“Did I get by with it?” she gasped.
“Yes! God bless you!” he cried, and their hands were parted swiftly.
He stood at the end of the platform and waved his white handkerchief to her; but in a moment, as she looked back, his receding figure dwindled and grew tiny, as if he were a mechanical toy at the end of two long, converging horizontal rods — a little doll man, diminishing and waving a doll’s white handkerchief. Above him the vast and broken blue landscape climbed into the sky, and a hazy curve of the cliff disclosed the gray monastery set upon its precipice. Thin as a spider’s guy lines, the garden railing ran at the edge, and tiny dark figures stood there, the size of exclamation points. “Ah, good-bye!” Claire cried. “Good-bye...”
Her mother pulled her back into her seat. “Do you want to get your head taken off?”
“It seems so strange,” Claire said, and uselessly applied a soaked handkerchief to her eyes and nose. “It’s so strange, Mother. I don’t understand it!”
“For heaven’s sake, stop crying! It only makes you talk as if you had a cold in the head. What don’t you understand?”
“It’s so strange there’ll be ‘people there — in that garden — year after year — just as we were. They’ll come there and never know anything happened there.... There’ll be people there, looking down over that cliff at the sea a hundred years from now. It’s so strange—” l “Yes, of course there’ll be people there,” Mrs.
Ambler said. “Probably a thousand years from now; they were there a thousand years ago, and three thousand for that matter. It’s an everlasting sort of place. Do you think it does any good to cry about it?”
But she knew what her daughter was crying about, and her sharpness was tactful. She said no more, but took up a book and read, apparently paying no attention to anything else. Claire was silent, sitting motionless, and, as the afternoon waned, her mother, glancing at her almost imperceptibly, saw that her eyes were dry. She was pale, but her breathing was quiet and not troubled by the little starts and catches that had beset her during the first hour of their journey.
The train stopped at the seaport town of Castro-vecchio; and when it went on again they heard American voices in the next compartment — voices of a mother and her son, it became evident. A little later, a youth of twenty-four or thereabouts appeared in the corridor, lounging, enjoying a cigarette and looking out of the window opposite the Amblers’ open door. He was tall, of an athlete’s figure, comely of face, well-advised in dress, and his air was that of a carefree and generally amused person. After a time his observation wandered, and he was aware of the girl sitting in the compartment outside of which he took his pleasure. His awareness of her, indeed, was vivid, almost fervent. He looked full ready to be cordial.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Does my smoking annoy you?”
“Not at all,” Mrs. Ambler assured him.
“Are you sure?” he asked earnestly. “Does it annoy you in the least?”
“No. It doesn’t come into the compartment; it blows the other way.”
“Well, I’ll be glad to throw my cigarette away,” he said. “I will if it annoys either of you.” He looked anxiously at Claire and added: “Are you sure it doesn’t annoy either of you?”
Claire did not even look toward him.
“Well,” he said, still hopefully earnest, “if you’re sure you both don’t mind it—”
At that, Mrs. Ambler was a little amused with him and a little embarrassed; then, looking at her silent and motionless daughter, she was stirred by a faint anxiety. Claire’s eyes, staring straight before her at the wall of the compartment, seemed to express a dangerous hostility.
“No, no! Neither of us minds it at all,” Mrs. Ambler said hastily; whereupon, after coughing and murmuring,” Well—” he moved away. They heard him speaking a few minutes later when he had rejoined his mother. The train had stopped at a village, and in the silence his voice, though not loud, was more audible than he knew. “Americans, yes. Frostiest looking girl I ever saw!”
He was not wholly discouraged, however; for after they were in motion again, he reappeared in the corridor, and the two ladies were conscious that upon the slightest sign to indicate they knew of his existence he would offer them the entertainment of conversation. Mrs. Ambler timidly considered offering the sign; but a glance at her daughter dismayed her. “See here,” the mother said, when the young man had again been frosted into a departure. “I hope you aren’t going to keep this up too long, Claire.”
“Keep what up?”
“Now, now!” Mrs. Ambler protested. “There wouldn’t be anything out of the way in letting that good-looking boy talk to you. He seems very nice indeed, and as he and his mother are probably going all the way through, I don’t see—” She paused.
“It might help you to get out of yourself a little.”
“I don’t want to be got out of myself.”
“Now, now!” Mrs. Ambler said again, and she smiled, though not unsympathetically. “You don’t think this is going to last, do you, dear — at your age? How long do you suppose it will be before you’ll be interested in seeing something of pleasant young gentlemen again?”
“I never will,” Claire said. “Never.”
“But if only on your own account you ought—”
“No,” Claire interrupted. “On their account is what I mean.”
“Good gracious! You haven’t become precisely poison to gentlemen, my child!”
“Yes,” Claire said, in a dead voice. “That’s all I am.”
Her mother urged no more, and the unhappy girl sat staring frozenly at the polished wall before her. Her thoughts were long and sorrowful, and after a while they became bitter, as well. The persistent youth returned once more to the corridor, and although he affected a manner of interest in his cigarette and the landscape, she was unable not to be conscious of his ever-hopeful consciousness of herself. “Idiot!” she thought, addressing him. “Miserable sleek-haired little idiot! Thinking your awful prattle could be endured for an instant! Haven’t you got eyes?”
She blamed him fiercely for not seeing her as she pictured herself to herself. In the autumn she had seen Clothilde Berin, the Parisian actress, play an abysmal tragedy. Mile. Berin was a tall black-and-white woman with gloomy black eyes under black brows, and, in the final scene of the drama, she sat, in black mourning, staring hollowly straight before her, over the heads of the audience, into an eternity of pain. And thus, to Claire, it seemed now that she herself appeared. She forgot her charming little dress, her pinkish gray stockings, her jaunty blue hat, and even her roses from Raona. What she imagined the young man in the corridor would see — if he had eyes!
— was a long, black-haired, black-eyed, black-clad woman with a dead white skin, staring forever before her. Couldn’t the idiot recognize a tragedy when he saw it?
Then, with horror, she realized that her two natures were in conflict again; the tricky and malicious artist was at work within her even now, when she was in the midst of the deepest suffering she had ever known. In spite of her true anguish, she was thinking of herself as picturesque; and she was indignant with a cub of a boy, whom she had never seen before, because he did not perceive how picturesque she really was! And thus she reached the bottom of her despair. “No wonder I do such harm!” she thought. “My very soul is artificial — and hideous!”
But at night she lay in her berth in the train that still sped roaring northward — endlessly northward — and the desperation of her will to return was so great that, conscious of her own absurdity, she entreated the iron tracks beneath her to change their course, curve backward and bring her again, in the morning, to Raona.
‘I’ve got to go back,” she whispered to the soggy little pillow. “Ah, I want to see him again! I’ll only just look at him. They’d let me do that, wouldn’t they?”
Then she knew what she had given up. The morning could not bring her to Raona but it need bring her no despair of her soul. The
artist within it had behaved not so badly, after all.
PART III. TWENTY-FIVE!”
XXII
THE ENDLESS PROCESSIONS of automobiles, with black tops shiny in an autumnal drizzle, filled the long avenues of Manhattan, and, creeping busily between quivering halts, were like armies of beetles on the march through gloomy ruts in wet stone. Not unlike detached smaller beetles upright and gesticulating to the greater were the traffic directors in gleaming black oilskin, while other imperious coleoptera stood at the awning entrances to apartment houses, and, as the electric lights came on in the late afternoon, outlined themselves in dark wet glitterings that became flashingly active when automobiles drew to the curb. At such times there seemed to be a deposit of larvae; the hard and darkly shining sides of the cars opened, emitting plastic beings to be taken in charge, apparently, by the attendant beetles at the awning ends, and, upon the fashionable avenues, the larvae were of a superior, tenderer kind; — delicate things, exquisitely swathed, they were handled sweetly and hygienically with deferential white gloves.
This is not to say that the deference was anything more than a hopeful sale of so much manner for proportionate pourboire. The giant beetle at the awning of the Abercrombie Apartments on Park Avenue had in his heart no true deference for the larvæ deposited with him, though they were among the most richly and softly wrapped in all that thoroughfare. “Tea!” he said mockingly to an official friend, who paused beside him in a relaxed interval. “They call it ‘tea’!
If you’d see ’em comn’ away from all these ‘teas,’ about an hour or so from now, you’d like to get hold of a little of that kind of ‘tea’ yourself, Charlie.”
The policeman laughed admiringly. “Cost about eight dollars a quart from a bootlegger, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, and more. It’s a shame,” the doorman said bitterly. “You’d be surprised how much of it they get away with. Yes, and even young girls! It’s the worst waste we’ve ever had in this country. Now before prohibition—” But here he interrupted him self; a French automobile drew out of the traffic to halt by the awning; he stepped forward cordially and opened the door. “Yes’m,” he said, not replying to any inquiry. “It’s a nasty afternoon. Very nasty, indeed, ma’am, and it looks like a nasty evening, too. Yes, ma’am, indeed it does so!”
The policeman glanced with a favourable interest at the emerging figure; for he knew that his friend spoke so freely of the weather to only those whom he regarded as important clients. This one, moreover, had every appearance of being such a client; she presented to view the slender elegance, completed, not immature, of a gracefully experienced young lady of the world, and, better still, she was to be distinguished from previously arriving clients by something even more ingratiating than her superior comeliness. Most of the others, too much like larvae, came out of their cars in a dead-eyed coma; apparently they had to be passed inside the building and relieved of their swathings before being roused to complete consciousness; — this one was already brilliantly alive; her blue eyes were twinklingly aware of everything and took note of both the doorman and the policeman as fellow-beings worthy of cognizance.
“Mr. Winge tells me he thinks it may be the climate, William,” she said to the former. “Mr. Winge is almost sure the climate has something to do with the weather.”
The policeman was charmed with her. “They ought to make more like that one,” he said, when she had gone briskly into the great, lighted doorway. ‘Who was she talkin’ about? Her husband?”
“No; she ain’t married. This Winge is only a dumb-bell lives here her and I joke about. He ain’t got no chance with her at all.”
“I hope not,” the policeman said. “You’d hate to think of one like that marryin’ a dumb-bell. About how old is she, you think?”
“Miss Ambler?” the doorman returned thoughtfully. “Well — prob’ly somewhere around where either they marry a young feller or else don’t, and wait a while and marry a man that’s lost his wife.”
“Is she so?” his friend said, amused. “I expect from her looks, though, she don’t feel no great call to be troublin’ her head over that!”
But his surmise was not at all a correct one: Miss Ambler had been troubling her head about that a great deal of late. In fact, at this very moment, in the elevator of the Abercrombie, she was almost acutely troubling her head about it and she had some special promptings to painful thought upon the subject. The least pressing of them, it may be explained, as a key to her present state of mind, was the fact that a previously patient suitor had delivered an ultimatum: he was to have a favourable answer by nightfall of to-day or he would henceforth treat her as a stranger, none of her proposed middle-grounds being possible for him. She found herself able to endure the prospect of his alienation; but a more serious matter was involved: she was twenty-four, which is bearable; — what began to take her breath was the imminent approach of her birthday. She had only a fortnight left; then she would be twenty-five.
Here was a disturbing numeral. For a girl the difference between twenty-four and twenty-five has a disproportionate importance. In certain uncomfortable suggestions it may be equal to the difference made by a whole decade in the life of a young man: for her, the difference between twenty-four and twenty-five may be what the difference between twenty-five and thirty-five is for him. In Claire’s mind, at twenty-four, there was a Rubicon before her; and to cross over, unwed and even unbetrothed, into twenty-five, was almost crossing over into a definite spinsterhood. Or, if it were not crossing into a spinsterhood so definite as to be absolute and permanent, it was crossing into that period of limbo wherein a maiden waits, ageing, until perchance she marries the relict widower of a former girl-friend and brings up children not her own. The doorman had defined Claire’s age shrewdly enough.
She had shivered a little upon leaving twenty-three for twenty-four, as if at the touch of an October breeze in August; yet autumnal gayety was easily possible for twenty-four. Twenty-four was not so bad of itself; its sinister quality resided in its border, and, as she approached nearer and nearer that border, she more and more often incredulously murmured the dread numeral to herself, wondering and dismayed to find it upon her lips.
“Twenty-five!” she thus whispered in the elevator. “Twenty-five!”
The elevator man did not hear her. What he said was only a coincidence; her apartment was upon the eighteenth floor. “Eighteen, Miss Ambler?”
“Twenty, Henry, please.”
He nodded affably. “Mrs. Allyngton’s, I expect. She seems to be having quite a tea this afternoon. Quite a tea at Mrs. Allyngton’s this afternoon, Miss Ambler.” And he added, in an admiring tone, though his purpose was merely to make a little more conversation with this favoured resident: “I was pretty sure you wouldn’t miss it, Miss Ambler. I told Joe; I said ‘She’ll be back here in time for it,’ I said. ‘You’ll see,’ I said. ‘She ain’t goin’ to let ’em leave her out when there’s anything going on,” I told him, ‘Not Miss Ambler!’ I told him.”
His passenger made the appreciative murmur of laughter required by genial manners; but as she stepped out upon the twentieth floor she was less pleased than she appeared. “Twenty-five!” she whispered again. But it seemed that even before twenty-five was actually reached, a girl had to exert herself to keep people from leaving her out. Her exertions must be somewhat noticeable since they roused the admiration of the elevator man.
XXIII
IN A CORNER, and a little apart from the general hilarity of Mrs. Allyngton’s “tea,” Claire sat asking herself why she made the exertions. At almost twenty-five, she was able to occupy her mind seriously with this puzzle and at the same time to produce the amount of chatter necessary to prevent the two gentlemen attending her from suspecting that either she or they were less lively than the liveliest of the party. Simultaneously she could take stock of everyone in the place, observing swiftly how well or ill such a one was “looking”; who talked to whom; how Mr. So-and-So’s flirtation with Mrs.
Thus-and-Thus progressed; what every woman wore and that the painted table Mrs. Allyngton had added to the “Regency treatment” of the apartment was probably spurious.
Most of the women present were young wives about Claire’s age; some of them were several years younger; two or three were a few years older; and she had known nearly all of them in their previous state of candidacy for the matrimonial condition. They had passed out of the preparatory period, and she hadn’t; so that her relation to them was a little like that of a student, still in school, to former classmates who, after a thrilling Commencement, have become graduates gloriously preoccupied with their new world. Companion initiates in an experience superior to hers, they seemed to have fulfilled their destiny, and to be at last properly and completely alive; while she, avoided by this common, happy destiny, was left outside, not yet really alive and never to be, indeed, if that destiny should still avoid her or she reject it. The latter alternative was the kinder, and already she knew that some of these friends were beginning to say of her: “It isn’t for lack of asking.” She was still with them but no longer of them, though they were obviously as fond of her as ever. They were always pleased to have their husbands dance with her; and she foresaw that as the years went by they would find an “odd man” for her whenever they could. At present she was still almost too amply able to supply the “odd man,” herself; and here she felt another difference between her condition and that of the graduates: it seemed to her that in spite of their superior advantages she understood men — even the husbands of some of her friends — better than they did. Apparently, marriage often involved a kind of blindness.
One of the men now chattering with her, over his third cocktail, was in reality, Claire thought, a total stranger to his wife, a pretty woman twittering with a group at Mrs. Allyngton’s piano. This man had tried to kiss Claire the first time he found himself alone with her, and the only reason he hadn’t tried again, she knew, was that she had thereafter successfully avoided being alone with him. Two or three of the other men present, she had cause to be aware, would do the same thing if she gave them half a chance to hope that they could “get away with it.” Another, an immaculate fat man, had annoyed her with confidential witticisms of double meaning until she stopped him. These were but sporadic indications of the nature of the beast, as she realized; but they certainly meant something; and her deduction was that most men were grosser and more predatory than their wives suspected. Without effort, she attracted men — attracted them sometimes to her own discomfort; but, in general, and as a woman, she believed that she did not really like them.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 430