years before, in the street with his two children, and he helpless, so to
say, to stem them. When Lois ran ahead, he had quickened his loping step,
stooped, and dabbed at her shoulder, apparently unaware that she was
unaware of him. He had whirled and threatened, “Come, now!” when little
Larry fell behind. One passing could have detected that finding himself
alone with these two, Bruce lost his own finished creaturehood, died,
rose as their attendant, and existed as an amateur.
One, passing, spoke to her chauffeur and drew to the curb—a dovelike
woman, already in a ripening youth, who looked on the children with the
look which was intended for Bruce. She said:
“You’ve not forgotten to-night?”
He had. But remembering, he vowed his remembrance. And Miss Anna Wild,
with her brooding way of attention to the children, to him, drove on,
with his negative, unconcerned eyes tormenting her, like a positive.
He had gone up one step to his habitable white house, and worked the
children into the passage. The passage was right, paneled, discreetly
mirrored; the nurse maid was right, by her voice, her eyelids, her quiet,
a genius at servitude. When Larry bellowed, “See you to-night, Father,”
and Lois hit Larry in the head to gain the balustrade side of the stair,
this maid hadn’t a rebuke; she had: “Only fancy what’s for tea.” All
three vanished.
Bruce had gone into the room where his tea table stood. This room also
was right, it rested him as could the cherishing brightness of something
happy to think about. But there had been nothing happy to think about,
and the very charm of the room had beaten at him like a desire. The
whole house had charm; the children, too. But Fanny wasn’t there any
more, and he was only thirty-six years old.
Overcome by this climax, he had stood staring at his tea table. In a
little while Mrs. Beryl would come in and pour. Her cousin would come
too, and probably Cory. Cory would hate that hour, and so would he
himself. The women would perhaps hate it; only, he thought, they wouldn’t
know that they did, having known hatred of so much for so long that
pretense had now taken its place, unconsidered. But Fanny had loved the
tea hour. Had she? Certainly she had. Little thing, in her delicate
clothes, living for his love and without another idea—no, no, he didn’t
mean that; but she _had_ loved him. To have lost her after five years of
love was ludicrous. He had faced a wall of amazement over which two years
had not let him look. From the panels her portrait regarded him, remote,
amused. How could she be amused when she was dead, and when he was left
here without her and adventureless? He had gone close to the portrait,
had remembered her kisses, had her in his arms. He said over her name,
“Fanny, Fanny, Fanny.” Its reality was a giddiness.
Mrs. Beryl had come into the room, followed by her cousin and Cory. And
as he looked into the eyes of the cousin, Lucy Beryl, Bruce had seen that
here was a woman whom also he could love.
He had been stupefied, then seized with an excitement beyond anything
that he had ever known. Love for Fanny had been the fruit of propinquity.
This was the fruit of something else. As strong as his excitement
throbbed his sickening sense of guilt. To love some one who was not
Fanny? It was even more improbable than had been Fanny’s death.
Tea went on. Mrs. Beryl poured, and he had noticed that she powdered her
hair so that it should boast of the youth of her face. Her opals had
winked like the eyes of a fox. Having no conversation, she had learned
emphasis, and the last word of every sentence escaped her with its vowel
trained like a seal. He liked her, laughed at her, looked at Lucy Beryl
and trembled. She was as smooth and clear and perfumed as transparent
soap. And her little sentences spread from her like lather.
“Can’t we have the children in?” Cory had demanded shortly. “Jolly little
beggars.” Bruce could have embraced old Cory. Bruce wanted to show his
children to Lucy Beryl. His children. She did not second the suggestion,
and he liked her indifference. Mrs. Beryl said: “Oh, Brucie, do let us!
Do-o!” For “o” was such a becoming vowel.
Lois and Larry had come in, and for conduct they dealt in the
unbelievabilities, the naïve, the saucy, the devilish, all composed,
too, with their courtesy. So far as they had been taught, they were
irreproachable; their irregularities lay in their improvisations. But
there was one improvisation for which Bruce had forgiven his Lois.
“Daddy,” she said, “are you sad like you look? Larry and I betted. I
betted....”
Mrs. Beryl’s look enveloped Bruce, appealed to Lucy, and lit on Cory, who
crunched a nut.
“They are motherless, the darlings,” she explained to Lucy, who blushed.
A pretty moment. Mrs. Beryl could not keep her hands off it.
“Go and ask Miss Lucy if she won’t tell you a story sometime, lo-vies,”
she said.
“Know any?” Larry demanded, wheeling on Miss Lucy. “I mean any that are
any good?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Lucy Beryl. “People always have to tell stories to
me.”
“Aren’t you growned-up?” demanded Lois.
“No,” she said, and her eyes danced on Bruce. “Is anybody?” she asked him.
“I hope not,” he said gently. He had been enchanted.
“I don’t understand children very well, I’m afraid,” she said, and Mrs.
Beryl looked as if she knew, but was afraid Bruce wouldn’t know, that
Lucy, from confusion, was lying; but Bruce was thinking merely that this
angel was above pretending to swallow his children alive for his sake.
Still, when they kissed her as they went away, she did without fervor
kiss them rather at large and on the ear; he noticed that. But by then
the hour had become, he could recall, a swinging censer whose smoke
coursed curling through his veins. When they took their leave, he had
gone up to his room and entered it a stranger.
The room was small and sweet and colored. The covers, the linen, the
draperies, were of Fanny’s choosing. She had liked blue. He stood in the
doorway that night and wondered how the room would look in rose.
He had dined alone, and had the children down. He looked at them with
anxiety. Lois was six, Larry was five. Soon there would be for them
school, college. Somebody must help them, he was not doing enough. At
dessert he had leaned to them and admonished them: “You two must be
good—you must be good.” When Lois returned languidly, “Wha’ for, Daddy?”
he felt terror. Already was he too late?
He barely remembered his engagement with Miss Anna Wild, and to keep it,
late in the evening, dragged himself from his dream. He telephoned her
first to ask if he might still come, heard the patience and sweetness
of her voice, was rested by it. He thought with pleasure—the pleasure
of the man literally caught away from himself, as we say, that he would
tell her, this old friend, what had happened to him. Perhaps then he
could believe that it had happened, for Anna Wild had known Fanny. And
now the name of Fanny was no longer a giddiness, but instead seemed to
steady him, or, it might be, rather to take him aback. He had resolutely
repeated the name Fanny as he walked under the stars.
He remembered that the night had come in a whirl of wind and the cold.
Streams of air tore through the darkness, their thin spray switching
and stinging, and from inner coverts broke and regathered a thin roar
as from some ambiguous beast too old and worn to care to roar. From the
core of the cold blew an odor of clean, far plains, tended by the sweep
of snow and the killing quality of frost, an odor like the odor of frozen
furrows, the pang of spring. Nor was the spring far distant, for already
this turmoil was behaving like music, with a recurrent quiet. At such
intervals, cloudy spring stars looked on and then withdrew, as if to
attend on brighter immediacies. All this came back to him as pungently
present as remembered perfume.
Before Anna Wild he had sat down in his tremendous preoccupation. Usually
he talked to her about himself. Come to think of it, even though he had
been trying to talk of Lucy Beryl, Anna could not have observed the
slightest difference. For he had been telling how Lucy Beryl affected
_him_. Such had been his conception of talking about Lucy. He had
described her by relating how much he needed her, and had said, “My
children, they are motherless.” Anna had been a receiving station for his
analysis of his own case. He had hardly seen her plain, dark face, her
careful hair. She was an imperishable-looking lady, and he had always
loved the perishables. “I wanted to tell you about Lucy Beryl,” he had
said lamely. “It is so overwhelming a thing to feel that I could ever
again think of any woman save Fanny.” She did not say: “You are not
thinking of any other woman. You are thinking of yourself.” She said
merely: “Dear old Brucie!” and he had thought what a brick Anna was. “I
don’t know how to get along without you,” had been his way of expressing
his admiration; and she had said dryly that she would still be there,
that it wasn’t _she_ who had changed, and had asked after the children.
When she did this the look in her face made him pause. He could see that
look now. It was a look such as a traveler wears who faces a memento of
home. “Why don’t you adopt a child or two, Anna?” he had asked, and she
had questioned: “Yours?” But he had said no, that _he_ needed them. What
sort of mother would Lucy Beryl make, did she think? (If he had been as
crude in society as he was on that hearth, he now thought grimly, he
would have been voted back to pre-cave days before man noticed that a
woman was peering about for a shelter other than the sky.)
But he had continued to look at Anna. He had seen her tenderness. He had
seen it turn from the thought of the children to the thought of him. Afar
off he saw, as a man sees a town where he does not intend to tarry. He
was dazzled, as by a glitter of sparks which fell from the sky and did
not burn him. Good old Anna!
* * * * *
When shortly he had opened his house on the sound for a week-end, and had
down Mrs. Beryl and Lucy and Cory, he invited Anna, in the spirit of
unto the least this was the least that he could do.
On the first afternoon at tea Lois and Larry were brought in by their
admirable English nurse and handed about like curios. It was as if he
himself had been saying, “I picked these up with Fanny.” They had behaved
as the angels behave, had submitted to being touched by strange hands,
had looked small and helpless and evanescent, dancing on the ledge
overhanging the abyss of the past, the future, heredity, hazard, and
diet. The firelight played upon all the people, made them quick with
false motion, rich with red and orange, drunken with warmth, and magical
with difference. He remembered that Larry had played with a little cloth
flower, had showed it to Cory, whom he adored, had whispered to his
father to ask if he might give it to Cory, had found a box and bestowed
on Cory the flower in an excess of dignity and denial of self, and then
had burst into tears for the sake of the lost flower. Cory had said,
“Oh, I say, old chap, take it back!” Lucy Beryl had cried, “Oh, give him
back his flower!” and she had looked beautiful and flushed and indignant
as she had folded Larry in her arms. Bruce recalled his enchantment at
her bright head bowed above his boy’s head. Then he had heard Anna Wild
saying:
“Bruce, don’t you think it’s important not to let him have back that
flower? It’s really rather crucial for him, isn’t it?”
“You’re right,” Bruce had said, and cried: “Son, you’ve given away the
flower, you know. That’s all....”
He saw Lucy Beryl charmingly pout, he saw the quiet power in the face of
Anna Wild. And on no more than that cloth flower in his son’s hand, it
had come to him as by words written in fire on the air that Lucy was no
more a mother for his children than a cup of tea, but that Anna Wild was
one of those women who mother the very apples on the trees. Mrs. Beryl,
who discerned that her niece was failing, said under her voice that
Lucy was far too sympathetic; but he saw through Mrs. Beryl as if he had
tasted the blood of a covey of dragons.
His eyes being opened and his ears unsealed, he lived through those three
days of the house party like a creature without a cuticle, raw to every
contact. He watched his new love with his children, saw her spoil them,
puzzle them, tease them, lie to them, all adorably and damnably. Knowing
little of his children’s nervous systems, he learned much by watching the
sportive bombardments of that beloved, in her play with Lois and Larry.
When he came on her, at dusk, wrapped in a sheet and telling them a ghost
story, her sweet voice undulating in silvery wails, he stood stricken.
This sheet she threw from her face, stood meshed in it, breathless and
sparkling, a child, still shuddering, circled by each arm. He throbbed at
her presence and winced at her performance, after an ancient manner in
men. On a pretext he carried the children off, and that night he sat by
their beds long after they slept. With social values, with modern values
of the individual’s motions of duty toward society, Bruce was not much
concerned; but the immemorial need of the parent to foster the offspring
was in his blood like passion. It was in that hour that he read his own
course.
On the station platform, the morning that his house party returned to
town, Bruce, as one who has died and is henceforth divorced from earth,
watched all those postures, those half looks, those abstractions of Lucy
Beryl, and knew that he was seeing them for the last time. By the station
door Mrs. Beryl asked him to dine with them on Lucy’s last evening, and
he accepted, knowing quite well what was hoped of him, knowing too, that
he would send some excuse to that dinner and knife a dream, for him
already dead or dying. It required days for the dream to die—days spent
down in the country alone.
In six months he asked Anna Wild to be his wife. That was what he asked
her, but what he meant was merely, “Will you be their mother?” And she
knew.
Sitting now with Cory in the lobby of that Florida hotel, he was thinking
of his wife. She had been to him such a wife as few men have, he thought,
and to his children such a mother as they had not known even in Fanny.
But he had never loved her; he had loved Lucy Beryl. And now, after these
fourteen years, with Lois married and Larry gone round the world, here
he was, at fifty, married to a woman whom he did not love and never had
loved. She had done an admirable job, but he was bored by her. And a
quarter century of her stared him in the face.
He tried to think that he was in no worse case than millions of men, but
he admitted that he was, because with her he never had known romance.
All of romance that he had seen in his life was still his five years
with Fanny. It was impossible that he should die in such poverty of
experience. He felt richly justified in looking for something else, or so
he told himself at that moment. He felt richly justified in his present
occupation of looking for Lucy Beryl.
He had deliberately suggested to Anna that they come to Miami, and he had
chosen the hotel where he knew that Lucy Beryl lived. He had invited Cory
to go, too—Cory who had looked on for fourteen years and, if he had made
deductions, had always kept still about them.
This first night in the hotel dining room Bruce had watched the door
unceasingly. Anna, plump and content and completely imperishable, looked
on, saying nothing, and if she divined, she did not reveal anything at
all. She had now the family-off-my-hands look of fifty. Through dinner
Bruce had seen her plump throat, the wide parting of her hair, her hand
cut by his wedding ring. He thought of Lucy Beryl. If he had married
her, his children might now both be in jail. Or would they? They had
his blood, and Fanny’s. Why hadn’t he thought of that in time? And now
after dinner, with Cory there in the lobby, this thought recurred to him
passionately as his eyes followed Anna, who was looking at the lobby
art. He saw that round head, that profile tilted estimatingly before a
Victorian waterfall at sunset.
Fourteen years, a quarter of a century to carry.
The elevator door clicked and slid and clicked again. From its threshold
stepped a woman in corn color, her light hair bulking about her ears.
She was large, snugly fitted above the thick, straight waist, slow, very
aware. One might discern at once how, forty-five years earlier, her baby
pictures had looked.
“There she is,” said Cory.
Bruce stared. Unmistakably, there she was. Lucy Beryl Sanderson, he
remembered. And on her track came a drawn man, with a mothy look, but not
from choice. There she was, his Lucy Beryl, and here was her husband.
With no thought of Cory or of his Anna, Bruce got to his feet and
followed not far from the drawn man’s side. This man Bruce barely saw.
His own eyes were on Lucy, her indolent turn of the head, her ripe
shoulders, as smooth as soap. The air of her came back to him, and he
breathed it.
The three passed Anna, intent on her Victorian waterfall, her round head
tilted appraisingly, now this way and now that. And as they passed her,
the drawn man brushed roughly by Bruce, who turned and regarded him, and
was stupefied to discern that this man was staring hungrily at Anna, at
Anna, who looked so like a dove.
In that instant Bruce could feel himself in the drawn man’s shoes, could
feel those fourteen years of proximity to this great flaxen Lucy, and
those twenty-five years of her to carry. And yoked to Lucy, even as was
this drawn man, he saw himself passing Anna, as a stranger in some lobby,
and turning to look approvingly at her dovelike presence.
The words which Bruce was framing for Lucy died. He wavered, looked once
more at the retreating flax on Lucy’s head, once more at her soaplike
shoulders. For one moment he breathed her air. Then he wheeled, came
back, and sat down by Cory.
“This whole love thing,” said Bruce, loudly, “isn’t enough. I tell you,
it isn’t enough.”
“Why, no,” said Cory. “Of course not.”
II
—_And Blue_
... Flowers, pushing through from some inner plane of being, and with
such energy that they are visible to man. Especially the blue gentian.
THE NEW BOTANY
THE FOURTH GENERATION
When she was eighty-seven years old, Grandma Imlay’s children said that
she must not live alone in the winters but must stay with them. Her
children were in the sixties, and they spoke with such authority that
she obeyed. She stayed for one winter in Bertha’s house, and liked it
very little, and said so. When spring came she went back with groans and
thanksgiving to her little house on the pond, and all that summer she
swept the bricks, polished the windows on the inside and fed the birds on
the platform of her clothes reel. But when autumn came they had her go to
live with another daughter—Emmy. At this compulsion Grandma Imlay made,
in her weak way, a furious row, but her row made no difference. They took
her away, describing to her how nice and warm she would be. Moreover,
Emmy’s daughter had just been married, and she and her husband might as
well live in Grandma’s house that winter.
These young people had no wish to begin housekeeping with Grandma Imlay’s
furniture, so they stored it in a room of her little house, and bought
new oak. Into her little linoleum-covered dining room they moved a huge
sideboard and an extension table; and they took out of her parlor her
center table and her ingrain carpet, and bought instead a Wilton rug and
an overstuffed rocker and divan. Her yellow bedroom furniture they moved
to the bedroom off the kitchen and said that Grandma must come and stay
with them whenever she liked.
When Grandma Imlay first came in town, in April, and went to call at her
old home, she trembled with delight to be there again, where she had
lived for sixty-five years. Here her seven children had been born, and
one had died, here her husband had lived and died; and she had baked
much food and washed many clothes, had seen her daughters courted and
married, and some of their children born. There had been little animals
that she had loved, long-ago meetings of her society, boat rides on the
pond, and merry times of house-cleaning and of holiday. She loved the
smell of the linoleum and the bare washed boards and the dining-room
table oilcloth.
She entered now upon that oak sideboard and extension table, the Wilton
rug and the overstuffed rocker and divan. “It’s not the same, no more,”
said Grandma Imlay.
She went back to her daughter Emmy’s. At first she had been dazed, but
when later she talked of it, her eyes flashed. “I gave them my house.
They took—I don’t know what. No stuff—no. But somethings. It’s not the
same, no more.”
The young people invited her to come back and eat with them. She asked,
“On _that_ table?” and said no more. But when they invited her to come
for her birthday, she went. Some of her old neighbors were there, young
and old. She moved for a time about the rooms, then went to the door,
crying: “Let’s go out!” They all sat about on the platform of the clothes
reel and on the wash bench and on an overturned tub. She made them bring
out there the ice cream and the sunshine cake.
On a day in May they told her that Emmy’s grandchild would be born that
night, they thought. She said capably: “I will go down there and see
what’s to be done.” When they tried to dissuade her, she said so much
that they were obliged to take her there. She went in, and began doing
in the old way, and when the nurse and the doctor put her aside, she
went out to the platform of the clothes reel and sat there for a long
time, not replying. It grew late, and they tried to take her home, but
she crept into her kitchen where things were not much changed; and there
she waited in the darkness. After a long time she heard the cry of the
child. When they brought the baby to the kitchen she sat quiet, and when
they showed him to her, she said with no show of feeling: “Has he got
all his arms and legs?” “Yes, Grandma,” they said. “And he’s your first
great grandchild.” At that she stared up at them. They left her, counting
something on her fingers.
When they were ready to go home she was not in the kitchen. Emmy thought
of the pond and began to cry: “She’s jumped in the water—she feels she’s
not needed and she’s jumped in the water!” But then she opened the door
of the bedroom off the kitchen. There on her old yellow bedstead Grandma
Imlay was lying asleep. “I believe,” said Emmy, “she’s going to stay here
now. What on earth changed her?”
THE QUESTION
Becoming aware that he had no idea what his life was about, Baldy
Michelson thought that he must end it. How could he go on with his little
grocery and his cement house on Cottage Grove Avenue, his small car and
his wife? If he had a radio or a piano player or a child, life might be
interesting, or if he could afford to go anywhere for his two weeks’
vacation. As it was, he went for a few days to the Dunes, then sat at
home with his wife or went to the picture show; and dug in his languid
garden. In the beveled mirror too large for the bedroom, he saw a man
with dead eyes, expressionless face which did not change when he spoke.
In all his day there was nothing that he liked to do. Sometimes he looked
at his wife and wondered what she made of it. But she was a shadow with a
sharp tone.
One day he said to her: “Ella, I can’t stand twenty years more of this.”
She replied: “Neither can I.” It was the first time that they had agreed
in years.
He looked at her with new sympathy, saying: “What can we do?”
She said: “Let’s sell the house and the business and go abroad.”
He cried: “What would we do when our money was all gone?”
She replied: “I don’t know, but it would be more interesting than to turn
on the gas and leave the money to Alex.”
Baldy did not like his nephew Alex either. They sold house, furniture,
and business. From the time the hatrack was carried out of the hall,
Baldy began to revive.
They bought new clothes, sailed away, saw three capitals, visited the
seat of the Michelsons—it was _probably_ the same family—and one night
were walking in Chelsea when Baldy said:
“How’d it be to buy a nice villa over here and settle down? I was
talking with the greengrocer yesterday. He needs a partner....”
They bought the villa in Chelsea, a small car, and hoped to have a radio
or a piano player, but not yet. When vacation came they went for three
days to Brighton. When they returned Baldy dug in a languid garden, went
to the cinema and sat at home with his wife. In five years he looked in
their beveled mirror and saw himself with dead eyes and unchanging face;
and in a voice which did not change either he said to his wife: “Ella,
how would you like to go back to the States?”
She replied with emotion: “Let’s go, let’s go!”