Linda Condon Part 9

This, for Linda, was horribly embarra.s.sing. However, she gravely promised. The Russian lighted a cigarette; almost she was serene again.

Linda said, "Fatness is awful, isn't it?"

Pleydon replied, "Death should be the penalty. If women aren't lovely--"

he waved away every other consideration.

"And if men have fingers like carrots--" Susanna mimicked him. Judith, flushed, her hair loosened, approached. "Linda," she demanded, "do you remember when we ordered the taxi? Was it two or three?" Markue, at her shoulder, begged her not to consider home.

"I'm going almost immediately," Pleydon said, "and taking your Linda."

His height and determined manner scattered all objections.

Linda, at the entrance to the apartment, found to her great surprise--in place of the motor she had expected--a small graceful single-horse victoria, the driver b.u.t.toned into a sealskin rug. Deep in furs, beside Pleydon, she was remarkably comfortable, and she was soothed by the rhythmic beat of the hoofs, the even progress through the crystal night of Fifth Avenue.

Her companion flooded his being with the frozen air. They had, it seemed, lost all desire to talk. The memory of Markue's party lingered like the last vanishing odor of his incense; there was a confused vision of the murmurous room against the lighted exterior where the drinks sparkled on a table. Linda made up her mind that she would not go to another. Then she wondered if she'd see Pleydon again. The Russian singer had been too silly for words.

It suddenly occurred to her that the man now with her had taken Susanna Noda, and that he had left her planted. He had preferred driving her, Linda Condon, home. He wasn't very enthusiastic about it, though; his face was gloomy.

"The truth is," he remarked at last, "that Susanna is right--I am not in the first rank. But that was all nonsense about the necessity of the gutter--sentimental lies."

Linda was not interested in this, but it left her free to explore her own emotions. The night had been eventful because it had shaken all the foundation of what she intended. That single momentary delicious thrill had been enough to threaten the entire rest. At the same time her native contempt of the other women, of Judith with her tumbled hair, persisted.

Was there no other way to capture such happiness? Was it all hopelessly messy with drinks and unpleasant familiarity?

What did Pleydon mean by spirit? Surely there must be more kinds of love than one--he had intimated that. She gathered that "Homer's children,"

those airs of Gluck that she liked so well, were works of art, sculpture, such as he did. Yet she had never thought of them as important, important as oatmeal or delicate soap. She made up her mind to ask him about it, when she saw that they had reached the Eighties; she was almost home.

"I am going away to-morrow," he told her, "for the winter, to South America. When I come back we'll see each other. If you should change address send me a line to the Harvard Club." The carriage had stopped before the great arched entrance to the apartment-house, towering in its entire block. He got out and lifted her to the pavement as if she had been no more than a flower in his hands. Then he walked with her into the darkness of the garden.

The fountains were cased in boards; the hedged borders, the bushes and gra.s.s, were dead. High above them on the dark wall a window was bright.

Linda's heart began to pound loudly, she was trembling ... from the cold. There was a faint sound in the air--the elevated trains, or stirring wings? It was nothing, then, to be lifted into heaven. There was the door to the hall and elevator. She turned, to thank Dodge Pleydon for all his goodness to her, when he lifted her--was it toward heaven?--and kissed her mouth.

She was still in his arms, with her eyes closed. "Linda Condon?" he said, in a tone of inquiry.

At the same breath in which she realized a kiss was of no importance a sharp icy pain cut at her heart. It hurt her so that she gasped. Then, and this was strange, she realized that--as a kiss--it hadn't annoyed her. Suddenly she felt that it wasn't just that, but something far more, a part of all her inner longing. He had put her down and was looking away, a face in shadow with an ugly protruding lip.

She saw him that way in her dreams--in the court under the ma.s.sive somber walls, with a troubled frown over his eyes. It seemed to her that, reaching up, she smoothed it away as they stood together in a darkness with the fountains, the hedges, dead, the world with never a sound sleeping in the prison of winter.

XVII

Linda thought about Dodge Pleydon on a warm evening of the following May. At four o'clock, in a hotel, Pansy had been married; and the entire Feldt connection had risen to a greater height of clamorous cheer than ever before. Extravagant unseasonable dishes, wines and banked flowers were lavishly mingled with sentimental speeches, healths and tears.

Linda had been acutely restless, impatient of all the loud good humor and stupid compliments. The sense of her isolation from their life was unbearably keen. She would have a very different wedding with a man in no particular like Pansy's.

After dinner--an occasion, with Pansy absent, where Mr. Moses Feldt's tears persisted in flowing--she had strayed into the formal chamber across from the dining-room and leaned out of a window, gazing into the darkening court. Directly below was where Pleydon had kissed her. She often re-examined her feelings about that; but only to find that they had dissolved into an indefinite sense of the inevitable. Not alone had it failed to shock her--she hadn't even been surprised. Linda thought still further about kissing, with the discovery that if, while it was happening, she was conscious of the kiss, it was a failure; successful, it carried her as far as possible from the actuality.

Pleydon, of course, had not written to her; he had intimated nothing to the contrary, only asking her to let him know, at the Harvard Club, if she changed address. That wasn't necessary, and now, probably, he was back from South America. Where, except by accident, might she see him?

Markue, with his parties, had dropped from Judith's world, his place taken by a serious older dealer in Dutch masters with an impressive gallery just off Fifth Avenue.

That she would see him Linda was convinced; this feeling absorbed any desire; it was no good wanting it or not wanting it; consequently she was undisturbed. She considered him gravely and in detail. Had there been any more Susanna Nodas in his stay south? She had heard somewhere that the women of Argentine were irresistible. Her life had taught her nothing if not the fact that a number of women figured in every man's history. It was deplorable but couldn't be avoided; and whether or not it continued after marriage depended on the cunning of any wife.

Now, however, Linda felt weary already at the prospect of a married life that rested on the constant play of her ingenuity. A great many things that, but a little before, she had willingly accepted, seemed to her probably not less necessary but distinctly tiresome. Linda began to think that she couldn't really bother; the results weren't sufficiently important.

Dodge Pleydon.

She slept in a composed order until the sun was well up. It was warmer than yesterday; and, going to an afternoon concert with Judith, she decided to walk. Linda strolled, in a short severe jacket and skirt, a black straw hat turned back with a c.o.c.kade and a crisp flushed ma.s.s of sweet peas at her waist. The occasion, as it sometimes happened, found her in no mood for music. The warmth of the sunlight, the open city windows and beginning sounds of summer, had enveloped her in a mood in which the jangling sentimentality of a street organ was more potent than the legato of banked violins.

She was relieved when the concert was over, but lingered at her seat until the crowd had surged by; it made Linda furious to be shoved or indiscriminately touched. Judith had gone ahead, when Linda was conscious of the scrutiny of a pale well-dressed woman of middle age.

It became evident that the other was debating whether or not to speak; clearly such an action was distasteful to her; and Linda had turned away before a restrained voice addressed her:

"You will have to forgive me if I ask your name ... because of a certain resemblance. Seeing you I--I couldn't let you go."

"Linda Condon," she replied.

The elder, Linda saw, grew even paler. She put out a gloved hand. "Then I was right," she said in a slightly unsteady voice. "But perhaps, when I explain, you will think it even stranger, inexcusable. My dear child, I am your father's sister."

Linda was invaded by a surprise equally made up of interest and resentment. The first was her own and the second largely borrowed from her mother. Besides, why had her father's family never made the slightest effort to see her. This evidently had simultaneously occurred to the other.

"Of course," she added, quite properly, "we can't undertake family questions here. I shouldn't blame you a bit, either, if you went directly away. I had to speak, to risk that, because you were so unmistakably a Lowrie. It is not a common appearance. We--I--" she floundered for a painful moment; then she gathered herself with a considerable dignity. "Seeing you has affected me tremendously, changed everything. I have nothing to say in our defense, you must understand that. I am certain, too, that my sister will feel the same--we live together in Philadelphia. I hope you will give me your address and let us write to you. Elouise will join with me absolutely."

Linda told her evenly where she lived, and then allowed Miss Lowrie to precede her toward the entrance. She said nothing of this to Judith, nor, momentarily, to her mother. She wanted to consider it undisturbed by a flood of talk and blame. It was evident to her that the Lowries had behaved very badly, but just how she couldn't make out. She recalled her father's sister--her aunt--minutely, forced to the realization that she was a person of entire superiority. Here, she suddenly saw, had been the cause of all their difficulties--the Lowries hadn't approved of the marriage, they had objected to her mother.

Five years ago she would have been incensed at this; but now, essentially, she was without personal indignation. She wanted, for herself, to discover as much as possible about her father and his family. A need independent of maternal influences stirred her. Linda was rea.s.sured by the fact that her father had been gently born; while she realized that she had always taken this for granted. Her mother must know nothing about the meeting with Miss Lowrie until the latter had written.

That was Friday and the letter came the following Tuesday. Linda, alone at the breakfast-table, instantly aware of the source of the square envelope addressed in a delicate regular writing, opened it and read in an unusual mental disturbance:

"My dear Linda,

I hope you will not consider it peculiar for me to call you this, for nothing else seems possible. Meeting you in that abrupt manner upset me, as you must have noticed. Of course I knew of you, and even now I can not go into our long unhappy affair, but until I saw you, and so remarkably like the Lowries, I did not realize how wicked Elouise and I had been. But I am obliged to add only where you were concerned. We have no desire to be ambiguous in that.

However, I am writing to say that we should love to have you visit us here. It is possible under the circ.u.mstances that your mother will not wish you to come. Yet I know the Lowries, a very independent and decided family, and although it is my last intention to be the cause of difficulty with your mother, still I hope it may be arranged.

In closing I must add how happy I was at the evidence of your blood.

But that, I now see, was a certainty. You will have to forgive us for a large measure of blindness. Affectionately,

AMELIA VIGNe LOWRIE."

Almost instantaneously Linda was aware that she would visit the Lowries.

She liked the letter extremely, as well as all that she remembered of its sender. At the same time she prepared for a scene with her mother, different from those of the past--with the recourse to the brandy flask--but no less unpleasant. They had very little to say to each other now; and, when she went into her mother's room with an evident definite purpose, the latter showed a constrained surprise, a palpable annoyance that her daughter had found her at the daily renovation of her worn face.

XVIII

Linda said directly, "I met Miss Lowrie, father's sister, at a concert last week, and this morning I had a letter asking me to stay with them in Philadelphia."