Linda Condon Part 11

"You appear to take a lot for granted," he complained.

"I'd been wondering when it would happen," she admitted coolly.

"It always does, then?"

"Usually I stop it," she continued. "I don't believe I'll ever like being kissed. Can you tell me why? No one ever has; they all think they can bring me around to it."

"And to them," he added.

"But they end by being furious at me. I've been sworn at and called dreadful names. Sometimes they're only silly. One cried; I hated that the most."

"Do you mean that you were sorry for him?"

"Oh, dear, no. Why should I be? He looked so odious all smeared with tears."

Arnaud Hallet returned promptly: "Linda, you're a little beast." To counteract his rude speech he kissed her again. "This," he said with less security, "threatens to become a habit. I thought, at forty-five, that I was safely by the island of sirens, but I'll be on the rocks before I know it."

She laughed with the cool remoteness of running water.

"I wonder you haven't been murdered," he proceeded, "in a moonless garden by an elderly lawyer. Do you ever think of the lyric day when, preceded by a flock of bridesmaids and other flowery pagan truck, you'll meet justice?"

"Marriage?" she asked. "But of course. I have everything perfectly planned--"

"Then, my dear Linda, describe him."

"Very straight," she said, "with beautiful polished shoes and brushed hair."

"You ought to have no trouble finding that. Any number of my friends have one--to open the door and take your things. I might arrange a very satisfactory introduction for everybody concerned--a steady man well on his way to preside over the pantry and table."

"You're not as funny as usual," Linda decided critically. "That, too, disturbs me," he replied. "It looks even more unpromising for the near future."

XXI

In her room Linda thought, momentarily, of Arnaud Hallet; whatever might have been serious in her att.i.tude toward him dissolved by the lightness of his speech. Dodge Pleydon appealed irresistibly to her deepest feelings. Now her mental confusion was at least clear in that she knew what troubled her. It was not new, it extended even to times before Pleydon had entered her life--the difficulties presented by the term "love."

In her mind it was divided into two or three widely different aspects, phases which she was unable to reconcile. Her mother, in the beginning, had informed her that love was a nuisance. To be happy, a man must love you without any corresponding return; this was necessary to his complete management, the securing of the greatest possible amount of new clothes.

It was as far as love should be allowed to enter marriage. But that reality, with a complete expression in shopping, was distant from the immaterial and delicate emotions that in her responded to Pleydon.

Linda had been familiar with the materials, the processes, of what, she had been a.s.sured, was veritable love since early childhood. Her mother's dressing, the irritable hours of fittings and at her mirror, the paint she put on her cheeks, the crimping of her hair were for the favor of men. These struggles had absorbed the elder, all the women Linda had encountered, to the exclusion of everything else. This, it seemed, must, from its overwhelming predominance, be the greatest thing in life.

There was nothing mysterious about it. You did certain things intelligently, if you had the figure to do them with, for a practical end. The latter, carefully controlled, like an essence of which a drop was delightful and more positively stifling, was as real as the methods of approach. Oatmeal or scented soap! The force of example and a.s.sociation combined to bathe such developments in the sanest light possible, and Linda had every intention of the successful grasping of an easy and necessary luxury. She had, until--vaguely--now, been entirely willing to accept the unescapable conditions of love used as a means or the element of pleasure at parties. Now, however, the unexpected element of Dodge Pleydon disturbed her philosophy.

Suddenly all the lacing and painting and crimping, the pretense and lies and carefully planned accidental effects, filled her with revolt. The insinuations of women, the bareness of their revelations, her mother returning unsteady and mussed from a dinner, were unutterably disgusting. Even to think of them hurt her fundamentally: so much of what she was, of what she had determined, had been destroyed by an emotion apparently as slight as echoed music.

Here was the real mystery and for which nothing in her experience had prepared her. She began to see why it was called a nuisance--if this were love--and wondered if she had better not suppress it at once. It wouldn't be suppressed. Her thoughts continually came back to Pleydon, and the warmth, the disturbing thrill, always resulted. It led her away from herself, from Linda Condon; a sufficiently strange accomplishment.

A concern for Dodge Pleydon, little schemes for his happiness and well-being, put aside her clothes and complexion and her future.

Until the present her acts had been the result of deliberation. She had been impressed by the necessity for planning with care; but, in the cool gloom of the covered bed, a sharp joy held her at the possibility of flinging caution away. Yet she couldn't quite, no matter how much she desired it, lose herself. Linda was glad that Pleydon was rich; and there were, she remembered, moments for surrender.

As usual these problems, multiplying toward night, were fewer in the bright flood of morning. She laughed at the memory of Arnaud Hallet's humor; and then, it was late afternoon, the maid told her that Pleydon was in the drawing room. Her appearance satisfactory she was able to see him at once. To her great pleasure neither Pleydon nor his clothes had changed. He was dressed in light-gray flannels; a big easy man with a crushing palm, large features and an expression of intolerance.

"Linda," he said, "what a splendid place to find you. So much better than Markue's." He was, she realized, very glad to see her, and dropped at once, as if they had been uninterruptedly together, into intimate talk. "My work has been going badly," he proceeded; "or rather not at all. I made a rather decent fountain at Newport; but--remember what Susanna said?--it's not in the first rank. A happy balance and strong enough conception; yet it is like a Cellini ewer done in granite. The truth is, too much interests me; an artist ought to be the victim of a monomania. I'm a normal animal." He studied her contentedly:

"How lovely you are. I came over--in an automobile at last--because I was certain you couldn't exist as I remembered you. But you could and do. Lovely Linda! And what a gem of a letter. It might have been copied from 'The Perfect Correspondent for Young Females.' You're not going to lose me again. When I was a little boy I had a pa.s.sion for sherbets."

She smiled at him with half-closed eyes and the conviction that, with Pleydon, she could easily be different. He leaned forward and his voice startled her with the impression that he had read her mind:

"If you could care for any one a lifetime would be short to get you.

Look, you have never been out of my thoughts--or within my reach. It seems a myth that I kissed you; impossible ... Linda."

"But you did," she told him, gaining happiness from the mere a.s.surance.

They were alone in the drawing-room, and he rose, sweeping her up into his arms. Yet the expected joy evaded her desire and the sudden determination to lose utterly her reserve. It was evident that he as well was conscious of this, for he released her and stood frowning, his protruding lower lip uglier than ever.

"A lifetime would be nothing," he said again; "or it might be everything wasted. Which are you--all soul and spirit, or none?"

"I don't know," she replied, in her bitter disappointment, her heart pinched by the sharpest pain she remembered. There was the stir of skirts at the door; Linda turned with a sense of relief to Amelia Lowrie. However, dinner progressed very well indeed. "Then your aunt,"

Elouise said to Pleydon, "was Carrie Dodge. I recall her perfectly."

That established, the Lowrie women talked with a gracious freedom, exploring the furthermost infiltrations of blood and marriages.

Linda was again serene. She watched Pleydon with an extraordinary formless conviction--each of them was a part of the other's life; while in some way marriage and love were now hopelessly confused. It was beyond effort or planning. That was all she could grasp, but she was contented. Sometimes when he talked he made the familiar descriptive gesture with his hand, as if he were shaping the form of his speech: a sculptor's gesture, Linda realized.

Later they wandered into the garden, a dark enclosure with the long ivy-covered facade of the house broken by the lighted s.p.a.ces of windows.

Beyond the fence at regular intervals an electric car pa.s.sed with an increasing and diminishing clangor. The white petals of the magnolia-tree had fallen and been wheeled away; the blossoms of the rhododendron were dead on their stems. It was, Linda felt, a very old garden that had known many momentary emotions and lives.

Dodge Pleydon, standing before her, put his hands on her shoulders.

"Would I have any success?" he asked. "Do you think you'd care for me?"

She smiled confidently up at his intent face. "Oh, yes." Yet she hoped that he would not kiss her--just then. The delicacy of her longing and need were far removed from material expressions. This, of course, meant marriage; but marriage was money, comfort, the cold thing her mother had impressed on her. Love, her love, was a mistake here. But in a little it would all come straight and she would understand. She no longer had confidence in her mother's wisdom.

In spite of her shrinking, of a half articulate appeal, he crushed her against his face. Whatever that had filled her with hope, she thought, was being torn from her. A sickening aversion over which she had no control made her stark in his arms. The memories of the painted coa.r.s.e satiety of women and the sly hard men for which they schemed, the loose discussions of calculated advances and sordid surrenders, flooded her with a loathing for what she pa.s.sionately needed to be beautiful.

Yet deep within her, surprising in its vitality, a fragile ardor persisted. If she could explain, not only might he understand, but be able to make her own longing clear and secure. But all she managed to say was, "If you kiss me again I think it will kill me." Even that failed to stop him. "You were never alive," he a.s.serted. "I'll put some feeling into you. It has been done before with marble."

Linda, unresponsive, suffered inordinately.

Again on her feet she saw that Pleydon was angry, his face grim. He seemed changed, threatening and unfamiliar; it was exactly as if, in place of Dodge Pleydon, a secretive impersonal ugliness stood disclosed before her. He said harshly:

"When will you marry me?"

It was what, above all else, she had wanted; and Linda realized that to marry him was still the crown of whatever happiness she could imagine.

But her horror of the past recreated by his beating down of her gossamer-like aspiration, the vision of him flushed and ruthless, an image of indiscriminate nameless man, made it impossible for her to reply. An abandon of shrinking fear numbed her heart and lips.

"You won't get rid of me as you do the others about you," he continued.

"This time you made a mistake. I haven't any pride that you can insult; but I have all that you--with your character--require. I have more money even than you can want." She cried despairingly: