Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 9
A NUMBER of things made necessary this trip of Clarence; there were the usual customers to be visited; the new equipment of the Junoform Corset Factory was in need of inspection, and finally there was an engagement to spend Christmas and several days of the holiday season as the guest of the Seton family; and this he looked upon with relief because life in hotels had come to weary him inexpressibly. He longed for a home, with a wife who would put by his slippers for him and sit by his fireside. The prospect of one dreary hotel after another burdened his soul; so the acceptance of Mr. Seton's invitation had been even colored by a subdued enthusiasm.
It was, after all, ambition which had betrayed him into city life and the wretched, fly-by-night existence of a drummer. He was ambitious to be wealthy, to be admired, to be honored in a community.
There were times, but these were rare and isolated moments, when his ambitions rose for an instant beyond even these things, times when, in an ecstasy of intoxication, they soared dizzily among the pinnacles of hope far beyond the reach of one whose place in the structure of life was clearly somewhere in the foundations. It was then that he caught for an instant glimpses of a life in which he saw himself not only wealthy and respectable but distinguished and glamorous, one whose character captured the imagination, who gave himself and his life to the great world.
All this was perhaps not clearly thought out in his mind; yet he sensed its presence a little way beyond his reach as a small boy searches in the darkness of a jam closet for something which he knows is there but cannot see.
In these lurid, almost ecstatic moments, he saw his future wife not so much in the rôle of a domestic paragon, as a brilliant and beautiful creature, fit to walk through the avenues of the great world by the side of a clever and worldly man. To be sure, such things were never mentioned to fellow-drummers, yet they were there, shut up in his heart, quiet save for rare moments. His companions in the smoking car may have had their secrets too. It is impossible to say. If such secrets existed, they were too well hidden beneath their suspicions of each other.
It was in one of his placid, normal moods that he boarded the train for the west. He took off his brown overcoat with the half-belt at the back, his brown fedora hat, adjusted his eyeglasses, and settled himself in his chair. At the moment he permitted his thoughts to hover about the picture of May Seton, pale, blonde, good-natured and pretty in her plump way. There was nothing in the least carnal in these thoughts, for he was a young man who might have served as a model for those institutions which concern themselves with the morals of young men and preach the doctrine that complete purity of mind is possible by sheer perseverance alone. He was innocent of women. He had worked hard and had no time for them. Indeed the very thought of them in that way gave him a faintly squeamish feeling. He was one of those in whom desire follows in the wake of timid experience, who cannot in the beginning conceive passion otherwise than abstractly. So now he conceived May Seton more as an idea, a sort of stepping stone to comfort and warmth, than as a woman to be desired. That he might be a sensual man had never occurred to him.
As the train moved across the Jersey Flats he fell to considering his prospects as a son-in-law of Harvey Seton and the certainty of an interest in the Junoform Reinforced Corset Company, a thing already hinted at by his suppositions mother-in-law. He thought of the Town. He pictured, quite clearly and placidly, a small and pleasant house surrounded by shrubs and trees, a comfortable front porch. He even pictured Mrs. May Seton Murdock in a rocking chair, far more attractive than she was in the flesh, darning his socks. In fact, he saw his future bounded on four sides by Junoform Reinforced Corsets, by May Seton, by the Town and by hard work. It was this placid and uneventful path that his feet were to follow.
The car in which Clarence sat, like all cars bound from the East across the mountains into the fertile and prosperous Midlands, was crowded. He was not a man gifted with great curiosity and rarely indulged himself in speculation concerning his fellow travelers. Indeed, from his manner one soon understood that he observed very little about him. And now as the wheels clicked along the smooth track he settled himself to reading. He had brought with him against the monotonous agony of the trip a book by Richard Harding Davis and a copy of the Saturday Evening Post, and these absorbed his attention until the train had passed Philadelphia and turned northward a bit in the direction of Altoona. Presently his interest flagged and he fell to watching the scenery; but before long this too wearied him and he fell asleep. Slumber was a state which he welcomed, for there were long periods when his mind grew exhausted with turning over the same frayed thoughts. There were times when it might have been said that he existed in a state of suspended animation.
So between slumber and a bored wakefulness, the hours passed in a succession of dreary towns and monotonous winter-dead farms, punctuated by signs advertising patent medicines and cheap hotels. As the train swept through Johnstown, he was for a moment diverted by the sight of so much smoke and desolation, by the gigantic slag heaps and the flaming furnaces. The spectacle was not a new one. He must have seen it twenty times, by day when it was sordid, and by night when it became wild and fantastically magnificent. Yet it interested him as it always interested him, tugging at some part of his soul which failed to fit the neat pattern of his universal conformity.
"What a great country!" he reflected. "By George! It's a privilege to be a citizen of a country so energetic and prosperous!"
A curious light came suddenly into his nice brown eyes, and for a time the corset factory and May Seton were forgotten in the face of a new emotion, so much more profound and stirring. Even the rawness, the barren crudity of the picture exalted him. For a moment his ambitions threatened to gain the upper hand—those wild unruly ambitions which sometimes bore him beyond the round of thoughts which wearied him.
"To own mills like these!" he thought. "To be a power in industry. To go to Europe every year. To have a great house and one of these new automobiles."
And Johnstown disappeared behind the train, lost in a gigantic and all-enveloping cloud of smoke and soot through which the flames of the furnaces flashed dimly.
The monotonous mountains, seamed with black rivers flowing between crags of blue ice, succeeded the smutty town, and Clarence settled back in his chair. But he did not read. He sat staring out of the window, thinking, thinking, thinking. Perhaps he tried to nurse his sense of importance, to persuade himself that he possessed the stuff which went into the accomplishments of great ambitions.
The roaring train sped on and on, and presently he went into the smoking compartment where he fell into conversation with other traveling salesmen. They exchanged stories of a broad nature, until Clarence, by nature a nice young man, found the flavor growing too strong and returned to his seat.
Then it was for the first time that he noticed his fellow passengers. He did not notice all of them, or even two or three. He noticed only one, a woman who sat in the chair beside him reading a novel with a yellow paper back called "Chèri" by a person with the queer name of Colette.
He sat down and tried to read but, for some obscure reason, the figure of the woman kept getting between him and the story of the great open spaces. He found himself reading paragraphs which meant nothing to him. He read an entire page without knowing what had happened in the tale. Such a thing had never happened to him before.
The woman who kept thrusting herself between him and the story was dressed all in black, though she did not appear to be in mourning. Rather it seemed that she wore black because it became her. Across one shoulder was thrown a stole of black fox and from the brim of her small hat hung a froth of black lace which obscured her dark eyes and permitted her to regard her companions without receiving in return the force of their stares. From beneath the hat there escaped a bit of tawny hair, so dark that in some lights it appeared almost red. She appeared to take full advantage of the shield made by the lace, for from time to time she put down her yellow-backed novel and fell to observing the people about her . . . a middle-aged woman with a little boy in a sailor suit, a fat man who lay back in his seat and snored quietly, a pair of college girls, one reading ponderously the essays of Emerson and the other absorbed (self-consciously) in the pages of Boccacio; another traveling salesman and a pair of old women returning from a funeral who vied with each other in a talking race.
"And then I said to her . . ." "She said, 'Mabel, he'll never be well again . . . even if he didn't die, he'll never be well again'" . . . and "What do you think of such behavior? . . . Unpardonable, I thought. . . ." "I quite agree with you, unpardonable. . . ." "Well, that's what I told Mabel."
Snatches of the old women's talk, projected in voices pitched high enough to override the clamor of the train, were tossed about them like jagged fragments of glass.
The woman with the veil put down her book and, smiling quietly, listened to them. She turned away from Clarence a little so that he was able to shift his position and thus obtain a clearer view of her.
She was beautiful, and even to Clarence, unskilled in such fine distinctions, it was clear that she was a lady. This fact was conveyed beyond all doubt by the way she sat, poised with a neat and easy grace, in the way her slender hands clasping her book lay against the black of her dress, the way she carried her head and wore her fine clothes, even by the veil which somehow stood as a symbol of all that was gently bred in her character. There seemed between her and the others in the car an invisible veil which shielded her while she looked out upon them from a different world.
At her feet stood a smart black handbag, covered with bright labels. Clarence read them one after another in a kind of intoxication—Sorrento, Cannes, Dieppe, Hotel Ruhl, Hotel Royal Splendide, Hotel Ritz-Carlton. And, surely yet imperceptibly, just as an hour or two earlier the sight of the Johnstown furnaces had captivated his moderate imagination, the woman began to take possession of him. Somehow these two impressions became blended, and out of them there came to Clarence glimpses of a brilliant world which he never before penetrated, even in the wildest flights of ambition.
Presently the stranger, wearied of listening to her companions, resumed her reading and Clarence, still fascinated, continued to watch her until, becoming conscious of his gaze, she turned suddenly and dismissed him by the faintest movement of her shoulder. At the gesture, which from her seemed a command, he turned quickly away and blushed as if she had spoken to him in rebuke. Yet it seemed to him that as she glanced in his direction, her lovely mouth was arched for an instant by the faintest of smiles—a smile which said: "Staring does not disturb me. It is nothing new to me." It may even have been that she mocked him. It was impossible to say. Only one thing remained certain: Clarence had been disturbed by something entirely new in his experience.
In his own way he tried to discover what it was that suddenly shattered all his peace. The woman was beautiful, yet he in no sense desired her. Indeed, in the dull purity of his mind, it is probable that no such unclean thought even occurred to him. Beyond all doubt she fascinated him, yet it was not this which destroyed his ease. Rather it was something in her manner, something in her very bearing and personality which overwhelmed him . . . that sudden glimpse of another world, in which people lived lives as different from his as day is different from night, a sudden terror at her self-possession, at the unseen, impregnable barrier by which she protected herself from those others in the car. There was in her manner too a certain veiled but terrifying recklessness.
With an air of infinite absorption, she continued to read the yellow-backed novel, as if she had forgotten that the man in the seat beside her existed. Beyond her, the two old women continued, "And I said to her when she rang me up the next morning . . ." "It's shameful what some women will do!" . . . "Since that day he's been an invalid, unable to stir!" And they clucked and wagged their crêpe-clad heads like a pair of crows on a fence.
The train roared on through the blue-white mountains, into the west toward Pittsburgh. Upon the hills the early winter darkness had already begun to descend.
Still Clarence did not read. The novel and the Saturday Evening Post slipped to the floor and lay there unnoticed. The characters in his book failed to hold their own against the woman in the adjoining seat. He even had a faint sense of being on the edge of the romantic and exciting.
And at the same moment, the thoughts of May Seton and a comfortable house in the Town were swept away like so much rubbish into oblivion, carrying with them the sense of peace and certainty which a little time before made the future so pleasant and comfortable.
Presently he rose and went into the smoking compartment where he remained for a time. When he emerged, it was quite dark, and high up on the barren mountains an occasional warm yellow light indicated the existence of a lonely house. Returning to his chair he found the mysterious woman had vanished. Only the somber handbag covered with bright labels remained. The names glittered . . . Sorrento, Cannes, Firenze, Beau Rivage, Royal Splendide, Claridge's, Berkeley. . . .
He glanced at his gold watch (the gift of Uncle Henry) and decided to dine. Making his way toward the dining car, he found the passageway blocked by other passengers, college girls and boys, drummers like himself, old women, children, all swaying with the motion of the speeding train. It was a bad time to travel, on the eve of a holiday; yet the crowd was pleasant enough, good-natured, laughing, on the whole gay with the holiday spirit.
Slowly the door of the dining car devoured the thin line, casting out others who fought their way back in an opposing column, until at last Clarence stood at the entrance of the bright car, surveying the groups of heads bent over swaying soup and underdone chops.
Still harassed and unaccountably miserable, he stood first on one foot and then the other, surveying the crowd until at length he discovered far down the aisle his friend of the paper-backed novel. She sat at a table for two opposite an elderly man in a black frock coat who, quite properly, did not address her although he seemed not unconscious of her presence, for he stole from time to time glances at her tawny hair and fine throat until she dismissed him suddenly with a frank stare in which there was a great deal more than a hint of amusement. After that a wall, invisible as it was impenetrable, separated them, as was proper between two victims of a system which threw harassed travelers arbitrarily into each other's company. As she ate the woman continued to look about her as if she were profoundly amused by the friendly spectacle of the rocking car. Still she appeared to use the film of lace as a perpetual shield.
He had been watching her thus for a long time when, to his sudden horror, he saw the elderly man wipe his thin mouth with his napkin, pay his check and, followed by the steward, move fatally toward the end of the car. At the sight Clarence was tempted suddenly to run. Yet it was impossible to run. The best one could do was to turn back and squeeze slowly and painfully past the fat encumbrances of the corridor. Besides, how could one make a spectacle of one's self? What would people think? He stood frozen with horror, filled with the sensations of one about to be dragged forward to torture. As in a nightmare he felt himself borne forward by a steward who grinned maliciously and said, "Place for one? Certainly! Right this way."
Without effort he floated through space until suddenly, with a tormented and unuttered groan, he sank into the seat opposite the woman with the delicate black veil.
He felt the pulses beating in his throat. He bent over the menu card, but even this did not protect him. Again the unreality of a nightmare smote him. This time he was naked and horribly embarrassed at his improper predicament. He sensed the woman examining him as she examined the others, with a detached and curious smile of appraisal.
These were his sensations, various, confused, terrifying. As though there were eyes in the top of his neatly brushed head, he saw all this happening. What he did not see, what he could not have known were the thoughts of the woman—that she watched him, that she saw the throbbing vein in his throat stand out suddenly and knew well enough its meaning. By the aid of that agitated vein she saw, with a sophistication beyond his wildest imaginings, in this mild little drummer a man of a sensual, passionate nature. The thing which amused her was a speculation, absurd to be sure, but none the less clear. She wondered whether this little man knew himself, whether he had ever been aroused.
"Chops," Clarence found himself writing on the check. "Chops. Mashed potatoes. Lima beans. Coffee."
Then the sound of a voice reached him, warm, low, insinuating. "I advise you against the chops. They are atrocious. I was forced to send them back and order something else."
The woman had spoken to him of her own accord and his suspicions arose in sudden array, bristling and fully armed. Yet he knew that he must answer. Heroically he looked up and asked,
"What do you advise?"
"The roast beef is very good. . . ."
Though he detested it, he wrote down roast beef and then straightened in his chair, pulling at his collar and cravat. For the life of him, he could find nothing to say. It was impossible to overcome that fragile, invisible barrier.
"Don't think me impertinent," she said, "for speaking . . . but I'm almost bored to death. . . . I hate traveling. . . . I'd like always to stay in one spot."
For an instant he suspected the faintest trace of a foreign accent in her voice, though he could not be certain.
"I know," he said politely, "I hate it too. . . ."
She laughed softly.
"It's the first time I've traveled any distance in years. . . . I couldn't talk to the old crow who sat there before you. . . . It would have frightened him to death."
It was impossible for Clarence to say that it also frightened him to death, so he coughed and buttered a bit of roll.
"You don't mind my speaking, do you?" she pursued.
For a moment Clarence fancied he had lost his mind. It was queer enough that a strange woman should speak to him, but even queerer that she should sweep past all the procedure of good manners and ask him directly whether he minded it. And she was neither brazen nor embarrassed.
"No, of course not," he managed to say, "I mean I'm awfully glad. I hate traveling alone."
Then it occurred to him that he had made an indelicate, perhaps a suggestive remark, and the blushes once more swept his face.
After hours the waiter arrived with the roast beef and lima beans.
"I haven't much farther to go," continued the woman. "Thank God, I'm not bound for Chicago."
Clarence found it impossible to eat beneath her gaze.
"I get off at eleven something . . ." he said, "I've forgotten exactly. . . ."
The woman laughed. "Why, so do I! We must be bound for the same place."
For an instant he succumbed to a terrifying suspicion that, in truth, she had marked him for her own. But this idea he dismissed quickly, as utterly improbable. The woman was clearly a lady. She was terribly sure of herself, of keeping things just where she wanted them. She might be a spy, an adventuress. (Ghosts of a thousand cheap magazine stories danced through his brain.) Yet a woman like that, if she were bad, wouldn't be bothering herself with insignificant game like himself. He began to believe that she had been speaking the truth, that she had been driven to address him only out of a vast boredom.
"Perhaps we are," he said, and told her that he was bound for the Town.
"So am I," she replied. "It's the first time I've been back there in years. . . . Maybe you come from the Town?" she continued.
The discovery of this bond helped matters a little. It furnished at least some ground for the stumbling feet of Clarence.
"No, I'm going on business. . . . I've been there before. . . . It's a nice progressive Town, full of booming factories . . . a place to be proud of."
But he found abruptly that he had taken the wrong turning. The stranger was not proud of the Town. "I suppose you might be proud of it, if you like that sort of thing. . . . I find it abominable." For a moment, the bantering, charming, humorous look went out of the eyes behind the veil, supplanted by a sudden sadness. "No," she continued, "I don't like it, though I've no doubt it's very prosperous."
For a moment Clarence was baffled. He understood suddenly that this new strange world was more remote, more unfamiliar than he had imagined. It was not perhaps made out of factories and roaring furnaces. The discovery increased his awkwardness and in some strange way distended the glamour with which he surrounded her. He struggled for words.
"I'm going to spend Christmas with the Setons," he said. "Probably you know them. They've always lived in the Town."
The woman frowned slightly. "Seton?" she repeated, "Seton?" Then it appeared that the light dawned upon her. "To be sure. . . . I know. . . . They own a corset factory. . . . But they're new people. Yes, I know who they are although I don't know them."
She made the statement simply and without a trace of condescension. She made it as a simple observation. If she had said, "I know who the King of England is . . . but I don't know him," the intonation, the inflection would have been identical. She had answered his question, but she had answered it more profoundly than she knew, more profoundly, more tragically than even Clarence knew until years afterward. "I know who they are although I don't know them."
Before the eyes of Clarence there rose suddenly the image of May Seton, good-natured, trivial, blonde, commonplace. It was almost as if she had entered the train by some obscure miracle and stood there beside the mysterious stranger, awkward, silly, ungainly.
The woman was rising now. "I must go back to my seat," she said. "It isn't fair to keep the others waiting." She pulled the stole of black fox about her handsome shoulders and lowered the veil. "Thank you," she said, "for saving a poor helpless traveler from boredom."
And with that she closed the adventure.
When he returned to his seat, he found her sitting absorbed in her yellow-backed novel. Greeting him with a faint smile, she returned to her reading. After an hour she rested her head against the back of the chair and appeared to fall asleep. It was not until the train roared into the Town that she again addressed him.
Snow filled the air as they got down from the train at midnight. The big flakes, tormented by a rising wind, fell heavily, obscuring the yellow lights of the dirty brick station. They were the only passengers to descend and Clarence offered to take charge of her luggage. There were two large trunks and another handbag. The trunks she left at the station. She would send for them. The two handbags she would take with her.
The great train, spouting steam, got under way with a vast uproar. The brightly lighted cars moved away into the snowstorm and the pair of them were left alone beneath the yellow glare of the station lamps. A little way off two horse drawn cabs stood by the curb, the heads of the beasts hanging, their backs bent against the storm. From the warm station emerged a pair of drivers, muffled to the ears. To one of them, the lady called out.
"Oh, Jerry," she said, "I'm glad you're here. . . . There's no one to meet me. . . . I didn't send word ahead."
The plumper of the two old men took off his hat and peered at her for a moment while the snow fell on his bald head. Slowly recognition came to him. "Sure, Miss Lily. . . . It's a pleasure. . . . Back again, after so many years . . . and not a day older, if you'll let me say so."
At this the stranger laughed softly. The cabby took the bags from Clarence, who had bestirred himself briskly to do the proper thing.
"It's late," he said. "Perhaps I'd better go with you to see that nothing happens."
"Thank you," replied his companion, "but I'll be safe. . . . I haven't far to go . . . and I've known Jerry all my life. . . . He has driven me ever since I was a little girl. . . . You see I only live a little way off." She laughed again, "Right in the midst of the Mills." She made a little gesture with her big muff to indicate the direction of the Mills. There, above the encircling flames of the furnaces, rose dimly the silhouette of a great house crowning the top of a low hill. But for the flames of the furnaces it would have remained invisible. Now it stood out against the red, snow-dimmed glare, black, mysterious.
The woman stepped into the swaying, moth-eaten cab and the driver climbed to the seat. Suddenly she leaned out of the window and addressed Clarence. "Before we part," she said, "I suppose we ought to know each other's names, pour sauver les convenances. I'm Miss Shane," she added, "Miss Lily Shane."
Clarence took off his hat and bowed. "I'm Mr. Murdock. . . . Mr. Clarence Murdock."
"And you won't think me wicked, I know," she added, "for speaking to a strange man. . . . I'm careful who I speak to. . . . I knew I would be safe with you."
And the cab drove off through the snowstorm in the direction of Shane's Castle, leaving Clarence on the platform mumbling a polite answer, his face scarlet, his pulses beating faster than they had ever beaten before.
After a moment he climbed into the other cab and bade the driver take him to the residence of Mr. Harvey Seton. The contentment, the holiday spirit had oozed out of him. He was no longer glad to be spending Christmas with the Setons. Reflecting upon his recent encounter, it occurred to him suddenly what it was that was familiar about the woman. Lily Shane! To be sure, she was the cousin of Ellen Tolliver! The rich cousin . . . ! There was something about her that reminded him of Ellen as she sat talking to him in the Setons' parlor, something withdrawn and contained, rather distinguished and proud. In one of those moments of insight, so rare to him, he saw all at once that there was in the girl and her cousin something which set them aside from the others.
This thought he turned over and over in his mind as the musty cab, smelling faintly of ammonia, bore him through the blowing storm further and further into the smug future that lay spread out before him in a suburban panorama of little white houses with "artistic" piazzas and shutters ornamented by cut-out hearts and diamonds; and after a time he became once more almost content. The wild disturbance caused by the sudden encounter with the stranger appeared to have quieted, when another thought, entering suddenly his tired brain, made him miserable once more. He fell to considering the final speech of Miss Lily Shane. . . . "I'm careful who I speak to. I knew I should be safe with you." . . .
He could not make out whether or not the speech was meant as a tribute to him. Something in the memory of the stranger's manner implied that he was a poor thing.
And then it occurred to him that at this very moment he must be passing the Tollivers' house, and poking his head out of the cab window, he saw that there was still a light in the windows. For an instant he fancied that the wind bore toward him the strains of wild music, surging and passionate; but of this he could not be certain, for the wind howled wildly and snow fell in a thick blanket. It may have been, after all, only his imagination; it had been playing him queer tricks since the very moment he raised his eyes and saw Miss Lily Shane sitting there beside him.