Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 3
IT was Lily who still dominated her thoughts when she descended at last to find her mother setting the table for the family supper. This was an operation into which Mrs. Tolliver threw all the great energy and force of her character. It was impossible for her to do things easily; the placing of each fork involved as much precision, as much thoroughness and intensity as the building of a bridge or a skyscraper. It was the gesture of an ardent housekeeper burning incense before the Gods of Domesticity, the abandoned devotion of an artist striving for perfection.
For an instant Ellen stood in the doorway watching her mother as if somewhere in the recesses of her clever brain she considered this parent as she might consider a stranger, marking the woman's strong face, her vigorous black hair, the rosiness of her healthy cheeks. Ellen, her mother said, had a disconcerting way of studying people, of prying into their lives, even of imagining things about them that could not possibly have been true. This was exactly what Ellen did as she waited in the doorway. She regarded silently the figure that stood before her, swathed in durable serge and ornamented with a gold chain and a tiny Swiss watch out of all proportion with the size and vigor of her body.
Then suddenly Mrs. Tolliver became aware of her daughter's presence. She straightened her back and stood with the knives and forks poised in her hand beneath the glare of the ornate chandelier.
"Well," she said. "You might speak when you come into a room." Then after a slight pause, "You can finish the table. I've got to watch the pies."
Listlessly the daughter took the silverware and absently she began laying it at the places to be occupied by her father, by Fergus, by Robert. There was no place for Gramp Tolliver. He ate in the solitude of his own room meals which were placed on the bottom step of the "back way" to be carried up by him in response to a loud knock on the door of his hermitage. For eight years he had eaten thus in exile.
"Ma," began Ellen, "when does Lily arrive?"
The mother continued to pour water into the shining glasses. "In a week or two . . . I don't know exactly," she said, and then raised her blue eyes to regard her daughter with a long and penetrating look. Between the two there was a sort of constant and secret warfare which went on perpetually as if, failing to understand each other, there could be no grounds between them for trust. Now Mrs. Tolliver saw nothing but the top of Ellen's dark head, secretive, silent, as she bent over the table.
"Why do you want to know?" she asked with an air of suspicion. "You've been talking a great deal about Lily lately. . . ."
"I don't know," came the evasive answer. "I like her. . . . I'd like to be like Lily some day."
Mrs. Tolliver resumed her task in silence but with an air of thoughtfulness. Again it was Ellen who broke the silence.
"I suppose there's no money . . . now that everything is settled." She put this forward tentatively, as if the matter was of no great interest to her.
"There's nothing over. . . ." replied her mother. "You knew there wouldn't be. . . . If Papa is elected, things will be all right again . . . for a time at least." This last she added with a profound sigh—a signal that at any moment consideration of the trials brought upon her by an easy-going husband might loose all the torrent of an emotional, primitive nature. "Why do you ask?"
"I just wondered," said Ellen. "I'd hoped things might be a little better."
"They won't be . . . for a time. . . ."
The significance of this conversation lay not so much in what was said as in what was not said. Neither the mother nor the daughter approached the real subject of the conversation openly. They hovered about it, descending for a time on the edge of it, flitting away again coyly, with backward glances. The fault may have been Ellen's. Certainly the ways of the honest, emotional Mrs. Tolliver were neither dark nor devious. Presently the mother made an effort to strike at the heart of the situation.
"I wish," she said, "that you would settle down and be content, Ellen. . . . I thought you were better for a time. . . . What is it you want? Is it to go away just when you're old enough to be a comfort to me? Is that the reward a mother has for her care and sacrifices? That she loses her only daughter as soon as she is old enough to think she is grown up?"
She was slipping into one of the most unbearable of her emotional moods, a mood of self-pity, when she threw herself as the Pope before the Visigoths upon the mercy of her husband and children. All the signs of its approach were at hand—the pathos, the slightly theatrical tone. The mood was aggravating because fundamentally it was reasonable. You could not argue the rightness of her position. She had sacrificed everything for her husband and her children. Day by day she continued to sacrifice everything. She would go on sacrificing herself until she died. She would have given her life for them without a regret. To wait upon her amiable unsuccessful husband and her three superlatively wonderful children was her idea of love, of perfect service. They were her world, her life, the beginning, the very core, the end of her passionate existence. The only reward she asked was possession; they must belong to her always.
And then it struck Ellen suddenly that the position of the mother was pitiable. It was pitiable because she knew so little of what was in her daughter's heart . . . so precious little of all the things stirring there so wildly, so savagely. She could never know, at least until after it was done—whatever it was that was to be done. Even then she could not understand that there were stronger things than love, things which were more profound and more important.
"And why are you so interested in Lily?" began her mother. "Why do you say you want to be like her?"
"I don't know," replied Ellen in a low voice. "I don't know except that I don't want to be like the others."
Her mother considered her for a moment and then shook her head, as if silently she had reached a decision.
"I can't understand your restlessness," she said. "I don't know where you get it."
Ellen stood now leaning against the mantelpiece above the gas log. Outside the rain still fell heavily.
"Well," she said, "it's not my fault that one grandfather ran away from home as a boy and went to California to dig gold. . . . And it's not my fault that the other left his wife and ran away to live in Europe for thirteen years."
Mrs. Tolliver turned sharply. "Who told you that? I mean about your grandfather Tolliver. . . ."
Ellen smiled in her silent, proud way. "I'm not deaf, Mama, nor blind. . . . I've been about the house now for nearly nineteen years. I know about Gramp Tolliver."
Again Ellen was smitten by amazement at her mother's ignorance of how much she knew, at how little the older woman understood of the shrewd knowledge she had hoarded away.
"I'm sorry you know it," said Mrs. Tolliver. "It would have been just as well if you hadn't known." Again she nodded her head with that same air of reaching a secret decision. "But now that you know it, you might as well know some other things. . . . You're old enough now, I guess." She sat down on one of the stiff-backed chairs and beckoned to her daughter. "Come here," she said, "and sit on my lap. . . . I'll tell you other things."
Ellen came to her and sat upon her lap, rather awkwardly, for to her it seemed a silly thing. She had not the faintest understanding of all that this small gesture meant to her mother. And secretly she hardened herself against a treacherous attack upon her affections. It was the habit of her mother to attack her through love. Always it had been a sure method of reducing Ellen's fortress of secrecy and hardness.
"It's about Lily," began Mrs. Tolliver. "I know Lily is beautiful. She's very kind and pleasant . . . but there are things about her that aren't nice. In some ways Lily is a loose woman. . . . She's laid herself open to talk. . . . People smirch her good name. . . . Perhaps she isn't really bad. . . . Nobody really knows anything against her, but she is free with men. . . . There's been talk, Ellen, and when there's smoke, there's fire."
Here Ellen interrupted her. "I don't believe it. . . . I don't believe any of it," she exclaimed stubbornly. "It's the way people talk. I know how they do. . . . I've heard. . . . It's one reason why I hate the Town."
And then Ellen saw her mother assume a great calmness, deliberately and with a certain ostentation, in order to impress Ellen with her sense of justice. It was like taking a cloak from a closet and putting it gravely about her. "I've never mentioned it to any one," she said (never once guessing the thoughts in her daughter's mind), "not to a soul. . . . Nothing could induce me to. . . . After all, Lily is my first cousin, the daughter of Aunt Julia, my own mother's sister. . . . I wouldn't permit any one to befoul her name in my presence. . . . But here we are alone, together, you and I. . . . It's in the family. That makes a difference. . . . Sometimes, in the family, one has to face the facts. And the facts are that Lily hasn't behaved well. . . . She's lived in Paris for years, alone in the wickedest city in the world. . . . There's even talk about her having had a baby . . . and she's never been married. . . . Nobody knows . . . and Aunt Julia wouldn't tell me. . . . You can't get a word out of her. . . . You wouldn't want to be like that, now would you?"
Ellen fell to pleating the folds of her cheap dress. Her dark brows drew closer together. She was sullen, awkward.
"I don't see that it makes any difference . . . not to Lily. She's free. . . . She's happy."
"But she's rich," said her mother. "That's why she's free . . . and only God knows whether she's happy. . . . A woman like that can't be happy. . . . I don't want my daughter, my pure, lovely little daughter to be contaminated."
The tide of Mrs. Tolliver's emotions displayed all the signs of bursting the dam of her restraint. Ellen knew these signs. Her mother was beginning to drag in God. She was beginning to use words like "pure," and "lovely." And for the first time in her life, Ellen found herself instead of softening, growing harder and harder. Strangely enough, it was the words of the gentle, birdlike Miss Ogilvie which gave her a new power. This time, she was not to be defeated.
"Well, it doesn't make any difference," she said, rising from her mother's lap. "I like Lily better than any one in this town . . . I always will . . . and nothing can change me." The fine line of her young chin grew stubborn and there rose between mother and daughter the old impregnable wall.
It is impossible to imagine what ruse Mrs. Tolliver would have used next, impossible to calculate the depths of emotion into which she might have plunged, had she not been halted by so small a thing as the ringing of a doorbell. The sound jangled noisily through the house and Ellen, finding in it the opportunity for escape, sped away to open the door.
Outside on the doorstep, drenched, tow-headed and grinning, stood Jimmy Seton, the little brother of May Seton. In one grubby hand he held a note.
"It's from May," he grinned. "I guess it's an invitation to a party."
And without another word, he vanished like an imp into the dark wall of pouring rain.