Early Autumn (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 1)/Chapter 2
It was Olivia's habit (and in some way every small action at Pentlands came inevitably to be a habit) to go about the house each night before climbing the paneled stairs, to see that all was in order, and by instinct she made the little tour as usual after Sabine had disappeared, stopping here and there to speak to the servants, bidding them to go to bed and clear away in the morning. On her way she found that the door of the drawing-room, which had been open all the evening, was now, for some reason, closed.
It was a big square room belonging to the old part of the house that had been built by the Pentland who made a fortune out of equipping privateers and practising a sort of piracy upon British merchantmen—a room which in the passing of years had come to be a museum filled with the relics and souvenirs of a family which could trace its ancestry back three hundred years to a small dissenting shopkeeper who had stepped ashore on the bleak New England coast very soon after Miles Standish and Priscilla Alden. It was a room much used by all the family and had a worn, pleasant look that compensated for the monstrous and incongruous collection of pictures and furniture. There were two or three Sheraton and Heppelwhite chairs and a handsome old mahogany table, and there were a plush sofa and a vast rocking-chair of uncertain ancestry, and a hideous bronze lamp that had been the gift of Mr. Longfellow to old John Pentland's mother. There were two execrable water-colors—one of the Tiber and the Castle San Angelo and one of an Italian village—made by Miss Maria Pentland during a tour of Italy in 1846, and a stuffed chair with tassels, a gift from old Colonel Higginson, a frigid steel engraving of the Signing of the Declaration which hung over the white mantelpiece, and a complete set of Woodrow Wilson's History of the United States given by Senator Lodge (whom Aunt Cassie always referred to as "dear Mr. Lodge"). In this room were collected mementoes of long visits paid by Mr. Lowell and Mr. Emerson and General Curtis and other good New Englanders, all souvenirs which Olivia had left exactly as she found them when she came to the big house as the bride of Anson Pentland; and to those who knew the room and the family there was nothing unbeautiful or absurd about it. The effect was historical. On entering it one almost expected a guide to step forward and say, "Mr. Longfellow once wrote at this desk," and, "This was Senator Lodge's favorite chair." Olivia knew each tiny thing in the room with a sharp sense of intimacy.
She opened the door softly and found that the lights were still burning and, strangest of all, that her husband was sitting at the old desk surrounded by the musty books and yellowed letters and papers from which he was compiling laboriously a book known as "The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony." The sight of him surprised her, for it was his habit to retire punctually at eleven every night, even on such an occasion as this. He had disappeared hours earlier from the ball, and he still sat here in his dinner coat, though it was long after midnight.
She had entered the room so softly that he did not hear her and for a moment she remained silently looking down at him, as if undetermined whether to speak or to go quietly away. He sat with his back to her so that the sloping shoulders and the thin, ridged neck and partly bald head stood outlined against the white of the paneling. Suddenly, as if conscious of being watched, he turned and looked at her. He was a man of forty-nine who looked older, with a long horse-face like Aunt Cassie's—a face that was handsome in a tired, yellow sort of way—and small, round eyes the color of pale-blue porcelain. At the sight of Olivia the face took on a pouting expression of sourness . . . a look which she knew well as one that he wore when he meant to complain of something.
"You are sitting up very late," she observed quietly, with a deliberate air of having noticed nothing unusual.
"I was waiting to speak to you. I want to talk with you. Please sit down for a moment."
There was an odd sense of strangeness in their manner toward each other, as if there had never been, even years before when the children were babies, any great intimacy between them. On his part there was, too, a sort of stiff and nervous formality, rather quaint and Victorian, and touched by an odd air of timidity. He was a man who would always do not perhaps the proper thing, but the thing accepted by his world as "proper."
It was the first time since morning that the conversation between them had emerged from the set pattern which it had followed day after day for so many years. When he said that he wanted to speak to her, it meant usually that there was some complaint to be made against the servants, more often than not against Higgins, whom he disliked with an odd, inexplicable intensity.
Olivia sat down, irritated that he should have chosen this hour when she was tired, to make some petty comment on the workings of the house. Half without thinking and half with a sudden warm knowledge that it would annoy him to see her smoking, she lighted a cigarette; and as she sat there, waiting until he had blotted with scrupulous care the page on which he had been writing, she became conscious slowly of a strange, unaccustomed desire to be disagreeable, to create in some way an excitement that would shatter for a moment the overwhelming sense of monotony and so relieve her nerves. She thought, "What has come over me? Am I one of those women who enjoys working up scenes?"
He rose from his chair and stood, very tall and thin, with drooping shoulders, looking down at her out of the pale eyes. "It's about Sybil," he said. "I understand that she goes riding every morning with this fellow O'Hara."
"That's true," replied Olivia quietly. "They go every morning before breakfast, before the rest of us are out."
He frowned and assumed almost mechanically a manner of severe dignity. "And you mean to say that you have known about it all along?"
"They meet down in the meadows by the old gravel-pit because he doesn't care to come up to the house."
"He knows, perhaps, that he wouldn't be welcome."
Olivia smiled a little ironically. "I'm sure that's the reason. That's why he didn't come to-night, though I asked him. You must know, Anson, that I don't feel as you do about him."
"No, I suppose not. You rarely do."
"There's no need to be unpleasant," she said quietly.
"You seem to know a great deal about it."
"Sybil tells me everything she does. It is much better to have it that way, I think."
Watching him, it gave her a faint, warm sense of satisfaction to see that Anson was annoyed by her calmness, and yet she was a little ashamed, too, for wanting the excitement of a small scene, just a tiny scene, to make life seem a little more exciting. He said, "But you know how Aunt Cassie and my father feel about O'Hara."
Then, for the first time, Olivia began to see light in the darkness. "Your father knows all about it, Anson. He has gone with them himself on the red mare, once or twice."
"Are you sure of that?"
"Why should I make up such a ridiculous lie? Besides, your father and I get on very well. You know that." It was a mild thrust which had its success, for Anson turned away angrily. She had really said to him, "Your father comes to me about everything, not to you. He is not the one who objects or I should have known." Aloud she said, "Besides, I have seen him with my own eyes."
"Then I will take it on my own responsibility. I don't like it and I want it stopped."
At this speech Olivia's brows arched ever so slightly with a look which might have been interpreted either as one of surprise or one of mockery or perhaps a little of both. For a moment she sat quite still, thinking, and at last she said, "Am I right in supposing that Aunt Cassie is at the bottom of this?" When he made no reply she continued, "Aunt Cassie must have gotten up very early to see them off." Again a silence, and the dark little devil in Olivia urged her to say, "Or perhaps she got her information from the servants. She often does, you know."
Slowly, while she was speaking, her husband's face had grown more and more sour. The very color of the skin seemed to have changed so that it appeared faintly green in the light from the Victorian luster just above his narrow head.
"Olivia, you have no right to speak of my aunt in that way."
"We needn't go into that. I think you know that what I said was the truth." And a slow warmth began to steal over her. She was getting beneath his skin. After all those long years, he was finding that she was not entirely gentle.
He was exasperated now and astonished. In a more gentle voice he said, "Olivia, I don't understand what has come over you lately."
She found herself thinking, wildly, "Perhaps he is going to soften. Perhaps there is still a chance of warmth in him. Perhaps even now, after so long, he is going to be pleasant and kind and perhaps . . . perhaps . . . more."
"You're very queer," he was saying. "I'm not the only one who finds you so."
"No," said Olivia, a little sadly. "Aunt Cassie does, too. She's been telling all the neighborhood that I seem to be unhappy. Perhaps it's because I'm a little tired. I've not had much rest for a long time now . . . from Jack, from Aunt Cassie, from your father . . . and . . . from her." At the last word she made a curious little half-gesture in the direction of the dark north wing of the big house.
She watched him, conscious that he was shocked and startled by her mentioning in a single breath so many things which they never discussed at Pentlands, things which they buried in silence and tried to destroy by pretending that they did not exist.
"We ought to speak of those things, sometimes," she continued sadly. "Sometimes when we are entirely alone with no one about to hear, when it doesn't make any difference. We can't pretend forever that they don't exist."
For a time he was silent, groping obviously, in a kind of desperation for something to answer. At last he said feebly, "And yet you sit up all night playing bridge with Sabine and old Mrs. Soames and Father."
"That does me good. You must admit that it is a change at least."
But he only answered, "I don't understand you," and began to pace up and down in agitation while she sat there waiting, actually waiting, for the thing to work itself up to a climax. She had a sudden feeling of victory, of intoxication such as she had not known in years, not since she was a young girl; and at the same time she wanted to laugh, wildly, hysterically, at the sight of Anson, so tall and thin, prancing up and down.
Opposite her he halted abruptly and said, "And I can see no good in inviting Mrs. Soames here so often."
She saw now that the tension, the excitement between them, was greater even than she had imagined, for Anson had spoken of Mrs. Soames and his father, a thing which in the family no one ever mentioned. He had done it quite openly, of his own free will.
"What harm can it do now? What difference can it make?" she asked. "It is the only pleasure left to the poor battered old thing, and one of the few left to your father."
Anson began to mutter in disgust. "It is a silly affair . . . two old . . . old. . . ." He did not finish the sentence, for there was only one word that could have finished it and that was a word which no gentleman and certainly no Pentland ever used in referring to his own father.
"Perhaps," said Olivia, "it is a silly affair now. . . . I'm not so sure that it always was."
"What do you mean by that? Do you mean. . . ." Again he fumbled for words, groping to avoid using the words that clearly came into his mind. It was strange to see him brought face to face with realities, to see him grow so helpless and muddled. "Do you mean," he stammered, "that my father has ever behaved . . ." he choked and then added, "dishonorably."
"Anson . . . I feel strangely like being honest to-night . . . just for once . . . just for once."
"You are succeeding only in being perverse."
"No . . ." and she found herself smiling sadly, "unless you mean that in this house . . . in this room. . . ." She made a gesture which swept within the circle of her white arm all that collection of Victorian souvenirs, all the mementoes of a once sturdy and powerful Puritan family, " . . . in this room to be truthful and honest is to be perverse."
He would have interrupted her here, angrily, but she raised her hand and continued, "No, Anson; I shall tell you honestly what I think . . . whether you want to hear it or not. I don't hope that it will do any good. . . . I do not know whether, as you put it, your father has behaved dishonorably or not. I hope he has. . . . I hope he was Mrs. Soames' lover in the days when love could have meant something to them. . . . Yes . . . something fleshly is exactly what I mean. . . . I think it would have been better. I think they might have been happy . . . really happy for a little time . . . not just living in a state of enchantment when one day is exactly like the next. . . . I think your father, of all men, has deserved that happiness. . . ." She sighed and added in a low voice, "There, now you know!"
For a long time he simply stood staring at the floor with the round, silly blue eyes which sometimes filled her with terror because they were so like the eyes of that old woman who never left the dark north wing and was known in the family simply as she, as if there was very little that was human left in her. At last he muttered through the drooping mustache, as if speaking to himself, "I can't imagine what has happened to you."
"Nothing," said Olivia. "Nothing. I am the same as I have always been, only to-night I have come to the end of saying 'yes, yes' to everything, of always pretending, so that all of us here may go on living undisturbed in our dream . . . believing always that we are superior to every one else on the earth, that because we are rich we are powerful and righteous, that because . . . oh, there is no use in talking. . . . I am just the same as I have always been, only to-night I have spoken out. We all live in a dream here . . . a dream that some day will turn sharply into a nightmare. And then what will we do? What will you do . . . and Aunt Cassie and all the rest?"
In her excitement her cheeks grew flushed and she stood up, very tall and beautiful, leaning against the mantelpiece; but her husband did not notice her. He appeared to be lost in deep thought, his face contorted with a kind of grim concentration.
"I know what has happened," he said presently. "It is Sabine. She should never have come back here. She was like that always . . . stirring up trouble . . . even as a little girl. She used to break up our games by saying: 'I won't play house. Who can be so foolish as to pretend muddy water is claret! It's a silly game.'"
"Do you mean that she is saying it again now . . . that it's a silly game to pretend muddy water is claret?"
He turned away without answering and began again to pace up and down over the enormous faded roses of the old Victorian carpet. "I don't know what you're driving at. All I know is that Sabine . . . Sabine . . . is an evil woman."
"Do you hate Sabine because she is a friend of mine?"
She had watched him for so many years disliking the people who were her friends, managing somehow to get rid of them, to keep her from seeing them, to force her into those endless dinners at the houses of the safe men he knew, the men who had gone to his college and belonged to his club, the men who would never do anything that was unexpected. And in the end she had always done as he wanted her to do. It was perhaps a manifestation of his resentment toward all those whom he could not understand and even (she thought) feared a little—the attitude of a man who will not allow others to enjoy what he could not take for himself. It was the first time she had ever spoken of this dog-in-the-manger game, but she found herself unable to keep silent. It was as if some power outside her had taken possession of her body. She had a strange sensation of shame at the very moment she spoke, of shame at the sound of her own voice, a little strained and hysterical.
There was something preposterous, too, in the sight of Anson prancing up and down the old room filled with all the souvenirs of that decayed respectability in which he wrapped himself . . . prancing up and down with all his prejudices and superstitions bristling. And now Olivia had dragged the truth uncomfortably into the light.
"What an absurd thing to say!" he said bitterly.
Olivia sighed. "No, I don't think so. . . . I think you know exactly what I mean." (She knew the family game of pretending never to understand a truthful, unpleasant statement.)
But this, too, he refused to answer. Instead, he turned to her, more savage and excited than she had ever seen him, so moved that he seemed for a second to attain a pale flash of power and dignity. "And I don't like that Fiji Islander of a daughter of hers, who has been dragged all over the world and had her head filled with barbaric ideas."
At the sight of him and the sound of his voice Olivia experienced a sudden blinding flash of intuition that illuminated the whole train of their conversation, indeed, the whole procession of the years she had spent here at Pentlands or in the huge brownstone house in Beacon Street. She knew suddenly what it was that frightened Anson and Aunt Cassie and all that intricate world of family. They were terrified lest the walls, the very foundations, of their existence be swept away leaving them helpless with all their little prides and vanities exposed, stripped of all the laws and prejudices which they had made to protect them. It was why they hated O'Hara, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic. He had menaced their security. To be exposed thus would be a calamity, for in any other world save their own, in a world where they stood unprotected by all that money laid away in solid trust funds, they would have no existence whatever. They would suddenly be what they really were.
She saw sharply, clearly, for the first time, and she said quietly, "I think you dislike Thérèse for reasons that are not fair to the girl. You distrust her because she is different from all the others . . . from the sort of girls that you were trained to believe perfect. Heaven knows there are enough of them about here . . . girls as like as peas in a pod."
"And what about this boy who is coming to stay with Sabine and her daughter . . . this American boy with a French name who has never seen his own country until now? I suppose he'll be as queer as all the others. Who knows anything about him?"
"Sabine," began Olivia.
"Sabine!" he interrupted. "Sabine! What does she care who he is or where he comes from? She's given up decent people long ago, when she went away from here and married that Levantine blackguard of a husband. Sabine! . . . Sabine would only like to bring trouble to us . . . the people to whom she belongs. She hates us. . . . She can barely speak to me in a civil fashion."
Olivia smiled quietly and tossed her cigarette into the ashes beneath the cold steel engraving of the Signing. "You are beginning to talk nonsense, Anson. Let's stick to facts, for once. I've met the boy in Paris. . . . Sybil knew him there. He is intelligent and handsome and treats women as if they were something more than stable-boys. There are still a few of us left who like to be treated thus . . . as women . . . a few of us even here in Durham. No, I don't imagine you'll care for him. He won't belong to your club or to your college, and he'll see life in a different way. He won't have had his opinions all ready made, waiting for him."
"It's my children I'm thinking of. . . . I don't want them picking up with any one, with the first person who comes along."
Olivia did not smile. She turned away now and said softly, "If it's Jack you're worrying about, you needn't fuss any longer. He won't marry Thérèse. I don't think you know how ill he is. . . . I don't think, sometimes, that you really know anything about him at all."
"I always talk with the doctors."
"Then you ought to know that they're silly . . . the things you're saying."
"All the same, Sabine ought never to have come back here. . . ."
She saw now that the talk was turning back into the inevitable channel of futility where they would go round and round, like squirrels in a cage, arriving nowhere. It had happened this way so many times. Turning with an air of putting an end to the discussion, she walked over to the fireplace . . . pale once more, with faint, mauve circles under her dark eyes. There was a fragility about her, as if this strange spirit which had flamed up so suddenly were too violent for the body.
"Anson," she said in a low voice, "please let's be sensible. I shall look into this affair of Sybil and O'Hara and try to discover whether there is anything serious going on. If necessary, I shall speak directly to both of them. I don't approve, either, but not for the same reason. He is too old for her. You won't have any trouble. You will have to do nothing. . . . As to Sabine, I shall continue to see as much of her as I like."
In the midst of the speech she had grown suddenly, perilously, calm in the way which sometimes alarmed her husband and Aunt Cassie. Sighing a little, she continued, "I have been good and gentle, Anson, for years and years, and now, to-night . . . to-night I feel as if I were coming to the end of it. . . . I only say this to let you know that it can't go on forever."
Picking up her scarf, she did not wait for him to answer her, but moved away toward the door, still enveloped in the same perilous calm. In the doorway she turned. "I suppose we can call the affair settled for the moment?"
He had been standing there all the while watching her out of the round cold blue eyes with a look of astonishment as if after all those years he had seen his wife for the first time; and then slowly the look of astonishment melted into one of slyness, almost of hatred, as if he thought, "So this is what you really are! So you have been thinking these things all these years and have never belonged to us at all. You have been hating us all the while. You have always been an outsider—a common, vulgar outsider."
His thin, discontented lips had turned faintly gray, and when he spoke it was nervously, with a kind of desperation, like a small animal trapped in a corner. The words came out from the thin lips in a sharp, quick torrent, like the rush of white-hot steel released from a cauldron . . . words spoken in a voice that was cold and shaken with hatred.
"In any case," he said, "in any case . . . I will not have my daughter marry a shanty Irishman. . . . There is enough of that in the family."
For a moment Olivia leaned against the door-sill, her dark eyes wide with astonishment, as if she found it impossible to believe what she had heard. And then quietly, with a terrible sadness and serenity in her voice, she murmured almost to herself, "What a rotten thing to say!" And after a little pause, as if still speaking to herself, "So that is what you have been thinking for twenty years!" And again, "There is a terrible answer to that. . . . It's so terrible that I shan't say it, but I think you . . . you and Aunt Cassie know well enough what it is."
Closing the door quickly, she left him there, startled and exasperated, among all the Pentland souvenirs, and slowly, in a kind of nightmare, she made her way toward the stairs, past the long procession of Pentland ancestors—the shopkeeping immigrant, the witch-burner, the professional evangelist, the owner of clipper ships, and the tragic, beautiful Savina Pentland—and up the darkened stairway to the room where her husband had not followed her in more than fifteen years.
Once in her own room she closed the door softly and stood in the darkness, listening, listening, listening. . . . There was at first no sound save the blurred distant roar of the surf eating its way into the white dunes and the far-off howling of a beagle somewhere in the direction of the kennels, and then, presently, there came to her the faint sound of soft, easy breathing from the adjoining room. It was regular, easy and quiet, almost as if her son had been as strong as O'Hara or Higgins or that vigorous young de Cyon whom she had met once for a little while at Sabine's house in Paris.
The sound filled her with a wild happiness, so that she forgot even what had happened in the drawing-room a little while before. As she undressed in the darkness she stopped now and then to listen again in a kind of fierce tension, as if by wishing it she could keep the sound from ever dying away. For more than three years she had never once entered this room free from the terror that there might only be silence to welcome her. And at last, after she had gone to bed and was falling asleep, she was wakened sharply by another sound, quite different, the sound of a wild, almost human cry . . . savage and wicked, and followed by the thud thud of hoofs beating savagely against the walls of a stall, and then the voice of Higgins, the groom, cursing wickedly. She had heard it before—the sound of old John Pentland's evil, beautiful red mare kicking the walls of her stall and screaming wildly. There was an unearthly, implacable hatred between her and the little apelike man . . . and yet a sort of fascination, too.
As she sat up in her bed, listening, and still startled by the wild sound, she heard her son saying:
"Mama, are you there?"
"Yes."
She rose and went into the other room, where, in the dim light from the night-lamp, the boy was sitting up in bed, his pale blond hair all rumpled, his eyes wide open and staring a little.
"You're all right, Jack?" she whispered. "There's nothing the matter?"
"No—nothing. I had a bad dream and then I heard the red mare."
He looked pale and ill, with the blue veins showing on his temples; yet she knew that he was stronger than he had been for months. He was fifteen, and he looked younger than his age, rather like a boy of thirteen or fourteen, but he was old, too, in the timeless fashion of those who have always been ill.
"Is the party over? . . . Have they all gone?" he asked.
"Yes, Jack. . . . It's almost daylight. You'd better try to sleep again."
He lay down without answering her, and as she bent to kiss him good-night, she heard him say softly, "I wish I could have gone to the party."
"You will, Jack, some day—before very long. You're growing stronger every day."
Again a silence, while Olivia thought bitterly, "He knows that I'm lying. He knows that what I've said is not the truth."
Aloud she said, "You'll go to sleep now—like a good boy."
"I wish you'd tell me about the party."
Olivia sighed. "Then I must close Nannie's door, so we won't waken her." And she closed the door leading to the room where the old nurse slept, and seating herself on the foot of her son's bed, she began a recital of who had been at the ball, and what had happened there, bit by bit, carefully and with all the skill she was able to summon. She wanted to give him, who had so little chance of living, all the sense of life she was able to evoke.
She talked on and on, until presently she noticed that the boy had fallen asleep and that the sky beyond the marshes had begun to turn gray and rose and yellow with the rising day.