Day in and day out Lily’s life followed its easy, happy course. Always
there were diversions, always gaiety, always people. Yet there were
times now--indeed they seemed to have begun upon her return from America
following her mother’s death--when a cloud of sadness descended upon
her, times when she would withdraw suddenly to her own room as if some
tiny thing, a word, a gesture, an intonation, had set fire to a train of
secret memories. Frequently she kept her room for the rest of the day,
seeing no one, lunching and dining alone on a gilt table placed before
her chaise longue by the window.
These sudden fits of melancholy disturbed Ellen who remarked on them
gravely to old Madame Gigon.
“She was never like that before. I can’t see what it is that disturbs
her.”
Madame Gigon saw no cause for alarm. “It’s true,” she said. “She was
never like that before. But it may be that she grows tired. You see she
is growing older, my dear Mees Ellen. All of us, as we grow older, like
moments of solitude and quiet. It gives one time to reflect on life. You
don’t understand that yet. You’re too young. But some day you will
understand. As you get older you begin to wonder what it’s all about ...
(_pourquoi le combat_).”
“Perhaps,” replied Ellen with a vigorous shrug. “I’m sure it can’t be
her mother. It might, of course, be Irene.”
And they fell to discussing for the hundredth time the case of Irene,
whom Madame Gigon had not seen since she was a little girl. They talked
of her strange behavior, Madame Gigon wagging her old head, staring
before her with sightless eyes.
“It is tragic ... a life like that,” she would say. “A life wasted. You
know she was a pretty little girl.... She could have married.”
They spoke of her as if she were dead. It was true that to them ... to
Ellen, to Madame Gigon, she was forever lost. Perhaps they were right,
with that instinctive knowledge which underlies the consciousness of
women chattering together over the strangeness of human behavior.
Perhaps Irene _was_ dead.... Perhaps she had been dead since a certain
night when the last traces of her faith in humanity were throttled. It
was true that she had left the world and turned her faith toward God
alone, as if she were already dead and in purgatory.
“She was always queer,” Ellen would say.
And then Madame Gigon, as if she were conscious of toying with thoughts
of blasphemy, would say piously:
“But she is a good woman, who has given her life to good work and
prayer.”
But she spoke as if trying to convince herself, as if she did not quite
believe what she said.
And Lily, all the while, kept her secret. Undoubtedly she was no longer
in her first youth. This may have depressed her, for she was a woman to
whom beauty and youth were the beginning and the end. Yet the fits of
melancholy had something to do with a more definite and tangible thing.
They were associated in some way with a little enameled box in which she
kept a growing bundle of clippings from the American newspapers which
Ellen brought into the house at Numero Dix.
In the solitude of her room, she opened the box and reread them many
times, over and over again until the edges became frayed and the print
blurred from much fingering. They had to do with the career of a certain
labor leader, a man named Krylenko who seemed a strange person to excite
the interest of a woman like Madame Shane. The clippings marked the
progress of the man. Whenever there was a strike, Krylenko appeared to
take a hand in it. Slowly, clipping by clipping, the battle he fought
was being won. The unions penetrated now this steel town, now that one.
There were battles, brutalities, deaths, fires in his trail, but the
trail led steadily upward toward a goal. He was winning slowly. That he
was strong there could be no doubt. He was so strong that great
newspapers printed editorials against him and his cause. They called
him an “anarchist,” “an alien disturber,” “a peril to the great American
nation” and, most frequently of all, “a menace to prosperity and the
inalienable rights of property.”
Lily kept the enameled box locked in a drawer of her writing desk. No
one had ever seen it. No one would see it until she died. It had been
there for seven years.
It was on the morning after one of these attacks of melancholy, a few
days after Jean’s visit, that the Town suddenly intruded once more upon
the house in the Rue Raynouard.
Lily sat on the sunlit terrace of the garden before a late breakfast of
chocolate and buttered rolls, opposite Ellen whose habit it was to arise
early and pursue some form of violent exercise while her cousin still
slept. This morning she had been riding in the Bois de Bologne. As a
little girl she learned to ride under the instruction of her
grandfather, old Jacob Barr, and she rode well and easily with the air
and the skill of one who has grown up with horses. The languid
Schneidermann accompanied her on these early morning jaunts. She owned
her horse because in the long run it was more economical and, as she
said, “No pennies slip through my fingers.”
She wore a tight black riding habit with a white stock and a low derby
hat. The riding crop lay across her strong, slim knees as she smoked and
watched Lily devour too many rolls and a too large bowl of rich
chocolate.
Between them on the table lay the morning’s letters. In Ellen’s little
heap there were three or four notes from struggling music students,
begging help or advice from her, one from a manager proposing an
interview with regard to an American tour, a bill from Durand the
publisher. Lily’s pile was altogether different. It consisted almost
entirely of bills, from Coty, from Worth, from Henri the florist, from
Augustin the hairdresser, from Lanvin ... from ... on and on endlessly
and at the bottom a letter from the lawyers who succeeded on the death
of William Baines, “the old fogy,” to the management of Lily’s holdings
in the Town.
The last letter she read through twice with so deep an interest that the
chocolate grew cold and she was forced to send for a hot cup and more
hot rolls. When she had finished she leaned back in the wicker chair,
buried beneath the silk, the lace ruffles and the pale tiny bows of her
peignoir.
“D’you know, Ellen,” she remarked, “I am growing too rich. I’ve no idea
what to do with all my money.”
Ellen put down her letter abruptly and knocked the ash from her
cigarette.
“There are plenty of places for it.” She slapped the envelope against
her slim thigh. “I’ve had two letters this morning asking me for money
... from two music students. Heaven knows I’ve got nothing to spare. All
that’s left over I send to Ma. What is it now? A gold mine or an oil
well?”
“Neither,” said Lily. “It’s just the Town making me richer and richer.
It’s from Folsom and Jones ... I guess they’re since your time. They’re
lawyers and they handle Irene’s and my estate. They want me to sell the
rest of the property we own.”
Ellen pursed her lips reflectively. “How much are they offered?”
“Something over five hundred thousand. They say they can get six in a
pinch.”
She whistled softly. “Take it ... take it. Those old shacks can’t be
worth that.”
“It isn’t the shacks,” said Lily. “It’s the land itself they want. The
shacks aren’t even worth repair. Why, they were built, most of them,
while father was still living. The lawyers hint that the Town is ashamed
of them, that they are a disgrace to the Town.”
“I suppose it has changed,” remarked Ellen.
“The population has doubled,” said her cousin. “There aren’t enough
houses for the people. Why, last summer people who came to work at the
Mills had to live in tents for a time. Even the people on Park avenue
let out rooms. The Chamber of Commerce asked them to. They appealed to
their pride not to stop the tremendous growth. There’s been a
tremendous....”
Ellen interrupted her. “I know ... I know.... Watch us grow. The biggest
city in the state in ten years. Well, it’s money in your pocket. You’ve
no kick coming.”
The chocolate and rolls arrived and Lily began once more to eat.
“I don’t see how you can eat all that and keep your figure,” observed
Ellen.
“Massage,” said Lily. “Massage ... and luckily the time is coming when I
can eat all I want and be as fat as I like. In another fifteen years
I’ll be an old woman and it won’t matter what I do.” The faint
bitterness again drifted through the speech, evasive and imperceptible.
“What does Irene say to your selling?” inquired Ellen.
“The lawyers say she wants to sell. You know I haven’t had a line from
her in years. She’s in France now, you know.”
“In France!” said Ellen, her eyebrows rising in surprise.
“Yes, at Lisieux.”
“I should think you’d go and see her.”
“She wouldn’t see me if I went. What good would it do?”