Lydia had offered to drop Bobby at the railroad station on her way home,
although she had to go a few miles out of her way to do it. He was going
back to town. It was dark by the time they started. She liked the
feeling of having him there tucked in beside her while she absolutely
controlled his destiny for the next half hour. She liked even to take
risks with his life, more precious to her at least for the time than any
other, in the hope that he would protest, but he never did. He
understood his Lydia.
After a few minutes she observed, "I suppose you know Eleanor has a new
young man."
"Intensely interesting, or absolutely worth while?" he asked.
"Both, according to her. She's bringing him out at the Piers' this
evening. She was just asking me to be nice to him."
"Like asking the boa constrictor to be nice to a newborn lamb, isn't
it?"
"If I'm nice to her men it gives her a feeling of confidence in them."
"If you're nice to them you take them away from her."
"No, Bobby. It's a funny thing, but it isn't so easy as you think to get
Eleanor's men away from her."
"Ah, you've tried?"
"She has a funny kind of hold on them. It's her brains. She has brains,
and they appreciate it. I don't often want her men. They're apt to be so
dreadful. Do you remember the biologist with the pearl buttons on his
boots? This one is in politics--or something. He has a funny
name--O'Bannon."
"Oh, yes--Dan O'Bannon."
"You know him?"
"I used to know him in college. Lord, he was a wild man in those days!"
Bobby snickered reminiscently. "And now he's the local district
attorney."
"What does a district attorney do, Bobby?"
"Why, he's a fellow elected by the county to prosecute----"
"Look here, Bobby, if the Emmonses ask you to spend this coming Sunday
with them, go, because I'm going." She interrupted him because it was
the kind of explanation that she had never been able to listen to. In
fact she had so completely ceased to listen that she was unaware of
having interrupted the answer to her own question, and Bobby did not
care to bring the matter to her attention for fear her invitation to the
Emmonses might be lost in the subsequent scuffle. Besides he esteemed it
his own fault. Most people who ask you a question like that really mean
to say, "Would there be anything interesting to me in the answer to this
question? If not, for goodness' sake don't answer it." So he gladly
abandoned defining the duties of the district attorney and answered her
more important statement.
"Of course I'll go, only they haven't asked me."
"They will--or else I won't go. You'll come out on Friday afternoon."
"I can't, Lydia, until Saturday."
"Now, Bobby, don't be absurd. Don't let that old man treat you like a
slave."
Lydia's attitude to Bobby's work was a trifle confusing. She wished him
to attain a commanding position in the financial world but had no
patience with his industry when it interfered with her own plans. The
attaining of any position at all seemed unlikely in Bobby's case. He was
a clerk in the great banking house of Gordon & Co., a firm which in the
course of a hundred and twenty-five years had built itself into the very
financial existence of the country. In almost any part of the civilized
globe to say you were with Gordon & Co. was a proud boast. But pride was
all that a man of Bobby's type was likely to get out of it. Promotion
was slow. Lydia talked of a junior partnership some day, but Bobby knew
that partnerships in Gordon & Co. went to qualities more positively
valuable than his. Sometimes he thought of leaving them, but he could
not bear to give up the easy honor of the connection.
It was better to be a doorkeeper with Gordon & Co. than a partner with
some ephemeral firm.
It amused him to hear her talk of Peter Gordon treating him like a
slave. The dignified, middle-aged head of the firm, whose business was
like an ancestral religion to him, hardly knew his clerks by sight.
"It isn't exactly servile to work half a day on Saturday," he said
mildly.
"They'd respect you more if you asserted yourself. Do come on Friday,
Bobby. I shall be so bored if you're not there."
He reflected that after all he would rather be dismissed by Gordon & Co.
than by the young lady beside him.
"Dearest Lydia, how nice you can be when you want to--like all tyrants."
They had reached the small deserted wooden hut that served as a railroad
station, and Lydia stopped the car.
"I suppose it's silly, but I wish you wouldn't say that--that I'm a
tyrant," she said appealingly. "I don't want to be, only so often I know
I know better what ought to be done. This afternoon, for instance,
wasn't it much better for us all to play outside instead of in that
stuffy little room of Eleanor's? Was that being a tyrant?"
"Yes, Lydia, it was; but I like it. All I ask is a little tyrant in my
home."
She sighed so deeply that he leaned over and kissed her cool cheek.
"Good-by, my dear," he said.
The kiss did not go badly. He had done it as if, though not sure of
success, he was not adventuring on absolutely untried ground.
"I think you'd better not do that, Bobby."
"Do you hate it?"
"Not particularly, only I don't want you to get dependent on it."
He laughed as he shut the car door. The light of the engine was visible
above the low woods to their left.
"I'll take my chances on that," he said.
As she drove away she felt the injustice of the world. Everyone did ask
your advice; they did want you to take an interest, but they complained
when this interest led you to exert the slightest pressure on them to do
what you saw was best. That was so illogical. You couldn't give a person
advice that was any good unless you entered in and made their problem
yours, and of course if you did that--only how few people except herself
ever did it for their friends--then you were concerned, personally
concerned that they should follow your advice. They were all content,
too, she thought, when her tyranny worked out for their good. Bobby, for
instance, had not complained of her having forced the Emmonses to ask
him for Sunday. He thought that commendable. Perhaps the Emmonses
hadn't. And yet how much better to be clear. She did not want to go and
spend Sunday with anyone unless she could be sure of having someone to
amuse her. Suppose she had gone there and found that like Benny they
were using her to entertain some of their dull friends. That would have
made her angry. She might have been disagreeable and broken up a
friendship. This way it was safe.
She did not get home until half past seven, and she was dining at eight,
fifteen minutes' drive away.
A pleasant smell of roses and wood smoke greeted her as she entered the
house. She loved her house, with the broad shingles and classic
pilasters of the front still untouched. Ten years ago her father had
bought it--a nice old farmhouse with an ornamental band running round it
below the eaves and a perfect little porch before the door. Since then
she had been becoming more and more attached to it as it became more and
more the work of her own creation. She had added whatever she needed
without much regard to the effect of the whole--a large paneled room,
English as much as anything, an inner garden suggestive of a Spanish
patio, a tiled Italian hall and a long servant's wing that was nothing
at all.
She put her head in the dining room, where Miss Bennett in a stately tea
gown was just beginning a solitary dinner.
"Hello, Benny! Have a good dinner. I forgot to tell you I'm going to the
Emmonses for Sunday, so if you want to ask someone down to keep you
company, do. I'm going to be late for dinner."
Miss Bennett smiled and nodded, recognizing this as a peace
demonstration. Fourteen years had taught her that Lydia was not without
generosity.
Fourteen years ago this coming winter the Thornes had entered Miss
Bennett's life. Old Joe Thorne had come by appointment to her little New
York apartment. The appointment had been made by a friend of Miss
Bennett's--Miss Bennett's friends were always looking for something
desirable for her in those days. Her family, who had been identified
with New York for a hundred and fifty years, had gradually declined in
fortune until the panic of 1893 had almost wiped out the little fortune
of Adeline and her mother, the last of the family. Adeline had been
brought up, not in luxury but in a comfortable, unalterable feminine
idleness. She had always had all the clothes she needed to go about
among the people she knew, and they were the people who had everything.
The Bennetts had never kept a carriage, but they had never stinted
themselves in cabs. The truth was they had never stinted themselves in
anything that they really wanted. And Adeline, when she found herself
alone in the world at thirty, with an income of only a few thousand,
continued the family tradition of having what she wanted. She took a
small apartment, which she contrived to make charming, and she lived
nicely by the aid of her old French nurse, who came and cooked for her
and dressed her and turned her out as perfectly as ever. She continued
to dine out every night, and though nominally she spent her summers in
New York as an economy, she was always on somebody's yacht or in
somebody's country house. She paid any number of visits and enjoyed life
more than most people.
Her friends, however, for she had the power of creating real
attachments, were not so well satisfied. At first they were persuaded
that Adeline would marry--it was so obviously the thing for Adeline to
do--but she was neither designing nor romantic. She lacked both the
reckless emotion which may lead one to marry badly and the cold-blooded
determination to marry well.
She was just past forty the day Joe Thorne came. She could still see him
as he entered in his blue overcoat with a velvet collar. A big powerful
man with prominent eyes like Bismarck's, and a heavy dark brown mustache
bulging over his upper lip. He did not expect to give much time to the
interview. He had come to see if Miss Bennett would do to bring up his
daughter, who at ten years was giving him trouble. He wanted her
prepared for the social opportunities he intended her to have. It seemed
strange to him that a person who lived as simply as Miss Bennett could
really have these social opportunities in her control, but he had been
advised by people whom he trusted that such was the fact, and he
accepted it.
He was the son of a Kansas farmer, had left the farm as a boy and
settled in a small town, and had learned the trade of bricklaying. By
hard work he gradually amassed a few hundred dollars, and this he
invested in a gravel bank just outside the town. It was the only gravel
bank in the neighborhood and brought him a high return on the money.
Then just as the gravel was exhausted the town began to spread in that
direction, and Thorne was arranging to level his property and sell it in
building lots, when a still more unexpected development took place. Oil
was struck in the neighborhood, and beneath Thorne's gravel lay a well.
If Fate had intended him to be poor she should never have allowed him to
make his first thousand dollars, for from the moment he had any surplus
everything he touched did well. In one of his trips to the Louisiana oil
district he met and married a local belle, a slim, pale girl with
immense dark-circled black eyes and a skin like a gardenia. She followed
him meekly about the country from oil wells to financial centers until
after the birth of her daughter. Then she settled down in Kansas City
and waited his rare visits. The only inconsiderate thing she had ever
done to him was to die and leave him with an eight-year-old daughter.
For several stormy years he tried various solutions--foreign governesses
who tried to marry him, American college girls who attempted to make
him take his fair share of parental responsibility, an old cousin who
had been a school teacher and dared to criticize his manner of life. At
last his enlarging affairs brought him to New York and he heard of Miss
Bennett. He heard of her through Wiley, his lawyer. Wiley, a man in the
forties, then attaining preeminence at the bar in New York, had been
thought by many people to be an ideal husband for Adeline. They were old
friends. He admired her, wished her well, and thought of her instantly
when his new client applied to him for help.
The minute Thorne saw Miss Bennett he saw that she would do perfectly.
He made her the offer of a good salary. He couldn't believe that she
would refuse it. She could hardly believe it herself, for she was
unaccustomed to setting up her will against anyone's least of all
against a man like Joe Thorne, who had successfully battled his way up
against the will of the world. The contest went on for weeks and weeks.
Poor Miss Bennett kept consulting her friends, almost agreeing to go
when she saw Thorne, and then telephoning him that she had changed her
mind, and bringing him round to her apartment--which was just what she
didn't want--to argue her into it again.
Some of her friends opposed her going to the house of a widower whose
reputation in regard to women was not spotless. Others thought--though
they did not say--that if she went, and succeeded in marrying him, she
would be doing better than she had any right to expect. Perhaps if Miss
Bennett could have fallen in love with Lydia she might have yielded, but
even at ten, Lydia, a black-eyed determined little person, inspired fear
more than love.
Poor Adeline grew pale and thin over the struggle. At last she decided,
after due consultation with friends, to end the matter by being a little
bit rude, by telling Thorne that she just didn't like the whole
prospect; that she preferred her own little place and her own little
life.
"Like it--like this cramped little place?" he said, looking about at the
sunshine and chintz and potted daisies of her cherished home. "But I'd
make you comfortable, give you what you ought to have--Europe, your
friends, your carriage, everything."
He went on to argue with her that she was wrong, utterly wrong to like
her own life. Her last card didn't win. She yielded at last for no
better reason than that her powers of resistance were exhausted.
Thorne was then living in a house on a corner of upper Fifth Avenue,
with a pale-pink brocade ballroom running across the front and taking
all the morning sunshine, and a living room and library at the back so
dark that you couldn't read in it at mid-day, with marble stairs and
huge fire-places that didn't draw--a terrible house. Some years later,
under Miss Bennett's influence, he had bought the more modest house in
the Seventies where Lydia now spent her winters. But it was to the
Fifth Avenue house that Miss Bennett came, and found herself plunged
into one of the most desperate struggles in the world. Thorne, whose
continuous interest was given to business, attempted to rule Lydia in
crises--by scenes, scenes of a violence that Miss Bennett had never seen
equaled. As it turned out, her coming weakened Thorne's power; not that
she wasn't usually on his side--she was--but she was an audience, and
Thorne had some sense of shame before an audience, while Lydia had none
at all.
Many a time she had seen him box Lydia's ears and, mild as she was, had
been glad to see him do it. But it was his violence that undid him. It
was then that Lydia became suddenly dignified and, unbroken, contrived
to make him appear like a brute.
There is nothing really more unbreakable than a child who considers
neither her physical well-being nor public opinion. An older person,
however violent, has learned that he must consider such questions, and
it is a weakness in a campaign of violence to consider anything but the
desired end.
And on the whole Thorne lost. He could make Lydia do or refrain from
doing specific acts--at least he could when he was at home. He had not
permitted her at ten to keep her great Danes nor at thirteen to drive a
high-stepping hackney in a red-wheeled cart which she ordered for
herself without consultation with anyone.
The evening after that struggle was over he had asked Miss Bennett to
marry him. She knew why he did it. Lydia in the course of the row had
referred to her as a paid companion. He had long been considering it as
a sensible arrangement, particularly in case of his death. Miss Bennett
refused him. She tried to think that she had been tempted by his offer,
but she was not. To her he seemed a violent man who had been a
bricklayer, and she always breathed a sigh of relief when he was out of
the house. She was glad that he did not press the point, but in after
years it was a solid comfort to her to remember that she might have been
Lydia's stepmother if she had chosen.
But it was in the long-drawn-out contest that Thorne failed. He could
not make Lydia keep governesses that she didn't like. Her method was
simple--she made their lives so disagreeable that nothing could make
them stay. He never succeeded in getting her to boarding school, though
he and Miss Bennett, after a long conference, decided that that was the
thing to do. But that failure was partly due to his failing health.
That was their last great struggle. He died in 1912. In his will he left
Miss Bennett ten thousand a year, with the request that she stay with
his daughter until her marriage. It touched Miss Bennett that he should
have seen that she could not have stayed if she had been dependent on
Lydia's capricious will. It was this that made her position
possible--the fact that they both knew she could go in an instant if
she wanted; not that she ever doubted that Lydia was sincerely attached
to her.