Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 46
IT was Fergus who first called Gramp The Everlasting. The name was not original; he found it in one of the seed catalogues which his father brought into the apartment; for Charles Tolliver, shut up all day in a government office and all night in a city flat, led vicariously a life which in happier times had been a reality. The living room was cluttered with the catalogues of gardening houses and journals which dealt with agriculture, stock breeding and horses. The outward life of the gentle man was scarcely more than an illusion; a man with Charles Tolliver's face and dressed in Charles Tolliver's clothes lived at an address in the east Seventies of New York City; the same man worked at the Customs House, eating his lunch modestly in one of the little restaurants where Clarence and Mr. Wyck had once taken their gloomy meals. But the real Charles Tolliver was not to be found in any of these places. He lived perpetually among the farms of a county in the Midlands, or in the hotel bars and parlors of the Town, talking endlessly of the Grand Circuit races. And sometimes he was to be found seated with a fishing rod on the banks of a clear stream a thousand miles from the greasy current of the North River. When he was not in such places, he could be found among the catalogues which displayed gay colored pictures of gigantic beets and ears of sweet corn, or in the pages of journals which had splendid pictures of prize cows and great herds of cattle grazing knee deep in alfalfa. Sometimes he found pictures of his old friend Judge Wilkins' prize shorthorns and on such occasions he grew sentimental and talked of the county as an old man talks of the love affairs of his youth. One would have thought that the triumph of each new blue ribbon won by Judge Wilkins' prize bull, Herkimer Sextant, was a personal triumph of Charles Tolliver. The city had for him no reality; it was a dreary episode, a nightmare from which he would in time awake as he awaked reluctantly from the pleasant dreams he had when, carefully tucked in on the divan by Hattie's capable hand, he escaped for a little while from the ugliness of the hard, unreal city. Since he had come from the Town, the habit of sleep had grown upon him: it was a drug . . . hashish or opium.
It was in one of his garden catalogues that Fergus found the name. Seizing the booklet in hilarious triumph, he bore it to his mother and, holding it open, he showed her a large picture in color of a gigantic raspberry advertised as bearing throughout the season. Underneath in bold letters there stood forth in an amazing coincidence the name—Tolliver's Everlasting. The name stuck and from then on the family referred to Gramp with humorous disrespect by that name. At length the old man himself overheard it and was delighted. He resolved then to see his hundredth birthday. In the solitude of his room, he felt amazingly brittle and young. Time rushed past him; tremendous things happened to the family, but he remained passive, unchanged because he had no emotions left to exhaust him.
The war that trapped Ellen and Rebecca Schönberg somewhere in the neighborhood of Trieste dawned upon the Tollivers in the most conventional fashion. At first they talked of it as impossible and absurd, and for the first time in years Gramp emerged from his seclusion to discuss with Robert (for whom he had an intense dislike) the Siege of Paris, which he had lived through in his youth. Indeed his interest attained such a magnitude that he very nearly revealed a secret hope that one day he might be taken, a millstone about his daughter-in-law's neck, back to the city where he had spent what she would have called "a profligate youth." But he took care not to mention the wish for fear that Hattie, in revenge for so many defeats over so many years, would do all in her power to thwart it. At ninety he wanted to see Paris again. He developed a passion for the military maps which appeared in the newspapers and used up all the pins in the house tracing the advance of the Germans toward the Marne.
As for Hattie, she gave small heed to his eccentricities, for she was occupied with other things. Her son, her best-beloved, was in England; she could not trust him. He might join in the war. She knew him well enough to know that he would not stop to weigh the chances of death; such a spectacle would fascinate him. And she knew that her daughter, in the company of an unearthly creature called Rebecca Schönberg (whom she had come to regard darkly as a sort of procuress), was lost somewhere in Austria. Until now, these foreign nations had meant little to her save that they were in the part of the world from which came the hordes of aliens who jostled her in the street. But now all was changed; a great war was no longer a distant affair to be treated with indifference. Her children were involved. She fancied Fergus already ill and wounded. She saw Ellen taken for a spy and immured in the sort of a dungeon one saw in the lurid pictures of the Sunday papers.
The news that came at last into the midst of her frantic anxiety brought her no peace. The two letters arrived by the same mail. The one from Fergus contained the information that he had gone to France, that vaguely he was trying to find a place where he might see the war. He was all right, he wrote. She must remember his excellent luck. It was all terrible, tragic, incredible . . . the sights he had already seen, the things he had already heard. Yet it was magnificent too; somehow between the lines of a letter which he had meant to be reassuring and a little cold, she caught a sense of his reckless enthusiasm. She understood that he saw the war as a great spectacle. She remembered him as a little boy, wild with excitement at the glitter and pomp of a circus parade, intoxicated by the splendor, captured by the romance.
And she knew that she could not stop him. She knew that all the ink in the world and all the words she might write with it would not hold him back. It was all so clear in his letter. The image returned to her again and again . . . a little boy, running recklessly, wildly toward the gaudy parade. . . . Only this time the parade was tragic and wound its length half way across the face of Europe. And because it was so gigantic, it was all the more powerful, all the more glamorous. What could she do against it?
Sometimes she cursed Gramp, The Everlasting, for the wandering spirit he had passed on to her children, and sometimes she reproached her own people for their strength and energy. If her children had been poor weak things she would never have lost them; she could have guarded them always. Sometimes when her worry and despair became overwhelming, she had a terrible premonition that in the end she would be left, alone, with that terrible sardonic old man, her father-in-law.
But Ellen was coming home! Ellen was coming home! She wrote from a place called Genoa to say that she was sailing in two days with Rebecca Schönberg, whom Hattie pictured as sallow, dark and sinister. Ellen had escaped from Austria, out of the midst of the war! She had been arrested with the dangerously international Miss Schönberg, but in the end, due to Miss Schönberg's Aunt Lina and Uncle Otto, everything had been set right and they were allowed to go by boat from Pola into Italy. It was a wretched experience. The police, the soldiers . . . every one was stupid and a little insane. Ellen would, she wrote, be thankful to get away from such a madhouse as Europe had become. Damn them! she wrote, for starting a war just when I had planned a tour of Austria and Germany!
There was hardness in that one line, of a new and amazing kind.
The entry into New York was made, due to Rebecca's shrewdness, the proper sort of event. Two women straight (as the newspaper men managed to make it seem) from the front line! Two women who had been detained as spies! Two women who were good for at least two columns of space, paid for at so much a line, not to speak of the large photograph showing them on the deck of the Giuseppe Verdi with a great black Swiss shepherd dog that belonged to Lilli Barr! Two women with (almost) the dust of the trenches on their shoulders! The papers were full of Lilli Barr, and Miss Rebecca Schönberg, her manager. Every one got something out of it. Lilli Barr got a vast amount of attention. Rebecca Schönberg found herself in the newspapers and rose correspondingly in the eyes of all the relatives and acquaintances, (there were Bettelheims and Czelovars and Schönbergs in New York as well as in London and Paris and Vienna) to whom she had been known until now as Raoul Schönberg's eccentric niece. The newspaper men earned extra money on space and the public had a first hand account of the war. It was all arranged magnificently. Lilli Barr got in under the line before the hundreds of other musicians who likewise damned the war and turned their faces toward a new world that had suddenly acquired an enormous importance.
Hattie Tolliver, dressed in shabby black, and weeping with joy, was on the pier, and with her, Robert, stolid and a little cynical of the grand manner with which his arrogant sister descended the gangplank. Seven trunks were gone through by customs men. Hattie Tolliver discovered that Miss Schönberg, instead of being a dark, sinister species of procuress, was red-haired, good-natured and immensely excited and triumphant. Robert, to his disgust, was told that he was quite a man, and Hattie was told that she was not a day older, that she must have a new hat . . . a half-dozen new hats . . . at once. And, at length, under the eyes of bedazzled fellow-passengers, the entire party, with immense gusto, got under way.
It was all different from the damp December day when a lonely young widow, secretly terrified, waved farewell to Fergus as the doddering old City of Paris slipped away from the pier. It was not Ellen Tolliver who was returning. She had been left behind somewhere in Europe. It was Lilli Barr.
The seven trunks did not go to the apartment in the Seventies; they were sent instead to the Ritz, to the rooms arranged by Raoul Schönberg, the diamond merchant, in accordance with instructions from his niece. Miss Schönberg went with the trunks and the wolf-like dog, but Ellen, with her hand clasped in both her mother's, smiling in triumph beneath the gaze of her mother's tear-stained eyes, went straight to the apartment. All the way Robert sat opposite them, stolidly. He was the bourgeois member of the family. For him there were no transports of joy and sorrow, no wild soarings of delight, no gay irresponsibility, no intense passions, no violent depressions, no fierce desire to set off wandering about the earth. And so it happened that he, the most dependable, the most unselfish, was the one whom all the others took for granted. For him there would never be any celebration to mark the prodigal's return. Darkly he knew all this, and was in his quiet way, content. Somehow he had escaped the heritage of The Everlasting. Secretly he thought there was a great deal of bunk about Miss Schönberg and his sister Ellen; he suspected that their adventures had not been, in fact, so exciting as Miss Schönberg, with a magnificent embroidery of detail, made them seem.
Still, he knew nothing about their profession. Such nonsense might be necessary. Thank God, it was not necessary in the bond business to behave like a three ring circus!
It was long after midnight when Ellen at last joined her manager at the Ritz. Dressed in the smart clothes in which she left the ship, she remained at the apartment surrounded by her family, talking, laughing, even weeping a bit when the rich, violent emotion of her mother engulfed them all save Robert and The Everlasting in a sort of sentimental orgy. Gramp joined them too, for in a city apartment it was no longer possible to keep him shut away as they had done in the days when he occupied a room above the kitchen.
There was but one thing to sadden the reunion; it was the absence of Fergus. Ellen learned for the first time, when she asked for him, that he had gone to Europe. It was rotten luck, because in the depths of her heart he was the one she had wanted to see above all the others. He would have appreciated the grandiose triumph of her return; he would have laughed at it but he would have understood the importance of the spectacle. He would have known how well it was done. She needed his little touch of mocking humor, his complete sympathy. . . . And now he was gone. There was even a chance that she might never see him again.
The others had no interest in the spectacle. Her mother, it was clear, was proud that she was famous; but she really cared nothing at all for Lilli Barr. It was Ellen Tolliver who absorbed them all. They wanted to recapture Ellen Tolliver, pin her down and keep her with them forever. And that, of course, could not be done, because there was so little of Ellen and so much of Lilli.
Once, as they talked frantically, she caught a sudden twinkle in the eye of The Everlasting as he sat, silent and mocking, a little beyond the border of the family group. It was a brief twinkle, which vanished as quickly as it had come, but it told her that he, like Fergus, understood. He knew that she had carried the war into the enemy's country and had won. They hadn't, after all, pulled her down and clipped her wings.
And then, during a brief silence, in the flood of talk there sounded through the room the familiar echo of his demoniacal chuckle. He was thinking, perhaps, of the winter night when he threw a fit and so allowed Ellen to escape.
The occasion was so great that Gramp was allowed to have his dinner with the rest of the family, a privilege which had not been granted in more than fifteen years; for on that first night Hattie would have welcomed the devil himself and placed him on her right hand. Sitting there with his dim spectacles tilted on the end of his high thin nose, he watched them all without taking any part in the celebration. He listened while Ellen described Lily's house in the Rue Raynouard, and he understood, what the others failed to understand, that of course the Baron was Lily's lover. He saw quickly enough that Ellen had closed her eyes to all that took place in the lovely old house. And he knew what the others did not . . . that Ellen had not really returned to them at all, that she had learned the wisdom of going her own way and allowing others to do the same. She had, in short, discovered freedom; she had found her way about in a strange world and had learned the tricks which gave her the upper hand. He was proud of her to have been so smart, to have learned so quickly.
This was no longer the stormy, unhappy Ellen who had run away with a drummer. This was Lilli Barr, a woman of the world, hard, successful, with smooth edges. She glittered a bit. She was too slippery ever to recapture. She sat there, in her chic, expensive clothes, self-possessed, remote, smiling, and a little restless, as if she were impatient to be gone already back into the nervous, superficial clatter of the life which had swallowed her.
The others would discover all this in time, later on. The Everlasting knew it at once.
At one o'clock, Robert summoned a taxi and drove with her to the Ritz. It was a strange, silent ride in which the brother and sister scarcely addressed each other. They were tired, and they were separated in age by nearly ten years. (Robert had been but ten when Ellen eloped.) The one was an artist, caught up for the moment in the delirium of success. The other sold bonds and was working at it with a desperate, plodding persistence. They might, indeed, have been strangers.
Ellen, watching in silence the silhouette of her brother's snub nose and unruly red hair against the window of the taxicab, began to understand, with a perception almost as sharp as the old man's, what it was that had happened. It made her sad and a little fearful lest she should discover that Rebecca had already gone to bed and she would find herself alone in the gaudy hotel. She was afraid, more and more of late, to be left alone.
Still, she reflected, there would be Hansi . . . for company . . . Hansi, a big, black, wolfish dog who devoted himself to her with a fanatic affection.
And the thought of Hansi turned her memories in the direction of Paris, which lay safe for the time being from the Germans; for Hansi reminded her always of Callendar and the day, just before they left for Vienna, when a fat little old man brought the dog with a note to the house in the Rue Raynouard. . . . A note which read . . . "I send you Hansi because he is like you. He will look well by your side and be devoted to you. He may remind you sometimes of me, even in the midst of wild applause. It would be easy now to forget one who has known since the beginning that you were a great artist.
That was all . . . just a line or two, but enough to remind her of what she had forgotten—the awful sense of his patience, which seemed always to say with a shrug that all life was merely a matter of waiting.
The solid voice of Robert roused her.
"Here we are," he said, and stepping from the cab, she was washed for an instant by the brilliant white glare of electricity and then vanished through the whirling doors into the Ritz.
In all the hubbub of those busy, noisy days there were intervals when, for a moment, she found time for reflection . . . odd moments between tea and dinner, or in the hours after midnight when the roar of the city and the small revealing sounds of the great hotel had abated a little; or moments when Rebecca, buoyant, triumphant and full of business interviewed in the sitting room the men who came from musical papers suggesting a sort of polite blackmail. Rebecca handled them all beautifully because she had in her the blood of a hundred generations who had lived by barter. So Ellen escaped them, save when it was necessary for her to be interviewed. Rebecca arranged the concerts that were to be given. She was busy, she was happy, she was content in her possession of Lilli Barr.
It occurred to Ellen after a time that she had not seen Mr. Wyck. In all the confusion there had been no mention of her mother's lodger. He had not been about. So when her mother came to lunch the next day in her sitting room at the Ritz, she asked, after the usual warm kisses had been exchanged, concerning the mysterious lodger.
"He went away the week before you arrived," said Hattie. "I could never understand why. He had seemed to be so satisfied."
Ellen endeavored to conceal her sense of pleasure at his disappearance. "Perhaps," she suggested, "he was leaving town."
Hattie frowned. "No. It wasn't that," she replied. "He said that he must have a room nearer his work. . . . It seemed a silly reason."
Ellen called Hansi to her side and the big black dog threw himself down with his head against her knee, his green eyes fastened on her face with a look of adoration. She stroked the fine black head and murmured, "You never told me his name."
"His name was Wyck," said Hattie. "We grew to be very fond of him. He was no trouble at all, though he did sometimes talk too much concerning his family. Still, I can see that he had nothing else to talk about. He didn't seem to have any friends but us. Fergus was the only one who didn't like him."
Ellen looked up suddenly. She had forgotten Fergus. She had forgotten that Wyck had seen him on the morning when Clarence lay dead on the divan in the Babylon Arms. Perhaps they did not remember each other. Certainly it was clear that Hattie knew nothing. Fergus must have known and, distrusting the nasty little man, have kept his secret. It was a strange world.
There was champagne that day for lunch because Rebecca had asked her uncle Raoul and his daughter, a handsome dark Jewess. Together they sat about a table laden with food which was rich and bizarre to Hattie Tolliver. The sunlight streamed in at the windows and the waiters bobbed in and out of the room serving her daughter. The champagne she refused to drink and when the diamond merchant filled Ellen's glass, she frowned and said, "I wish you wouldn't drink, Ellen. You never know what it leads to."
And when Mr. Schönberg, after telling one or two risqué stories, held a match to Ellen's cigarette, Hattie frowned again and the old look of suspicion came into her eyes. It was Lily Shane who had taught her daughter to behave like a fast woman. She knew that.
It was only when the first excitement of Ellen's return had worn away that Hattie began to feel the dull ache of an unhappiness which she could neither understand nor define. With all the vast optimism of her nature she had fancied the return of Ellen as something quite different from the reality. A hundred times during the long years while her daughter was away, she lived through the experience in her imagination; she saw Ellen taking her place once more in the midst of the family, quarreling cheerfully with Robert, helping her mother about the house, going and coming as the mood struck her. She fancied that Ellen would be, as in the old days, sullen and sometimes unhappy but always dependent just the same, always a rather sulky little girl who would play the piano by the hour while her mother saw to it that there was no work, no annoyance to disturb her.
And now it was quite different. She scarcely saw Ellen save when she went to the Ritz to eat a hurried lunch of fancy, rich foods under the bright eyes of the cheerful Miss Schönberg. The old piano stood in the apartment, silent save when Hattie herself picked out her old tunes in a desperate attack of nostalgia. Ellen had played for her a half dozen times but always on the great piano in her sitting room at the Ritz; it was not the same as in the sentimental, happy days when Hattie, as ruler of her household, sat darning with her family all about her. There was no time for anything. And Ellen herself . . . she had become slippery somehow, happier than in the old days, but also more remote, more independent, more "complete" as Lily had said. She had no need of any one.
There were days too when Hattie felt the absence of Mr. Wyck. Of all those who had at one time or another depended upon her . . . old Julia, Fergus, Ellen, Wyck and all the others . . . none remained save her husband. And somehow she had come to lose him too. Here in the city, living in his farm papers and in his memories, he had escaped her in a way she failed to understand. He slept more and more so that there were times when she was worried lest he might really be ill. Robert and The Everlasting were aloof and independent; they were no help whatever. But Mr. Wyck had come to her, wanting desperately all the little attentions which she gave so lavishly. And now he was gone, almost secretly and without gratitude. It hurt her because she could not understand why he had run away.
At times it seemed that with on one to lean upon her, the very foundations of her existence had melted away; there were moments when, for the first time in all her troubled and vigorous life, she feared that the world into which she had come might at last defeat her.