Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 52
THE first letter from Lily since Ellen had left the house in the Rue Raynouard for Vienna arrived on the eve of her departure from New York for the West. It was a sad letter, tragic and strangely subdued for one so buoyant, so happy as Lily to have written. Still, there were reasons . . . reasons which piled one upon another in a crescendo of sorrow and tragedy. It was, as Ellen remarked to Rebecca while they sat at breakfast in the bright sitting room, as if the very foundations of Lily's life had collapsed.
César was missing. "I have given up hope," wrote Lily, "of seeing him again. Something tells me that he is dead, that even if he were a prisoner I should have heard from him. I know he is gone. I saw him on the night he went into action. His troop passed through Meaux in the direction of the Germans and he stopped for five minutes . . . five precious minutes . . . at Germigny. And then he rode away into the darkness. . . . I am certain that he is dead."
Nor was this all. Madame Gigon too was dead. With Lily she had been trapped in the house at Germigny, too ill to flee. The Germans had entered the park and the château and spent a night there. Before morning they were driven out again. During that night Madame Gigon had died. She was buried now in the family grave at Trilport, nearby.
And Jean . . . the Jean (eighteen now) who was such a friend of Ellen's, who had ridden wildly through the Bois and through the fields at Germigny, was in the hospital. He had been with César's troop. César had pledged himself to look out for the boy. But César had vanished during the first skirmish with the Uhlans. Jean had lost him, and now Jean lay in the hospital at Neuilly with his left leg amputated at the knee.
"I am back in the Rue Raynouard," wrote Lily, "but you can imagine that it is not a happy place. I am alone all day and when I go out, I see no one because all the others are busy with the war, with their own friends and relations. Many of them have gone to the country because living has become very dear in Paris. We are safe again, but I am alone. There is not much pleasure here. I too have been very ill. I know now what a stranger I have always been. I am American still, despite everything. They know it too and have left me alone."
When Rebecca had gone, bustling and rather hard, out into the streets, Ellen sat for a long time with Hansi beside her, holding the sad letter in her hands. This, then, was what had happened to Lily's world, a world which, protected by wealth, had seemed so secure, so far beyond destruction. In a single night it was gone, swept away like so much rubbish out of an open door. Only Jean was left; and Jean, who loved life and activity and movement, was crippled now forever.
Moved by an overwhelming sadness, Ellen reproached herself for having been rude to old Madame Gigon, for having quarreled with César. She had been unpleasant to them because (she considered the thing honestly now, perhaps for the first time) because the one had been of no use to her and the other had threatened to stand in her way. She knew too for the first time how much Lily had loved her César. In her letter she made no pretenses; she was quite frank, as if after what had happened it was nonsense, pitiful nonsense, any longer to pretend. They were lovers; they had loved each other for years . . . it must have been nearly twelve years of love which stood blocked by César's sickly wife. There was, Ellen owned, something admirable in such devotion, still more when there was no arbitrary tie to bind them, the one to the other.
She rose presently and began to pace up and down the sunlit room, the black dog following close at her heels, up and down, up and down, up and down. And the weariness, the strange lack of zest, which she had spoken of to Mrs. Callendar, took possession of her once more. She was, in the midst of her triumph, surrounded by the very clippings which acclaimed her, afraid with that curious fear of life which had troubled her since the beginning. It was a hostile world in which one must fight perpetually, only to be defeated in the end by some sinister thrust of circumstance . . . a thrust such as had destroyed all Lily's quiet security. It was well indeed to have humility.
She remembered too that Fergus was caught up in the torrent which had swept away so much that Lily held dear. . . . Fergus and (she halted abruptly in her restless pacing and grew thoughtful) Fergus and Callendar, the two persons in all the world whom she loved best. In the terror of the moment, she was completely honest. She loved Callendar. If there had ever been any doubt, she knew it now. She did not, even to save her own emotions, to shield her own vanity, put the thing out of her mind. She gave herself up to the idea.
In her restless pacing, she fancied that she must do something. She must save them—Callendar and Fergus—by some means; but like Thérèse in her anxiety over her fortune, like Hattie in her desperation, she found herself defeated. There was nothing to be done. This gaudy show, this spectacle, this glittering circus parade which crossed the face of Europe could not be blocked. She could not save them because they preferred the spectacle to anything in all the world. Ah, she knew them both! . . . She knew what it was in them that was captured and held fast by the spectacle. She knew that if she had been a man, she too would have been there by their side. They must be in the center of things, where there was the most going on, the one aloof, the other fairly saturated in the color, the feel, the very noise of the whole affair. It was a thirst for life, for a sense of its splendor. . . . She knew what it was because she too was possessed by it. It had nothing to do with patriotism; that sort of emotion was good enough for the French.
Like Hattie, like Thérèse, like a million other women she was helpless, and the feeling terrified her, who had never been really helpless before. This war, which she had damned for a nuisance that interrupted her own triumphant way, became a monster, overwhelming and bestial, before which she was powerless. And in her terror she was softened by a new sort of humanity. She became merely a woman whose men were at war, a woman who could do nothing, who must sit behind and suffer in terror and in doubt.
Rebecca found her there when she returned at three o'clock, still pacing up and down, up and down, the great black dog following close at her heels. She had not lunched; she had not thought of eating.
"The letter from Lily," she told Rebecca, with an air of repression, "has upset me. I don't know what I'm to do. I want to go back to Paris."
The statement so astounded Rebecca that she dropped the novels and papers she was carrying and stood staring.
"What!" she cried, "Go back now? Sacrifice everything we have worked for? Ruin everything? Give up all these engagements? You must be mad."
It was plain that Ellen had thought of all this, that the struggle which she saw taking form with Rebecca had already occurred in her own soul. She knew what she was sacrificing . . . if she returned.
"Lily is alone there, and in trouble. Some one should go to her."
So that was it! Rebecca's tiny, bright ferret's eyes grew red with anger. "Lily! Lily!" she said. "Don't worry about Lily. I'll wager by this time she has found some one to console her."
Ellen moved toward her like a thunder cloud, powerful, menacing in a kind of dignity that was strange and even terrifying to Rebecca. "You can't say that of her. I won't have you. How can you when it was Lily who has helped me more than any one in the world? I won't have it. Who are you to speak like that of Lily . . . my own cousin?"
"Lily who has helped you!" screamed Rebecca. "And what of me? What of me?" She began to beat her thin breasts in a kind of fury. Her nose became a beak, her small eyes red and furious. "Have I done nothing? Am I no one, to be cast aside like this? What of the work I have done, the slaving?"
For a moment they stood facing each other, silent and furious, close in a primitive fashion to blows. There was silence because their anger had reached a point beyond all words and here each held herself in check. It was Ellen who broke the silence. She began to laugh, softly and bitterly.
"Perhaps you're right," she said in a low voice. "I do owe you a great deal . . . as much, really, as I owe to Lily. It has given you the right to a certain hold upon me."
(But the difference, she knew, was this—that Lily would never exert her right of possession.)
"You can't go," continued Rebecca, "not now. Think of it . . . all the years of sacrifice and work, gone for nothing. Can't you see that fate has delivered triumph into your hands. If you turn your back upon it now, you'd be nothing less than a fool." She saw in a sudden flash another argument and thrust it into the conflict. "Always you have taken advantage of opportunity. . . . You told me so yourself. . . . And now when the greatest chance of all is at hand, you turn your back on it. I can't understand you. Why should you suddenly be so thoughtful of Lily?"
Ellen sat down and fell to looking out of the window. "Perhaps you're right," she said. "I'll think it out . . . more clearly perhaps."
There was, after all, nothing that she could do. The old despair swept over her, taking the place of her pessimistic anger. She could not go to the front, among the soldiers, to comfort Callendar. He would have been the last to want her there.
"Perhaps you're right," she repeated, and then, "War is a rotten thing for women."
But Rebecca had, all the same, a feeling that it was not Lily whom she was fighting but some one else—whom, she could not imagine. She could not have known of course that Thérèse Callendar had already written her son that she had seen Ellen Tolliver, that she was handsomer than ever and more fascinating and sullen, and that in a sly postscript she had remarked, "The strange thing is that I believe she is still in love with you. I watched her, out of curiosity, and I am sure of it."
And, of course, none of them knew that Callendar on reading the letter somewhere in the mud near Loos, with the throbbing of the barrage in his ears, had smiled at the trickery of women and thought, "Curiosity, indeed!"
It was in the end Rebecca who won, not a victory perhaps but at least a delay. The little Jewess was much too shrewd ever to suppose that Ellen might be conquered so easily; if she had won a temporary advantage she understood it was because Ellen chose to let her win, because Ellen had weighed the question and decided that all things considered, Rebecca was right. To turn back at this point was a folly which she could not deny. Belonging now in a sense to the whole world she was no longer absolute mistress of her own fortune; such freedom was, after all, the privilege only of the obscure. She was in truth, she thought bitterly, still a mountebank, an entertainer, who waited behind a painted screen to entertain the public. The stage was greater now and the audience had grown from the fashionable little group in the Callendar drawing-room to all the world. That was the only difference.
But stronger than any sense of duty or obligation was the old terror of a terrible poverty which forced one to keep up appearances. She had tasted the security that comes of riches and she could not turn back. There were memories which would not die, memories of the days when as a girl she had put on a bold face before all the Town, memories, even worse, of the drab petty economies she had known in the days at the Babylon Arms. And even stronger than all these things was her fear of failure, a passionate fear which might easily have driven her in some circumstances to suicide. One who had been so ruthless, so arrogant, so proud, dared not fail. That way too had been blocked.
So she found herself brought up sharply against the problem of the Town. They wanted her there; they were, strangely enough, proud of her. Eva Barr had written her, and Miss Ogilvie, and even May Biggs, whom she had feared ever to see again. She had left them all believing that she would never turn back, believing that by stepping aboard the express for the East she had turned her back forever upon a place which, in honest truth, she despised. But she had not escaped; there were ties, intangible and tenuous, which bound her to the place. There were times when she was even betrayed by a certain nostalgia for the sight of the roaring black furnaces, the dark empty rooms of Shane's Castle, closed now and barren of all life; the decaying smoke-stained houses that stood far back from the streets surrounded by green lawns and old trees.
She thought, "This again is a sign that something has gone from me, something fierce and spirited. I am growing softer."
They had, so May Biggs wrote, built a new concert hall, and what could be so appropriate as to have it opened by a daughter of the Town? "A daughter of the Town," she reflected bitterly. "Yes, I am that. It, too, claims me."
And it was true. She was a daughter of the Town. There was in her the same fierce energy, the same ruthlessness, the same pride. If she had been born elsewhere, in some less harsh and vigorous community, she would herself have been softer, less overwhelmingly successful. It was true. She was a daughter of the hard, uncompromising Town.
"It happens like that . . ." Miss Ogilvie had said, "in the most unexpected places . . . in villages, in towns. . . . Why, even in a dirty mill town like this."
But in the end, it was her pride which led her back. Because, a dozen years ago, she had talked wildly and desperately, because she had boasted of what she would one day do, she must return now to let them see that she had done it. It was a triumph which in her heart she counted as more than the triumphs of London, of Paris, of New York, of all the world. For she had not yet escaped the Town. She would not be free until they saw her fabulous success.
But Hattie could not go with her. Hattie's triumph was spoiled. On the night of the concert when The Everlasting had appeared without warning, it was necessary for some one to see that the old man was returned safely to the apartment, so to Charles Tolliver the task had been assigned. Gramp, Heaven knows, could easily have found his way back; he knew more of the world than any of them, but he chose never to interfere with such plans lest he seem too active, too spry to require any attention. To guard his security, he encouraged their assumption that he was feeble and a bit childish. He had not forgotten the security which comes of being a possession.
It is impossible to have known what thoughts passed through the crafty, old mind as he walked by the side of his son through the dark streets. They did not speak; they were as strange to each other as they had always been, as remote as if there had been not the slightest bond between them. Perhaps the old man scorned his son for his gentle goodness, so misplaced in a world where there was so little use for that sort of thing. Perhaps he understood that Ellen was after all much closer to himself than to her father. Perhaps he knew that Charles Tolliver, in his heart, had been saddened by the triumph, because it stood as a seal upon his daughter's escape. Perhaps he noticed the faint weariness in the step of his son, the dark circles beneath his eyes, the listlessness of his manner, as if he had grown weary of the confused, tormented life all about him.
It was the old man . . . the father . . . whose step was light, whose eye was shining as they entered the flat. It was the old man too who sat up reading until he heard Hattie and Miss Ogilvie, returning from the Ritz, come in at three in the morning. For Charles Tolliver had gone quickly away to his bed and to the dreams that were his reality.
In the morning Hattie had called Ellen to say that her father was ill. He had been drowsy. It was almost impossible to keep him awake. The doctor had been there.
"He says," Hattie told her, "that he must have been ill for a long time without speaking of it. He has never complained. I don't understand it. And now he's too drowsy to tell me anything. The doctor says he is badly run down. He is worried because Papa seems to have no resistance."
He had grown no better with the passing of time. Indeed, the drowsiness seemed to increase, and there were times when he talked irrationally, as if he had never left the Town at all. He held long, fantastic conversations with Judge Wilkins and talked too of the Grand Circuit races and Pop Geers.
And when Ellen left for the Midlands, Hattie remained behind to sit in the rocking chair at her husband's side caring for him and for Gramp who had since the night when he ran away to the concert become troublesome again as if there were something in the air.