Chapter TWO: A Vincelle in His Natural Habitat

He waked the next morning to a marvelous peace. Pendleton was still sleeping beside him, and there was no other sound but his quiet breathing. Vincelle felt very wide awake; he got up instantly, and he was glad to believe, from the silence, that it was still very early and that he would be able to get home before eleven. He had forgotten to wind his watch the night before and it had stopped, but he fancied that he could sense the time. He went over to one of the windows and pulled up the shade with a rattle; it wasn’t his nature to consider the sleep of friends. It was a bright, frosty morning, very clear; before him lay a neat back garden, and behind it a stable. Not a sign of life. He drew on his socks, always the first step of his routine, and suddenly a disturbing thought assailed him. He went over to Pendleton and shook him and shook him until he opened his eyes. Pendleton swore at him.

“Look here!” said young Vincelle. “Where do I shave?”

“Don’t shave!” said Pendleton. “Go to sleep again like a Christian.”

“No. I told Mother I’d try to get home in time to take her to church.”

Pendleton pulled out his watch from under his pillow.

“Ah!” he shouted, exultantly. “Half past eleven already, my son! Foiled!”

Vincelle frowned.

“I haven’t missed in years,” he said. “Poor old lady! She counts on it.”

“Now perhaps you’ll shut up and let me go to sleep again.”

“Where can I shave? Is there a bathroom?”

“Ring the bell,” said Pendleton. “And some one’ll bring you hot water.”

But when he was dressed in the clothes he had brought with him in his bag, he hesitated to go down alone in this strange house. He strolled about the room, smoking, until Pendleton was ready, and they descended together. There wasn’t a soul to be seen.

“They’ve all gone to church,” said Pendleton.

This struck Vincelle as grossly inhospitable, someone should have been there to attend to him. But a nice little servant brought them an excellent breakfast in the dining room and after it they sat comfortably in front of the fire, enjoying cigars from an open box on the sideboard.

“As soon as they come back, we’ll go,” said Pendleton. And they did so. Mrs. Mason offered them the use of the family omnibus in which they had returned from church, but Pendleton said they’d rather walk. She did not invite them to stop for dinner, which Vincelle considered impolite. If she didn’t want them, why couldn’t she simply invite them in a half-hearted, unacceptable manner?

“I must thank you for a most enjoyable time,” he said ceremoniously.

She smiled and held out her hand.

“Come again!” she said.

Claudine, too, gave him her hand, but her glance and her smile were lamentably devoid of significance. Evidently he wasn’t, for her, a special person; he was nothing but a young man who had come down for a dance. They set out down the hill, and he was able now to gain an idea of the place at his leisure. It was a big wooden house with a cupola on top; it had no pretension to beauty or architectural style, it was in fact, quite hideous and ungainly, made of grey clapboards with a slate roof; square, except that on one side a little greenhouse was built out from the veranda. The garden, too, although large, was not like the gardens of other people: there was no fountain, no nicely set out shrubs. There was a beautiful old box hedge enclosing it, but inside it looked irregular and untidy.

Pendleton was talking cheerfully.

“What do you think of her?” he asked.

“Very attractive,” said Vincelle.

“Did you ever see anyone like her?” he pursued.

Vincelle admitted that he hadn’t.

“I don’t mind telling you I’m pretty hard hit,” said Pendleton.

This was something his friend had very much wished not to hear.

“What about _her_?” he asked, briefly.

Pendleton groaned.

“She’s such a little flirt!” he said. “Of course, I’m not in a position to marry now, anyway. I’m not making enough to keep myself. And by the time I can ask her ... with all these fellows hanging round her all the time ... Lord!”

Vincelle considered this frankness unmanly and indecorous. Never would he have admitted a liking for a young lady until he was certain that she returned it.

They crossed on the ferry, standing outside in the fine, cold air, on the deck of the ark-shaped old boat. They reached New York and just caught the Wall Street ferry and at last disembarked in the familiar air of Brooklyn. They both lived in the august Columbia Heights district, Pendleton in a house which was respectable, but no more, and Vincelle in a fine one, on a corner, with a garden quite twenty feet wide. He respected this garden, because it represented extra property and also because it kept them aloof from all neighbors; through the high iron fence could be seen its winter desolation, a complete and woeful barrenness. At the best of times it was hardly an oasis, nothing grew in it, and nothing was intended to grow in it, except a wretched ancient wistaria, two bushes of Japanese holly and a tall shrub, dry and dead. The common use of the garden was as a place in which the house plants could stand, the rubber trees and palms and orange trees in tubs. Every Spring old Mrs. Vincelle bought a number of potted geraniums and had them planted in a certain bed where they blossomed, mangily, for a month or two.

He bade his friend good-bye here and ran up the brown stone steps, opened the door with his latch key, and entered into a chill vault, dark, muffled, dismal. He hung up coat and hat on a gigantic piece of furniture which towered up to the ceiling and which was at once a hat rack, a pier-glass, a bureau with six drawers and a low table with a marble top. Then he ran up the thickly carpeted stairs to a bedroom on the floor above where he knew he would find his mother.

Sure enough, there she was, sitting in her rocking chair, with folded hands, looking out on to the quiet street, a fragile little old lady of sixty with a contemptuous, wizened little face and melancholy brown eyes. She was dressed in her Sunday dress of black silk with a white lace vest, she wore her best earrings, her diamond brooch, and a fine wool shawl bundled about her narrow shoulders.

“Well!” she said with a smile.

Her son approached and kissed her reverently.

“I was very sorry, Mother, to miss taking you to church,” he said, “but I didn’t wake up until eleven. It was three o’clock when we got to bed.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Did they dance on Sunday morning? Well, I dare say no one thinks of such things any longer. However, it didn’t matter, Gilbert. I had a touch of rheumatism, I shouldn’t have gone anyway.”

“Pshaw!” he said solicitously. “Your shoulder again, Mother?”

“It doesn’t matter. Sit down, Gilbert, and tell me all about it.”

He sat down opposite her, smoothing his sleek black head.

“Oh! The usual thing!” he said.

“Are they nice people?”

“Oh, yes, nice enough. The father’s a professor.”

“That may mean anything,” said the old lady. “I’ve known some professors who were very nice people and some who were impossible. Did you see that girl that Ashley is so enthusiastic about?”

“Yes, I saw her.”

“Mrs. Pendleton tells me he’s head over heels in love with her.”

“Oh, well, you know what Ashley is. He’s always in love.”

“Is she as pretty as he imagines?”

“I don’t know what he imagines,” said her son, a little peevishly. “She’s a very attractive girl. Look here, Mother, I haven’t had any dinner.”

“Mercy me,” cried the old lady. “And it’s nearly four o’clock! Why didn’t you stay in Staten Island? Our dinner’s over and done with hours ago. Ring the bell, Gilbert!”

He did so and it was promptly answered by a woman servant.

“Fetch Miss Dorothy,” she said.

She had risen in her agitation regarding her son’s shocking hunger and began pottering about the room, frowning, lifting up little articles from the bureau and the table with trembling old hands. It was a fine, big room with a Turkish rug on the floor and an assemblage of solid walnut furniture. It was crowded with knickknacks, photographs, a hundred and one mementoes of her past life. It hadn’t the look of a bedroom, for the bureau was hidden behind a screen and the bed was a folding one, displaying nothing but an immense bevelled mirror set in a broad frame of polished wood. Her son had never, even in childhood, seen the least trace of disorder in this room.

“Pshaw!” said the old lady, “she’s asleep again, I suppose. The older she grows the lazier she gets. She’s forever creeping upstairs and going to sleep.... All nonsense.... Here am I so troubled with insomnia that I don’t get five hours rest out of the night and I don’t think anyone’s even seen me taking a nap.... Well, Dorothy!”

A woman stood smiling in the doorway, a stout, grey-haired woman with a tousled, guilty air, a cousin, who earned her bitter bread as a companion for various relatives. She was always spoken of as staying with Aunt This and Cousin That; after two or three months she was sent away, with a sort of rage engendered by her submission, her poverty and her stupidness, and then when the memory had worn off, she was recalled. Her usefulness was never admitted, but always exploited.

“Why, Gilbert!” she said, with an air of pleased surprise. “I didn’t hear you come in!”

“I don’t think you’d hear a sound if the house was on fire!” said the old lady, tartly. “It’s dangerous, the way you sleep. We could all be murdered in our beds, and it wouldn’t disturb you.”

“Why, Cousin Selina, I wasn’t asleep! I was writing letters!”

“Well, now perhaps you’ll be able to attend to this poor boy. He hasn’t had any dinner. And I’d calculated on his having a hearty meal there, so I hadn’t planned for a very big supper. And Katie’s out. Run down to the kitchen and see if you and Mary can’t fix up something nice for him. And tell Mary supper at five instead of six.”

Miss Dorothy looked terrified. She knew so well the very meagre resources of this household where there was never quite enough of anything, where each egg was mentally numbered.

“I’ll do my best,” she said, doubtfully, and vanished.

“Now run upstairs and get ready!” said the old lady.

There were three big, unoccupied bedrooms on her floor, but it had seemed to her, and to Gilbert, more fitting for a bachelor to live on the floor above. He had a very large room there, furnished with austere majesty, an ugly and uncomfortable room which he accepted as he accepted everything else in the life his mother had arranged for him. There was a black dressing-room attached, furnished with a marble wash basin and two big clothes presses: it was supposed to belong to his room and the one next, jointly, but as Miss Dorothy now occupied that adjoining room, the second door was well bolted.

He sat down in a large, high-backed rocking chair with a tapestry seat, one of the many pieces of furniture sent upstairs in disgrace after long service. He began, absent-mindedly, to rock and to think--about Claudine. His thoughts were all distressful and clouded; he felt himself irresistibly attracted by that gay little creature, and he resented it. He resented everything about that dance, the casualness, the cheerfulness; his own home seemed to him admirably correct and majestic. He felt quite unaccountably insulted. These people had treated him in cavalier fashion....

He was naturally inclined to sulkiness. It was his refuge from an incomprehensible world. And perhaps his great capacity for being offended came from an equally pathetic source, perhaps it was a sort of protest made by his youth and his manhood against his bondage. He wasn’t aware of the bondage: he believed that his relations with his mother were ideal and that he “humoured” her in a respectful way. But as a matter of fact, he was less free, he was more under her dominion, than even Miss Dorothy. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that he was hypnotized. He had been led to believe that he was happy; the poor, sullen lonely creature. He never laughed: he very seldom smiled; he hadn’t a spark of humour or gaiety in him. Pendleton privately considered him “heavy,” and heavy he was. It hadn’t prevented him from making a few conquests though. His handsome face, his invincible innocence and possibly his money and his well-known ability in business had won two or three little hearts; but though he had been flattered, he hadn’t been much touched. He had never before in his life experienced anything like this; this was positively uncomfortable. He was obsessed and annoyed by the memory of Miss Mason of Staten Island. Her sparkling face, her liquid voice, the surprising novelty of her had completely captured him. The idea of a girl as pretty and popular and charming as she being able to talk with a--what was it--a paleontologist in so grave a way....

Summoned by Miss Dorothy he descended through the silent house to the dining-room in the basement, always used when the family was alone, and attacked the dismal feast set before him. He was silent because he was silent by nature, having nothing to communicate, and the two women were silent, for what in Heaven’s name had they to say to him or to each other? Meals in that household were perfunctory and ascetic; the old lady didn’t like to waste money on food, it needn’t be either appetizing or nourishing so long as it was according to tradition, and decent. They finished, and all went solemnly up-stairs again; the little old lady first, noiseless over the thick carpet, incredibly slight and unsubstantial, then her son, the staircase creaking under his heavy tread, the quiet darkness reverberating with his loud, masculine cough, and last of all Miss Dorothy.

They went into the back drawing-room and sat down in the chairs they invariably occupied. The old lady closed her eyes, for that nap she always took, and always denied. Miss Dorothy, owing to the fact of its being Sunday, couldn’t take up her fancy work, which was then one of her strongest claims to gentility and gave her at least a semblance of elegant uselessness, and she too closed her eyes, not to sleep, but to continue in her weary and muddled brain her intricate calculations, “planning” she called it. She had to plan for a new black skirt. Could she manage with that alpaca Cousin Selina had given her and if not could she possibly spare the money to buy a new one? She hadn’t a salary; simply, when she left to stay with the next relative, Cousin Selina would give her something in an envelope and it might be enough or it might be very little. She had no occupation for her thoughts but her planning; poor soul. She hadn’t a single interest in life.

As for Gilbert, he being a man, had to read the Sunday newspapers and to smoke. He had an arm-chair and a foot-stool and a smoking stand, placed ready for him, in a good light. But his peace was gone. He was sunk in black depression.