THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE
_By EDITH WHARTON_
THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE
OLD NEW YORK
FALSE DAWN
THE OLD MAID
THE SPARK
NEW YEAR’S DAY
THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
SUMMER
THE REEF
THE MARNE
FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING
THE MOTHER’S
RECOMPENSE
BY
EDITH WHARTON
AUTHOR OF
“OLD NEW YORK,” “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,”
“THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON,” ETC.
_Desolation is a delicate thing._
SHELLEY.
[Illustration]
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXV
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1924, 1925 by The Pictorial Review Company
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
My excuses are due to the decorous shade of Grace Aguilar, loved of our
grandmothers, for deliberately appropriating, and applying to uses so
different, the title of one of the most admired of her tales.
E. W.
BOOK I.
THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE
I.
Kate Clephane was wakened, as usual, by the slant of Riviera sun across
her bed.
It was the thing she liked best about her shabby cramped room in the
third-rate Hôtel de Minorque et de l’Univers: that the morning sun came
in at her window, and yet that it didn’t come too early.
No more sunrises for Kate Clephane. They were associated with too
many lost joys--coming home from balls where one had danced one’s
self to tatters, or from suppers where one had lingered, counting
one’s winnings (it was wonderful, in the old days, how often she had
won, or friends had won for her, staking a _louis_ just for fun, and
cramming her hands with thousand franc bills); associated, too, with
the scramble up hill through the whitening gray of the garden, flicked
by scented shrubs, caught on perfidious prickles, up to the shuttered
villa askew on its heat-soaked rock--and then, at the door, in the
laurustinus-shade that smelt of honey, that unexpected kiss (well
honestly, yes, unexpected, since it had long been settled that one was
to remain “just friends”); and the pulling away from an insistent arm,
and the one more pressure on hers of lips young enough to be fresh
after a night of drinking and play and more drinking. And she had never
let Chris come in with her at that hour, no, not once, though at the
time there was only Julie the cook in the house, and goodness knew....
Oh, but she had always had her pride--people ought to remember _that_
when they said such things about her....
That was what the sunrise reminded Kate Clephane of--as she supposed
it did most women of forty-two or so (or was it really forty-four last
week?) For nearly twenty years now she had lived chiefly with women
of her own kind, and she no longer very sincerely believed there were
any others, that is to say among women properly so called. Her female
world was made up of three categories: frumps, hypocrites and the “good
sort”--like herself. After all, the last was the one she preferred to
be in.
Not that she could not picture another life--if only one had met the
right man at the right hour. She remembered her one week--that tiny
little week of seven days, just six years ago--when she and Chris had
gone together to a lost place in Normandy where there wasn’t a railway
within ten miles, and you had to drive in the farmer’s cart to the
farm-house smothered in apple-blossoms; and Chris and she had gone
off every morning for the whole day, while he sketched by willowy
river-banks, and under the flank of mossy village churches; and every
day for seven days she had watched the farm-yard life waking at dawn
under their windows, while she dashed herself with cold water and did
her hair and touched up her face before he was awake, because the early
light is so pitiless after thirty. She remembered it all, and how
sure she had been then that she was meant to live on a farm and keep
chickens; just as sure as he was that he was meant to be a painter, and
would already have made a name if his parents hadn’t called him back to
Baltimore and shoved him into a broker’s office after Harvard--to have
him off their minds, as he said.
Yes, she could still picture that kind of life: every fibre in her
kept its glow. But she didn’t believe in it; she knew now that “things
didn’t happen like that” for long, that reality and durability were
attributes of the humdrum, the prosaic and the dreary. And it was
to escape from reality and durability that one plunged into cards,
gossip, flirtation, and all the artificial excitements which society so
lavishly provides for people who want to forget.
She and Chris had never repeated that week. He had never suggested
doing so, and had let her hints fall unheeded, or turned them off with
a laugh, whenever she tried, with shy tentative allusions, to coax him
back to the idea; for she had found out early that one could never ask
him anything point-blank--it just put his back up, as he said himself.
One had to manœuvre and wait; but when didn’t a woman have to manœuvre
and wait? Ever since she had left her husband, eighteen years ago,
what else had she ever done? Sometimes, nowadays, waking alone and
unrefreshed in her dreary hotel room, she shivered at the memory of all
the scheming, planning, ignoring, enduring, accepting, which had led
her in the end to--this.
Ah, well--
“Aline!”
After all, there was the sun in her window, there was the triangular
glimpse of blue wind-bitten sea between the roofs, and a new day
beginning, and hot chocolate coming, and a new hat to try on at the
milliner’s, and--
“_Aline!_”
She had come to this cheap hotel just in order to keep her maid. One
couldn’t afford everything, especially since the war, and she preferred
veal for dinner every night to having to do her own mending and dress
her hair: the unmanageable abundant hair which had so uncannily
survived her youth, and sometimes, in her happier moods, made her feel
that perhaps, after all, in the eyes of her friends, other of its
attributes survived also. And besides, it looked better for a lone
woman who, after having been thirty-nine for a number of years, had
suddenly become forty-four, to have a respectable-looking servant
in the background; to be able, for instance, when one arrived in new
places, to say to supercilious hotel-clerks: “My maid is following with
the luggage.”
“_Aline!_”
Aline, ugly, neat and enigmatic, appeared with the breakfast-tray. A
delicious scent preceded her.
Mrs. Clephane raised herself on a pink elbow, shook her hair over her
shoulders, and exclaimed: “Violets?”
Aline permitted herself her dry smile. “From a gentleman.”
Colour flooded her mistress’s face. Hadn’t she known that something
good was going to happen to her that morning--hadn’t she felt it in
every touch of the sunshine, as its golden finger-tips pressed her
lids open and wound their way through her hair? She supposed she was
superstitious. She laughed expectantly.
“A gentleman?”
“The little lame boy with the newspapers that Madame was kind to,” the
maid continued, arranging the tray with her spare Taylorized gestures.
“Oh, poor child!” Mrs. Clephane’s voice had a quaver which she tried
to deflect to the lame boy, though she knew how impossible it was to
deceive Aline. Of course Aline knew everything--well, yes, that was the
other side of the medal. She often said to her mistress: “Madame is
too much alone--Madame ought to make some new friends--” and what did
that mean, except that Aline knew she had lost the old ones?
But it was characteristic of Kate that, after a moment, the quaver
in her voice did instinctively tilt in the direction of the lame
boy who sold newspapers; and when the tears reached her eyes it was
over his wistful image, and not her own, that they flowed. She had a
way of getting desperately fond of people she had been kind to, and
exaggeratedly touched by the least sign of their appreciation. It was
her weakness--or her strength: she wondered which?
“Poor, poor little chap. But his mother’ll beat him if she finds out.
Aline, you must hunt him up this very day and pay back what the flowers
must have cost him.” She lifted the violets and pressed them to her
face. As she did so she caught sight of a telegram beneath them.
A telegram--for her? It didn’t often happen nowadays. But after all
there was no reason why it shouldn’t happen once again--at least once.
There was no reason why, this very day, this day on which the sunshine
had waked her with such a promise, there shouldn’t be a message at
last, the message for which she had waited for two years, three years;
yes, exactly three years and one month--just a word from him to say:
“_Take me back._”
She snatched up the telegram, and then turned her head toward the wall,
seeking, while she read, to hide her face from Aline. The maid, on whom
such hints were never lost, immediately transferred her attention to
the dressing-table, skilfully deploying the glittering troops on that
last battlefield where the daily struggle still renewed itself.
Aline’s eyes averted, her mistress tore open the blue fold and read:
“Mrs. Clephane dead--”
A shiver ran over her. _Mrs. Clephane dead?_ Not if Mrs. Clephane knew
it! Never more alive than today, with the sun crisping her hair, the
violet scent enveloping her, and that jolly north-west gale rioting out
there on the Mediterranean. What was the meaning of this grim joke?
The first shock over, she read on more calmly and understood. It was
the other Mrs. Clephane who was dead: the one who used to be her
mother-in-law. Her first thought was: “Well, serve her right”--since,
if it was so desirable to be alive on such a morning it must be
correspondingly undesirable to be dead, and she could draw the
agreeable conclusion that the other Mrs. Clephane had at last been come
up with--oh, but thoroughly.
She lingered awhile on this pleasing fancy, and then began to reach out
to wider inferences. “But if--but if--but little Anne--”
At the murmur of the name her eyes filled again. For years now she had
barricaded her heart against her daughter’s presence; and here it
was, suddenly in possession again, crowding out everything else, yes,
effacing even Chris as though he were the thinnest of ghosts, and the
cable in her hand a cock-crow. “But perhaps now they’ll let me see
her,” the mother thought.
She didn’t even know who “they” were, now that their formidable
chieftain, her mother-in-law, was dead. Lawyers, judges, trustees,
guardians, she supposed--all the natural enemies of woman. She wrinkled
her brows, trying to remember who, at the death of the child’s father,
had been appointed the child’s other guardian--old Mrs. Clephane’s
overpowering assumption of the office having so completely effaced her
associate that it took a few minutes to fish him up out of the far-off
past.
“Why, poor old Fred Landers, of course!” She smiled retrospectively.
“I don’t believe he’d prevent my seeing the child if he were left to
himself. Besides, isn’t she nearly grown up? Why, I do believe she must
be.”
The telegram fell from her hands, both of which she now impressed into
a complicated finger-reckoning of how old little Anne must be, if Chris
were thirty-three, as he certainly was--no, thirty-one, he couldn’t
be more than thirty-one, because _she_, Kate, was only forty-two ...
yes, forty-two ... and she’d always acknowledged to herself that there
were nine years between them; no, eleven years, if she were really
forty-two; yes, but was she? Or, goodness, was she actually forty-five?
Well, then, if she was forty-five--just supposing it for a minute--and
had married John Clephane at twenty-one, as she knew she had, and
little Anne had been born the second summer afterward, then little
Anne must be nearly twenty ... why, quite twenty, wasn’t it? But then,
how old would _that_ make Chris? Oh, well, he _must_ be older than
he looked ... she’d always thought he was. That boyish way of his,
she had sometimes fancied, was put on to make her imagine there was a
greater difference of age between them than there really was--a device
he was perfectly capable of making use of for ulterior purposes. And
of course she’d never been that dreadful kind of woman they called a
“baby-snatcher”.... But if Chris were thirty-one, and she forty-five,
then how old _was_ Anne?
With impatient fingers she began all over again.
The maid’s voice, seeming to come from a long way off, respectfully
reminded her that the chocolate would be getting cold. Mrs.
Clephane roused herself, looked about the room, and exclaimed: “My
looking-glass, please.” She wanted to settle that question of ages.
As Aline approached with the glass there was a knock at the door. The
maid went to it, and came back with her small inward smile.
“Another telegram.”
Another? This time Mrs. Clephane sat bolt upright. What could it be,
now, but a word from him, a message at last? Oh, but she was ashamed
of herself for thinking of such a thing at such a moment. Solitude had
demoralized her, she supposed. And then her child was so far away, so
invisible, so unknown--and Chris of a sudden had become so near and
real again, though it was three whole years and one month since he had
left her. And at her age--She opened the second message, trembling.
Since Armistice Day her heart had not beat so hard.
“New York. Dearest mother,” it ran, “I want you to come home at once. I
want you to come and live with me. Your daughter Anne.”
“You asked for the looking-glass, Madame,” Aline patiently reminded her.
Mrs. Clephane took the proffered glass, stared into it with eyes at
first unseeing, and then gradually made out the reflection of her
radiant irrepressible hair, a new smile on her lips, the first streak
of gray on her temples, and the first tears--oh, she couldn’t remember
for how long--running down over her transfigured face.
“Aline--” The maid was watching her with narrowed eyes. “The Rachel
powder, please--”
Suddenly she dropped the glass and the powder-puff, buried her face in
her hands, and sobbed.
II.
She went out an hour later, her thoughts waltzing and eddying like the
sunlit dust which the wind kept whirling round the corners in spasmodic
gusts. Everything in her mind was hot and cold, and beating and blowing
about, like the weather on that dancing draughty day; the very pavement
of the familiar streets, and the angles of the buildings, seemed to
be spinning with the rest, as if the heaviest substances had suddenly
grown imponderable.
“It must,” she thought, “be a little like the way the gravestones will
behave on the Day of Judgment.”
To make sure of where she was she had to turn down one of the white
streets leading to the sea, and fix her eyes on that wedge of blue
between the houses, as if it were the only ballast to her brain, the
only substantial thing left. “I’m glad it’s one of the days when the
sea is firm,” she thought. The glittering expanse, flattened by the
gale and solidified by the light, rose up to meet her as she walked
toward it, the pavement lifting her and flying under her like wings
till it dropped her down in the glare of the Promenade, where the
top-knots of the struggling palms swam on the wind like chained and
long-finned sea-things against that sapphire wall climbing half-way up
the sky.
She sat down on a bench, clinging sideways as if lashed to a boat’s
deck, and continued to steady her eyes on the Mediterranean. To collect
her thoughts she tried to imagine that nothing had happened, that
neither of the two cables had come, and that she was preparing to lead
her usual life, as mapped out in the miniature engagement-book in her
hand-bag. She had her “set” now in the big Riviera town where she had
taken refuge in 1916, after the final break with Chris, and where,
after two years of war-work and a “Reconnaissance Française” medal,
she could carry her head fairly high, and even condescend a little to
certain newcomers.
She drew forth the engagement-book, smiling at her childish game of
“pretending.” At eleven, a hat to try on; eleven-thirty, a dress; from
then to two o’clock, nothing; at two, a slow solemn drive with poor
old Mrs. Minity (in the last-surviving private victoria in the town);
tea and bridge at Countess Lanska’s from four to six; a look in at
the Rectory of the American church, where there was a Ladies’ Guild
meeting about the Devastated Regions’ Fancy Fair; lastly a little
dinner at the Casino, with the Horace Betterlys and a few other pals.
Yes--a rather-better-than-the-average day. And now--Why, now she could
kick over the whole apple-cart if she chose; chuck it all (except the
new dress and hat!): the tedious drive with the prosy patronizing old
woman; the bridge, which was costing her more than it ought, with that
third-rate cosmopolitan set of Laura Lanska’s; the long discussion at
the Rectory as to whether it would “do” to ask Mrs. Schlachtberger to
take a stall at the Fair in spite of her unfortunate name; and the
little dinner with the Horace Betterlys and their dull noisy friends,
who wanted to “see life” and didn’t know that you can’t see it unless
you’ve first had the brains to imagine it.... Yes, she could drop it
all now, and never never see one of them again....
“My daughter ... my daughter Anne.... Oh, you don’t know my little
girl? She _has_ changed, hasn’t she? Growing up is a way the children
have.... Yes, it is ageing for a poor mother to trot about such a
young giantess.... Oh, I’m going gray already, you know--here, on the
temples. _Fred Landers?_ It is you, really? Dear old Fred! No, of
course I’ve never forgotten you.... Known me anywhere? You would? Oh,
nonsense! Look at my gray hair. But _men_ don’t change--lucky men! Why,
I remember even that Egyptian seal-ring of yours.... My daughter ... my
daughter Anne ... let me introduce you to this big girl of mine ... my
little Anne....”
It was curious: for the first time she realized that, in thinking
back over the years since she had been parted from Anne, she seldom,
nowadays, went farther than the episode with Chris. Yet it was long
before--it was eighteen years ago--that she had “lost” Anne: “lost” was
the euphemism she had invented (as people called the Furies The Amiable
Ones), because a mother couldn’t confess, even to her most secret self,
that she had willingly deserted her child. Yet that was what she had
done; and now her thoughts, shrinking and shivering, were being forced
back upon the fact. She had left Anne when Anne was a baby of three;
left her with a dreadful pang, a rending of the inmost fibres, and yet
a sense of unutterable relief, because to do so was to escape from the
oppression of her married life, the thick atmosphere of self-approval
and unperceivingness which emanated from John Clephane like coal-gas
from a leaking furnace. So she had put it at the time--so, in her
closest soul-scrutiny, she had to put it still. “I couldn’t breathe--”
that was all she had to say in her own defence. She had said it
first--more’s the pity--to Hylton Davies; with the result that two
months later she was on his yacht, headed for the West Indies.... And
even then she couldn’t breathe any better; not after the first week or
two. The asphyxiation was of a different kind, that was all.
It was a year later that she wrote to her husband. There was no answer:
she wrote again. “At any rate, let me see Anne.... I can’t live
without Anne.... I’ll go and live with her anywhere you decide....”
Again no answer.... She wrote to her mother-in-law, and Mrs. Clephane’s
lawyer sent the letter back unopened. She wrote, in her madness, to the
child’s nurse, and got a reply from the same legal firm, requesting her
to cease to annoy her husband’s family. She ceased.
Of all this she recalled now only the parting from Anne, and
the subsequent vain efforts to recover her. Of the agent of her
release, of Hylton Davies, she remembered, in the deep sense of
remembering, nothing. He had become to her, with his flourish and
his yachting-clothes, and the big shining yacht, and the cocoa-palms
and general setting of cool drinks and tropical luxury, as unreal as
somebody in a novel, the highly coloured hero (or villain) on the
“jacket”. From her inmost life he had vanished into a sort of remote
pictorial perspective, where a woman of her name figured with him, in
muslin dresses and white sunshades, herself as unreal as a lady on a
“jacket”.... Dim also had grown the years that followed: lonely humdrum
years at St. Jean-de-Luz, at Bordighera, at Dinard. She would settle in
a cheap place where there were a circulating library, a mild climate,
a few quiet bridge-playing couples whom one got to know through the
doctor or the clergyman; then would grow tired and drift away again.
Once she went back to America, at the time of her mother’s death.... It
was in midsummer, and Anne (now ten years old) was in Canada with her
father and grandmother. Kate Clephane, not herself a New Yorker, and
with only two or three elderly and disapproving relatives left in the
small southern city of her origin, stood alone before the elaborately
organized defences of a vast New York clan, and knew herself
helpless. But in her madness she dreamed of a dash to Canada, an
abduction--schemes requiring money, friends, support, all the power and
ruse she was so lacking in. She gave that up in favour of a midnight
visit (inspired by _Anna Karénine_) to the child’s nursery; but on the
way to Quebec she heard that the family had left in a private car for
the Rocky Mountains. She turned about and took the first steamer to
France.
All this, too, had become dim to her since she had known Chris. For
the first time, when she met him, her soul’s lungs seemed full of air.
Life still dated for her from that day--in spite of the way he had
hurt her, of his having inflicted on her the bitterest pain she had
ever suffered, he had yet given her more than he could take away. At
thirty-nine her real self had been born; without him she would never
have had a self.... And yet, at what a cost she had bought it! All
the secluded penitential years that had gone before wiped out at a
stroke--stained, defiled by follies she could not bear to think of,
among people from whom her soul recoiled. Poor Chris! It was not that
he was what is called “vicious”--but he was never happy without what
he regarded as excitement; he was always telling her that an artist
had to have excitement. She could not reconcile his idea of what this
stimulus consisted in with his other tastes and ideas--with that
flashing play of intelligence which had caught her up into an air she
had never breathed before. To be capable of that thought-play, of those
flights, and yet to need gambling, casinos, rowdy crowds, and all the
pursuits devised to kill time for the uninventive and lethargic! He
said he saw things in that kind of life that she couldn’t see--but
since he also saw this unseeable (and she knew he did) in nature, in
poetry and painting, in their shared sunsets and moonrises, in their
first long dreaming days, far from jazz-bands and baccarat tables, why
wasn’t that enough, and how could the other rubbishy things excite the
same kind of emotions in him? It had been the torment of her torments,
the inmost pang of her misery, that she had never understood; and that
when she thought of him now it was through that blur of noise and glare
and popping corks and screaming bands that she had to grope back to the
first fleeting Chris who had loved her and waked her.
* * * * *
At eleven o’clock she found herself, she didn’t know how, at the
milliner’s. Other women, envious or undecided, were already flattening
their noses against the panes. “That bird of Paradise ... what they
cost nowadays!” But she went in, cool and confident, and asked gaily
to try on her new hat. She must have been smiling, for the saleswoman
received her with a smile.
“What a complexion, ma’am! One sees you’re not afraid of the wind.”
But when the hat was produced, though it was the copy of one she had
already tried on, it struck Mrs. Clephane as absurdly youthful, even
ridiculous. Had she really been dressing all this time like a girl in
her teens?
“You forget that I’ve a grown-up daughter, Madame Berthe.”
_“Allons, Madame plaisante!”_
She drew herself up with dignity. “A daughter of twenty-one; I’m
joining her in New York next week. What would she think of me if I
arrived in a hat more youthful than hers? Show me something darker,
please: yes, the one with the autumn leaves. See, I’m growing gray on
the temples--don’t try to make me look like a flapper. What’s the price
of that blue fox over there? I like a gray fur with gray hair.”
In the end she stalked out, offended by the milliner’s refusal to take
her gray hair seriously, and reflecting, with a retrospective shiver,
that her way of dressing and her demeanour must have thoroughly fixed
in all these people’s minds the idea that she was one of the silly
vain fools who imagine they look like their own daughters.
At the dress-maker’s, the scene repeated itself. The dashing little
frock prepared for her--an orange silk handkerchief peeping from the
breast-pocket on which an anchor was embroidered--made her actually
blush; and reflecting that money wouldn’t “matter” now (the thought
of the money had really not come to her before) she persuaded the
dress-maker to take the inappropriate garment back, and ordered,
instead, something sober but elaborate, and ever so much more
expensive. It seemed a part of the general unreal rapture that even the
money-worry should have vanished.
Where should she lunch? She inclined to a quiet restaurant in a back
street; then the old habit of following the throng, the need of rubbing
shoulders with a crowd of unknown people, swept her automatically
toward the Casino, and sat her down, in a blare of brass instruments
and hard sunshine, at the only table left. After all, as she had
often heard Chris say, one could feel more alone in a crowd.... But
gradually it came over her that to feel alone was not in the least what
she wanted. She had never, for years at any rate, been able to bear
it for long; the crowd, formerly a solace and an escape, had become a
habit, and being face to face with her own thoughts was like facing a
stranger. Oppressed and embarrassed, she tried to “make conversation”
with herself; but the soundless words died unuttered, and she sought
distraction in staring about her at the unknown faces.
Their number became oppressive: it made her feel small and
insignificant to think that, of all this vulgar feasting throng, not
one knew the amazing thing which had befallen her, knew that she was
awaited by an only daughter in a big house in New York, a house she
would re-enter in a few days--yes, actually in a few days--with the
ease of a long-absent mistress, a mistress returning from an immense
journey, but to whom it seems perfectly natural and familiar to be once
again smiling on old friends from the head of her table.
The longing to be with people to whom she could tell her news made her
decide, after all, to live out her day as she had originally planned
it. Before leaving the hotel she had announced her departure to the
astonished Aline (it was agreeable, for once, to astonish Aline) and
despatched her to the post-office with a cable for New York and a
telegram for a Paris steamship company. In the cable she had said
simply: “Coming darling.” They were the words with which she used to
answer little Anne’s calls from the nursery: that impatient reiterated
“Mummy--Mummy--I want my _Mummy_!” which had kept on echoing in her
ears through so many sleepless nights. The phrase had flashed into her
head the moment she sat down to write the cable, and she had kept
murmuring to herself ever since: “Mummy--Mummy--I want my _Mummy_!”
She would have liked to quote the words to Mrs. Minity, whose door she
was now approaching; but how could she explain to the old lady, who
was deaf and self-absorbed, and thought it a privilege for any one to
go driving with her, why little Anne’s cry had echoed so long in the
void? No; she could not speak of that to any one: she must stick to her
old “take-it-for-granted” attitude, the attitude which had carried her
successfully over so many slippery places.
Mrs. Minity was very much pre-occupied about her foot-warmer. She spent
the first quarter of an hour in telling Mrs. Clephane that the Rector’s
wife, whom she had taken out the day before, had possessed herself of
the object without so much as a “may I,” and kept her big feet on it
till Mrs. Minity had had to stop the carriage and ask the coachman in
a loud voice how it was that _The Foot-warmer_ had not been put in as
usual. Whereupon, if you please, Mrs. Merriman had simply said: “Oh,
I have it, thanks, dear Mrs. Minity--such a comfort, on these windy
days!” “Though why a woman who keeps no carriage, and has to tramp
the streets at all hours, should have cold feet I can’t imagine--nor,
in fact, wholly believe her when she says so,” said Mrs. Minity, in
the tone of one to whom a defective circulation is the recognized
prerogative of carriage-owners. “I notice, my dear, that _you_ never
complain of being cold,” she added approvingly, relegating Kate, as an
enforced pedestrian, to Mrs. Merriman’s class, but acknowledging in her
a superior sense of propriety. “I’m always glad,” she added, “to take
you out on windy days, for battling with the _mistral_ on foot must be
so very exhausting, and in the carriage, of course, it is so easy to
reach a sheltered place.”
Mrs. Minity was still persuaded that to sit in her hired victoria,
behind its somnolent old pair, was one of the most rapid modes of
progression devised by modern science. She talked as if her carriage
were an aeroplane, and was as particular in avoiding narrow streets,
and waiting at the corner when she called for friends who lived in
them, as if she had to choose a safe alighting-ground.
Mrs. Minity had come to the Riviera thirty years before, after an
attack of bronchitis, and finding the climate milder and the life
easier than in Brooklyn, had not gone back. Mrs. Clephane never knew
what roots she had broken in the upheaval, for everything immediately
surrounding her assumed such colossal proportions that remoter
facts, even concerning herself, soon faded to the vanishing-point.
Only now and then, when a niece from Bridgeport sent her a bottle of
brandy-peaches, or a nephew from Brooklyn wrote to say that her income
had been reduced by the foreclosure of a mortgage, did the family
emerge from its transatlantic mists, and Mrs. Minity become, for a
moment, gratified or irate at the intrusion. But such emotions, at
their acutest, were but faint shadows of those aroused by the absence
of her foot-warmer, or the Salvation Army’s having called twice in
the same month for her subscription, or one of the horses having a
stiff shoulder, and being replaced, for a long hazardous week, by
another, known to the same stable for twenty years, and whom the
_patron_ himself undertook to drive, so that Mrs. Minity should not
miss her airing. She _had_ thought of staying in till her _own_ horse
recovered; but the doctor had absolutely forbidden it, so she had taken
her courage in both hands, and gone out with the substitute, who was
not even of the same colour as the horse she was used to. “But I took
valerian every night,” she added, “and doubled my digitalis.”
Kate Clephane, as she listened (for the hundredth time), remembered
that she had once thought Mrs. Minity a rather impressive old lady,
somewhat arrogant and very prosy, but with a distinct “atmosphere,” and
a charming half-obsolete vocabulary, suggesting “Signers” and Colonial
generals, which was a refreshing change from the over-refinement of
Mrs. Merriman and the Betterlys’ monotonous slang. Now, compared to
certain long-vanished figures of the Clephane background--compared even
to the hated figure of old Mrs. Clephane--Mrs. Minity shrank to the
semblance of a vulgar fussy old woman.
“Old Mrs. Clephane never bragged, whatever she did,” Kate thought:
“how ridiculous all that fuss about driving behind a strange horse
would have seemed to her. After all, good breeding, even in the odious,
implies a certain courage....” Her mother-in-law, as she mused, assumed
the commanding yet not unamiable shape of a Roman matron of heroic
mould, a kind of “It-hurts-not-O-my-Pætus,” falling first upon the
sword.
The bridge-players in Countess Lanska’s pastille-scented and
smoke-blurred drawing-room seemed to have undergone the same change as
Mrs. Minity. The very room, as Kate entered, on fire from the wind,
seemed stuffier, untidier and, yes--vulgarer--than she had remembered.
The empty glasses with drowned lemon-peel, the perpetually unemptied
ash-trays, the sketches by the Countess’s latest protégé--splashy
flower markets, rococo churches, white balustrades, umbrella-pines
and cobalt seas--the musical instruments tossed about on threadbare
cashmere shawls covering still more threadbare sofas, even the
heart-rending gaze of the outspread white bear with the torn-off ear
which, ever since Kate had known him, had clung to his flattened head
by the same greasy thread: all this disorder was now, for the first
time, reflected in the faces about the card-tables. Not one of them,
men or women, if asked where they had come from, where they were going,
or why they had done such and such things, or refrained from doing
such other, would have answered truthfully; not, as Kate knew, from
any particular, or at any rate permanent, need of concealment, but
because they lived in a chronic state of mental inaccuracy, excitement
and inertia, which made it vaguely exhilarating to lie and definitely
fatiguing to be truthful.
She had not meant to stay long, for her first glance at their new faces
told her that to them also she would not be able to speak of what had
happened. But, to subdue her own agitation and divert their heavy eyes,
the easiest thing was to take her usual hand at bridge; and once she
had dropped into her place, the familiar murmur of “No trumps ... yes
... diamonds.... Who dealt?... No bid.... No ... yes ... no ...”, held
her to her seat, soothed by the mesmeric touch of habit.
* * * * *
At the Rectory Mrs. Merriman exclaimed: “Oh, _there_ she is!” in a
tone implying that she had had to stand between Mrs. Clephane and the
assembled committee.
Kate remembered that she was secretary, and expected to read the
minutes.
“Have I kept you all waiting? So sorry,” she beamed, in a voice that
sang hallelujahs. Mrs. Merriman pushed the book toward her with a
protecting smile; and Mrs. Parley Plush of the Villa Mimosa (she always
told you it had been quite her own idea, calling it that) visibly
wondered that Mrs. Merriman should be so tolerant.
They were all there: the American Consul’s wife, mild, plump and
irreproachable; the lovely Mrs. Prentiss of San Francisco, who “took
things” and had been involved in a drug scandal; the Comtesse de Sainte
Maxime, who had been a Loach of Philadelphia, and had figured briefly
on the operatic stage; the Consul’s sister, who dressed like a flapper,
and had been engaged during the war to a series of American officers,
all of whom seemed to have given her celluloid bangles; and a pale
Mrs. Marsh, who used to be seen about with a tall tired man called
“the Colonel”, whose family-name was not Marsh, but for whom she wore
mourning when he died, explaining--somewhat belatedly--that he was a
cousin. Lastly, there was Mrs. Fred Langly of Albany, whose husband
was “wanted” at home for misappropriation of funds, and who, emerging
from the long seclusion consequent on this unfortunate episode, had
now blossomed into a “prominent war-worker”, while Mr. Langly devoted
himself to the composition of patriotic poems, which he read (flanked
by the civil and military authorities) at all the allied Inaugurations
and Commemorations; so that by the close of the war he had become its
recognized bard, and his “Lafayette, can we forget?” was quoted with
tears by the very widows and orphans he had defrauded. Facing Mrs.
Merriman sat the Rector, in clerical pepper-and-salt clothes and a
secular pepper-and-salt moustache, talking cheerful slang in a pulpit
voice.
Mrs. Clephane looked about her with new eyes. Save for their hostess,
the Consul’s wife and Mrs. Langly, “things” had been said of all the
women; even concerning Mrs. Parley Plush, the older inhabitants (though
they all went to her teas at the Villa Mimosa) smiled and hinted. And
they all knew each other’s stories, or at least the current versions,
and affected to disapprove of each other and yet be tolerant; thus
following the example of Mrs. Merriman, who simply wouldn’t _listen_ to
any of those horrors, and of Mr. Merriman, whose principle it was to
“believe the best” till the worst stared him in the face, and then to
say: “I understand it all happened a long while ago.”
To all of them the Rectory was a social nucleus. One after another they
had found their way there, subscribed to parochial charities, sent Mrs.
Merriman fruit and flowers, and suppressed their yawns at Mothers’
Meetings and Sewing Circles. It was part of the long long toll they had
to pay to the outraged goddess of Respectability. And at the Rectory
they had made each other’s acquaintance, and thus gradually widened
their circle, and saved more hours from solitude, their most dreaded
enemy. Kate Clephane knew it all by heart: for eighteen years she had
trodden that round. The Rector knew too; if ever a still youngish
and still prettyish woman, in quiet but perfect clothes with a scent
of violets, asked to see him after service, he knew she was one more
recruit. In all the fashionable Riviera colonies these ladies were
among the staunchest supporters of their respective churches. Even the
oldest, stoutest, grimmest of his flock had had her day; Mr. Merriman
remembered what his predecessor had hinted of old Mrs. Orbitt’s past,
and how he had smiled at the idea, seeing Mrs. Orbitt, that first
Sunday, planted in her front pew like a very Deborah.
Some of the prettiest--or who had been, at least--exchanged parishes,
as it were; like that sweet Lady de Tracey, who joined the American
fold, while Miss Julia Jettridge, from New York, attended the Anglican
services. They both said it was because they preferred “the nearest
church”; but the Rector knew better than that.
Then the war came; the war which, in those bland southern places and to
those uprooted drifting women, was chiefly a healing and amalgamating
influence. It was awful, of course, to admit even to one’s self that
it could be that; but, in the light of her own deliverance, Kate
Clephane knew that she and all the others had so viewed it. They had
shuddered and wept, toiled hard, and made their sacrifices; of clothes
and bridge, of butter and sweets and carriage-hire--but all the while
they were creeping slowly back into the once impregnable stronghold of
Social Position, getting to know people who used to cut them, being
invited to the Préfecture and the Consulate, and lots of houses of
which they used to say with feigned indifference: “Go to _those_ dreary
people? Not for the world!” because they knew they had no chance of
getting there.
Yes: the war had brought them peace, strange and horrible as it was
to think it. Kate’s eyes filled as she looked about the table at
those haggard powdered masks which had once glittered with youth and
insolence and pleasure. All they wanted now was what she herself wanted
only a few short hours ago: to be bowed to when they caught certain
people’s eyes; to be invited to one more dull house; to be put on
the Rector’s Executive Committees, and pour tea at the Consuless’s
“afternoons”.
“May I?” a man’s voice fluted; and a noble silver-thatched head with a
beak-like nose and soft double chin was thrust into the doorway.
“Oh, Mr. Paly!” cried Mrs. Merriman; and murmured to the nearest
ladies: “For the music-- I thought he’d better come today.”
Every one greeted Mr. Paly with enthusiasm. It _was_ poky, being only
women and the Rector. And Mr. Paly had the dearest little flat in
one of the old houses of the “Vieux Port”, such a tiny flat that one
wondered how any one so large, manly and yet full of quick womanish
movements, managed to fit in between the bric-a-brac. Mr. Paly clasped
his hostess’s hand in a soft palm. “I’ve brought my young friend Lion
Carstairs; you won’t mind? He’s going to help me with the programme.”
But one glance at Mr. Carstairs made it clear that he did not mean
to help any one with anything. He held out two lax fingers to Mrs.
Merriman, sank into an armchair, and let his Antinous-lids droop over
his sullen deep gray eyes. “He’s awfully good on Sicilian music ...
noted down folk-songs at Taormina....” Mr. Paly whispered, his leonine
head with its bushy eye-brows and silver crown bending confidentially
to his neighbour.
“Order!” rapped the Rector; and the meeting began.
* * * * *
At the Casino that night Kate Clephane, on the whole, was more
bored than at the Rectory. After all, at the Merrimans’ there was a
rather anxious atmosphere of kindliness, of a desire to help, and a
retrospective piety about the war which had served them such a good
turn, and of which they were still trying, in their tiny measure, to
alleviate the ravages.
Whereas the Betterlys--
“What? Another begging-list? No, my dear Kate; you don’t! Stony-broke;
that’s what I am, and so’s Harry--ain’t you, Harry?” Marcia
Betterly would scream, clanking her jewelled bangles, twisting one
heavy hand through her pearls, and clutching with the other the
platinum-and-diamond wrist-bag on which she always jokingly pretended
that Kate Clephane had her eye. “Look out, Sid, she’s a regular
train-robber; hold you up at your own door. I believe she’s squared the
police: if she hadn’t she’d ’a been run in long ago.... Oh, the _war?
What war?_ Is there another war on? What, that old one? Why, I thought
_that_ one was over long ago.... You can’t get anybody _I_ know to talk
about it even!”
“Guess we’ve got our work cut out paying for it,” added Horace
Betterly, stretching a begemmed and bloated hand toward the wine-list.
“Well, I should _say_!” his wife agreed with him.
“Sid, what form of liquid refreshment?” And “Sid”, a puffy Chicago
business man, grew pink in his effort to look knowing and not name the
wrong champagne....
It was odd: during her drive with Mrs. Minity, at Madame Lanska’s, and
again at the Rectory, Kate Clephane had meant to proclaim her great
news--and she had not yet breathed a word of it. The fact was, it was
too great; too precious to waste on Mrs. Minity’s inattention, too
sacred to reveal to Madame Lanska’s bridge-players, and too glorious
to overwhelm those poor women at the Rectory with. And now, in the
glare and clatter of the Casino, with the Sids and Harrys exchanging
winks, and the Mrs. Sids and Harrys craning fat necks to see the last
new cocotte, or the young Prince about whom there were such awful
stories--here, of all places, to unbare her secret, name her daughter:
how could she ever have thought it possible?
Only toward the end of the long deafening dinner, when Marcia and
Mrs. Sid began to make plans for a week at Monte Carlo, and she found
herself being impressed into the party (as she had, so often and so
willingly, before) did Mrs. Clephane suddenly find herself assuming the
defensive.
“You can’t? Or you _won’t_? Now, you Kate-cat you,” Marcia threatened
her with a scented cigarette, “own up now--what’s doing? What you onto
this time? Ain’t she naughty? _We_ ain’t grand enough for her, girls!”
And then, suddenly, at a sign from Horace, and lowering her voice,
but not quite enough to make the communication private: “See here,
Kate darling--of course, you know, _as our guest_: why, of course,
naturally.” While, on the other side, Mrs. Sid drawled: “What I want to
know is: where else _can_ anybody go at this season?”
Mrs. Clephane surveyed her calmly. “To New York--at least I can.”
They all screamed it at her at once: “N’York?” and again she dropped
the two syllables slowly from disdainful lips.
“Well, I never! Whaffor, though?” questioned Horace from the depths of
a fresh bumper.
Mrs. Clephane swept the table with a cool eye. “Business--family
business,” she said.
“_Criky!_” burst from Horace. And: “Say, Sid, a drop of _fine_, just
to help us over the shock? Well, here’s to the success of the lady’s
Family Business!” he concluded with a just-perceptible wink, emptying
his champagne goblet and replacing it by the big bubble-shaped liqueur
glass into which a thoughtful waiter had already measured out the
proper quantity of the most expensive _fine_.
III.
As Kate Clephane stood on deck, straining her eyes at the Babylonian
New York which seemed to sway and totter toward her menacingly, she
felt a light hand on her arm.
“Anne!”
She barely suppressed the questioning lift of her voice; for the length
of a heart-beat she had not been absolutely certain. Then ... yes,
there was her whole youth, her whole married past, in that small pale
oval--her own hair, but duskier, stronger; something of her smile too,
she fancied; and John Clephane’s straight rather heavy nose, beneath
old Mrs. Clephane’s awful brows.
“But the eyes--you chose your own eyes, my darling!” She had the girl
at arms’-length, her own head thrown back a little: Anne was slightly
the taller, and her pale face hung over her mother’s like a young moon
seen through mist.
“So wise of you! Such an improvement on anything we had in stock....”
How absurd! When she thought of the things she had meant to say! What
would her child think her? Incurably frivolous, of course. Well, if she
stopped to consider _that_ she was lost.... She flung both arms about
Anne and laid a long kiss on her fresh cheek.
“My Anne ... little Anne....”
She thirsted to have the girl to herself, where she could touch her
hair, stroke her face, draw the gloves from her hands, kiss her over
and over again, and little by little, from that tall black-swathed
figure, disengage the round child’s body she had so long continued to
feel against her own, like a warmth and an ache, as the amputated feel
the life in a lost limb.
“Come, mother: this way. And here’s Mr. Landers,” the girl said. Her
voice was not unkind; it was not cold; it was only muffled in fold on
fold of shyness, embarrassment and constraint. After all, Kate thought,
it was just as well that the crowd, the confusion and Fred Landers were
there to help them over those first moments.
“Fred Landers! Dear old Fred! Is it you, really? Known me anywhere? Oh,
nonsense! Look at my gray hair. But _you_--” She had said the words
over so often in enacting this imagined scene that they were on her
lips in a rush; but some contradictory impulse checked them there, and
let her just murmur “Fred” as her hand dropped into that of the heavy
grizzled man with a red-and-yellow complexion and screwed-up blue eyes
whom Time had substituted for the thin loose-jointed friend of her
youth.
Landers beamed on her, silent also; a common instinct seemed to have
told all three that for the moment there was nothing to say--that they
must just let propinquity do its mysterious work without trying to
hasten the process.
In the motor Mrs. Clephane’s agony began. “What do they think of _me_?”
she wondered. She felt so sure, so safe, so enfolded, with them; or
she would have, if only she could have guessed what impression she was
making. She put it in the plural, because, though at that moment all
she cared for was what Anne thought, she had guessed instantly that,
for a time at least, Anne’s view would be influenced by her guardian’s.
The very tone in which he had said, facing them from his seat between
the piled-up bags: “You’ll find this young woman a handful--I’m not
sorry to resign my trust--” showed the terms the two were on. And so
did Anne’s rejoinder: “I’m not a handful now to any one but myself--I’m
in my own hands, Uncle Fred.”
He laughed, and the girl smiled. Kate wished her daughter and she had
been facing each other, so that she could have seen the whole stretch
of the smile, instead of only the tip dimpling away into a half-turned
cheek. So much depended, for the mother, on that smile--on the smile,
and the motion of those grave brows. The whole point was, how far did
the one offset the other?
“Yes,” Mr. Landers assented, “you’re a free agent now--been one for
just three weeks, haven’t you? So far you’ve made fairly good use of
your liberty.”
Guardian and ward exchanged another smile, in which Kate felt herself
generously included; then Landers’s eye turned to hers. “You’re not a
bit changed, you know.”
“Oh, come! Nonsense.” Again she checked that silly “look at my gray
hair.” “I hope one never is, to old friends--after the first shock, at
any rate.”
“There wasn’t any first shock. I spotted you at once, from the pier.”
Anne intervened in her calm voice. “I recognized mother too--from such
a funny old photograph, in a dress with puffed sleeves.”
Mrs. Clephane tried to smile. “I don’t know, darling, if I recognized
you.... You were just there ... in me ... where you’ve always been....”
She felt her voice breaking, and was glad to have Mr. Landers burst in
with: “And what do you say to our new Fifth Avenue?”
* * * * *
She stood surveying its upper reaches, that afternoon, from the window
of the sitting-room Anne had assigned to her. Yes; Fred Landers was
right, it was a new, an absolutely new, Fifth Avenue; but there was
nothing new about Anne’s house. Incongruously enough--in that fluid
city, where the stoutest buildings seemed like atoms forever shaken
into new patterns by the rumble of Undergrounds and Elevateds--the
house was the very one which had once been Kate’s, the home to which,
four-and-twenty years earlier, she had been brought as a bride.
Her house, since she had been its mistress; but never hers in the sense
of her having helped to make it. John Clephane lived by proverbs. One
was that fools built houses for wise men to live in; so he had bought
a fool’s house, furniture and all, and moved into it on his marriage.
But if it had been built by a fool, Kate sometimes used to wonder,
how was it that her husband found it to be planned and furnished so
exactly as he would have chosen? He never tired of boasting of the
fact, seemingly unconscious of the unflattering inference to be drawn;
perhaps, if pressed, he would have said there was no contradiction,
since the house had cost the fool a great deal to build, and him,
the wise man, very little to buy. It had been, he was never tired of
repeating, a bargain, the biggest kind of a bargain; and that, somehow,
seemed a reason (again Kate didn’t see why) for leaving everything in
it unchanged, even to the heraldic stained glass on the stairs and the
Jacobean mantel in a drawing-room that ran to Aubusson.... And here it
all was again, untouched, unworn--the only difference being that she,
Kate, was installed in the visitor’s suite on the third floor (swung up
to it in a little jewel-box of a lift), instead of occupying the rooms
below which had once been “Papa’s and Mamma’s”. The change struck
her at once--and the fact that Anne, taking her up, had first pressed
the wrong button, the one for the floor below, and then reddened in
correcting her mistake. The girl evidently guessed that her mother
would prefer not to go back to those other rooms; her having done so
gave Kate a quick thrill.
“You don’t mind being so high up, mother?”
“I like it ever so much better, dear.”
“I’m so glad!” Anne was making an evident effort at expansiveness.
“That’s jolly of you--like this we shall be on the same floor.”
“Ah, you’ve kept the rooms you had--?” Kate didn’t know how to put it.
“Yes: the old nursery. First it was turned into a schoolroom, then into
my den. One gets attached to places. I never should have felt at home
anywhere else. Come and see.”
Ah, here, at last, in the grim middle-aged house, were youth and
renovation! The nursery, having changed its use, had perforce had to
change its appearance. Japanese walls of reddish gold; a few modern
pictures; books; a budding wistaria in a vase of Corean pottery; big
tables, capacious armchairs, an ungirlish absence of photographs and
personal trifles. Not particularly original; but a sober handsome room,
and comfortable, though so far from “cosy.” Kate wondered: “Is it her
own idea, or is this what the new girl likes?” She recalled the pink
and white trifles congesting her maiden bower, and felt as if a rather
serious-minded son were showing her his study. An Airedale terrier,
stretched before the fire, reinforced the impression. She didn’t
believe many of the new girls had rooms like this.
“It’s all your own idea, isn’t it?” she asked, almost shyly.
“I don’t know--yes. Uncle Fred helped me, of course. He knows a lot
about Oriental pottery. I called him ‘Uncle’ after father died,” Anne
explained, “because there’s nothing else to call a guardian, is there?”
On the wall Kate noticed a rough but vivid oil-sketch of a branch of
magnolias. She went up to it, attracted by its purity of colour. “I
like that,” she said.
Anne’s eyes deepened. “Do you? I did it.”
“You, dear? I didn’t know you painted.” Kate felt herself suddenly
blushing; the abyss of all she didn’t know about her daughter had once
more opened before her, and she just managed to murmur: “I mean, not
like _this_. It’s very broad--very sure. You must have worked....”
The girl laughed, caught in the contagion of her mother’s
embarrassment. “Yes, I’ve worked hard--I care for it a great deal.”
Kate sighed and turned from the picture. The few words they had
exchanged--the technical phrases she had used--had called up a time
when the vocabulary of the studio was forever in her ears, and she
wanted, at that moment, to escape from it as quickly as she could.
Against the opposite wall was a deep sofa, books and a reading-lamp
beside it. Kate paused. “That’s just where your crib used to stand!”
She turned to the fireplace with an unsteady laugh. “I can see you by
the hearth, in your little chair, with the fire shining through your
bush of hair, and your toys on the shelf in front of you. You thought
the sparks were red birds in a cage, and you used to try to coax them
through the fender with bits of sugar.”
“Oh, did I? You darling, to remember!” The girl put an arm about Kate.
It seemed to the mother, as the young warmth flowed through her, that
everything else had vanished, and that together they were watching the
little girl with the bush of hair coaxing the sparks through the fender.
* * * * *
Anne had left her, and Mrs. Clephane, alone in her window, looked
down on the new Fifth Avenue. As it surged past, a huge lava-flow
of interlaced traffic, her tired bewildered eyes seemed to see the
buildings move with the vehicles, as a stationary train appears to
move to travellers on another line. She fancied that presently even
the little Washington Square Arch would trot by, heading the tide of
sky-scrapers from the lower reaches of the city.... Oppressed and
confused, she rejected the restless vision and called up in its place
the old Fifth Avenue, the Fifth Avenue still intact at her marriage,
a thoroughfare of monotonously ugly brown houses divided by a thin
trickle of horse-drawn carriages; and she saw her mother-in-law, in
just such a richly-curtained window, looking down, with dry mental
comments, on old Mrs. Chivers’s C-spring barouche and Mrs. Beaufort’s
new chestnut steppers, and knowing how long ago the barouche had been
imported from Paris, and how much had been paid for the steppers--for
Mrs. Clephane senior belonged to the generation which still surveyed
its world from an upper window, like the Dutch ancestresses to whom the
doings of the street were reported by a little mirror.
The contrast was too great; Kate Clephane felt herself too much a part
of that earlier day. The overwhelming changes had all happened, in a
whirl, during the years of her absence; and meanwhile she had been
living in quiet backwaters, or in the steady European capitals where
renewals make so little mark on the unyielding surface of the past. She
turned back into the room, seeking refuge in its familiar big-patterned
chintz, the tufted lounge, the woolly architecture of the carpet. It
was thoughtful of Anne to have left her.... They were both beginning
to be oppressed again by a sense of obstruction: the packed memories
of their so different pasts had jammed the passages between them. Anne
had visibly felt that, and with a light kiss slipped out. “She’s
perfect,” her mother thought, a little frightened....
She said to herself: “I’m dead tired--” put on a dressing-gown,
dismissed the hovering Aline, and lay down by the fire. Then, in the
silence, when the door had shut, she understood how excited she was,
and how impossible it would be to rest.
Her eyes wandered about the unchanged scene, and into the equally
familiar bedroom beyond--the “best spare-room” of old days. There hung
the same red-eyed Beatrice Cenci above the double bed. John Clephane’s
parents had travelled in the days when people still brought home
copies of the Old Masters; and a mixture of thrift and filial piety
had caused John Clephane to preserve their collection in the obscurer
corners of his house. Kate smiled at the presiding genius selected to
guard the slumbers of married visitors (as Ribera monks and Caravaggio
gamblers darkened the digestive processes in the dining-room); she
smiled, as she so often had--but now without bitterness--at the naïve
incongruities of that innocent and inquisitorial past. Then her eye
lit on the one novelty in the room: the telephone at her elbow. Oh,
to talk to some one--to talk to Fred Landers, instantly! “There are
too many things I don’t know ... I’m too utterly in the dark,” she
murmured. She rushed through the directory, found his number, and
assailed his parlour-maid with questions. But Mr. Landers was not at
home; the parlour-maid’s inflexion signified: “At this hour?” and a
glance at the clock showed Kate that the endless day had barely reached
mid-afternoon. Of course he would not be at home. But the parlour-maid
added: “He’s always at his office till five.”
His office! Fred Landers had an office--had one still! Kate remembered
that two-and-twenty years ago, after lunching with them, he used always
to glance at his watch and say: “Time to get back to the office.” And
he was well-off--always had been. He needn’t--needn’t! What on earth
did he do there, she wondered? What results, pecuniary or other, had
he to show for his quarter-century of “regular hours”? She remembered
that his profession had been legal--most of one’s men friends, in those
remote days, were lawyers. But she didn’t fancy he had ever appeared
in court; people consulted him about investments, he looked after
estates. For the last years, very likely, his chief business had been
to look after Anne’s; no doubt he was one of John Clephane’s executors,
and also old Mrs. Clephane’s. One pictured him as deeply versed in
will-making and will-interpreting: he had always, in his dry mumbling
way, rather enjoyed a quibble over words. Kate thought, by the way,
that he mumbled less, spoke more “straight from the shoulder,” than
he used to. Perhaps it was experience, authority, the fact of being
consulted and looked up to, that had changed the gaunt shambling Fred
Landers of old days into the four-square sort of man who had met her on
the pier and disentangled her luggage with so little fuss. Oh, yes, she
was sure the new Fred Landers could help her--advice was just what she
wanted, and what, she suspected, he liked to give.
She called up his office, and in less than a minute there was his calm
voice asking what he could do.
“Come at once--oh, Fred, you must!”
She heard: “Is there anything wrong?” and sent him a reassuring laugh.
“Nothing--except _me_. I don’t yet know how to fit in. There are so
many things I ought to be told. Remember, I’m so unprepared--”
She fancied she felt a tremor of disapproval along the wire. Ought she
not to have gone even as far as that on the telephone?
“Anne’s out,” she added hastily. “I was tired, and she told me to rest.
But I can’t. How can I? Can’t you come?”
He returned, without the least acceleration of the syllables: “I never
leave the office until--”
“Five. I know. But just today--”
There was a pause. “Yes; I’ll come, of course. But you know there’s
nothing in the world to bother about,” he added patiently. (“He’s
saying to himself,” she thought, “‘that’s the sort of fuss that used to
drive poor Clephane out of his wits’.”)
But when he came he did not strike her as having probably said anything
of the sort. There was no trace of “the office”, or of any other
preoccupation, in the friendly voice in which he asked her if she
wouldn’t please stay lying down, and let him do the talking.
“Yes, I want you to. I want you to tell me everything. And first of
all--” She paused to gather up her courage. “What does Anne know?” she
flung at him.
Her visitor had seated himself in the armchair facing her. The late
afternoon light fell on his thick ruddy face, in which the small
eyes, between white lids, looked startlingly blue. At her question
the blood rose from his cheeks to his forehead, and invaded the thin
pepper-and-salt hair carefully brushed over his solidly moulded head.
“Don’t--don’t try to find out, I beg of you; I haven’t,” he stammered.
She felt his blush reflected on her own pale cheek, and the tears rose
to her eyes. How was he to help her if he took that tone? He did not
give her time to answer, but went on, in a voice laboriously cheerful:
“Look forward, not back: that’s the thing to do. Living with young
people, isn’t it the natural attitude? And Anne is not the kind to dig
and brood: thank goodness, she’s health itself, body and soul. She
asks no questions; never has. Why should I have put it into her head
that there were any to ask? Her grandmother didn’t. It was her policy
... as it’s been mine. If we didn’t always agree, the old lady and
I, we did on _that_.” He stood up and leaned against the mantel, his
gaze embracing the pyramidal bronze clock on which a heavily-draped
Muse with an Etruscan necklace rested her lyre. “Anne was simply
given to understand that you and her father didn’t agree; that’s all.
A girl,” he went on in an embarrassed tone, “can’t grow up nowadays
without seeing a good many cases of the kind about her; Lord forgive
me, they’re getting to be the rule rather than the exception. Lots
of things that you, at her age, might have puzzled over and thought
mysterious, she probably takes for granted. At any rate she behaves as
if she did.
“Things didn’t always go smoothly between her and her grandmother. The
child has talents, you know; developed ’em early. She paints cleverly,
and the old lady had her taught; but when she wanted a studio of her
own there was a row--I was sent for. Mrs. Clephane had never heard of
anybody in the family having a studio; that settled it. Well, Anne’s
going to have one now. And so it was with everything. In the end Anne
invariably gets what she wants. She knew of course that you and her
grandmother were not the best of friends--my idea is that she tried
to see you not long after her father died, and was told by the old
lady that she must wait till she was of age. They neither of them told
me so--but, well, it was in the air. And Anne waited. But now she’s
doubly free--and you see the first use she’s made of her freedom.” He
had recovered his ease, and sat down again, his hands on his knees, his
trouser-hem rather too high above wrinkled socks and solemn square-toed
boots. “I may say,” he added smiling, “that she cabled to you without
consulting me--without consulting anybody. I heard about it only when
she showed me your answer. That ought to tell you,” he concluded gaily,
“as much as anything can, about Anne. Only take her for granted, as she
will you, and you’ve got your happiest days ahead of you--see if you
haven’t.”
As he blinked at her with kindly brotherly eyes she saw in their
ingenuous depths the terror of the man who has tried to buy off fate by
one optimistic evasion after another, till it has become second nature
to hand out his watch and pocket-book whenever reality waylays him.
She exchanged one glance with that lurking fear; then she said: “Yes;
you’re right, I suppose. But there’s not only Anne. What do other
people know? I ought to be told.”
His face clouded again, though not with irritation. He seemed to
understand that the appeal was reasonable, and to want to help her, yet
to feel that with every word she was making it more difficult.
“What they know? Why ... why ... what they _had_ to ... merely
that....” (“What you yourself forced on them,” his tone seemed to
imply.)
“That I went away....”
He nodded.
“With another man....”
Reluctantly he brought the words out after her: “With another man.”
“With Hylton Davies....”
“Hylton Davies....”
“And travelled with him--for nearly two years.”
He frowned, but immediately fetched a sigh of relief. “Oh,
well--abroad. And he’s dead.” He glanced at her cautiously, and then
added: “He’s not a man that many people remember.”
But she insisted: “After that....--”
Mr. Landers lifted his hand in a gesture of reassurance; the cloud
was lifted from his brow. “After that, we all know what your life
was. You’ll forgive my putting it bluntly: but your living in that
quiet way--all these years--gradually produced a change of opinion ...
told immensely in your favour. Even among the Clephane relations ...
especially those who had glimpses of you abroad ... or heard of you
when they were there. Some of the family distinctly disapproved of--of
John’s attitude; his persistent refusal ... yes, the Tresseltons even,
and the Drovers--I know they all did what they could--especially Enid
Drover--”
Her blood rushed up and the pulses drummed in her temples. “If I cry,”
she thought, “it will upset him--” but the tears rose in a warm gush
about her heart.
“Enid Drover? I never knew--”
“Oh, yes; so that for a long time I hoped ... we all hoped....”
She began to tremble. Even her husband’s sister Enid Drover! She had
remembered the Hendrik Drovers, both husband and wife, as among the
narrowest, the most inexorable of the Clephane tribe. But then, it
suddenly flashed across her, if it hadn’t been for the episode with
Chris perhaps she might have come back years before. What mocking
twists fate gave to one’s poor little life-pattern!
“Well--?” she questioned, breathless.
He met her gaze now without a shadow of constraint. “Oh, well, you know
what John was--always the slave of anything he’d once said. Once he’d
found a phrase for a thing, the phrase ruled him. He never could be got
beyond that first vision of you ... you and Davies....”
“Never--?”
“No. All the years after made no difference to him. He wouldn’t listen.
‘Burnt child dreads the fire’ was all he would say. And after he died
his mother kept it up. She seemed to regard it as a duty to his
memory.... She might have had your life spread out before her eyes, day
by day, hour by hour ... it wouldn’t have changed her.” He reddened
again. “Some of your friends kept on trying ... but nothing made any
difference.”
Kate Clephane lay silent, staring at the fire. Tentatively, fearfully,
she was building up out of her visitor’s tones, his words, his
reticences, the incredible fact that, for him and all her husband’s
family--that huge imperious clan--her life, after she had left them,
had been divided into two sharply differentiated parts: the brief lapse
with Hylton Davies, the long expiation alone. Of that third episode,
which for her was the central fact of her experience, apparently not
a hint had reached them. She was the woman who had once “stooped to
folly”, and then, regaining her natural uprightness, had retained it
inflexibly through all the succeeding years. As the truth penetrated
her mind she was more frightened than relieved. Was she not returning
on false pretences to these kindly forgiving relations? Was it not
possible, indeed almost certain, that a man like Frederick Landers, had
he known about Chris, would have used all his influence to dissuade
Anne from sending for her, instead of exerting it in the opposite
sense, as he avowedly had? And, that being so, was she not taking them
all unawares, actually abusing their good faith, in passing herself
off as the penitential figure whom the passage of blameless years had
gradually changed from the offending into the offended? Yet was it,
after all, possible that the affair with Chris, and the life she had
led with him, could so completely have escaped their notice? Rumour has
a million eyes, and though she had preserved appearances in certain,
almost superstitious, ways, she had braved them recklessly in others,
especially toward the end, when the fear of losing Chris had swept away
all her precautions. Then suddenly the explanation dawned on her. She
had met Chris for the first time less than a year before the outbreak
of the war, and the last of their months together, the most reckless
and fervid, had been overshadowed, blotted out of everybody’s sight, in
that universal eclipse.