THE PICTURE PUZZLE
There was a good quarter of an hour beginning with the tear-blurred
moment when Mary caught sight of her father looking for her and Rush down
the railway station platform, during which the whole fabric of misgivings
about her home-coming dissolved as dreams do when one wakes. It had not
been a dream she knew, nor the mere concoction of her morbid fancy. He
had not looked at her like this nor kissed her like this--not once since
that fatal journey to Vienna five years ago. Had something happened
between him and Paula that made the difference? Or was it her brother's
presence, that, serving somehow to take off the edge, worked a mysterious
catalysis?
When John, after standing off and gazing wordless for a moment at this
new son of his, this man he had never seen, in his captain's uniform with
bits of ribbon on the breast of it,--tried to say how proud he was and
choked instead, it was for Mary that he reached out an unconscious,
embracing arm, the emotion which would not go into words finding an
outlet for itself that way.
When they got out to the motor and old Pete, once coachman, now
chauffeur, his eyes gleaming over the way Rush had all but hugged him,
said to her, "You home to stay, too, Miss Mary?" her father's hand which
clasped her arm revealed the thrilling interest with which he awaited her
answer to that question. The importunity of the red-cap with the luggage
relieved her of the necessity for answering but the answer in her heart
just then was "Yes."
It was with a wry self-scornful smile that she recalled, later that day,
the emotions of the ride home. If at any time before they got to the
house, her father had repeated the old servant's question, "Are you home
to stay, Mary?" she would, she knew, have kissed the hand that she held
clasped in hers, wept blissfully over it and told him she wanted never to
go away again. She hadn't minded his not asking because she thought she
knew quite surely why he had not. He was afraid to risk his momentary
happiness upon her answer. And why had she not volunteered the assurance
he wanted so eagerly and dared not ask for? The beastly answer to that
question was that she had enjoyed the thrill of his uncertainty--a
miserable sort of feline coquetry.
Well, it had been short-lived, that little triumph of hers. It had
stopped against a blank wall just when the car stopped under the _ports
cochère_ of the Dearborn Avenue house. John's arm which had been around
her was withdrawn and he looked with just a touch of ostentation at his
watch. She knew before he spoke that when he did, his tone would ring
flat. The old spell was broken. He was once more under the dominion of
the newer, stronger one.
"I'm terribly late," he said. "I must drive straight along to the
hospital. I'll see you to-night. We're having a few old friends in to
dinner. Run along now. Your Aunt Lucile will be waiting for you."
His omission to mention Paula had been fairly palpable. Her reply, "All
right, dad, till to-night, then. _Au 'voir_" had been, she knew, as
brittle and sharp-edged as a bit of broken glass. It had cut him;--she
had meant it to.
Well it served her right. Paula deserved to own the stronger spell.
Paula's emotional channels were open and deep. No choking snags and
sandbars, no perverse eddies in them. Look at her with Rush to-day! There
was a situation that fairly bristled with opportunities for blundering.
She might, with this grown-up son of her husband's whom she had hardly
seen, have shown herself shy, embarrassed, at a loss how to take him. She
might have tried to be archly maternal with him or elder-sisterly. But
she played up none of these sentimental possibilities, seemed, indeed,
serenely unaware of them. She treated him just as she had always treated
Mary--as a contemporary. From the beginning she had no trouble making him
talk. For one thing her acquaintance with France and Germany was intimate
enough to enable her to ask him questions which he found it pleasantly
stimulating to try to answer. As she felt her way to firmer ground with
him, she allowed what was evidently a perfectly spontaneous affection to
irradiate the look she turned upon him and to warm her lovely voice.
So she must have begun--as simply and irresistibly as that--in Vienna!
Mary tried hard to think of it as a highly skillful performance, but this
was an attitude she could not maintain. It was not a performance at all;
it was--just Paula, who, having taken her father away from her was now,
inevitably, going to take her brother too. Not because she meant
to--quite unconscious that she was doing any harm ("and of course she
isn't, except to a cat like me")--that was the maddening, and at the same
time, endearing thing about her.
For there was a broad impartiality about her spell that tugged at Mary
even while she forlornly watched Rush yielding to it. And the way it
affected Aunt Lucile was simply funny. She melted, visibly, like a
fragment left on the curb by the iceman, whenever Paula--turned the
current on. What made this the more striking was that Aunt Lucile's
normal mood to-day impressed Mary as rather aggressively sell-contained.
Was it just that Mary had forgotten how straight she sat and how
precisely she moved about? Had she always had that discreet significant
air, as if there were something she could talk about but didn't mean
to--not on any account? Or was there something going on here at home that
awaited--breathlessly awaited--discovery? Whatever it was, when Paula
turned upon her it went, laughably;--only it would have been a pretty
shaky sort of laugh.
It was after lunch that Paula electrified them by suggesting that they
all go together to a matinée. That's an illustration of the power she
had. To each of the three, to Lucile and to Mary as well as to the now
infatuated Rush, she could make a commonplace scheme like that seem an
irresistibly enticing adventure. Lucile recovered her balance first, but
it was not until Nat had fetched the morning paper and they had discussed
their choice of entertainments for two or three minutes that she said of
course she couldn't go. She didn't know what she'd been thinking of. The
number of things imperatively to be done or seen to in preparation for
the party to-night would keep her busy all the afternoon.
Then Mary followed suit. If this was really going to be a party--she
hadn't quite got this idea before--she'd have to spend the afternoon
unpacking and putting her frocks in order or she wouldn't have
anything to wear.
"Well," Paula said comfortably, "until they turn me on like a Victrola at
nine o'clock or so, I've nothing to do with the party except not think
about it." She made this observation at large, then turned on Rush.
"You'll come with me, won't you, and keep me from getting frightened
until tea-time?"
Rush would go--rather!--but he laughed at the word "frightened."
"I'm not joking," she said, and reaching out she covered his hand, which
rested on the cloth, with one of hers.
He flushed instantly at that; then said to the others with slightly
elaborated surprise, "It _is,_ cold, for a fact."
"So is the other one," said Paula. "For that matter, so are my feet. And
getting colder every minute. Come along or we'll be late."
Mary branded this as a bit of rather crude coquetry. It wasn't
conceivable that a professional opera singer of Paula's experience could
look forward with any sort of emotion to the mere singing of a few songs
to a group of familiar friends. It occurred to her, too, that Paula had
calculated on her refusal to go to the matinée as definitely as on Aunt
Lucile's and for a moment she indulged the idea of changing her mind and
going along with them just to frustrate this design. Only, of course, it
wouldn't work that way. She couldn't keep Rush from being taken away from
her by playing the spoil-sport. She couldn't keep him anyhow she
supposed. She made a hasty, rather forlorn retreat to her own room as
soon as the departing pair were safely out of the house.
That room of hers exerted now a rather curious effect upon her mood. It
had been hers ever since her promotion from the nursery and it, like
her brother's adjoining, had been kept unchanged, unoccupied during her
long absence.
The furniture and the decoration of it had been her mother's last
Christmas present. The first Mrs. Wollaston had lived under the influence
of the late Victorian esthetes, and Mary's room looked as if it had been
designed for Elaine the lily maid of Astolat, an effect which was
heightened by a large brown picture in a broad brown frame of Watts' Sir
Galahad. After her mother's death, that winter, Mary added a Botticelli
Madonna, the one with the pomegranate, which she hung by itself on a wall
panel. There was a narrow black oak table under it to carry a Fra
Angelico triptych flanked by two tall candlesticks. It wasn't exactly a
shrine, even if there was a crimson cushion conveniently disposed before
it, and if Mary for a while said her prayers there instead of in the old
childish way at her bedside, and if she genuflected when she passed it,
that was her own affair.
Coming to it now, as to port after storms, with the intention almost
openly avowed to herself of lying down upon the bed and, for an hour or
two, feeling as sorry for herself as she could, she found an appalling
strangeness about its very familiarity that pulled her up short. The
abyss she stared into between herself and the Mary Wollaston whose
image was so sharply evoked by the ridiculously unchanged paraphernalia
of that Mary's life, turned her giddy. Even the face which looked back
at her from the frame of that mirror seemed the other Mary's rather
than her own.
From the doorway she stood, for a moment, staring. Then she managed a
smile (it was the only possible attitude to take) at Sir Galahad, above
the bed. The notion of flinging herself down for a self-pitying revel
upon that bed,--the other Mary's virginal little narrow bed--had become
unthinkable. The thing to do was to stop thinking. Quickly.
She stripped off her suit and blouse, slipped on a pongee kimono that she
got out of her hand-bag, unlocked her trunk and began discharging its
contents all about the room. She covered the chairs with them, the bed,
the narrow table--that had never had anything upon it but that Fra
Angelico triptych and the two candlesticks--the round table with the
reading lamp, the writing desk in the corner, the floor. Then, a little
out of breath, she paused.
Which among two or three possible frocks should she wear for the party
to-night? What sort of party was it going to be anyhow? It was curious,
considering the fact that they had done nothing but sit and talk all the
morning, how vague her ideas about it were. Her father had said
something out in the car about having a few old friends in for dinner.
Paula was going to sing and professed herself frightened by the
prospect. Also she had cited it as the reason for an unusually and
almost strenuously unoccupied day. On the other hand it was keeping Aunt
Lucile distractedly busy.
Was it the chance result of their preoccupation with other things that
she had been given no more intelligible account of it, or was it
something that all three of them, her father, Paula and Aunt Lucile, were
walking round the edge of? The nub of some seriously trivial quarrel? Was
that why Paula was so elaborately disengaged and Aunt Lucile so
portentous? Was it even perhaps why her father had so abruptly fled this
morning without coming into the house?
She treated this surmise kindly. It was something to think about anyhow;
something to sharpen her wits upon, just as a cat stretches her claws in
the nap of the drawing-room rug. She rescued from oblivion half a dozen
remarks heard during the morning, whose significance had gone over her
head, and tentatively fitted them together like bits of a picture puzzle.
She hadn't enough to go on but she believed there was something there.
And when a little later in the afternoon, she heard, along with a knock
on her door, her aunt asking if she might come in, she gave her an
enthusiastic welcome, scooped an armful of things out of a chair and
cleared a sitting space for herself at the foot of the bed.
"Would this blue thing do for to-night?" she asked, "or isn't it enough
of an affair? What sort of party is it anyhow?"
"Goodness knows," said Lucile. "Between your father and Paula I find it
rather upsetting."
Mary had reached out negligently for her cigarette case, lighted one and
letting it droop at a rather impossible angle, supported by the lightest
pressure of her lips so that the smoke crept up over her face into her
lashes and her hair, folded her hands demurely in her lap and waited for
her aunt to go on. She was mischievously half aware of the disturbing
effect of this sort of thing upon Lucile.
"What has there been between them?" Mary asked, when it became clear that
her aunt needed prompting. "Between father and Paula, I mean. Not a row?"
Mary never used language like this except provocatively. It worked on her
aunt as she had meant it to.
"There has been nothing between them," she said, "that requires a rowdy
word like that to express. It has not been even a quarrel. But they have
been for the last day or two, a little--at ..."
"Outs?" Mary suggested.
This had been the word on Lucile's tongue. "At cross purposes," she
amended and paused again. But Mary seeing that she was fairly launched
waited, economically, meanwhile, inhaling all the smoke from her
cigarette. "I suppose after all, it's quite natural," Lucile began,
"that Paula should attract geniuses, since she's rather by way of being
one herself."
Mary took the cigarette in her fingers so that she could speak a little
more crisply than was possible around it. "Who is the genius she's
attracting now? Doesn't father like him? And is he being not asked to the
party? I'm sorry, aunt, I didn't mean to interrupt."
"He is being asked which, it appears, is what Paula objects to; only not
until after dinner. That she insisted upon. Really," she went on, in
response to her niece's perplexed frown, "I shall be much more
intelligible If you'll let me begin at the beginning."
"Please do," said Mary. "Where did Paula find him?"
"I found him," said Miss Wollaston. "Paula discovered him a little later.
I found him on a bench in the park and told him he might come to tune
the drawing-room piano. Paula had him tune her piano instead and spent
what must have been a rather mad day with him over it. He brought round
some songs the next day for her to try and she and Portia Stanton's
husband have been practising them with hardly any intermission since. The
idea was that when they had 'got them up' as they say, the man,--March
his name is, Anthony March, I think,--should be invited round to hear
Paula sing them. Paula insists, absurdly it seems to me, that he never
has heard a note of them himself; that he can't even play them upon the
piano. How he could compose them without playing them on the piano first,
is beyond me. But she is inclined to be a little emotional, I think, over
the whole episode. Quite naturally--even Paula can't deny that--your
father thought he would like to be present when the songs were sung and
it was arranged that it should be this evening."
"She may not have been able to deny that it was natural," Mary observed,
"but I'd bet she didn't like it."
"It's only fair to Paula to say," Miss Wollaston insisted, "that she did
nothing to exhibit a feeling of that sort. But when, at John's
suggestion, I spoke of the possibility of having in the Cravens and the
Blakes,--the Cravens are very musical, you know--and Wallace Hood who
would be really hurt if we left him out, Paula came nearer to being
downright rude than she often allows herself to be. She said among other
things that she didn't propose to have March subjected to a
'suffocating' affair like that. She said she wanted him free to
interrupt as often as he liked and tell them how rotten they were. That
was her phrase. When I observed that Mr. March didn't impress me as the
sort of person who could conceivably wish to be rude as that she said he
could no more remember to be polite when he heard those songs for the
first time than she herself could sing them in corsets. She summed it
up by saying that it wasn't going to be a polite affair and the fewer
polite people there were, hanging about, the better. There was,
naturally, nothing I could say to that."
"I should think not," Mary agreed, exhaling rather explosively an
enormous cloud of smoke. "Poor Aunt Lucile!" Her commiseration didn't
sound more than skin deep.
"The matter rested there," the elder woman went on, "until your father
received Rush's telegram that you were coming to-day. Then he took
matters into his own hands and gave me a list of the people he wanted
asked. There are to be about a dozen besides ourselves at dinner and
perhaps as many more are to come after."
"I can see Paula when you told her that," Mary reflected. "Or did you
make dad tell her himself? Yes, of course you did! Only what I can't
understand is why Paula didn't say, 'All right. Have your party, and I'll
sing if you want me to. Only not--what's his name?--March's songs.' And
have him all to herself, as she wanted him, later. That would have been
mate in one move, I should think."
Then, at the fleeting look she caught in the act of vanishing from her
aunt's face, she cried, "You mean she _did_ say that? And that father
turned to ice, the way he can and--made a point of it? You know it's
serious, if he's done that."
With a vigor meant to compensate for a sad lack of conviction, Miss
Wollaston protested against this chain of unwarranted assumptions. But
she admitted, at last, that her own surmise accorded with that of her
niece. John certainly had said to her at breakfast that he saw no reason
for foregoing the musical feature of the evening simply because an
audience was to be present to hear it. Paula's only comment had been a
dispassionate prediction that it wouldn't work. It wouldn't be fair to
say she sulked; her rather elaborate detachment had been too good-humored
for that. Her statement, at lunch, that she was to be turned on like a
Victrola at half past nine, was a fair sample.
"What's he like, this genius of hers?" Mary wanted to know. "Young and
downy and helpless, I suppose. With a look as if he was just about to
burst into tears. I met one like that last winter." She knew exactly how
to get results out of her aunt.
"He's not in the least like that! If he had been I should never have
brought him home, not even to tune the piano. He's quite a well behaved,
sensible-appearing young man, a little over thirty, I should say. And he
does speak nicely, though I think Paula exaggerates about that."
"Sensible or not, he's fallen wildly in love with her, of course," Mary
observed. "The more so they are the more instantaneously they do it."
But this lead was one Miss Wollaston absolutely declined to follow. "If
that clock's right," she exclaimed, gazing at a little traveling affair
Mary had brought home with her, "I haven't another minute." It was not
right, for it was still keeping New York time, but the diversion served.
"Wallace Hood spoke of coming in to see you about tea-time," she said
from the doorway. "I'm going to be to busy even to stop for a cup, so do
be down if you can."