turned very warm; unusually warm for the time of year. When he had
dressed and had sought out Cecil to say good-by to her he found her
by the big studio window on the top floor of the apartment where
they lived. She was sitting in the window-seat, her chin cupped in
her hand, looking out over the city, in the dark pool of which
lights were beginning to open like yellow water-lilies. Her white
arm gleamed in the gathering dusk, and she was dressed in some
diaphanous blue stuff that enhanced the bronze of her hair. Adrian
took his place silently beside her and leaned out. The air was very
soft and hot and embracing, and up here it was very quiet, as if one
floated above the lower clouds of perpetual sound.
Cecil spoke at last. "It's lovely, isn't it?" she said. "I should
have come to find you, but I couldn't. These first warm nights! You
really understand why people live, after all, don't you? It's like a
pulse coming back to a hand you love." She was silent a moment.
"Kiss me," she said, finally. "I--I'm so glad I love you, and we're
young."
He stooped down and put his arms about her. He could feel her tremble.
How fragrant she was, and queer, and mysterious, even if he had
lived with her now for almost fifteen years! He was infinitely glad
at the moment for his entire life. He kissed her again, kissed her
eyes, and she went down the stairs with him to the hall-door. She
was to stop for him at his uncle's, after a dinner to which she was
going.
Adrian lit a cigarette and walked instead of taking the elevator. It
was appropriate to his mood that on the second floor some one with a
golden Italian voice should be singing "Louise." He paused for a
moment. He was reminded of a night long ago in Verona, when there
had been an open window and moonlight in the street. Then he looked
at his watch. He was late; he would have to hurry. It amused him
that at his age he should still fear the silent rebuke with which
his uncle punished unpunctuality.
He arrived at his destination as a near-by church clock struck the
half-hour. The new butler admitted him and led him back to where his
uncle was sitting by an open window; the curtains stirred in the
languid breeze, the suave room was a little penetrated by the night,
as if some sly, disorderly spirit was investigating uninvited. It
was far too hot for the wood fire--that part of the formula had been
omitted, but otherwise each detail was the same. "The two hundredth
time!" Adrian thought to himself. "The two hundredth time, at least!
It will go on forever!" And then the formula was altered again, for
his uncle got to his feet, laying aside the evening paper with his
usual precise care. "My dear fellow," he began, "so good of you! On
the minute, too! I----" and then he stumbled and put out his hand.
"My glasses!" he said.
Adrian caught him and held him upright. He swayed a little.
"I----Lately I have had to use them sometimes, even when not reading,"
he murmured. "Thank you! Thank you!"
Adrian went back to the chair where his uncle had been sitting. He
found the glasses--gold pince-nez--but they were broken neatly in
the middle, lying on the floor, as if they had dropped from
someone's hand. He looked at them for a moment, puzzled, before he
gave them back to his uncle.
"Here they are, sir," he said. "But--it's very curious. They're
broken in such an odd way."
His uncle peered down at them. He hesitated and cleared his throat.
"Yes," he began; then he stood up straight, with an unexpected twist
of his shoulders. "I was turning them between my fingers," he said,
"just before you came in. I had no idea--no, no idea! Shall we go in?
I think dinner has been announced."
There was the sherry in the little, deeply cut glasses, and the
clear soup, with a dash of lemon in it, and the fish, and afterward
the roast chicken, with vegetables discreetly limited and designed
not to detract from the main dish; and there was a pint of champagne
for Adrian and a mild white wine for his uncle. The latter twisted
his mouth in a dry smile. "One finds it difficult to get old," he
said. "I have always been very fond of champagne. More aesthetically
I think than the actual taste. It seems to sum up so well the
evening mood--dinner and laughter and forgetting the day. But now----"
he flicked contemptuously the stem of his glass--"I am only allowed
this uninspired stuff." He stopped suddenly and his face twisted
into the slight grimace which Adrian in the last few weeks had been
permitted occasionally to see. His hand began to wander vaguely over
the white expanse of his shirt.
Adrian pushed back his chair. "Let me--!" he began, but his uncle
waved a deprecating hand. "Sit down!" he managed to say. "Please!"
Adrian sank back again. The colour returned to his uncle's cheeks
and the staring question left his eyes. He took a sip of wine.
"I cannot tell you," he observed with elaborate indifference,
"how humiliating this thing is becoming to me. I have always had a
theory that invalids and people when they begin to get old and infirm,
should be put away some place where they can undergo the unpleasant
struggle alone. It's purely selfish--there's something about the
sanctity of the individual. Dogs have it right--you know the way
they creep off? But I suppose I won't. Pride fails when the body
weakens, doesn't it, no matter what the will may be?" He lifted his
wine-glass. "I am afraid I am giving you a very dull evening, my
dear fellow," he apologized. "Forgive me! We will talk of more
pleasant things. I drink wine with you! How is Cecil? Doing well
with her painting?"
Adrian attempted to relax his own inner grimness. He responded to
his uncle's toast. But he wished this old man, so very near the
mysterious crisis of his affairs, would begin to forego to some
extent the habit of a lifetime, become a little more human. This
ridiculous "façade"! The dinner progressed.
Through an open window the night, full of soft, distant sound, made
itself felt once more. The candles, under their red shades,
flickered at intervals. The noiseless butler came and went. How old
his uncle was getting to look, Adrian reflected. There was a
grayness about his cheeks; fine, wire-like lines about his mouth.
And he was falling into that sure sign of age, a vacant
absent-mindedness. Half the time he was not listening to what he,
Adrian, was saying; instead, his eyes sought constantly the shadows
over the carved sideboard across the table from him. What did he see
there? What question was he asking? Adrian wondered. Only once was
his uncle very much interested, and that was when Adrian had spoken
of the war and the psychology left in its train. Adrian himself had
not long before been released from a weary round of training-camps,
where, in Texas dust, or the unpleasant resinous summer of the South,
he had gone through a repetition that in the end had threatened to
render him an imbecile. He was not illusioned. As separate
personalities, men had lost much of their glamour for him; there had
been too much sweat, too much crowding, too much invasion of dignity,
of everything for which the world claimed it had been struggling and
praying. But alongside of this revolt on his part had grown up an
immense pity and belief in humanity as a mass--struggling, worm-like,
aspiring, idiotic, heroic. The thought of it made him uncomfortable
and at the same time elate.
His uncle shook a dissenting head. On this subject he permitted
himself mild discussion, but his voice was still that of an old,
wearied man, annoyed and bewildered. "Oh, no!" he said. "That's the
very feature of it that seems to me most dreadful; the vermicular
aspect; the massed uprising; the massed death. About professional
armies there was something decent--about professional killing. It
was cold-blooded and keen, anyway. But this modern war, and this
modern craze for self-revelation! Naked! Why, these books--the young
men kept their fingers on the pulses of their reactions. It isn't
clean; it makes the individual cheap. War is a dreadful thing; it
should be as hidden as murder." He sat back, smiled. "We seem to
have a persistent tendency to become serious to-night," he remarked.
Serious! Adrian saw a vision of the drill-grounds, and smiled
sardonically; then he raised his head in surprise, for the new
butler had broken all the rules of the household and was summoning
his uncle to the telephone in the midst of dessert. He awaited the
expected rebuke, but it did not come. Instead, his uncle paused in
the middle of a sentence, stared, and looked up. "Ah, yes!" he said,
and arose from his chair. "Forgive me, Adrian, I will be back shortly."
He walked with a new, just noticeable, infirmness toward the door.
Once there he seemed to think an apology necessary, for he turned
and spoke with absent-minded courtesy.
"You may not have heard," he said, "but Mrs. Denby is seriously ill.
Her nurse gives me constant bulletins over the telephone."
Adrian started to his feet, then sat down again. "But--" he
stuttered--"but--is it as bad as all that?"
"I am afraid," said his uncle gently, "it could not be worse." The
curtain fell behind him.
Adrian picked up his fork and began to stir gently the melting ice
on the plate before him, but his eyes were fixed on the wall opposite,
where, across the shining table, from a mellow gold frame, a
portrait of his grandfather smiled with a benignity, utterly belying
his traditional character, into the shadows above the candles. But
Adrian was not thinking of his grandfather just then, he was
thinking of his uncle--and Mrs. Denby. What in the world----!
Dangerously ill, and yet here had been his uncle able to go through
with--not entirely calmly, to be sure; Adrian remembered the lack of
attention, the broken eye-glasses; and yet, still able to go through
with, not obviously shaken, this monthly farce; this dinner that in
reality mocked all the real meaning of blood-relationship. Good Lord!
To Adrian's modern mind, impatient and courageous, the situation was
preposterous, grotesque. He himself would have broken through to the
woman he loved, were she seriously ill, if all the city was cordoned
to keep him back. What could it mean? Entire selfishness on his
uncle's part? Surely not that! That was too inhuman! Adrian was
willing to grant his uncle exceptional expertness in the art of
self-protection, but there was a limit even to self-protection.
There must be some other reason. Discretion? More likely, and yet
how absurd! Had Mr. Denby been alive, a meticulous, a fantastic
delicacy might have intervened, but Mr. Denby was dead. Who were
there to wound, or who left for the telling of tales? A doctor and
the servants. This was not altogether reasonable, despite what he
knew of his uncle. Here was some oddity of psychology he could not
follow. He heard the curtains stir as his uncle reentered. He looked
up, attentive and curious, but his uncle's face was the mask to
which he was accustomed.
"How is Mrs. Denby?" he asked.
Mr. McCain hesitated for the fraction of a second. "I am afraid,
very ill," he said. "Very ill, indeed! It is pneumonia. I--the
doctor thinks it is only a question of a little time, but--well, I
shall continue to hope for the best." There was a metallic harshness
to his concluding words. "Shall we go into the library?" he continued.
"I think the coffee will be pleasanter there."
They talked again of the war; of revolution; of the dark forces at
large in the world.
Through that hour or two Adrian had a nakedness of perception
unusual even to his sensitive mind. It seemed to him three spirits
were abroad in the quiet, softly-lit, book-lined room; three
intentions that crept up to him like the waves of the sea, receded,
crept back again; or were they currents of air? or hesitant, unheard
feet that advanced and withdrew? In at the open windows poured at
times the warm, enveloping scent of the spring; pervading, easily
overlooked, lawless, persistent, inevitable. Adrian found himself
thinking it was like the presence of a woman. And then, overlapping
this, would come the careful, dry, sardonic tones of his uncle's
voice, as if insisting that the world was an ordinary world, and
that nothing, not even love or death, could lay disrespectful
fingers upon or hurry for a moment the trained haughtiness of the
will. Yet even this compelling arrogance was at times overtaken,
submerged, by a third presence, stronger even than the other two; a
presence that entered upon the heels of the night; the ceaseless
murmur of the streets; the purring of rubber tires upon asphalt; a
girl's laugh, high, careless, reckless. Life went on. Never for a
moment did it stop.
"I am not sorry that I am getting old," said Mr. McCain. "I think
nowadays is an excellent time to die. Perhaps for the very young,
the strong--but for me, things are too busy, too hurried. I have
always liked my life like potpourri. I liked to keep it in a china
jar and occasionally take off the lid. Otherwise one's sense of
perfume becomes satiated. Take your young girls; they remain
faithful to a love that is not worth being faithful to--all noise,
and flushed laughter, and open doors." Quite unexpectedly he began
to talk in a way he had never talked before. He held his cigar in
his hand until the ash turned cold; his ringers trembled just a
little.
"You have been very good to me," he said. Adrian raised startled eyes.
"Very good. I am quite aware that you dislike me"--he hesitated and
the ghost of a smile hovered about his lips--"and I have always
disliked you. Please!" He raised a silencing hand. "You don't mind
my saying so? No. Very well, then, there is something I want to tell
you. Afterward I will never mention it again. I dare say our mutual
dislike is due to the inevitable misunderstanding that exists
between the generations. But it is not important. The point is that
we have always been well-bred toward each other. Yes, that is the
point. You have always been a gentleman, very considerate, very
courteous, I cannot but admire you. And I think you will find I have
done the best I could. I am not a rich man, as such things go
nowadays, but I will hand you on the money that will be yours quite
unimpaired, possibly added to. I feel very strongly on that subject.
I am old-fashioned enough to consider the family the most important
thing in life. After all, we are the only two McCains left." He
hesitated again, and twisted for a moment his bloodless hands in his
lap, then he raised his eyes and spoke with a curious hurried
embarrassment. "I have sacrificed a great deal for that," he said.
"Yes, a great deal."
The soft-footed butler stood at his elbow, like an actor in comedy
suddenly cast for the role of a portentous messenger.
"Miss Niles is calling you again, sir," he said.
"On, yes!--ah--Adrian, I am very sorry, my dear fellow. I will
finish the conversation when I come back."
This time the telephone was within earshot; in the hall outside.
Adrian heard his uncle's slow steps end in the creaking of a chair
as he sat down; then the picking up of the receiver. The message was
a long one, for his uncle did not speak for fully a minute; finally
his voice drifted in through the curtained doorway.
"You think ... only a few minutes?"
"... Ah, yes! Conscious? Yes. Well, will you tell her, Miss Niles?--yes,
please listen very carefully--tell her this. That I am not there
because I dared not come. Yes; on her account. She will understand.
My heart--it's my heart. She will understand. I did not dare. For her
sake, not mine. Tell her that. She will understand. Please be very
careful in repeating the message, Miss Niles. Tell her I dared not
come because of my heart.... Yes; thank you. That's it.... What? Yes,
I will wait, Miss Niles."
Adrian, sitting in the library, suddenly got to his feet and crossed
to the empty fireplace and stood with his back to it, enlightenment
and a puzzled frown struggling for possession of his face. His
uncle's heart! Ah, he understood, then! It was discretion, after all,
but not the kind he thought--a much more forgiveable discretion. And,
yet, what possible difference could it make should his uncle die
suddenly in Mrs. Denby's house? Fall dead across her bed, or die
kneeling beside it? Poor, twisted old fool, afraid even at the end
that death might catch him out; afraid of a final undignified gesture.
A motor blew its horn for the street crossing. Another girl laughed;
a young, thin, excited girl, to judge by her laughter. The curtains
stirred and again there was that underlying scent of tulips and
hyacinths; and then, from the hall outside, came the muffled thud of
a receiver falling to the floor. Adrian waited. The receiver was not
picked up. He strode to the door. Crumpled up over the telephone was
old Mr. McCain.
Cecil came later. She was very quick and helpful, and jealously
solicitous on Adrian's account, but in the taxicab going home she
said the one thing Adrian had hoped she wouldn't say, and yet was
sure she would. She belonged to a sex which, if it is honest at all,
is never reticently so. She believed that between the man she loved
and herself there were no possible mental withdrawals. "It is very
tragic," she said, "but much better--you know it is better. He
belonged to the cumberers of the earth. Yes, so much better; and this
way, too!"
In the darkness her hand sought his. Adrian took it, but in his
heart was the same choked feeling, the same knowledge that something
was gone that could not be found again, that, as a little boy, he had
had when they sold, at his father's death, the country place where
he had spent his summers. Often he had lain awake at night, restless
with the memory of heliotrope, and phlox, and mignonette, and
afternoons quiet except for the sound of bees.
"CONTACT!"
BY FRANCES NOYES HART[8]
[Footnote 8: Frances Newbold Noyes, in _Pictorial Review_ for
December, 1920.]
The first time she heard it was in the silk-hung and flower-scented
peace of the little drawing-room in Curzon Street. His sister Rosemary
had wanted to come up to London to get some clothes--Victory clothes
they called them in those first joyous months after the armistice,
and decked their bodies in scarlet and silver, even when their poor
hearts went in black--and Janet had been urged to leave her own drab
boarding-house room to stay with the forlorn small butterfly. They had
struggled through dinner somehow, and Janet had finished her coffee
and turned the great chair so that she could watch the dancing fire
(it was cool for May), her cloudy brown head tilted back against the
rose-red cushion, shadowy eyes half closed, idle hands linked across
her knees. She looked every one of her thirty years--and mortally
tired--and careless of both facts. But she managed an encouraging
smile at the sound of Rosemary's shy, friendly voice at her elbow.
"Janet, these are yours, aren't they? Mummy found them with some
things last week, and I thought that you might like to have them."
She drew a quick breath at the sight of the shabby packet.
"Why, yes," she said evenly. "That's good of you, Rosemary. Thanks a
lot."
"That's all right," murmured Rosemary diffidently. "Wouldn't you
like something to read? There's a most frightfully exciting Western
novel----"
The smile took on a slightly ironical edge. "Don't bother about me,
my dear. You see, I come from that frightfully exciting West, and I
know all about the pet rattlesnakes and the wildly Bohemian cowboys.
Run along and play with your book--I'll be off to bed in a few
minutes."
Rosemary retired obediently to the deep chair in the corner, and
with the smile gone but the irony still hovering, she slipped the
cord off the packet. A meager and sorry enough array--words had
never been for her the swift, docile servitors that most people
found them. But the thin gray sheet in her fingers started out
gallantly enough--"Beloved." Beloved! She leaned far forward,
dropping it with deft precision into the glowing pocket of embers.
What next? This was more like--it began "Dear Captain Langdon" in
the small, contained, even writing that was her pride, and it went
on soberly enough, "I shall be glad to have tea with you next
Friday--not Thursday, because I must be at the hut then. It was
stupid of me to have forgotten you--next time I will try to do better."
Well, she had done better the next time. She had not forgotten him
again--never, never again. That had been her first letter; how
absurd of Jerry, the magnificently careless, to have treasured it
all that time, the miserable, stilted little thing! She touched it
with curious fingers. Surely, surely he must have cared, to have
cared so much for that!
It seemed incredible that she hadn't remembered him at once when he
came into the hut that second time. Of course she had only seen him
for a moment and six months had passed--but he was so absurdly vivid,
every inch of him, from the top of his shining, dark head to the
heels of his shining, dark boots--and there were a great many inches!
How could she have forgotten, even for a minute, those eyes dancing
like blue fire in the brown young face, the swift, disarming charm
of his smile, and, above all, his voice--how, in the name of
absurdity could any one who had once heard it ever forget Jeremy
Langdon's voice? Even now she had only to close her eyes, and it
rang out again, with its clipped, British accent and its caressing
magic, as un-English as any Provincial troubadour's! And yet she had
forgotten--he had had to speak twice before she had even lifted her
head.
"Miss America--oh, I say, she's forgotten me, and I thought that I'd
made such an everlasting impression!" The delighted amazement
reached even her tired ears, and she had smiled wanly as she pushed
the pile of coppers nearer to him.
"Have you been in before? It's stupid of me, but there are such
hundreds of thousands of you, and you are gone in a minute, you see.
That's your change, I think."
"Hundreds of thousands of me, hey?" He had leaned across the counter,
his face alight with mirth. "I wish to the Lord my angel mother
could hear you--it's what I'm forever tellin' her, though just
between us, it's stuff and nonsense. I've got a well-founded
suspicion that I'm absolutely unique. You wait and see!"
And she had waited--and she had seen! She stirred a little, dropped
the note into the flames, and turned to the next, the quiet, mocking
mouth suddenly tortured and rebellious.
"No, you must be mad," it ran, the trim writing strangely shaken.
"How often have you seen me--five times? Do you know how old I am.
How hard and tired and useless? No--no a thousand times. In a little
while we will wake up and find that we were dreaming."
That had brought him to her swifter than Fate, triumphant mischief
in every line of his exultant face. "Just let those damned old cups
slip from your palsied fingers, will you? I'm goin' to take your
honourable age for a little country air--it may keep you out of the
grave for a few days longer. Never can tell! No use your scowlin'
like that--the car's outside, and the big chief says to be off with
you. Says you have no more colour than a banshee, and not half the
life--can't grasp the fact that it's just chronic antiquity. Fasten
the collar about your throat--no, higher! Darlin', darlin', think of
havin' a whole rippin' day to ourselves. You're glad, too, aren't you,
my little stubborn saint?"
Oh, that joyous and heart-breaking voice, running on and on--it made
all the other voices that she had ever heard seem colourless and
unreal--
"Darlin' idiot, what do I care how old you are? Thirty, hey? Almost
old enough to be an ancestor! Look at me--no, look at me! Dare you
to say that you aren't mad about me!"
Mad about him--mad, mad! She lifted her hands to her ears, but she
could no more shut out the exultant voice now than she could on that
windy afternoon.
"Other fellow got tired of you, did he? Good luck for us, what?
You're a fearfully tiresome person, darlin'. It's goin' to take me
nine-tenths of eternity to tell you how tiresome you are. Give a
chap a chance, won't you? The tiresomest thing about you is the way
you leash up that dimple of yours. No, by George, there it is! Janie,
look at me----"
She touched the place where the leashed dimple had hidden with a
delicate and wondering finger--of all Jerry's gifts to her the most
miraculous had been that small fugitive. Exiled now, forever and
forever.
"Are you comin' down to White Orchards next week-end? I'm off for
France on the twelfth and you've simply got to meet my people.
You'll be insane about 'em--Rosemary's the most beguilin'
flibbertigibbet, and I can't wait to see you bein' a kind of an
elderly grandmother to her. What a bewitchin' little grandmother
you're goin' to be one of these days----"