Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 21
WEEKS passed before there came from Ellen any news beyond the mere statement that she was alive, comfortable and well, and that although she was sorry for her actions she could not have done otherwise. Some day, she implied with romantic overtones, they would understand.
When at last a real letter came, it was turbulent, hard and unrepentant. Nor was the spelling the best.
"I am sorry for May . . . a little," she wrote, "but it won't make any difference to her. She is in love with men and not one man. To have lost Clarence won't end her happiness. Any man will do as well. In a year she'll be married, like as not to Herman Biggs. It was different with me. Everything depended upon Clarence . . . everything, you understand. To me he made all the difference.
"And we are happy," she continued, as if this was, after all, a matter of secondary importance. "Clarence loves me. We have a nice apartment quite near to Riverside Drive that overlooks the river where the warships anchor. It is the top floor of an enormous apartment house . . . ten stories high, and the view is wonderful. You can see over half the city. It is called the Babylon Arms.
"You see, Clarence and two friends of his (a Mr. Bunce and a Mr. Wyck) shared it before I came and now we have it to ourselves, because his two friends kindly moved elsewhere. Mr. Bunce is nice but Mr. Wyck is a poor sport, always talking about his relatives. You see, he's what he calls an 'old New Yorker,' sort of run-down and pathetic, and awfully dependent. I think he hates me for having taken Clarence away from him, and for breaking up the apartment. But it doesn't matter. He's too insignificant to count.
"Mr. Bunce got married the other day. He says we drove him to it, chasing him out into the street with no place to live. That's the way he talks . . . hearty and pleasant but a bit noisy. The girl isn't much—a big, pleasant girl like himself whose father is a building contractor in Hoboken, which is really a suburb of New York."
And so she sketched briefly, and with the careless cynicism of youth, the downfall of Mr. Wyck; for it is true that the reverberations of the elopement made themselves felt in a place so far from the Town as the Magical City. With her appearance the whole world of Mr. Wyck toppled, hung for a moment in mid-air, and at last collapsed, leaving him in the backwater of a grimy boarding house on lower Lexington Avenue. No longer had he any one to admire or honor him for the sake of the ancient Wyck blood and the spinster aunts in Yonkers. On the very day of Ellen's arrival the name of Wyck Street was changed to Sullivan in honor of a Tammany politician. Night after night, a lonely little man, he sat, an outcast, on the edge of his narrow bed, waiting for his milk to heat over the gas jet in the fourth floor rear. He mourned Clarence who represented the only friendship he had ever known. He mourned the Babylon Arms where for a time he had been almost a man, independent and free. And as he mourned the hatred grew in the recesses of his timid, unhappy soul.
It is true that in her letter Ellen revealed a great deal, but it is true that she did not reveal everything, for there remained between her and a complete revelation the pride which would not allow her to admit disillusion. She did not, for example, say that the view from her windows included, besides the noble river, glimpses of wooden shacks and bleak factories, half-veiled in smoke and mist, on the distant Jersey shore. Nor did she say that beneath her window there were monotonous and hideous rows of brownstone houses, unrelieved in their ugliness even by tiny patches of mangy grass. And she said nothing of the railway tracks that lay between her and the river, crowded with cars that imprisoned lines of wretched cattle standing shoulder to shoulder, whose presence sometimes filled the lofty flat with the faint, dismal sounds and odors of the barnyard. These things she could not bring herself to set down on paper because they would have dimmed the splendor raised by such a name as The Babylon Arms.
Nor did she say that after all Mr. Bunce and Mr. Wyck and even perhaps Clarence were not so different from the people in the Town; because this might have given rise to a faint suspicion that, after all, she had not escaped. There were things and shades of things which the Town must never know. She understood, perhaps even then, the affair of building a career. There must be glory, only glory, and triumph.
And Mrs. Tolliver, reading the letter over and over in the long darkness of the winter evenings, stirred herself night after night to observe that "something had happened to Ellen."
"She's told me more in this letter than she has ever told me in all her life before. She must be happy or she couldn't write such a letter."
And for a time she consoled herself with this thought, only to utter after a long silence the eternal doubt. "I only hope he's good enough for her."
Then, when her husband had fallen into a final deep slumber from which he stubbornly refused to be roused, it was the habit of the woman to go to the piano and dissipate the terrible stillness of the lonely room with the strains of The Blue Danube and The Ninety and Nine played laboriously with fingers that were stained and a little stiff from hard work.
The faint, awkward sounds, arising so uncertainly from the depths of a piano accustomed now to silence, must have roused in her a long sequence of memories turning backward slowly as she played, into the days when she had struggled for time from household cares to learn those pitiful tunes. The hours spent at the old harmonium in her father's parlor were hours stolen from cooking and baking, from caring for her younger brothers and sisters, hours which, so long ago, had raised in her imagination sounds and scenes more glamorous than anything found in the borders of the country that was her home. They were not great, these two melodies—one born of Evangelism and the other out of the gaiety of an Austrian city—yet they were in a fashion the little parcel of glamour which life had dealt out to Hattie Tolliver. The rest was work and watchfulness, worries and cares.
There must have been in the woman something magnificent, for never, even in deep recesses of her heart, did she complain of the niggardliness of that tiny parcel. She sought only to wrest a larger share for her children, for her Ellen who was gone now a-seeking glamour on her own.
And, of course, the sound of the music made by her stiffened fingers may have brought back for a time something of her lost Ellen.
Because there was in Hattie no softness which would allow her to admit defeat, she set about, once the first shock of the affair had softened, to reconstruct all her existence upon a new plan, motivated by a single ideal. How this change came about, she would have been the last to understand. It came, in a sense, as a revelation. She awoke one morning and there it was, clear as the very winter landscape—a vision of the sort which guides people of passionate nature. True, there were circumstances which led her mind in that one direction; there was, to be sure, the look that had come into the blue eyes of her elder son since the day when Ellen had fled. Any one could have seen it, a look so eloquent and so intense, which said, "I too must have my chance. I too must go into the world." Perhaps he remembered the half-humorous promises to help him that Ellen had made so frequently. There was, she knew, a secret sympathy between the two in which she played no part. It was a look which came often enough into the eyes of Hattie Tolliver's family. If the boy had been old enough to reason and understand such things, he might have said, "My grandfathers set out into a wilderness to conquer and subdue it. It was a land filled with savages and adventure. I too must have my chance. I am of a race of pioneers but I no longer have any frontier. I must turn back again, as Ellen has turned, to the east!" In a little while—a few years more—the look was certain to come into the eyes of Robert, the youngest.
And doubtless the woman came to understand that it was impossible any longer to hope that her husband might realize any of the wild and gaudy dreams she had held so often before his philosophic and indifferent eyes. He was a gentleman, and no longer young; he had indeed turned the corner into middle age. What must be done rested with her alone.
And so, understanding that Ellen would never turn back, the plan of her existence ceased to find its being in the smoky Town; it became instead a pursuit of her children. If they would not remain in the home she had made for them then she must follow them, and, like a nomad, place her tent and build her fires where they saw fit to rest.
So she set about planning how it was possible to escape from the Town, to transport all her family and their belongings into a world which she had disliked and even feared but which now must be faced. Fantastical schemes were born, reared their heads and collapsed in a brain which considered nothing impossible. She would herself support them all if necessary, though she had not the faintest idea of how it was to be done. Surely in a great city like New York, there were ways of becoming rich, even fabulously so. She had read stories in the newspapers. . . .
But her first action was a direct one. Dressed in black merino and armed with an umbrella which she carried on important occasions as a general bears his baton, she assailed her enemy Judge Weissman in the sanctuary of his untidy office, and after a scene in which she accused him of thievery, bribery and a dozen other crimes, she bullied him, playing shrewdly upon a horsewhipping incident out of his own past, into using his influence to gain for her husband some new work—not mere work but a position worthy of him and of the dignity of her family.
She won the battle and in her triumph, which mounted higher and higher during the walk home, she gave rein in her unbounded optimism to even wilder and more fantastic schemes. There was relief in the knowledge that at last she had taken things into her own hands. No longer was she to be a power behind the throne urging forward an amiable and indifferent husband. Things must change now. She herself would act. She had achieved an opening wedge. In time she would secure an appointment for her husband in New York. She could take the children there. She could be where she could drop in on Ellen at the Babylon Arms (preposterous name!). She would watch and aid them in their progress toward success and glory. Ah, she could wrest anything from life. It was, after all, nothing more than a question of energy and persistence.
These thoughts were whirling madly about her brain as she turned the corner into Sycamore Street in time to see a group of children congregated before the path that led into the shaggy domain of the Tollivers. They appeared to be watching something and clung to the gate peering in through the lilacs at the vine-covered house. Unconsciously she increased her pace, and as she approached the gate they fell back, with a look of awe and the sort of animal curiosity which comes into the eyes of children gathered on the scene of a catastrophe. Through their ranks and into the house, she made her way like a fine ship in full sail.
Once inside she learned the news.
It was this—that upstairs in the room once occupied by Ellen there lay on the bed the unconscious form of her father, the invincible Jacob Barr. They told her that the patriarch, while superintending the loading of hay in his mows, had made a miss-step and so crashed to the floor twenty feet below. They had brought him to her house on a truss of hay. The doctors, the same doctors whom Gramp Tolliver had baffled, said he might die suddenly or that he might live for years, but he would never walk again.
When she had put the place in order and driven out the confusion which accompanies physicians, she seated herself in a chair opposite the unconscious old man and presently began to weep.
"What good is it now? What difference does it make?" she repeated bitterly over and over again.
Where before there had been but one, there were now two old men to be managed, and Hattie Tolliver, understanding that it was now impossible to follow Ellen, settled herself to waiting. For what? Perhaps for death to claim her own father. It would have been, as she said, a blessing, for the fracture concerned far more than a hip bone; the very spirit of old Jacob Barr was crushed in that fall from the mows. Sinking back upon the pillows of Ellen's bed, he gave up the struggle. A life in which there was no activity was for him no life at all. He became again like a little child, like his own little children whom his daugher Hattie had cared for through all the years of his widowhood. Sometimes he sang songs and there were hours when he talked to himself and to Hattie of things which had happened when she was a very little girl or before she was born. He lived again in the Civil War and in the days preceding it when the fleeing niggers hid in his great mows. Passers-by in Sycamore Street sometimes heard snatches of singing in a voice now cracked, now loud and strong and defiant. . . . John Brown's Body lies a-moldering in the Grave, But his Soul goes marching on. Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
But Gramp Tolliver in his high room walled with books kept spry and alert, triumphant now in the knowledge that he had survived old Jacob Barr, that the stern virtue of the old Scotsman had not prolonged his health and happiness by so much as an hour. He read his old books and scribbled on bits of yellow paper, ageing not at all, remaining always spare, cynical, vindictive.
In these days his daughter-in-law rarely addressed him, and less and less frequently she came to see that his room was in order. There were other cares to occupy her energy. There was a husband, working now, and two growing boys and her own father to care for; in addition to all these she had taken to sewing, secretly, for friends whose fortunes were better. (She was a magnificent needle-woman.) And she had each day to write a long letter to Ellen, though the letters in return came but weekly and sometimes not so often.
They kept her informed of the bare facts of her daughter's life. They told her, in a new, amusing and somewhat cynical fashion of Ellen's adventures among the music teachers of the city . . . of weeks spent wandering through the bleak and drafty corridors of studio buildings, tormented with the sounds made by aspiring young musicians. They described the charlatans, the frauds, which she found on every side, teachers who offered every sort of trick and method by which fame and fortune could be reached by the one and only short cut. There were women called Madame Tessitura and Madame Scarlatti, who had been born Smith or Jones and knew less of music than May Seton, and men who wore velveteen jackets and insisted upon being called "Maestro." There were the usual adventures (alarming to Hattie Tolliver who saw her daughter still as a little girl) with lecherous old men. Indeed, in this connection Ellen wrote with a certain hard mockery that was utterly strange and carried overtones of an unmoral point of view, as if such things were to be treated more as preposterous jokes than as "grave offenses." And in this Mrs. Tolliver fancied she discerned some traces of Lily's influence. To a woman like Lily, such things didn't matter. She took them too lightly, as a part of the day's experience . . . carefree, charming, indolent Lily, so impossible to combat.
And at last, wrote Ellen, she had stumbled upon the proper person . . . an old man, a Frenchman, who bore the name of Sanson. He knew what music could be, and so she had settled with him, working under his guidance. In his youth he had known Liszt, and he had been a friend of Teresa Carreño, until a quarrel with that temperamental beauty ended the friendship. Ellen, he had hinted, might one day become as famous as Carreño (she was like her in a way) but she must work, work, work and not lose her head. It would be a long hard path with Paris at the end! (It was always this thought which filled Mrs. Tolliver with a nameless dread. Paris! Paris! And Lily!)
But what troubled her most was the absence of any comment upon Clarence beyond a simple statement that he was well. By now she must have realized that Ellen had no love for him. From her letters it was clear that she had not found him actually offensive. He was a good enough husband; he did everything for Ellen. It was, indeed, clear that he worshiped her. But on her side there appeared to be only a great void, a colossal emptiness where there should have been the emotion that was the very foundation of her mother's life.
Mrs. Tolliver worried too about the expenses of her daughter's household. In such matters, distance made no difference. It was her habit to remark to her husband, "If only I could be near Ellen I could teach her so much about managing. Clarence must make a great deal of money to have such a flat and pay for her lessons too."
And when she questioned Ellen in her letters, she received the reply that Ellen had spoken to her husband and been told that there was no need to worry. He had, he said, plenty of money . . . eight thousand a year.
It is possible of course that Ellen never loved him for an instant; it is probable that the state of her affections never progressed beyond the stage of the kindly pity which is akin to love. She was not a bad wife. She cared for him admirably. She kept his house in order. She even cooked for him delicacies which she had learned from her mother. He insisted that she have a servant, declaring that he could easily afford it. She gave him all that he asked, even of herself, and yet there was a difference . . . a difference with altered everything. It was that difference which Hattie Tolliver, expert in such things, sensed in the letters of her daughter. It filled her with a vague suspicion that Ellen had sold herself to satisfy a thing no greater than mere ambition.
Of Clarence's sentiments there could have been no doubt. He sang his wife's praises to the men at the Superba Electrical Company, to the men whom he met on those trips into the west when Ellen was left behind alone in the Babylon Arms. He bought her present after present until, at length, the whole aspect of their little apartment was changed. Bit by bit the furniture altered its character. First there was a small grand piano, and then a sofa and presently a chair or two, and at last the brass beds which he and Bunce had once occupied gave place to twin beds of pale green ornamented with garlands of salmon pink roses. And strangely enough as the apartment brightened, the little man himself appeared slowly to fade. In contrast with his handsome and energetic wife, he grew more and more pale. It was as if he were being devoured by some inward malady. Yet there was nothing wrong. Doctors could discover nothing save the usual weakness of his heart.
If he desired a more demonstrative affection than that given him by Ellen, he said nothing of the desire. He never spoke of love. Indeed, long afterward, when Ellen followed back her memories of their life together she was unable to recall any mention of the word. If he desired her passionately he sought her silently and with timidity, as if each caress she gave him were far beyond that which he had any reason to expect. He was a shy man and with Ellen it was impossible to speak of such things; there was a coolness about her, a chastity of the sort which surrounds some women regardless of everything. And always it was she who dominated, always she who gave, coldly and without passion, as if she felt that in all honor she owed him a debt.
With the passing of the months the breach between Ellen and Mr. Wyck became complete. The other friends came sometimes to the Babylon Arms where Clarence, with a sudden expansion of temperament, entertained them in lordly fashion and beamed with pride in his wife. But Mr. Wyck no longer came. There had been no open quarrel, not even a hasty word. Quietly he had dropped from the habit of seeing Clarence at home. It was a change so imperceptible that before Clarence understood it, it was complete.
They met sometimes at lunch in one of the cheap restaurants frequented by Mr. Wyck, for Clarence, so far as his own needs and pleasures were concerned, had taken to a program of economy. And there, over greasy food, they talked of the old days together, Clarence speaking with sentiment and Mr. Wyck with a curious wistfulness. He too had grown pale and cadaverous upon the diet in his Lexington Avenue boarding house. He hated Ellen. He had hated her from the moment she had stepped through the door of the apartment, so cool and arrogant, so sure of herself. But he was too wise to betray his feeling save in subtle gibes at her and references to the jolly old days that were passed. He was lost now in the obscenities of a boarding house, a nobody treated scornfully even by the old aunts in Yonkers who looked upon him still as an anemic little boy with Fauntleroy curls playing among the iron dogs and deers of their front lawn.
And no one, of course, knew that Mr. Wyck, wrapped in his shabby overcoat, sometimes walked the streets after dark in the neighborhood of Riverside Drive, the gale from the North River piercing his bones, his pale eyes upturned toward the pleasant light that beamed from the top floor of the Babylon Arms.