, glanced languidly over his
shoulder,--and got on his feet with extraordinary expedition! He said
something under his breath. But it was the abrupt silence of the room
that made Blair turn round. It did not need his stammering dismay, his
half-cringing--"Clear out, will you, you fellows "--to get the men out
of the room. They did not know who she was, but they knew she was
Somebody. She did not speak, but the powerful personality seemed to
sweep in and clear the atmosphere of its sickly triviality. She stood
blocking up the doorway, looking at them; they were mostly Seniors, but
there was not a man among them who did not feel foolish under that
large and quiet look. Then she stepped a little aside. The movement was
unmistakable. They jostled one another like a flock of sheep in their
effort to get away quickly. Somebody muttered, "Good afternoon--" but
the others were speechless. They left a speechless host behind them.
Mrs. Maitland, her rusty bonnet very much on one side, watched them go;
then she closed the door behind them, and stood looking at her son who
was still holding the corkscrew in his hands. Her feet were planted
firmly wide apart, her hands were on her hips; her eyebrow was lifting
ominously. "Well?" she said; with the echo of that golden voice still
in her ears, her own voice was, even to herself, unexpectedly mild.
"I didn't expect you," Blair managed to say.
"I inferred as much," she said dryly; "so this is the way you keep up
with your classes?"
"There are no lectures at this time of day," he said. "If you had been
so kind, my dear mother, as to let me know you were coming"--he spoke
with that exaggerated and impertinent politeness that confesses fright;
"I would have met you. Instead of that, you--you--you burst in--" he
was getting whiter and whiter. The thought that the men had seen the
unkempt figure, the powerful face, the straggling locks of hair, the
bare hands,--seen, in fact, the unlovely exterior of a large and
generous nature, a nature which, alas, he, her son, had never seen;
that they had seen her, and guessed, of course, that she was his
mother, was positively unendurable to Blair. He tried to speak, but his
voice shook into silence. His dismay was not entirely ignoble; the
situation was excruciating to a man whose feeling for beauty was a form
of religion; his mortification had in it the element of horror for a
profaned ideal; his mother was an esthetic insult to motherhood.
"I've no fault to find with your friends being here, if they don't
interfere with your studies," Mrs. Maitland said.
"Oh," he said rather blankly; then his shame of her stung him into
fury: "why didn't you tell me that you--"
"I've been to see the Dean," she said; "sit down there and listen to
me. Here, give me a chair; not that pincushion thing! Give me a chair
fit for a man to sit on,--if you've got one in this upholstery shop."
Blair, with trembling hands, pushed a mahogany chair to her side. He
did not sit down himself. He stood with folded arms and downcast eyes.
She was not unkind; she was not even ungentle. She was merely explicit:
_he was a fool_. All this business,--she pointed to the bottle and the
empty glasses; all this business was idiotic, it was a boy's
foolishness. "It shows how young you are, Blair," she said kindly,
"though the Lord knows you are old enough in years to have some sense!"
But if he kept the foolishness up, and this other tomfoolery on account
of which she had had to leave the Works and spend her valuable time
talking to the Dean, why, he might be expelled. He would certainly be
suspended. And that would put off his getting into business for still
another year. "And you are twenty-four!" she said.
While she talked she looked about her, and the mother-softness began to
die out of her eyes. Sarah Maitland had never seen her son's room; she
saw, now, soft-green hangings, great bowls of roses, a sideboard with
an array of glasses, a wonderfully carved ivory jar standing on a
teak-wood table whose costliness, even to her uneducated eyes, was
obvious. Suddenly she put on her spectacles, and still talking, rose,
and walked slowly about the room glancing at the water-colors. By and
by, just at the end of her harangue,--to which Blair had listened in
complete silence,--she paused before a row of photographs on the
mantelpiece; then, in the midst of a sentence, she broke off with an
exclamation, leaned forward, and seizing a photograph, tore it in two,
across the smiling face and the bare bosom, across the lovely, impudent
line of the thigh, and flung it underfoot. "Shame on you! to let your
mother see a thing like that!"
"I didn't ask my mother to see it."
"If you have thoughts like this," she said, "Elizabeth did well to
throw you over for David."
Blair lifted one eyebrow with a glimmer of interest. "Oh, David has got
her, has he?"
"At any rate, he's a _man!_ He doesn't live like this"--she made a
contemptuous gesture; "muddling with silks and paintings, and pictures
of bad women! What kind of a room is this for a man? Full of flowers
and stinking jars, and cushions, and truck? It's more fit for a--a
creature like that picture"--she set her heel on the smiling face;
"than for a man! I ought never to have sent you here. I ought to have
put you to puddling." She looked at him in growing agitation. "My God!
Blair, what are you--living this way, with silks and perfumery and clay
baby dolls? You've got no guts to you! I didn't mind your making a fool
of yourself; that's natural; nobody can get to be a man till he's been
a fool; but this--" She stood there, with one hand on the mantelpiece
beside the row of photographs and bits of carving and little silver
trinkets, and looked at him in positive fright. "And you are _my_ son,"
she said.
The torrent of her angry shame suddenly swept Blair's manhood of
twenty-four years away; her very power stripped him bare as a baby; it
almost seemed as if she had sucked his masculinity out of him and
incorporated it into herself. He stood there like a cringing schoolboy
expecting to be whipped. "One of the men gave me that picture; I--"
"You ought to have slapped his face! Listen to me: you are going to be
looked after,--do you hear me? You are going to be watched. Do you
understand?" She gathered up the whole row of photographs, innocent and
offensive together, and threw them into the fire. "You are going to
walk straight, or you are coming home, and going to work."
It was a match to gunpowder; in an instant Blair's temper, the terrific
temper of the uniformly and lazily amiable man, flashed into furious
words.
Stammering with rage, he told her what he thought of her; to record his
opinion is not for edification. Even Sarah Maitland flinched before it.
She left him with a bang. She saw the Dean again, and her
recommendations of espionage were so extreme and so unwise that he
found himself taking Blair's part in his effort to save the young man
from the most insolent intrusion upon his privacy. She went back to
Mercer in a whirl of anger but in somber silence. She had scorched and
stung under the truths her son told her about herself; she had bled
under the lies she had told him as to her feeling for him. She looked
ten years older for that hour in his room. But she had nothing to say.
She told poor, frightened Nannie that she had "seen Master Blair"; she
added that he was a fool. To Robert Ferguson she was a little more
explicit:
"Blair has not been behaving himself; he's in debt; he has been
gambling. See that all these bills are paid. Tell Watson to give him a
hundred dollars more a month; I won't have him running in debt in this
way. Now what about the Duluth order?"