Chapter XIV

The incident put Mrs. Aldesey quite out of his mind, and it was not till he stood on her doorstep and rang her bell that he remembered his grievance against her and realized that it had been made more definite by this glimpse of Adrienne's significance. That his friend was prepared for him was evident at his first glance; she had even, he saw, been expecting him, for she broke out at once with: "Oh, my dear Roger--what _are_ you going to do with her?"

He was actually pleased to find himself putting her, with some grimness, in her place. "What is she going to do with us? you mean. You underrate Mrs. Barney's capacity, let me tell you, my dear friend."

But Mrs. Aldesey was not easily quelled. "Underrate her! Not I! She's a Juggernaut if ever there was one. Her capacity is immense. She'll roll on and she'll crush flat. That poor Barney! She is as blind as a Juggernaut, but _he_ will come to see--alas! he is seeing already--though you and I danced round him with veils and cymbals--that people won't stand being pelted with platitudes from soup to dessert. The Lumleys will, of course; it's their natural diet; though even they like their platitudes served with a touch of _sauce piquante_; but Rosamund Pope told me that she felt black and blue all over and Cuthbert Haviland--malicious toad--imitates her already to perfection: dreadful little voice, dreadful little smile, dreadful little quotations and all. It will be one of his London gags. That shepherdess! My dear Roger, don't pretend to me that _you_ don't see it!"

Oldmeadow, sunken in the chair opposite her, surveyed her over his clasped hands with an air of discouragement.

"What I'm most seeing at the moment is that she's made you angry," he remarked. "If what you say were all the truth, why should she make you angry? She's not as blind as a Juggernaut. That's where you made your mistake. She'll only crush the people who don't lie down before her. She knows perfectly well where she is going--and over whom. So be careful, that is my advice, and keep out of her way; unless you want to lose a toe or a finger."

Mrs. Aldesey showed, at this, that he had arrested her. In spite of the element of truth in Adrienne's verdict upon her he knew her to be, when veils and cymbals were cast aside, a sincere and gallant creature. She did not attempt to hide from him now and, after a moment of mutual contemplation, she laughed a little, with not unreal mirth and said: "I suppose I am angry. I suppose I'm even spiteful. It's her patronage, you know. Her suffocating superiority. To have to stand there, for his sake, and _take_ it! You overrate her, Roger. No woman not abysmally stupid could say the things she says."

"Your mistake again. She's able to say them because she's never met irony or criticism. She's not stupid," he found his old verdict. "Only absurd. You know, you gave yourself away to her. You showed her what you thought of her. You patronized _her_."

"Is _no_ retaliation permitted?" Mrs. Aldesey moaned. "Must one accept it all? Be scourged with the stars and Browning and then bow one's head to her caresses? After all, Barney is your friend, not mine, and it's as your friend that I've tried to be decent to his wife. But she hates me like poison. She gave herself away, too, you know. I liked the way she excluded me from her prospects for your welfare. And of course she knew my marriage wasn't a happy one."

"I don't think that she did. No; I don't think so. You _are_ poison to her--cold poison," said Oldmeadow. "Don't imagine for a moment she didn't see that you were dancing about him with veils and cymbals. She didn't give herself away, for she had nothing to conceal. She was candid and you weren't. She didn't pretend that you were under the stars with her; while you kept up appearances."

"But what's to become of your Barney if we don't keep them up!" Mrs. Aldesey cried. "Is he to be allowed to see that nobody can stand her--except people he can't stand? He'll have to live, then, with Mrs. and Mr. Prentiss. Did you try to talk to Mrs. Prentiss? Do you know that she told me that death was 'perfectly sublime'?"

"Perhaps it is. Perhaps she'll find it so. They all seem to think well of death, out in California"--Oldmeadow allowed himself to relax from his admonitory severity. "Mrs. Prentiss isn't as silly as she seems, I expect. And you exaggerate Barney's sensitiveness. He'd get on very well with Mrs. Prentiss if you weren't there to show him you found her a bore. He has a very simple side and we must hope it may become simpler. The only chance for Barney, I see it more and more, is that we should efface ourselves as much as possible. The people who find the Prentisses a bore, I mean. And it won't be difficult for us to do that. She will see to it that we are effaced. Only, of course, it's a grief. I'm so fond of him"; and as Oldmeadow stretched forth his legs and put his hands in his pockets there drifted across his mind, in a thin, sharp, knife-like stroke, the memory of Barney--tall eighteen-year-old Barney--with dear old Effie, luxuriously upturned in his arms, being softly scratched--Barney's hand with a cat was that of an expert--and told that she was the best and most beautiful of cats.

"It's a great shame," said Mrs. Aldesey; "I've been thinking my spiteful thoughts, too, instead of sympathizing with you. Of course, if it's any consolation to you, one usually does lose one's friends when they marry. But it needn't have been as bad as this. What a thousand pities he couldn't have fallen in love with a nice girl of his own kind. You couldn't do anything about it when you went down in the spring?"

Oldmeadow had never said anything to Mrs. Aldesey about his hopes for Nancy. He had a secretive instinct for keeping his friendships in compartments and discussed only those portions that overflowed. "Nothing," he said. "And the mischief was that I went down hostile, as you warned me against doing. Barney saw at once that I didn't care for her; and she saw it at once. He even forced a sort of expression of opinion from me and I know now that it's always glooming there at the back of his mind when he sees me. It was quite useless. Once he'd fallen under her spell it was all up with him. She has her singular power and, for a man in love with her, her singular charm. Even I, you know, understand that."

Mrs. Aldesey contemplated him. "I confess I can't," she said. "She is so desperately usual. I've seen her everywhere, ever since I can remember. Attending lectures at the Sorbonne; listening to Wagner at Bayreuth; having dresses tried on at Worth's; sitting in the halls of a hundred European hotels. She is the most unescapable form of the American woman; only not _du peuple_ because of the money and opportunity that has also extirpated everything racy, provincial and individual."

"I don't know," said Oldmeadow. He mused, his hands clasped behind his head. "She's given me all sorts of new insights." His eyes, after his wont, were on the cornice and his friend's contemplation, relaxed a little from its alert responsiveness, allowed itself a certain conjectural softness as she watched him. "I feel," he went on, "since knowing her, that I understand America, her America, better than you do. You're engaged in avoiding rather than in understanding it, aren't you? What you underrate, what Americans of your type don't see--because, as you say, it's so oppressively usual--is the power of her type. If it is a type; if she is as ordinary as you say. It's something bred into them by the American assumption of the fundamental rightness of life; a confidence unknown before in the history of the world. An individual, not an institutional or social, confidence. They do, actually, seem to take their stand on the very universe itself. Whereas the rest of us have always had churches or classes to uphold us. They have all the absurdities and crudities of mere individualism. They have all the illusions of their ignorance. Yet I sometimes imagine, after I've seen her, that it's a power we haven't in the least taken into our reckoning. Isn't it the only racial thing that America has produced--the only thing that makes them a race? It makes them independent of us, when we've always imagined, in our complacency, that they were dependent. It enables them to take what we have to give, but to do with it what they, not we, think best. And by Jove, who knows how far it will carry them! Not you, my dear Lydia. You'll stay where you are--with us."

His eyes had come back and down to her, and her gaze resumed its alertness and showed him that she found the picture he drew disquieting. "You mean it's a new kind of civilization that will menace ours?"

"It's not a civilization; that's just what it's not. It's a state of mind. Perhaps it will menace us. Perhaps it does. We've underrated it; of that I'm sure; and underrated power is always dangerous. It will be faith without experience against experience without faith. What we must try for, if we're not to be worsted, is to have both--to keep experience and to keep faith, too. Only so shall we be able to hold our own against Mrs. Barney. And even so we shan't be able to prevent her doing things to us--and for us. She'll do things for us that we can't do for ourselves." His mind reverted to the faces of the brougham. "In that way she's bound to worst us. We'll have to accept things from her."

Oldmeadow's eyes had gone back to the cornice and, in the silence that followed, Mrs. Aldesey, as she sat with folded arms, played absently with the lace ruffle at her wrist. The lace was an heirloom, like her rings, and the contemplation of them may have afforded her some sustainment. "She's made you feel all that, then," she remarked. "With her crook and her hat and her rose-wreathed lamb. If such a sardonic old lion as you does really grow bodeful before the rose-wreathed lamb there is, I own, reason to fear for the future. I'm glad I'm growing old. It would hurt me to see her cutting your claws."

"Oh, she won't hurt us!" Oldmeadow smiled at her. "It's rather we who will hurt her--by refusing to lie down with her lamb. If that's any comfort to you."

"Not in the least. I'm not being malicious. You don't call it hurt, then, to be effaced?"

"Smothered in rose-leaves, eh?" he suggested. "It would be suffocating rather than suffering. She does give me that feeling. But you'll make her suffer--you have, you know--rather than she you."

"I really don't know about that," said Mrs. Aldesey. "You make me quite uncomfortable, Roger. You make me superstitious. She's done that to me already. I refuse to take her seriously, but I shall avoid her. That's what it comes to. Like not giving the new moon a chance to look at you over your left shoulder."