I
It now became the aim of Angelica’s life to satisfy Eddie. She felt that
his standard was the right one, however painfully high it might be, and
that he was genuinely concerned with helping her to attain it. And she
felt that, in spite of his youthfulness and his somewhat grandiloquent
air, he was a remarkable and an admirable man.
The more she saw of him, the more she admired him. She was a shrewd
enough observer, yet she never detected in him a single lapse from his
own rigid principles. What he set out to do, he did; what he determined
to be, he was. She had not knowledge or experience enough to see that he
was ignorant, crude, and childlike; she could see only his force, his
strength of will, the earnestness of his ambition, and his complete
ingenuousness.
He went directly to Polly. He told her that Angelica was ambitious, and
that he wished to help her.
"So any evenings that you don’t need her," he said, "she can come to me
and study. I’ll look out some books for her."
Polly smiled and agreed.
"It’s another of poor Eddie’s Utopian schemes," she said to her
mother-in-law. "I don’t know what he expects to accomplish with the
girl."
"I only hope _she_ won’t accomplish anything!" said Mrs. Russell. "She’s
very pretty, and Eddie’s so susceptible. Of course, he thinks it’s a sin
to think of a girl as a girl, but still----”
They didn’t at all like this educational project, but Mrs. Russell was
too careless and Polly too sensible to interfere. Besides which, it
didn’t look really alarming. Eddie was not the sort--it would have been
impossible to Eddie--to contemplate illicit relations with Angelica, and
with his extreme propriety he was certainly not likely to consider
marrying her. It was simply an annoyance to have her thus exalted. They
were irritated and somewhat contemptuous, but they said nothing. They
took care never to discuss Eddie in her presence.
It was a recognized fact that she and Eddie were allies. They were oddly
alike in many ways. They had the same sort of careless austerity;
neither of them cared whether a chair were comfortable or not, the soup
hot or cold, the weather propitious; they disdained fatigue, were ready
to work all day and all night to achieve an object, and had a fierce and
driving ambition for power and distinction. But Angelica was coarser and
stronger, while Eddie was more sensitive and very much more scrupulous.
He was ruled by ideas, she was ruled by her vigorous impulses.
Polly very rarely wanted Angelica in the evening, and Mrs. Russell dared
not summon her, so that it became quite a usual thing for her to go
up-stairs with Eddie directly after dinner and settle down with some
valuable book of his selection. He didn’t make any attempt really to
teach her; she could as well have sat in her own room to read, but that
would have entirely destroyed the character of the thing for Eddie. She
must be sitting there, under his eye, docile, earnest, his pupil.
Sometimes he worked, sometimes he was himself engaged with one of his
instructive books, which he bought in sets; but whatever it was, he very
rarely spoke to her. He maintained his pose of imperturbability, which
she knew well enough to be only a pose.
It didn’t take her long to see how it was with him. She understood that
sort of thing so well! She saw how drawn he was to her, how she stirred
his ardent blood; and she rejoiced and brought out all her tricks to
torment him. When she wanted something explained, she would bring her
book to him and stand beside him, leaning against him, bending over so
that her hair brushed his cheek. She had attitudes that were poems of
allurement; there were certain tones in her voice, certain little
gestures, which she saw enthralled and disturbed and shocked him.
"She doesn’t know what she’s doing!" he would think.
Well, she didn’t exactly. She was well enough aware of the effect of her
naughty wiles upon him, and upon other men; but she had never
experienced the thing herself, never yet been transfixed by a dart such
as she delighted to shoot. At first she was proud and gleeful; but after
she had seen his painful effort to retain his dignity--his majesty, one
might say--undisturbed, she felt a sort of respectful pity for him, and
desisted.
She had no illusions; she didn’t fancy that his inclination toward her
was love; she never dreamed of marrying him, and she understood him and
herself too well even to contemplate any other sort of alliance. She
ceased her tricks, became honest and sober with him, and sat at his feet
to learn what she could. The knowledge that she was desirable in his
eyes did good to Angelica, for it gave her more confidence, more hope of
attaining ultimate magnificence. She showed him her natural self,
inquisitive, eager, strong, ready for any sacrifice, any denial, that
might help her in her progress, a nature at once ardent and calculating,
a cool, shrewd, subtle Italian mind.
As for herself, she wasn’t in the slightest degree attracted by Eddie.
She admired him and respected him, she felt a warm friendliness toward
him, but no smallest trace of love or desire. It wasn’t possible; he
wasn’t the man for her; he wasn’t her sort.
In contrast, and running parallel with this life of effort and progress
under Eddie’s direction, ran the other existence, the lazy, soft life of
the harem. One-half of her time she was studying, reflecting, earnestly
considering her manners and deportment; the other half she spent with
Mrs. Russell and Polly, in a thoroughly demoralizing uselessness.
Laziness was Polly’s darling vice. She had long passed the stage of
struggling against it; now she hugged it, enjoyed it without shame. She
lay in bed, in a chaise-longue, or on a sofa, hour after hour, smoking
cigarettes, lost in her sorrowful reveries. Where on earth was she to
find an incentive to activity? There was no one whom she might love and
serve; no effort was necessary to obtain all the luxuries possible. Her
old love of her art lay buried beneath her grief; she felt that she had
all that she could ever expect in life.
She had got quite used to Angelica now, and more or less fond of her.
She liked to have the girl near, sitting with one of Eddie’s books;
absorbed in it, yet instantly ready for any service required.
"Do you know, Angelica," Polly said to her one day, "the very nicest
thing about you is that you never fidget!"
Angelica considered that.
"No," she said. "I know I don’t. I see other people squirming and
wriggling all the time, and I wonder--I don’t know--I _am_ quiet; but
I’ve got lots of life in me."
"I should say you had! Just my antithesis, aren’t you? I’m quiet, too,
but it’s because I haven’t any life in me at all."
"Well," said Angelica, displaying no interest in Polly’s state of mind,
and reverting, as she generally did, to herself, "I’m always kind of
expecting something to happen. So I just--wait."
Her naïve egoism never affronted Polly. Disillusioned, she would have
been rendered uneasy by affection or great interest; she liked it this
way, with no pretense on either side, nothing to keep up. She never
affected any interest in Angelica, although she couldn’t attain her
companion’s supreme self-absorption. She was obliged, now and then, to
ask a question; in fact, she couldn’t help being curious about Angelica,
who was not at all curious about her.
She was sometimes a little piqued by the young creature’s cool
assumption that she was of no interest. She knew, as all other people
know, what lay within herself, how different she was from every one else
who had ever lived, how interesting she was, both in her qualities and
her experiences, a thing true of every one; and yet how impossible it is
to make others see it!
Polly was a woman of curious temperament--intense, sensitive, flexible,
and yet protected and perhaps isolated by a certain cool good sense. She
was an artist, a musician, a woman who had twice loved and twice been
most cruelly deceived and rebuffed, who had suffered and thought very
much and very bitterly, if not very profoundly; but she was also the
simple daughter of a small town, a woman who liked a long and leisurely
gossip, who had sane and healthy blood flowing beneath her idle
hypochondria. Woman of the world, smoker of cigarettes, reader of the
most astounding books, seasoned as she was, disillusioned, heart-sick, a
bit theatrical, perhaps, in her utter indifference, she was nevertheless
the same Polly who would have heartily enjoyed a day spent in
jelly-making, or nut-gathering, or sewing with a friendly and talkative
group of her own Ohio women.
She had very little in common with Mrs. Russell. They didn’t really like
each other, but being unoccupied, and in somewhat similar circumstances,
they got on well enough together. The whole household got on together,
in fact. There were intrigues, incredibly petty and subtle struggles and
plots, but nothing overt.
The other two women accepted this new favourite of Eddie’s with resigned
tolerance; they made use of her, but they were quite kind. They, too,
had an influence on Angelica; they taught her something, a little of the
compromise that must be made with life. You didn’t have to love people
or to hate them--you had only to get on with them. She could not but
admire their charming good-humour, their complete lack of the
aggressiveness which the people she had known before had been obliged to
cultivate. They were all three so _comfortable_ together!