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THE GREATER INCLINATION
by EDITH WHARTON
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE GREATER INCLINATION
I
_The Muse’s Tragedy_.
II
_A Journey_.
III
_The Pelican_.
IV
_Souls Belated_.
V
_A Coward_.
VI
_The Twilight of the God_.
VII
_A Cup of Cold Water_.
VIII
_The Portrait_.
THE GREATER INCLINATION
THE MUSE’S TRAGEDY
Danyers afterwards liked to fancy that he had recognized Mrs. Anerton at once; but that, of course, was absurd, since he had seen no portrait of her–she affected a strict anonymity, refusing even her photograph to the most privileged–and from Mrs. Memorall, whom he revered and cultivated as her friend, he had extracted but the one impressionist phrase: “Oh, well, she’s like one of those old prints where the lines have the value of color.”
He was almost certain, at all events, that he had been thinking of Mrs. Anerton as he sat over his breakfast in the empty hotel restaurant, and that, looking up on the approach of the lady who seated herself at the table near the window, he had said to himself, “_That might be she_.”
Ever since his Harvard days–he was still young enough to think of them as immensely remote–Danyers had dreamed of Mrs. Anerton, the Silvia of Vincent Rendle’s immortal sonnet-cycle, the Mrs. A. of the _Life and Letters_. Her name was enshrined in some of the noblest English verse of the nineteenth century–and of all past or future centuries, as Danyers, from the stand-point of a maturer judgment, still believed. The first reading of certain poems–of the _Antinous_, the _Pia Tolomei_, the _Sonnets to Silvia_,–had been epochs in Danyers’s growth, and the verse seemed to gain in mellowness, in amplitude, in meaning as one brought to its interpretation more experience of life, a finer emotional sense. Where, in his boyhood, he had felt only the perfect, the almost austere beauty of form, the subtle interplay of vowel-sounds, the rush and fulness of lyric emotion, he now thrilled to the close-packed significance of each line, the allusiveness of each word–his imagination lured hither and thither on fresh trails of thought, and perpetually spurred by the sense that, beyond what he had already discovered, more marvellous regions lay waiting to be explored. Danyers had written, at college, the prize essay on Rendle’s poetry (it chanced to be the moment of the great man’s death); he had fashioned the fugitive verse of his own storm-and-stress period on the forms which Rendle had first given to English metre; and when two years later the _Life and Letters_ appeared, and the Silvia of the sonnets took substance as Mrs. A., he had included in his worship of Rendle the woman who had inspired not only such divine verse but such playful, tender, incomparable prose.
Danyers never forgot the day when Mrs. Memorall happened to mention that she knew Mrs. Anerton. He had known Mrs. Memorall for a year or more, and had somewhat contemptuously classified her as the kind of woman who runs cheap excursions to celebrities; when one afternoon she remarked, as she put a second lump of sugar in his tea:
“Is it right this time? You’re almost as particular as Mary Anerton.”
“Mary Anerton?”
“Yes, I never _can_ remember how she likes her tea. Either it’s lemon _with_ sugar, or lemon without sugar, or cream without either, and whichever it is must be put into the cup before the tea is poured in; and if one hasn’t remembered, one must begin all over again. I suppose it was Vincent Rendle’s way of taking his tea and has become a sacred rite.”
“Do you _know_ Mrs. Anerton?” cried Danyers, disturbed by this careless familiarity with the habits of his divinity.
“‘And did I once see Shelley plain?’ Mercy, yes! She and I were at school together–she’s an American, you know. We were at a _pension_ near Tours for nearly a year; then she went back to New York, and I didn’t see her again till after her marriage. She and Anerton spent a winter in Rome while my husband was attached to our Legation there, and she used to be with us a great deal.” Mrs. Memorall smiled reminiscently. “It was _the_ winter.”
“The winter they first met?”
“Precisely–but unluckily I left Rome just before the meeting took place. Wasn’t it too bad? I might have been in the _Life and Letters_. You know he mentions that stupid Madame Vodki, at whose house he first saw her.”
“And did you see much of her after that?”
“Not during Rendle’s life. You know she has lived in Europe almost entirely, and though I used to see her off and on when I went abroad, she was always so engrossed, so preoccupied, that one felt one wasn’t wanted. The fact is, she cared only about his friends–she separated herself gradually from all her own people. Now, of course, it’s different; she’s desperately lonely; she’s taken to writing to me now and then; and last year, when she heard I was going abroad, she asked me to meet her in Venice, and I spent a week with her there.”
“And Rendle?”
Mrs. Memorall smiled and shook her head. “Oh, I never was allowed a peep at _him_; none of her old friends met him, except by accident. Ill-natured people say that was the reason she kept him so long. If one happened in while he was there, he was hustled into Anerton’s study, and the husband mounted guard till the inopportune visitor had departed. Anerton, you know, was really much more ridiculous about it than his wife. Mary was too clever to lose her head, or at least to show she’d lost it–but Anerton couldn’t conceal his pride in the conquest. I’ve seen Mary shiver when he spoke of Rendle as _our poet_. Rendle always had to have a certain seat at the dinner-table, away from the draught and not too near the fire, and a box of cigars that no one else was allowed to touch, and a writing-table of his own in Mary’s sitting-room–and Anerton was always telling one of the great man’s idiosyncrasies: how he never would cut the ends of his cigars, though Anerton himself had given him a gold cutter set with a star-sapphire, and how untidy his writing-table was, and how the house- maid had orders always to bring the waste-paper basket to her mistress before emptying it, lest some immortal verse should be thrown into the dust-bin.”
“The Anertons never separated, did they?”
“Separated? Bless you, no. He never would have left Rendle! And besides, he was very fond of his wife.”
“And she?”
“Oh, she saw he was the kind of man who was fated to make himself ridiculous, and she never interfered with his natural tendencies.”
From Mrs. Memorall, Danyers further learned that Mrs. Anerton, whose husband had died some years before her poet, now divided her life between Rome, where she had a small apartment, and England, where she occasionally went to stay with those of her friends who had been Rendle’s. She had been engaged, for some time after his death, in editing some juvenilia which he had bequeathed to her care; but that task being accomplished, she had been left without definite occupation, and Mrs. Memorall, on the occasion of their last meeting, had found her listless and out of spirits.
“She misses him too much–her life is too empty. I told her so–I told her she ought to marry.”
“Oh!”
“Why not, pray? She’s a young woman still–what many people would call young,” Mrs. Memorall interjected, with a parenthetic glance at the mirror. “Why not accept the inevitable and begin over again? All the King’s horses and all the King’s men won’t bring Rendle to life-and besides, she didn’t marry _him_ when she had the chance.”
Danyers winced slightly at this rude fingering of his idol. Was it possible that Mrs. Memorall did not see what an anti-climax such a marriage would have been? Fancy Rendle “making an honest woman” of Silvia; for so society would have viewed it! How such a reparation would have vulgarized their past–it would have been like “restoring” a masterpiece; and how exquisite must have been the perceptions of the woman who, in defiance of appearances, and perhaps of her own secret inclination, chose to go down to posterity as Silvia rather than as Mrs. Vincent Rendle!
Mrs. Memorall, from this day forth, acquired an interest in Danyers’s eyes. She was like a volume of unindexed and discursive memoirs, through which he patiently plodded in the hope of finding embedded amid layers of dusty twaddle some precious allusion to the subject of his thought. When, some months later, he brought out his first slim volume, in which the remodelled college essay on Rendle figured among a dozen, somewhat overstudied “appreciations,” he offered a copy to Mrs. Memorall; who surprised him, the next time they met, with the announcement that she had sent the book to Mrs. Anerton.
Mrs. Anerton in due time wrote to thank her friend. Danyers was privileged to read the few lines in which, in terms that suggested the habit of “acknowledging” similar tributes, she spoke of the author’s “feeling and insight,” and was “so glad of the opportunity,” etc. He went away disappointed, without clearly knowing what else he had expected.
The following spring, when he went abroad, Mrs. Memorall offered him letters to everybody, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Louise Michel. She did not include Mrs. Anerton, however, and Danyers knew, from a previous conversation, that Silvia objected to people who “brought letters.” He knew also that she travelled during the summer, and was unlikely to return to Rome before the term of his holiday should be reached, and the hope of meeting her was not included among his anticipations.
The lady whose entrance broke upon his solitary repast in the restaurant of the Hotel Villa d’Este had seated herself in such a way that her profile was detached against the window; and thus viewed, her domed forehead, small arched nose, and fastidious lip suggested a silhouette of Marie Antoinette. In the lady’s dress and movements–in the very turn of her wrist as she poured out her coffee–Danyers thought he detected the same fastidiousness, the same air of tacitly excluding the obvious and unexceptional. Here was a woman who had been much bored and keenly interested. The waiter brought her a _Secolo,_ and as she bent above it Danyers noticed that the hair rolled back from her forehead was turning gray; but her figure was straight and slender, and she had the invaluable gift of a girlish back.
The rush of Anglo-Saxon travel had not set toward the lakes, and with the exception of an Italian family or two, and a hump-backed youth with an _abbe_, Danyers and the lady had the marble halls of the Villa d’Este to themselves.
When he returned from his morning ramble among the hills he saw her sitting at one of the little tables at the edge of the lake. She was writing, and a heap of books and newspapers lay on the table at her side. That evening they met again in the garden. He had strolled out to smoke a last cigarette before dinner, and under the black vaulting of ilexes, near the steps leading down to the boat-landing, he found her leaning on the parapet above the lake. At the sound of his approach she turned and looked at him. She had thrown a black lace scarf over her head, and in this sombre setting her face seemed thin and unhappy. He remembered afterwards that her eyes, as they met his, expressed not so much sorrow as profound discontent.
To his surprise she stepped toward him with a detaining gesture.
“Mr. Lewis Danyers, I believe?”
He bowed.
“I am Mrs. Anerton. I saw your name on the visitors’ list and wished to thank you for an essay on Mr. Rendle’s poetry–or rather to tell you how much I appreciated it. The book was sent to me last winter by Mrs. Memorall.”
She spoke in even melancholy tones, as though the habit of perfunctory utterance had robbed her voice of more spontaneous accents; but her smile was charming. They sat down on a stone bench under the ilexes, and she told him how much pleasure his essay had given her. She thought it the best in the book–she was sure he had put more of himself into it than into any other; was she not right in conjecturing that he had been very deeply influenced by Mr. Rendle’s poetry? _Pour comprendre il faut aimer_, and it seemed to her that, in some ways, he had penetrated the poet’s inner meaning more completely than any other critic. There were certain problems, of course, that he had left untouched; certain aspects of that many-sided mind that he had perhaps failed to seize–
“But then you are young,” she concluded gently, “and one could not wish you, as yet, the experience that a fuller understanding would imply.”
II
She stayed a month at Villa d’Este, and Danyers was with her daily. She showed an unaffected pleasure in his society; a pleasure so obviously founded on their common veneration of Rendle, that the young man could enjoy it without fear of fatuity. At first he was merely one more grain of frankincense on the altar of her insatiable divinity; but gradually a more personal note crept into their intercourse. If she still liked him only because he appreciated Rendle, she at least perceptibly distinguished him from the herd of Rendle’s appreciators.
Her attitude toward the great man’s memory struck Danyers as perfect. She neither proclaimed nor disavowed her identity. She was frankly Silvia to those who knew and cared; but there was no trace of the Egeria in her pose. She spoke often of Rendle’s books, but seldom of himself; there was no posthumous conjugality, no use of the possessive tense, in her abounding reminiscences. Of the master’s intellectual life, of his habits of thought and work, she never wearied of talking. She knew the history of each poem; by what scene or episode each image had been evoked; how many times the words in a certain line had been transposed; how long a certain adjective had been sought, and what had at last suggested it; she could even explain that one impenetrable line, the torment of critics, the joy of detractors, the last line of _The Old Odysseus_.
Danyers felt that in talking of these things she was no mere echo of Rendle’s thought. If her identity had appeared to be merged in his it was because they thought alike, not because he had thought for her. Posterity is apt to regard the women whom poets have sung as chance pegs on which they hung their garlands; but Mrs. Anerton’s mind was like some fertile garden wherein, inevitably, Rendle’s imagination had rooted itself and flowered. Danyers began to see how many threads of his complex mental tissue the poet had owed to the blending of her temperament with his; in a certain sense Silvia had herself created the _Sonnets to Silvia_.
To be the custodian of Rendle’s inner self, the door, as it were, to the sanctuary, had at first seemed to Danyers so comprehensive a privilege that he had the sense, as his friendship with Mrs. Anerton advanced, of forcing his way into a life already crowded. What room was there, among such towering memories, for so small an actuality as his? Quite suddenly, after this, he discovered that Mrs. Memorall knew better: his fortunate friend was bored as well as lonely.
“You have had more than any other woman!” he had exclaimed to her one day; and her smile flashed a derisive light on his blunder. Fool that he was, not to have seen that she had not had enough! That she was young still–do years count?–tender, human, a woman; that the living have need of the living.
After that, when they climbed the alleys of the hanging park, resting in one of the little ruined temples, or watching, through a ripple of foliage, the remote blue flash of the lake, they did not always talk of Rendle or of literature. She encouraged Danyers to speak of himself; to confide his ambitions to her; she asked him the questions which are the wise woman’s substitute for advice.
“You must write,” she said, administering the most exquisite flattery that human lips could give.
Of course he meant to write–why not to do something great in his turn? His best, at least; with the resolve, at the outset, that his best should be _the_ best. Nothing less seemed possible with that mandate in his ears. How she had divined him; lifted and disentangled his groping ambitions; laid the awakening touch on his spirit with her creative _Let there be light!_
It was his last day with her, and he was feeling very hopeless and happy.
“You ought to write a book about _him,”_ she went on gently.
Danyers started; he was beginning to dislike Rendle’s way of walking in unannounced.
“You ought to do it,” she insisted. “A complete interpretation–a summing- up of his style, his purpose, his theory of life and art. No one else could do it as well.”
He sat looking at her perplexedly. Suddenly–dared he guess?
“I couldn’t do it without you,” he faltered.
“I could help you–I would help you, of course.”
They sat silent, both looking at the lake.
It was agreed, when they parted, that he should rejoin her six weeks later in Venice. There they were to talk about the book.
III
_Lago d’Iseo, August 14th_.
When I said good-by to you yesterday I promised to come back to Venice in a week: I was to give you your answer then. I was not honest in saying that; I didn’t mean to go back to Venice or to see you again. I was running away from you–and I mean to keep on running! If _you_ won’t, _I_ must. Somebody must save you from marrying a disappointed woman of–well, you say years don’t count, and why should they, after all, since you are not to marry me?
That is what I dare not go back to say. _You are not to marry me_. We have had our month together in Venice (such a good month, was it not?) and now you are to go home and write a book–any book but the one we–didn’t talk of!–and I am to stay here, attitudinizing among my memories like a sort of female Tithonus. The dreariness of this enforced immortality!
But you shall know the truth. I care for you, or at least for your love, enough to owe you that.
You thought it was because Vincent Rendle had loved me that there was so little hope for you. I had had what I wanted to the full; wasn’t that what you said? It is just when a man begins to think he understands a woman that he may be sure he doesn’t! It is because Vincent Rendle _didn’t love me_ that there is no hope for you. I never had what I wanted, and never, never, never will I stoop to wanting anything else.
Do you begin to understand? It was all a sham then, you say? No, it was all real as far as it went. You are young–you haven’t learned, as you will later, the thousand imperceptible signs by which one gropes one’s way through the labyrinth of human nature; but didn’t it strike you, sometimes, that I never told you any foolish little anecdotes about him? His trick, for instance, of twirling a paper-knife round and round between his thumb and forefinger while he talked; his mania for saving the backs of notes; his greediness for wild strawberries, the little pungent Alpine ones; his childish delight in acrobats and jugglers; his way of always calling me _you–dear you_, every letter began–I never told you a word of all that, did I? Do you suppose I could have helped telling you, if he had loved me? These little things would have been mine, then, a part of my life–of our life–they would have slipped out in spite of me (it’s only your unhappy woman who is always reticent and dignified). But there never was any “our life;” it was always “our lives” to the end….
If you knew what a relief it is to tell some one at last, you would bear with me, you would let me hurt you! I shall never be quite so lonely again, now that some one knows.
Let me begin at the beginning. When I first met Vincent Rendle I was not twenty-five. That was twenty years ago. From that time until his death, five years ago, we were fast friends. He gave me fifteen years, perhaps the best fifteen years, of his life. The world, as you know, thinks that his greatest poems were written during those years; I am supposed to have “inspired” them, and in a sense I did. From the first, the intellectual sympathy between us was almost complete; my mind must have been to him (I fancy) like some perfectly tuned instrument on which he was never tired of playing. Some one told me of his once saying of me that I “always understood;” it is the only praise I ever heard of his giving me. I don’t even know if he thought me pretty, though I hardly think my appearance could have been disagreeable to him, for he hated to be with ugly people. At all events he fell into the way of spending more and more of his time with me. He liked our house; our ways suited him. He was nervous, irritable; people bored him and yet he disliked solitude. He took sanctuary with us. When we travelled he went with us; in the winter he took rooms near us in Rome. In England or on the continent he was always with us for a good part of the year. In small ways I was able to help him in his work; he grew dependent on me. When we were apart he wrote to me continually–he liked to have me share in all he was doing or thinking; he was impatient for my criticism of every new book that interested him; I was a part of his intellectual life. The pity of it was that I wanted to be something more. I was a young woman and I was in love with him–not because he was Vincent Rendle, but just because he was himself!
People began to talk, of course–I was Vincent Rendle’s Mrs. Anerton; when the _Sonnets to Silvia_ appeared, it was whispered that I was Silvia. Wherever he went, I was invited; people made up to me in the hope of getting to know him; when I was in London my doorbell never stopped ringing. Elderly peeresses, aspiring hostesses, love-sick girls and struggling authors overwhelmed me with their assiduities. I hugged my success, for I knew what it meant–they thought that Rendle was in love with me! Do you know, at times, they almost made me think so too? Oh, there was no phase of folly I didn’t go through. You can’t imagine the excuses a woman will invent for a man’s not telling her that he loves her–pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if any other woman used them! But all the while, deep down, I knew he had never cared. I should have known it if he had made love to me every day of his life. I could never guess whether he knew what people said about us–he listened so little to what people said; and cared still less, when he heard. He was always quite honest and straightforward with me; he treated me as one man treats another; and yet at times I felt he _must_ see that with me it was different. If he did see, he made no sign. Perhaps he never noticed–I am sure he never meant to be cruel. He had never made love to me; it was no fault of his if I wanted more than he could give me. The _Sonnets to Silvia_, you say? But what are they? A cosmic philosophy, not a love-poem; addressed to Woman, not to a woman!
But then, the letters? Ah, the letters! Well, I’ll make a clean breast of it. You have noticed the breaks in the letters here and there, just as they seem to be on the point of growing a little–warmer? The critics, you may remember, praised the editor for his commendable delicacy and good taste (so rare in these days!) in omitting from the correspondence all personal allusions, all those _details intimes_ which should be kept sacred from the public gaze. They referred, of course, to the asterisks in the letters to Mrs. A. Those letters I myself prepared for publication; that is to say, I copied them out for the editor, and every now and then I put in a line of asterisks to make it appear that something had been left out. You understand? The asterisks were a sham–_there was nothing to leave out_.
No one but a woman could understand what I went through during those years–the moments of revolt, when I felt I must break away from it all, fling the truth in his face and never see him again; the inevitable reaction, when not to see him seemed the one unendurable thing, and I trembled lest a look or word of mine should disturb the poise of our friendship; the silly days when I hugged the delusion that he _must_ love me, since everybody thought he did; the long periods of numbness, when I didn’t seem to care whether he loved me or not. Between these wretched days came others when our intellectual accord was so perfect that I forgot everything else in the joy of feeling myself lifted up on the wings of his thought. Sometimes, then, the heavens seemed to be opened….
* * * * *
All this time he was so dear a friend! He had the genius of friendship, and he spent it all on me. Yes, you were right when you said that I have had more than any other woman. _Il faut de l’adresse pour aimer_, Pascal says; and I was so quiet, so cheerful, so frankly affectionate with him, that in all those years I am almost sure I never bored him. Could I have hoped as much if he had loved me?
You mustn’t think of him, though, as having been tied to my skirts. He came and went as he pleased, and so did his fancies. There was a girl once (I am telling you everything), a lovely being who called his poetry “deep” and gave him _Lucile_ on his birthday. He followed her to Switzerland one summer, and all the time that he was dangling after her (a little too conspicuously, I always thought, for a Great Man), he was writing to _me_ about his theory of vowel-combinations–or was it his experiments in English hexameter? The letters were dated from the very places where I knew they went and sat by waterfalls together and he thought out adjectives for her hair. He talked to me about it quite frankly afterwards. She was perfectly beautiful and it had been a pure delight to watch her; but she _would_ talk, and her mind, he said, was “all elbows.” And yet, the next year, when her marriage was announced, he went away alone, quite suddenly … and it was just afterwards that he published _Love’s Viaticum_. Men are queer!
After my husband died–I am putting things crudely, you see–I had a return of hope. It was because he loved me, I argued, that he had never spoken; because he had always hoped some day to make me his wife; because he wanted to spare me the “reproach.” Rubbish! I knew well enough, in my heart of hearts, that my one chance lay in the force of habit. He had grown used to me; he was no longer young; he dreaded new people and new ways; _il avait pris son pli_. Would it not be easier to marry me?
I don’t believe he ever thought of it. He wrote me what people call “a beautiful letter;” he was kind; considerate, decently commiserating; then, after a few weeks, he slipped into his old way of coming in every afternoon, and our interminable talks began again just where they had left off. I heard later that people thought I had shown “such good taste” in not marrying him.
So we jogged on for five years longer. Perhaps they were the best years, for I had given up hoping. Then he died.
After his death–this is curious–there came to me a kind of mirage of love. All the books and articles written about him, all the reviews of the “Life,” were full of discreet allusions to Silvia. I became again the Mrs. Anerton of the glorious days. Sentimental girls and dear lads like you turned pink when somebody whispered, “that was Silvia you were talking to.” Idiots begged for my autograph–publishers urged me to write my reminiscences of him–critics consulted me about the reading of doubtful lines. And I knew that, to all these people, I was the woman Vincent Rendle had loved.
After a while that fire went out too and I was left alone with my past. Alone–quite alone; for he had never really been with me. The intellectual union counted for nothing now. It had been soul to soul, but never hand in hand, and there were no little things to remember him by.
Then there set in a kind of Arctic winter. I crawled into myself as into a snow-hut. I hated my solitude and yet dreaded any one who disturbed it. That phase, of course, passed like the others. I took up life again, and began to read the papers and consider the cut of my gowns. But there was one question that I could not be rid of, that haunted me night and day. Why had he never loved me? Why had I been so much to him, and no more? Was I so ugly, so essentially unlovable, that though a man might cherish me as his mind’s comrade, he could not care for me as a woman? I can’t tell you how that question tortured me. It became an obsession.
My poor friend, do you begin to see? I had to find out what some other man thought of me. Don’t be too hard on me! Listen first–consider. When I first met Vincent Rendle I was a young woman, who had married early and led the quietest kind of life; I had had no “experiences.” From the hour of our first meeting to the day of his death I never looked at any other man, and never noticed whether any other man looked at me. When he died, five years ago, I knew the extent of my powers no more than a baby. Was it too late to find out? Should I never know _why?_
Forgive me–forgive me. You are so young; it will be an episode, a mere “document,” to you so soon! And, besides, it wasn’t as deliberate, as cold-blooded as these disjointed lines have made it appear. I didn’t plan it, like a woman in a book. Life is so much more complex than any rendering of it can be. I liked you from the first–I was drawn to you (you must have seen that)–I wanted you to like me; it was not a mere psychological experiment. And yet in a sense it was that, too–I must be honest. I had to have an answer to that question; it was a ghost that had to be laid.
At first I was afraid–oh, so much afraid–that you cared for me only because I was Silvia, that you loved me because you thought Rendle had loved me. I began to think there was no escaping my destiny.
How happy I was when I discovered that you were growing jealous of my past; that you actually hated Rendle! My heart beat like a girl’s when you told me you meant to follow me to Venice.
After our parting at Villa d’Este my old doubts reasserted themselves. What did I know of your feeling for me, after all? Were you capable of analyzing it yourself? Was it not likely to be two-thirds vanity and curiosity, and one-third literary sentimentality? You might easily fancy that you cared for Mary Anerton when you were really in love with Silvia– the heart is such a hypocrite! Or you might be more calculating than I had supposed. Perhaps it was you who had been flattering _my_ vanity in the hope (the pardonable hope!) of turning me, after a decent interval, into a pretty little essay with a margin.
When you arrived in Venice and we met again–do you remember the music on the lagoon, that evening, from my balcony?–I was so afraid you would begin to talk about the book–the book, you remember, was your ostensible reason for coming. You never spoke of it, and I soon saw your one fear was _I_ might do so–might remind you of your object in being with me. Then I knew you cared for me! yes, at that moment really cared! We never mentioned the book once, did we, during that month in Venice?
I have read my letter over; and now I wish that I had said this to you instead of writing it. I could have felt my way then, watching your face and seeing if you understood. But, no, I could not go back to Venice; and I could not tell you (though I tried) while we were there together. I couldn’t spoil that month–my one month. It was so good, for once in my life, to get away from literature….
You will be angry with me at first–but, alas! not for long. What I have done would have been cruel if I had been a younger woman; as it is, the experiment will hurt no one but myself. And it will hurt me horribly (as much as, in your first anger, you may perhaps wish), because it has shown me, for the first time, all that I have missed….
A JOURNEY
As she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the rush of the wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles of wakeful lucidity. The sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence. Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then she turned her head and looked through the opening in the hangings at her husband’s curtains across the aisle….
She wondered restlessly if he wanted anything and if she could hear him if he called. His voice had grown very weak within the last months and it irritated him when she did not hear. This irritability, this increasing childish petulance seemed to give expression to their imperceptible estrangement. Like two faces looking at one another through a sheet of glass they were close together, almost touching, but they could not hear or feel each other: the conductivity between them was broken. She, at least, had this sense of separation, and she fancied sometimes that she saw it reflected in the look with which he supplemented his failing words. Doubtless the fault was hers. She was too impenetrably healthy to be touched by the irrelevancies of disease. Her self-reproachful tenderness was tinged with the sense of his irrationality: she had a vague feeling that there was a purpose in his helpless tyrannies. The suddenness of the change had found her so unprepared. A year ago their pulses had beat to one robust measure; both had the same prodigal confidence in an exhaustless future. Now their energies no longer kept step: hers still bounded ahead of life, preempting unclaimed regions of hope and activity, while his lagged behind, vainly struggling to overtake her.
When they married, she had such arrears of living to make up: her days had been as bare as the whitewashed school-room where she forced innutritious facts upon reluctant children. His coming had broken in on the slumber of circumstance, widening the present till it became the encloser of remotest chances. But imperceptibly the horizon narrowed. Life had a grudge against her: she was never to be allowed to spread her wings.
At first the doctors had said that six weeks of mild air would set him right; but when he came back this assurance was explained as having of course included a winter in a dry climate. They gave up their pretty house, storing the wedding presents and new furniture, and went to Colorado. She had hated it there from the first. Nobody knew her or cared about her; there was no one to wonder at the good match she had made, or to envy her the new dresses and the visiting-cards which were still a surprise to her. And he kept growing worse. She felt herself beset with difficulties too evasive to be fought by so direct a temperament. She still loved him, of course; but he was gradually, undefinably ceasing to be himself. The man she had married had been strong, active, gently masterful: the male whose pleasure it is to clear a way through the material obstructions of life; but now it was she who was the protector, he who must be shielded from importunities and given his drops or his beef-juice though the skies were falling. The routine of the sick-room bewildered her; this punctual administering of medicine seemed as idle as some uncomprehended religious mummery.
There were moments, indeed, when warm gushes of pity swept away her instinctive resentment of his condition, when she still found his old self in his eyes as they groped for each other through the dense medium of his weakness. But these moments had grown rare. Sometimes he frightened her: his sunken expressionless face seemed that of a stranger; his voice was weak and hoarse; his thin-lipped smile a mere muscular contraction. Her hand avoided his damp soft skin, which had lost the familiar roughness of health: she caught herself furtively watching him as she might have watched a strange animal. It frightened her to feel that this was the man she loved; there were hours when to tell him what she suffered seemed the one escape from her fears. But in general she judged herself more leniently, reflecting that she had perhaps been too long alone with him, and that she would feel differently when they were at home again, surrounded by her robust and buoyant family. How she had rejoiced when the doctors at last gave their consent to his going home! She knew, of course, what the decision meant; they both knew. It meant that he was to die; but they dressed the truth in hopeful euphuisms, and at times, in the joy of preparation, she really forgot the purpose of their journey, and slipped into an eager allusion to next year’s plans.
At last the day of leaving came. She had a dreadful fear that they would never get away; that somehow at the last moment he would fail her; that the doctors held one of their accustomed treacheries in reserve; but nothing happened. They drove to the station, he was installed in a seat with a rug over his knees and a cushion at his back, and she hung out of the window waving unregretful farewells to the acquaintances she had really never liked till then.
The first twenty-four hours had passed off well. He revived a little and it amused him to look out of the window and to observe the humours of the car. The second day he began to grow weary and to chafe under the dispassionate stare of the freckled child with the lump of chewing-gum. She had to explain to the child’s mother that her husband was too ill to be disturbed: a statement received by that lady with a resentment visibly supported by the maternal sentiment of the whole car….
That night he slept badly and the next morning his temperature frightened her: she was sure he was growing worse. The day passed slowly, punctuated by the small irritations of travel. Watching his tired face, she traced in its contractions every rattle and jolt of the tram, till her own body vibrated with sympathetic fatigue. She felt the others observing him too, and hovered restlessly between him and the line of interrogative eyes. The freckled child hung about him like a fly; offers of candy and picture- books failed to dislodge her: she twisted one leg around the other and watched him imperturbably. The porter, as he passed, lingered with vague proffers of help, probably inspired by philanthropic passengers swelling with the sense that “something ought to be done;” and one nervous man in a skull-cap was audibly concerned as to the possible effect on his wife’s health.
The hours dragged on in a dreary inoccupation. Towards dusk she sat down beside him and he laid his hand on hers. The touch startled her. He seemed to be calling her from far off. She looked at him helplessly and his smile went through her like a physical pang.
“Are you very tired?” she asked.
“No, not very.”
“We’ll be there soon now.”
“Yes, very soon.”
“This time to-morrow–“
He nodded and they sat silent. When she had put him to bed and crawled into her own berth she tried to cheer herself with the thought that in less than twenty-four hours they would be in New York. Her people would all be at the station to meet her–she pictured their round unanxious faces pressing through the crowd. She only hoped they would not tell him too loudly that he was looking splendidly and would be all right in no time: the subtler sympathies developed by long contact with suffering were making her aware of a certain coarseness of texture in the family sensibilities.
Suddenly she thought she heard him call. She parted the curtains and listened. No, it was only a man snoring at the other end of the car. His snores had a greasy sound, as though they passed through tallow. She lay down and tried to sleep… Had she not heard him move? She started up trembling… The silence frightened her more than any sound. He might not be able to make her hear–he might be calling her now… What made her think of such things? It was merely the familiar tendency of an over-tired mind to fasten itself on the most intolerable chance within the range of its forebodings…. Putting her head out, she listened; but she could not distinguish his breathing from that of the other pairs of lungs about her. She longed to get up and look at him, but she knew the impulse was a mere vent for her restlessness, and the fear of disturbing him restrained her…. The regular movement of his curtain reassured her, she knew not why; she remembered that he had wished her a cheerful good-night; and the sheer inability to endure her fears a moment longer made her put them from her with an effort of her whole sound tired body. She turned on her side and slept.
She sat up stiffly, staring out at the dawn. The train was rushing through a region of bare hillocks huddled against a lifeless sky. It looked like the first day of creation. The air of the car was close, and she pushed up her window to let in the keen wind. Then she looked at her watch: it was seven o’clock, and soon the people about her would be stirring. She slipped into her clothes, smoothed her dishevelled hair and crept to the dressing-room. When she had washed her face and adjusted her dress she felt more hopeful. It was always a struggle for her not to be cheerful in the morning. Her cheeks burned deliciously under the coarse towel and the wet hair about her temples broke into strong upward tendrils. Every inch of her was full of life and elasticity. And in ten hours they would be at home!
She stepped to her husband’s berth: it was time for him to take his early glass of milk. The window-shade was down, and in the dusk of the curtained enclosure she could just see that he lay sideways, with his face away from her. She leaned over him and drew up the shade. As she did so she touched one of his hands. It felt cold….
She bent closer, laying her hand on his arm and calling him by name. He did not move. She spoke again more loudly; she grasped his shoulder and gently shook it. He lay motionless. She caught hold of his hand again: it slipped from her limply, like a dead thing. A dead thing? … Her breath caught. She must see his face. She leaned forward, and hurriedly, shrinkingly, with a sickening reluctance of the flesh, laid her hands on his shoulders and turned him over. His head fell back; his face looked small and smooth; he gazed at her with steady eyes.
She remained motionless for a long time, holding him thus; and they looked at each other. Suddenly she shrank back: the longing to scream, to call out, to fly from him, had almost overpowered her. But a strong hand arrested her. Good God! If it were known that he was dead they would be put off the train at the next station–
In a terrifying flash of remembrance there arose before her a scene she had once witnessed in travelling, when a husband and wife, whose child had died in the train, had been thrust out at some chance station. She saw them standing on the platform with the child’s body between them; she had never forgotten the dazed look with which they followed the receding train. And this was what would happen to her. Within the next hour she might find herself on the platform of some strange station, alone with her husband’s body…. Anything but that! It was too horrible–She quivered like a creature at bay.
As she cowered there, she felt the train moving more slowly. It was coming then–they were approaching a station! She saw again the husband and wife standing on the lonely platform; and with a violent gesture she drew down the shade to hide her husband’s face.
Feeling dizzy, she sank down on the edge of the berth, keeping away from his outstretched body, and pulling the curtains close, so that he and she were shut into a kind of sepulchral twilight. She tried to think. At all costs she must conceal the fact that he was dead. But how? Her mind refused to act: she could not plan, combine. She could think of no way but to sit there, clutching the curtains, all day long….
She heard the porter making up her bed; people were beginning to move about the car; the dressing-room door was being opened and shut. She tried to rouse herself. At length with a supreme effort she rose to her feet, stepping into the aisle of the car and drawing the curtains tight behind her. She noticed that they still parted slightly with the motion of the car, and finding a pin in her dress she fastened them together. Now she was safe. She looked round and saw the porter. She fancied he was watching her.
“Ain’t he awake yet?” he enquired.
“No,” she faltered.
“I got his milk all ready when he wants it. You know you told me to have it for him by seven.”
She nodded silently and crept into her seat.
At half-past eight the train reached Buffalo. By this time the other passengers were dressed and the berths had been folded back for the day. The porter, moving to and fro under his burden of sheets and pillows, glanced at her as he passed. At length he said: “Ain’t he going to get up? You know we’re ordered to make up the berths as early as we can.”
She turned cold with fear. They were just entering the station.
“Oh, not yet,” she stammered. “Not till he’s had his milk. Won’t you get it, please?”
“All right. Soon as we start again.”
When the train moved on he reappeared with the milk. She took it from him and sat vaguely looking at it: her brain moved slowly from one idea to another, as though they were stepping-stones set far apart across a whirling flood. At length she became aware that the porter still hovered expectantly.
“Will I give it to him?” he suggested.
“Oh, no,” she cried, rising. “He–he’s asleep yet, I think–“
She waited till the porter had passed on; then she unpinned the curtains and slipped behind them. In the semi-obscurity her husband’s face stared up at her like a marble mask with agate eyes. The eyes were dreadful. She put out her hand and drew down the lids. Then she remembered the glass of milk in her other hand: what was she to do with it? She thought of raising the window and throwing it out; but to do so she would have to lean across his body and bring her face close to his. She decided to drink the milk.
She returned to her seat with the empty glass and after a while the porter came back to get it.
“When’ll I fold up his bed?” he asked.
“Oh, not now–not yet; he’s ill–he’s very ill. Can’t you let him stay as he is? The doctor wants him to lie down as much as possible.”
He scratched his head. “Well, if he’s _really_ sick–“
He took the empty glass and walked away, explaining to the passengers that the party behind the curtains was too sick to get up just yet.
She found herself the centre of sympathetic eyes. A motherly woman with an intimate smile sat down beside her.
“I’m real sorry to hear your husband’s sick. I’ve had a remarkable amount of sickness in my family and maybe I could assist you. Can I take a look at him?”
“Oh, no–no, please! He mustn’t be disturbed.”
The lady accepted the rebuff indulgently.
“Well, it’s just as you say, of course, but you don’t look to me as if you’d had much experience in sickness and I’d have been glad to assist you. What do you generally do when your husband’s taken this way?”
“I–I let him sleep.”
“Too much sleep ain’t any too healthful either. Don’t you give him any medicine?”
“Y–yes.”
“Don’t you wake him to take it?”
“Yes.”
“When does he take the next dose?”
“Not for–two hours–“
The lady looked disappointed. “Well, if I was you I’d try giving it oftener. That’s what I do with my folks.”
After that many faces seemed to press upon her. The passengers were on their way to the dining-car, and she was conscious that as they passed down the aisle they glanced curiously at the closed curtains. One lantern- jawed man with prominent eyes stood still and tried to shoot his projecting glance through the division between the folds. The freckled child, returning from breakfast, waylaid the passers with a buttery clutch, saying in a loud whisper, “He’s sick;” and once the conductor came by, asking for tickets. She shrank into her corner and looked out of the window at the flying trees and houses, meaningless hieroglyphs of an endlessly unrolled papyrus.
Now and then the train stopped, and the newcomers on entering the car stared in turn at the closed curtains. More and more people seemed to pass–their faces began to blend fantastically with the images surging in her brain….
Later in the day a fat man detached himself from the mist of faces. He had a creased stomach and soft pale lips. As he pressed himself into the seat facing her she noticed that he was dressed in black broadcloth, with a soiled white tie.
“Husband’s pretty bad this morning, is he?”
“Yes.”
“Dear, dear! Now that’s terribly distressing, ain’t it?” An apostolic smile revealed his gold-filled teeth.
“Of course you know there’s no sech thing as sickness. Ain’t that a lovely thought? Death itself is but a deloosion of our grosser senses. On’y lay yourself open to the influx of the sperrit, submit yourself passively to the action of the divine force, and disease and dissolution will cease to exist for you. If you could indooce your husband to read this little pamphlet–“
The faces about her again grew indistinct. She had a vague recollection of hearing the motherly lady and the parent of the freckled child ardently disputing the relative advantages of trying several medicines at once, or of taking each in turn; the motherly lady maintaining that the competitive system saved time; the other objecting that you couldn’t tell which remedy had effected the cure; their voices went on and on, like bell-buoys droning through a fog…. The porter came up now and then with questions that she did not understand, but that somehow she must have answered since he went away again without repeating them; every two hours the motherly lady reminded her that her husband ought to have his drops; people left the car and others replaced them…
Her head was spinning and she tried to steady herself by clutching at her thoughts as they swept by, but they slipped away from her like bushes on the side of a sheer precipice down which she seemed to be falling. Suddenly her mind grew clear again and she found herself vividly picturing what would happen when the train reached New York. She shuddered as it occurred to her that he would be quite cold and that some one might perceive he had been dead since morning.
She thought hurriedly:–“If they see I am not surprised they will suspect something. They will ask questions, and if I tell them the truth they won’t believe me–no one would believe me! It will be terrible”–and she kept repeating to herself:–“I must pretend I don’t know. I must pretend I don’t know. When they open the curtains I must go up to him quite naturally–and then I must scream.” … She had an idea that the scream would be very hard to do.
Gradually new thoughts crowded upon her, vivid and urgent: she tried to separate and restrain them, but they beset her clamorously, like her school-children at the end of a hot day, when she was too tired to silence them. Her head grew confused, and she felt a sick fear of forgetting her part, of betraying herself by some unguarded word or look.
“I must pretend I don’t know,” she went on murmuring. The words had lost their significance, but she repeated them mechanically, as though they had been a magic formula, until suddenly she heard herself saying: “I can’t remember, I can’t remember!”
Her voice sounded very loud, and she looked about her in terror; but no one seemed to notice that she had spoken.
As she glanced down the car her eye caught the curtains of her husband’s berth, and she began to examine the monotonous arabesques woven through their heavy folds. The pattern was intricate and difficult to trace; she gazed fixedly at the curtains and as she did so the thick stuff grew transparent and through it she saw her husband’s face–his dead face. She struggled to avert her look, but her eyes refused to move and her head seemed to be held in a vice. At last, with an effort that left her weak and shaking, she turned away; but it was of no use; close in front of her, small and smooth, was her husband’s face. It seemed to be suspended in the air between her and the false braids of the woman who sat in front of her. With an uncontrollable gesture she stretched out her hand to push the face away, and suddenly she felt the touch of his smooth skin. She repressed a cry and half started from her seat. The woman with the false braids looked around, and feeling that she must justify her movement in some way she rose and lifted her travelling-bag from the opposite seat. She unlocked the bag and looked into it; but the first object her hand met was a small flask of her husband’s, thrust there at the last moment, in the haste of departure. She locked the bag and closed her eyes … his face was there again, hanging between her eye-balls and lids like a waxen mask against a red curtain….
She roused herself with a shiver. Had she fainted or slept? Hours seemed to have elapsed; but it was still broad day, and the people about her were sitting in the same attitudes as before.
A sudden sense of hunger made her aware that she had eaten nothing since morning. The thought of food filled her with disgust, but she dreaded a return of faintness, and remembering that she had some biscuits in her bag she took one out and ate it. The dry crumbs choked her, and she hastily swallowed a little brandy from her husband’s flask. The burning sensation in her throat acted as a counter-irritant, momentarily relieving the dull ache of her nerves. Then she felt a gently-stealing warmth, as though a soft air fanned her, and the swarming fears relaxed their clutch, receding through the stillness that enclosed her, a stillness soothing as the spacious quietude of a summer day. She slept.
Through her sleep she felt the impetuous rush of the train. It seemed to be life itself that was sweeping her on with headlong inexorable force– sweeping her into darkness and terror, and the awe of unknown days.–Now all at once everything was still–not a sound, not a pulsation… She was dead in her turn, and lay beside him with smooth upstaring face. How quiet it was!–and yet she heard feet coming, the feet of the men who were to carry them away… She could feel too–she felt a sudden prolonged vibration, a series of hard shocks, and then another plunge into darkness: the darkness of death this time–a black whirlwind on which they were both spinning like leaves, in wild uncoiling spirals, with millions and millions of the dead….
* * * * *
She sprang up in terror. Her sleep must have lasted a long time, for the winter day had paled and the lights had been lit. The car was in confusion, and as she regained her self-possession she saw that the passengers were gathering up their wraps and bags. The woman with the false braids had brought from the dressing-room a sickly ivy-plant in a bottle, and the Christian Scientist was reversing his cuffs. The porter passed down the aisle with his impartial brush. An impersonal figure with a gold-banded cap asked for her husband’s ticket. A voice shouted “Baig- gage express!” and she heard the clicking of metal as the passengers handed over their checks.
Presently her window was blocked by an expanse of sooty wall, and the train passed into the Harlem tunnel. The journey was over; in a few minutes she would see her family pushing their joyous way through the throng at the station. Her heart dilated. The worst terror was past….
“We’d better get him up now, hadn’t we?” asked the porter, touching her arm.
He had her husband’s hat in his hand and was meditatively revolving it under his brush.
She looked at the hat and tried to speak; but suddenly the car grew dark. She flung up her arms, struggling to catch at something, and fell face downward, striking her head against the dead man’s berth.
THE PELICAN
She was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity, humanized by a dimple that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said possessing the outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the real thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic problem.
I don’t think nature had meant her to be “intellectual;” but what can a poor thing do, whose husband has died of drink when her baby is hardly six months old, and who finds her coral necklace and her grandfather’s edition of the British Dramatists inadequate to the demands of the creditors?
Her mother, the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt, had written a poem in blank verse on “The Fall of Man;” one of her aunts was dean of a girls’ college; another had translated Euripides–with such a family, the poor child’s fate was sealed in advance. The only way of paying her husband’s debts and keeping the baby clothed was to be intellectual; and, after some hesitation as to the form her mental activity was to take, it was unanimously decided that she was to give lectures.
They began by being drawing-room lectures. The first time I saw her she was standing by the piano, against a flippant background of Dresden china and photographs, telling a roomful of women preoccupied with their spring bonnets all she thought she knew about Greek art. The ladies assembled to hear her had given me to understand that she was “doing it for the baby,” and this fact, together with the shortness of her upper lip and the bewildering co-operation of her dimple, disposed me to listen leniently to her dissertation. Happily, at that time Greek art was still, if I may use the phrase, easily handled: it was as simple as walking down a museum- gallery lined with pleasant familiar Venuses and Apollos. All the later complications–the archaic and archaistic conundrums; the influences of Assyria and Asia Minor; the conflicting attributions and the wrangles of the erudite–still slumbered in the bosom of the future “scientific critic.” Greek art in those days began with Phidias and ended with the Apollo Belvedere; and a child could travel from one to the other without danger of losing his way.
Mrs. Amyot had two fatal gifts: a capacious but inaccurate memory, and an extraordinary fluency of speech. There was nothing she did not remember– wrongly; but her halting facts were swathed in so many layers of rhetoric that their infirmities were imperceptible to her friendly critics. Besides, she had been taught Greek by the aunt who had translated Euripides; and the mere sound of the [Greek: ais] and [Greek: ois] that she now and then not unskilfully let slip (correcting herself, of course, with a start, and indulgently mistranslating the phrase), struck awe to the hearts of ladies whose only “accomplishment” was French–if you didn’t speak too quickly.
I had then but a momentary glimpse of Mrs. Amyot, but a few months later I came upon her again in the New England university town where the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt lived on the summit of a local Parnassus, with lesser muses and college professors respectfully grouped on the lower ledges of the sacred declivity. Mrs. Amyot, who, after her husband’s death, had returned to the maternal roof (even during her father’s lifetime the roof had been distinctively maternal), Mrs. Amyot, thanks to her upper lip, her dimple and her Greek, was already esconced in a snug hollow of the Parnassian slope.
After the lecture was over it happened that I walked home with Mrs. Amyot. From the incensed glances of two or three learned gentlemen who were hovering on the door-step when we emerged, I inferred that Mrs. Amyot, at that period, did not often walk home alone; but I doubt whether any of my discomfited rivals, whatever his claims to favor, was ever treated to so ravishing a mixture of shyness and self-abandonment, of sham erudition and real teeth and hair, as it was my privilege to enjoy. Even at the opening of her public career Mrs. Amyot had a tender eye for strangers, as possible links with successive centres of culture to which in due course the torch of Greek art might be handed on.
She began by telling me that she had never been so frightened in her life. She knew, of course, how dreadfully learned I was, and when, just as she was going to begin, her hostess had whispered to her that I was in the room, she had felt ready to sink through the floor. Then (with a flying dimple) she had remembered Emerson’s line–wasn’t it Emerson’s?–that beauty is its own excuse for _seeing_, and that had made her feel a little more confident, since she was sure that no one _saw_ beauty more vividly than she–as a child she used to sit for hours gazing at an Etruscan vase on the bookcase in the library, while her sisters played with their dolls–and if _seeing_ beauty was the only excuse one needed for talking about it, why, she was sure I would make allowances and not be _too_ critical and sarcastic, especially if, as she thought probable, I had heard of her having lost her poor husband, and how she had to do it for the baby.
Being abundantly assured of my sympathy on these points, she went on to say that she had always wanted so much to consult me about her lectures. Of course, one subject wasn’t enough (this view of the limitations of Greek art as a “subject” gave me a startling idea of the rate at which a successful lecturer might exhaust the universe); she must find others; she had not ventured on any as yet, but she had thought of Tennyson–didn’t I _love_ Tennyson? She _worshipped_ him so that she was sure she could help others to understand him; or what did I think of a “course” on Raphael or Michelangelo–or on the heroines of Shakespeare? There were some fine steel-engravings of Raphael’s Madonnas and of the Sistine ceiling in her mother’s library, and she had seen Miss Cushman in several Shakespearian _roles_, so that on these subjects also she felt qualified to speak with authority.
When we reached her mother’s door she begged me to come in and talk the matter over; she wanted me to see the baby–she felt as though I should understand her better if I saw the baby–and the dimple flashed through a tear.
The fear of encountering the author of “The Fall of Man,” combined with the opportune recollection of a dinner engagement, made me evade this appeal with the promise of returning on the morrow. On the morrow, I left too early to redeem my promise; and for several years afterwards I saw no more of Mrs. Amyot.
My calling at that time took me at irregular intervals from one to another of our larger cities, and as Mrs. Amyot was also peripatetic it was inevitable that sooner or later we should cross each other’s path. It was therefore without surprise that, one snowy afternoon in Boston, I learned from the lady with whom I chanced to be lunching that, as soon as the meal was over, I was to be taken to hear Mrs. Amyot lecture.
“On Greek art?” I suggested.
“Oh, you’ve heard her then? No, this is one of the series called ‘Homes and Haunts of the Poets.’ Last week we had Wordsworth and the Lake Poets, to-day we are to have Goethe and Weimar. She is a wonderful creature–all the women of her family are geniuses. You know, of course, that her mother was Irene Astarte Pratt, who wrote a poem on ‘The Fall of Man’; N.P. Willis called her the female Milton of America. One of Mrs. Amyot’s aunts has translated Eurip–“
“And is she as pretty as ever?” I irrelevantly interposed.
My hostess looked shocked. “She is excessively modest and retiring. She says it is actual suffering for her to speak in public. You know she only does it for the baby.”
Punctually at the hour appointed, we took our seats in a lecture-hall full of strenuous females in ulsters. Mrs. Amyot was evidently a favorite with these austere sisters, for every corner was crowded, and as we entered a pale usher with an educated mispronunciation was setting forth to several dejected applicants the impossibility of supplying them with seats.
Our own were happily so near the front that when the curtains at the back of the platform parted, and Mrs. Amyot appeared, I was at once able to establish a comparison between the lady placidly dimpling to the applause of her public and the shrinking drawing-room orator of my earlier recollections.
Mrs. Amyot was as pretty as ever, and there was the same curious discrepancy between the freshness of her aspect and the stateness of her theme, but something was gone of the blushing unsteadiness with which she had fired her first random shots at Greek art. It was not that the shots were less uncertain, but that she now had an air of assuming that, for her purpose, the bull’s-eye was everywhere, so that there was no need to be flustered in taking aim. This assurance had so facilitated the flow of her eloquence that she seemed to be performing a trick analogous to that of the conjuror who pulls hundreds of yards of white paper out of his mouth. From a large assortment of stock adjectives she chose, with unerring deftness and rapidity, the one that taste and discrimination would most surely have rejected, fitting out her subject with a whole wardrobe of slop-shop epithets irrelevant in cut and size. To the invaluable knack of not disturbing the association of ideas in her audience, she added the gift of what may be called a confidential manner–so that her fluent generalizations about Goethe and his place in literature (the lecture was, of course, manufactured out of Lewes’s book) had the flavor of personal experience, of views sympathetically exchanged with her audience on the best way of knitting children’s socks, or of putting up preserves for the winter. It was, I am sure, to this personal accent–the moral equivalent of her dimple–that Mrs. Amyot owed her prodigious, her irrational success. It was her art of transposing second-hand ideas into first-hand emotions that so endeared her to her feminine listeners.
To any one not in search of “documents” Mrs. Amyot’s success was hardly of a kind to make her more interesting, and my curiosity flagged with the growing conviction that the “suffering” entailed on her by public speaking was at most a retrospective pang. I was sure that she had reached the point of measuring and enjoying her effects, of deliberately manipulating her public; and there must indeed have been a certain exhilaration in attaining results so considerable by means involving so little conscious effort. Mrs. Amyot’s art was simply an extension of coquetry: she flirted with her audience.
In this mood of enlightened skepticism I responded but languidly to my hostess’s suggestion that I should go with her that evening to see Mrs. Amyot. The aunt who had translated Euripides was at home on Saturday evenings, and one met “thoughtful” people there, my hostess explained: it was one of the intellectual centres of Boston. My mood remained distinctly resentful of any connection between Mrs. Amyot and intellectuality, and I declined to go; but the next day I met Mrs. Amyot in the street.
She stopped me reproachfully. She had heard I was in Boston; why had I not come last night? She had been told that I was at her lecture, and it had frightened her–yes, really, almost as much as years ago in Hillbridge. She never _could_ get over that stupid shyness, and the whole business was as distasteful to her as ever; but what could she do? There was the baby– he was a big boy now, and boys were _so_ expensive! But did I really think she had improved the least little bit? And why wouldn’t I come home with her now, and see the boy, and tell her frankly what I had thought of the lecture? She had plenty of flattery–people were _so_ kind, and every one knew that she did it for the baby–but what she felt the need of was criticism, severe, discriminating criticism like mine–oh, she knew that I was dreadfully discriminating!
I went home with her and saw the boy. In the early heat of her Tennyson- worship Mrs. Amyot had christened him Lancelot, and he looked it. Perhaps, however, it was his black velvet dress and the exasperating length of his yellow curls, together with the fact of his having been taught to recite Browning to visitors, that raised to fever-heat the itching of my palms in his Infant-Samuel-like presence. I have since had reason to think that he would have preferred to be called Billy, and to hunt cats with the other boys in the block: his curls and his poetry were simply another outlet for Mrs. Amyot’s irrepressible coquetry.
But if Lancelot was not genuine, his mother’s love for him was. It justified everything–the lectures _were_ for the baby, after all. I had not been ten minutes in the room before I was pledged to help Mrs. Amyot carry out her triumphant fraud. If she wanted to lecture on Plato she should–Plato must take his chance like the rest of us! There was no use, of course, in being “discriminating.” I preserved sufficient reason to avoid that pitfall, but I suggested “subjects” and made lists of books for her with a fatuity that became more obvious as time attenuated the remembrance of her smile; I even remember thinking that some men might have cut the knot by marrying her, but I handed over Plato as a hostage and escaped by the afternoon train.
The next time I saw her was in New York, when she had become so fashionable that it was a part of the whole duty of woman to be seen at her lectures. The lady who suggested that of course I ought to go and hear Mrs. Amyot, was not very clear about anything except that she was perfectly lovely, and had had a horrid husband, and was doing it to support her boy. The subject of the discourse (I think it was on Ruskin) was clearly of minor importance, not only to my friend, but to the throng of well-dressed and absent-minded ladies who rustled in late, dropped their muffs and pocket-books, and undisguisedly lost themselves in the study of each other’s apparel. They received Mrs. Amyot with warmth, but she evidently represented a social obligation like going to church, rather than any more personal interest; in fact, I suspect that every one of the ladies would have remained away, had they been sure that none of the others were coming.
Whether Mrs. Amyot was disheartened by the lack of sympathy between herself and her hearers, or whether the sport of arousing it had become a task, she certainly imparted her platitudes with less convincing warmth than of old. Her voice had the same confidential inflections, but it was like a voice reproduced by a gramophone: the real woman seemed far away. She had grown stouter without losing her dewy freshness, and her smart gown might have been taken to show either the potentialities of a settled income, or a politic concession to the taste of her hearers. As I listened I reproached myself for ever having suspected her of self-deception in saying that she took no pleasure in her work. I was sure now that she did it only for Lancelot, and judging from the size of her audience and the price of the tickets I concluded that Lancelot must be receiving a liberal education.
I was living in New York that winter, and in the rotation of dinners I found myself one evening at Mrs. Amyot’s side. The dimple came out at my greeting as punctually as a cuckoo in a Swiss clock, and I detected the same automatic quality in the tone in which she made her usual pretty demand for advice. She was like a musical-box charged with popular airs. They succeeded one another with breathless rapidity, but there was a moment after each when the cylinders scraped and whizzed.
Mrs. Amyot, as I found when I called on her, was living in a sunny flat, with a sitting-room full of flowers and a tea-table that had the air of expecting visitors. She owned that she had been ridiculously successful. It was delightful, of course, on Lancelot’s account. Lancelot had been sent to the best school in the country, and if things went well and people didn’t tire of his silly mother he was to go to Harvard afterwards. During the next two or three years Mrs. Amyot kept her flat in New York, and radiated art and literature upon the suburbs. I saw her now and then, always stouter, better dressed, more successful and more automatic: she had become a lecturing-machine.
I went abroad for a year or two and when I came back she had disappeared. I asked several people about her, but life had closed over her. She had been last heard of as lecturing–still lecturing–but no one seemed to know when or where.
It was in Boston that I found her at last, forlornly swaying to the oscillations of an overhead strap in a crowded trolley-car. Her face had so changed that I lost myself in a startled reckoning of the time that had elapsed since our parting. She spoke to me shyly, as though aware of my hurried calculation, and conscious that in five years she ought not to have altered so much as to upset my notion of time. Then she seemed to set it down to her dress, for she nervously gathered her cloak over a gown that asked only to be concealed, and shrank into a seat behind the line of prehensile bipeds blocking the aisle of the car.
It was perhaps because she so obviously avoided me that I felt for the first time that I might be of use to her; and when she left the car I made no excuse for following her.
She said nothing of needing advice and did not ask me to walk home with her, concealing, as we talked, her transparent preoccupations under the guise of a sudden interest in all I had been doing since she had last seen me. Of what concerned her, I learned only that Lancelot was well and that for the present she was not lecturing–she was tired and her doctor had ordered her to rest. On the doorstep of a shabby house she paused and held out her hand. She had been so glad to see me and perhaps if I were in Boston again–the tired dimple, as it were, bowed me out and closed the door on the conclusion of the phrase.
Two or three weeks later, at my club in New York, I found a letter from her. In it she owned that she was troubled, that of late she had been unsuccessful, and that, if I chanced to be coming back to Boston, and could spare her a little of that invaluable advice which–. A few days later the advice was at her disposal. She told me frankly what had happened. Her public had grown tired of her. She had seen it coming on for some time, and was shrewd enough in detecting the causes. She had more rivals than formerly–younger women, she admitted, with a smile that could still afford to be generous–and then her audiences had grown more critical and consequently more exacting. Lecturing–as she understood it– used to be simple enough. You chose your topic–Raphael, Shakespeare, Gothic Architecture, or some such big familiar “subject”–and read up about it for a week or so at the Athenaeum or the Astor Library, and then told your audience what you had read. Now, it appeared, that simple process was no longer adequate. People had tired of familiar “subjects”; it was the fashion to be interested in things that one hadn’t always known about–natural selection, animal magnetism, sociology and comparative folk-lore; while, in literature, the demand had become equally difficult to meet, since Matthew Arnold had introduced the habit of studying the “influence” of one author on another. She had tried lecturing on influences, and had done very well as long as the public was satisfied with the tracing of such obvious influences as that of Turner on Ruskin, of Schiller on Goethe, of Shakespeare on English literature; but such investigations had soon lost all charm for her too-sophisticated audiences, who now demanded either that the influence or the influenced should be quite unknown, or that there should be no perceptible connection between the two. The zest of the performance lay in the measure of ingenuity with which the lecturer established a relation between two people who had probably never heard of each other, much less read each other’s works. A pretty Miss Williams with red hair had, for instance, been lecturing with great success on the influence of the Rosicrucians upon the poetry of Keats, while somebody else had given a “course” on the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas upon Professor Huxley.
Mrs. Amyot, warmed by my participation in her distress, went on to say that the growing demand for evolution was what most troubled her. Her grandfather had been a pillar of the Presbyterian ministry, and the idea of her lecturing on Darwin or Herbert Spencer was deeply shocking to her mother and aunts. In one sense the family had staked its literary as well as its spiritual hopes on the literal inspiration of Genesis: what became of “The Fall of Man” in the light of modern exegesis?
The upshot of it was that she had ceased to lecture because she could no longer sell tickets enough to pay for the hire of a lecture-hall; and as for the managers, they wouldn’t look at her. She had tried her luck all through the Eastern States and as far south as Washington; but it was of no use, and unless she could get hold of some new subjects–or, better still, of some new audiences–she must simply go out of the business. That would mean the failure of all she had worked for, since Lancelot would have to leave Harvard. She paused, and wept some of the unbecoming tears that spring from real grief. Lancelot, it appeared, was to be a genius. He had passed his opening examinations brilliantly; he had “literary gifts”; he had written beautiful poetry, much of which his mother had copied out, in reverentially slanting characters, in a velvet-bound volume which she drew from a locked drawer.
Lancelot’s verse struck me as nothing more alarming than growing-pains; but it was not to learn this that she had summoned me. What she wanted was to be assured that he was worth working for, an assurance which I managed to convey by the simple stratagem of remarking that the poems reminded me of Swinburne–and so they did, as well as of Browning, Tennyson, Rossetti, and all the other poets who supply young authors with original inspirations.
This point being established, it remained to be decided by what means his mother was, in the French phrase, to pay herself the luxury of a poet. It was clear that this indulgence could be bought only with counterfeit coin, and that the one way of helping Mrs. Amyot was to become a party to the circulation of such currency. My fetish of intellectual integrity went down like a ninepin before the appeal of a woman no longer young and distinctly foolish, but full of those dear contradictions and irrelevancies that will always make flesh and blood prevail against a syllogism. When I took leave of Mrs. Amyot I had promised her a dozen letters to Western universities and had half pledged myself to sketch out a lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion.
In the West she achieved a success which for a year or more embittered my perusal of the morning papers. The fascination that lures the murderer back to the scene of his crime drew my eye to every paragraph celebrating Mrs. Amyot’s last brilliant lecture on the influence of something upon somebody; and her own letters–she overwhelmed me with them–spared me no detail of the entertainment given in her honor by the Palimpsest Club of Omaha or of her reception at the University of Leadville. The college professors were especially kind: she assured me that she had never before met with such discriminating sympathy. I winced at the adjective, which cast a sudden light on the vast machinery of fraud that I had set in motion. All over my native land, men of hitherto unblemished integrity were conniving with me in urging their friends to go and hear Mrs. Amyot lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion! My only hope was that, somewhere among the number of my accomplices, Mrs. Amyot might find one who would marry her in the defense of his convictions.
None, apparently, resorted to such heroic measures; for about two years later I was startled by the announcement that Mrs. Amyot was lecturing in Trenton, New Jersey, on modern theosophy in the light of the Vedas. The following week she was at Newark, discussing Schopenhauer in the light of recent psychology. The week after that I was on the deck of an ocean steamer, reconsidering my share in Mrs. Amyot’s triumphs with the impartiality with which one views an episode that is being left behind at the rate of twenty knots an hour. After all, I had been helping a mother to educate her son.
The next ten years of my life were spent in Europe, and when I came home the recollection of Mrs. Amyot had become as inoffensive as one of those pathetic ghosts who are said to strive in vain to make themselves visible to the living. I did not even notice the fact that I no longer heard her spoken of; she had dropped like a dead leaf from the bough of memory.
A year or two after my return I was condemned to one of the worst punishments a worker can undergo–an enforced holiday. The doctors who pronounced the inhuman sentence decreed that it should be worked out in the South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my thermometer and my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another. In the vast and melancholy sea of my disoccupation I clutched like a drowning man at any human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory interest in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my fellow-sufferers; but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I clung with undiscriminating enthusiasm.
In no other way can I explain, as I look back on it, the importance I attached to the leisurely confidences of a new arrival with a brown beard who, tilted back at my side on a hotel veranda hung with roses, imparted to me one afternoon the simple annals of his past. There was nothing in the tale to kindle the most inflammable imagination, and though the man had a pleasant frank face and a voice differing agreeably from the shrill inflections of our fellow-lodgers, it is probable that under different conditions his discursive history of successful business ventures in a Western city would have affected me somewhat in the manner of a lullaby.
Even at the tune I was not sure I liked his agreeable voice: it had a self-importance out of keeping with the humdrum nature of his story, as though a breeze engaged in shaking out a table-cloth should have fancied itself inflating a banner. But this criticism may have been a mere mark of my own fastidiousness, for the man seemed a simple fellow, satisfied with his middling fortunes, and already (he was not much past thirty) deep-sunk in conjugal content.
He had just started on an anecdote connected with the cutting of his eldest boy’s teeth, when a lady I knew, returning from her late drive, paused before us for a moment in the twilight, with the smile which is the feminine equivalent of beads to savages.
“Won’t you take a ticket?” she said sweetly.
Of course I would take a ticket–but for what? I ventured to inquire.
“Oh, that’s _so_ good of you–for the lecture this evening. You needn’t go, you know; we’re none of us going; most of us have been through it already at Aiken and at Saint Augustine and at Palm Beach. I’ve given away my tickets to some new people who’ve just come from the North, and some of us are going to send our maids, just to fill up the room.”
“And may I ask to whom you are going to pay this delicate attention?”
“Oh, I thought you knew–to poor Mrs. Amyot. She’s been lecturing all over the South this winter; she’s simply _haunted_ me ever since I left New York–and we had six weeks of her at Bar Harbor last summer! One has to take tickets, you know, because she’s a widow and does it for her son–to pay for his education. She’s so plucky and nice about it, and talks about him in such a touching unaffected way, that everybody is sorry for her, and we all simply ruin ourselves in tickets. I do hope that boy’s nearly educated!”
“Mrs. Amyot? Mrs. Amyot?” I repeated. “Is she _still_ educating her son?”
“Oh, do you know about her? Has she been at it long? There’s some comfort in that, for I suppose when the boy’s provided for the poor thing will be able to take a rest–and give us one!”
She laughed and held out her hand.
“Here’s your ticket. Did you say _tickets_–two? Oh, thanks. Of course you needn’t go.”
“But I mean to go. Mrs. Amyot is an old friend of mine.”
“Do you really? That’s awfully good of you. Perhaps I’ll go too if I can persuade Charlie and the others to come. And I wonder”–in a well-directed aside–“if your friend–?”
I telegraphed her under cover of the dusk that my friend was of too recent standing to be drawn into her charitable toils, and she masked her mistake under a rattle of friendly adjurations not to be late, and to be sure to keep a seat for her, as she had quite made up her mind to go even if Charlie and the others wouldn’t.
The flutter of her skirts subsided in the distance, and my neighbor, who had half turned away to light a cigar, made no effort to reopen the conversation. At length, fearing he might have overheard the allusion to himself, I ventured to ask if he were going to the lecture that evening.
“Much obliged–I have a ticket,” he said abruptly.
This struck me as in such bad taste that I made no answer; and it was he who spoke next.
“Did I understand you to say that you were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot’s?”
“I think I may claim to be, if it is the same Mrs. Amyot I had the pleasure of knowing many years ago. My Mrs. Amyot used to lecture too–“
“To pay for her son’s education?”
“I believe so.”
“Well–see you later.”
He got up and walked into the house.
In the hotel drawing-room that evening there was but a meagre sprinkling of guests, among whom I saw my brown-bearded friend sitting alone on a sofa, with his head against the wall. It could not have been curiosity to see Mrs. Amyot that had impelled him to attend the performance, for it would have been impossible for him, without changing his place, to command the improvised platform at the end of the room. When I looked at him he seemed lost in contemplation of the chandelier.
The lady from whom I had bought my tickets fluttered in late, unattended by Charlie and the others, and assuring me that she would _scream_ if we had the lecture on Ibsen–she had heard it three times already that winter. A glance at the programme reassured her: it informed us (in the lecturer’s own slanting hand) that Mrs. Amyot was to lecture on the Cosmogony.
After a long pause, during which the small audience coughed and moved its chairs and showed signs of regretting that it had come, the door opened, and Mrs. Amyot stepped upon the platform. Ah, poor lady!
Some one said “Hush!”, the coughing and chair-shifting subsided, and she began.
It was like looking at one’s self early in the morning in a cracked mirror. I had no idea I had grown so old. As for Lancelot, he must have a beard. A beard? The word struck me, and without knowing why I glanced across the room at my bearded friend on the sofa. Oddly enough he was looking at me, with a half-defiant, half-sullen expression; and as our glances crossed, and his fell, the conviction came to me that _he was Lancelot_.
I don’t remember a word of the lecture; and yet there were enough of them to have filled a good-sized dictionary. The stream of Mrs. Amyot’s eloquence had become a flood: one had the despairing sense that she had sprung a leak, and that until the plumber came there was nothing to be done about it.
The plumber came at length, in the shape of a clock striking ten; my companion, with a sigh of relief, drifted away in search of Charlie and the others; the audience scattered with the precipitation of people who had discharged a duty; and, without surprise, I found the brown-bearded stranger at my elbow.
We stood alone in the bare-floored room, under the flaring chandelier.
“I think you told me this afternoon that you were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot’s?” he began awkwardly.
I assented.
“Will you come in and see her?”
“Now? I shall be very glad to, if–“
“She’s ready; she’s expecting you,” he interposed.
He offered no further explanation, and I followed him in silence. He led me down the long corridor, and pushed open the door of a sitting-room.
“Mother,” he said, closing the door after we had entered, “here’s the gentleman who says he used to know you.”
Mrs. Amyot, who sat in an easy-chair stirring a cup of bouillon, looked up with a start. She had evidently not seen me in the audience, and her son’s description had failed to convey my identity. I saw a frightened look in her eyes; then, like a frost flower on a window-pane, the dimple expanded on her wrinkled cheek, and she held out her hand.
“I’m so glad,” she said, “so glad!”
She turned to her son, who stood watching us. “You must have told Lancelot all about me–you’ve known me so long!”
“I haven’t had time to talk to your son–since I knew he was your son,” I explained.
Her brow cleared. “Then you haven’t had time to say anything very dreadful?” she said with a laugh.
“It is he who has been saying dreadful things,” I returned, trying to fall in with her tone.
I saw my mistake. “What things?” she faltered.
“Making me feel how old I am by telling me about his children.”
“My grandchildren!” she exclaimed with a blush.
“Well, if you choose to put it so.”
She laughed again, vaguely, and was silent. I hesitated a moment and then put out my hand.
“I see you are tired. I shouldn’t have ventured to come in at this hour if your son–“
The son stepped between us. “Yes, I asked him to come,” he said to his mother, in his clear self-assertive voice. “_I_ haven’t told him anything yet; but you’ve got to–now. That’s what I brought him for.”
His mother straightened herself, but I saw her eye waver.
“Lancelot–” she began.
“Mr. Amyot,” I said, turning to the young man, “if your mother will let me come back to-morrow, I shall be very glad–“
He struck his hand hard against the table on which he was leaning.
“No, sir! It won’t take long, but it’s got to be said now.”
He moved nearer to his mother, and I saw his lip twitch under his beard. After all, he was younger and less sure of himself than I had fancied.
“See here, mother,” he went on, “there’s something here that’s got to be cleared up, and as you say this gentleman is an old friend of yours it had better be cleared up in his presence. Maybe he can help explain it–and if he can’t, it’s got to be explained to _him.”_
Mrs. Amyot’s lips moved, but she made no sound. She glanced at me helplessly and sat down. My early inclination to thrash Lancelot was beginning to reassert itself. I took up my hat and moved toward the door.
“Mrs. Amyot is under no obligation to explain anything whatever to me,” I said curtly.
“Well! She’s under an obligation to me, then–to explain something in your presence.” He turned to her again. “Do you know what the people in this hotel are saying? Do you know what he thinks–what they all think? That you’re doing this lecturing to support me–to pay for my education! They say you go round telling them so. That’s what they buy the tickets for– they do it out of charity. Ask him if it isn’t what they say–ask him if they weren’t joking about it on the piazza before dinner. The others think I’m a little boy, but he’s known you for years, and he must have known how old I was. _He_ must have known it wasn’t to pay for my education!”
He stood before her with his hands clenched, the veins beating in his temples. She had grown very pale, and her cheeks looked hollow. When she spoke her voice had an odd click in it.
“If–if these ladies and gentlemen have been coming to my lectures out of charity, I see nothing to be ashamed of in that–” she faltered.
“If they’ve been coming out of charity to _me_,” he retorted, “don’t you see you’ve been making me a party to a fraud? Isn’t there any shame in that?” His forehead reddened. “Mother! Can’t you see the shame of letting people think I was a d–beat, who sponged on you for my keep? Let alone making us both the laughing-stock of every place you go to!”
“I never did that, Lancelot!”
“Did what?”
“Made you a laughing-stock–“
He stepped close to her and caught her wrist.
“Will you look me in the face and swear you never told people you were doing this lecturing business to support me?”
There was a long silence. He dropped her wrist and she lifted a limp handkerchief to her frightened eyes. “I did do it–to support you–to educate you”–she sobbed.
“We’re not talking about what you did when I was a boy. Everybody who knows me knows I’ve been a grateful son. Have I ever taken a penny from you since I left college ten years ago?”
“I never said you had! How can you accuse your mother of such wickedness, Lancelot?”
“Have you never told anybody in this hotel–or anywhere else in the last ten years–that you were lecturing to support me? Answer me that!”
“How can you,” she wept, “before a stranger?”
“Haven’t you said such things about _me_ to strangers?” he retorted.
“Lancelot!”
“Well–answer me, then. Say you haven’t, mother!” His voice broke unexpectedly and he took her hand with a gentler touch. “I’ll believe anything you tell me,” he said almost humbly.
She mistook his tone and raised her head with a rash clutch at dignity.
“I think you’d better ask this gentleman to excuse you first.”
“No, by God, I won’t!” he cried. “This gentleman says he knows all about you and I mean him to know all about me too. I don’t mean that he or anybody else under this roof shall go on thinking for another twenty-four hours that a cent of their money has ever gone into my pockets since I was old enough to shift for myself. And he sha’n’t leave this room till you’ve made that clear to him.”
He stepped back as he spoke and put his shoulders against the door.
“My dear young gentleman,” I said politely, “I shall leave this room exactly when I see fit to do so–and that is now. I have already told you that Mrs. Amyot owes me no explanation of her conduct.”
“But I owe you an explanation of mine–you and every one who has bought a single one of her lecture tickets. Do you suppose a man who’s been through what I went through while that woman was talking to you in the porch before dinner is going to hold his tongue, and not attempt to justify himself? No decent man is going to sit down under that sort of thing. It’s enough to ruin his character. If you’re my mother’s friend, you owe it to me to hear what I’ve got to say.”
He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.
“Good God, mother!” he burst out suddenly, “what did you do it for? Haven’t you had everything you wanted ever since I was able to pay for it? Haven’t I paid you back every cent you spent on me when I was in college? Have I ever gone back on you since I was big enough to work?” He turned to me with a laugh. “I thought she did it to amuse herself–and because there was such a demand for her lectures. _Such a demand!_ That’s what she always told me. When we asked her to come out and spend this winter with us in Minneapolis, she wrote back that she couldn’t because she had engagements all through the south, and her manager wouldn’t let her off. That’s the reason why I came all the way on here to see her. We thought she was the most popular lecturer in the United States, my wife and I did! We were awfully proud of it too, I can tell you.” He dropped into a chair, still laughing.
“How can you, Lancelot, how can you!” His mother, forgetful of my presence, was clinging to him with tentative caresses. “When you didn’t need the money any longer I spent it all on the children–you know I did.”
“Yes, on lace christening dresses and life-size rocking-horses with real manes! The kind of thing children can’t do without.”
“Oh, Lancelot, Lancelot–I loved them so! How can you believe such falsehoods about me?”
“What falsehoods about you?”
“That I ever told anybody such dreadful things?”
He put her back gently, keeping his eyes on hers. “Did you never tell anybody in this house that you were lecturing to support your son?”
Her hands dropped from his shoulders and she flashed round on me in sudden anger.
“I know what I think of people who call themselves friends and who come between a mother and her son!”
“Oh, mother, mother!” he groaned.
I went up to him and laid my hand on his shoulder.
“My dear man,” I said, “don’t you see the uselessness of prolonging this?”
“Yes, I do,” he answered abruptly; and before I could forestall his movement he rose and walked out of the room.
There was a long silence, measured by the lessening reverberations of his footsteps down the wooden floor of the corridor.
When they ceased I approached Mrs. Amyot, who had sunk into her chair. I held out my hand and she took it without a trace of resentment on her ravaged face.
“I sent his wife a seal-skin jacket at Christmas!” she said, with the tears running down her cheeks.
SOULS BELATED
Their railway-carriage had been full when the train left Bologna; but at the first station beyond Milan their only remaining companion–a courtly person who ate garlic out of a carpet-bag–had left his crumb-strewn seat with a bow.
Lydia’s eye regretfully followed the shiny broadcloth of his retreating back till it lost itself in the cloud of touts and cab-drivers hanging about the station; then she glanced across at Gannett and caught the same regret in his look. They were both sorry to be alone.
“_Par-ten-za!_” shouted the guard. The train vibrated to a sudden slamming of doors; a waiter ran along the platform with a tray of fossilized sandwiches; a belated porter flung a bundle of shawls and band-boxes into a third-class carriage; the guard snapped out a brief _Partensa!_ which indicated the purely ornamental nature of his first shout; and the train swung out of the station.
The direction of the road had changed, and a shaft of sunlight struck across the dusty red velvet seats into Lydia’s corner. Gannett did not notice it. He had returned to his _Revue de Paris,_ and she had to rise and lower the shade of the farther window. Against the vast horizon of their leisure such incidents stood out sharply.
Having lowered the shade, Lydia sat down, leaving the length of the carriage between herself and Gannett. At length he missed her and looked up.
“I moved out of the sun,” she hastily explained.
He looked at her curiously: the sun was beating on her through the shade.
“Very well,” he said pleasantly; adding, “You don’t mind?” as he drew a cigarette-case from his pocket.
It was a refreshing touch, relieving the tension of her spirit with the suggestion that, after all, if he could _smoke_–! The relief was only momentary. Her experience of smokers was limited (her husband had disapproved of the use of tobacco) but she knew from hearsay that men sometimes smoked to get away from things; that a cigar might be the masculine equivalent of darkened windows and a headache. Gannett, after a puff or two, returned to his review.
It was just as she had foreseen; he feared to speak as much as she did. It was one of the misfortunes of their situation that they were never busy enough to necessitate, or even to justify, the postponement of unpleasant discussions. If they avoided a question it was obviously, unconcealably because the question was disagreeable. They had unlimited leisure and an accumulation of mental energy to devote to any subject that presented itself; new topics were in fact at a premium. Lydia sometimes had premonitions of a famine-stricken period when there would he nothing left to talk about, and she had already caught herself doling out piecemeal what, in the first prodigality of their confidences, she would have flung to him in a breath. Their silence therefore might simply mean that they had nothing to say; but it was another disadvantage of their position that it allowed infinite opportunity for the classification of minute differences. Lydia had learned to distinguish between real and factitious silences; and under Gannett’s she now detected a hum of speech to which her own thoughts made breathless answer.
How could it be otherwise, with that thing between them? She glanced up at the rack overhead. The _thing_ was there, in her dressing-bag, symbolically suspended over her head and his. He was thinking of it now, just as she was; they had been thinking of it in unison ever since they had entered the train. While the carriage had held other travellers they had screened her from his thoughts; but now that he and she were alone she knew exactly what was passing through his mind; she could almost hear him asking himself what he should say to her….
* * * * *
The thing had come that morning, brought up to her in an innocent-looking envelope with the rest of their letters, as they were leaving the hotel at Bologna. As she tore it open, she and Gannett were laughing over some ineptitude of the local guide-book–they had been driven, of late, to make the most of such incidental humors of travel. Even when she had unfolded the document she took it for some unimportant business paper sent abroad for her signature, and her eye travelled inattentively over the curly _Whereases_ of the preamble until a word arrested her:–Divorce. There it stood, an impassable barrier, between her husband’s name and hers.
She had been prepared for it, of course, as healthy people are said to be prepared for death, in the sense of knowing it must come without in the least expecting that it will. She had known from the first that Tillotson meant to divorce her–but what did it matter? Nothing mattered, in those first days of supreme deliverance, but the fact that she was free; and not so much (she had begun to be aware) that freedom had released her from Tillotson as that it had given her to Gannett. This discovery had not been agreeable to her self-esteem. She had preferred to think that Tillotson had himself embodied all her reasons for leaving him; and those he represented had seemed cogent enough to stand in no need of reinforcement. Yet she had not left him till she met Gannett. It was her love for Gannett that had made life with Tillotson so poor and incomplete a business. If she had never, from the first, regarded her marriage as a full cancelling of her claims upon life, she had at least, for a number of years, accepted it as a provisional compensation,–she had made it “do.” Existence in the commodious Tillotson mansion in Fifth Avenue–with Mrs. Tillotson senior commanding the approaches from the second-story front windows–had been reduced to a series of purely automatic acts. The moral atmosphere of the Tillotson interior was as carefully screened and curtained as the house itself: Mrs. Tillotson senior dreaded ideas as much as a draught in her back. Prudent people liked an even temperature; and to do anything unexpected was as foolish as going out in the rain. One of the chief advantages of being rich was that one need not be exposed to unforeseen contingencies: by the use of ordinary firmness and common sense one could make sure of doing exactly the same thing every day at the same hour. These doctrines, reverentially imbibed with his mother’s milk, Tillotson (a model son who had never given his parents an hour’s anxiety) complacently expounded to his wife, testifying to his sense of their importance by the regularity with which he wore goloshes on damp days, his punctuality at meals, and his elaborate precautions against burglars and contagious diseases. Lydia, coming from a smaller town, and entering New York life through the portals of the Tillotson mansion, had mechanically accepted this point of view as inseparable from having a front pew in church and a parterre box at the opera. All the people who came to the house revolved in the same small circle of prejudices. It was the kind of society in which, after dinner, the ladies compared the exorbitant charges of their children’s teachers, and agreed that, even with the new duties on French clothes, it was cheaper in the end to get everything from Worth; while the husbands, over their cigars, lamented municipal corruption, and decided that the men to start a reform were those who had no private interests at stake.
To Lydia this view of life had become a matter of course, just as lumbering about in her mother-in-law’s landau had come to seem the only possible means of locomotion, and listening every Sunday to a fashionable Presbyterian divine the inevitable atonement for having thought oneself bored on the other six days of the week. Before she met Gannett her life had seemed merely dull: his coming made it appear like one of those dismal Cruikshank prints in which the people are all ugly and all engaged in occupations that are either vulgar or stupid.
It was natural that Tillotson should be the chief sufferer from this readjustment of focus. Gannett’s nearness had made her husband ridiculous, and a part of the ridicule had been reflected on herself. Her tolerance laid her open to a suspicion of obtuseness from which she must, at all costs, clear herself in Gannett’s eyes.