Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 31
IF Ellen had ever had any use for such a creature as a confidante, she would have told her no doubt that life, at this moment, was an exasperating puzzle. Between the manners of Herman Biggs and Clarence and the manners of such a man as Richard Callendar, there lay a vast gulf, a sort of blank page in the book of her experience, an hiatus that left her uneasy and disturbed.
Clarence and Herman Biggs, she understood, represented to a great degree the husband and lover of her own country. They were the ones who came seeking, the ones who idolized the object of their affections. They were, if not fascinating, affectionate and docile. They were perhaps, even convenient, so long as they did not get under foot. There was in them a certain childlike innocence, complicated alone by a Quixotic code of chivalry and honor which allowed them to be despoiled. Either they overlooked or were innocent of the ways of the world and so clung to the sentimental image of women as pure, devoted creatures who were always good and generous. There were, of course, such things as "bad women" but these did not concern them; such women were of a class apart, without any real relation to good women, a third sex one might have said, with its own uses. The women of their world had changed abruptly, swiftly, in a generation or two, from helpmates on a rude frontier adventure into creatures of luxury; and men like Herman and Clarence had not kept pace. These were the men whom Ellen had always known. There had never been any one like Richard Callendar.
In the absence of Clarence among the factories of the middle west Ellen lunched, not once, but several times with Callendar. Out of the money she had earned by her playing she was able now to dress herself in a fashion which, if not smart, was at least simple and charming. With the approach of the warm days, they lunched at Sherry's (for he made no effort to conceal his attentions) in an open window which gave out upon the Avenue and the stream of carriages, disordered now by increasing inroads of noisy automobiles. She must have understood, out of the depths of her mother's teachings, that what she did was an improper and even a dangerous thing. It was, at least, a misstep, taken through lack of experience . . . a step which later on she might not have risked.
There was Callendar himself to be considered. It was clear that, despite all her coolness, he had an effect upon her. There were times when she would blush as if suddenly overcome by a sense of his presence, for he was charming to her—gentle, understanding, full of a fire which leapt up in sudden gusts to join the flame of her own triumph and zest in living. In the window overlooking Fifth Avenue there were moments when she must have forgotten everything save the future, hours when they talked of Europe, when he described to her with something very close to passion the brilliance of Paris or the smoky glow of London. Both were naïve, Ellen in the fashion of the inexperienced and Callendar, so dark, so charming, so utterly new, in the fashion of a man whose directness of action had nothing to do with the question of conventions. It was impossible for either to have understood the emotion that drew them together, for it was a romantic thing to which both were then insensible, the one because life had taught her not to expect such a thing as romance, the other because he had never believed in its existence.
One bright afternoon in May they walked all the way from Sherry's through the park to the Babylon Arms. It was a soft day when the park appeared veritably to reflect its greenness upon the air itself, a day when the willows were softened by a haze of new leaves, and the rare clusters of cherry trees appeared in faint blurs of delicate pink. Along the edges of the lake, freed now of its burden of ice and not yet burdened anew with the old newspapers of sweltering August, the nursemaids divided the iron benches with vagabonds and old ladies who had come there simply to rest, to sit relaxed, silent, as if they were sustained somehow without effort by the very softness of the air. The quality of this pervading gentleness appeared to have its effect upon the two; for a time they were enveloped by a languor which drugged the intelligence and warmed the senses. They walked lazily, side by side, Ellen in a tight gray suit and a large picture hat, Callendar looking at her now and then out of his gray eyes and poking the fresh green grass with his malacca stick. At times they stopped and laughed, for Callendar was in a charming mood when he became a blagueur, irresistible and caressing. Under the influence of the day even the hardness of Ellen, which could be at times almost pitiful, appeared to melt away. She laughed at him. She even watched him slyly from the corner of her eyes, but not in the old hostile fashion. It was more the way one would watch a charming little boy, fearful lest his knowledge of the admiration might give him an advantage.
It could not have been the weather alone which so changed her. There were other things, among them beyond all doubt Callendar himself and the friendship which he had given her, the same friendship which his mother and even Sabine in her brusque, shy way had offered. They were friends in a way no one, save Lily, had ever been before. It is possible that there came to her on this soft warm day a knowledge of her kinship with these people, of a bond which if undefinable was none the less certain and secure. They had nothing to gain from her and they were not concerned with subduing her; they did not seek to change her in any way at all. They were like her old Aunt Julia and the mysterious Lily, who had warned her not to let people make her fit a pattern, not to let them drag her down to the level of their own mediocrity; she understood now what Lily meant. These were people who, by some quality of honesty that was almost a physical thing, had attained an aristocracy of their own, a state which had its foundations in that very honesty. There was, too, a distinction about them of a sort beyond such individuals as the genteel, decayed Mr. Wyck, May Seton and her giggles, Mr. Bunce who was so robust and kind, and (this thought must have occurred to her) even Clarence whose kindly humbleness barred him forever. They were not muddled; they stood outlined, for all their strangeness, with a sharp clarity.
It was an understanding that had come to her over a long time dimly as through a mist. To-day she knew it. She began to understand why there were some people whom she admired and some for whom she could have in her heart contempt or at best an emptiness that bordered upon pity.
So she walked very happily with the fascinating, dark young man, content perhaps that she might go on thus forever, that she might always have him and Sabine and Thérèse quite as they were, without any change. And in the depths of her heart it would have given her a sharp, leaping pleasure to have encountered suddenly on one of those asphalt paths May Seton and others of her townspeople. It would have pleased her to have had them witness her triumph. For she had not yet escaped the Town.
Into the midst of this a new knowledge came, sharp and unforeseen.
Under the shadow of Daniel Webster in the bronze attitude of a pouter pigeon, Callendar halted sharply and turned toward her with a swift directness, looking at her so closely that for an instant she blushed.
"Might I come in with you this afternoon?" he asked. "Will you be alone?"
Faced by the disarming gaze of the gray eyes, she forgot for a moment her game of watching. She answered, "Why, yes. I'll be alone." And then, as if she could not control herself, she looked away and started walking once more.
He did not speak again until they had reached the outer barrier of the park when he said,
"I'd like to have you play for me . . . alone. I've never heard you save in a crowd. I fancy you would play best for an audience of one."
They turned presently between the Syrian Lions of the Babylon Arms and, after being borne silently aloft in the swaying elevator, they climbed the two flights of stairs to the door of the tiny apartment which Ellen opened with her key. The room was in darkness until she lifted the shades which (on the advice of that passionate housekeeper, her mother) were drawn to protect the cheap, bright carpet from the sharp rays of the spring sun, and then the light revealed a shabby little room stuffed with the things which Clarence had bought her. There were chairs and sofas and pillows, pictures, ornaments and little tables. In one corner the grand piano stood somewhat apart in a little bay cleared of furniture. Richard, leaning on his stick and viewing the confusion gravely, must have thought her lover a poor sort, who could offer her only a great profusion of things in the poorest of taste. Yet he did not smile, perhaps because he was not greatly interested in the room. In the midst of all the stuff, Ellen, taking off her picture hat and blushing still with a hazy sense of confusion, possessed an air of aloofness, of being detached from all the shabby things. She rose above them as once before she had risen above the furniture in the Setons' dismal parlor.
The gaiety that had flourished in the bright park became dampened now by a queer sense of strain, an awkwardness which made itself apparent in the silence of both. They were no longer in the bright open park: the walls which shut them in had changed everything, sharpened in some indefinable way the power of their senses. For an instant they stood regarding each other shyly, and presently Ellen said, "Do sit down there. . . . And I'll play for you. What do you want to hear?"
Richard told her that the choice must be hers, and then he seated himself in Clarence's leather arm chair and lighted a cigarette with the matches from Clarence's smoking table in the Mission style. Without speaking again she began to play. It was as if she had said, "I will talk to you in this fashion," and after the first few chords had fallen the sense of strain and conflict disappeared, swallowed up again, this time in the man's attitude of passionate listening.
She played for him, first of all, some Schumann which was so like the shadowy, soft consciousness of this new feeling born with such abruptness there in the park; and then she played some of his beloved Chopin and turned at last into the Sonata Appassionata. She played as she played only for Fergus who listened in the same fashion, slumped down in his chair, his eyes half closed, his curling, golden hair all rumpled, with the air of one intoxicated by sound. It must have occurred to her, for the first time, that there was between her brother and this stranger a certain likeness, a capacity for wild abandonment that was terrifying. To-day all the things which for so long a time had been shut up within the walls of her bitter secrecy poured forth and overflowed into the music; and with this there was united a new fire, a sudden warmth that was strange to her. She knew a strange desire to share all that she possessed, a curious, aching desire close to the border of tears. It was so, perhaps, because love would always be to her like this . . . a wild and passionate heightening of the senses which found its manifestation in an unearthly unity of spirit. For a time she carried Richard with her into the ecstasy she was able to invoke.
And when at length the last chords drifted slowly away, they permitted the silence to remain unbroken for a long time while he sat, still slumped in his chair, his eyes half closed, watching her with the air of one on whom a spell has been cast.
He sat there in Clarence's chair in Clarence's place, magnificent like herself in all that desert of commonplace things. There was a sense of unreality about the whole scene. She must have known, deep within that hard intelligence of hers, that what she saw was at best an illusion since between them both there lay differences, circumstances, facts that were not to be overcome.
He went presently, after they had exchanged a few stupid phrases drawn by sheer force from the depths of an emotion which neither was willing to betray save by their silence. They did not even speak of another meeting; nothing happened; upon the surface their parting was strangely empty and bare. And when the door had closed behind him, Richard halted for a moment in the dark hallway and leaned against the wall. Perhaps he remembered what his mother, so old in her wisdom and so shrewd, had told him. She's not the ordinary sort. . . . You'd best keep clear of her.
The mocking look had gone out of his eyes. Something had happened to him, an experience that was altogether new in a life by no means limited in such matters . . . a thing which opened the fancy to a new magnificence, a new rapture, a new intoxication. It was a vision which he may have doubted because he had never believed in its existence. But between him and this wild adventure there stood a barrier against which he could make no progress. It was an invisible wall of a sort he had never encountered in any woman, not even in the terrible serenity of Sabine. Hard it was, and clear like crystal, protecting something which he might see but never touch. She's not the ordinary sort. . . . You'd best keep clear of her.
On the opposite side of the door Ellen flung herself down on the ugly divan and wept, silently and horribly, as she had wept once before in the dark solitude of her own virginal room, while the autumn rain drenched the garden outside. And again she could not have told why she wept. It was a passionate sensuous weeping which exhausted itself presently and left her weary and quiet until long after the lights had begun to twinkle through the smoke along the river.
Yet nothing had happened—nothing at all of which she could say, "It is this or that."