Melissa

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  She watched him like a child, as he rubbed her fingers to bring warmth to them. Evening had not cooled the heat of the day, yet her hand was very cold and there was no color in the fingertips. Ravel concentrated on them, and was inordinately happy when they flushed pink under his manipulations. He looked at Melissa’s interested face, and he came still closer to her. Then she was no longer interested. Her hand lay in his, unresisting.

  “I keep remembering my mother. I don’t think I am sad about her,” she repeated. “Yet it is very strange. She was very lonely when she died.” She stared at Ravel, as if surprised. “I never thought of that before—that Mama was lonely. Why should she have been lonely? We were all at home. Phoebe was her great favorite, and she was proud of Andrew. It has just occurred to me that Andrew is very like Mama. I never believed that before. Yes,” she added, startled, “Andrew is very like Mama. He has her quietness and firmness. In a way, they were both incorruptible.”

  This amazed her. “Why should I say that, Ravel? There was nothing to corrupt them. No one attempted, ever, to corrupt them. So why should they have seemed incorruptible? No one gives that impression unless someone, somewhere, has tried to corrupt him. I don’t quite know what I am talking about,” she continued, and she rubbed her forehead with her free hand, as if confused. “I only know that they both had that manner of bitter integrity and resistance. And when I remember it, I am sorrowful, in a way I cannot explain, as one would be sorry about something strong which had been assaulted and which had resisted attack.”

  Ravel understood, where Melissa did not. He was stirred, and full of pity. He could not find anything to say.

  “I never liked my mother,” said Melissa, simply. “I believe she made my father very unhappy. But now I am beginning to see that it was not because she was malevolent, as I once thought, but because she did not understand him. And it has come to me that perhaps Papa did not understand Mama, either. She wanted things for her children which he did not think were important and which were not really important. She wanted the farm, and she wanted Papa to supervise it properly so it would keep us in comfort. But Papa hated the farm, and he wished only to leave it and have done with it. And Mama did not appreciate what a great genius my father was. But still, she was very lonely. I feel her loneliness now, as if it were my own.”

  As usual, Ravel wished that Melissa might display a little more versatility in conversation. He was tired of her family. He knew Andrew now, and thought him dull beyond consideration. He had met Phoebe, and recognized her at once. As for Charles, it sometimes seemed incredible to Ravel that he never met this man, for by now he knew him as well as he had ever known anyone. But he had heard little, if anything, from Melissa about Amanda, and he forgot to be bored, and even became interested.

  He did not know what made him say it, but he said: “I think you must be very like your mother, Melissa.”

  She turned on him with a startling abruptness and something like a fierce, concentrated glare. “Why should you say that? Who spoke of it to you? It is not true! You must not believe it.”

  Ravel was nonplussed at this sudden emotional storm. He regarded Melissa closely. There was a flare of color on her cheek-bones and her eyes were flashing.

  He said, quickly: “I don’t know why I said it, Melissa. You may call it intuition, if you will. I never saw your mother. No one has told me much about her. Yet,” he added, “I feel you are like her.”

  “No!” exclaimed Melissa. She pressed the palms of her hands together. “It is not true. There is a physical resemblance, I confess. I have had to see that myself. We have the same coloring, the same height. But beyond that, there was nothing.”

  Disconcertingly then, she forgot him, as she often did. She appeared to shrink together; the very dimensions of her body lessoned, drew together, as if she had become chilled. “Had I been my father’s wife, I should have understood him,” she said.

  But you tried to be his wife, my poor child, thought Ravel. And he encouraged you in your attempt, for his own amusement. Ravel looked at Melissa’s hands, and it did not seem possible to him that he had held one of them only a moment ago. They had become remote, not human hands but like the hands of the dead. They had taken on a kind of transparency and fragile outline. This frightened him.

  “But why think of what is past?” he said, quickly.

  She looked at him seriously, with her childlike earnestness. “I don’t know,” she replied. “But it has become very important to me. There is something I am trying to remember, to understand. Sometimes I have very strange thoughts.” She continued to regard him steadily. “You said, a few days ago, that you would soon finish your poem. Is it finished now?”

  He had become accustomed to the suddenness with which she changed subjects. In another woman, he would have thought this duplicity or a desire to conceal something. But he knew that in some way, which would probably always be obscure to him, her question was linked with what she had previously been saying. He was relieved.

  “I am polishing the last twenty lines. When they are finished, I shall read them to you. You remember, you did not like the last line.”

  “No. It was colorless. ‘The drowning moon lost self and image in the sea.’ The death of Orpheus should end on a more wild and sonorous note. He mourned Eurydice, so that all the rocks and the waters sang and mourned loudly, in echoing answer. Your line is too muted, too weary. It is like an old, tired man mourning, not a young man.”

  But what do you know of youth? thought Ravel. What do you know of mourning, you poor child, who have never loved?

  Suddenly, Melissa was animated, with a strained and desperate animation. Her voice became hurried: “When one has lost what one has loved, then there is no silence in the heart. There is a terrible pain, so loud that there is no other sound at all but grief. Everything seems to grieve with you; everything seems to cry back, and takes on distorted shapes of agony.”

  Ravel said nothing. She is speaking of that damned fraud, her father, he thought with sudden disgust. But something else made him acutely uneasy, made him look at Melissa with a new sharpness.

  He said: “You must have loved your father beyond imagining, Melissa.”

  She sat still, without turning or moving, for what was a considerable time. Then she said faintly: “My father? Oh, yes, my father. I grieved very much for him.”

  Abruptly, and unaffectedly, she thrust her hand into the bosom of her frock and pulled out a crumpled paper which had been carefully folded. She held it in her hand and gazed at Ravel with eyes that were vivid with suffering.

  “This is a copy of a letter which my father wrote to Geoffrey a long time ago. It is apparently an answer to a letter which Geoffrey had written him suggesting that Papa send Phoebe to school. Read it. You will then see how very kind Geoffrey is. I thought him a very coarse and unfeeling man. And now I am miserable because I thought that.”

  Accustomed as Ravel was to swift changes of subjects when he was talking with Melissa, he could not help being startled at her last words. Moreover, the conversation had taken a disagreeable turn. He and Melissa never talked of Geoffrey. It had been tact on his part: what it was on Melissa’s, he was never quite certain. Yet now she had thrust the name of her husband into Ravel’s notice, like a child suddenly presenting an obnoxious toad it had recently captured. Ravel reflected briefly on the subject of inconvenient husbands, and the thought was not pleasant. But he took the letter with a sensation of ennui. He was not interested in Phoebe, and he was certainly not interested in discovering how “kind” was the man whom he intended to rob of a very peculiar wife at the earliest possible moment. For one instant the realistic Ravel found the whole situation distasteful and ludicrous, and he wondered why he remained here on this uncomfortable stone with insects buzzing about his head. But the moment scuttled away swiftly. He had found love to be too engrossing and too delightful to allow realism to smear it with its dirty finger.

  Holding the letter very gingerly, he began to
read carelessly. Then he read closely and with profound interest. The light on the water began to dim. The willows crowded closer in their darkening isolation. The sound of the river reverberated more strongly in the approaching twilight.

  Ravel read and reread the letter. He was a man who had long ago forgotten ever to be sickened by any manifestation of the enormities of human nature. If he was told a tale of guile or of evil, of contemptible novelty or treachery, he would laugh and find it all very amusing. But he did not find this amusing.

  He thoughtfully refolded the letter. He could not yet look at Melissa. He was afraid. It did not seem possible to him that she had deceived herself. Yet, when he finally turned to her, he was not sure. He looked into her eyes, and then glanced away again. He could not bear what he had seen. That imploring, that supplicating, expression was more than he could endure. She knows, he thought, but she will not let herself know yet. She wants me to reassure her. Is it a good thing for me to do so? Would it not be better for her to see that I know the truth, and to acknowledge it?

  “You see how kind Geoffrey was,” Melissa was saying, and her voice was low and hoarse and questioning. He heard the pleading note, so desperate and urgent, and he could not resist it.

  “Yes, it was very kind,” he said gently. His handsome face became grim and hard.

  He heard Melissa draw a deep breath, as if she had been rescued from intolerable anguish. Now her voice was steadier: “It was wrong of Papa not to let Phoebe go to school. He could have repaid Geoffrey later. He was wrong, too, about Phoebe. But then, I also was wrong. Neither of us could have suspected, in the beginning, that she had so much talent.”

  Ravel was silent. He put the letter down on the stone between himself and Melissa. He could not bring himself to place it in her hand. He stared down at it. His face was no longer suave and charming. He knew all the uglinesses but, to him, this was the ugliest thing he had ever known. He watched Melissa pick up the letter tenderly and thrust it back into her bodice. He thought of it there, between her white breasts, and his hands tightened into fists.

  “It was because Geoffrey was so kind that he married me,” he heard Melissa say. He glanced up swiftly, disbelieving. Melissa nodded. “Yes,” she said. “He tried to help all of us, for Papa’s sake. But Andrew was too proud. He married that dreadful girl, and Phoebe married John Barrett. I was the only one left who needed help, and so he married me. And that is why I must go away soon, to relieve him of the burden.”

  With a stunned sensation Ravel realized that the moment for which he had been waiting all these months had finally come. Yet he could not move. He could only sit there and stare incredulously at Melissa. Her face stood out in the quickening twilight like a sharp white mask, its shadowy hollows poignant and luminous. Her eyes, full of torment and simple revelation, looked into his.

  And then Ravel knew all there was to know. He resisted the knowledge violently and with an enraged and defeated passion which he had not thought it possible for him to feel. In a real and frantic effort to deny what he knew, he lost all sense of proportion. He was sickened with the loss that confronted him. He knew the first desolation of his life, his first furious grief, and he would not accept it. All at once, he felt the emptiness about him, the loneliness and bereavement, and he knew what it was to recognize the face of his own intolerable sorrow.

  He took Melissa’s arms in his hands and pulled her so close to him that their faces almost touched. She tried to draw away, but he held her strongly.

  “Yes, Melissa,” he said, “you must go away, and very soon. Will you go away with me, tomorrow?”

  His hands gripped her flesh. He wanted to kiss her, to cover her mouth with his in a frenzy of desire and misery. If she would only go with him, tonight, tomorrow, she herself might never know what he knew. This was his only hope. He shook her almost savagely, hating her for the restraint he put on himself.

  “Tonight, Melissa? Tomorrow?”

  She did not try to pull away now. He saw the swimming blue of her eyes, steadfast and still.

  “You think I should go?” she said, and her breath was full in his face.

  “Yes, you should go. There is no one here who loves you.” He stopped. He could not cry out to her of his own love, not yet. “There is no one who wants you, Melissa. Let me help you.”

  He appreciated fully the fantastic qualities of this whole situation. Now his rage against what he knew became frantic. Yet it had a quality of unreality.

  “I will take you away, my dear. To New York. We shall be happy, I promise you. Tomorrow?”

  Melissa closed her eyes and leaned back against his gripping hands. Her face became as quiet as it would be in death. But she said quite clearly: “You are very kind. I have no friends, anywhere. But you must know many people. You could help me get a position of some kind. Perhaps there is a publisher you know, for whom I could read, or a family who desire a governess.”

  Ravel’s grip on her arms loosened. Then his hands dropped. He regarded her for a long, very quiet, moment. He knew it was no use. He knew it was no use even when he denied it and would not accept it. If he was to gain anything, he thought, he must not tell her. That was his only hope. But, with a stark premonition, he understood that he really had no hope, that he could never reach her. He shook his head slowly. There must be a way. There was no such a thing as inevitability.

  “I’ll help you, Melissa,” he said. But his voice was lifeless.

  She stood up, slowly and heavily, and he stood up also. They faced each other in the falling light, a space between them.

  In spite of himself, he could not stop himself from making one last effort. He said, pleadingly: “Melissa, look at me. Do you see nothing, nothing at all?”

  The gray shadow of exhaustion had fallen over her face. Through it, she peered at him uncertainly.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, confusedly. “I see you. You are my friend. At least, I believe you are my friend.”

  Ravel did not speak. “It is getting late,” he said at last, knowing that she was watching him uncertainly.

  They went away, side by side, through the clustering willows. They reached the spot where they usually parted. Here, Ravel said: “How shall I know when you wish to leave?” He spoke dully.

  “I have only a few pages more to write,” replied Melissa.

  “I can complete it in a day or two. I will let you know in time.”

  Dimly, she sensed something was wrong. But she did not know what it was. She waited for him to speak. He could only look at her in silence. And then, he turned away and left her.

  It took Ravel two days to accept the fact that everything was hopeless, that he could expect nothing. It was the longest and most bitter struggle of his life. On Friday, very quietly, without the knowledge even of the avid townsfolk, he packed his belongings and went away. He did not write Melissa, to tell her of his going, for in some manner he knew that she would not care, would not even wonder at his absence.

  CHAPTER 44

  Geoffrey returned home suddenly and unexpectedly on Saturday evening, on the last train from Philadelphia. A heavy rain was falling, after a recent thunderstorm. Before entering the house, he glanced up at the windows of the apartments which he occupied with Melissa. They were dark. Melissa had evidently gone to bed. Geoffrey was somewhat relieved. He wished to have a talk with his sister, and he entered his bedroom as quietly as possible, so that Melissa might not know he had returned.

  He had come home on an impulse. For the past few months he had been filled with a restless depression and a feeling that he could not come to grips with affairs, either in his business or his personal life. It was like encountering spiderwebs in the dark. He was not a man to be thankful that crises had been delayed, or might never occur. He believed in crises. Without them, existence tended to become stale and null, like brackish backwaters.

  He had been watching Melissa unobtrusively for a long time. He now believed that a crisis should be precipitated. S
o, after he had washed his hands and face, he went to his sister’s apartments. He knew she was still up.

  Arabella greeted him with every display of affectionate surprise. He looked at her sharply, without appearing to do so. She was sitting by an open window, reading one of the novels which his firm had recently published and which he found contemptible. But it was to her taste, he knew. It was, unfortunately, to the taste of much of the American reading public, the taste of middle-aged women especially. Arabella was dressed in a peignoir of many-ruffled mauve silk and lace, which cast a yellowish light on her face, and emphasized her wrinkles. She had touched up her hair again, so that the faded and graying strands he had observed a month ago were now completely gone in a haze of brass. Geoffrey noted that she was growing fatter, and that her tiny gray eyes were more metallic and penetrating than ever. He saw them, above her happy smile. He kissed her painted cheek, holding his breath against the effluvium of attar-of-roses which pervaded her immediate vicinity.

  Though he protested that it was late and that he had dined in Philadelphia, she insisted that he must have tea. She put aside her book and ordered tea, and he drank it to please her, and they talked inconsequentially, and the heavy rain rumbled on outside. The trees swayed in the rain, whose sound could be heard through the open window.

  Arabella again expressed her pleasure in his unexpected return. “We grow so dull here, in the summer,” she confided. She waited. He did not ask about his wife. He turned the tea-cup in his hand, his head bent. Arabella’s eyes narrowed upon him. She had, at one time, only disliked him. Now, because he had so humiliated and debased her, she hated him. She hated his broad thick shoulders, the angle of his dark cheek and chin, the big strength of his hands, the heaviness of his mouth. To her, they embodied all her mortifications and bitterness, all her resentment, the injustices of her life. She smiled tenderly when he lifted his head and looked at her.