Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 7
THE Christmas holidays arrived; the Tollivers sold the last of their horses, and went on showing brave and indifferent faces to the world. Ellen, going her secret way, awaited the arrival of her cousin Lily, still certain that Lily would have a solution. She no longer argued with her mother. Instead she took refuge in silence and if she spoke at all it was in a docile and pleasant fashion. She permitted herself to be petted and admired, so that Mrs. Tolliver in the eternal optimism of her nature believed that Ellen had forgotten or out-grown her restlessness, and was content.
But the girl spent hours at her piano, playing wildly, as if the sound of her music in some way eased the fierce restlessness of her spirit. At times she attacked a polonaise with such violence and fire that the spangled notes soared through the air and penetrated even the stillness of Gramp Tolliver's solitary chamber. At such moments the old man paused in his reading, permitted his book to slip to the floor and sat in his rocking chair motionless, listening with his lean old head cocked a little on one side, a wild and dancing light in his eye. For hours at a time he listened thus, muttering occasionally to himself.
(That granddaughter of his had something which none of them suspected, something that was rare and precious in this world.) When the music at last died away, losing itself in the maze of walls which shut him into exile, it was his habit to sink back with a clucking sound and begin to rock, gently at first and then more and more savagely, until at last he became submerged by the stream of shrewd, malicious thoughts which swept through his old brain.
"She's got something none of them understand. . . . And I'm the only one who knows it. But they'll kill it in her. They'll pull her down until she's on the level with the rest of them. I know. . . . I know. . . . Haven't I heard Liszt himself, in Paris in the heyday of his fame? And Rubinstein? They'll destroy her if they can with all their little tricks and deceits. . . . Mean they are, meaner than dirt, trying to drag her down to the rest of them. . . . The girl doesn't know it herself. . . . How good she is no one has ever told her. . . . She doesn't know the power that's in her. They'll never let her free. They'll clip her wings. They've clipped the wings of greater ones. . . ."
And then with a cascade of wicked chuckles the old man settled back to his reading. "They've never clipped my wings. They can't because I don't live in their world. They can't come close enough to catch me. They can't fly high enough. . . ."
And slowly the rocking decreased in violence until at last the chair became quite still and the skinny arm reached down to recover the heavy book. Belowstairs the last echoes of the turbulent music died away until the silence was broken only by the distant cries of children playing in the streets and the faint muttering of the old man. . . .
"It's best that she doesn't know. . . . It wouldn't help her . . . only make her miserable . . . only give them a chance to tear her to pieces, nerve by nerve. . . ."
Again the persistent rocking until at last the room grew dark, and the old man rose in response to a loud knock on the door of the stairs, stirred himself and lighted an oil lamp so that he might find his way to the tray of food that Mrs. Tolliver thrust in at the door of his cell. There was no gas in this room beneath the roof; Gramp Tolliver had been an expense for too many years. It would have cost twenty dollars to fit his room with gas lights. And in ten years he had produced nothing save the scraps of paper covered with bird track handwriting that were stowed away in the pigeonholes of the desk.
In those days there came to Grandpa Tolliver, more by some obscure instinct than by any communication with those outside his cell, the certainty that his granddaughter's behavior was a source of irritation to the people of the Town. True, he occasionally overheard from the kitchen below snatches of reproachful conversation which drifted upward by way of the ventilator . . . strange remarks which appeared to come out of the blue, yet when pieced together they provided a coherent story. Reproaches of sulkiness, of silence, of secrecy, cast by a mother, who desired nothing so much as confidences, against a daughter who was incapable of anything but secrecy. They were an ill-matched pair. This the old man understood, with a sort of wicked satisfaction, because the things which in Ellen were incomprehensible to her mother were the things which had come down to the girl from himself. It was another mark in the long score between Grandpa Tolliver and his daughter-in-law; another, in which nature herself took a hand, in the long battle between two fiercely antagonistic temperaments.
He could not have known that the people in the Town likewise had reproaches for Ellen. He could not have known that they said it was her duty to begin giving music lessons in order to prop up the fortunes of a proud and bankrupt family. Yet in his unearthly way, he did know; and in some vague way he was pleased. Even in his isolation so impregnable, so defiant, his heart was warmed by the thought of an ally. The enemy was driving Ellen, a neutral, into his camp; and into his icy heart there came drop by drop a warm trickle of unaccustomed sympathy. Not that Gramp Tolliver planned active aid; that would have been too much to expect, for Gramp Tolliver had discovered half a century earlier the idiocy of mixing in the affairs of other people.
Instead he chuckled and read in triumph and vindication The Decline and Fall.