Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories Part 7

'You shall have a box of sweets to-morrow,' Mrs. Bradley told her, 'with or without the novel, as you like.'

And Dollie thanked her, watching her cut the cake, and, as the rain lashed against the windows, remarking on the bad weather and cheerfully hoping that 'poor old Jack' wasn't in those horrid trenches. 'I think war's a wicked thing, don't you, Mrs. Bradley?' she added.

When Dollie talked in this conventionally solicitous tone of Jack, her mother-in-law could but wish her upstairs again, merely young, merely the tired and battered refugee. She had not much tenderness for Jack, that was evident, nor much imaginativeness in regard to the feelings of Jack's mother. But she soon pa.s.sed from the theme of Jack and his danger. Her tea was finished and she got up and went to the piano, remarking that there was one thing she could do. 'Poor mother used to always say I was made of music. From the time I was a mere tot I could pick out anything on the piano.' And placing herself, pressing down the patent-leather shoe on the loud pedal, she surged into a waltz as foolish and as conventionally alluring as her own eyes. Her inaccuracy was equaled only by her facility. Smiling, swaying over the keys with alternate speed and languor, she addressed her audience with altogether the easy mastery of a music-hall artiste: 'It's a lovely thing--one of my favorites. I'll often play, Mrs. Bradley, and cheer us up. There is nothing like music for that, is there? it speaks so to the heart.' And, whole-heartedly indeed, she accompanied the melody by a pa.s.sionate humming.

The piano was Jack's and it was poor Jack who was made of music. How was he to bear it, his mother asked herself, as she sat listening. Dollie, after that initiation, spent many hours at the piano every day--so many and such noisy hours, that her mother-in-law, unnoticed, could shut herself in the little morning-room that overlooked the brick wall at the front of the house and had the morning sun.

It was difficult to devise other occupations for Dollie. She earnestly disclaimed any wish to have proper music lessons; and when her mother-in-law, patiently persistent, arranged for a skillful mistress to come down twice a week from London, Dollie showed such apathy and dullness that any hope of developing such musical ability as she possessed had to be abandoned. She did not like walking, and the sober pageant of the winter days was a blank book to her. Sewing, she said, had always given her frightful fidgets; and it was with the strangest sense of a privilege, a joy unhoped-for and now thrust upon her, that Mrs. Bradley sat alone working at the little garments which meant all her future and all Jack's. The baby seemed already more hers than Dollie's.

Sometimes, on a warm afternoon, Dollie, wrapped in her fur cloak, would emerge for a little while and watch her mother-in-law at work in her borders. The sight amused and surprised, but hardly interested her, and she soon went tottering back to the house on the preposterous heels which Mrs. Bradley had, as yet, found no means of tactfully banishing.

And sometimes, when the piano again resounded, Mrs. Bradley would leave her borders and retreat to the hazel copse, where, as she sat on the stone bench, she could hear, through the soft sound of the running water, hardly more than the distant beat and hum of Dollie's waltzes; and where, with more and more the sense of escape and safety, she could find a refuge from the sight and sound and scent of Dollie--the thick, sweet, penetrating scent which was always to be indelibly a.s.sociated in her mother-in-law's mind with this winter of foreboding, of hope, and of growing hopelessness.

In her letters to Jack, she found herself, involuntarily at first, and then deliberately, altering, suppressing, even falsifying. While Dollie had been in bed, when so much hope had been possible of a creature so unrevealed, she had written very tenderly, and she continued, now, to write tenderly, and it was not false to do that; she could feel no hardness or antagonism against poor Dollie. But she continued to write hopefully, as, every day, hope grew less.

Jack, himself, did not say much of Dollie, though there was always the affectionate message and the affectionate inquiry. But what was difficult to deal with were the hints of his anxiety and fear that stole among the terse, cheerful descriptions of his precarious days. What was she doing with herself? How were she and Dollie getting on? Did Dollie care about any of the things she cared about?

She told him that they got on excellently well, that Dollie spent a good deal of time at the piano, and that when they went out to tea people were perfectly nice and understanding. She knew, indeed, that she could depend on her friends to be that. They accepted Dollie on the terms she asked for her. From friends so near as Mrs. Crawley and Lady Wrexham she had not concealed the fact that Dollie was a misfortune; but if others thought so, they were not to show it. She still hoped, by degrees, to make Dollie a figure easier to deal with at such neighborly gatherings.

She had abandoned any hope that Dollie would grow: anything so feeble and so foolish could not grow; there was no other girl under the little dancer; she was simply no more and no less than she showed herself to be; but, at this later stage of their relationship, Mrs. Bradley essayed, now and then, a deliberate if kindly severity--as to heels, as to scents, as to touches of rouge.

'Oh, but I'm as careful, just as careful, Mrs. Bradley!' Dollie protested. 'I can't walk in lower heels. They hurt my instep. I've a very high instep and it needs support.' She was genuinely amazed that any one could dislike her scent and that any one could think the rouge unbecoming. She seemed to acquiesce, but the acquiescence was followed by moods of mournfulness and even by tears. There was no capacity in her for temper or rebellion, and she was all unconscious of giving a warning as she sobbed, 'It's nothing--really nothing, Mrs. Bradley. I'm sure you mean to be kind. Only--it's rather quiet and lonely here. I've always been used to so many people--to having everything so bright and jolly.'

She was not rapacious; she was not dissolute; she could be kept respectable and even contented if she were not made too aware of the contrast between her past existence and her present lot. With an air only of pensive pride she would sometimes point out to Mrs. Bradley, in the pages of those same ill.u.s.trated weeklies with which her mother-in-law a.s.sociated her, the face of some former companion. One of these young ladies had recently married the son of a peer. 'She _is_ in luck, Floss,' said Dollie. 'We always thought it would come to that.

He's been gone on her for ages, but his people were horrid.'

Mrs. Bradley felt that, at all events, Dollie had no ground for thinking her 'horrid'; yet she imagined that there lay drowsing at the back of her mind a plaintive little sense of being caught and imprisoned. Floss had stepped, triumphant, from the footlights to the registrar's office, and apparently had succeeded in uniting the radiance of her past and present status. No, Dollie could be kept respectable and contented only if the pressure were of the lightest. She could not change, she could only shift; and although Mrs. Bradley felt that for herself, her life behind her, her story told, she could manage to put up with a merely shifted Dollie, she could not see how Jack was to manage it. What was Jack to do with her? was the thought that pressed with a growing weight on her mother's heart. She could never be of Jack's life; yet here she was, in it, planted there by his own generous yet inevitable act, and by hers--in its very centre, and not to be evaded or forgotten.

And the contrast between what Jack's life might have been and what it now must be was made more poignantly apparent to her when Frances Thorpe came down to stay from a Sat.u.r.day to Monday: Frances in her black, tired and thin from Red-Cross work in London; bereaved in more, her old friend knew, than dear Toppie's death; yet with her leisurely, unstressed cheerfulness almost unaltered, the lightness that went with so much tenderness, the drollery that went with so much depth. Dearest, most charming of girls,--but for Jack's wretched stumble into 'fairyland'

last summer, destined obviously to be his wife,--could any presence have shown more disastrously, in its contrast with poor Dollie, how Jack had done for himself?

She watched the two together that evening--Frances with her thick, crinkled hair and clearly curved brow and her merry, steady eyes, leaning, elbow on knee, to talk and listen to Dollie; and Dollie, poor Dollie, flushed, touched with an unbecoming sulkiness, aware, swiftly and unerringly, of a rival type. Frances was of the type that young men married when they did not 'do for themselves.' There was now no gulf of age or habit to veil from Dollie her disadvantage. She answered shortly, with now and then a dry, ironic little laugh; and, getting up at last, she went to the piano and loudly played.

'He couldn't have done differently. It was the only thing he could do,'

Frances said that night before her bedroom fire. She did not hide her recognition of Jack's plight, but she was staunch.

'I wouldn't have had him do differently. But it will ruin his life,'

said the mother. 'If he comes back, it will ruin his life.'

'No, no,' said Frances, looking at the flames. 'Why should it? A man does n't depend on his marriage like that. He has his career.'

'Yes. He has his career. A career isn't a life.'

'Isn't it?' The girl gazed down. 'But it's what so many people have to put up with. And so many haven't even a career.' Something came into her voice and she turned from it quickly. 'He's crippled, in a sense, of course. But you are here. He will have you to come back to always.'

'I shall soon be old, dear, and she will always be here. That's inevitable. Some day I shall have to leave her to Jack to bear with alone.'

'She may become more of a companion.'

'No; no, she won't.'

The bitterness of the mother's heart expressed itself in the dry, light utterance. It was a comfort to express bitterness, for once, to somebody.

'She is a harmless little thing,' Frances offered after a moment.

'Harmless?' Mrs. Bradley turned it over dryly and lightly.' I can't feel her that. I feel her blameless if you like. And it will be easy to keep her contented. That is really the best that one can say of poor Dollie.

And then, there will be the child. I am pinning all my hopes to the child, Frances.'

Frances understood that.

Dollie, as the winter wore on, kept remarkably well. She had felt it the proper thing to allude to Jack and his danger; and so, now, she more and more frequently felt it the proper thing to allude, humorously, if with a touch of melancholy, to 'baby.' Her main interest in baby, Mrs.

Bradley felt, was an alarmed one. She was a good deal frightened, poor little soul, and in need of constant rea.s.surances; and it was when one need only pet and pity Dollie that she was easier to deal with. Mrs.

Bradley tried to interest her in plans for the baby; what it should be named, and how its hair should be done if it were a little girl--for only on this a.s.sumption could Dollie's interest be at all vividly roused; and Mrs. Bradley hoped more than ever for a boy when she found Dollie's idle yet stubborn thoughts fixed on the name of Gloria.

She was able to evade discussion of this point, and when the baby came, fortunately and robustly, into the world on a fine March morning, she could feel it as a minor but very real cause for thanksgiving that Dollie need now never know what she thought of Gloria as a name. The baby was a boy, and now that he was here, Dollie seemed as well pleased that he should be a commonplace Jack, and that there should be no question of tying his hair with c.o.c.kades of ribbon over each ear.

Smiling and rosy and languid, she lay in her charming room, not at all more maternal,--though she showed a bland satisfaction in her child and noted that his eyes were just like Jack's,--yet subtly more wifely.

Baby, she no doubt felt, with the dim instinct that did duty for thought with her, placed and rooted her and gave her final rights. She referred now to Jack with the pensive but open affection of their shared complacency, and made her mother-in-law think, as she lay there, of a soft and sleepy and tenacious creeper, fixing tentacle after tentacle in the walls of Jack's house of life.

If only one could feel that she had furnished it with a treasure.

Gravely, with a sad fondness, the grandmother studied the little face, so unfamiliar, for signs of Jack. She was a helplessly clear-sighted woman, and remembrance was poignantly vivid in her of Jack's face at a week old. Already she loved the baby since its eyes, indubitably, were his; but she could find no other trace of him. It was not a Bradley baby; and in the dreamy, foreboding flickers of individuality that pa.s.s uncannily across an infant's features, her melancholy and steady discernment could see only the Byles ancestry.

She was to do all she could for the baby: to save him, so far as might be, from his Byles ancestry, and to keep him, so far as might be, Jack's and hers. That was to be her task. But with all the moulding that could, mercifully, be applied from the very beginning, she could not bring herself to believe that this was ever to be a very significant human being.

She sent Jack his wire: 'A son. Dollie doing splendidly.' And she had his answer: 'Best thanks. Love to Dollie.' It was curious, indeed, this strange new fact they had now, always, to deal with; this light little 'Dollie' that must be pa.s.sed between them. The baby might have made Jack happy, but it had not solved the problem of his future.

III

A week later the telegram was brought to her telling her that he had been killed in action.

It was a beautiful spring day, just such a day as that on which she and Jack had first seen Dorrington, and she had been working in the garden.

When she had read, she turned and walked down the path that led to the hazel copse. She hardly knew what had happened to her; there was only an instinct for flight, concealment, secrecy; but, as she walked, there rose in her, without sound, as if in a nightmare, the terrible cry of her loneliness. The dark wet earth that covered him seemed heaped upon her heart.

The hazel copse was ta.s.seled thickly with golden green, and as she entered it she saw that the hepaticas were in flower. They seemed to shine with their own celestial whiteness, set in their melancholy green among the fallen leaves. She had never seen them look so beautiful.

She followed the path, looking down at them, and she seemed to feel Jack's little hand in hers and to see, at her side, his nut-brown head.

It had been on just such a morning. She came to the stone bench; but the impulse that had led her here was altered. She did not sink down and cover her face, but stood looking around her at the flowers, the telegram still open in her hand; and slowly, with stealing calm, the sense of sanctuary fell about her.

She had lost him, and with him went all her life. He was dead, his youth and strength and beauty. Yet what was this strange up-welling of relief, deep, deep relief, for Jack; this gladness, poignant and celestial, like that of the hepaticas? He was dead and the dark earth covered him; yet he was here, with her, safe in his youth and strength and beauty forever. He had died the glorious death, and no future, tangled, perplexed, fretful with its foolish burden, lay before him. There was no loss for Jack--no fading, no waste. The burden was for her, and he was free.

Later, when pain should have dissolved thought, her agony would come to her unalleviated; but this hour was hers, and his. She heard the river and the soft whisperings of spring. A bird dropped lightly, unafraid, from branch to branch of a tree near by. From the woods came the rapid, insistent tapping of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r; and, as in so many springs, she seemed to hear Jack say, 'Hark, mummy,' and his little hand was always held in hers. And, everywhere, telling of irreparable loss, of a possession unalterable, the tragic, the celestial hepaticas.

She sat down on the stone bench now and closed her eyes for a little while, so holding them more closely--Jack and the hepaticas--together.

POSSESSING PRUDENCE

BY AMY WENTWORTH STONE