Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 65
AS the weeks passed in the quiet of the big house in the Rue Raynouard, they did not annoy her. To Hattie, Ellen's mood—her sulkiness, her silence—had a familiarity that was comforting; Ellen had been silent and sulky as a girl, she had behaved thus throughout that last happy winter before she escaped forever in company with poor Clarence. Hattie, in the midst of caring for a big house which ran much better when left to itself, went about mothering Ellen, respecting her silences, happy that for a little time her daughter seemed to have some need of her.
And Lily . . . Lily was far too wise ever to pry into the affairs of any one. In time, she knew, everything became clear, everything would stand revealed. Besides there had been for her no element of surprise in the whole trouble. She had known men like Callendar; indeed, it was men like Callendar who had always been attracted to her (save only in the case of de Cyon with whom it was not a question of love). What puzzled her was the reason why a man like Callendar—a man capable of such intense passion, a man of such fascination and elusive masculinity—should ever have loved so persistently and in the end married a creature so independent, so fierce-willed as her cousin. One might as well have expected César to love Ellen; and César had hated her always with a passion which she returned. The whole affair had been wrong since the beginning . . . perverse and unnatural. Any one could have known that they would be unhappy. And in a quiet, gentle fashion Lily found satisfaction in the spectacle of a humbled, unhappy Ellen married to a man who was a match for her, perhaps more than a match—a man who stood aside and watched her coldly in the way she had watched people all her life. It was almost as if the first poor, pale husband, whom Lily had met so long ago on the crowded train bound for the Town, was by some turn of circumstances being avenged.
Callendar, she knew, had come to the house not once but several times. He had talked with Ellen while they walked up and down the long garden beneath the mottled plane trees. She had watched them, secretly, wondering at the calm fashion in which they talked and at the inhuman hardness of Ellen. (She herself would have weakened and yielded long ago.) And each time he had gone away defeated, she knew, for the time being.
And then, slowly, bit by bit, the story came to her. She heard it even before Hattie heard it, how they had quarreled and how he had even gone so far as to strike her in a sudden gust of wild and unsuspected anger. She heard too of the women in the hotel at Tunis and of another woman, the wife of a French official living in a villa near them. Ellen had seen them walking together one night when she had stolen from the house to follow him.
"Think of it!" she cried to Lily. "I descended even to that . . . even to spying. Oh, he is a monster. You have no idea the sort of a man he is."
And yet (thought Lily) she loves him, or she would not feel so violently. And Lily did have an idea what sort of a man he was; she knew far more than Ellen imagined, for she was a woman of great experience, however discreet she may have been. That was perhaps the reason why every one bore their confidences to Lily first of all.
"And yet," continued Ellen as they sat late one night in the long drawing-room, "there are times when for a moment I can see how perfect a husband, how perfect a lover he could be, if he but chose to be. Once we could have been happy, for I was the stronger then and I know that I could have changed him. He is in love with me in a queer fashion. He has behaved like this with no other woman. . . . I am certain of it. . . . I could have changed him once, but it is too late now." And she, Ellen Tolliver, began to weep. "I am crying," she said, "because I have missed so much. I know that I shall never have another chance at happiness . . . of that sort."
She is crying (thought Lily) because she is a child who wants everything in the world, a child who will never be satisfied.
"None of us," she said aloud, "has everything. No one life is long enough to encompass it all. We can only try to have as much as possible."
She might have added, "You have fame and wealth. Is not that enough?" But she kept silent because she knew that Ellen had taken account of these things and would, just then, have given them all in exchange for this other happiness. For Ellen could not bear the thought of having failed.
Lily was busy too in those days with her own affairs, for in the collapse of de Cyon's party she found it necessary to entertain, to go about, to meet new people, to make new friends. She gave dinner after dinner and invited Americans who might be of importance to her husband; and because she was a woman whose life existed only in relation to the men who surrounded her, she did it all gladly, though it ran against all the indolence of her nature. It would help de Cyon and it would be good too for Jean. Lily, who no longer put up bulwarks against age—Lily, who had allowed the gray to come into her tawny hair, was stepping aside to make way for others.
In her tactful fashion she managed somehow to coördinate all the coming and going in the big house. When Ellen told her about the baby, she insisted that it be born in her house.
"It is the center of the family now and it has been my home for so long that I seem always to have lived here. It will be no trouble to any one. We will move de Cyon's books out of the pavilion and turn it over to you. Jean used it for his own when he came home from school. De Cyon will not mind. He can have a room on the second floor."
Indeed the news of the child altered the life of the entire household until the preparations took on the proportions of a royal arrival. Callendar sent flowers daily (which Ellen could not be forever sending away) and she accepted them because the child was his too. This thought saddened her and made her gentle with him when he came sometimes to call, respectfully, with a new tenderness of manner which she had never suspected. It might have weakened her will in the end and defeated her if she had not understood, as Sabine had done before her, that it was born in reality of his own vanity. He was being gentle with her now because she was the potential mother of his child, of his heir. At other times it maddened her to think that he should treat her gently and tenderly because there was the child to be considered. He had never thought of her at all. There had never been any real tenderness. She had suspicions too that it was only another way of attacking her will.
As for Hattie, the news appeared to change the whole tone and color of her life. Besides running the house she began to fuss and fidget over her Ellen. She recommended this and that; she was always advising her on the subject of prenatal influence. "You must remember," she said, "that I planned you should be a musician long before you were born. You can mold the whole life of the child."
She did not care whether the child was a girl or a boy. It was enough that she was to have a grandchild.
On the other side of the Atlantic, old Thérèse received only the calamitous news that there had been a separation. Instantly she had wound up her affairs, closed the house on Murray Hill and engaged a cabin. There was no time to be lost. Richard and Ellen must be reconciled at once. They must be brought together again. If this last chance failed, it would be the end of everything. There would be no more Callendars and no more men to care for the Callendar fortune and the ancient banking firm of Leopopulos et Cie. In an agony of uncertainty, the fat, bedizened, energetic old woman crossed the Atlantic and rushed by motor from Havre to Paris. In her heart, she had known all along that the marriage could not endure. She had played all her stakes on the chance that it would endure long enough to accomplish her purpose.
Still in ignorance of the prospects, she arrived in Paris late in the afternoon and went straight to the house in the Avenue du Bois where her son waited her in the small sitting room. Black and untidy, with her precious reticule swung over her fat arm, she closed the door behind her and faced him in a fury. She did not greet him. She did not even wait for him to speak.
"What is it you have done now? I know it is your fault. You have ruined everything." Her beady eyes glittered and she panted for breath as she flung herself down, thinking "After I work for years to accomplish this marriage."
He smiled at her. "I have done nothing," he said. "I do not know why she ran away."
But she knew he was lying. "You do know," she cried. "You do know. It is another woman. . . . Why can't you leave women alone? You," she mocked, "who thought yourself so wise, so clever with women, have ruined everything again." Her fury mounted and she began to shriek at him incoherently like a mad woman. "She will never divorce you as Sabine did. . . . Of what use are you to any one? Who would regret it if you died? You are worthless. . . . You are a waster . . . a devil." She beat her reticule with her fat bejeweled hands and gasped for breath. "I spend all my life caring for your fortune and you only waste it and run after women. . . . What sort of a man are you? You cannot even give me an heir. . . . There is a curse on you."
Callendar stood by the open window looking out, his back the picture of a cold and maddening indifference. It must have been clear to him that she cared more for her fortune than for her son. Her fortune . . . It was the one thing left her now, and what could she do with it? She could not take it into her grave. She could not even rest there knowing that it was being wasted and would in the end be broken up into small bits and distributed among obscure cousins she had never seen . . . the fortune which her family, the family of the green-eyed old banker of Pera, had built up over centuries. . . .
"Does all that mean nothing to you? Does nothing have any meaning for you?" she cried.
They were in open warfare now, the mother and the son, and after all that had been said nothing would ever again be the same between them. They stood there naked in combat, stripped of all pretense and intriguing.
Presently the old woman became more calm and in a low voice, that was strangely soft after all her harsh catalogue of accusations, murmured, as if speaking to herself, "I do not see how you can be the son of your father. . . . If I did not know. . . . If I did not know, I could never believe it."
And then Callendar turned from the window and looked at her with an insolent smile.
"Where is Ellen?" she asked. "Where is she?"
"She is in the Rue Raynouard with Madame de Cyon. If you had waited," he spoke slowly now, with a tantalizing slowness. "If you had given me a moment or allowed me to speak, I should have told you. . . . Ellen is with child."
For a moment the old woman, gasping, peered at him in silence, and then she began to weep. It was the first time that any one had ever seen tears flow from those shrewd, glittering eyes. She took her reticule and pressed it against her breast as if it had been a child. "My little boy!" she said, through her tears. "My little boy . . . My Richard . . . Forgive me . . . Everything then is saved." Brightening, she continued, "And it will be a boy, hein? I have prayed, I have burned candles . . . I must go to Madame de Thèbes and find out for certain. I cannot wait. . . . I cannot wait. . . . She can tell everything by reading the crystal. I cannot wait."
Still clutching her reticule, she rose and, drying her tears on a dirty handkerchief of exquisite texture, she waddled to the door. As she opened it, the plump figure of Victorine vanished around a corner of the great hall. She had heard everything this time, for Thérèse and her son spoke French when they were together.
In the drawing-room at the Rue Raynouard, Ellen sat with her mother and Lily having tea when Thérèse was announced. To them she said, "If you don't mind, I'd best see her alone. . . . I don't know what it means. She has come perhaps to persuade me to return. She won't give up easily."
So Lily and Hattie left and a moment later at the foot of the stairs the figure of old Thérèse appeared, hot and untidy, peering with her eyes squinted, in search of her daughter-in-law. For a time Ellen waited in the cool shadows, watching. It was incredible (she thought) how Thérèse had changed. She was a figure of fun as she stood there, clutching her precious reticule, disheveled and bizarre, peering into the dim room. This was not the eccentric, worldly Thérèse of the house on Murray Hill. It was an old harridan, obsessed by a single idea—her fortune and what would become of it.
"Mrs. Callendar," she said softly, moving forward.
"Ah, there you are . . . My dear! My darling!" She waddled toward her daughter-in-law and embraced her.
(She has taken to oiling her hair, thought Ellen. She will be running a fruit stand soon.)
"I have heard the news. . . . I have heard the news. . . . You are to have a leetle baby."
She sat down, her fat old face all soft and beaming now, her diamonds glittering dimly as they had always glittered.
"Did Richard tell you?" asked Ellen.
"I only landed yesterday. . . . I motored all the way from Le Havre. I did not know the news then. I only knew that you had run away from him. What is it? What has happened?"
Ellen, watching her, knew that in the recesses of her Oriental mind the old woman thought her a fool for running away. Thérèse believed that any woman could make a good wife. It was a woman's duty to put up with anything, as Sabine had done until she was thrust aside as barren and useless. As Sabine had said, Thérèse could have protected herself from a man like Callendar. She had been born old and wise, expecting nothing. She could not argue with Thérèse. The old woman would have thought her crazy.
"I have left him," she said. "I shall not go back."
"Perhaps the baby . . ." And Thérèse put her head on one side in a queer foreign fashion and smirked. "Perhaps the baby will change things." Then she leaned forward and patted Ellen's hand. "Never mind, we won't speak of it now, my darling. . . . It would disturb you . . . in your condition." She kept returning again and again to the idea of the baby.
Then, settling back in her chair, she took a biscuit from the reticule and began to nibble it. "We need not worry now," she continued. "To think of it . . . a baby . . . a grandson."
Ellen could not resist the perverse temptation. It was this old woman who, after all, had forced the marriage. She said, "Perhaps it will be a granddaughter."
But Thérèse was confident. "No, I have said prayers. I have burned candles. I have done everything. . . . I have paid an astrologer . . . I have overlooked nothing. I am sure it will be a grandson. It is all arranged. You have made me happy, my child. I must arrange to reward you."
(So Ellen had made two women fantastically happy . . . her own mother and old Thérèse.)
"I will make a settlement on you. I will give you a present . . . a magnificent present." And she began to finger her reticule again as if she might draw from it a bag of great gold pieces. "I will send to-morrow for a lawyer. We will arrange it."
And then, like Hattie, she began to offer piece after piece of advice, bits of good sense and weird snatches of ancient, tribal superstition. Ellen must do thus and so to make certain the child was a boy. She must eat this and that. And she must have the proper doctors . . . the very best. They must take no risks. "I will pay for everything. . . ." she repeated. "You can charge it all to me. What is a little money to Thérèse Callendar?"
And at last she left, still excited and chattering. At the foot of the stairs, she turned, "I am going now to Madame de Thèbes to find out if it will be a boy. . . . But I am certain . . . I am sure." And she waddled up the long stairs and climbed again into the motor which drove her away on a round of fortune tellers.
The next morning she returned bringing her lawyer and with Ellen they sat for an hour in de Cyon's study arranging the settlement. It was shrewdly managed. Thérèse made a fine gift, but with many strings to it. Ellen was not to be allowed to touch the principal. The income would be hers whether the child was a boy or a girl. If it was a boy the principal would go to him on the death of his mother; if a girl it would return to the estate. The money, whatever became of it, was never to escape from the Callendar-Leopopulos fortune; but the income was large enough to support Ellen in comfort for the rest of her life. She accepted it because it made her position impregnable; it protected her, it gave her possession over the boy (for she too was certain it would be a boy) to do with as she saw fit. And she need never again know the old terror of being poor.
It was not until two days later, when she examined the settlement carefully, that she discovered a part of it was in real estate and included the flamboyant Babylon Arms, fallen now upon evil days, grown shabby and no longer respectable. The house where poor Clarence had lived until he destroyed himself was to be the property of her child . . . a child whose father was Richard Callendar.
Slowly the whole life in the big house came to revolve about Ellen and the coming child. June passed and July. The gentle de Cyon was moved with all his books and files and papers from the pavilion into a room on the second floor. (No man save one with the resistance of old Gramp had any chance in this household of women.) Thérèse, untidy, her eyes brighter and brighter with the reassurance given her by Madame de Thèbes and a dozen other soothsayers, came daily and bore Ellen away to a variety of doctors. Callendar came sometimes on calls which grew more and more formal as time passed; and Sabine called and sent baskets of fruit. Musicians, actresses, composers passed in and out. Through it all, Hattie moved in her triumphant way, older now but scarcely less subdued than she had been in the days when she sat darning, surrounded by her family in the shabby sitting room on Sycamore street. In Hattie there were elements of the eternal which took no account of changes in the life about her. It is possible that nothing in the whole spectacle seemed in the least strange to her. She appeared to accept its absurdity as a matter of course . . . the presence of Lily's French husband, of Jean who had had no father, the glittering dinners given in the Louis Quinze dining room which she never attended, the comings and goings of the untidy old woman who ate biscuits out of a handbag, the visits of the fastidious and fashionable Sabine, and even the occasional calls of Callendar himself, a man whom she regarded as a sinister and immoral creature, who would have ruined the life of any one of less character than a child of hers. She was busy. She had no time for memories. She had no longer to invent tasks for herself, and so she was happy. She was caught up again in the wild scurry and confusion of life.
Only Lily and old Gramp took the affair with calmness, the one gently with the air of knowing that in all the confusion some one must keep her head and smooth out all the little difficulties which arose from so strange a mélange of characters, the old man with an indifference which placed small value upon the arrival of one more child in a world already too well filled, a world in which there could no longer be any solitude save in one's own soul. He came and went as he chose through the garden gate opening into the Rue de Passy, encountering on his way now Sabine, now old Thérèse, now de Cyon, now a doctor or two, all of whom regarded him with the air of looking upon a specter. It was impossible to believe that so old a man could still be alive. He passed them all without so much as a glance, absorbed always in his search for the youth which had escaped him forever. In him too there were elements of the eternal, which nothing could alter or change in any way. To Gramp, Sycamore Street and the Rue Raynouard were in the end the same.
And then one morning a taxicab appeared at the door and discharged into the midst of the confusion a triumphant Rebecca Schönberg, bustling and with a new light in her ferrety eyes, her mind full of schemes for fresh triumphs and new concert tours; for the news of the débâcle had come to her through the gentle and forgotten Schneidermann in Vienna where she had gone to visit Uncle Otto and Aunt Lina. Already, before even she had seen Ellen, she had started under way news of the return of Lilli Barr to the concert stage. (She knew well enough that Ellen would never return to Callendar. She knew that in the end he had defeated himself. He had hung himself with his own rope; but he had done it so much sooner than she expected.)
She bribed Augustine to let her know when Callendar came to the house, and when he arrived she took care that he did not escape without seeing her. She met him at the foot of the stairs. She did not flaunt her triumph; she was far too subtle for that. The same blood flowed in her veins and she understood how best to mock him.
She said, "Ah! It's you. I hadn't expected to see you here." And holding out her hand with the air of a mourner, she murmured with sad looks and a bogus sincerity, "I'm so sorry it turned out badly. I had hoped you would be successful this time. I wanted you to know that I am full of sympathy. . . . But, of course, Ellen could not have done otherwise."
And so she left him nothing to say. She sent him away, bedraggled and a little ridiculous, in defeat; for by the light in her eye he could not fail to see that she was jeering him. He had not subdued Lilli Barr. She belonged once more to Rebecca and to the world. And in the end it was women who defeated him—women who had always been his obsession, the women who surrounded Ellen—Lily and Hattie and Rebecca, the subtle Sabine and even Thérèse with her gift that made Ellen unpregnably secure. He had not broken her spirit, for he had never possessed her even for a moment; it was her awareness which had baffled him, standing like a wall across his path.
The perverse experiment had failed; there had not even been much pleasure in it. Youth lay behind him. What lay ahead? As he stepped from Lily's door there were lines in the handsome, insolent face which no amount of exercise or massage could ever smooth away. . . . He was growing old. It was as if these women had banded together and, placing Ellen in their midst, now mocked him. . . . Women . . . Women . . . Women . . . One could come to hate them all in the end.
So Rebecca too, in the wholly false supposition that she had come for a brief visit, was given a room that opened off the gallery and so joined all the colony which centered about Ellen in a world founded upon dividends from the black Mills in the Midlands.
And Ellen waited, growing more and more calm as her time approached. She found pleasure in the fantastic spectacle of Lily's house. She was the center of it, and the old intoxication, so familiar to Lilli Barr, began slowly to claim her again.