“Tell me, Gertrude.” She assumed a voice of firm quietness, and again took one of Gertrude’s trembling hands. It felt suddenly clammy and increasingly cold.
Gertrude gazed at her blindly, then averted her face. “But, how can I? I don’t know where to begin, what to say—”
“Suppose you don’t ‘begin,’ Trudie. Suppose you just start right out. I don’t need preliminary explanations.”
“But it is so horrible, to insult you this way!” cried the girl, her hand writhing in Amy’s strongly retaining grasp. “I must have been mad to think that you might want to help me, that you would listen to me insulting your—”
There was a silence, after Gertrude’s one sharp sob. Her chin had fallen on her chest, and her hair, loosened, half covered her haggard young face. Amy still held her hand. Her own face had become grayer than ever, and sadder.
“It’s about Paul, isn’t it, darling?” Her voice was very gentle and tender. “Yes, I know. And you’ve come to tell me today that you don’t want to marry him, and that your Papa is urging you into it, and you—Trudie, how did you imagine I might be able to help you?”
“I didn’t know!” Gertrude turned to her wildly. “I didn’t know! But I thought you might understand. I thought in some way you might help. I didn’t realize how it would be insulting you—”
Amy dropped her head a little and studied the hand that held her own with such a desperate thin grip.
“It isn’t insulting me, love,” she said softly. “I understand how you feel. I always thought it—quite wrong. But your father assured me that you were willing, that you were quite fond of Paul. I didn’t know.”
“He lied! Aunt Amy, he lied! I—I never liked Paul. Forgive me, he’s your son. But I never liked him. I don’t mean he isn’t—excellent, and all that, and that he isn’t a really fine person. But I don’t want him. He’s not for me. I—I love Philippe, and we want to be married. And Papa is forcing me to marry Paul.”
“Forcing you? How horrible!” Amy stood up, agitated herself. She had become pale, and the tensed bones of her face showed in a hard way through her flesh.
Gertrude clung to her dress; Amy looked down at her pitifully, breathing very hard in her indignation and real horror.
“Yes, Aunt Amy, he’s forcing me. Of course, I know he can’t drag me to Paul and marry me outright to him. But—there are other ways. You—you don’t know Papa—” For one moment a faint smile, like a gleam, passed over Amy’s eyes. “But Papa has so many ways. You can’t resist him. It’s like fighting a mountain of iron. It just stands there, and after awhile, it bears down on you and crushes you.”
“Does Paul know how you feel about him, Trudie?”
“Yes. I’ve told him. Dozens of times. He either laughs, or gets angry. He doesn’t believe it. He says he loves me, and he can’t understand what difference it makes if I don’t love him.”
Amy listened to this thoughtfully. “Yes, I can see that Paul would say that. Paul is something like your father—he wants something and is outraged or contemptuous if any one opposes him. My children never did have much sense of humor. I admit that Paul is very egotistic, too; he believes that his own desires are more important than any one else’s. Your own father only believes that as he is the stronger, the weaker ought to yield without so much fuss.”
“And they usually yield,” said Gertrude with despair. “I can’t hold out against Papa much longer, even though I’d rather die than not marry Philippe. That’s why I’ve come to you, Aunt Amy. I—I thought perhaps you might talk to Paul.”
“Talk to Paul?” Amy smiled wryly. “What good would that do? Paul and I have never been—congenial. I have a suspicion he thinks me a weakling. At least, we can never meet, even at the table, without clashes. Besides, he would be very indignant if I tried to interfere with what he would call his own business. However, I will speak to him. But I have a still better plan than that. It might be successful.”
Gertrude, flushed with hope, sprang to her feet. She seized Amy’s arm. “What is it? Do you think it would be any good? Please tell me!”
Amy put her arm about the girl; her throat thickened with compassion. “I can’t promise too much, darling. But I think, I really think, it might have a good chance. Trust me to do what I can.”
Gertrude, laughing and smiling now through her tears, wiped her eyes. A faint color had come into her face. “I will trust you! I do trust you! It’s—it’s like a new life in me.”
Amy sat down. “Does your Mama know you have come to me to ask for help?”
“No. I didn’t tell her. You see, Mama thinks that I ought to be strong enough to oppose Papa, and keep on opposing him. Sometimes,” and her expression saddened, “sometimes I think Mama is just standing back and watching Papa and me, as she’d watch a play. Sometimes I think she wouldn’t care if Papa beat me down.”
“But how unjust of you, Trudie. Your Mama isn’t that sort at all.”
“Aunt Amy, you don’t know. One night I asked her to let me sleep with her, because Papa and Paul were waiting for me and I wanted to hide. She did let me sleep with her, and told Papa I was staying with Aunt Dorcas for the night. But she said that I’d always gone to Papa with everything, and it was a little late—”
“I see.” Amy was very grave. “I see.” To herself she said wretchedly: So May is even making this poor child pay for Ernest and me. I did not think it of her. And yet, it is only human. “Trudie, your Mama has much on her side. I think you have hurt her feelings for years. Try to understand that. But I am certain that she would do anything at all to keep you from being unhappy.”
Gertrude started fearfully. The door was opening, and Elsa after a hasty knock thrust her discontented face into the room. “May I come in for a moment, Mama? Oh, is that Trudie?” She smiled, her expression lightening.
“Come in, lovie,” said Amy, pulling another chair toward the fire. Elsa, without a glance at her mother, came beaming into the room. Her dark gray woollen dress was untidy and none too immaculate, and her pretty shining hair was disarranged and uncombed. There was a smudge on her big, well-shaped nose, and her hands were soiled; it was evident that she had been digging in the conservatory recently. She had grown quite plump, and this exuberance of flesh and her unusual height, made her appear much older and much more matured than her twenty-two years. Too, her fresh and blooming complexion, big white teeth, and general air of hearty earthiness, made her look like some wholesome, big-footed peasant girl. She sat down between her mother and Gertrude, and she made the girl appear fragile, colorless and too delicate by comparison.
“Well!” she exclaimed loudly. “I haven’t seen you for an age, Trudie! And the weather’s been so bad that I haven’t felt like visiting, myself. But how is everyone at home?” A deeper tinge came into her face “Have you heard from Frey lately?”
Gertrude smiled her rather thin and satirical smile. “We are all as well as ever. Did you know we expect Frey for Christmas, after all? Mama got a letter from him yesterday. She said she was anxious about it, and was wondering if he were well. His letter was a little incoherent and excited. We think he might have good news for us. Of course, Papa says he was probably drunk.” She laughed, a little hysterically, as though relieved from some enormous strain.
“But how silly. Frey hardly ever drinks anything,” said Elsa indignantly. Her color was very high, and the big capable hands that folded and unfolded a fold of her dress were trembling slightly. “So he is coming at Christmas?” She smiled brilliantly. “How awfully nice for—for all of you.”
Amy watched, pityingly. She sighed. What irony, she thought, that her children had fallen in love with Ernest’s children, and the latter would not be had by them. If only Elsa were not so big, so bouncing, so utterly impervious to delicacy, so utterly lacking in subtlety. Poor girl. It was probably the fragility of Frey and Gertrude that attracted such lustiness, such arrogant crudeness, such loud-voiced hunger. Why, she thought with whimsical melancholy, Frey and Ge
rtrude would be squashed like bugs under the weight of Paul and Elsa, or be lost, like Gullivers, in the hands of her young giants.
Gertrude, her terror lifted, was quite willing to be more amiable to her cousin. She chattered of Frey, his prospects, the praises of his teachers, repeated little anecdotes from his letters. And Elsa listened, brooding with delight upon the girl, her massive shoulders hunched toward her, her big lighted face intent.
She said, with an elaborate carelessness: “I haven’t written to Frey recently. I’m so afraid he’ll be cross with me. Did he—did he mention me in his last letter?”
Gertrude hesitated; Amy turned her calm face to her. “Why—yes, I believe he did,” lied Gertrude, embarrassed. “He—he said he had quite a lot of things to tell you. About Paris.”
Elsa smiled again. It was like the sun, that smile, shining and content. Can she really be as blind as that? thought Amy compassionately, her heart aching for her daughter. Or does she, like all of us, believe what she wants to believe? The lies are so obvious; only stupidity or love could be taken in by them. Sometimes I think, in Elsa’s case, that it is both.
“Oh, Paris,” said Elsa. “I would love to see Paris.” Amy regarded her with surprise. “Windsor is so dull,” went on Elsa, “it makes all of us dull, also. It is strange that we make our environment out of the stuff of ourselves, and yet it chokes us, sometimes, as if it were a foreign element we couldn’t breathe. As if,” she hesitated for words, “as if our environment was like the air we breathed out, a sort of exhalation, that it wasn’t wholesome to use again.” (No, thought Amy, with renewed surprise, she is not stupid. I wonder why she never talks so, to me? Do I oppress her, as Ernest oppresses his children?) Elsa, having concluded her speech, frowned; she never could find the exact words, and it infuriated her. “You know what I mean,” she added, with a lumbering, helpless wave of her hands. “You know—as if our environment, our civilization, was dung.”
Gertrude colored, Amy laughed, at this forthright description. “Yes, Windsor is dull,” agreed Amy. “But I never thought you considered it so.”
“What is there here for me, for any one?” asked Elsa surlily. “We’ll all be a pack of old maids, Trudie and me and Annabelle Shirley and Mary Anne Stimson and Adeline Liggett—all of us. Because our beaux are looking in New York and Baltimore and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh for wives. It’s just an accident that Lucy met her Oswald, and she had to do that in New York.” She rose, yawned and stretched, her gray stuff frock pulling up over her petticoats with the soiled flounces. She looked like a rosy great child, yawning so. She dropped her arms. “I’ll be glad to see Frey again,” she added. “I wish I could go back to Paris with him.” She looked at Gertrude as she said this, and deep within her blue eyes a spark started, and grew. Gertrude, feeling ashamed of her pitiful lies, glanced away.
Tea was brought in, and cakes. They ate and drank, snug in the golden firelight, the autumn day lowering more than ever outside. It was raining heavily, and the windows were awash with gray streams. The bare trees outside were spectres, writhing and drowning in a wall of water.
When Gertrude rose to go, she felt as if she were about to leave a snug harbor to sail out again into storms and distresses.
CHAPTER LXIX
Ernest, after a comfortable little dinner alone with Amy in her sitting room, looking about expansively, smiled at her, and sipped a very small glass of sherry. He still detested the taste of alcohol, and only the little fillip the sherry gave him made him drink even this modest amount.
Paul was detained at the bank, as it was the first of the month and the books were usually gone over at this time. John Charles was staying overnight with a friend, and Elsa, also. On these visits of Ernest’s, things were always neatly arranged in this fashion, without discussion, seemingly occurring in the natural train of events. If he guessed by what anxious contrivance, what humiliation, what secret self-detestation, Amy arrived at these satisfactory arrangements, he pretended bland ignorance. He could not help seeing the flush on her face when he arrived, her silence and stiffness. But after awhile she always became herself, gentle, laughing, understanding and tolerant, eager to please him, courting his good temper and his affection.
Amy had arranged an exceptionally fine little dinner this night, which tempted even Ernest’s casual appetite, and made him express unusual praise. She also looked exceedingly charming and youthful in her dark green velvet gown, elaborately draped and decorated with sparkling crystal buttons. At her ears glittered the rosy fire of diamonds, and her slender white hands with their delicate tips were ringed and braceleted. He noticed again that there was not a single strand of gray in her polished hair, not even at the temples. His love had made her bloom, regenerated her whole body, glossed her flesh.
He began to tell her of his recent visit to New York and Washington. He had had luncheon with the President. “Mr. Grant, or rather, General Grant, is a very amiable and simple man,” he said, “sturdy, unimaginative as are all soldiers, thinking himself very subtle, and remarkably easy to deceive. Soldiers are always very conservative, for they have deep faith in authority and are disciplined. I consider him a very fine President.”
“But they say he is quite stupid, really a cipher,” replied Amy. She had mastered the supreme artistry of conversation, to be able to think her own thoughts and yet make intelligent remarks.
“Precisely, my dear. And that is why he is such a good President! What the devil would we want with a President who had a will and notions of his own? God knows what sort of follies he would have up his sleeve, what arrogances. He might even get the idea that he could be a leader, or a reformer, leading the nation on to ‘higher and better’ things. And get himself into a fine tangle with Congress, thus dividing and upsetting the country. What we need in a President is a simple gentleman to sign papers and add dignity to public affairs, a nice conservative gentleman who has no dreams of social reforms, and is quite satisfied with things as they are, one who loves his garden and likes children, rides horses sedately, grows a beard in order to look benign, and presides over Congress like a very benevolent and amiable deity.”
“I wonder,” said Amy thoughtfully, “what would happen to this country if we accidentally elected someone like Lincoln again, a real leader? God knows we need one in these times.”
“Nonsense. Congress is capable of managing everything, and capable of being managed—by those who are really in power.” Ernest smiled slightly. “If we had had a President with ‘notions’ around September, 1869, we would have been ruined. He might have stopped that corner in gold. There’s been a lot of so-called ‘labor agitation’ these last couple of years, too, and a President who had social delusions might have encouraged the dogs in the mines and the factories, might have made the financial panic we are just digging out of now the excuse for miserable ‘labor’ legislation and ‘protection.’ We don’t want kiss-mammies in the White House, full of brotherly love and indignation. This is a practical world; there’s no place in it for putting axioms into practice and setting up the Kingdom of Heaven down here. There are hard-headed men behind Congress, capable of managing things without nonsense.”
“And without mercy,” murmured Amy. But Ernest’s sharp ear caught the remark.
“Without mercy? What does mercy mean? Sloppy sentimentality? Impractical ideals that split into shavings on the first contact with reality? Mercy, my dear, is always the enemy of progress, for progress demands strength and courage and uncompromising resolution. Virtues are all very well for parlor ornaments, but you can’t carry much water in them.”
“And what do you mean by progress? The greatest good to the greatest number? Or the greatest profits to the few at the cost of the greatest misery to the many? I don’t call that progress, Ernest. I call that exploitation.”
But Ernest merely grinned. “I see you have been reading the nasty newspapers. I’m surprised at you, Amy. Why don’t you read a little biology, instead? Really a fascinating subject; I’ve
just discovered it recently, and found that Nature expresses all my ideas. Not that I’m a crusader, even for Nature’s very excellent methods; I merely want to mind my own business.”
Amy poured more tea. “What is this I hear about the Knights of Labor? I understand they are actually boasting of a fifty thousand membership.”
Ernest grunted. “Just discontented cattle, second generation Magyars and Prussians and Irish, and Czechs and Bohemians, whose fathers were damn glad to come over here in cattle boats and work fourteen hours a day in mills and factories and mines for more to eat than they had ever had before in their lives. But feed a dog and he thinks he is a wolf. Impudent rabble! They were starving in their own countries, and utterly hopeless. We bring them over here, put them to work, put roofs over their heads, pay them all they are worth, and once the edge is off their hunger, and they have cleared their mouths of their food, they begin to yelp for more. Even if they can’t eat any more.”
“Didn’t Oliver Twist ask for more, too?” Amy’s smile was faintly satirical.
“Oliver Twist? Who the devil is Oliver Twist?”
“You would not know, Ernest. He’s only a character in a novel.”
“A novel, eh? Well, I leave the novel-reading to you women.”
Amy rose and went to a small rosewood bookcase, and came back with a thick book in her hand. She laid it playfully near Ernest’s cup. “There, it’s by your own countryman, Dickens. I’m sure it’ll bring memories back to you of the place your mother used to call ‘dear old England.’ Oliver Twist is in there. I have an idea it might do you some good to read about little Oliver.”
“Oh, Dickens is another one of your social reformers, full of thunder and lightning and indignation.” Ernest turned the pages disinterestedly. “I’m surprised his books are ever published in England. But then, there’s been a lot of fool labor legislation in England recently. Filthy sentimentality!”
“Yes, that’s true.”
Ernest looked annoyed. “Some fools even prophesy that the day may arrive when labor will have something to say in Government. I hope not. I’m sure not. That would be a calamity.” He frowned. “Do you know why I went to Washington, Amy? Well, there’s been a lot of scurvy agitating lately about the importation of foreign labor. There always was a little yammering, but no one paid much attention. Now it’s gotten worse, due to those Chinese we brought in to build the Western railroads. There’s even a lobby in Washington, very vocal. So I went to Washington to see a few of my friends there, Senators and Supreme Court Judges. Gentlemen. They assured me I had little to worry about.” He laughed shortly. “Amy, all things are for sale in Democracies.”
Dynasty of Death Page 71