Linda Condon Part 18

"They have been moving the local heavens, ever since the monument was placed, to have it set aside. I suppose they would have succeeded, too, if a large amount given to the city were not contingent on its preservation. But then they can always donate more money in the cause of their sacred respectability."

Linda had never, she exclaimed, heard of anything more disgusting. It was plain that Hesperia knew nothing of art. "Every one," she ran on in the heat of her resentment, "every one, that is, who should decide, agrees it's magnificent. They were frightfully lucky to get it--Dodge's finest work." She wrote at once to Pleydon commanding his presence and expressing her contempt of such depravity of opinion. To her surprise he was undisturbed, apparently, by the condemnation of his monument.

He even laughed at her energy of scorn. She was hurt, perceptibly silenced, with a feeling of having been misunderstood or rather undervalued. Her disturbance at any blame attached to the statue of Simon Downige was extremely acute. But, she thought, if it failed to worry Dodge why should she bother. She did, in spite of this philosophy; Simon was tremendously important to her.

He stood for things: she had watched his evolution from the clay sketch, and in Pleydon's mind, to the final heroic proportions; and she had taken for granted that a grateful world would see him in her light.

A woman, she decided, had made the trouble; and she hated her with a personal vigor. Pleydon said:

"I told you that old Simon was unbalanced; now you can see it by his reception in a successful city. The sculptor--do you remember him, a Beaux-Arts graduate?--admits that he had always opposed it, but that political motives overbore his pure protest. There is a scheme now to build a pavilion, for babies, and shut out the monument from open view.

They may do that but time will sweep away their walls. If I had modeled Simon Downige, yes, he would go; but I modeled his vision, his aspiration--the hope of all men for release and purity.

"Downige and the individual babies are unimportant compared to a vision of perfection, of escape. As long as men live, if they live, they'll reach up; and that gesture in itself is heaven. Not accomplishment. The spirit dragging the flesh higher; but spirit alone--empty balloons. A dream in bronze, harder even than men's heads, more durable than their prejudices, so permanent that it will wear out their ignorance; and in the end--always in the end--they'll bring their wreath.

"A replica has gone to Cottarsport, from me; and you ought to see it there, on a block of New England granite. It's in the Common, a windswept reach with low houses and a white steeple and the sea. It might have been there from the beginning, rising on rock against the pale salt day. They can go to h.e.l.l in Hesperia."

Still Linda's hurt persisted; she saw the unfortunate occurrence as a direct blow at her pride. Arnaud, too, failed her; he was splendid in his a.s.sault upon such rapacious stupidity; but it was only an impersonal concern. His manner expressed the conviction that it might have been expected. He was blind to her special enthusiasm, her long intimate connection with the statue. Exasperated she almost told him that it was more real to her than their house, than Vigne and Lowrie, than he. She was stopped, fortunately, by the perception that, amazingly, the statue was more actual than Dodge Pleydon. It touched the center of her life more nearly.

Why, she didn't know.

If her mental confusion increased by as much as a feeling, Linda thought, she would be close to madness. It was unbearable at practically forty.

Lowrie said, at the worst possible moment, that he found the entire episode ridiculously overemphasized. A statue more or less was of small importance. If the Downige family were upset why didn't they employ an able lawyer to dispose of it? There were many ways for such a proceeding--

"I have no desire to hear them," she interrupted. "You seem to know a tremendous lot, but what good it will do you in the end who can say!

And, with all your cleverness, you haven't an ounce of appreciation for art. Besides, I hate to see any one as young as you so sure of himself.

Often I suspect you are patronizing your father and me. It's not pretty nor polite."

Lowrie was obviously embarra.s.sed by her attack, and managed the abrupt semblance of an apology. Arnaud, who had put down his eternal book, said nothing until the boy had vanished. "Wasn't that rather sharp?" he asked mildly. "Perhaps," she replied in a tone without warmth or regret.

"Somehow I am never comfortable with Lowrie."

"You are too much alike," he shrewdly observed. "It is laughable at times. Did you expect your children to be fountains of sentiment?

And, look here--if I can get along in comfort with you for life you in particular ought to put up peacefully with Lowrie. He is a d.a.m.ned sight more human than, at bottom, you are; a woman of alabaster."

"I loathe quarrels," she admitted; "they are so vulgar. You know that they are not like me and just said so. Oh, Arnaud, why does life get harder instead of easier?"

He put his book aside completely and gazed at her in patient thought.

"Linda," he said finally, "I have never heard anything that stirred me so much; not what you said, my dear, but the recognition in your voice."

A wistfulness of love for her enveloped him; an ineffable desire as vain as the pa.s.sion she struggled to give him in return. She smiled in an unhappiness of apology.

"Perhaps--" he stopped, waiting any a.s.surance whatever, his face eager like a dusty lamp in which the light had been turned sharply up. She was unable to stir, to move her gaze from his hopeful eyes, to mitigate by a breath her slender white aloofness. A smile different from hers, tender with remission, lingered in his fading irradiation. The dusk was gathering, adding its melancholy to his age--sixty-five now. Why that was an old man! Her sympathy vanished in her shrinking from the twilight that was, as well, slowly, inevitably, deepening about her.

It was laughable that, as she approached an age whose only resource was tranquillity, she grew more restless. Her present vague agitation belonged ridiculously to youth. The philosophy of the evident that had supported her so firmly was breaking at the most inopportune time. And it was, she told herself, too late for anything new; the years for that had been spent insensibly with Arnaud. Linda was very angry with herself, for, in all her shifting state of mind, she preserved an inner necessity for the quality of exactness expressed in her clothes. There were literally no neglected s.p.a.ces in her conscious living.

Her thoughts finally centered about the statue in Hesperia--it presented an actual mark for her fleeting resentments. She wondered why it so largely occupied her thoughts, moved her so personally. She watched the papers for the scattered reports of the progress of the contention it had roused, some ill-natured, others supposedly humorous, and nearly all uninformed. She became, Arnaud said, the champion of the esthetic against Dagon. He elaborated this picture until she was forced to smile against her inclination, her profound seriousness. Linda had the feeling that she, too, was on the pedestal that held the bronze effigy of Simon Downige challenging the fog that obscured men. Its fate was hers. She didn't pretend to explain how.

As time pa.s.sed it seemed to her that it took her longer and longer to dress in the morning, while her preparations couldn't be simpler; her habit of deliberation had become nearly a vice, the precision of her ruffles, her hair, a tyranny. She never quite lost the satisfaction of her mirror's faultless reflection; and stopped, now, for a moment's calm interrogation of the being--hardly more silvery cool than the reality--before her.

Arnaud was at the table, and the gaze with which he met her was troubled. The morning paper, she saw, was, against custom, at her place, and she picked it up with an instinctive sense of calamity. The blackly printed sensational headline that immediately established her fear sank vivid and entire into her brain: an anonymous inflamed mob in Hesperia had pulled down and destroyed Pleydon's statue. Their act was described as a tribute to the liberality of the present Downige family in the light of its objection to the monument.

As if in the development of her feeling Linda had a sensation of crashing with a sickening violence from a pedestal to the ground.

Actually, it seemed, the catastrophe had happened to her. She heard, with a sense of inutility, Arnaud denouncing the outrage; he had a pencil in his hand for the composition of a telegram to Dodge. He paid--but perhaps only naturally--no attention to her, suffering dully from her fall. She shuddered before the recreated lawless approaching voice of the mob; the naked ugly violence froze her with terror; she felt the gross hurried hands winding ropes about her, the rending brutality of force--

She sat and automatically took a small carved gla.s.s of orange-juice from a bed of ice, and her chilled fingers recalled a dim image of her mother. Arnaud was speaking, "I'm afraid this will cut through Pleydon's security, it was such a wanton destruction of his unique power. You see, he worked lovingly over the cast with little files and countless finite improvements. The mold, I think, was broken. What a piece of luck the thing's at Cottarsport." He paused, obviously expecting her to comment; but suddenly phrases failed her.

In place of herself she should be considering Dodge; her sympathy even for him was submerged in her own extraordinary injury. However, she recovered from her first gasping shock, and made an utterly commonplace remark. Never had her sense of isolation been stronger. "I must admit,"

her husband continued, "that I looked for some small display of concern.

I give you my word there are moments when I think Pleydon himself cut you out of stone. He isn't great enough for that, though; in the way of perfection you successfully gild the lily. A thing held to be impossible."

Linda told him with amazing inanity that his opinion of her was unreliable; and, contented, he lightly pursued his admiration of what he called her boreal charm. At intervals she responded appropriately and proceeded with breakfast. She had entered a region of dispa.s.sionate consideration, her characteristic detachment, she thought, regained. She mentally, calmly, reconstructed the motives and events that had led to the destruction of the statue; they, at least, were evident to her.

She reaffirmed silently her conviction that it had resulted from the stupidity, the vanity, of a woman. The limitations of men, fully as narrow, operated in other directions.

Then, with an incredulous surprise, she was aware that the clear s.p.a.ce of her reason was filling with anger. Never before had such a flood of emotion possessed her; and she surrendered herself, in an enormous relief, to the novelty of its obliterating tide. It deepened immeasurably, sweeping her far from the security of old positions of indifference and critical self-possession. Linda became enraged at a world that had concentrated all its degraded vulgarity in one unspeakable act.

x.x.xVII

It was fall, October, and the day was a s.p.a.ce of pale gold foliage wreathed in blue garlands of mist. The gardener was busy with a wooden rake and wheelbarrow in which he carted away dead leaves for burning.

The fire was back of the low fence, in the rear, and Linda, at the dining-room window, could hear the fierce small crackle of flames; the drifting pungent smoke was like a faint breath of ammonia. Arnaud had left for the day, Lowrie was at the university, while Vigne and her husband--moving toward their ultimate colonial threshold--had taken a small house. She was alone.

As usual.

However, in her present state her solitude had lost its inevitability; she failed to see why it must continue until the end of time. She could no longer discover a sufficient reason for her limitless endurance, her placid acceptance of all that chance, or any inconsiderable person, happened to dictate. She wasn't like that in the least. Her temper had solidified as though it were ice, taking everywhere the form in which it was held. It was a reality. She determined, as well, that her feeling should not melt back into the familiar acceptance of a routine that had led her blindfolded across such an extent of life.

She understood now, in a large part, her disturbance at the indignity to Dodge's monument--he had a.s.sured her that she was its inspiration; except for her it would never have been realized, he would have kept on modeling those Newport fountains, continued with the Susanna Nodas, spending himself ign.o.bly. He loved her, and that love had resulted in a statue the world of art, of taste, honored. But it was she all the while they were approving, discussing, writing about, Linda Condon.

She had always been that, Pleydon had informed her, never Linda Hallet--in spite of Arnaud and their children. It sounded like nonsense; but, at the bottom, it was truth. Of course it couldn't be explained, for example, to the man who had every right, every evidence, to consider himself her husband. Nothing was susceptible of explanation. Absolutely nothing! There was the earth, which appeared to be everything, the houses you entered, the streets you pa.s.sed over, the people among whom you lived, yet that wasn't all. Heavens, no! It was quite unimportant compared with--with other facts latent in the mind and blood.

Dodge Pleydon's love was one of those other facts; it was simply impossible to deny its existence, its power. Dodge had been totally changed by it, born over again. But she, who had been the source, had had no good from it, nothing except the thrill that had always been hers. No one knew of it, counted it as her achievement, paid the slightest attention to her. Arnaud smiled indulgently, Lowrie scoffed.

When the statue had been thrown down they thought of it merely as a deplorable part of the day's news. They hadn't seen that she, Linda Condon, was unspeakably insulted.

She doubted if she could bring them to comprehend what had happened--to her. Or if Arnaud understood, if she made it plain, what good would be done! That wouldn't save her, put her back again on the pedestal. The latter was necessary. Linda recognized that a great deal of her feeling was based on pride; but it was a pride entirely justified. She had no intention of submitting to the coa.r.s.e hands and ropes of public affront.

Throughout her life she had rebelled against any profanation of her person, she had hated to be touched.

Every instinct, she found, every delicate self-opinion, was bound into Pleydon's success; the latter had kept her alive. Without it existence would have been intolerable. It was unbearable now.

She discharged the small daily duties of her efficient housekeeping with a contemptuous exactness; for years she had accomplished, in herself, nothing more. But at last a break had come. Linda recognized this without any knowledge of what reparation it would find. She wasn't concerned with that, a small detail. It would be apparent. Arnaud was silent through dinner; tired, it seemed. She saw him as if at the distant end of a dull corridor--as she looked back. There was no change in her liking for him. Mechanically she noticed the disorder of his scant hair and rumpled sleeves.

Not until, waking sharply, in the middle of the night, did she have a glimpse of a possible course--she might live with Dodge and perfectly express both her retaliation and her accomplishment. In that way she would reestablish herself beside him and place their vision in bronze on an elevation beyond the spite of the envious and the blind.

It was so directly simple that she was surprised it hadn't occurred to her before. The possibility had always been a part, unsuspected and valuable, of her special being; the largely condemned faults of her character and experience had at least brought her this--a not inconsiderable freedom in a world everywhere barred by the necessity for upholding a hypocritical show of superiority to honest desire. The detachment that deprived her of life's conventional joys released her from its common obligations. That conviction, however, was too intimately connected with all her inheritance to bring her any conscious dramatic sense of rebellion or high feeling of justified indignation.

Sleep had deserted her, and she waited for the dawn in the windows that would bring her escape. It was very slow coming; the blackness took on a grayer tone, like ink with added faint infusions of water. Slowly the blackness dissolved and she heard the stir of the sparrows in the ivy.

There was the pa.s.sing rumble of an early electric car on the paved aged street, the blurred hurried shuffle of a workman's clumsy shoes. The brightening morning was cool with a premonitory touch of frost; at the window she saw a vanishing silver sheen on the lawn and board fence.

A sensation of youth pervaded her; and while, perhaps, it was out of keeping with her years, she had still her vitality unspent; she was without a trace of the momentary frost on the gra.s.s. She was tranquil, leisurely; her heart evenly sent its life through her unflushed body.

Piece by piece she put on her web-like garments, black and white; brushing the heavy stream of her hair and tying the inevitable sash about her supple waist.