Chapter I: Yellow Gentians (3)

He stared down the lobby and saw himself on a winter afternoon, fourteen years before, in the street with his two children, and he helpless, so to say, to stem them. When Lois ran ahead, he had quickened his loping step, stooped, and dabbed at her shoulder, apparently unaware that she was unaware of him. He had whirled and threatened, “Come, now!” when little Larry fell behind. One passing could have detected that finding himself alone with these two, Bruce lost his own finished creaturehood, died, rose as their attendant, and existed as an amateur.

One, passing, spoke to her chauffeur and drew to the curb—a dovelike woman, already in a ripening youth, who looked on the children with the look which was intended for Bruce. She said:

“You’ve not forgotten to-night?”

He had. But remembering, he vowed his remembrance. And Miss Anna Wild, with her brooding way of attention to the children, to him, drove on, with his negative, unconcerned eyes tormenting her, like a positive.

He had gone up one step to his habitable white house, and worked the children into the passage. The passage was right, paneled, discreetly mirrored; the nurse maid was right, by her voice, her eyelids, her quiet, a genius at servitude. When Larry bellowed, “See you to-night, Father,” and Lois hit Larry in the head to gain the balustrade side of the stair, this maid hadn’t a rebuke; she had: “Only fancy what’s for tea.” All three vanished.

Bruce had gone into the room where his tea table stood. This room also was right, it rested him as could the cherishing brightness of something happy to think about. But there had been nothing happy to think about, and the very charm of the room had beaten at him like a desire. The whole house had charm; the children, too. But Fanny wasn’t there any more, and he was only thirty-six years old.

Overcome by this climax, he had stood staring at his tea table. In a little while Mrs. Beryl would come in and pour. Her cousin would come too, and probably Cory. Cory would hate that hour, and so would he himself. The women would perhaps hate it; only, he thought, they wouldn’t know that they did, having known hatred of so much for so long that pretense had now taken its place, unconsidered. But Fanny had loved the tea hour. Had she? Certainly she had. Little thing, in her delicate clothes, living for his love and without another idea—no, no, he didn’t mean that; but she _had_ loved him. To have lost her after five years of love was ludicrous. He had faced a wall of amazement over which two years had not let him look. From the panels her portrait regarded him, remote, amused. How could she be amused when she was dead, and when he was left here without her and adventureless? He had gone close to the portrait, had remembered her kisses, had her in his arms. He said over her name, “Fanny, Fanny, Fanny.” Its reality was a giddiness.

Mrs. Beryl had come into the room, followed by her cousin and Cory. And as he looked into the eyes of the cousin, Lucy Beryl, Bruce had seen that here was a woman whom also he could love.

He had been stupefied, then seized with an excitement beyond anything that he had ever known. Love for Fanny had been the fruit of propinquity. This was the fruit of something else. As strong as his excitement throbbed his sickening sense of guilt. To love some one who was not Fanny? It was even more improbable than had been Fanny’s death.

Tea went on. Mrs. Beryl poured, and he had noticed that she powdered her hair so that it should boast of the youth of her face. Her opals had winked like the eyes of a fox. Having no conversation, she had learned emphasis, and the last word of every sentence escaped her with its vowel trained like a seal. He liked her, laughed at her, looked at Lucy Beryl and trembled. She was as smooth and clear and perfumed as transparent soap. And her little sentences spread from her like lather.

“Can’t we have the children in?” Cory had demanded shortly. “Jolly little beggars.” Bruce could have embraced old Cory. Bruce wanted to show his children to Lucy Beryl. His children. She did not second the suggestion, and he liked her indifference. Mrs. Beryl said: “Oh, Brucie, do let us! Do-o!” For “o” was such a becoming vowel.

Lois and Larry had come in, and for conduct they dealt in the unbelievabilities, the naïve, the saucy, the devilish, all composed, too, with their courtesy. So far as they had been taught, they were irreproachable; their irregularities lay in their improvisations. But there was one improvisation for which Bruce had forgiven his Lois.

“Daddy,” she said, “are you sad like you look? Larry and I betted. I betted....”

Mrs. Beryl’s look enveloped Bruce, appealed to Lucy, and lit on Cory, who crunched a nut.

“They are motherless, the darlings,” she explained to Lucy, who blushed. A pretty moment. Mrs. Beryl could not keep her hands off it.

“Go and ask Miss Lucy if she won’t tell you a story sometime, lo-vies,” she said.

“Know any?” Larry demanded, wheeling on Miss Lucy. “I mean any that are any good?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Lucy Beryl. “People always have to tell stories to me.”

“Aren’t you growned-up?” demanded Lois.

“No,” she said, and her eyes danced on Bruce. “Is anybody?” she asked him.

“I hope not,” he said gently. He had been enchanted.

“I don’t understand children very well, I’m afraid,” she said, and Mrs. Beryl looked as if she knew, but was afraid Bruce wouldn’t know, that Lucy, from confusion, was lying; but Bruce was thinking merely that this angel was above pretending to swallow his children alive for his sake. Still, when they kissed her as they went away, she did without fervor kiss them rather at large and on the ear; he noticed that. But by then the hour had become, he could recall, a swinging censer whose smoke coursed curling through his veins. When they took their leave, he had gone up to his room and entered it a stranger.

The room was small and sweet and colored. The covers, the linen, the draperies, were of Fanny’s choosing. She had liked blue. He stood in the doorway that night and wondered how the room would look in rose.

He had dined alone, and had the children down. He looked at them with anxiety. Lois was six, Larry was five. Soon there would be for them school, college. Somebody must help them, he was not doing enough. At dessert he had leaned to them and admonished them: “You two must be good—you must be good.” When Lois returned languidly, “Wha’ for, Daddy?” he felt terror. Already was he too late?

He barely remembered his engagement with Miss Anna Wild, and to keep it, late in the evening, dragged himself from his dream. He telephoned her first to ask if he might still come, heard the patience and sweetness of her voice, was rested by it. He thought with pleasure—the pleasure of the man literally caught away from himself, as we say, that he would tell her, this old friend, what had happened to him. Perhaps then he could believe that it had happened, for Anna Wild had known Fanny. And now the name of Fanny was no longer a giddiness, but instead seemed to steady him, or, it might be, rather to take him aback. He had resolutely repeated the name Fanny as he walked under the stars.

He remembered that the night had come in a whirl of wind and the cold. Streams of air tore through the darkness, their thin spray switching and stinging, and from inner coverts broke and regathered a thin roar as from some ambiguous beast too old and worn to care to roar. From the core of the cold blew an odor of clean, far plains, tended by the sweep of snow and the killing quality of frost, an odor like the odor of frozen furrows, the pang of spring. Nor was the spring far distant, for already this turmoil was behaving like music, with a recurrent quiet. At such intervals, cloudy spring stars looked on and then withdrew, as if to attend on brighter immediacies. All this came back to him as pungently present as remembered perfume.

Before Anna Wild he had sat down in his tremendous preoccupation. Usually he talked to her about himself. Come to think of it, even though he had been trying to talk of Lucy Beryl, Anna could not have observed the slightest difference. For he had been telling how Lucy Beryl affected _him_. Such had been his conception of talking about Lucy. He had described her by relating how much he needed her, and had said, “My children, they are motherless.” Anna had been a receiving station for his analysis of his own case. He had hardly seen her plain, dark face, her careful hair. She was an imperishable-looking lady, and he had always loved the perishables. “I wanted to tell you about Lucy Beryl,” he had said lamely. “It is so overwhelming a thing to feel that I could ever again think of any woman save Fanny.” She did not say: “You are not thinking of any other woman. You are thinking of yourself.” She said merely: “Dear old Brucie!” and he had thought what a brick Anna was. “I don’t know how to get along without you,” had been his way of expressing his admiration; and she had said dryly that she would still be there, that it wasn’t _she_ who had changed, and had asked after the children. When she did this the look in her face made him pause. He could see that look now. It was a look such as a traveler wears who faces a memento of home. “Why don’t you adopt a child or two, Anna?” he had asked, and she had questioned: “Yours?” But he had said no, that _he_ needed them. What sort of mother would Lucy Beryl make, did she think? (If he had been as crude in society as he was on that hearth, he now thought grimly, he would have been voted back to pre-cave days before man noticed that a woman was peering about for a shelter other than the sky.)

But he had continued to look at Anna. He had seen her tenderness. He had seen it turn from the thought of the children to the thought of him. Afar off he saw, as a man sees a town where he does not intend to tarry. He was dazzled, as by a glitter of sparks which fell from the sky and did not burn him. Good old Anna!

* * * * *

When shortly he had opened his house on the sound for a week-end, and had down Mrs. Beryl and Lucy and Cory, he invited Anna, in the spirit of unto the least this was the least that he could do.

On the first afternoon at tea Lois and Larry were brought in by their admirable English nurse and handed about like curios. It was as if he himself had been saying, “I picked these up with Fanny.” They had behaved as the angels behave, had submitted to being touched by strange hands, had looked small and helpless and evanescent, dancing on the ledge overhanging the abyss of the past, the future, heredity, hazard, and diet. The firelight played upon all the people, made them quick with false motion, rich with red and orange, drunken with warmth, and magical with difference. He remembered that Larry had played with a little cloth flower, had showed it to Cory, whom he adored, had whispered to his father to ask if he might give it to Cory, had found a box and bestowed on Cory the flower in an excess of dignity and denial of self, and then had burst into tears for the sake of the lost flower. Cory had said, “Oh, I say, old chap, take it back!” Lucy Beryl had cried, “Oh, give him back his flower!” and she had looked beautiful and flushed and indignant as she had folded Larry in her arms. Bruce recalled his enchantment at her bright head bowed above his boy’s head. Then he had heard Anna Wild saying:

“Bruce, don’t you think it’s important not to let him have back that flower? It’s really rather crucial for him, isn’t it?”

“You’re right,” Bruce had said, and cried: “Son, you’ve given away the flower, you know. That’s all....”

He saw Lucy Beryl charmingly pout, he saw the quiet power in the face of Anna Wild. And on no more than that cloth flower in his son’s hand, it had come to him as by words written in fire on the air that Lucy was no more a mother for his children than a cup of tea, but that Anna Wild was one of those women who mother the very apples on the trees. Mrs. Beryl, who discerned that her niece was failing, said under her voice that Lucy was far too sympathetic; but he saw through Mrs. Beryl as if he had tasted the blood of a covey of dragons.

His eyes being opened and his ears unsealed, he lived through those three days of the house party like a creature without a cuticle, raw to every contact. He watched his new love with his children, saw her spoil them, puzzle them, tease them, lie to them, all adorably and damnably. Knowing little of his children’s nervous systems, he learned much by watching the sportive bombardments of that beloved, in her play with Lois and Larry. When he came on her, at dusk, wrapped in a sheet and telling them a ghost story, her sweet voice undulating in silvery wails, he stood stricken. This sheet she threw from her face, stood meshed in it, breathless and sparkling, a child, still shuddering, circled by each arm. He throbbed at her presence and winced at her performance, after an ancient manner in men. On a pretext he carried the children off, and that night he sat by their beds long after they slept. With social values, with modern values of the individual’s motions of duty toward society, Bruce was not much concerned; but the immemorial need of the parent to foster the offspring was in his blood like passion. It was in that hour that he read his own course.

On the station platform, the morning that his house party returned to town, Bruce, as one who has died and is henceforth divorced from earth, watched all those postures, those half looks, those abstractions of Lucy Beryl, and knew that he was seeing them for the last time. By the station door Mrs. Beryl asked him to dine with them on Lucy’s last evening, and he accepted, knowing quite well what was hoped of him, knowing too, that he would send some excuse to that dinner and knife a dream, for him already dead or dying. It required days for the dream to die—days spent down in the country alone.

In six months he asked Anna Wild to be his wife. That was what he asked her, but what he meant was merely, “Will you be their mother?” And she knew.

Sitting now with Cory in the lobby of that Florida hotel, he was thinking of his wife. She had been to him such a wife as few men have, he thought, and to his children such a mother as they had not known even in Fanny. But he had never loved her; he had loved Lucy Beryl. And now, after these fourteen years, with Lois married and Larry gone round the world, here he was, at fifty, married to a woman whom he did not love and never had loved. She had done an admirable job, but he was bored by her. And a quarter century of her stared him in the face.

He tried to think that he was in no worse case than millions of men, but he admitted that he was, because with her he never had known romance. All of romance that he had seen in his life was still his five years with Fanny. It was impossible that he should die in such poverty of experience. He felt richly justified in looking for something else, or so he told himself at that moment. He felt richly justified in his present occupation of looking for Lucy Beryl.

He had deliberately suggested to Anna that they come to Miami, and he had chosen the hotel where he knew that Lucy Beryl lived. He had invited Cory to go, too—Cory who had looked on for fourteen years and, if he had made deductions, had always kept still about them.

This first night in the hotel dining room Bruce had watched the door unceasingly. Anna, plump and content and completely imperishable, looked on, saying nothing, and if she divined, she did not reveal anything at all. She had now the family-off-my-hands look of fifty. Through dinner Bruce had seen her plump throat, the wide parting of her hair, her hand cut by his wedding ring. He thought of Lucy Beryl. If he had married her, his children might now both be in jail. Or would they? They had his blood, and Fanny’s. Why hadn’t he thought of that in time? And now after dinner, with Cory there in the lobby, this thought recurred to him passionately as his eyes followed Anna, who was looking at the lobby art. He saw that round head, that profile tilted estimatingly before a Victorian waterfall at sunset.

Fourteen years, a quarter of a century to carry.

The elevator door clicked and slid and clicked again. From its threshold stepped a woman in corn color, her light hair bulking about her ears. She was large, snugly fitted above the thick, straight waist, slow, very aware. One might discern at once how, forty-five years earlier, her baby pictures had looked.

“There she is,” said Cory.

Bruce stared. Unmistakably, there she was. Lucy Beryl Sanderson, he remembered. And on her track came a drawn man, with a mothy look, but not from choice. There she was, his Lucy Beryl, and here was her husband.

With no thought of Cory or of his Anna, Bruce got to his feet and followed not far from the drawn man’s side. This man Bruce barely saw. His own eyes were on Lucy, her indolent turn of the head, her ripe shoulders, as smooth as soap. The air of her came back to him, and he breathed it.

The three passed Anna, intent on her Victorian waterfall, her round head tilted appraisingly, now this way and now that. And as they passed her, the drawn man brushed roughly by Bruce, who turned and regarded him, and was stupefied to discern that this man was staring hungrily at Anna, at Anna, who looked so like a dove.

In that instant Bruce could feel himself in the drawn man’s shoes, could feel those fourteen years of proximity to this great flaxen Lucy, and those twenty-five years of her to carry. And yoked to Lucy, even as was this drawn man, he saw himself passing Anna, as a stranger in some lobby, and turning to look approvingly at her dovelike presence.

The words which Bruce was framing for Lucy died. He wavered, looked once more at the retreating flax on Lucy’s head, once more at her soaplike shoulders. For one moment he breathed her air. Then he wheeled, came back, and sat down by Cory.

“This whole love thing,” said Bruce, loudly, “isn’t enough. I tell you, it isn’t enough.”

“Why, no,” said Cory. “Of course not.”