Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 32
MEANWHILE from the Town there came to Ellen in the weekly letters of her mother bits of news which sometimes interested her but more often did not. There was the news of May Seton's marriage to Herman Biggs, an evening wedding in the Methodist church with a supper afterwards at which Skinflint Seton, in a gesture of triumph and vindication, had flung loose the purse strings and gone so far as to provide an orchestra which played behind a screen of smilax and carnations.
"Herman," wrote Hattie Tolliver, "looked a gawk, with his freckles, and May was too fat for her dress. It was cut princess fashion and trimmed with duchess lace. She carried a shower bouquet of white roses and sweet peas. Herman's trousers bagged at the knees. At least this is what Cousin Eva Barr, who went to the wedding, told me. I wasn't invited. They say that the Setons have been living on cold hash ever since.
"They went to French Lick Springs on their honeymoon and now Herman is back at the factory learning the corset business."
Miss Ogilvie had not been well lately and Aunt Julia was becoming more and more eccentric. She had shut up all but one great room at Shane's Castle and would see no one but the Doctor and Hattie Tolliver. "I go to see her three times a week. She needs some one to take hold of that great house. There's no one else, so I do it. Miss Ogilvie comes in to sit with Pa while I'm gone. She's given up some of her pupils. She says she finds she can't do as much as she once could.
"Your father is doing well at the bank and I've managed to lay aside quite a sum after the debts were paid. We'll need it to send Fergus to school. I've sold the rings that Aunt Julia gave me and we're now on the prosperous side of things once more. If your father had only listened to me, we'd have been rich to-day, but he always said he knew best, and he trusted people too much. Before long we'll have enough to come East. I want to be with my children."
Then there were inquiries after her health and Clarence's welfare and endless cautions and advice concerning the management of the flat, for distance made little difference to Hattie Tolliver when it concerned the interests of some one she loved. It was as if she ran Ellen's household as well. In one letter she was even bold enough to ask whether there was any hope of her becoming a grandmother.
Each of these letters, though it bore a great similarity to all the others, was in a sense an epic. They recorded in sentences vigorously written and crowded with a host of details, the daily history of a community. They were fiercely personal and colored by the prejudices of Hattie Tolliver. In her enemies there was nothing good and in those she loved best nothing bad. Her world was one of a savage intensity, painted like Skinflint Seton's entirely in blacks and whites.
She inquired frequently whether Clarence would be coming West, insisting that he must stop and see them in the Town and tell them all the news. And the credulous woman was put off with the story that Clarence had given up traveling and would not be in the West again for a long time. It was a lie that Ellen invented to protect him, since he was too timid ever to risk meeting any one who might recognize him as spiritual ravisher of Mrs. Herman Biggs (née May Seton).
And at length there came a letter containing the news that Grandpa Barr had died.
"He passed away," wrote Mrs. Tolliver, "quietly. I was in the room and he was just lying there looking at the ceiling and singing an old song that he used to sing when Ma was still alive and I was a little girl. They used to sing it as a duet. 'I will find my rest in the eagle's nest,' it was called, and they sang it in the long summer evenings when all the chores were done and they sat out under the trees. I can remember it well. He was humming this when suddenly he tried to sit up, and said, 'Why, Ma. . . . There you are, come to meet me. . . . I'm coming to you. . . . In just a minute, as soon as I get the little red cow in from the field by the cairn.' And then he lay back and died without another word. (It was indeed a long way from Grandpa Barr, dead now, with his memories of the frontier, to Thérèse Callendar and her carved emerald saved from the sack of Constantinople.)
"It was a good thing because he wanted to die for so long. It was hard on a man like that who had always been so active. He was like a little child. For a long time he hadn't said anything sensible. I did everything for him and I don't regret it. It was hard sometimes with so much else to worry me and take up my time.
"Aunt Julia is getting worse and worse. She can't leave her bed now and can only eat things without sugar. I make her cakes every week and custards, the kind she likes. I can't even have a holiday, because she grows restless and worse when I'm away."
And then there was a significant paragraph, brightened by a certain spice of resentment. "Gramp remains just the same . . . not a day older and just as strong as ever. It looks to me as if he'd live forever. I don't see what I've done to bear such a cross!"
The letters from Ellen grew steadily fewer and more unsatisfactory. With her old instinct, she wrote only of those things which were of no importance, bits of news concerning the health of Clarence and herself, comments on the heat, even stories which she had read in the newspapers. Of her unhappiness she said nothing, though it was at the moment the one thing which dominated all her existence.
After the stifled farewell on the afternoon in May Callendar appeared to vanish. Clarence returned and they gave their party for the Bunces—a party to which Mr. Wyck, somewhat uppish and deeply wretched, brought a spinister heiress from Brooklyn. They played pinochle and drank beer which the radiant Clarence brought in from a delicatessen store. Ellen, it must be said, behaved beautifully and played for them to dance until the tenant from the floor below, a retired actress with yellow hair and a white poodle, made a profane protest to the janitor. She was kind to Clarence and even affectionate, as if in some way the tenderness brought her peace.
Only once was there an unpleasantness and this occurred when Mr. Wyck, finding her alone in a corner looked at her out of his green eyes and observed, "I understand you're growing famous. I hear that you play a great deal in public . . . at fashionable parties."
For an instant, Ellen looked at him sharply and then, believing perhaps that he knew nothing, replied, "Not often . . . now and then. . . . It is profitable."
He did not address her again but sat meditating in a sour fashion, absorbed apparently in the color of the beer he held in his long soft hands, and presently, with the air of emerging from a fog of thought, he observed, "It's too bad Clarence can't enjoy the parties too."
"He would hate them," said Ellen abruptly.
This observation Wyck turned over in his mind and when he spoke again, it was with an air of confidence, of making a concession.
"No," he said, "I understand that. He wouldn't feel at home. He'd be the most miserable person there."
But the look in his eye, the soft insinuation of his voice said, without saying it, "No, you and I are different. We were made for the fashionable world."
Ellen laughed, but there was in the laugh a little sudden choke of bitterness. She came to her husband's defense. "I don't think he'd like it, but it wouldn't be on that account."
It was the most friendly conversation they had ever had, and although he did not address her again during the remainder of the evening, she was aware at odd moments that he was watching her. The sight disturbed her, perhaps because she understood vaguely that the anemic little man possessed an amazing sense of intuition. She understood too that, under the air of condescension which he observed toward the other guests, there was at work all the old hostility, heightened now by a new knowledge that had come to him from some mysterious source. It was as if she were in combat with a woman, sharp-witted and feline, over the possession of a man whom she had no desire to own. Absurdity enveloped the idea of any one fighting for possession of Clarence. He was so easy to possess.
Not even when she went to the Callendars' to play did she have a glimpse of Richard. The group had dwindled now as one by one the friends of Mrs. Callendar betook themselves into the country. There remained during the hot months only the good-natured hostess and occasionally Sabine who was staying in town until Mrs. Callendar sailed. They made excuses for Richard; they told her when she noted his absence that he was at Newport, or in Philadelphia, or vaguely that he was in the country; they kept up a little game in which Mrs. Callendar and Sabine told lies and Ellen accepted them, and both sides knew that the other had no belief in the deceit. Beyond the shrewd probing which the plump Greek woman practised on the evenings when Ellen came to dine with her alone there was no sign on either side. Yet a grayness enveloped them all, altering in its descent the whole tone of their days.
Sabine gave least evidence of the change, but with her it was impossible from her behavior ever to discover the faintest knowledge of her heart, impossible to know anything that lay behind the shield of her terrible self-possession. She had betrayed herself only once, for an instant. Beyond that one could only judge that she was waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . with an overpowering patience, as if she knew the rules of the world in which she lived would give her the prize in the end. There was magnificence in the sight of her, sitting there in the evenings, marvelously dressed, not beautiful but fantastically attractive, listening quietly to the music made by a woman whom she had every reason to hate.
They all talked of the same things, in the same fashion, refusing to admit that anything had happened to change the pleasant, even way of their existence; and each knew that the other knew exactly what she knew. There were times, after dinner in the dark library, when there would be long silences broken only by the faint click of a tiny coffee cup against a saucer. Each of them watched the others, and in those long evenings the two who were so old, so wise in experience, came to respect the newcomer who played the game quite as well as themselves.
A night or two before Thérèse Callendar sailed, Ellen came to dine with her alone. Throughout the long dinner, which the Greek woman had served in the library at a small table, they kept up the game. It was not until the cigarettes and coffee were brought in that Thérèse as the servant closed the door behind him, said abruptly, "I want to talk to you about my son."
It came so suddenly, after so much waiting, that Ellen said nothing. She blushed and the tears came into her eyes. She kept silent.
"I think I know what has happened," said Mrs. Callendar. She did not speak now in her old cynical fashion, slipping quickly from one thing to another. All the evening she had been grave and now, mingled with the gravity, there was a curious warmth, a sympathy which reached out and touched Ellen. She understood, it seemed, that the matter had arrived at the point where it was necessary to go beneath the thin surface of their pretense, when she must delve under all those polished little speeches that made life move along an easy path and deal, directly, with a thing that was stronger than any of them.
"We all know," she continued softly. "We played the game very nicely, but now something must be done about it. Sabine knows it too. She's known all along and it hurts her perhaps more than any of us because she understands that in my son there are things which are beyond her control. . . ." She coughed. "For that, my dear, you are much better equipped. I hope you respect Sabine for an extraordinary woman . . . civilized. I think you might put her to torture and never succeed in making her cry out."
Ellen, sitting now with her head bowed as if she had been accused, said, "I know. . . . I know that."
"I know my own son . . ." repeated Mrs. Callendar gravely. "I know him well. We are very different in some ways . . . but I know him." Here she paused for a moment and stirred her coffee with the tiny silver spoon. "I've seen him when he fancied he was in love with a woman." She raised one plump hand and the soiled diamonds glittered darkly. "Oh, this has not been the first time. It has happened before. But this time there is a difference." She coughed and added, "This time instead of pursuing the object, he has run away from her. . . . That makes it serious."
Ellen, mute and frightened by the frankness of the older woman, sat awkwardly, like a little girl, regarding her. Surely she had never heard any one talk in quite this fashion . . . so honestly and yet so calmly. In a moment like this she had expected anger, even denunciation; she had prepared herself for it.
"I don't know what is to be done about it . . ." continued Mrs. Callendar, "because I don't know everything. . . . In a case like this, one must know everything in order to make sense. You have done something to him. I don't blame you. . . . It is simply one of those things which happens. . . . I fancy if you had not met each other as you did, you would have met in some other fashion. . . ." Her green eyes narrowed and her lips contracted so that all her plumpness appeared to shrivel and vanish. She seemed suddenly to become vastly old and wizened. "Yes, I am sure you would have met. Nothing could have kept you apart." And then, plump and kindly once more, she said, "I don't know what it is you have done to him. I don't fancy he knows himself, but he's miserable. . . . You see, the trouble is that he is really romantic . . . just as I am romantic . . . and he's always pretended he was an experienced, cynical homme du monde. . . . In that one thing he is dishonest."
She reached over and in an unexpected gesture touched the hand of the girl so that Ellen, taken unaware by this movement of sympathy, began to cry softly.
"I am romantic," said Mrs. Callendar softly, "though you might not believe it. Listen!" She leaned forward. "Listen! I'll tell you a story about myself and you'll see. You'll understand then perhaps that I have sympathy enough to be of use in this matter . . . because in a time of this sort, it's sympathy that's needed more than anything else."
And then she settled back and between puffs on her cigarette related bit by bit, from the very beginning, the romantic story of her elopement with Richard Callendar's father. She told the story with an Oriental sense of color, and slowly before the eyes of the girl she recreated the color of Constantinople in her youth, all the magic of the summer palace and the Bosphorus by moonlight, all the desolation of the Greek aunts, all the crafty manner of the rich old Dikran Leopopulos, and above all the somber glow of the love she had known for the blond and handsome young American. Under the spell of her own tale she began to speak half in French, half in English, but Ellen, listening, became so caught up in the magic of the story that she understood it all, even those things which Thérèse Callendar related in an alien tongue. The tale set fire to a vein of warmth in the girl which until now had gone undiscovered, save only at times when, lost in her music, it had emerged translated into a beauty of sound. For the moment even the plump Greek woman herself appeared no longer to be old and ugly and covered with diamonds in need of cleaning. In the fervor of her story, she attained for a passing instant the quality of youth and of a fleeting beauty out of the Levant.
And when she had finished, she leaned back and said, with a wicked chuckle, "Voyez. I am ugly now and fat. But I was not then." Then she sighed quickly and looked down at her rings. "You see the thing is that he died . . . he was drowned before we had been married two years."
Again Ellen kept silent. There was nothing for her to say that would not have been trivial and idiotic. She waited and presently Thérèse said, "You see, I can understand. . . . I wanted you to know that. . . . One would have said that he and I were separated by a thousand things. None of them made the least difference."
It was Ellen who in the end interrupted the strange, breathless silence which enveloped them at the conclusion of Thérèse's story. She murmured, "It was nothing that I meant to do. . . . It happened. . . . I don't know how. . . . It happened without either of us saying anything. It was," (she groped for the words and collapsed into banality), "It was like a flash of lightning."
"It would be," said Thérèse, "with him. I don't believe he understands what it is."
"And I haven't seen him since."
"He has never spoken a word of it. . . . Always he tells me."
Something of the girl's awkwardness had vanished now, and between them there was a sense of a sympathy that had not before existed. It was the manner now of two women who were confidants.
"There is nothing I can do," said Ellen, "nothing. It is hopeless."
"You were a brave girl to go on coming here."
A flash of Ellen's old spirit returned as she said, "What could I do? Running away helped nothing. . . . It's hard because I have had no one to speak to . . . no one I could talk it over with. . . . You see, I am really alone. . . . It never mattered before. . . . I mean . . . the loneliness."
They faced each other, two women, each possessed of intelligence and honesty, striving to discover some way out of the tangle in which they were caught. Being wise, they knew perhaps the uselessness of violence. They waited, each knowing well enough that there was much more concerned than simple romance. Thérèse knew, no doubt, that the young woman who, stripped now of her fierce secrecy, sat opposite her, frightened and tearful, was not simply an adventuress seeking to gain a husband and a vast fortune. She knew, too, how much these things would have meant to the girl, and she understood well enough that Ellen, face to face with an unaccustomed tangle, lacked the experience which could have helped her.
On Ellen's side, she must have been conscious of facing a mystery. The plump woman, covered with dirty diamonds, was her friend, yet, despite her kindliness, she was remote, separated from her by differences of blood, of tradition, of a million things. She was as remote, as beyond comprehension in the subtlety of her wise, old mind as her dark son, even in the moments when he was most disarming. Her own people Ellen might battle and overthrow, but these were different. She could not even fathom the woman's friendliness.
"I am not a cheap adventuress," she repeated. "Don't believe that."
"My dear girl, I am not such a fool. . . . I was not born yesterday. . . . I have dealt with women of that sort."
"You see," said Ellen, folding and refolding her handkerchief like a little girl, "I am quite alone. . . . I looked on him as a friend . . . as I might look on my own brother. . . . I never thought of such a thing."
At this Mrs. Callendar made a clucking noise and bowed her head for a time in thought. At last she said, "Ah, but that is where the trouble lay! That is where you were wrong! . . . Such a thing is not possible with him. . . . There is acquaintance and the next step is the other thing. He is not, after all, like your American men."
Ellen looked up now and ceased to plait the handkerchief. "I can see that . . ." she said. "I've learned a great deal. I've thought of nothing else for weeks. . . . It frightens me because I can't stop thinking of it when I want to . . . not even at night. There's never been anything like it before." She looked directly at Mrs. Callendar. "Could I talk to you . . . ? Could I tell you the truth?"
"My dear, it is the only way we shall arrive anywhere."
"I've got to tell some one . . . I've thought and thought about the whole thing. I don't know what it is he wants of me. He has never said anything. . . . We have never even mentioned it." She smiled faintly. "Perhaps I am a fool and silly. We've never mentioned it in any way. . . ."
Mrs. Callendar interrupted her. "Ah, but that's it. That's what makes it serious. . . ."
"Perhaps I'm talking of something that doesn't exist."
"Oh, it exists all right." Thérèse knocked the ash from her cigarette. "You would know it if you had seen him." She turned sharply to Ellen. "Why do you think he is avoiding you? It's not because he regards you as a virgin not to be defiled. It's himself he's thinking of too."
"But there is nothing to be done. . . . Nothing can be done."
"Do you love him?"
Ellen smiled again. "How should I know that? I've not been in love a hundred times. I had never met anything like this. I had my whole life planned, perfectly, to the very end. I don't know what's to happen now."
Before she answered Mrs. Callendar sighed. "If there is enough of love, anything is possible." She raised her plump hand. "Oh, I'm not being a romantic fool. I only mean that if there is enough of passion . . . If you believe that it is the greatest thing of all, worth all else in the world, then take what life can give you. Let nothing stop you. It will come to an end soon enough and you will be unhappy, but you must understand that in the beginning. If you are to have remorse, have it before you act and be done with it. . . . That is the only rule for intelligent people, and they are after all the only ones who dare know such a rule."
For a time Ellen sat quietly regarding the floor, lost in consideration of all her companion had said. It was a bewildering speech and colossally unmoral. She must have thought, then or later, of the vast distance which separated the girl who sat in Mrs. Callendar's drawing-room from the girl who sat on Hattie Tolliver's knee the night that Jimmy Seton rang the bell and brought Clarence into her life; yet she had only gone a little way. Turning the speech of Mrs. Callendar over and over in her mind, she became aware that it savored curiously of Lily. It was a consciousness always present, an awareness of Lily's charm, her beauty, her curious soft independence, the beauty, the talk, the scandal that centered about her. . . . If Hattie Tolliver could have known it, the influence of wicked Lily was stronger at that moment than it had ever been. Out of all the talk, the experience, the sorrow, Lily was emerging slowly from the well of mystery that engulfed her.
"It is impossible," said Ellen slowly, "because I could not marry him." She hesitated for a moment and then added in a whisper, "I have a husband already. . . . I've never told any one."
She began to weep once more, gently and wearily, while Mrs. Callendar, poised and remote in black satin and diamonds, regarded her with an expression of astonishment.
At last the older woman said, "You should have told me this. It changes everything. Sabine told me that you had a lover . . . that she had seen him at your flat."
"That was my husband."
"You never spoke of him, so we had nothing else to believe." She smiled suddenly and touched Ellen's hand once more. "I was right then. I did not believe it possible."
Ellen looked at her silently, in amazement. "But you had me to your house, as a friend. How could you have done that when you thought me a woman of that sort?"
Across the gulf that separated them, Mrs. Callendar laughed and said, "But that would have made no difference. I learned long ago not to be concerned with the morals of my friends. You are what you are and I like you, my dear, whether you had one lover or fifty, except that if you had had fifty I should have known you to be a woman of no taste." She paused and lighted another cigarette out of the box she had sent her from Constantinople. "I had no idea," she continued thoughtfully, "how wide the difference was. . . . Besides, you are a musician . . . an artist. One does not require of an artist the morals of the bourgeoisie. One expects such things. It is so because it is so, and there's an end to it." She puffed for a time, slowly, lost in thought, and then added in a kind of postscript. "My poor girl! What a lot you have not learned! You will not be free until you do what you see fit . . . regardless of any one."
And now Ellen found herself once more where she had begun. In all their talk they had arrived after all nowhere, because they had been talking all the while of two different things. Mrs. Callendar, conscious perhaps of the hopelessness of the muddle, rose and began to walk slowly up and down the room, an absurd and untragic figure, plump and much laced but energetic and clever. After a time she came and stood by Ellen's chair.
"I take it then," she said, "that you do not love your husband."
"I don't know," Ellen replied dully, "I don't know. It is nothing like this new thing . . . nothing at all. I am sorry for him. Perhaps that is it."
"It is a match then that your parents made?"
"No. . . . It is not that. . . . It's quite different. . . ." She hesitated for a moment and then said in a low voice, "I ran away with him. . . . I eloped. It was not because I loved him. It was because I had to escape. I wanted to be a musician. . . . I wanted to be great. Lately I have thought sometimes I was only a fool . . . that I have only confused and ruined everything."
This Mrs. Callendar pondered for a time, returning to her chair and lighting another cigarette before she spoke. "And why do you pity him?" she asked presently.
"It is because he is so good and so humble. I am afraid of hurting him. He has been good to me and generous. It is almost worse than if I had loved him. . . . Don't you see?"
"You would not divorce him?" asked Mrs. Callendar.
"No," Ellen cried suddenly. "No, I could not do that. . . . I couldn't. . . ."
"And you would not run away from him?"
"It is the same thing in the end. . . . It would hurt him. It might kill him. . . . He's such a good man . . . so kind, so helpless. He wants me to love him always. . . . He's done everything he could for me . . . everything and more than he is able to do. You see. I told you there was nothing to be done."
"No," said Mrs. Callendar slowly, "I'm afraid there is nothing to be done. . . ." Again she rose from her chair and walked over to the window. "You had best think it over." She turned and faced Ellen. "I will talk to Richard. I will not sail to-morrow. I will stay. It must be settled somehow, for the sake of all of us. . . . I have not forgotten Sabine. She must be considered."