while she did so, to some doom as yet incalculable; she went on very
much as she had done for Mr. Pitman and Mrs. Drack, with the rage
of desperation and, as she was afterward to call it to herself, the
fascination of the abyss. She didn't know, couldn't have said at the
time, _why_ his projected benevolence should have had most so the
virtue to scare her: he would patronize her, as an effect of her
vividness, if not of her charm, and would do this with all high
intention, finding her case, or rather _their_ case, their funny old
case, taking on of a sudden such refreshing and edifying life, to
the last degree curious and even important; but there were gaps of
connection between this and the intensity of the perception here
overtaking her that she shouldn't be able to move in _any_ direction
without dishing herself. That she couldn't afford it where she had got
to--couldn't afford the deplorable vulgarity of having been so many
times informally affianced and contracted (putting it only at that, at
its being by the new lights and fashions so unpardonably vulgar): he
took this from her without turning, as she might have said, a hair;
except just to indicate, with his new superiority, that he felt the
distinguished appeal and notably the pathos of it. He still took
it from her that she hoped nothing, as it were, from any other
_alibi_--the people to drag into court being too many and too
scattered; but that, as it was with him, Murray Brush, she had been
_most_ vulgar, most everything she had better not have been, so she
depended on him for the innocence it was actually vital she should
establish. He flushed or frowned or winced no more at that than he did
when she once more fairly emptied her satchel and, quite as if they
had been Nancy and the Artful Dodger, or some nefarious pair of that
sort, talking things over in the manner of _Oliver Twist_, revealed
to him the fondness of her view that, could she but have produced a
cleaner slate, she might by this time have pulled it off with Mr.
French. Yes, he let her in that way sacrifice her honorable connection
with him--all the more honorable for being so completely at an end--to
the crudity of her plan for not missing another connection, so much
more brilliant than what he offered, and for bringing another man,
with whom she so invidiously and unflatteringly compared him, into her
greedy life.
There was only a moment during which, by a particular lustrous look
she had never had from him before, he just made her wonder which turn
he was going to take; she felt, however, as safe as was consistent
with her sense of having probably but added to her danger, when he
brought out, the next instant: "Don't you seem to take the ground that
we were guilty--that _you_ were ever guilty--of something we shouldn't
have been? What did we ever do that was secret, or underhand, or any
way not to be acknowledged? What did we do but exchange our young vows
with the best faith in the world--publicly, rejoicingly, with the full
assent of every one connected with us? I mean of course," he said with
his grave kind smile, "till we broke off so completely because we
found that--practically, financially, on the hard worldly basis--we
couldn't work it. What harm, in the sight of God or man, Julia," he
asked in his fine rich way, "did we ever do?"
She gave him back his look, turning pale. "Am I talking of _that_? Am
I talking of what _we_ know? I'm talking of what others feel--of what
they _have_ to feel; of what it's just enough for them to know not to
be able to get over it, once they do really know it. How do they know
what _didn't_ pass between us, with all the opportunities we had?
That's none of their business--if we were idiots enough, on the top of
everything! What you may or mayn't have done doesn't count, for _you_;
but there are people for whom it's loathsome that a girl should have
gone on like that from one person to another and still pretend to
be--well, all that a nice girl is supposed to be. It's as if we had
but just waked up, mother and I, to such a remarkable prejudice; and
now we have it--when we could do so well without it!--staring us
in the face. That mother should have insanely _let_ me, should so
vulgarly have taken it for my natural, my social career--_that's_ the
disgusting, humiliating thing: with the lovely account it gives of
both of us! But mother's view of a delicacy in things!" she went on
with scathing grimness; "mother's measure of anything, with her grand
'gained cases' (there'll be another yet, she finds them so easy!) of
which she's so publicly proud! You see I've no margin," said Julia;
letting him take it from her flushed face as much as he would that her
mother hadn't left her an inch. It was that he should make use of the
spade with her for the restoration of a bit of a margin just wide
enough to perch on till the tide of peril should have ebbed a little,
it was that he should give her _that_ lift--!
Well, it was all there from him after these last words; it was before
her that he really took hold. "Oh, my dear child, I can see! Of course
there are people--ideas change in our society so fast!--who are not in
sympathy with the old American freedom and who read, I dare say, all
sorts of uncanny things into it. Naturally you must take them as they
are--from the moment," said Murray Brush, who had lighted, by her
leave, a cigarette, "your life-path does, for weal or for woe, cross
with theirs." He had every now and then such an elegant phrase.
"Awfully interesting, certainly, your case. It's enough for me that it
_is_ yours--I make it my own. I put myself absolutely in your place;
you'll understand from me, without professions, won't you? that I do.
Command me in every way! What I do like is the sympathy with which
you've inspired _him_. I don't, I'm sorry to say, happen to know him
personally,"--he smoked away, looking off; "but of course one knows
all about him generally, and I'm sure he's right for you, I'm sure it
would be charming, if you yourself think so. Therefore trust me and
even--what shall I say?--leave it to me a little, won't you?" He had
been watching, as in his fumes, the fine growth of his possibilities;
and with this he turned on her the large warmth of his charity. It was
like a subscription of a half-a-million. "I'll take care of you."
She found herself for a moment looking up at him from as far below as
the point from which the school-child, with round eyes raised to the
wall, gazes at the parti-colored map of the world. Yes, it was a
warmth, it was a special benignity, that had never yet dropped on her
from any one; and she wouldn't for the first few moments have known
how to describe it or even quite what to do with it. Then, as it still
rested, his fine improved expression aiding, the sense of what had
happened came over her with a rush. She was being, yes, patronized;
and that was really as new to her--the freeborn American girl who
might, if she had wished, have got engaged and disengaged not six
times but sixty--as it would have been to be crowned or crucified. The
Frenches themselves didn't do it--the Frenches themselves didn't dare
it. It was as strange as one would: she recognized it when it came,
but anything might have come rather--and it was coming by (of all
people in the world) Murray Brush! It overwhelmed her; still she could
speak, with however faint a quaver and however sick a smile. "You'll
lie for me like a gentleman?"
"As far as that goes till I'm black in the face!" And then while he
glowed at her and she wondered if he would pointedly look his lies
that way, and if, in fine, his florid, gallant, knowing, almost
winking intelligence, _common_ as she had never seen the common
vivified, would represent his notion of "blackness": "See here, Julia;
I'll do more."
"'More'--?"
"Everything. I'll take it right in hand. I'll fling over you--"
"Fling over me--?" she continued to echo as he fascinatingly fixed
her.
"Well, the biggest _kind_ of rose-colored mantle!" And this time, oh,
he did wink: it _would_ be the way he was going to wink (and in the
grandest good faith in the world) when indignantly denying, under
inquisition, that there had been "a sign or a scrap" between them. But
there was more to come; he decided she should have it all. "Julia,
you've got to know now." He hung fire but an instant more. "Julia,
I'm going to be married." His "Julias" were somehow death to her; she
could feel that even _through_ all the rest. "Julia, I announce my
engagement."
"Oh, lordy, lordy!" she wailed: it might have been addressed to Mr.
Pitman.
The force of it had brought her to her feet, but he sat there smiling
up as at the natural tribute of her interest. "I tell you before any
one else; it's not to be 'out' for a day or two yet. But we want you
to know; _she_ said that as soon as I mentioned to her that I had
heard from you. I mention to her everything, you see!"--and he almost
simpered while, still in his seat, he held the end of his cigarette,
all delicately and as for a form of gentle emphasis, with the tips
of his fine fingers. "You've not met her, Mary Lindeck, I think: she
tells me she hasn't the pleasure of knowing you, but she desires it so
much--particularly longs for it. She'll take an interest too," he went
on; "you must let me immediately bring her to you. She has heard so
much about you and she really wants to see you."
"Oh mercy _me_!" poor Julia gasped again--so strangely did history
repeat itself and so did this appear the echo, on Murray Brush's lips,
and quite to drollery, of that sympathetic curiosity of Mrs. Drack's
which Mr. Pitman had, as they said, voiced. Well, there had played
before her the vision of a ledge of safety in face of a rising tide;
but this deepened quickly to a sense more forlorn, the cold swish of
waters already up to her waist and that would soon be up to her chin.
It came really but from the air of her friend, from the perfect
benevolence and high unconsciousness with which he kept his
posture--as if to show he could patronize her from below upward quite
as well as from above down. And as she took it all in, as it spread to
a flood, with the great lumps and masses of truth it was floating, she
knew inevitable submission, not to say submersion, as she had never
known it in her life; going down and down before it, not even putting
out her hands to resist or cling by the way, only reading into the
young man's very face an immense fatality and, for all his bright
nobleness his absence of rancor or of protesting pride, the great gray
blankness of her doom. It was as if the earnest Miss Lindeck, tall and
mild, high and lean, with eye-glasses and a big nose, but "marked" in
a noticeable way, elegant and distinguished and refined, as you could
see from a mile off, and as graceful, for common despair of imitation,
as the curves of the "copy" set of old by one's writing-master--it was
as if this stately well-wisher, whom indeed she had never exchanged
a word with, but whom she had recognized and placed and winced at
as soon as he spoke of her, figured there beside him now as also in
portentous charge of her case.
He had ushered her into it in that way as if his mere right word
sufficed; and Julia could see them throne together, beautifully at one
in all the interests they now shared, and regard her as an object of
almost tender solicitude. It was positively as if they had become
engaged for her good--in such a happy light as it shed. That was the
way people you had known, known a bit intimately, looked at you as
soon as they took on the high matrimonial propriety that sponged over
the more or less wild past to which you belonged, and of which, all of
a sudden, they were aware only through some suggestion it made them
for reminding you definitely that you still had a place. On her
having had a day or two before to meet Mrs. Drack and to rise to her
expectation she had seen and felt herself act, had above all admired
herself, and had at any rate known what she said, even though losing,
at her altitude, any distinctness in the others. She could have
repeated later on the detail of her performance--if she hadn't
preferred to keep it with her as a mere locked-up, a mere unhandled
treasure. At present, however, as everything was for her at first
deadened and vague, true to the general effect of sounds and motions
in water, she couldn't have said afterward what words she spoke, what
face she showed, what impression she made--at least till she had
pulled herself round to precautions. She only knew she had turned
away, and that this movement must have sooner or later determined
his rising to join her, his deciding to accept it, gracefully and
condoningly--condoningly in respect to her natural emotion, her
inevitable little pang--for an intimation that they would be better on
their feet.
They trod then afresh their ancient paths; and though it pressed upon
her hatefully that he must have taken her abruptness for a smothered
shock, the flare-up of her old feeling at the breath of his news, she
had still to see herself condemned to allow him this, condemned
really to encourage him in the mistake of believing her suspicious of
feminine spite and doubtful of Miss Lindeck's zeal. She was so far
from doubtful that she was but too appalled at it and at the officious
mass in which it loomed, and this instinct of dread, before their walk
was over, before she had guided him round to one of the smaller gates,
there to slip off again by herself, was positively to find on the
bosom of her flood a plank by the aid of which she kept in a manner
and for the time afloat. She took ten minutes to pant, to blow gently,
to paddle disguisedly, to accommodate herself, in a word, to the
elements she had let loose; but as a reward of her effort at least she
then saw how her determined vision accounted for everything. Beside
her friend on the bench she had truly felt all his cables cut, truly
swallowed down the fact that if he still perceived she was pretty--and
_how_ pretty!--it had ceased appreciably to matter to him. It had
lighted the folly of her preliminary fear, the fear of his even yet to
some effect of confusion or other inconvenience for her, proving
more alive to the quotable in her, as she had called it, than to the
inexpressible. She had reckoned with the awkwardness of that possible
failure of his measure of her charm, by which his renewed apprehension
of her grosser ornaments, those with which he had most affinity, might
too much profit; but she need have concerned herself as little for his
sensibility on one head as on the other. She had ceased personally,
ceased materially--in respect, as who should say, to any optical or
tactile advantage--to exist for him, and the whole office of his
manner had been the more piously and gallantly to dress the dead
presence with flowers. This was all to his credit and his honor, but
what it clearly certified was that their case was at last not even one
of spirit reaching out to spirit. _He_ had plenty of spirit--had all
the spirit required for his having engaged himself to Miss Lindeck,
into which result, once she had got her head well up again, she read,
as they proceeded, one sharp meaning after another. It was therefore
toward the subtler essence of that mature young woman alone that he
was occupied in stretching; what was definite to him about Julia
Bride being merely, being entirely--which was indeed thereby quite
enough--that she _might_ end by scaling her worldly height. They would
push, they would shove, they would "boost," they would arch both their
straight backs as pedestals for her tiptoe; and at the same time, by
some sweet prodigy of mechanics, she would pull them up and up with
her.
Wondrous things hovered before her in the course of this walk; her
consciousness had become, by an extraordinary turn, a music-box in
which, its lid well down, the most remarkable tunes were sounding. It
played for her ear alone, and the lid, as she might have figured, was
her firm plan of holding out till she got home, of not betraying--to
her companion at least--the extent to which she was demoralized. To
see him think her demoralized by mistrust of the sincerity of the
service to be meddlesomely rendered her by his future wife--she would
have hurled herself publicly into the lake there at their side, would
have splashed, in her beautiful clothes, among the frightened swans,
rather than invite him to that ineptitude. Oh, her sincerity, Mary
Lindeck's--she would be drenched with her sincerity, and she would
be drenched, yes, with _his_; so that, from inward convulsion to
convulsion, she had, before they reached their gate, pulled up in the
path. There was something her head had been full of these three or
four minutes, the intensest little tune of the music-box, and it made
its way to her lips now; belonging--for all the good it could do
her!--to the two or three sorts of solicitude she might properly
express.
"I hope _she_ has a fortune, if you don't mind my speaking of it:
I mean some of the money we didn't in _our_ time have--and that we
missed, after all, in our poor way and for what we then wanted of it,
so quite dreadfully."
She had been able to wreathe it in a grace quite equal to any he
himself had employed; and it was to be said for him also that he kept
up, on this, the standard. "Oh, she's not, thank goodness, at all
badly off, poor dear. We shall do very well. How sweet of you to have
thought of it! May I tell her that too?" he splendidly glared. Yes, he
glared--how couldn't he, with what his mind was really full of? But,
all the same, he came just here, by her vision, nearer than at any
other point to being a gentleman. He came quite within an ace of
it--with his taking from her thus the prescription of humility of
service, his consenting to act in the interest of her avidity, his
letting her mount that way, on his bowed shoulders, to the success in
which he could suppose she still believed. He couldn't know, he would
never know, that she had then and there ceased to believe in it--that
she saw as clear as the sun in the sky the exact manner in which,
between them, before they had done, the Murray Brushes, all zeal and
sincerity, all interest in her interesting case, would dish, would
ruin, would utterly destroy her. He wouldn't have needed to go on, for
the force and truth of this; but he did go on--he was as crashingly
consistent as a motorcar without a brake. He was visibly in love
with the idea of what they might do for her and of the rare "social"
opportunity that they would, by the same stroke, embrace. How he had
been offhand with it, how he had made it parenthetic, that he didn't
happen "personally" to know Basil French--as if it would have been at
all likely he _should_ know him, even _im_ personally, and as if he
could conceal from her the fact that, since she had made him her
overture, this gentleman's name supremely baited her hook! Oh, they
would help Julia Bride if they could--they would do their remarkable
best; but they would at any rate have made his acquaintance over it,
and she might indeed leave the rest to their thoroughness. He would
already have known, he would already have heard; her appeal, she was
more and more sure, wouldn't have come to him as a revelation. He had
already talked it over with _her_, with Miss Lindeck, to whom the
Frenches, in their fortress, had never been accessible, and his whole
attitude bristled, to Julia's eyes, with the betrayal of her hand, her
voice, her pressure, her calculation. His tone, in fact, as he talked,
fairly thrust these things into her face. "But you must see her for
yourself. You'll judge her. You'll love her. My dear child"--he
brought it all out, and if he spoke of children he might, in his
candor, have been himself infantine--"my dear child, she's the person
to do it for you. Make it over to her; but," he laughed, "of course
see her first! Couldn't you," he wound up--for they were now near
their gate, where she was to leave him--"couldn't you just simply make
us meet him, at tea say, informally; just _us_ alone, as pleasant old
friends of whom you'd have so naturally and frankly spoken to him: and
then see what we'd _make_ of that?"
It was all in his expression; he couldn't keep it out of that, and his
shining good looks couldn't: ah, he was so fatally much too handsome
for her! So the gap showed just there, in his admirable mask and
his admirable eagerness; the yawning little chasm showed where the
gentleman fell short. But she took this in, she took everything in,
she felt herself do it, she heard herself say, while they paused
before separation, that she quite saw the point of the meeting, as he
suggested, at her tea. She would propose it to Mr. French and would
let them know; and he must assuredly bring Miss Lindeck, bring her
"right away," bring her soon, bring _them_, his fiancée and her,
together somehow, and as quickly as possible--so that they _should_
be old friends before the tea. She would propose it to Mr. French,
propose it to Mr. French: that hummed in her ears as she went--after
she had really got away; hummed as if she were repeating it over,
giving it out to the passers, to the pavement, to the sky, and all as
in wild discord with the intense little concert of her music-box. The
extraordinary thing too was that she quite believed she should do it,
and fully meant to; desperately, fantastically passive--since she
almost reeled with it as she proceeded--she was capable of proposing
anything to any one: capable too of thinking it likely Mr. French
would come, for he had never on her previous proposals declined
anything. Yes, she would keep it up to the end, this pretence of owing
them salvation, and might even live to take comfort in having done for
them what they wanted. What they wanted _couldn't_ but be to get at
the Frenches, and what Miss Lindeck above all wanted, baffled of it
otherwise, with so many others of the baffled, was to get at Mr.
French--for all Mr. French would want of either of them!--still more
than Murray did. It was not till after she had got home, got straight
into her own room and flung herself on her face, that she yielded to
the full taste of the bitterness of missing a connection, missing the
man himself, with power to create such a social appetite, such a grab
at what might be gained by them. He could make people, even people
like these two and whom there were still other people to envy, he
could make them push and snatch and scramble like that--and then
remain as incapable of taking her from the hands of such patrons as of
receiving her straight, say, from those of Mrs. Drack. It was a high
note, too, of Julia's wonderful composition that, even in the long,
lonely moan of her conviction of her now certain ruin, all this grim
lucidity, the perfect clearance of passion, but made her supremely
proud of him.
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT
_Robert Louis Stevenson_ (1850-1894)
It was late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous,
relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered
it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after
flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous,
interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it
seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had
propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window: was
it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus, or were the holy
angels moulting? He was only a poor Master of Arts, he went on; and as
the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture
to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the
company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honor of the
jest and the grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his
own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when
he was Villon's age.
The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the
flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up.
An army might have marched from end to end and not a footfall given
the alarm. If there were any belated birds in heaven, they saw the
island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white
spars, on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the snow
settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was
drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque
or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into great false
noses, drooping toward the point. The crockets were like upright
pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind there was a
dull sound of dripping about the precincts of the church.