Linda Condon Part 14

He was quiet at this, the smoke of his cigarette climbing bluely in a s.p.a.ce with the aqueous stillness of a lake's depths. "The same," he went on after a long pause; "nothing has touched you. I ought to be relieved but, do you know, it frightens me. You are relentless. You have no right, at the same time, to be beautiful. I have seen a great many celebrated women at their best moments, but you are lovelier than any.

It isn't a simple affair of proportion and features--I wish I could hold it in a phrase, the turn of a chisel. I can't. It's deathless romance in a bang cut blackly across heavenly blue." He was silent again, and Linda glad that he still found her attractive. She discovered that the misery his presence once caused her had entirely vanished, its place taken by an eager interest in his affairs, a lightness of spirit at the realization that, while his love for her might have grown calm, no other woman possessed it.

At the dinner-table she listened--cool and fresh, Arnaud complained, in spite of the heat--to the talk of the two men. By her side Elouise Lowrie occasionally repeated, in a voice like the faint jangle of an old thin piano, the facts of a family connection or a commendation of the Dodges. Arnaud really knew a surprising lot, and his conversation with Pleydon was strung with terms completely unintelligible to her. It developed, finally, into an argument over the treatment of the acanthus motive in rococo ornament. France was summoned against Spain; the architectural degrading of Italy deplored.... It amazed her that any one could remember so much.

XXVI

Linda without a conscious reason suddenly stopped the investigation of her feeling for Pleydon. Even in the privacy of her thoughts an added obscurity kept her from the customary clear reasoning. After dinner, out in the close gloom of the garden, she watched the flicker of the cigarettes. There was thunder, so distant and vague that for a long while Linda thought she was deceived. She had a keen rushing sensation of the strangeness of her situation here--Linda Hallet. The night was like a dream from which she would stir, sigh, to find herself back again in the past waiting for the return of her mother from one of her late parties.

But it was Arnaud who moved and, accompanying Elouise Lowrie, went into the house for his interminable reading. Pleydon's voice began in a low remembering tone:

"What a fantastic place the Feldt apartment was, with that smothered room where you said you would marry me. You must have got hold of Hallet in the devil of a hurry. I've often tried to understand what happened; why, all the time, you were upset--why, why, why?"

"In a way it was because a ridiculous hairdresser burned out some of my mother's front wave," she explained.

"Of course," he replied derisively, "nothing could be plainer."

She agreed calmly. "It was very plain. If you want me to try to tell you don't interrupt. It isn't a happy memory, and I am only doing it because I was so rotten to you.

"Yes, I can see now that it was the hairdresser and a hundred other things exactly the same. My mother, all the women we knew, did nothing but lace and paint and frizzle for men. I used to think it was a game they played and wonder where the fun was. There were even hints about that and later they particularized and it made me as sick as possible.

The men, too, were odious; mostly fat and bald; and after a while, when they pinched or kissed me, I wanted to die.

"That was all I knew about love, I had never heard of any other--men away from their families for what they called a good time and women plotting and planning to give it to them or not give it to them. Then mother, after her looks were spoiled, married Mr. Moses Feldt, and I met Judith, who only existed for men and men's rooms and told me worse things, I'm sure, than mother ever dreamed; and, on top of that, I met you and you kissed me.

"But it was different from any other; it didn't shock me, and it brought back a thrill I have always had. I wanted, then, to love you, and have you ask me to marry you, more than anything else in the world. I was sure, if you would only be patient, that I could change what had hurt me into a beautiful feeling. I couldn't tell you because I didn't understand myself." She stopped, and Pleydon repeated, bitterly and slow:

"Fat old bald men; and I was one with them destroying your exquisite hope." She heard the creak of the basket chair as he leaned forward, his face masked in darkness. "Perhaps you think I haven't paid.

"You will never know what love is unless I can manage somehow to make you understand how much I love you. Hallet will have to endure your hearing it. This doesn't belong to him; it has not touched the earth.

Every one, more or less, talks about love; but not one in a thousand, not one in a million, has such an experience. If they did it would tear the world into shreds. It would tear them as it has me. I realize the other, the common thing--who experimented more! This has nothing to do with it. A boy lost in the idealism of his first worship has a faint reflection. Listen:

"I can always, with a wish, see you standing before me. You yourself--the folds of your sash, the sharp narrow print of your slippers on the pavement or the matting or the rug, the ruffles about your hands. I have the feeling of you near me with your breathing disturbing the delicacy of your breast. There is the odor and shimmer of your hair ... your lips move ... but without a sound.

"This vision is more real than reality, than an opera-house full of people or the Place Vendome; and it, you, is all I care for, all I think about, all I want. I find quiet places and stay there for hours, with you; or, if that isn't possible, I turn into a blind man, a dead man warm again at the bare thought of your face. Listen:

"I've been in shining heaven with you. I have been melted to nothing and made over again, in you, good. We have been walking together in a new world with rapture instead of air to breathe. A slow walk through dark trees--G.o.d knows why--like pines. And every time I think of you it is exactly as though I could never die, as though you had burned all the corruption out of me and I was made of silver fire. And listen:

"Nothing else is of any importance, now or afterward, you are now and the hereafter. I see people and people and hear words and words, and I forget them the moment they have gone, the second they are still. But I haven't lost an inflection of your voice. When I work in clay or stone I model and cut you into every surface and fold. I see you looking back at me out of marble and bronze. And here, in this garden, you tried to give me more--"

The infinitely removed thunder was like the continued echo of his voice.

There was a stirring of the leaves above her head; and the light that had shone against the house in Elouise Lowrie's window was suddenly extinguished. All that she felt was weariness and a confused dejection, the weight of an insuperable disappointment. She could say nothing.

Words, even Pleydon's, seemed to her vain. The solid fact of Arnaud, of what Dodge, more than seven years before, had robbed her, put everything else aside, crushed it.

She realized that she would never get from life what supremely repaid the suffering of other women, made up for them the failure of practically every vision. She was sorry for herself, yes, and for Dodge Pleydon. Yet he had his figures in metal and stone; his sense of the importance of his work had increased enormously; and, well, there were Lowrie and Vigne; it would be difficult, every one agreed, to find better or handsomer children. But they seemed no more than shadows or colored mist. This terrified her--what a hopelessly deficient woman she must be! But even in the profundity of her depression the old vibration of nameless joy reached her heart.

XXVII

In the morning there was a telegram from Judith Feldt, saying that her mother was dangerously sick, and she had lunch on the train for New York. The apartment seemed stuffy; there was a trace of dinginess, neglect, about the black velvet rugs and hangings. Her mother, she found, had pneumonia; there was practically no chance of her recovering.

Linda sat for a short while by the elder's bed, intent upon a totally strange woman, darkly flushed and ravished in an agonizing difficulty of breathing. Linda had a remembered vision of her gold-haired and gay in floating chiffons, and suddenly life seemed shockingly brief. A serious-visaged clergyman entered the room as she left and she heard the rich soothing murmur of a confident phrase.

The Stella Condon who had become Mrs. Moses Feldt had had little time for the support of the church; although Linda recalled that she had uniformly spoken well of its offices. To condemn Christianity, she had a.s.serted, was to invite bad luck. She treated this in exactly the way she regarded walking under ladders or spilling salt or putting on a stocking wrong. Linda, however, had disregarded these possibilities of disaster and, with them, religion.

A great many people, she noticed, talked at length about it; women in their best wraps and with expensive little prayer books left the hotels for various Sunday morning services, and ministers came in later for tea. All this, she understood, was in preparation for heaven, where everybody, who was not in h.e.l.l, was to be forever the same and yet radiantly different. It seemed very vague and far away to Linda, and, since there was such a number of immediate problems for her to consider, she had easily ignored the future. When now, with her mother dying, it was thrust most uncomfortably before her.

She half remembered sentences, admonitions, of the G.o.dly--a woman had once told her that dancing and low gowns were hateful in the sight of G.o.d, some one else that playing-cards were an instrument of the devil.

Pleasure, she had gathered, was considered wrong, and she instinctively put these opinions, together with a great deal else, aside as envious.

That expressed her whole experience. She had never keenly a.s.sociated the thought of death with herself before, and she was unutterably revolted by the impending destruction of her fine body, the delicate care of which formed her main preoccupation in life. Age was supremely distasteful, but this other ... she shuddered.

Linda wanted desperately to preserve the whiteness of her skin, the flexible black distinction of her hair, yes--her beauty. Here, again, with other women the vicarious immortality of children would be sufficient. But not for her. She was in the room that had been hers before marriage, with her infinite preparations for the night at an end; and, her hair loose across the blanched severity of her attire, her delicately full arms bare, she clasped her cold hands in stabbing apprehension.

She would do anything, anything, to escape that repulsive fatality to her lavished care. It was only to be accomplished by being good; and goodness was in the charge of the minister. She saw clearly and at once her difficulty--how could she go to a solemn man in a clerical vest and admit that she was solely concerned by the impending loss of her beauty.

The promised splendor of heaven, in itself, failed to move her--it threatened to be monotonous; and she was honest in her recognition that charity, the ugliness of poverty, repelled her. Linda was certain that she could never change in these particulars; she could only pretend.

A surprising multiplication of such pretense occurred to her in people regarded as impressively religious. She had seen men like that--she vaguely thought of the name Jasper--going off with her mother in cabs to dinners that must have been "G.o.dless." She wondered if this mere att.i.tude, the public show, were enough. And an instinctive response told her that it was not. If all she had been informed about the future were true she decided that her mother's chance was no worse than that of any false display of virtue.

She, Linda, could do nothing.

The funeral ceremony with its set form--so inappropriate to her mother's qualities--was even more remote from Linda's sympathies than was common in her encounters. But Mr. Moses Feldt's grief appeared to her actual and affecting. He invested every one with the purity of his own spirit.

She left New York at the first possible moment with the feeling that she was definitely older. The realization, she discovered, happened in that way--ordinarily giving the flight of time no consideration it was brought back to her at intervals of varying length. As she aged they would grow shorter.

The result of this experience was an added sense of failure; she tried more than ever to overcome her indifference, get a greater happiness from her surroundings and activity. Linda cultivated an attention to Lowrie and Vigne. They responded charmingly but her shyness with them persisted in the face of her inalienable right to their full possession.

She insisted, too, on going about vigorously in spite of Arnaud's humorous groans and protests. She forced herself to talk more to the men attracted to her, and a.s.sumed, with disconcerting ease, an air of sympathetic interest. But, unfortunately, this brought on her a rapid increase of the love-making that she found so fatiguing.

She studied her husband thoughtfully through the evenings at home, before the Franklin stove, or, in summer, in the secluded garden.

Absolutely nothing was wrong with him; he had, after several deaths, inherited even more money; and, in his deprecating manner where it was concerned, devoted it to her wishes. Except for books, and the clothes she was forced to remind him to get, he had no personal expenses. In addition to the money he never offended her, his relationships and manner were conducted with an inborn nice formality that preserved her highest self-opinion.

Yet she was never able to escape from the limitations of a calm admiration; she couldn't lose herself, disregard herself in a flood of generous emotion. When, desperately, she tried, he, too, was perceptibly ill at ease. Usually he was undisturbed, but once, when she stood beside him with her coffee cup at dinner, he disastrously lost his equanimity.

Tensely putting the cup away he caught her with straining hands.

"Oh, Linda," he cried, "is it true that you love me! Do you really belong to us--to Vigne and Lowrie and me? I can't stand it if you won't ... some day."

She backed away into the opening of a window, against the night, from the justice of his desire; and she was cold with self-detestation as her fingers touched the gla.s.s. Linda tried to speak, to lie; but, miserably still, she was unable to deceive him. The animation, the fervor of his longing, swiftly perished. His arms dropped to his side. An unbearable constraint deepened with the silence in the room, and later he lightly said:

"You mustn't trifle with my ancient heart, Linda, folly and age--"

XXVIII