All had been maliciously expecting some flamboyant display of toilette from Mrs. Alfred Lindsey, and all were disappointed. It was grudgingly conceded that she had finally, and sensibly, decided to subside into the role of the serious and responsible matron. Her gown of dim rose velvet and demure lace was cut on the most conservative and proper lines, and was relieved by no jewels. Her manner was abstracted, even dull. Doubtless, the once strong red of her mouth had been pure artifice, for now her lips were almost bluish, and even the purple of her eyes had dimmed..No one heard her laugh, and she had not danced, but had remained near her husband, who did not care for that exercise. It was noted, also, that she had lost much flesh and that she appeared to be very weary and distrait. Was it possible, whispered the ladies, that young Mrs. Lindsey was already—? They scrutinized her figure closely. Of course, she had been married hardly four months, and stays were very tight. However, it would be an excellent thing for Alfred, poor gentleman, who had only that miserable little cripple as evidence of his first marriage. They noticed that Alfred seemed somewhat preoccupied and tired; perhaps he was concerned with his wife’s “interesting condition.” When called from her side, it was with a sort of ponderous impatience, and he soon returned. Such devotion! sighed the ladies.
The Widow Kingsley decided to investigate. She found Amalie alone, lurking against the wall, and hidden by a grove of rubber plants. She kissed the young woman heartily; then, after an exchange of somewhat listless amenities, the widow asked abruptly: “My dear, are you going to have a baby? Everyone is curious. You seem so languid.”
Amalie did not blush or start. “No,” she said, very quietly. “No. At least, not yet.”
The widow eyed the other woman cunningly over her vigorously waving fan. “Nothing so settling for a wife as having babies, my love. I understand they are very satisfying.” She chortled. “At least, the preliminaries. You must have half a dozen.”
Amalie smiled slightly. “I shall remember your advice, dear Mrs. Kingsley. It is so very kind of you.”
“Never had any, myself,” confided the widow. “Never liked ’em. Of course, that is very unnatural of me. I am a most unnatural woman. Prefer cats. But in a world so hell-bent, always, on being natural and dull, it is very pleasant to be unnatural.”
Amalie’s smile was a little less forced. “I understand that it is the unnatural people who make history. Moreover, they have a hypnotic effect on the natural.”
The other woman chuckled. “I suspect you are right, my pet. I have hypnotized three men into marrying me. Gentlemen of substance. Look at me: I am not in the least dazzling or alluring. Yet, three gentlemen of fortune have married me, and adored me. That is hypnotic. Do you blame ’em?” she demanded, grinning.
Amalie gave her her full attention for the first time. “No,” she said thoughtfully, “I do not blame them. They must have found you exciting after association with so many insipid women.”
The widow, pleased, tapped the girl smartly on the arm with her fan. “I love you, my child. Not once have you said: ‘You must have been handsome, or charming.’ You have a good eye. I was always very ugly, but I was always very entertaining. A man may tire of a pretty face and a beautiful figure (which he immediately sets out to ruin) but he never tires of a woman who entertains him. I always admonish a bride to be amusing. Garner gossip, I say, the more malicious the better. Invent it, if you are short of facts. Use your imagination. Read extensively, but privately, and remember jokes and exciting incidents in what you read. Do not set out to be learned; gentlemen do not admire sensible comments from their wives. Make the devils laugh; they will tell you that they do not approve of scandal, but the male of the species laps up scandal as a cat laps up cream. I have never known a wife with a talent for the scandalous who ever lost her husband to another woman. A shocking tale about a friend or acquaintance is worth any amount of wifely duty and virtue, and far surpasses French lingerie.”
For the first time that evening, and even for weeks, Amalie laughed. The widow was gratified. She had not liked the gray color of Amalie’s face, the dull and lightless despair in her eyes.
“If,” she added, “one can add a shapely leg in a silk stocking, and a nice thigh, to a spicy tale, then you have the rascals enslaved for live. However, I had no shapely leg, but still I entranced ’em. That is because I have imagination.”
The widow shook her head. “Men are such irresponsible and inconsistent creatures. They have imposed the most tiresome virtues on us, and have called those virtues ‘natural’ to us. But really, we are the most reckless and violent rakes, under our stays and our demure manners. And, strange to say, it is this quality in us, when used with taste and piquancy in the marriage state, which keeps our husbands at our sides. But if we take men seriously, and attempt to live up to the picture of the virtues they have held up for our guidance, then they weary of us and go off after the first pair of flashing ankles.”
But Amalie was not listening. Jerome had just danced by with Miss Sally, in the measures of a most lilting and exciting waltz. Sally’s curls had been most indecorously close to Jerome’s lips; her face had been the face of a young sleeper caught in an intoxicating dream. Jerome had been smiling down at her tenderly, and his arm had been close. Amalie’s eyes closed spasmodically.
The Widow Kingsley, with her astuteness, saw all this. She rose, waited a moment, then tapped Amalie firmly and sharply on the arm. Amalie turned to her, faint and sick of expression. The widow was quiet, but her regard was both stern and piercing.
“Have you ever played the Market, my dear? No? There is a saying that one must ‘average his losses’ occasionally. That you must do. Take my advice, for I am an old woman, and I have learned common sense.”
Amalie stared at her. Mrs. Kingsley nodded grimly. “Yes, my love. It is a sad day when a woman is less wise than a man.”
She rustled away then, shouting to an acquaintance.
Amalie stared at herself in the mirror over her dressing table. She said: I am not wise. I never was wise. She could not move; she had sat like this for over fifteen minutes, making no effort to undress, her hands lying numbly among the crystal and gilt bottles that littered the lace which covered the table.
How was it possible to know whether one were wise or unwise? The exigencies of the moment compelled one to decision, and one smugly assured oneself that the decision was either inevitable or clever.
She thought of her childhood and her young girlhood, and now the whole flavor of them, the whole intensity and sordidness and hunger and fear came back to her overwhelmingly. She saw the shack in which she had lived with her dying mother and her drunken father. She saw the face of her mother, after her labors in the kitchens of others. She heard her father’s oaths, breathed the acrid smell of his breath. She saw her own young face in the cracked mirror of the filthy kitchen, and heard her own voice: “Never. Never. There is something else for me, if I can find it. And I will find it.”
She saw the snow that had seemed endless about the shack and felt the sharp wind on her thin body as she went to the pump for water. She had looked at the stars and had repeated over and over: “Never! Never!” She had felt the strength in her brain and in her will, and the beauty in her face. She had been only fourteen then, but the strength had always been there, like a weapon.
She had had this weapon of her will, and of her beauty. They were no small things, she had known very early. She had asked no help, no pity, no compassion. What she had done, she had done herself. A cool wind of pride momentarily blew upon the smart of her fiery suffering.
She could see the bedroom reflected in her mirror. She was safe; she was free. She must “average her losses.” What, in reality, had she lost? “Nothing,” she said, aloud. What was this silly thing that bedevilled her compared with what she had escaped and endured? If she had had greater strength, in the past, she need only exercise a lesser strength now, and then she would have peace.
She covered her eyes with one hand and c
alled upon that strength, harshly and commandingly.
She did not hear the dressing-room door open and close. And so it was that she started violently when she heard Alfred’s kind but reproving voice: “My dear, you are not undressed. Do you know it is long after midnight?”
She dropped her hand and looked at her husband in the mirror. She said, in a dull and mechanical tone: “I am sorry. I am so tired. I was just resting, Alfred.”
She stood up. He stood near her, in his crimson dressing gown. He was hesitating, and his smile was awkward. But there was a heavy flush on his face. He drew her into his arms and kissed her lips, lingeringly. He whispered: “Darling, do you know it has been long over two months—?”
He felt her grow hard as stone in his arms. But he did not hear her sudden wild and terrified thought: “But that would be adultery!”
He released her gently and looked down at her in surprise. He exclaimed: “What is it, Amalie? Are you ill?”
But she was overcome with the horror of her involuntary thought, her monstrous and appalling thought. Frightened, he caught her hand and cried: “Amalie, are you ill?”
He chafed her cold fingers in his warm palms. Frantically, he looked at her table. He found her smelling salts, uncorked the bottle, held it to her nose, murmuring incoherent and distracted words. He lowered her to the chair. Her head fell forward. He knelt beside her, shook her beseechingly.
“What is it, Amalie, my darling?” He put his hand to her forehead and lifted her face. What he saw frightened him even more. He stood up, glanced wildly at the door, as if for help.
She was pressing her hands to her face now, and shivering. Alfred pulled out his own handkerchief, wet it thoroughly, and messily, with eau de cologne, and rubbed it over Amalie’s brow and cheeks. “My God, what is it, Amalie? Tell me. I cannot bear it. Are you ill?”
The pungent smell and sting of the cologne steadied her broken self-control. She leaned against him, drawing deep breaths. But she did not look at him as she murmured, catching her breath between words: “I am only tired. It has been a long evening.” She paused. Her murmur was lower but firmer. “Yes, I am tired. There was the nursing of your uncle. I am tired enough to die. You—you must give me a little while, Alfred.” She raised her head and tried to meet his eyes. “You do understand?”
“Certainly!” he cried. But he did not. It was enough for him, then, to see that she had recovered somewhat. His heart slowed its frantic beating. He thought: There is no understanding women. It is true that she told me she did not love me, but was fond of me, and would try to make me a good wife. I knew all that before. But she did not shrink from me when I took her as my wife; she was gentle and compliant. I expected nothing else; I understood that well-bred women, or women with even a slight pretension to gentility, had no response in them. That is left for sluts and unnatural women. He drew a deep and reassuring breath of his own. One must remember that they are delicate creatures, at best, and inexplicable. One has only to be patient.
And then he had a most electric thought, powerful and thrilling. He knelt beside her, held her to him; she dropped her head upon his shoulder, as if unutterably exhausted.
He finally whispered: “Is it possible, Amalie, that—that—”
She was silent in his arms. She was not acquainted with duplicity, with treachery. She had never struck a blow at one who had trusted her, or even against her enemies. But now, in her extremity, she whispered in return: “I—do not—know—yet.”
He laughed aloud, but softly, in the access of his delight and wonder. “You must go to our Dr. Hawley, Amalie! Tomorrow! My darling, if it is only true!”
If this marvelous, this glorious thing were true, then all was explained, her shrinking from him, her avoidance of him. It explained it fully, even more than her “tiredness” and her reaction from the strain of long weeks of nursing his uncle. He was content; he would understand, he promised himself exultantly. He thought of young Philip, whom he loved, in spite of his disappointment. It would be excellent for Philip to have a brother. Philip, then, need not go, in September, to the school he dreaded, in order to fit himself for his position as a banker’s son. Philip, poor lad, could remain at home. There would be a sturdier boy, a whole boy, to take up the burden.
He helped her to her feet. She was flaccid, in his hands and arms. Very tenderly, then, he helped her undress. While he did so, he talked lightly and lovingly, and with hushed laughter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Mr. Lindsey, Philip and Amalie sat in the warm sun of early May.
To Mr. Lindsey, at least, the hills had never been so green, so softly rimmed with mauve, so tender. Never had there been a sky so lucid, so passionately blue and filled with the cry of life. Never had he so felt the poignancy of living, the tranquillity and joy of mere being, the ardent and ecstatic sorrow of awareness.
He had never been a religious man. He was the gentle skeptic, who had built his house upon reason and logic. But now he was old, and had come to suspect all reason. Logic, he thought, is the great conservative, the great sneerer. It is the blind procrastinator. Had man, through the ages, listened to logic what little progress he has made would never have come into being. But man, fortunately, has listened to his instinct, that mighty enemy of reason. We shall never, he thought, solve the riddle of man by the application of scientific instruments. We shall know ourselves only through our instincts. In the dark desert of those instincts stands God, a burning bush, lighting the whole chaotic landscape.
He had always believed that only the young are instinctive, aware of mysterious powers and forces in the universe. But now he knew that the old, sitting in the sunshine, done with so many things, feel the full power of instinct. The old, then, come to a time when they suspect reason and logic, for they have emerged from the hard dark prison of the struggle for existence, or the dim cloister of philosophy. It is significant, he thought, that logic has always been most admired by the secluded dialecticians, and by them has been developed to its ultimate absurdity. Logic is any man’s servant. He can rise up to his grotesque private universes on the sedate ladder of a perfectly valid and logical syllogism. By sincerely logical reasoning, he can persuade himself to commit enormities, or suicide. Mr. Lindsey suspected that most men commit suicide. Someone had once said of a certain man: “Died at fifteen; buried at seventy-five.”
When had he died? That was more important to him now than the question as to when he would be buried. But no, it was no longer important, after all, for he was alive again, completely alive, on the very edge of his grave.
It was sad, it was even terrible, that a man only knew the value and the loveliness and the grandeur of life when he was about to depart from it, just as one, forever departing from his old and familiar home, suddenly becomes aware of its dearness and meaning for him. He sees every tree in its clarity, as he has never seen it before. He sees the light on the windows of rooms he shall never enter again; he sees the tender ivy on the stones, the bloom of the old gardens, the familiar walks and the sun-warmed walls. He sees his house, not as a mere building, a mere place of habitation, a mere enclosure for his body and a protection from the terrors of the night, but as part of himself, part of all the pain he has endured and part of all the things he has loved and the passions he has experienced. When he turns finally from the door, twists the key in its lock, he goes forth an exile, full of grief.
We learn to live, to understand, when it is too late, he thought. Then he began to wonder. Time was nothing. Perhaps the few hours given to the old, to the departing, when they may look back with full awareness, are the only hours of significance in a man’s life.
He looked at the sky, and suddenly he was full of a calm ecstasy, a kind of rapturous realization. It was not faith. It was something much deeper, much tenderer, much more profound. It is enough, he thought, and it is enough to compensate for a lifetime of suffering and sadness and struggle, that we have had that moment or two of ecstasy which accompanies the knowledge of
the being of God, and of the meaning of man, and the peace that comes with them, the light that “never was on sea or land.”
He was sitting in the sun, with his Cashmere shawl over his crippled knees, his long white head bare to the gentle wind. Amalie was sitting near him, and Philip, in the chairs they had drawn up to him. Amalie, at his and Philip’s request, had been reading Plato’s Phaedo. But now Mr. Lindsey touched her shoulder gently.
“Please, my love, that is enough,” he said. “Even Plato can become tiresome. He was always so logical.”
Amalie glanced up in surprise. Then she saw Mr. Lindsey’s face, and was silent. She closed the book.
Mr. Lindsey looked reflectively at Philip. “What do you think of Plato, my boy?”
Philip blushed. He looked down at his beautiful white hands, so thin and twisted together now. He almost whispered: “I—I think almost all philosophers make—things—so wearisome.”
Mr. Lindsey did not speak, but he was intensely moved. Yes, his instinct, then, had been right. Only the very young and the old understood. He put out his hand and rested it on Philip’s deformed shoulder.
“And our new scientists,” said Mr. Lindsey, in a murmuring voice, “and our new materialism—they make things ‘so wearisome.’ Yes, our scientists, intoxicated now with Darwin and Huxley and so many others, will one day emerge from their darling materialism, their adoration of ‘natural laws,’ and rediscover God. Perhaps in the test tube, or the atom, in the star, or in geological strata, or in chemicals. What a shock it will be to them!”
Amalie looked from Philip to Mr. Lindsey. How alike they are! she thought, in spite of the pale Puritanism of the New Englander, and the dark, almost Latin, coloring of Philip. There was a certain vividness about them, in spite of their silences and their self-repressions. There was a frail but steellike vitality in them, thinly shining but intensely strong. She sighed, rested her hands on her book, and looked down at the valley.