Chapter XV: Part 15

(“No,” thought Ellen, “not openly, but like this, like the way you are talking to me.” It was dangerous, this business of insinuation.)

“It is remarkable that the feeling has lasted so long ... so many years,” Thérèse continued. “It has not been like that with any other woman. I think he is fascinated by your will, your power, your determination.”

“You make me a great person,” observed Ellen with irony, “but not a very seductive one.”

“There are ways and ways of seduction. What seduces one man passes over the head of another.”

“It is a perverse attraction....”

“Perhaps.... But most attractions are.”

Thérèse had seen the sudden change at the mention of her son’s name, just as she had seen the change in her son when Ellen’s name had been brought into the light. She meditated for a time in silence and then observed, “You are looking tired to-night.”

There were dark circles under Ellen’s eyes, pale evidences of the strain, the excitement which had not abated for an instant since they embarked for Vienna.

“I am tired,” she said, “very tired.”

“You should rest,” pursued Thérèse. “You could go to the place on Long Island. You could be alone there, if you liked. I shouldn’t bother you. I shall be busy in town until this tangle over money is settled.”

Ellen stirred and sighed. “No, that’s impossible. It’s good of you to offer it, but I can’t accept.... I can’t stop now. You see the ball has been started rolling. One must take advantage of success while it’s at hand. Never let a chance slip past. I know that ... by experience. You see, Miss Schönberg--she’s my manager--has arranged a great many engagements.”

“Whenever you want a place to rest,” continued Thérèse, “let me know.”

It was true that she was tired, bitterly tired; and more troubling, more enduring than the mere exhaustion was the obscure feeling that she had passed from one period of her life into another, that she had left behind somewhere in these three exciting years a milestone that marked the borderland of youth, of that first, fresh, exuberant youth which, at bottom, had been the source of all her success. It had slipped away somehow, in the night, without her knowing it. She was still strong (she knew that well enough), still filled with energy, but something was gone, a faint rosy mist perhaps, which had covered all life, even in the bitterest moments, with a glow that touched everything with a glamorous unreality, which made each new turning seem a wild adventure. It was gone; life was slipping past. Here she sat, a woman little past thirty, and what had she gained in exchange? Fame, perhaps? And wealth, which lay just around the next corner? Something had escaped her; something which in her mind was associated dimly with Lily and the memory of the pavilion silvered by the moon.

She stirred suddenly. “I must go. My mother and Miss Ogilvie are waiting at the Ritz.”

She rose and Thérèse pulled herself with an heroic effort from the depths of her chair. Together they walked through the bleak, shadowy hall and at the door Mrs. Callendar said, “You will come to dinner with me some night ... yes? I will ring you up to-morrow.”

And as Ellen moved away down the steps, she added, “Remember, you must not overwork.... You must care for yourself. You are not as young as you were once.”

It was that final speech _You are not as young as you were once_ which, like a barbed arrow, remained in her mind and rankled there as she drove in the Callendar motor through the streets to the Ritz where she found her mother and Miss Ogilvie sitting sleepily with an air of disapproval while Sanson and Rebecca and Uncle Raoul drank champagne and labored to be gay in celebration of the triumph.

It was about this hour that the amorous wailing of the tom-cat died forever upon the ears of Mr. Wyck.

* * * * *

In the morning the newspapers printed, in the column devoted to murders, suicides and crimes of violence, a single paragraph----

“Herbert Wyck, aged forty-three, single, committed suicide last night by inhaling gas in his room in a boarding house at ---- West 35th street. The only existing relative is Miss Sophronia Wyck residing in Yonkers. It is said that the dead man’s family once played a prominent part in the life of New York in the Seventies.”

But no one saw it ... not Hattie Tolliver, nor her husband, nor Robert, nor Ellen; they were all busy reading the triumphant notices of the concert at which, more than one critic said, a new Tèresa Carreño had arrived.

Thus passed Mr. Wyck whose one happiness was desolated because Lily Shane had encountered Clarence Murdock in the dining car of a transcontinental train. “Women like that,” Harvey Seton had said....

* * * * *

Ellen went to dine in the ugly dining room copied from the Duc de Morny not once but many times and she met there those people--Mrs. Mallinson, the Honorable Emma, the Apostle to the Genteel, Mr. Wickham Chase and scores of others--who had once sat on the opposite side of the lacquered screen waiting for the Russian tenor, the Javanese dancer and the unknown young American girl. She sat at dinner between bankers and bishops, between fashionable young men and elderly millionaires. She was a success, for she possessed an indifference bordering upon rudeness which allowed her dinner companions to talk as much as they pleased about themselves and led them into extraordinary efforts to win a gleam of interest from her clear blue eyes. And she learned that many things had changed since she last dined in the Callendar house. She learned that Mrs. Sigourney was no longer fashionable but merely material for the newspapers, and that Mrs. Champion and her Virgins had sunk into a brownstone obscurity in the face of a new age which no longer had a great interest in virginity; and that artists, musicians and writers were becoming the thing, that no dinner was complete without them. But it was amazing how little the whole spectacle interested her. She knew that it had all been arranged with a purpose; the indomitable Thérèse, for all her fatigue and worry, was preparing for the next step. These dinners gave Lilli Barr a place in the world of the Honorable Emma and the Apostle to the Genteel; they fixed her.

52

The first letter from Lily since Ellen had left the house in the Rue Raynouard for Vienna arrived on the eve of her departure from New York for the West. It was a sad letter, tragic and strangely subdued for one so buoyant, so happy as Lily to have written. Still, there were reasons ... reasons which piled one upon another in a crescendo of sorrow and tragedy. It was, as Ellen remarked to Rebecca while they sat at breakfast in the bright sitting room, as if the very foundations of Lily’s life had collapsed.

César was missing. “I have given up hope,” wrote Lily, “of seeing him again. Something tells me that he is dead, that even if he were a prisoner I should have heard from him. I know he is gone. I saw him on the night he went into action. His troop passed through Meaux in the direction of the Germans and he stopped for five minutes ... five precious minutes ... at Germigny. And then he rode away into the darkness.... I am certain that he is dead.”

Nor was this all. Madame Gigon too was dead. With Lily she had been trapped in the house at Germigny, too ill to flee. The Germans had entered the park and the château and spent a night there. Before morning they were driven out again. During that night Madame Gigon had died. She was buried now in the family grave at Trilport, nearby.

And Jean ... the Jean (eighteen now) who was such a friend of Ellen’s, who had ridden wildly through the Bois and through the fields at Germigny, was in the hospital. He had been with César’s troop. César had pledged himself to look out for the boy. But César had vanished during the first skirmish with the Uhlans. Jean had lost him, and now Jean lay in the hospital at Neuilly with his left leg amputated at the knee.

“I am back in the Rue Raynouard,” wrote Lily, “but you can imagine that it is not a happy place. I am alone all day and when I go out, I see no one because all the others are busy with the war, with their own friends and relations. Many of them have gone to the country because living has become very dear in Paris. We are safe again, but I am alone. There is not much pleasure here. I too have been very ill. I know now what a stranger I have always been. I am American still, despite everything. They know it too and have left me alone.”

When Rebecca had gone, bustling and rather hard, out into the streets, Ellen sat for a long time with Hansi beside her, holding the sad letter in her hands. This, then, was what had happened to Lily’s world, a world which, protected by wealth, had seemed so secure, so far beyond destruction. In a single night it was gone, swept away like so much rubbish out of an open door. Only Jean was left; and Jean, who loved life and activity and movement, was crippled now forever.

Moved by an overwhelming sadness, Ellen reproached herself for having been rude to old Madame Gigon, for having quarreled with César. She had been unpleasant to them because (she considered the thing honestly now, perhaps for the first time) because the one had been of no use to her and the other had threatened to stand in her way. She knew too for the first time how much Lily had loved her César. In her letter she made no pretenses; she was quite frank, as if after what had happened it was nonsense, pitiful nonsense, any longer to pretend. They were lovers; they had loved each other for years ... it must have been nearly twelve years of love which stood blocked by César’s sickly wife. There was, Ellen owned, something admirable in such devotion, still more when there was no arbitrary tie to bind them, the one to the other.

She rose presently and began to pace up and down the sunlit room, the black dog following close at her heels, up and down, up and down, up and down. And the weariness, the strange lack of zest, which she had spoken of to Mrs. Callendar, took possession of her once more. She was, in the midst of her triumph, surrounded by the very clippings which acclaimed her, afraid with that curious fear of life which had troubled her since the beginning. It was a hostile world in which one must fight perpetually, only to be defeated in the end by some sinister thrust of circumstance ... a thrust such as had destroyed all Lily’s quiet security. It was well indeed to have humility.

She remembered too that Fergus was caught up in the torrent which had swept away so much that Lily held dear.... Fergus and (she halted abruptly in her restless pacing and grew thoughtful) Fergus and Callendar, the two persons in all the world whom she loved best. In the terror of the moment, she was completely honest. She loved Callendar. If there had ever been any doubt, she knew it now. She did not, even to save her own emotions, to shield her own vanity, put the thing out of her mind. She gave herself up to the idea.

In her restless pacing, she fancied that she must do something. She must save them--Callendar and Fergus--by some means; but like Thérèse in her anxiety over her fortune, like Hattie in her desperation, she found herself defeated. There was nothing to be done. This gaudy show, this spectacle, this glittering circus parade which crossed the face of Europe could not be blocked. She could not save them because they preferred the spectacle to anything in all the world. Ah, she knew them both!... She knew what it was in them that was captured and held fast by the spectacle. She knew that if she had been a man, she too would have been there by their side. They must be in the center of things, where there was the most going on, the one aloof, the other fairly saturated in the color, the feel, the very noise of the whole affair. It was a thirst for life, for a sense of its splendor.... She knew what it was because she too was possessed by it. It had nothing to do with patriotism; that sort of emotion was good enough for the French.

Like Hattie, like Thérèse, like a million other women she was helpless, and the feeling terrified her, who had never been really helpless before. This war, which she had damned for a nuisance that interrupted her own triumphant way, became a monster, overwhelming and bestial, before which she was powerless. And in her terror she was softened by a new sort of humanity. She became merely a woman whose men were at war, a woman who could do nothing, who must sit behind and suffer in terror and in doubt.

* * * * *

Rebecca found her there when she returned at three o’clock, still pacing up and down, up and down, the great black dog following close at her heels. She had not lunched; she had not thought of eating.

“The letter from Lily,” she told Rebecca, with an air of repression, “has upset me. I don’t know what I’m to do. I want to go back to Paris.”

The statement so astounded Rebecca that she dropped the novels and papers she was carrying and stood staring.

“What!” she cried, “Go back now? Sacrifice everything we have worked for? Ruin everything? Give up all these engagements? You must be mad.”

It was plain that Ellen had thought of all this, that the struggle which she saw taking form with Rebecca had already occurred in her own soul. She knew what she was sacrificing ... if she returned.

“Lily is alone there, and in trouble. Some one should go to her.”

So that was it! Rebecca’s tiny, bright ferret’s eyes grew red with anger. “Lily! Lily!” she said. “Don’t worry about Lily. I’ll wager by this time she has found some one to console her.”

Ellen moved toward her like a thunder cloud, powerful, menacing in a kind of dignity that was strange and even terrifying to Rebecca. “You can’t say that of her. I won’t have you. How can you when it was Lily who has helped me more than any one in the world? I won’t have it. Who are you to speak like that of Lily ... my own cousin?”

“Lily who has helped you!” screamed Rebecca. “And what of me? What of me?” She began to beat her thin breasts in a kind of fury. Her nose became a beak, her small eyes red and furious. “Have I done nothing? Am I no one, to be cast aside like this? What of the work I have done, the slaving?”

For a moment they stood facing each other, silent and furious, close in a primitive fashion to blows. There was silence because their anger had reached a point beyond all words and here each held herself in check. It was Ellen who broke the silence. She began to laugh, softly and bitterly.

“Perhaps you’re right,” she said in a low voice. “I do owe you a great deal ... as much, really, as I owe to Lily. It has given you the right to a certain hold upon me.”

(But the difference, she knew, was this--that Lily would never exert her right of possession.)

“You can’t go,” continued Rebecca, “not now. Think of it ... all the years of sacrifice and work, gone for nothing. Can’t you see that fate has delivered triumph into your hands. If you turn your back upon it now, you’d be nothing less than a fool.” She saw in a sudden flash another argument and thrust it into the conflict. “Always you have taken advantage of opportunity.... You told me so yourself.... And now when the greatest chance of all is at hand, you turn your back on it. I can’t understand you. Why should you suddenly be so thoughtful of Lily?”

Ellen sat down and fell to looking out of the window. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “I’ll think it out ... more clearly perhaps.”

There was, after all, nothing that she could do. The old despair swept over her, taking the place of her pessimistic anger. She could not go to the front, among the soldiers, to comfort Callendar. He would have been the last to want her there.

“Perhaps you’re right,” she repeated, and then, “War is a rotten thing for women.”

But Rebecca had, all the same, a feeling that it was not Lily whom she was fighting but some one else--whom, she could not imagine. She could not have known of course that Thérèse Callendar had already written her son that she had seen Ellen Tolliver, that she was handsomer than ever and more fascinating and sullen, and that in a sly postscript she had remarked, “The strange thing is that I believe she is still in love with you. I watched her, out of curiosity, and I am sure of it.”

And, of course, none of them knew that Callendar on reading the letter somewhere in the mud near Loos, with the throbbing of the barrage in his ears, had smiled at the trickery of women and thought, “Curiosity, indeed!”

* * * * *

It was in the end Rebecca who won, not a victory perhaps but at least a delay. The little Jewess was much too shrewd ever to suppose that Ellen might be conquered so easily; if she had won a temporary advantage she understood it was because Ellen chose to let her win, because Ellen had weighed the question and decided that all things considered, Rebecca was right. To turn back at this point was a folly which she could not deny. Belonging now in a sense to the whole world she was no longer absolute mistress of her own fortune; such freedom was, after all, the privilege only of the obscure. She was in truth, she thought bitterly, still a mountebank, an entertainer, who waited behind a painted screen to entertain the public. The stage was greater now and the audience had grown from the fashionable little group in the Callendar drawing-room to all the world. That was the only difference.

But stronger than any sense of duty or obligation was the old terror of a terrible poverty which forced one to keep up appearances. She had tasted the security that comes of riches and she could not turn back. There were memories which would not die, memories of the days when as a girl she had put on a bold face before all the Town, memories, even worse, of the drab petty economies she had known in the days at the Babylon Arms. And even stronger than all these things was her fear of failure, a passionate fear which might easily have driven her in some circumstances to suicide. One who had been so ruthless, so arrogant, so proud, dared not fail. That way too had been blocked.

So she found herself brought up sharply against the problem of the Town. They wanted her there; they were, strangely enough, proud of her. Eva Barr had written her, and Miss Ogilvie, and even May Biggs, whom she had feared ever to see again. She had left them all believing that she would never turn back, believing that by stepping aboard the express for the East she had turned her back forever upon a place which, in honest truth, she despised. But she had not escaped; there were ties, intangible and tenuous, which bound her to the place. There were times when she was even betrayed by a certain nostalgia for the sight of the roaring black furnaces, the dark empty rooms of Shane’s Castle, closed now and barren of all life; the decaying smoke-stained houses that stood far back from the streets surrounded by green lawns and old trees.

She thought, “This again is a sign that something has gone from me, something fierce and spirited. I am growing softer.”

They had, so May Biggs wrote, built a new concert hall, and what could be so appropriate as to have it opened by a daughter of the Town? “A daughter of the Town,” she reflected bitterly. “Yes, I am that. It, too, claims me.”

And it was true. She was a daughter of the Town. There was in her the same fierce energy, the same ruthlessness, the same pride. If she had been born elsewhere, in some less harsh and vigorous community, she would herself have been softer, less overwhelmingly successful. It was true. She _was_ a daughter of the hard, uncompromising Town.

“_It happens like that ..._” Miss Ogilvie had said, “_in the most unexpected places ... in villages, in towns.... Why, even in a dirty mill town like this._”

But in the end, it was her pride which led her back. Because, a dozen years ago, she had talked wildly and desperately, because she had boasted of what she would one day do, she must return now to let them see that she had done it. It was a triumph which in her heart she counted as more than the triumphs of London, of Paris, of New York, of all the world. For she had not yet escaped the Town. She would not be free until they saw her fabulous success.

* * * * *

But Hattie could not go with her. Hattie’s triumph was spoiled. On the night of the concert when The Everlasting had appeared without warning, it was necessary for some one to see that the old man was returned safely to the apartment, so to Charles Tolliver the task had been assigned. Gramp, Heaven knows, could easily have found his way back; he knew more of the world than any of them, but he chose never to interfere with such plans lest he seem too active, too spry to require any attention. To guard his security, he encouraged their assumption that he was feeble and a bit childish. He had not forgotten the security which comes of being a possession.

It is impossible to have known what thoughts passed through the crafty, old mind as he walked by the side of his son through the dark streets. They did not speak; they were as strange to each other as they had always been, as remote as if there had been not the slightest bond between them. Perhaps the old man scorned his son for his gentle goodness, so misplaced in a world where there was so little use for that sort of thing. Perhaps he understood that Ellen was after all much closer to himself than to her father. Perhaps he knew that Charles Tolliver, in his heart, had been saddened by the triumph, because it stood as a seal upon his daughter’s escape. Perhaps he noticed the faint weariness in the step of his son, the dark circles beneath his eyes, the listlessness of his manner, as if he had grown weary of the confused, tormented life all about him.

It was the old man ... the father ... whose step was light, whose eye was shining as they entered the flat. It was the old man too who sat up reading until he heard Hattie and Miss Ogilvie, returning from the Ritz, come in at three in the morning. For Charles Tolliver had gone quickly away to his bed and to the dreams that were his reality.

In the morning Hattie had called Ellen to say that her father was ill. He had been drowsy. It was almost impossible to keep him awake. The doctor had been there.

“He says,” Hattie told her, “that he must have been ill for a long time without speaking of it. He has never complained. I don’t understand it. And now he’s too drowsy to tell me anything. The doctor says he is badly run down. He is worried because Papa seems to have no resistance.”

He had grown no better with the passing of time. Indeed, the drowsiness seemed to increase, and there were times when he talked irrationally, as if he had never left the Town at all. He held long, fantastic conversations with Judge Wilkins and talked too of the Grand Circuit races and Pop Geers.

And when Ellen left for the Midlands, Hattie remained behind to sit in the rocking chair at her husband’s side caring for him and for Gramp who had since the night when he ran away to the concert become troublesome again as if there were something in the air.

53

In the Town the new concert hall of which Cousin Eva Barr and May Biggs had written with such enthusiasm and detail raised its white Greek façade a score of yards from the main street. Erected to the twin worship of the muses of Music and the Theater it supplanted the dismal opera house of an early, less sophisticated period, and so left the late U. S. Grant architecture of that shabby, moth-eaten structure in an undivided dedication to the bastard sister of Music and the Theater, a shabby, commonplace child known as the Movies, whom Sabine had once said should be christened Pomegranate. Though the new temple was barely finished and the names of Shakespeare, Wagner (who would probably be left out now that there was a war and the Germans, who were the very backbone of the Town, had become blond beasts, professionally trained ravishers, and other things), Beethoven (who would slip by the committee because he had been dead so long), Verdi (whose Aïda many supposed to be the high water mark of all opera), Molière (suggested by Eva Barr but unknown to most of the committee), Racine (likewise), Weber (who was so dead as to be a natural history specimen and therefore unlikely to ravish any one, even spiritually), Goethe and Schiller (likewise, though still under suspicion)--were not yet carven upon its limestone pediment, the building was already streaked by the soot which drifted perpetually over the city from the remote flats where the mills now worked all day and all night in making shells. Yet the handsome temple could have had no existence save for the soot; the very smudges upon its virgin face were each one a symbol of the wealth which had made it possible. The Town had known four stages in its development. In the beginning there had been but a block house set down in a wilderness. Before many years had passed this was succeeded by a square filled with farmers and lowing cattle and heavy wagons laden with grain. Then in turn a community, raw and rankly prosperous which grew with a ruthless savagery, crushing everything beneath a passion for bigness and prosperity. And now, creeping in toward its heart, stealthily and, as many solid citizens believed, suspiciously, there came a softness which some called degeneration--a liking for beauty of sound, of sight, and of color. It stole up from the rear at the most unexpected moments upon men like Judge Weissmann. The wives of leading manufacturers and wholesale grocers had traitorously admitted lecturers and musicians into a fortress dedicated hitherto to the business of making money. And then with a sudden rush, the new forces had swept out of their hiding places on every side and saddled upon the noble citizenry a concert hall, a temple erected in the very heart of the citadel to the enemy.

So it stood there, bright and new, a few hundred yards from the Elks Club--a symbol of a change that was coming slowly to pass, a sign that the women and the younger generation had grown a little weary of a world composed entirely of noise and soot and clouds of figures. Men like Judge Weissmann saw it as the beginning of the end. Judge Weissmann (himself an immigrant from Vienna) called it “a sign that the old thrifty spirit of the pioneer was passing. The old opera house was good enough for concerts and shows.” And secretly he calculated how much all that white limestone and carving had cost him in taxes.

It was into this divided world that Ellen, who had known only a community that was solid in its admiration for smoke and bigness and prosperity, returned. They were good to her, despite all the things they had to say regarding her affectations. They considered her dog (Callendar’s dog) ridiculous, and they disapproved of the uncompromising Miss Schönberg who demanded her cash guaranty for the concert almost as soon as she stepped from the train. In certain benighted circles (which is to say those not associated with the flamboyant Country Club set) it was even whispered that she drank and smoked. They wondered how gentle Miss Ogilvie received such behavior, for Ellen stayed with Miss Ogilvie, who watched her bird’s-nest parlor grow blue with the smoke of Ellen’s and Rebecca’s cigarettes without ever turning a hair. Was she not entertaining a great artist? If she herself had had the courage, might not she have been smoking cigarettes and drinking champagne? Had she herself not failed because she was afraid of what people would say? None of them knew the spirit of rebellion, smoldering for so many years, that now leapt into flame beneath the mauve taffeta dress which she wore every day during Ellen’s visit.

The bird’s-nest parlor, with all its pampas grass and coral and curios, must have set fire to strange memories in the breast of Ellen. She sat again in the same chair where she had sat, abashed but proud, awkward yet possessed of her curious dignity, on the night of the elopement. The little room was filled with memories of Clarence. She must have seen him again as he had been on that first night (so lost now in the turmoil of all that had gone between) ... sitting there, frightened of old Harvey Seton, ardent and excited in his choked, inarticulate fashion, a man who even then had seemed a little ridiculous and pitiful.

And once Miss Ogilvie had summoned him to life when she said to Ellen, “Poor Mr. Murdock. If only he could be here to see your success.”

The little old woman had the best intentions in the world. The meager speech was born of sympathy and kindness alone. She could not have known that each word had hurt Ellen intolerably. Poor Clarence! He would not have liked it. It would have made him even more insignificant and wretched. _The husband of Ellen Tolliver. That’s what I’ll be!_ The words echoed ironically in her ears. And Clarence had never known Lilli Barr, who was born years after he died.... Lilli Barr who had nothing to do with poor Clarence. So far as the world was concerned he had never existed at all.

She had her triumph. There were set floral pieces with the words “Welcome Home” worked in carnations and pansies. And there was a welcoming speech by Mrs. McGovern, president of the Sorosis Club (who had downed Cousin Eva Barr only after a fierce struggle for the honor). And they had cheered her. It was a triumph and in a poor, inadequate fashion it satisfied her. But she was not sure that it was worth all the pain.

She did not go into the empty, echoing rooms of Shane’s Castle. She saw it, distantly, veiled in the smoke and flame of the Flats, from Miss Ogilvie’s back window on the hill, the one monument of her family in all the Town. She could not have borne it to enter alone the door which on each Christmas Day for so many years had admitted a whole procession.

And she came to understand that it was not alone the Town which she was driven relentlessly to escape. It was the Babylon Arms, Thérèse Callendar and all her world, even her own family, all save Fergus--she must escape forever any tie that bound her, any bond which gave her into possession.

* * * * *

On the day after the concert Miss Ogilvie gave a reception. Crowds of women and a few intimidated men thronged the tiny parlor. They passed in and out in an endless stream, until Rebecca, who could bear it no longer, invaded the virgin privacy of Miss Ogilvie’s bedroom and fell into a perfect orgy of smoking while she read Holy Living and Dying, the only book at hand to divert her. Hansi, shut in an adjoining room, howled and howled in his solitude.

Long after the winter twilight had descended, at a moment when Ellen thought she could endure the procession no longer, it began to abate and as the last guest departed she saw, coming up the neat brick walk between the lilacs and syringas, the figure of a plump dowdy woman surrounded by a phalanx of children. In truth there were but four in the phalanx but in the fading light their numbers seemed doubled. As the woman came nearer there rose about her an aura of familiarity ... something in the way she walked, coquettish and ridiculous in a woman so plump and loose of figure. And then, all at once in a sudden flash, Ellen recognized the walk. The woman was May Biggs. Years ago May had moved thus, giggling and flirting her skirts from side to side while she walked with her arm about Ellen’s waist. Only now (Ellen reflected) there was twice as much of her to wriggle and the effect was not the same.

As she approached Ellen did not wait. Some memory was stirred by the sight, something which she could no more control than she could understand.... May Biggs, whom she had scorned always, coming up Miss Ogilvie’s brick walk carrying one child and leading three others by the hand, a May Biggs who was stout now and already middle-aged in her dowdy clothes covered with feathers and buttons and bits of passementerie. It was extraordinary, the feeling that overwhelmed her; it was a sensation compounded of joy and melancholy, of guilt and a curious desire to recapture something which had escaped her forever, perhaps that first reckless youth which had slipped away in the night without her knowing it.

She stood in the doorway, crying, “May ... May Seton!”

And then she was kissing May who blushed and held on awkwardly to the youngest of the four little Biggses.

In the little parlor they were alone, for Miss Ogilvie under the stress of the excitement and the failure of the local bakery to deliver the macaroons had retired to her chamber with her smelling salts, where she now sat in a cloud of blue smoke talking with Rebecca while the great black dog howled in the adjoining room.

Once they were seated, May put forward her offspring, one by one, in order on the descending scale. “This is Herman Junior ... and this Marguerite ... and this Merton ... and the baby here is named after me.”

(All in order, thought Ellen, two boys and two girls, properly alternated.)

The two boys shook hands awkwardly, Marguerite curtseyed and smirked with all the coquetry descended from her now settled mother, and the baby gurgled pleasantly and buried her head. They were all very neat and clean. Their manners were excellent. They revealed glimpses of a little world that was placid, orderly, comfortable and perhaps a little monotonous.

“I brought the children,” said May. “I wanted them to meet you. This,” she said, addressing the three who were able to walk, “is my girl friend I told you about. She’s famous now. You can remember when you’re grown up that you’ve met her.” And then abruptly, “Marguerite, put down that cake until the lady tells you to have one.”

She had not changed much. Hers was the good-natured, pleasant sort of face on which time leaves few traces, and since nothing could ever happen to May, very little could happen to her face. It had grown more plump, and less arch, for she was content and satisfied now with a solid husband, and she showed every sign of presenting a new hostage to fortune.

“Well,” she said, shyly. “A lot has happened, hasn’t it, Ellen.... I suppose I can still call you Ellen.”

There was something in May’s shyness, in the awe which shone in her eyes, that struck deep into Ellen’s humility. It made her feel preposterous and absurd and a little nightmarish.

“Good Heavens!” she replied. “That’s my name. Of all the people in the world, you have most right to use it.” And then. “But tell me the news. I’ve been too busy to hear any of it. It’s been ten years since I went away.”

She found herself blushing, perhaps at the sudden slip of the tongue that betrayed her into recognition of the one unpleasantness that stood between them. It was almost as if she had said, “since I ran away with Clarence.”

May, it seemed, was no more eager to mention his name. She hastened past it. “I tried to get Herman to come, but he wouldn’t go where there were so many women. He wants to see you. He said to tell you that if you would come to lunch, he’d come home from the works. You’d never know him. He’s a father now,” she made a sweeping gesture to include the restless troop that surrounded her, “and he has a mustache.”

Ellen declined, with a genuine regret. She wanted vaguely to enter the mild, ordered world out of which these four children had come.

“I can’t come because I am leaving at eight. You see, I can’t do what I like any more. I have engagements ... concerts which I must keep. But thank him. Maybe he could run over to-night.”

May thought not. They were making an inventory at the Junoform factory and Herman would be there until midnight. Harvey Seton (Lily’s arch enemy) was dead.

“He died last June. We found him cold in the morning in his bed in the spare room. You see he hadn’t slept in the same room with Ma since Jimmy was born. She says if he had, he might be alive to-day.”

So Herman was head of the factory now and he was worried. The new fashions had cut down the sale of corsets, and corsets made of rubber were putting into the discard those built upon the synthetic whalebone which old Samuel Barr had invented. Business wasn’t so good. Perhaps the fashions would change. Perhaps they would put in a rubber corset department. Ellen was fresh from Paris. Did she think there was any chance of small waists coming in again?

“Of course,” said May, with an echo of the old giggle, “women with my figure will always have to wear whalebone. Rubber is no good for me. And then just now, I have to wear my corsets loose....” She sighed. “If only I had a figure like yours.” And she swept Ellen’s straight gray clad figure with an appraising and envious glance.

“And your grandfather is still alive?” asked May in astonishment. “Why, he was an old man when you left. He must be nearly ninety now.”

“He’s ninety-one and very spry,” said Ellen. “He goes out to walk alone in the city. He hasn’t changed at all.”

“Well, well,” echoed May, and there rose an awkward pause which neither of them seemed able to break. Now that they had gone quickly through the past there seemed to be nothing of which to speak. The sound of the black dog’s howling came distantly into the little parlor. It was Merton, the third child, who saved the situation. May cried, “Merton, how many times have I told you not to touch things. Take your hand right out of that goldfish bowl.... Here, come here now and wipe it on Momma’s handkerchief.”

While this was being done Ellen reflected, a bit grimly, that perhaps it was just as well that she could not lunch with May. If the conversation had grown sterile in half an hour, how could one hope that it could be spread over an hour? Sabine, perhaps, had been right, when she had said once that it was a bad sign when a person had a great many _old_ friends. It meant that such a person had not much capacity for growth.

Here was May unchanged, exactly as she had always been, save that she had now the satisfaction of a husband and was no longer restless and coquettish. Perhaps she had been right when she said so long ago that all May wanted was a man; it did not matter what man.

“There now,” May was saying. “Sit on the chair and don’t swing your feet. You’ll scratch Miss Ogilvie’s furniture.” She turned to Ellen. “Marguerite,” she said, “is now taking lessons from Miss Ogilvie. Maybe some day you’ll be famous too, Marguerite. Maybe you’ll play for the lady. Come now ... that’s a nice girl ... play your new piece, the one called The Jolly Farmer.”

But Marguerite would not stir. She grew arch and hung her head. She threatened to sob. Her mother coaxed and argued and pleaded but nothing happened. Marguerite would have none of The Jolly Farmer. It was Rebecca who saved the situation by coming in.

“My God!” she said, on entering, but the rest of her sentence was lost forever because the sight of May and her offspring silenced her.

“Miss Schönberg,” said Ellen, “this is Mrs. Biggs.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said May, staring at the exotic figure of Rebecca, and then after a strained silence, “I must go now. Baby wants her supper.”

Ellen went with the party to the door and as she bade them farewell and the little procession got under way, she saw that May hung behind with a curious air of embarrassment until the three older children were half way down the neat brick path. With only the baby left to hear her, she turned abruptly to Ellen and with a blush, said, “There was one thing I wanted to ask you and I never had a chance until now. It’s about Clarence.” She hesitated and then with a supreme effort managed to say, “There was a story that he shot himself.... That wasn’t true, was it?”

Ellen did not answer at once. She took the hand of the baby in hers, and looking away, replied in a low voice, “No, it wasn’t true.... You remember he had a weak heart. It was his heart that killed him.”

“I’m glad,” said May softly. “I always liked him. I wouldn’t want to think he’d committed suicide.”

She stood in the doorway, unconscious of the cold until the figure of May, swaying from side to side and surrounded by the phalanx of offspring, had disappeared among the shadows of the lilacs.

In the hallway, Rebecca was awaiting her.

“Thank God, that’s over,” she said with a laugh, but she must have noticed that Ellen did not respond.

“She was a friend of mine,” Ellen observed gravely. “I grew up with her.”

Again Rebecca laughed in that same hard, worldly fashion. “I must say she has been more abundant than you.”

This time Ellen made no answer at all. She was hypnotized by the memory of the look that had come into May’s eyes at the mention of Clarence. It was an embarrassed, shy look, but it glowed all the same with a fire that had never burned for Herman Biggs. And Ellen understood then for the first time that she had been wrong after all, for Clarence--poor, meek, inarticulate Clarence, who had been dead for years--was to May a romantic figure, a fascinating creature. May had thought of him always ... perhaps in the same fashion in which she herself thought of Callendar.

It had been all wrong since the beginning. There was no longer any doubt. It was May whom he should have married. And she wondered again for the thousandth time what it was that had turned him toward herself.

But the dog was still howling in loneliness. She walked along the tiny hall and as she opened the door he leapt at her in a frenzy of devotion.

“Hansi, old fellow,” she murmured and pressed her face against his sleek black head.

54

It was six years now, through the evil chance that led them to pass each other unknowingly in mid-Atlantic, since Fergus had seen his sister. From afar, even in the turmoil and excitement of the war he had watched her progress, now in the letters from his mother (which he discounted because he knew she was inclined to exaggerate when her children were concerned) now in the letters from Ellen, and sometimes in the newspapers which filtered through, weeks old, to his escadrille at the front. As Ellen had guessed, he understood the ascent perfectly; he saw her working at it doggedly with one eye always upon the lucky chance. From afar he had admired the whole campaign and developed a passionate curiosity to know this Rebecca Schönberg who stood so cleverly in the background of the whole affair. She too had genius.

The great distance which separated them--even the years which had passed since he saw her, aboard the greasy old _City of Paris_, slip away into the winter mists of the North River--had not altered the transcendent quality of their understanding. Their tie was not, like the love of Hattie, a thing which emotionally demanded a close and breathless contact. It was less a matter of the senses and more a matter of the mind. Each had known always what to expect from the other, above all else a frank and unabashed honesty. They were very like each other, save that Fergus (and he knew it ruefully) lacked his sister’s stiff, inflexible wilfulness. It was these qualities, he understood well enough, which had given her the advantage. It had made of her a conqueror. The lack of it had left him a charming, happy-go-lucky fellow. But it gave him too a savor in life, a wild enjoyment, which she could never know.

The war suited him. As his mother had believed, it was to him a great show, a sort of masquerade in which he was at once a participant and a spectator; and it gave rein to impulses and inheritances which otherwise might never have been awakened--such strains as a passion for adventure that had its origin in wild cattle-thieving highland ancestors, and a love for the excitement to be found in battle high in the air above a world that lay spread out beneath him mapwise and miserably dwarfed. A little of this he managed to pin down in the eager, hurried letters he wrote to Ellen, so that she understood what it was that made him content and happy. It was a satisfaction very like her own, the satisfaction of triumph over great odds, of gambling for high stakes, of finding oneself absorbed utterly and passionately in the thing at hand. It was that queer streak again--the same queer streak which had made of Sam Barr a pauper and of Old Julia Shane a woman fabulously rich, the streak to which the clumsy perpetual motion machine rusting in a corn field of the middle-west stood as an eternal monument. It was the old fever to gobble up all of life, not alone mere stupid contentment, but danger and sorrow and even tragedy--a strange unworldly greed to get the most of a life which each of them knew in his very marrow was bitterly brief.

It was easy to see in the glowing letters of Fergus that he was wildly happy in those days. It was easy to see that the old restlessness, so long without a way to turn, at last had found its goal. The old adventurous blood had come into its own.

From a great distance he had watched his sister’s triumphs but, unlike the others, he had no awe of her imperious way of riding roughshod over those who stood in her path. To him Ellen Tolliver would always exist, concealed perhaps inside the shell of Lilli Barr, but alive none the less and ready to be called forth. The core, the heart was eternal. It did not change. He saw her still, in the rare moments when he had peace enough for reflection, as he had always seen her--a wilful, smolderingly brilliant, disagreeable sister with whom he could do as he chose, no matter what her mood or temper. It did not occur to him that she had grown older, in some ways more mellow and in some ways harder than she had ever been.

It was from Ellen that he heard first of his father’s death. She wrote him that the gentle man had gone to sleep on the night after her first concert in America and that afterward he had never really awakened. There had been moments when for a time he had recognized his wife and talked to her, though he did not seem quite clear and mixed the past and the present in a strange and touching confusion. And at the end she had written, in her bold, sprawling hand, “None of the doctors appeared to know what it was that killed him. But I knew what it was. He died simply of homesickness. He hated the city. He was born to hate it. But you must never say this to Ma, for it was she who forced him to leave the Town. And it was our fault in the end ... yours and mine, because it was us whom she was pursuing. She’ll never stop. She’s an extraordinary woman. Time has no effect upon her, no more than it has upon The Everlasting. He is ninety-four and though he looks as old as Methuselah, he is as spry and as clear in the head as a boy. He has learned how to protect himself. Oh! So admirably! Sometimes, I fancy he will outlive us all ... sitting in his room, rocking and chuckling! He has discovered a secret which none of us know! And he’ll never tell us.”

Thus Charles Tolliver had died, peacefully and without resentment, indifferent to the triumphs of his children so long as they were lost to him; for long ago he had recognized the loss, a thing his wife would never do. And he had lost not only his children but the very life he had loved. He had gone now from a sleep that had been fitful, from dreams which had been awakened harshly each morning by the noises of a hostile city, into a long unbroken sleep. Quietly and gently he had lived, a friend to all the world, serving for his part as little more than the father of Hattie’s children, passing on to them the qualities of old Gramp to unite with the qualities of Hattie and produce such offspring as Ellen and Fergus. They had never belonged to him, even for a moment. They had been Hattie’s always, and old Gramp’s....

55

Nearly three years passed before Ellen, having meanwhile added Australia and South America to the list of her triumphs, returned to the Paris which she had not seen since the day she left with Rebecca for the Vienna they had never reached and now never would reach; because, as Rebecca said, the old Vienna was gone now, forever. Ellen would never know it as it had been in the days when Rebecca had visited Uncle Otto who owned a sapphire mine in Cambodia.

In the end she went back to Paris over the protests of her mother and against the advice of Rebecca, who saw the return simply as a great bundle of money thrown to the winds. But she could not have done otherwise. She had to return. She was unable to explain the instinct, but she trusted it shrewdly as wise persons trust instinct for its value as accumulated experience over any mere process of logic. She had to see Lily again and the beautiful house (so saddened and changed) in the Rue Raynouard. And there were times too when she became obsessed by an inexplicable fear that if she did not go at once, she might be too late.... Too late for what? This she could not answer, save that vaguely it must have to do with Fergus and Callendar. Lily was in no danger; she lived quietly in the Rue Raynouard or in the white villa at Nice.