“A few days ago I saw Elsa in her carriage, shopping, and your darling little granddaughter Alice was with her. I asked for a photograph of the child, as you suggested I should, and when I secure one from Elsa I shall send it to you, though I still don’t see why you feel you cannot ask for it yourself. Alice is now nearly six years old, and all dark-red curls, the way yours used to be, though we all thought she would be a blonde, like me and Dorcas, and the prettiest dark blue eyes. How sad that she does not know her grandmama! Elsa is very stout, and unfriendly, I suppose on account of Jules, for Jules and Paul haven’t spoken to each other in a social way for over two years now. And Elsa, though she is barely thirty-five, has considerable gray hair. She is the type of woman who grows old quickly.
“We rarely see Paul, except at a distance at soirees and receptions and parties, and he, too, is stout and getting somewhat gray. Such an unpleasant young man, not at all agreeable, at least, not to me, his aunt. However poor mild Martin could have been the father of such as Elsa and Paul and John Charles is quite beyond me. Why, Martin was as meek and sweet as new butter!
“Lucy and her husband were in town for Christmas, bringing their boy with them. Thomas is a great boy now, nearly ten years old, and not a Barbour at all. Lucy has turned out to be a very pleasant young woman, and New York has certainly improved her, for she is amiable now and interested in the family. However, she is quite stout and losing her looks.”
There were more pages of this. And then, at the bottom, very cautiously for the indiscreet Florabelle: “I do not see much of Amy, but she is looking very well, for a woman of her age, and a grandmother. Ernest came alone to dinner last night, for John Charles and Joey have not been feeling very well lately, and Amy couldn’t come, and one has to be so cautious these days, with all this typhoid about, and the newspapers screaming that Ernest is really responsible for it all, not attending to the shacks of his workers and draining off the swamps down near the river where they live, and so many of them dying of the epidemic. Ernest himself isn’t looking any too well, and is quite thin. He works entirely too hard, we think, and his hair is quite white. He is showing his age, I am sorry to say.”
May put down this letter, as she did all the others, with the feeling that she had come an exhausting way through tangle and brush and hot sterile stretches just to reach an unsatisfying oasis where the water was bitter and scalding and the date-palms heavy with dust.
CHAPTER C
May received a ceremoniously autographed copy of Poems of Melancholy by her nephew, François Bouchard, “elegantly bound in red morocco,” stamped in gilt. She was too kind and gracious a woman, even in her thoughts, to lay the book aside with a smile: she was not only curious as to what François had written, but also conscientious. She had always been a little sorry for François, thin and brown and neurotic, with his feverish black eyes and thick black hair and dry brown lips which he was continually wetting. He was “the Jesuit” forgetting his cruelty and becoming afflicted with a sort of inward St. Vitus’s dance.
The poems were not too bad, but embarrassingly amateurish to the eye of an adult mind; in places they were exceedingly turgid, grandiloquent, heavily despairing, or banal. But there were a few lines that caught May’s attention, amazing her, making her wonder that such a youth as François, innocent and egotistic, could have written such a thing:
“O tell me not that memory is life!
It is but death,
Aware of itself!”
And that is what my life is: “death aware of itself,” she thought, with grief-stricken and astonished realization. She put the book aside, as though it had burned her. O God, if I did not have any memories! If I did not remember the children around the dining-room table where my father ate his dinners: Frey and Gertrude, Reginald and Guy, and Joey! Christmas dinners, with the turkey and the ham steaming on the table, and the silver bowls of nuts and apples and sweets, and the fire on the mahogany panelling, and the even rim of white on the window sills, and the snow falling and falling and the frozen trees snapping! And the sleighbells out on the drive, and friends and relatives arriving with bundles and baskets, and everyone laughing and shouting and stamping snow from his boots, and kissing, and turning hard cold red cheeks to be kissed—all the things that make home, and which nothing can ever replace. And Ernest, standing with his legs apart, back to the fire, young Ernest, middle-aged Ernest, old Ernest, but always the Ernest I loved—!
Her restlessness and despair were worse, now, for it was Christmas again, Christmas in Paris, with a long gray rain falling and splashing hollowly in the gutters, and carriages sliding by and umbrellas and alien voices. Godfrey, as usual, was absent, for his Second Symphony was to be played in the Opera on Christmas Day and he was busy attending rehearsals, unaware of time or mother or obligations, or even food and sleep. He would not be home, even for dinner, and May was allowing her servants the day off and intended to eat her lonely dinner in the great drafty dining room of the apartment-hotel. After that, she would drive to the Opera and hear the symphony, though her weary mind and tired body shuddered at the prospect.
As the ormolu clock on the black marble mantelpiece in her living room chimed one o’clock, May sighed, and began to consider whether to wear her black velvet or her dark blue gown, and whether pearls or diamonds were the more suitable. The rain ran in quicksilver streams down her silk-curtained windows, and she could hear the clop-clop of horses drearily trudging through the rain on the street below, and the rumble of carriage wheels. The fire had become low, and seemed to lurk sulkily behind its bars. She could hear the clock ticking loudly, the run and pelt of the storm, the faint dropping of coals, her own breathing. And nothing else.
All at once she thought: I am a lonely old woman in a strange house in a strange country among strangers, and the strangest of them all is my son! Not even he wants me, and there is not a soul to care whether I die in this room this very moment or not. And I have not been a bad wife or a bad mother! I have loved my home and my children and my husband, and brought to them humor and tenderness and understanding and charity. And in my old age, in spite of all the maxims and the proverbs, I have been left alone, an old woman with tears splashing down on her plump bosom, and a lonely dinner waiting for her downstairs in a lonely empty dining room, prepared for her by strangers.
She wiped her eyes and told herself despairingly that she could not attend that symphony. Godfrey would not know whether she were there or not, and he never asked her opinion of his compositions. And yet, she could not stay here, alone! She rose to her feet, filled with panic in the rain-darkened room, and clenched her hands to her heart, breathing heavily.
There came a loud shrill peal from the door-bell, splintering the silence into jagged fragments. May was so startled that she dropped her handkerchief, and her heart began to race. It could not be Frey, and it certainly was not any of her very casual acquaintances, who would not think of a lonely old woman on Christmas Day who apparently had wealth and position enough to entertain herself. She went to the door, for not one of the servants was in the apartment, and opened it herself, her knees trembling.
A tall, gaunt, rain-drenched young woman stood there, with great black eyes in a thin sallow face, rain-wet black hair streaking about her bony cheeks, hat tipped drunkenly over her forehead, the plumes running with water, and her badly fitting coat so hastily fastened that two large pearl buttons were riding up under her chin without the detention of the buttonholes opposite, now occupied by other buttons. Her boots were already leaving wet stains on the red carpet, and behind her, astonished but polite, lurked a small bellboy pulled lopsided by the weight of a vast and untidy-looking portmanteau, seemingly about to burst at the fastenings. The whole air of the young woman was one of febrile and haphazard forgetfulness, as though she found clothes an intolerable nuisance, out necessary, she supposed; she had a breathlessness which one suspected was quite common to her, and the manner of an absent-minded innocent who found life just a little too mu
ch at times, too exacting and exasperating.
May stared, blinking and incredulous. “Renee!” she burst out at last in a faint voice.
“Yes, Renee. How are you, darling Aunt May?” And the wet and astonishing young woman planted a vehement and very damp kiss on May’s cheek. “I just arrived in Paris this morning, to spend Christmas with you, and—well, here I am! Darling Aunt May, kiss me again! You haven’t changed a bit! Oh, bother, yes, boy—garçon—put the bag down anywhere. Anywhere! Aunt May, have you a franc? Let us get rid of this little wretch!”
In a mist of confusion, May led Renee into her own bedroom, helped her to unpack and change to dry clothes (the while Renee jerkily and vehemently chattered), and thought: She will, of course, sleep with me. What on earth will Frey say, and he so sensitive, and Renee so nerve-racking and noisy and talkative and untidy, but the dearest girl!
But when Renee, in wrinkled dry clothes consisting of a hideous shapeless black frock with crushed drapery at the back and a twisted white collar none too clean, and big black boots badly in need of cleaning, and sleek straight black hair confined sketchily in a net, and two huge pearls in her big brown ears, was sitting before the fire and sipping hot sweet coffee, the room no longer seemed desolate and abandoned, the fire crackled redly, and even the rain added a warm and protecting touch to the wintry afternoon.
She chattered on in her loud jerky nervous voice, seeming to run with febrile violence from one subject to another like one pursued. Her great dark eyes, soft and shimmering and heavily fringed, added beauty to the long thin colorless face with its big colorless mouth. Her long bony hands, with their prominent knuckles, gestured continually with motions oddly foreign. But May, smiling and happy and relaxed, thought what a pity it was that no one ever had realized what intelligence and kindness and understanding integrity lived in the plain, almost “horsey” face; and that should someone take the care to dress the poor girl appropriately, perhaps in dark red velvets and severe smooth broadcloths, and pile the sliding hair high in shining swirls, Renee would have been decidedly distinguée. Then, behind the swift animation, the almost convulsive energy of Renee’s face and manner, May, used to sadness herself, saw sadness and pain, and remembered that Renee had worshipped her father. And now she had neither father nor mother, and was keeping a lonely house for her brother Honore, who was too busy to know she was alive. “It is just a small house,” Renee was saying, with her strained laugh that revealed her square white teeth, “on Crescent Road, you know, one of those new things with dormer windows and long dreary doors and wooden fretwork and belfries. Only eight rooms, and three servants, but then, it is big enough for Honore and myself, and has two extra bedrooms, for when Etienne comes home, which is not often, and brings a guest.”
Renee had come to England with one of her few friends, quite unexpectedly: “But then, it was so lonely at home, and I couldn’t bear another Christmas without my—Papa; and now this Christmas there won’t even be Mama—And I thought, ‘why not go over to Paris and see dear Aunt May and Frey?’ and so here I am! Oh, Anita won’t mind; she’s going to Scotland, where she has a great-aunt and uncle, and I couldn’t bear to think of Scotland, after England. England was bad enough—” She smiled broadly, but May again saw the loneliness and fear and grief behind that smile.
“Stay with me, dearest Renee,” said May impulsively. She took the girl’s warm bony hand and held it in her trembling palms. “I’m a foolish, self-pitying old woman, but I’m lonely, and I’ve always loved you, my dear. And Frey—he’ll not even notice you’re here, unless you like music—You do? Then he’ll be captivated and you’ll hear enough music to satisfy you all the rest of your life.”
Renee’s smiling face suddenly changed to horror. “But how dreadful I am, Aunt May! I haven’t told you: Joey and John Charles are very ill with typhoid fever, though Joey was believed to be getting better just as I left four weeks ago! But John Charles was very low, and Aunt Amy was taking care of them—”
“Joey?” May’s face went gray and pinched, and a sickness rose up in her. “Joey? But he must be better, or I should have heard!”
“Of course! He was getting better four weeks ago. But it is such a terrible epidemic, and the people all say it is Uncle Ernest’s fault, which is ridiculous, though he absolutely refused to do anything about the water supply for his workmen, and it is so marshy where they live, and the doctors have been warning that if he does not do something the epidemic will spread and nothing will stop it. But he says ‘Stuff and nonsense’—you know Uncle Ernest.”
“Yes, I know ‘Uncle Ernest,’” said May through pale lips.
“And then when Joey and John Charles took it, and others took it, he had the water supply attended to, but it was too late. The Philadelphia papers are just screaming for his blood, and he’s suing one of them, and now even the New York papers are dancing like dervishes, and there’s an investigation.”
May, suddenly prickling all over with deadly fear, rang the service bell. When an attendant came she wrote a cable with hands that were cold and shaking. It was addressed to Ernest, and asked to be informed of Joey’s condition.
This done, she sat down and tried to concentrate on Renee’s chatter, but a dreadful presentiment was upon her, and her whole body shivered and became icy. I shall be violently ill if I don’t control myself, she said over and over in her thoughts, trying to listen to Renee. Her hands would clasp themselves together convulsively and she would swallow dryly to keep from screaming aloud.
Then, crossing her own cable, a cable from Ernest arrived that night, just as May began to light the lamps and the servants were returning.
It read, briefly: “Joey died this morning at ten o’clock. John Charles died three days ago.” Only that, no attempt being made to soften the blow, no concern shown for the mother of his son.
But May, in her own agony of grief, forgave even this, for in Joey’s death Ernest had lost his last hope in his children. His son had died almost by his own willing and his own hand, just as Guy had died, and Gertrude had died.
CHAPTER CI
Renee attended May with devotion during the month’s illness that kept the poor woman in bed. She was suffering from shock, nervous breakdown and grief. Her condition was such that she ceased to care for Godfrey’s feelings, as to what his sensations were with regard to Renee’s arrival and residence in the apartment, and the inconvenience and disorder and confusion that illness brought with it.
But to her languid amazement, she discovered that after the first upheaval and indignation, Godfrey settled down happily to the new conditions. It is true that for several weeks he was very distant and formal to his cousin, and avoided his home ostentatiously, not appearing for meals, and showing, when he was obliged to be there, only the faintest solicitude for his mother and very little consideration for Renee. His entire unspoken attitude was that he considered the whole thing, including his brother’s death, a fiendishly designed plot to disarrange his tranquillity and disturb his comfort. He walked about with an indignant manner and a lofty resentful face. However, he had controlled his first hysteria, and was very silent and dignified, making no trouble at all, and keeping his friends away.
Renee tried kindness, humor, placation, interest in music, patience and smiles, without any result save blank stares and curled lips. Then one night, after leaving May’s bedroom and seeing that her aunt was asleep, she encountered Godfrey sulking in the living room, a blank score and a pencil upon his knee. He made as if to get up and flee as usual at the advent of his cousin, but she suddenly placed her strong young hands on his delicate shoulders and forced him roughly back into his chair. Then, standing over him as he blinked below her, and keeping her voice steady and quiet, she said: “You are a pig. Only a pig. Not even the shadow of a man. Only a pig.” And she looked down at him with her beautiful eyes suddenly fierce with contempt and vivid with disgust.
Then she went away, walking firmly, to the kitchen, to supervise the preparing of the me
nu for the next day. She did not look back at Godfrey, huddled and astounded in his chair.
Godfrey went out and did not return for three days, in which Renee frantically lied to May about his whereabouts. On the third day he returned, and Renee met him in the hallway. Her face was very pale and thin her eyes shadowed with sleeplessness and anxiety. When she saw her cousin, her expression lightened with passionate relief, followed instantly by another expression of scorn and anger. She tried to pass him, but to her surprise, he took hold of her arm. She saw, with increasing amazement, that he was smiling. He had never smiled at her before, and all at once he seemed singularly beautiful and sweet-faced to the girl.
“You are quite right, Renee,” he said softly. “I am a pig. Only a pig. I’ll never change, except this time I realize my piggishness. Do you think you can put up with me, now?”
And he kissed her white and sunken cheek tenderly, as he had never kissed any one, not even his mother, before.
She burst into tears of exhaustion and relief, and felt something infinitely warm and lovely which she could not understand. She clung to him, her face pressed to his, her tears running down his own cheek. And he cried with her, as they stood there, their arms about each other.
CHAPTER CII
May, during her period of convalescence, thought of Ernest and Amy, and said to herself: I have tried to hate both of them, but I can’t. I wish I could. But hate seems very petty in the face of life, like a child spitting at a mountain. She tried to recall some poem she had read somewhere: didn’t it say something about there not needing to be a villain, that “passions spin the plot,” and that we “are betrayed by what is false within”? But why false? A man surely is hardly responsible for the bend and shape and pattern of his character; at the best he can only disguise them, and that, even if the results are good, is hypocrisy. Ernest had been no hypocrite, and neither had Amy. Ernest had allowed his innate pattern to develop, with great destruction, however, to everyone and everything that had come near the borders of that pattern. But even his ability to allow the forming of the pattern had been part of his nature. It was very confusing; apparently the safe citizens, the upright, fine citizens, were only hypocrites deliberately distorting the innate shape of themselves. Civilization, then, was only a mass of twisted and tortured patterns, and it was only when war came or hate or greed, that the patterns straightened out convulsively and were their original shapes.
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