PHILIP MCALLISTER, I was thinking, was one of those men in whom there lingers the perfectionism of childhood, who, when his stature was Lilliputian, saw the world as titanic, saw love centered in a goddess as a principle of salvation, as the meaning of that large, floating life, seeming so shapeless and so wonderful, like the shifting clouds of summer which veil and unveil the sun, that life he thought might vanish before he had sprung forth from his dwarfish body. We say of such people erroneously that they have never “grown up.” We should say instead that they grew up too quickly, skipping certain years and finding themselves flowering, alone, and in the snow, months before the spring. The phantom he had been pursuing all his life, and which he believed was at last entrapped in this girl whom he had loved intermittently for many years, had escaped him and the love with which he thought to imprison her had dematerialized, leaving him without love and without an object to try to love.
I was coming from the Countess’ and was on my way to the young McAllisters’ house where they were having a cocktail party and I was going over, with distaste, the conversation I had just had with my earlier hostess. Having summoned me over the phone that morning to have luncheon with her, she began, the moment we had left the dining-room for the library, to state her object. It was nothing more than simply to satisfy her curiosity. For some months past, indeed, ever since Philip and Hopestill had come back from a wedding trip to Canada, everyone had been slightly or greatly (depending on the extent of his prejudices) shocked by the almost constant presence in their house of Harry Morgan. The Countess von Happel wanted to know what I thought of it. Had I any idea why such otherwise attractive people set loose upon their guests a person of such execrable manners, such unrelenting buffoonery? He was addicted to imitations and in the course of a single evening recently, the Countess declared, had “done” President Roosevelt at a cocktail party, Katharine Hepburn at a psychiatrist’s, a Negro on trial for murder, a priest confronted by Mae West. There was little to distinguish one from another and no one could understand how he could delude himself into thinking he had the least gift for mimicry. “If he’s as inexpert at architecture as he is at imitations,” remarked the Countess, “the Concord house will be a scandal.” The Concord house was already in a sense a scandal, for Hopestill and Morgan spent a great deal of time there, often without Philip and without any more chaperonage than that of the carpenter or the gardener.
Did I believe, as some people did, that Philip was perhaps endeavoring to show Hopestill how detestable his predecessor was by forcing the man upon her, much in the way some mothers allow their children to eat their way into an indifference for candy? And was this newly announced pregnancy part of Philip’s plan to tame the wild creature who had lived amongst wolves so long that she had come to howl like them?
I was disinclined to confide in the Countess my own opinion for she was a notorious gossip and was not above naming the sources of her tidbits, and so, to all her queries, I only replied, “Oh, I suppose he amuses them,” or “He’s not such a bad sort when he isn’t clowning.”
But I was not to be let off so easily. The Countess, who enjoyed nothing so much as contemplating people’s motives, continued her anatomizing.
“I cannot accept the attachment between Philip and Mr. Morgan as altogether genuine. And if he is trying to teach Hope a lesson, isn’t he a bit innocent? I mean, my dear Euphrysone, one can’t help hearing things. One hears of Mr. Morgan’s reputation.”
We are instantly put on our guard by the effeminate man who, as if to dispel our suspicions, says, “You know, homosexuals interest me very much psychologically and I must confess I have a number of good friends among them whom I would like to have you meet,” or takes an even bolder stand and says, “I am so amused by the rumors I have heard about myself that I have been tempted to give people really something to talk about by having my hair curled and my fingernails painted” (so that we know, in the first instance, that if the homosexuals have admitted him to their minds which he is investigating in the interest of his hobby, they have as well admitted him to their arms, and in the second that curling his hair and painting his nails are probably what he will shortly do, but not for the reason that he has prepared us). Just so, the confidence that Philip placed in Harry Morgan made the astute Countess suspect that he did not trust him at all, that he was jealous of those New York days and New York evenings to which the young millionaire so casually referred, calling upon Hopestill to confirm the name of a restaurant or of a mutual friend.
“Pretend you’re a European, darling! I love you! Don’t be shocked! Tell me, dear angel, if you don’t agree with this evil-minded old woman that Philip McAllister has some reason—don’t interrupt, Sonia—for being disappointed in that lovely bride of his? And . . . Come sit beside me. I don’t know where that Filipino child of mine is. And that he does not really adore her so much as he appears?”
“I don’t follow you, Countess,” I said nervously.
My friend pouted and then laughed. “Of course you don’t follow me, precious scamp, you’re a mile ahead of me.”
I was by no means averse to gossip but I did not enjoy it with the Countess who, for some reason unknown to me, was reined in by no inhibitions when she spoke to me although I was certain that she was discreet with others. She seemed to be under the impression that my moral view had the same generous, continental latitude as hers. My disquietude, as I fumblingly put down my coffee cup, was transmitted to her and a small silence came between us, as precise as a picture hanging on a wall.
The Countess went on, more gently. “Oh, I have not been nice at all! But you and I, Sonia, observe things other people don’t. Don’t we now? Wouldn’t you agree with me that probably you and I are the only people, besides the principals, of course, who know that Mr. Morgan was Hope’s friend before her marriage?”
“Friend?” I repeated. “But of course they were friends.”
“I use the word in its European sense, darling, as you perfectly well know.” She crossed the room to the bell-pull, and stood poised a moment, the light from the window enlivening her fair hair with brilliant undulations, her nose aloft. There was something at once so childish and so wise about her pose as well as about what she had just been saying that I smiled. She caught my smile, returned it, and said, “Don’t try to pretend any longer that you’re not a spy. You were spying on me just then. We will have some more coffee and something very special, a beautiful brandy.”
Bit by bit, in the course of the afternoon, my hostess’ conjectures came out. Some she revised, others she left intact; I proffered nothing new, but I was forced, by the sheer weight of her intuition which had synthesized random elements into a composition as clear as a case history written in a book, to agree with her. I did not, however, know any ease even with the assistance of the crystal-clear brandy, for I felt somehow that simply by listening I was letting Hopestill’s cat out of the bag.
Berthe von Happel, through the same sort of almost physical insight that Mamselle Thérèse had employed, had known from the beginning why Hopestill had suddenly decided to marry Philip. In another sort of society, her guess would probably have immediately occurred to anyone who did not believe that the girl was in love. But it would never have crossed the mind of, for example, Amy Brooks. Hopestill might be disliked, might be criticized for her inability to get on with her relatives-in-law, for her sharp and often cruel treatment of servants, for her bland disregard of charitable works, but no one would have dreamed of accusing her of so great a crime as the one she actually had committed and the one the Countess took matter-of-factly. For whatever else she was, Hopestill was a member of a society which did not countenance illegitimate children, which, in a sense, did not believe in them, just as the prim Victorian who is told for the first time of sodomy says with a firm scoff, “I never heard of it before. I don’t believe it. It’s merely a bit of obscene nonsense.” To be sure, shop-girls and servants frequently ruined their lives through such misdemeanors, but the people one lunched with and invited to dinner chose other means: dipsomania or betting on the horses. Bastardry was not acknowledged as a possible function of the upper classes. (I recalled, in a momentary flare of anger, how the first time I had met Philip McAllister, he had accused me of coming to him for an abortion.) But there had been a time, the Countess declared, when New England had not been so naïve, when sin was looked for in every stratum and duly punished.
Had I never seen in Philip McAllister’s eyes the fanaticism of a Puritan? Had I never noticed how, at a dinner party, his flushed face did not turn when he spoke to someone but was kept tensely in an attitude that allowed him to keep a constant vigil on his wife, as if he were trying to read the thoughts in her deceitful head, or as if he wished to convey to her some message that would inform her he knew everything and forgave her nothing? Oh, to be sure, most people took this as a look of love. Indeed, the sole criticism of him was that he prolonged beyond the point of decency, his look of nuptial rapture and the vagueness which rendered him, in conversation, slightly stupid.
It was true, as the Countess said, that in public his eyes, across the cerulean azure of which there passed a flare of hotter blue like the quick, staggering stab of sun to the heart of a diamond, never left his wife but studied her as the rapt jeweler studies a rare stone through the little magnifying glass enfolded in his eye. And while he watched her, he praised her to everyone within earshot: no one had her genius for dress, or her hair, or her enchanting voice in a high minor key, or had that pearly shining flesh in which only the mouth, the palest pink or, in some lights, faint lilac, broke the lily-like monotony. In these first months of her pregnancy when it had not yet made itself cumbersome, she had reached the pinnacle of her loveliness, like the forced flower, blossoming under glass and out of reach of the distractions of other flowers and the alteration of its color by the sun or by the shade. No less embarrassed than her guests was Hopestill whose protests only made her husband the more extravagant, the more hysterically flattering: “And her greatest charm of all is that she doesn’t know how charming she is!” he would cry.
I told the Countess that I did not quite see the logic of her argument: if Philip was aware that he had been tricked, and if, as she maintained, he was a throw-back to early Puritanism, why did he not divorce her or punish her by depriving her of all society, or, at the very least, refuse to have Morgan in his house?
“Oh, don’t think he wants anyone to know. He wants them to suspect, probably. But he can’t punish her openly, can’t divorce her—for I have no doubt he feels strongly about divorce—can’t burn a scarlet letter in her forehead. Darling, unconsciously he’s imitating Dante: Don’t you remember that the lovers’ punishment is to embrace forever?”
I could not bear to listen to any more and got up. “I’m due at Hope’s house now,” I said, “though I’m sure I don’t know how I’ll face her.”
And she replied, “Why, be that same inscrutable Euphrysone we know so well. You cannot fool me! You have known all along! I love you! Give Hope a kiss for me!” And she deposited a kiss on either cheek, one for myself and one for Hopestill which I did not propose to deliver.
The Countess’ house, like her person, was overheated and over-fragrant, and it was a relief to be on the street. I idled, taking the longest way to Hopestill’s house, and finding an organ-grinder on Marlborough Street, I stopped to watch his monkey. I did not really attend the sad little dressed-up animal, but I put penny after penny into his leather hand and dreamily looked at him and at his soiled old master who could easily have been his father. The trees had been out for some time and although now, in the twilight, it was cold, there was a quality of spring in the air. I wished that I were in the country or that, at least, I might stay out of doors until it was quite dark, doing no more perhaps than paying the monkey for the windy tunes.
I moved on. Undoubtedly the Countess was right. Philip’s disappointment had made him hate Hopestill. And his hatred, coupled with his atavistic, vindictive morality, prompted him to torture her, to batten himself upon the love of the two sated and now unwilling people. But simultaneously, as he caused them to remain at their revolting banquet, though they were gorged, caused them, like Paolo and Francesca, to embrace forever and be embraced by hell, he, as overseer must also be in hell, must see to it that they rendered him the true accounts, and did not embezzle from eternity one instant of relief.
Only for Harry Morgan did I have no pity at all. The Countess, while she had deplored him, had seemed to accord him a measure of sympathy as the victim of Philip’s persecution, although she could not deny my charge that he was in no way bound to accept invitations to Hopestill’s house. There was one reason and I suspected two why he continued to come. The first was simply that he was a snob and had no intention of cutting himself off from the one house where he was welcome; he was a climber and would have given a good deal to be “in” as he was in other parts of the country. A fortune, he had discovered, was not the open sesame in Boston that it was elsewhere and he had once observed to me with a sort of bitter wonder that he could count on the fingers of one hand the débuts he had been invited to in this “city of the dead, this town where human life is at a premium.” But there was, I thought, another reason why he did not refuse to come to the McAllisters’ dinner parties and that was the new addition to Hopestill’s gatherings (and the Countess’, too, for that matter), that is, Kakosan Yoshida. Whether they saw one another anywhere save on Commonwealth Avenue, I could not tell, nor did I know if their friendship had progressed beyond the raillery they engaged in over cocktails, but I had perceived that they nearly always separated themselves from the rest of us before dinner and, by the time the highballs were served, had drifted to the sofa at the end of the drawing-room farthest from the fire-place. What they talked of, I could not dream, for I was sure that Kakosan had not told her new friend that she was acquainted with his tutor. Certainly, I had not told Nathan of any of this. He would have been maddened with jealousy if he had known that they were ever in the same room.
Kakosan had been an immediate success on the first Friday she had gone to the Countess’. Her conduct, of which I had been uncharitably dubious, was exemplary and her beauty, set off by a yellow satin dress embroidered with white flowers and a white carnation in her hair, distracted everyone so much from the music that the Countess was a little reserved in her conversation afterwards and we left rather earlier than usual. But Berthe von Happel bore no one a grudge and in a very short time she appeared at the Fridays and the Saturdays as often as I did. Likewise, she was taken up by Hopestill, and even Miss Pride, on one occasion, invited her to tea, though she confessed afterwards to me that she “found it a very pretty head but uncommonly empty.”
If I had not let it be known that Kakosan was a typist, no one would have suspected that she had any other occupation than that of arranging flowers in a bowl or playing jackstones in a garden complete with torii and tea-house. For she was one of those people who have the enviable knack of keeping their addresses a dark secret without appearing to hide anything, of answering ambiguously or not at all questions about activities, backgrounds, preferences, antipathies. If someone said to her, “Where did you live before you came here?” she would reply, “My father, you see, has copied his villa on the Yanagawa. You should see it! He is a great gardener. And how sorry he is he cannot have the tsubaki in this country he loved so much in his beautiful homeland. Do you know what it is? It is red like fire and sometimes it blooms in the snow. But he has some of the Japanese flowers, you know, wistaria and cherry trees and iris. He has to have flowers, of course, for he is a Zen-Buddhist and must decorate his tea-house. And do you know that even though it never snows where his villa is, just as soon as winter comes, he covers the lanterns with straw mats as he used to do in Kyushu?” A persistent busybody, charmed with this information but nevertheless determined to know whether the villa was in California or Florida or Louisiana, might say, “Where did you say he has his villa?” As if she had not heard the inquiry, she would go on, “Oh, yes, and he has two red pines which he sprays twice a year, for it is the custom to remove every single dead needle.” This was a side of Kakosan that I never saw when she was with Nathan or when she and I made our expeditions to the movies. With us, she talked only of her chief interests which were the “spirits,” film stars, and some disreputable young men with whom she often conversed in the Common on her way home from work on a subject she called “nationals” and which we translated roughly as “politics.” Or she would tell us the little adventures that took place in her office which sounded so remarkably like those I had heard from my classmates at the Back Bay Business College that I automatically envisaged Mrs. Hinkel as I listened to her.
But in the Boston houses, she was remote from anything worldly or anything Occidental, and I, along with everyone else, was captivated afresh each time my eyes came to rest on her dexterously wrought face as, when a conversation was in progress into which she could not enter, her golden mask became immovable and the eyes showed her to be humble before her intellectual superiors while the proud arch of her neck showed that the nobility of her blood forebade her too free participation in the meaningless talk of people who were “without tea.” She was apparently the “real thing” and seeing her thus, I longed for Nathan to possess her forever as the reward for his generous overlooking of her faults. But the moment she dropped her “company manners” and exchanged a few words with me in private, I hoped that the affair would be swiftly over. The repugnance I sometimes felt for her (when she revealed herself as being so far from the “real thing”) was the kind one feels toward anything that is not true to its origin if its origin is admirable or attractive: the book that begins well and peters out in mawkishness, the picture which at first seems profound until, on further study, we find that it has only the virtue of brilliant draftsmanship. She used only as ornaments the Samurai code, her father’s gentlemanly pursuits of religion and art, and they were as removable as the flowers in her hair.
Nathan, feeling that he was required to justify his love of her to me (rather, to himself, for he was sometimes agonized by the discrepancy between his vast love and its mean, elusive object) often denied that she was unchaste and stupid, not stating his denial with a negative but offering me instead instances of her talents which opposed and triumphed over her defects. He did not say, “She is not stupid,” but he said, “In some ways, she is very intelligent,” and as an illustration of her insight, he told me that she had once observed something in him he believed he had perfectly concealed. “No, really,” he said, “since I’m so generous with her, how could she know that I’m a miser?” I did not point out that the very energy of his generosity gave him away. Nor did he say that she was not promiscuous, but that she had been “misled.” At one time, he would declare that she was not a harlot because she had been in love with each of her bedfellows. At another time, in a fit of jealousy of all those unknown possessors of her, he said, “She has never been affected by any of it. I am quite sure this is the first time she has been in love.”
In the past month, she had been required to go to so many séances (some of which I knew to be imaginary, to be, actually, the Countess’ Saturday. For some reason, probably a clever one, she had never told Nathan that she had been “taken up” by Boston.) and had broken so many appointments with him that he had become hollow-eyed with anxiety, unstrung with the suspicion that she had another lover. It was this, combined with their very evident enjoyment of one another, that made me think Kakosan and Morgan had at least entered upon the preliminaries of a love affair.
2
I had no more than let myself in at Hopestill’s unlocked door than I was confronted with the proof of my suspicion, and it resulted from an incident which, by one of those almost supernatural timings of chance, occurred within the same hour that Nathan, two miles away and across the river in Cambridge, made the same discovery, his evidence being but slightly different from mine. The hall, through the carelessness of a servant, was not lighted yet, although it was quite dark, so that I could not distinguish the two people standing at one side of the door, possibly in an embrace, possibly helping one another with their wraps, but I heard Kakosan’s high-pitched voice, suffused with childish laughter, cry, “Gacho, don’t!”, the name by which, it will be remembered, she called Nathan. And Harry Morgan said, “Okay, baby, but wait till I get you home.” I was shocked, not only by the frank implications of these elided remarks, and the foretokening in them of Nathan’s heartbreak, but also by the boldness of this love-play, a dozen feet from the drawing-room door. I concluded that they had already been to the party and had been relaxed by the cocktails. This, at any rate, was an advantage, for I should not now be obliged to talk with either of them. It would have been too much, I felt, if I had had to be omniscient witness to the antics of these two as well as of the McAllisters’. I hurried past them and as I went up the stairs, caught Kakosan’s terrified murmur, “That was Sonie Marburg!”
Hopestill’s drawing-room was so spacious that despite her many guests, it did not seem crowded. As Miss Pride said of the room, “It’s not the temperature but the color that makes one think of an ice-chest. The fire in that pallid hearth gives no more warmth than the ones in the theater made with flashlights and red tissue paper.” It was called the “blue room” in contradistinction to an even chillier chamber, “the white parlor.” The floor was carpeted in silvery blue; the graceful chairs and sofas were upholstered in gray satin and heavy blue curtains hid the violet panes in the bay-window at the far end of the room. Bare of pictures (“I can’t afford originals and one doesn’t have prints,” she had said), the white walls were striated with gray shadows, for the room was dimly lit by a single bulb under the blue-green shade of a Chinese lamp. There was, as the Countess complained, nothing to look at in the room, for Hopestill detested bric-a-brac, having had her fill of it in her life at her aunt’s and, influenced perhaps by her prejudice against the maidenhair ferns and Aunt Alice’s Birthday Trifle, did not even put flowers on the tables.
“Oh, it’s California, very likely,” Miss Pride was saying to a youngish woman I had met before. “Most of them settle in the west, you know.”
When Miss Pride spoke of “the west,” it was as if she said “somewhere.” It was not quite a void, but it was something stretching interminably behind one’s back. Yes, she replied to her friend, she had been “out” once, and had not the least desire to go again.
“I dare say their rugged life and bad climate make the people hardy. But I must confess I find the Rocky Mountains quite hideous, quite lacking in style. They’re too much of a good thing, so to speak. Even if the landscape didn’t offend me, though, I couldn’t endure the place more than ten days at a time. There is a crackly feel in western speech that sets my teeth on edge.”
Her friend had spent three months in Saint Louis and countered, “But you should go to the middle west if you want to hear really peculiar speech. Of course Saint Louis is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. I could not get the key to the city. Is it southern? Is it mid-western? Is it an imitation of a German industrial town? I don’t know. But I do know that their accent makes it almost impossible for an easterner to understand what they say. If someone told you, ‘I lived tin yars in Versales, Mazura,’ would you have the least idea that he meant, ‘I lived ten years in Versailles, Missouri’? By the way, isn’t Versailles an amusing name?” The woman, whose home was in New Canaan, pronounced “idea” with a clear final consonant.
I was curiously soothed by this colloquy which was the first thing that came to my ears, for Miss Pride, no matter what scandals and disasters were perpetrated under her very nose, would never change. I assumed that she and her companion had been wondering where Kakosan’s father lived. Miss Pride’s announcement, “Most of them settle in the west, you know,” made the Japanese immigrants as remote and unconnected with the world in which she lived as if they had never left their native shores, and Kakosan Yoshida herself went up in thin air. So long as Miss Pride was here, I thought, I could face anything. I was comforted to see that while she disdained the tray of canapés held before her by a maid, she exchanged her empty glass for a full one when the butler came round, so that I knew she would stay a little longer at least.
Feigning great interest in someone’s proposed walking tour through Brittany, and someone else’s plan to present Hopestill with a set of lawn bowls for her Concord house, and Edward Pingrey’s recent attack of bronchitis, I actually only heard Philip’s voice, superimposed upon all the others. He was not yet drunk, but he had reached a stage of animation which often just precedes almost hysterical excitement.
“What so amuses Hope and Harry about my father,” I heard him say to Mr. Otis Whitney, a life-long friend of the Reverend McAllister, “is the titles of his books.” And he went off into a spasm of pointless laughter in which Mr. Whitney joined with only a pained smile. His father was well-known as a mountain climber and had written three small volumes called To the Jungfrau and Other Adventures, The Challenge of the Medicine Bow Range of the Rocky Mountains, and A Hymn to the Himalayas. The titles, of course, amused everyone. But what variety of madness was making Philip’s tongue wag on in so embarrassing a gaffe? One immediately pictured his wife and Morgan poking fun at his father while he indulgently looked on. It was no secret that Philip had no respect for him, but he had never expressed his contempt, had been friendly and even affectionate in his occasional little jokes about him. It sounded now as if his wife, through some obscure wile, had so corrupted him that neither taste nor common decency was left in this erstwhile dignified young man.
Evidently they had been discussing the renovations of the Concord house and the Reverend McAllister’s name had come up in this connection, for Mr. Whitney, putting his glass on the mantel and murmuring that he must be going on, said, “I shall want to see the place when it’s done.”
“Oh, it will be a gem, I can tell you, Mr. Whitney!” cried Philip. “You should see the fire-place Morgan has designed. It doesn’t look any more like a fire-place than you do.”
I hoped that others were not, like myself, concentrating on the over-pattern of our host’s voice. When Mr. Whitney had excused himself, Philip moved on to another group and repeated the reason why Hopestill and Harry Morgan were so amused by his father. Alcohol flings back, almost illimitably, the boundaries of humor so that we can find uproarious things which our poor sober friends miss altogether. It is necessary, if the joke is really good and really should be shared, to repeat it time and again until finally it penetrates those solemn skulls. Philip had for the third time cried out the names of his father’s books. “I had never realized how terribly funny they were until Harry Morgan and Hopestill pointed it out!” Hopestill, detaching herself from Amy Brooks and two other earnest girls, came swiftly to her husband’s side and slipping her arm through his, said, “Darling, Admiral Nephews wants to talk to you. Do rescue the poor old lamb. He’s over there, you see, with Mr. James who’s boring him to death.” Perhaps, in one of those flashes of sobriety that intermittently punctuate the state of drunkenness, he realized that he had gone far enough and he obediently followed his wife, pausing to speak to me and to say, in an undertone, “Is there something up between Morgan and your Japanese friend? I shouldn’t like that at all. I’ll talk to you about it later.”
I could keep my mind on nothing that was said to me and I moved with my cocktail to the fire-place where Hopestill’s powerful dog, a Doberman, lay on the hearth, lifting his muzzle to me as I approached. Kurt had once belonged to Herr Speyer, the German who had mistaken me for his daughter as I waited in the lobby on my first musical Friday. When he left the country, he gave Kurt to the Countess who, having three dogs already, had handed him over to Hopestill. Despite his savage appearance, he was gentle and welcomed the advances of strangers who could not fail to be impressed by his gleaming black coat and his sharp, intelligent face. I never saw him without being reminded of his owner and the encounter with him that had given me so keen and so long-echoing a pleasure.
I sat down to contemplate the play of the flames on the short black hair and in the wise eyes that were now amber and now jet, and to restore the Nordic face that I had seen that day through the flittering shadows from the sconces and the voice, overlaid as by a filigree, by the music that descended to us from the room above. “Here, boy,” I said, patting my knee. The dog wagged the stump from which his tail had been amputated, lifted his head to me, but did not get up. I wheedled a moment longer, then said, “Kurt! Kommst du!” and he bounded to me to put his forepaws on my lap, his shorn hind-end prancing. I was deeply attached to the affable animal who, though he bore only this resemblance to them, that is, that he could not talk, inspired me with the same joy—best known in memory—that certain things in nature did, and, in particular, through association with Herr Speyer, the August day when my father and I had seen the plover. Frequently Hopestill, who knew I was fond of Kurt, asked me to take him walking. We would hurtle down Clarendon Street to the esplanade and race along the river-bank. His strength and grace were communicated to me through the leash by which I restrained him and I was exhilarated with the swimming speed he demanded of me. Suddenly he would stop, listening. A growl would purr in his throat, but the bark it heralded did not come and instead, he would turn his head towards me, his companionable eyes informing me that he would not desert me after all for the excitement he had heard or smelled, far off, and we would resume our run.
Now Nathan and I, dreaming of Germany, had borrowed from libraries innumerable of those travel books which are written with a missionary’s zeal, quick to report slighting comments on their darlings in order to refute them. Amongst these enraptured Valentines to Baden towns, we had found one that was full of photographs, from long study of which we had come to feel familiar with the walks, the bridges, the castle gardens, the cafés, the parks, the University of Heidelberg. As I walked with Kurt (born in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and intended, with his siblings, for a career on the Munich police force), I imagined that I was on the north bank of the Neckar River, proceeding towards the suburb of Handschusheim, the hills rising to my right, while to my left, across the river, I could see the mansard roofs of the old University and the spire of the Cathedral of the Holy Ghost. Just as in Chichester, I used to fancy Miss Pride’s house in the shadow of the State House dome, so, taking the cathedral spire (the locum tenens being Eliot House across the Charles) as my landmark, I placed my red room somewhere to the left of it. Unless he was too impatient, I persuaded Kurt to stop awhile and I sat down on a stone bench. I ran my hand along the space between his pointed ears and like a child speaking to a doll, I told him about the room which had now acquired a locality, which was Heidelberg, a town plucked at random, and a temporal dimension which, owing to the peculiar light that stained the windows, was specified as autumn. At some change in the tone of my voice, the dog, hoping that we would move on again, would part his jaws in a grin, and I would say, “Ja, Kurt, Ja, Kurt!” and then take pity on the imploring tilt of his head and the little whine that sounded like a puppy’s.
“Doch, ist’s so spät?” I said to Kurt who was nuzzling my hand with his busy nose. I repeated the sentence in imitation of his former master and as I did so, tried to hear my accent which Nathan declared was more Russian than German. Experimenting a third time, I heard my mother’s voice and experienced the now familiar sensation that it was actually she who was speaking. Instantaneously, upon my image of her which accompanied the sound of her voice through my lips, she vanished like the will-o’-the-wisp and what stood before me was the red room. The apparition had never been quite like this before: through the windows, instead of merely other windows and sleeping cats upon the sills, I saw, framed by soiled and motionless curtains, in a flat opposite me, a real face but one which I could not see clearly since it appeared to be obscured by a sort of mist. It was an old woman’s face whose eyes seemed to be urged from their sockets a little, staring at me with malevolent fixity. The mistiness evaporated: Miss Pride was there, in the flat across the courtyard and the sunset had changed the color of her olive hat.
When I vainly tried to see not the room but Hopestill’s bare white walls and gray chairs, when I strained to hear the voices of her guests and could not, I knew that my game had got out of control and that Miss Pride had found me out in my retreat and was judging me a lunatic. It occurred to me with a terror that elevated me to an unimaginable height, that the only remedy for my obsession was a desperate one: that I must find the room in the real world before the real world intruded, as Miss Pride’s face was doing now and confused me to the point of madness. For at this moment—and it was only a moment that I was conscious of her scrutiny—I was seized with a madness that was like an intense pain and was something outside myself, a violent force which urged my footsteps for the first time across the threshold onto the threadbare carpet with its faint green design. The knowledge that something external had precipitated my entrance was confused by a vertiginous and inarticulate emotion and for the present, I could not name the frenzy that had threatened but had not yet gained entrance. Despite the agitation into which the watchful eyes had flung me, I thought I sat serenely at the writing desk and sometimes smiled and other times rubbed my forehead with the tips of my fingers and then turned in my chair to examine the books on the nearest shelves. I noticed that the chair was exactly the right height, made so by a cushion. I was proud of my medical manuscript so beautifully preserved. The voice of my remembering self, roused from its sleep, said, “It was on Dr. Galbraith’s desk the day you went to get him for Ivan.” But my peace did not last. As Miss Pride’s face moved closer, leaning out the window, her eyes pursued me and I whirled like a spinning top, whisking from corner to corner, fleeing them. I was strung out long like a bright wire that ended in brittle rays of copper, shining and pointed and raw. The eyes, like a surgeon’s knives, were urged into my brain. The edges of the knives screamed like sirens; their sound curled in thin circles round my hot, pink brains. I crouched in a corner of the room, down behind the bookcases, safe, I thought. But I was plucked up by the burning yellow flares that went in a direct path like a sure blade. Miss Pride blinked her eyes. The room vanished. I had not moved but I felt an overwhelming tranquillity as if my brain were healed again, was sealed and rounded and impervious, was like a loaded, seamless ball, my hidden and wonderfully perfect pearl.
“Well!” said Miss Pride jocularly. “What a profound slumber you’ve just had.”
Her niece stood beside her and both of them looked at me so curiously that I quickly said, “I was trying to remember a name.” I was still trembling from my shock and I wondered if my voice had betrayed me. What shall I do? my eyes inquired of Kurt. His elongated face was up-pointed, immobile, and alert. I answered myself, “I must find the room or I will be like Mamma and then Miss Pride will find out and lock me up!”
Miss Pride said, “Hope tells me she wants you to stay here for dinner. I must be going on now.”
“Oh, don’t go just yet, Auntie,” said Hopestill, her eyes wandering away from us as she sought her husband.
“I must,” said her aunt. “I am behind in my political articles. Do you follow Mr. Roosevelt, Hopestill?”
Hopestill, who prided herself on not reading the newspapers and who, at the moment, was too distracted to comprehend what Miss Pride was saying, replied, “I haven’t seen him in ages. I had dinner with him two years ago in a very muggy place in Cambridge. Surely he isn’t still at Harvard!”
“Oh, no,” answered Miss Pride, winking at me. “He’s in Washington now.”
“Really? As I recall, he was driving a banana-wagon that evening.”
Disliking the prospect of having dinner alone with the McAllisters, I said to Miss Pride, “You said this morning, you know, that you wanted to do a little work this evening. Perhaps I should come along with you now.”
“Oh, work is out of the question. Hopestill has made me quite tipsy. You stay here and enjoy yourself.”
She turned away and Hopestill, leaning towards me, said in a whisper, “Why don’t you want to stay, Sonie?”
“I didn’t say that,” I told her. “But the fact is that I wanted to make a telephone call. I . . .”
“Go into Philip’s study if you like. You won’t be disturbed there. I especially want you to stay. That is, I’m afraid if you don’t, I’ll have to eat alone because Philip will obviously pass out before dinner.”
I relished no better the thought of being alone with Hopestill. The Countess’ conversation, my knowledge of Kakosan and Morgan, and the visitation of the red room had combined to put me into an unsettled state which I knew only a normal evening with Miss Pride on Pinckney Street could cure. And, still, recollecting how her eyes had tracked me down, I was not sure of myself, felt I might suddenly cry out as she opened the Boston Evening Transcript or, more dreadful yet, the room might take me unawares again as it had done this afternoon and I would be obliged to explain my trance to her. Abruptly, I was stormed by a claustrophobia so violent that every element of the scene before me assumed the proportions of destroying force: there was no reason for this gathering, no reason for this elaborate amity amongst people whose civilization had pruned down their impulses to a set of manners which imperfectly concealed a dead indifference, no reason why I should be sitting here in this wealthy drawing-room when I, so far from being embourgeoised, could find pleasure only in the society of the dog, Kurt. I was alarmed by Philip who, damaged, loud, unrecognizable, was repeating anecdotes he had heard from Morgan and, to the even greater horror of his guests, was telling professional secrets about his own colleagues. Under what influence, wifely, personal, friendly, it was not known, he had, for some time past, seemed discontented with his profession. But he had not discussed it; people had only had a “feeling” that he was going through some crisis which would undoubtedly be happily resolved. Equally alarmed was I by Hopestill in whose eyes, strikingly like her aunt’s today, there was an insistent plea that I remain. She had selected me, I reasoned, because she was perhaps actually afraid to be alone with Philip and because I, of all the guests at the cocktail party, could be trusted not to carry my observations to the fastnesses of the Vincent and the Chilton Clubs.
If anyone was in need, I thought, it was myself. It had been true, as I told Hopestill, that I wanted to make a telephone call. It was, though I did not specify this, to Nathan, or rather, to the janitor of his building who would occasionally understand (he was quite deaf) what I wanted and call my friend to the telephone. For I felt that I must see him at once, must make him understand fully where the apples came from, must impress upon him the necessity of my finding the red room. Moreover, I wanted to see, simply by looking at him, that he did not know who his rival was.
And I did not want to telephone from Philip’s study. I had thought of a booth in a drug-store on a certain corner from which, and only from which, I had always put through my calls to Nathan, so that I had come to associate with his distant, often blurred voice, the wooden counter visible to me through the glass door of my little cell, where a pharmacist of Hellenic beauty stood as if guarding his rows of amber glass jars full of pills, his curly golden hair occupying the place of greatest light under the neon legend: “Prescriptions.” It was nearly always necessary, since several minutes elapsed from the time I got the janitor until I heard Nathan’s dazed “Hello”—these calls were even now a surprise to him—for me to deposit a second or third nickel in the slot. The young god, pushing aside a ciborium of nuxvomica, called, as I hurtled out of the box, “Here, I’ll change it for you,” having two nickels in exchange for my dime already waiting in his outspread hand. I had not time to thank him, for I was afraid my connection would be cut off, but when I had hung up and was leaving, expressed my gratitude and made a vague promise that it would not happen again. His large, heavily-lidded hazel eyes twinkled, either because he felt he was in on a secret (perhaps he thought that my parents would not allow me to see the person I was telephoning and that I was arranging a secret rendezvous) or else because he was amused by my absent-mindedness or by the loquacity which made all my calls cost double. He said: “I always have change back here any time you need it,” as if he had no wish to be deprived of the spectacle of my flurry. Once I had got Nathan immediately, for he was passing by the janitor’s door as the telephone rang, and the original coin I had deposited sufficed, my message being short. The pharmacist, who had been slowly doing up a package, glanced at me through the glass door from time to time and when I came out, rapidly produced two nickels from a box at the end of the counter. I thanked him but said I had finished and he exclaimed, “You didn’t get your party, then!” in a tone something like disappointment.
It was in that place where, creature of habit that I was, I wanted to make my engagement with Nathan. Superstitiously, I felt that if I telephoned from this house, its owners would be drawn into my maelstrom whereas the pharmacist could not since he knew nothing of me and I knew of him only his youth, his beauty, and his deep voice containing the vestiges of a Nova Scotian accent. I was afraid, moreover, that if I did not make the call and see Nathan tonight, my determination would wane and by morning would have perished altogether so that the day to which I opened my eyes would be identical to all other days save that the danger was nearer, but not near enough, in the bright sunlight streaming through my familiar windows, to make me remember clearly enough how terrified I had been by Miss Pride’s eyes.
When Hopestill motioned toward my untouched glass and asked me if I did not like the cocktails, I realized with a start that I had been here only a few minutes. I drank quickly and guiltily, gave Kurt a parting caress and, at Hopestill’s injunction, set out to find the Admiral.
Throughout the half hour that I exchanged quotations with Admiral Nephews and soberly discussed, with Frank Whitney, the horrors of Communism, listened attentively to a drunken middle-aged man whom I had never seen before who was writing a book on a subject which he did not divulge, one part of my mind was busily casting about for an excuse to leave before dinner. Why did I not now slip upstairs, get my coat, and leave without saying good-by, then go to the drug-store or directly to Cambridge? In reflecting on one’s own or in considering another’s frustrations, one sees them as unnecessary, forgetting that the amenities of society, arbitrary and often absurd, beset us at every turn and it is only in larger things that one’s will is really free. Thus we cannot, unless we have expert tact, or unless we are resigned to being called rude or erratic, turn from our door an unexpected visitor who arrives in the midst of a quarrel or an intimate conversation which we are loath to break off, or when we are at work. Yet, by suffering the intrusion, we accomplish nothing but ill, for our visitor senses that he is unwanted and does not understand why and we, on the other hand, are so displeased with him for not understanding that we fill our stilted, sporadic talk with little barbs, deeply offensive, so that when he leaves he may be resolving never to see us again. For there is, in the patois peculiar to the guest-host relationship, an ambiguity that penetrates to the very roots. Thus, the hostess who for the past hour has been grimacing with swallowed yawns, has, almost unconsciously, been emptying the ash-trays and collecting the glasses, begs us, when we get up to leave, not to go yet, that it is still early, that she wants another drink and cannot have it unless we stay. If we do remain, there eventually comes back to us, percolated through our mutual acquaintances, the remark she has made over the telephone the next morning, “So and So is very nice but someone should explain to him that there is a time beyond which one does not prolong a visit,” or, “Like all great talkers, he’s quite unaware of time. I was simply nodding in my chair and he didn’t notice at all for he was only conscious of the sound of his own voice.”
Philip was studiously avoiding me, and while the last thing I wanted was to talk with him, I was disturbed by the way in which, whenever our eyes met, he seemed not to see me at all and, if he found himself by accident standing near me, he immediately moved away, sometimes in the midst of a conversation. Hopestill, on the contrary, was almost constantly at my side. Her voice became progressively louder, as if she were trying to drown out Philip.
Guests were beginning to leave and there were only a dozen or so left in the drawing-room, loitering over a last cocktail. There came a general lull which was broken by Philip’s clear voice saying to a young woman, the wife of a colleague of his, “I can’t persuade Hope to go to Dr. Masters. She goes to a New York doctor just as she goes to a New York modiste. Fortunately our good friend Harry Morgan is decent enough to drive her down for her appointments.”
As everyone knew, Hopestill was under the care of an obstetrician who served all the matrons of her circle, whose office was a few blocks from her house on Dartmouth Street. This very afternoon, she had been comparing notes with someone who had recently had a child and who declared that the process, under the supervision of Dr. Masters, was actually a pleasure. Hopestill had agreed warmly that she was devoted to him. Moreover, it was known that she had been only once to New York since her marriage and that time in the company of the Countess and Amy Brooks for the purpose of shopping and going to a Picasso exhibit. Yet, if she denied what her husband said, it would appear to the guests that she was in the habit of making trips either to New York or to some trysting place with Harry Morgan (Concord! thought the guests. Would she have the nerve?), using to her husband the excuse that she was visiting a doctor. Consequently, although the young woman with whom she had discussed Dr. Masters was still in the room, she said, laughing, “Oh, I only go to Dr. Ragsdale for good measure. I am quite loyal to Dr. Masters.” Dr. Ragsdale, evidently the first name that came to her, had been her psychiatrist.
Philip smiled innocently across the room at her and said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were seeing Dr. Masters, darling? I would have been greatly relieved to know that the product was not to be labeled ‘made in New York.’ ”
The guests stared in hopeless embarrassment, full of pity for this naïve cuckold and regretful that he was so trusting of his wife that he had all but published her shocking subterfuges, and full of indignation that he had reached such a state of mind that his social sensitivity had been completely dulled. Specific pregnancies were not and never had been openly discussed in so loud a voice.
I waited for no more but left the room and went directly upstairs. As I picked up my coat from Hopestill’s bed, I heard women talking in the dressing room adjoining. “Isn’t there something in the Hippocratic oath he’s disobeying?” said one. “He has the taste, thank fortune, to mention no names, but, for example, there’s only one person he could have meant when he was ridiculing plastic surgery. It’s frightening to see how high and mighty he is.” “I’ve never particularly cared for him,” said another, “but I find him quite impossible now. And of course Hope has such strange notions. I dare say she picked them up in New York.” “New York won’t hurt a flea if it’s a good flea,” returned the first. “Mother says it’s a question of blood. ‘By their fruits shall ye know them,’ says Mother.” “Everyone was devoted to Mrs. Mather, you know, although I’ve heard she was a neurasthenic. And of course her father! No wonder Hope is what she is.”
I was surprised by this comment on Miss Pride’s dead sister for it was like the statement of the anti-Semitic, “To be sure I have known Jews whom I’ve liked. I was very fond of So and So, for instance, though even in him, you must admit, the objectionable characteristics of his race were not completely obliterated.” Summary pronouncements upon personalities are common to people in society who, looking upon families as units almost as disjunct as nations, acquire a prejudice against or an affection for one member, make a declaration of war against or an alliance with the whole but make certain reservations in either case, in order to appear fair. In a moment, I overheard the first voice remark, “Miss Pride has always been rather underhanded, Mother says. It’s perfectly absurd, at her age, to continue to regard Admiral Nephews as her beau especially when poor Mrs. Nephews is confined to her bed most of the time.”
My departure, observed by no one, gave me a feeling of security, and painful as it might be to try to explain my dilemma to Nathan, I looked forward with pleasure to this evening which I would spend in his grubby rooms. On the way out, I bought a bottle of Liebfraumilch which came, green and dripping, out of an ice-chest, and, to take home later to Miss Pride, a bunch of mountain laurel which came, I was told by the vendor, from West Virginia. The jade-green leaves and the pink flowers like little bonbon cups made me think of Kakosan and her father’s garden and the garden that Nathan had promised, in the delirium of his rapture, to build for her in some distant time and space, a castle in Spain, a vine-covered cottage, that shrine which varies according to the experience of the lovers, but is an essential of love’s culture.
He had been trying for the last hour to telephone me and as I came through the murky basement, ducking under the obese pipes of the furnace that stretched out like the arms of an octopus, I found him emerging from the janitor’s flat where he had been making one last attempt to reach me. I knew that he was in severe distress for it had been agreed at the beginning that he was never to call me at Miss Pride’s. He told me tonelessly as his baffled eyes roved my face as if he half hoped to find there what he had lost, that two hours before, he had gone, by appointment, to Morgan’s apartment to give him a lesson and had found that he was not there. But there was a note for him which the butler went to fetch. As he waited in the hall, he saw lying on the table a copy of the book, Der Traum der Roten Kammer, identical to the one Kakosan had given him. He could not decide whether to go away at once, leaving it untouched, maddened with uncertainty, or to probe its pages for evidence of her guilt, for marks, inscriptions, a chance slip of paper. He concluded that he must know, once and for all. First he opened it and smelled the pages which gave off, just as his did, a fragrance of her favorite scent (he had given her a flagon of it only a short time before), for it was her romantic habit to spray her letters and gifts. And then, upon the flyleaf, written with the curlicues of penmanship she effected only in notes to intimate friends, was the same girlish, warm-hearted endorsement that appeared in his—and both in red ink—“For dearest Gacho from his Hototogisu.” He had then torn a page from his notebook and written to Morgan that the pressure of examinations would prevent him from giving any more lessons.
Somewhere the block-flute which we often heard gave out a waggish excerpt from The Well-Tempered Clavichord. The surface of our cool, golden wine was marred by floating bits of cork. Nathan’s face was three-quarters turned towards me and his birthmark looked like a shadow. I was conscious of these things in terms of a painting. They were a flat surface with only a representation of dimensions and I projected them into Paris, pretending that we were there and presently would go out for a pernod at the café Nathan had always said he would visit first, the Closerie des Lilas. Or I imagined us wandering through the crooked streets and over the bridges of Würzburg where, at any moment, we might pass my father or jostle the elbow of my cousin Peter. Or I was in Heidelberg and the block-flute became the song of a foreign bird entering through the windows of my ruby room.
If Nathan had been listening to me as I told him what I had come for, if he had heard me taking off, layer by layer, the wrappings of my jewel, I might have lost it forever. To my own ears, my revelation sounded banal, my terror was flaccid, unimportant, trumped-up. And I was surprised that I could not make him see what I so clearly saw myself: this churchly, peaceable hallucination. I had reached the end of my account and said, “I want to find the room, you see.” But I was not really conscious of this need which, until now, had seemed so urgent, and when Nathan said, “I’m sorry. I haven’t been listening. What did you say?” I was comforted that I had not, after all, admitted a trespasser. I returned to his immediate and frenzied world, feeling wise, mature, and safe.
3
In the spring, the young McAllisters opened their Concord house where they spent week-ends. Frequently they entertained and their country parties were more successful than those they had had in town, not only because there were more things to do—Hopestill, although she could not participate herself, organized horseback parties by moonlight, fitted up a badminton court with lights, arranged half a dozen other diversions that appealed to her guests, and gained for her the reputation of being a highly resourceful hostess—but also because Harry Morgan was no longer in evidence and Philip had for all practical purposes become once more the person everyone had liked and admired.
Guests, approaching the house at night, were deceived by its size. Under the influence of the darkness, out of which the ell loomed suddenly, incandescent between the blooming apple trees, it seemed of manorial proportions. The impression, actually false, was strengthened by the landscape. On two sides, there was a wide sweep of lawn bounded by low stone walls in the shadows of which grew violets and lilies-of-the-valley. At the back was a grove of pines, the entrance to which had been cleared into a precise avenue where I sometimes took a walk in the early morning, relishing the blackened trunks of the pruned trees and the rich brown of the resilient needles out of which, here and there, a shell-pink mushroom thrust its tender cap.
It was not the house itself that had been renovated in Harry Morgan’s startling manner, but a smaller building which had formerly been Philip’s grandfather’s study. No one, not even the older McAllisters, could complain that there was anything amiss in the main house. The room into which one entered was ancient, stiff, yet withal charming. The wide, thickly knotted boards of the original floors were darkened to a rich red-brown. The dresses of some of the ladies and the hides of some of the hounds in the narrative wallpaper had faded from red to the color of a wine stain and from yellow to a sandy pallor. At one end of the room was a long fireplace whose white mantel was laden with pewter plates and tankards and, at either end, ivy cascading from amber bottles. It was not a room for casual lounging. The hostility to comfort seemed to have been intentional and every article of furniture had been designed to punish the flesh: the high-backed, cane-bottomed chairs, the cruel, three-cornered “roundabouts,” the cherry settle, as harsh as a pew. But the eye was pleased by the pure white doors and by two corner cupboards facing one another at the far end of the room which showed, through leaded panes, old red china, silver goblets and a flurry of bibelots.
It had been a shock, on the night of the housewarming, to go from this eighteenth century parlor to the “studio.” It was like the transition from one extreme of temperature to its opposite. The studio was a box in two stories, the lower one being given over to one large room, at the end of which was a completely outfitted bar, curved and equipped with a chromium foot-rail and high maple stools upholstered in red leather. On either side, French doors opened out, on one side to a path leading to the open slype between the main part of the house and the ell, on the other, to the pine grove. The new, waxed floor was bare. Here and there, scattered about its long expanse, were massive leather chairs of an obtuse structure, but one which afforded great bodily comfort. For tables, slabs of flawed plate glass with a greenish tinge lay on iron frames. Sofas, chairs, tables, bookshelves were low as if the people meant to use them had shrunk from a normal stature but had, at the same time, become uncommonly wide. The tall, thin guests, engulfed in the cavernous chairs, had seemed fragile and undernourished, no match for the thick, pint-sized and blood-red glasses out of which they drank.
A pair of pyramidal green vases stood on the mantelpiece and, with their insistent geometry, influenced the tulips springing from them to resemble also a “new idea” so that they did not belong to the world of nature but to that of mathematical design. There was a card table in whose four legs were inserted wedge-shaped shelves to hold the drinks of the players; a pair of crystal andirons for the remodeled fire-place which, as Philip had once said, looked no more like a fire-place than did Mr. Otis Whitney, and which he referred to as “the antrum.” It was a low, square hole overhung by a vast rectangular marble shelf. A fire there could be tended, Miss Pride said, only by a dwarf and even he would be in danger of dashing his brains out. On the hearth stood a sandstone carving which represented three plump women in a happy embrace and was entitled “Breadline.”
The Reverend McAllister, leading his mother about the room, had been less distressed by the bar than he had been by three pen and ink drawings which hung over a bookshelf and which produced an optical illusion: from one point of view they seemed to be illustrations of the myths of Venus and Adonis, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Narcissus, but by a slight change of focus, one saw that their subject was phallic, an assemblage of genitalia in coy half-ambush behind fronds, lotus flowers, and broad leaves of palmettos. The pictures had been a present from one of Hopestill’s former friends on Joy Street, and although she was quite aware of their intention, if someone gasped and whispered in an appalled hiss that she evidently did not know what they were, she replied, “You’re not the first person to tell me that, and I’m beginning to think there really is something ambiguous about them, though for the life of me I can’t see it.” It was quite true: she had seen the symbols in her first glance but had thereafter refused to let her eyes see anything but Orpheus holding his lute and Adonis lying in Venus’ arms. As the latter, they were wholly without distinction, so that people thought either Hopestill’s taste had gone terribly downhill or else that she was lying. As the clergyman stood before them, a dark blush stole upward from his stiff collar and he exclaimed to his mother, “I seem to be seeing things!” The old lady fetched her lorgnette from her handbag and moved up close to the pictures, although her son made an abortive attempt to stop her. She turned away, ferreting Hopestill out to kill her with a look, made particularly baleful by its filtration through her haughty instrument. Afterwards she was heard to say, “I shall never go into poor Edward’s renovated library again. It gives me the same feeling of distress that I would have if the Old Manse were turned into a Howard Johnson.” Miss Pride, refusing to acknowledge Harry Morgan’s authorship of the changes, said of it, “Berthe von Happel, for all her eccentric notions about decorating an interior in Massachusetts, could not have produced that monstrosity. I do believe that children are born with a mental disease these days.” And the Countess, looking with frank horror upon a kidney-shaped writing desk with a bakelite top and two chromium legs, one obese, the other as thin as a rail, murmured to me, “I dream! There has not yet been devised a machine to make anything so out of the question as this.”
It struck me that the studio was a rarefied extension of that state of mind which had sent Hopestill to Dr. Ragsdale’s consulting room. It was the demonstration, in meaningless shapes, in dislocated structure, of the rebellion to which she had become addicted without volition. Rather, the volition had existed in the beginning as a defense against her aunt, but it had now evaporated. What had taken place between her and Philip after their cocktail party, I never guessed, but none of us saw Harry Morgan again, and from that time forward, Hopestill was altered. It was difficult to say exactly what was changed in her except her appearance. She seemed to have gone beyond fear and beyond rebellion, beyond, indeed, all feeling and to exist automatically. Perhaps she had surrendered completely to Philip’s hatred and had allowed her physical being to share in her moral disintegration. The demolition of her beauty was, everyone thought, merely temporary. After her child was born, her skin would regain its luster and her eyes their animation; she would be as brilliantly organized as she had been before. I wondered, though, if she would ever again be beautiful, and I thought that perhaps what we had seen as beauty had not been beauty at all but another quality, an emotional or intellectual force so powerful that it actually appeared in her person.
It will be remembered that when I was a little girl, I thought Miss Pride was beautiful. Later on, I did not call her that, but neither did I call her ugly. It was that my feeling had changed: from admiration of her carriage and her clothes, I had progressed to love of her. If by saying “she is beautiful,” we mean something more (as I must have meant even as a child), we mean this as a commentary on our relationship with her, we have actually said, “my gaze is freighted with feeling and my love has urged this face to resemble my sweet memory of it.” And that “feeling,” like the catalyst which remains stable, must remedy, through its unchanging agency, the imperfections of what we see. Conversely, when we hate, our hearts can deceive our senses so that we find hideous what has beauty inseparably in it. In this way I, at the time I had said Miss Pride was beautiful, had simultaneously said that my mother was ugly or else that her beauty was something gone bad.
Now it was not only Hopestill’s illness that made me think she had always been ugly. There was a force at play in my altered perceptions that was subtler and stronger than that which had come from my expanding knowledge of beauty, or that gradual repudiation of childhood criteria, or that vision, enriched by maturity, which allows one to speak of “types of beauty.” Rather, it was that I had slowly come of age in knowledge of her and of her milieu into which I had willed myself. What marked the advent of my adulthood was a moment when I, standing in the doorway of the studio, saw her lying bare-footed on the couch. She was alone and Kurt lay on the floor beside her. Her small, bony feet were busily prehensile, spryly fiddling with the cushions, the toes opening and shutting like a cat’s claws, the arch bowed tightly. I thought of her green slippers and how I had longed to be Hopestill or a girl just like her. Now, receiving her greeting, hearing her barren voice, I thought, “Why, it is her life that is ugly and has been from the beginning.”
“What shall I do, Miss Pride?” I asked.
She deliberated the chess-board, not my question, and replied, “And how do you feel about it? Do you think she will be cured?”
I told her my opinion and then I waited, my heart palpitating at the sight of her as in her green beaver hat and black suit, whose nocturnal sobriety was relieved only by the white collar of her mannish shirt, she moved the men across the board. I knew that today after church, she was to have luncheon at the house of a Coolidge and that the guest of honor was to be a Mrs. Roosevelt, née Cabot. “Thunder!” she said suddenly. “I’ve made a mistake. You’ve rattled me and it’s all spoiled. Well, Sonia, I would regret parting company with you, my dear girl, for I find your services useful and your manners steadily improve. I suppose there are other establishments besides the one your mother is in now? Of a different character where one would pay her keep. At any rate, I shall investigate.”
She had set the men up to begin again and was referring to her manual, holding it at arm’s length in the far-sightedness of age which she would admit to no one but me. I believed I was dismissed and turned to go, but she said, without taking her eyes from the diagram she was following, “Sonia, let us say for the sake of argument that I do agree to set your mother up in a private sanitarium: What returns will you make to me?”
Thinking that she wanted to know how I would repay the money, I replied, “I don’t know what I can do for many years, Miss Pride. But perhaps I could set her up myself. I don’t spend what you give me, you know.”
She squinted in my direction. “My dear child, the pin money I give you wouldn’t go very far in one of those places. Mind you, I know all about them. They’re run by bloodsuckers and don’t be told anything different. Mrs. Eppington’s oldest daughter, who is named something remarkable like Margarine, though of course it isn’t that, married a Russian who went quite mad and was sent off to one of those fashionable bedlams at a ruinous cost that led her eventually to opening a little tea-room in Newport, where all you could get for love or money, was some horrid red soup and salads made of Bartlett pears. Not that the marriage wouldn’t have been absurd anyway. They had an apartment facing Washington Square, furnished as we don’t furnish apartments in Boston, with couches that became beds and a bar in a closet, and I believe he had an icon, though he wasn’t that sort of Russian. But I wander. No, Sonie, returns of that sort are not what I have in mind.”
I started to speak, to assure her that I would not leave her. But she held up her hand for silence.
“If I undertake to support your mother as well as yourself, I shall be doing it with no thought of being paid back. I must repeat—although I am sure you return my devotion—that this is, I know, not much of a life for a girl your age. You have your moods, as we all do in our youth, our sentimental dreams of adventure, our fancied love affairs. Here, I’ve moved the rook too far.” She changed the man’s position. “You’re unusually steady to be sure. I have only had inklings of a certain restiveness at times. I had it, for example, one evening not long ago, when you brought me that charming mountain laurel.” She paused and glanced up at me. “Sonia, my father, a blunt man, but one who husbanded his words, brought me up in the belief that silence was the ideal policy, that honesty was next best, and that falsehood should be reserved for state occasions. For example, the only lie I ever heard him tell was to Mr. Charles Francis Adams’ secretary who, under the impression that Papa was Mr. Stanley Pride, Consul General of Madrid, asked him to renew his acquaintance with the Secretary of the Navy at a dinner party at the Yacht Club. Papa said, ‘I shall be delighted to renew my acquaintance with Mr. Adams.’ He claimed that this was an equivocation rather than a direct lie, for he did not say Mr. Charles Francis Adams, and he could have meant Mr. Richard Chilton Adams or Mr. Archibald Revere Adams, two perfectly bona fide Adamses with whom he lunched every day at the Harvard Club. But silence, silence was what Papa chiefly counseled, and while I have so far as possible followed his precept, I must confess that there are times when you are a little too silent. Sometimes I cannot compass you. You become a cipher. I am afraid you will disappear altogether, vanish utterly. On that evening, for example, that you brought me the mountain laurel, I had the feeling while we talked that you were paying no attention to what you said. I did not ask you where you had been, though I had heard from Hopestill that you had not stayed for dinner, and I do not ask you now. But, my dear child, I cannot live with an image of you! If you are troubled by something, I implore you to let me know.”
“That night,” I said, “I had had too many cocktails at Hopestill’s.”
“I’m not entirely satisfied with that, but we shall let it go. You will keep me company, help me with my little book in the twilight of my life? You will not go away from Boston?”
“But I have no intention of going away from Boston!” I cried.
She drew her game to a close and glancing up at the clock which indicated twenty minutes before eleven, she waved her hand toward the cabinet where I went to pour out her sherry. I noticed that her hand shook; she seemed to shrink as I watched and her hand, curled into a trembling, beseeching cup, was like a beggar’s, asking for alms. It was not the sherry that she reached out to seize, but it was myself. Putting the glass down beside the chess-board, she extended her old claw to me. “Agree!” she cried. “Agree never to leave me until I die!” She smiled, but the terror of death was in her yellow eyes and in her voice, and although I took the proffered hand and smiled back at her, my whole soul retreated from her in the appalled vision of her awful dependence, her hideous cowardice. “Agree!” she was crying.
“I agree,” I said, but my voice was unnatural and I could feel perspiration collecting on my upper lip.
“I thought you wouldn’t fail me. Poor Hope failed me but I dare say it was partly my fault. Lord, I must get to church! I wish you could hear our new Reverend Jackson, from New Jersey, oddly enough, but he preaches admirably. Good-by.” And she went from the room, her martial tread echoing with a decreasing resonance down the corridor until the diminuendo ceased with the opening and closing of the outer door. Ethel peered into the library to announce that Mac was ready.
On the way to Wolfburg, I was fretful, then scolded myself for my directionless discontent. My problem had been solved, and I could ask for nothing more. It was perhaps only the spring air that made me suddenly wanderlustig. Perhaps it was Nathan’s preparations to leave for Paris that inspired me with thoughts of leaving Boston. He had often told me that he had money enough to pay my passage. I envied him his mobility; my double servitude, that to my mother and to Miss Pride, lay heavy on me, and now, since our conversation in the library this morning, the die was cast. I could not, morally, disappear. Just before we reached the asylum, I regained control of myself, said I loved my mother and I loved Miss Pride and Boston and that nothing could ever shake me from my resolve to live the rest of my life exactly as I was living it now.
My mother had been over her illness for some time, and as I waited in the corridor, I determined to outdo myself in tenderness and to tell her, if she was in despair, that she was to be moved soon to a house that she would like. One by one the visitors were summoned to the doctors’ cells and I saw them then going off to the reception room, their hands full of flowers or fruit or magazines. And presently I was quite alone save for the tireless, ethereal voice warbling for Dr. Finkelstein and Dr. Short. A doctor crossed the hall and seeing me, said, “You aren’t Miss Marburg, are you? Well, then, will you just step this way a moment?” We went into “my” doctor’s office and my escort put his arm about my shoulder in a paternal affability. Another doctor besides mine was sitting on the window-ledge.
“Miss Marburg,” said Dr. Tudor, “Dr. Burns, who spoke to you last winter about your mother, has presented his findings to us and we have been going over the case.” He cleared his throat and said something in an undertone to his colleague at the window who then went to a filing case and brought back a bulging manila folder. “As you know, psychiatry is not a definitive science any more than medicine is. And diseased minds are as liable to relapse as are diseased bodies. And, if anything, they are more difficult to diagnose accurately. Now let us say we have concluded that a man with pulmonary trouble has fibrosis. His symptoms, blood-tests, x-rays corroborate our opinion. He is kept in bed sufficiently long to remedy the trouble and we let him get up. But his fever rises, he begins to cough blood. We put him through another examination and find that he has tuberculosis of the lungs. We were probably not wrong in the first place. He did have fibrosis, but the tubercula bacilli, present in everyone, were working under our very noses, so slyly that none of our tests registered their progress. And now we must change our offensive, go back to a point near the starting line and begin again. Sometimes this happens in diseases of the mind. Originally we called your mother a ‘manic depressive’ and we had hopes of her complete recovery by simple treatment. But recently, particularly since her last attack of bronchitis, she has at times revealed symptoms of another disease, that is, katatonia.”
The doctors all were watching me, and I had the feeling that they were taking note of everything, that they saw, and afterwards would discuss, the slight tic that began at the corner of my right eye.
Dr. Tudor continued, “I must tell you frankly that what we have concluded is not hopeful. No treatment we know of can certainly arrest the course of katatonia. Two days ago, your mother, who is now in a room by herself, was seized with a violent attack of vomiting, after which a muscular rigidity set in which has continued with rare intervals of relaxation. Sleep is possible only if we give her opiates. Her hallucinations have increased and have become so diverse that they appear entirely unrelated to anything we know of in her history. It is bad news, Miss Marburg, but like all bad news, it is better to know it at once.”
“Do you mean, sir,” I said, “that my mother will never be well again?”
“We can’t talk in positive terms like that, as I have said. Patients have recovered. Many have made partial recoveries. Your mother may be one of those fortunate people who do regain their health. But it will take a long time and we can promise you nothing.”
“Does she know? I mean, is she . . .”
“You mean, is she unhappy. Subjectively, that is. Let me assure you that she is in a world of her own. She is frightened, yes, but nothing we can do, nothing anyone can do, can remove the cause of her fright.”
“Perhaps I could! Perhaps if I took her away, back to Chichester, she would be better.”
The doctor rose and came around his desk, standing over me with a benevolent smile that was yet somehow hasty as if he wished to draw our interview to a close. “Believe me, there is nothing you can do. For the time being, your visits will be of no use. She is very sick.”
“Poor Mamma,” I murmured.
“You go on home now. When we have anything to report, we’ll drop you a line. Some day you can see her again.”
“Some day? But when?”
“That, I can’t say.”
“Will you give her my flowers?” I asked him, holding out the waxy Easter lilies I had bought that morning at Mr. Quince’s. Dr. Tudor laid them on his desk and, finished with my case, led me to the door. The corridor was silent, for all the other visitors had gone to their melancholy meetings. My footsteps on the hard, rubbery floor sounded wet and loud, and the sunshine which stopped halfway from the door seemed remote, a golden bay. The indefatigable voice pursued me to the door, calling after me, “Doctor Fink-ull-stein! Doctor Shor-ort! Doctor Baaxter!” I was conscious of the terrible permanence of the asylum: forever, in the same inflections, the voice would chant and bleat the names of the same doctors, would echo through the glistening halls where every surface and every shadow was rounded, where even the doctors, at their most precise, smoothed down the sharp edges of what they said. Only the shafts of sunlight were sharp, but they were laden with round motes.
Poor Mamma! The red room, now that I needed it, would not come. Instead, there came to me the kitchen in Chichester and the hot night I had lain on the floor at my mother’s feet. Suddenly, with the same kind of uneasiness I had felt when I thought Father Mulcahy said “God’s warning,” rather than “Good morning,” I believed that her change had come about through my own treachery. For several days my conscience did not allow my thoughts to stray from my crime, and it tormented me, saying, “You must not believe them when they tell you she isn’t conscious of her misery.” But at last I conquered the moral voice, and when I told Miss Pride that henceforth I should be free on Sundays to accompany her to church, and she did not ask me for any explanation, the recrudescence of the pain and remorse was momentary. For the time being, I had walled up my mother into the farthest recess of my mind, knowing that the time would come when I must let her out again.
4
I had only just learned to smoke. Like most tyros, mistaking the habit for an exciting vice, I had elaborate equipment: holders, lighters, cases, and expensive, unusual cigarettes with which I sometimes vapored through a whole evening without requiring any other entertainment than that of watching the smoke I expelled ascending in lively indirection, the thin columns expanding or splitting, and of feeling an occasional pain in my diaphragm when I inhaled deeply as if a weight had plummeted downward through my esophagus and simultaneously had delivered to my skull a faintly dizzying blow. My imagination, consigning insidious properties to the cigarettes as if tobacco were cousin to opium, through its perhaps intentional error, rendered to my thoughts a dreamy quality, the reality of their objects being interrupted just as my vision of the walls, the windows, the furniture was interrupted by the smoke. I experienced, as in illness, an imperviousness to time, feeling that I was an inviolable bystander before whose serene eyes the raging world catapulted through arbitrary, mechanized hours.
I was sitting one afternoon in the Concord cemetery, leaning against a mossy tree. Below me was a green, stagnant pool into which now and again fell a twig or pebble but it made no sound for the surface of the water was velvety with mold. From behind me came the sound of the gardener’s lawn-mower and the occasional click of a trowel on stone. The faintest wind soughed in the branches and brought me the smell of pine-needles and lilies-of-the-valley which grew in profusion there amongst the graves. As I had come up the slope called “Authors’ Ridge,” I had seen tourists gazing respectfully at Emerson’s clumsy pink quartz gravestone and at the slabs marked “Alcott.” I had known by their pronunciation that they were outlanders, for they accented Thoreau on the last syllable and pronounced Alcott with a short “a.” Miss Pride detested sight-seers who visited the cemeteries. One day she had seen a man set up a tripod and produce a great lot of photographer’s contraptions to make a snapshot of Longfellow’s sarcophagus in the Mount Vernon graveyard. Taking the law into her own hands, she accosted him and said, “Look here, sir, this is not permitted.” A rude man, he asked for her authority, and she replied, “I just stepped out of my house, Elmwood. My name is Mamie Lowell.” No longer interested in Longfellow, he turned his camera on her and before she could collect her wits, he had taken her picture, saying, “This is even better. I’d rather bring ’em back alive than dead.”
I knew that I should go on to Hopestill’s house where I was to meet Miss Pride, but I was too languorous to move and repeatedly said to myself as I fitted a new cigarette into my carved holder, a present from Kakosan, that this would be the last. Between puffs, I held the holder horizontal and mused on its giver. It had been a token of her gratitude for my introduction of her to the Countess and had been sent, fantastically enough, by messenger who, in the employ of the telegraph company, had appeared vexed to be the porter of a parcel wrapped in pale blue tissue paper through whose silver ribbons three dark violets had been passed. “It ain’t a telegram,” he said, not by way of information since there could be no doubt on that point, but to show me that the absurd kickshaw he handed to me was in no way comparable to the important yellow envelopes which it was his proper function to deliver and several of which now conspicuously protruded from his breast pocket.
Kakosan, along with the present, had sent a note in her characteristically inconsistent style: upon a calling card giving her name in Japanese characters which ran like red bacteria down one side, she had written in a neat commercial school hand, “For a swell pal.”
She, like Morgan, had disappeared from the blue drawing-room after the cocktail party, although, as I knew from Hopestill, she still received invitations. I concluded that she did not want to see me, remembering her frightened whisper, “That’s Sonie Marburg,” as I went up the stairs. She had made several futile attempts to see Nathan who steadfastly refused to consider a reconciliation. I had seen her only once, by accident. We met at dusk one day as I was going home along Commonwealth Avenue and we stopped beside a false magnolia shrub that had just come into flower. The white petals were smudged with pink and a lilac color; the thick, broad leaves were stiff and glossy as if they had been varnished. We talked only of the flowers and of Ginger Rogers. But on the following day, she sent me a set of brushes in an ivory box which she asked me to give to Nathan in memory of her. She had promised, long before, to teach him to write Japanese.
Nathan was torn between the desire to keep the brushes and the desire to wound Kakosan by returning them. I persuaded him to keep them since they would be a souvenir of that aspect of her he had loved. It was some time before he ever used them, but when he did, practicing the few brush strokes he had learned from her, there came to the good side of his face a look of tenderness and longing, not for the person he no longer loved nor could love, but for the girl he had known in the beginning, had pursued like a bloodhound down the streets of Boston, hiding behind the subway kiosks as she, this still unknown beauty, stopped to buy fresh posies for her hair. Finally, after months of this delightful chase, he had accosted her at a street corner as they waited for the traffic to pass and had asked her if she knew of anyone who could give him lessons in Japanese. He would put down the brushes, pass his fingers over his marked cheek, and then would pour each of us a teacup of his violent sherry and tell me, for the thousandth time, that he would never love anyone but an Oriental woman again with the same kind of wonder that he had loved Yoshidasan in the first of those days.
I looked at my watch: at this very moment, Nathan’s train for New York was leaving from the South Station. At midnight tomorrow, he would sail for France. I felt no particular sense of loss. This morning when I had told him good-by in his basement room, stripped of his personal gear, his books and trash and the photographs of Dostoievsky and Heine which had hung over his desk, I had, on an impulse, taken between my hands his mutilated face and kissed him on the lips, and my kiss was not only a farewell to him but a resolute farewell to the temptations he had put in my path which had attempted to make my staid feet nomadic.
I flung my cigarette into the slimy pond and got up. If there were time, before we went back to Boston, I would take Kurt for a run through the woods behind Hopestill’s house. I hoped that I would be offered one of the rum cocktails which had been invented by Harry Morgan, the household’s former arbiter bibendi. Miss Pride had been making a tour of the Concord gardens in the company of several people whom she did not like, including the Mesdames McAllister, and I was confident that she would find herself in need of a restorative and would suggest to her niece that she “concoct a little something for us.”
The old lady, all alone, was sitting on the lawn in a cane-bottomed chair. She was reading and did not hear my footsteps on the driveway. I was struck by the singular composition of the picture before my eyes: the spare black figure central in the expanse of shining grass and behind her the white house with its pedimented windows flanked by green shutters and its paneled door which was slightly ajar; burnishing the whole scene, giving to it that final fillip which distinguishes art from nature, was the clear light of early summer as skillfully executed as Vermeer’s sunshine. She looked up with a smile as I approached.
“I hope you have enjoyed Hawthorne’s grave better than I have done the gardens. I have no horticultural principles, yet had the great misfortune of being taken in tow by Mrs. Bigelow who feels very strongly about tulipes noire. I could not comfort her at Charity Brewster’s, where she was confronted by several specimens.”
I laughed and asked if Hopestill had accompanied her and she replied, “No. I don’t know where she is. There isn’t a sign of life about the place. Not even her animal is here.”
Turning her eyes once again to her book, she indicated that she had spent enough time on me and I left her, making my way round the house to the studio. I helped myself generously to whiskey from the bar and put a Brahms piano concerto on the automatic phonograph. There was a sweet flamboyance to the music; it was like a plump and tender hug into which I burrowed luxuriously. Whiskey and music, I reflected, especially when taken together, made time fly incredibly fast. When the long concerto was finished, it was growing dark. A little wind had come up, threatening a storm. The air itself, more than the dark clouds, presaged the arrival of the thunder and the rain. I went back to the house to see if Hopestill had returned. Miss Pride had gone inside and the lawn was bare again save for the deepening shadows of the apple trees along the drive. There was a note for me thrust into the knocker which read: “Undone by the gardens I have gone upstairs to rest. When our tardy hostess arrives, tell her that since we have been given no tea, we shall expect dinner. Lucy Pride.”
An hour later, just after the storm broke, Hopestill, wild-eyed, tousled, burst into the studio. She did not take off her wet raincoat but sprawled in a vermilion chair and the legs she stretched out before her were clad in jodhpurs, a fact that did not strike me as odd probably because her whiskey had rendered me impervious to surprise. Nor was I taken aback when she asked for the decanter of whiskey and took three large drinks neat and with a masculine rapidity.
“Do you believe in supernatural things?” she said quickly in a shrill voice and leaned forward with an eager look in her harried face.
“Some, I suppose.” I regretted that I had drunk so much. I felt that there was something amiss and could not capture it.
“I mean, do you think hate can kill? There is a story about a woman who makes a doll in the image of another woman and burns it and the woman comes to some dire end, İ think. It’s been so long ago that I can’t remember, but lately it’s been haunting me.”
“I don’t believe in that,” I said.
“Where’s Aunt Lucy?” she asked, sitting up. “I want to ask her something. I want her to give me Mercy.”
“What about Kurt? He’d kill her.”
“Kurt? Oh . . .” Although she had poured herself a fourth glass of whiskey, she put it down before it had reached her lips and her face became instantly as pale as moonlight. “Kurt is dead,” she said.
“Dead?”
“He was killed this afternoon . . . run over on the Bedford road.”
“Was he off his leash? Weren’t you with him?”
“No. He had been with me. I was riding. I had been running my horse and he was keeping up with me. Something frightened Chiquita—you know that little Palomino mare?—and she stopped suddenly and reared. Kurt went tearing back, here I thought, but just now, as I was coming up the road, I found him.”
“I wish you hadn’t let him go with you,” I cried. “Why didn’t you follow him? Why were you a whole afternoon going after him, Hopestill? Didn’t you care?”
“I had had a little accident and couldn’t get back. Chiquita threw me.”
Now I saw the riding trousers for the first time, wondered even in my alarm when she had got them to fit her now misshapen body, and my voice issued as a scream. “You are ill, then!”
“Yes, I suppose that I shall be very ill.”
“I must call Philip.” I stumbled to the door.
“Don’t! He’ll think I did it intentionally.” She slipped off her short boots and her damp socks. “And of course I did. I made Chiquita do it. Once, I remembered, she threw me because I was wearing some Indian bracelets which rattled and the sound made her wild. I wore them today.” And she pulled up the sleeve of her raincoat to show me three thin silver bands.
“You hadn’t any right!” I said furiously and ran out and round to the house where, without disturbing Miss Pride, I telephoned Philip in Boston. As I waited for the sound of his voice, I could think of nothing but Hopestill’s nimble feet as they had looked just now on the bare floor. They were somehow aged, for the skin was stretched and blanched and over the sharply knuckled bones, the tracery of veins stood out, blue and vermicular. When I had got Philip and he promised to come at once, I went outside and stood in the drenching rain under an apple tree and over and over again hummed the phrase from The Well-Tempered Clavichord, the favorite of the anonymous block-flute player. And I did not leave my dripping sanctuary until, three-quarters of an hour later, the lights of Philip’s car came bobbing through the trees.
When I went back to the cemetery in October, half a year after her death, I could not remember at once where Hopestill was buried. At the time of her funeral, I had not heeded any landmarks, and all I could see, in my mind’s eye, was her grave as it was yawning for her casket and, a few minutes afterward, as it became a fresh mound and pile of flowers. Built on a hill, this graveyard of a small New Hampshire town was cut by a spiraling road into four or five sloping tiers, all similar in appearance. Identical paths ran parallel to each other and every tree, spruce, or cedar, or elm, was mimicked by a twin. Hopestill was at the very top, beside her father. They were farther up even than the graveyard’s only mausoleum which, in a splendor of marble and genuflecting angels, housed the bones of a distinguished bishop, native of the town, who had returned from the wide world to settle in the dust of his last vestments under his boyhood’s earth. Miss Pride, the connoisseur of graves, had remarked as we drove away, “I’d walk if I were buried there. From what you can tell of his Grace’s taste from that outrageous excrescence, he must have been a trying party when he was alive. I dare say he went in for parlor statuary.”
It had begun to snow long before the bus that brought me had bumbled into the little town, and by the time I had found her stone, it was covered over by a deep layer of white which was replaced by another as soon as I had brushed it off. Indeed, there was no need for me to see it, for I clearly remembered the bare factual legend engraved on the plain granite oblong: that she had been born some time and given the name Hopestill Pride Mather, and, being married, had taken McAllister, and that she had died a little more than twenty-one years after her birth. Nor was I, uncovering it and shielding it from the snowfall by my hunched-up body, urged by this physical symbol into recalling her better. I could not, as I crouched there, gazing, feel any harmony with her soul as it existed now or with her soul as it was arrested when her breathing stopped. I had not the faith as had her loving old friend the Admiral that her “spirit” still lived, though what he meant, approximately, was, “I have faith that Hopestill’s soul continues its existence. What I know exists is my faith.” But I granted the possibility that a soul might continue to operate in some imponderable place. There was, though, no affective coloring to the hypothesis: the grave could not become to me more than a little elevation of the soil and a flat stone and the skeleton which I visualized could not be hers but merely “skeleton,” merely “heap of bones,” and it was almost an accident that these bones had been the framework of someone I had known. I wondered when, in her grave, her hair had stopped growing and when its gloss was gone and if its dust were gray or red. I could see it yet, blandished by every change of light, the only remnant of her loveliness left when she lay in the fern-fingered casket. I shivered with the cold and with the memory of my mother’s obsession over Ivan’s hair which she thought had grown long in the water and was tangled with seaweed.
I had come this long way in the cold to finish her history, in a sense. I thought that if I saw her simple, conventional grave, like all the others, I would be able to efface from my memory the unhappiness of her last days. Although passion was withheld from me as I knelt and I was conscious of the cold which, chilling the dramatic core of my errand, made it folly, tears fell from my eyes, as tame as the windless snow. But they were tears almost of ennui because the death for which she had made so wild a preparation, no longer shocked me but seemed a languid petering out, like the expiring fire from which there comes a final flare and hiss of resin and then is ash. My weeping did not last and when I stood up, I saw that for a moment the snow had stopped and the air was clear enough for me to see the village’s green roofs and white church spires.
The snow returned, colder than before, and obliterated the hill opposite the one on which the graveyard was built. A wind came down from the north, swift and soundless. As clearly as though it were borne by the rushing air, I heard the block-flute piping The Well-Tempered Clavichord, and trembled, recollecting how, all during her illness I had sat in my room on Pinckney Street humming it over and over again so that I would not hear the telephone which at any moment might bring us word that she had died. That revenant, whose single tune had joined my very blood so that its floating through the canals of my body depended for the tranquillity of its progress upon the cadences of that passage of music, purling in my ungifted throat, brought back, as the sight of her grave had been powerless to do, the person of Hopestill, not as the shrunken creature in the casket nor as the handsome girl of Boston, but of the little girl with the long red hair in the dining-room at the Hotel Barstow. All the time she had lain in the hospital dying, I had been able to think only of her bare feet and of the green slippers which I had defaced and slashed and of her recollection, that night in the studio, of the effigy-burning in The Return of the Native. Reason told me I was laughable and self-important in feeling myself an element in her death, but superstition rebuked me, made me deafen myself to the telephone with Bach.
She had been unrecognizable in her casket: her hair had been curled when half its beauty had been its straightness. A little rouge had been put on her lips which had never before been so treated. She was dressed in her wedding gown; she looked pinked and cooked like a frivolous cake. Mrs. Frothingham whispered in someone’s ear, “Such a pretty girl to make such a plain corpse!”
I sat behind the straight, black backs of Philip and Miss Pride. Once Philip’s shoulders lifted with a sigh. The Countess and Amy Brooks, the Hornblowers, the Admiral, all the cousins, and the friends wept. The McAllisters were rigid like Miss Pride and Philip. The organ music seared me as it had done the day Hopestill married, and the bright, hot sunlight on the wooden floor of the little church stole into my very brain, burning it like liquid gold.
The minister said: “One thing have I desired of the Lord, which I will require; even that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord and to visit his temple. For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his tabernacle; yea, in the secret place of his dwelling shall he hide me, and set me up upon a rock of stone.” The even voice and the words were cooling and when we knelt to pray, I mouthed the word “tabernacle” against the smooth wood of the pew ahead of me.
Outside, in the merciless sunlight, the guests, with their faces streaming, were grouped about on the lawn. The white spire of the church pointed up to a sky where shiny cumulus clouds were approached by gray rain clouds. It was impossible to tell which went behind; the rain was coming, we all knew, and we waited impatiently for the signal to move on to the cemetery. It had been quite a nuisance for some people to drive all the way up on such an uncomfortable day. Of course, it was understandable that Hopestill should want to be buried by her father. Even so . . . Little conversations, far removed from the dead girl, had started up everywhere, and I heard a woman say to her companion, “He is very interesting, I suppose, but he is so alien to anything I have ever known. He has the word ‘success’ written all over him like the measles and his children have come down with it, too. The boy is very fat and was unmercifully teased at St. Marks, but somehow or other he has got in with Alexander Hornblower’s son and they’re as thick as thieves. So he gets on, you see.”
The Countess, more moved, I felt, than anyone except perhaps myself and Philip, pressed a point-lace handkerchief to her eyes and said to Miss Pride, “Ah! Let us pretend we are children again and are being escorted by our mammas for the first time through the Tuileries. Wasn’t it wonderful! Wasn’t it bliss to be ignorant then and not . . .”
But now the casket was borne out and she did not finish. As we got into the automobiles, the merging of the clouds was completed; no blue sky was visible. A heavy rain fell, but in five minutes, by the time we had reached the gate of the cemetery, the storm was over.
Soon after the funeral, Miss Pride and I left Boston to spend the summer in Mattapoisett. She had not liked, she said, to leave me alone in Cambridge again and although it might seem strange, at her age, to begin going to a new place, she had been rejuvenated, she said, by our work on the memoirs. We had not spoken of Hopestill at any time.
I started down the graveyard hill. When I reached the road, my depression lifted and I was reassured that what I had just left was a tabernacle. I felt strangely energetic and as if I had completed a difficult task. It had not snowed here, but there was the bluish fog of autumn between the trees; there was the smell, acrid and like the moist hull of a walnut, of maple leaves that had begun to fall. From a second rise, the last little hill between the graveyard and the town, I saw that the mist was vanishing as I watched, and the sun was coming out. Snug and rubicund, splattered with scarlet and golden leaves, the earth lay at its meridian.
It was late afternoon when I got off the bus on Tremont Street and I hurried. Miss Pride was giving a little dinner party, in honor of the engagement of Amy Brooks to Edward Pingrey. She had invited the Countess and the Admiral, Baron Kalenkoff, Mr. James, the Arthur Hornblowers, and the Norwegian water-color painter. We were to start with cocktails made with the second best gin, but during dinner were to have the best champagne. “Champagne, you know, shouldn’t be kept too long,” she had said. “I have had this two years and I really must have it drunk up.”
As I crossed the Common, where the leaves were curly underfoot and the squirrels were lively in their heyday, I glanced up at the State House dome still shining brightly in the last rays of the descending sun. I used it now as a sort of register for the light. My glance told me that if I made haste, that same glow burnishing the golden sphere would still be on my windows. I hurried on across Beacon Street, down Mount Vernon, then turned into Louisburg Square. For a few minutes I stood at the farthest corner, looking at Miss Pride’s house through the high black iron palings with their tops shaped alternately like sword points and sword hilts. Every seventeenth bloomed with a flower on a stalk like Grecian drapery. Frost had made the beds of myrtle droop, but the stunted evergreens were bright. Small Aristides and Christopher Columbus regarded one another across the expanse of dead grass.
The sun had left the lower windows of our house, but mine and Hopestill’s on the third floor, and the servants’ above were red. I knew that within, the Cape Cod lighter on my hearth would cast forth blinding spears of light. For a moment, the scene seemed remembered, not perceived; it was as if some intelligence in my eyes themselves believed that they would take in the house with its green shutters, its brass letter-slot on the pure white door for the last time now and therefore saw all details overlaid by a film, by an impalpable smoke like the twilight which presently would absorb the sun. Perhaps the time had passed and I could not, save in imagination, traverse the short cobblestoned space between my vantage point and the door to which I owned a key. But then, immediately upon the full development of my feeling that Boston was a part of the past for me just as it was so completely for Hopestill, I was brought back to the present time and knew again that these realities had not diminished in size and in distinctness. Years hence they would perhaps, after Miss Pride was dead, and they would be like the trees of an avenue which perspective reduces and shrouds.
Through the doorway of the building on which an inscription read: Per Angusta ad Augusta, a man and woman emerged. The man put on his bowler, then drew on his gray suède gloves. Their voices carried across the quiet square.
“Is it too late to look in at Lucy Pride’s?” asked the woman.
Her companion took his watch out of his pocket. “It’s six. Wouldn’t that rush us? I dare say it wouldn’t, but even so I’d rather not at this hour. Lincoln Nephews is usually the only one left by this time, the old loiterer.”
The woman laughed. “You’re only angry because he gave you your comeuppance in charades.”
“Ulalume!” cried the man with bitter scorn. “Who but the most egotistical pedant would act out such a thing as that!”
They moved on down Pinckney Street and I ran across to Miss Pride’s house. As I fitted my key to the lock, I noticed that the last of the rosy light had gone and that over the steep street lay a topaz patina. Far below, the fragment of the Charles was pure, cold, blue, and across it, a single sail, like a perfect iceberg, moved slowly. From within the house came the Admiral’s voice, so close to me I knew he was about to open the door and I withdrew my key to wait for him. “Good-by, Lucy. I’ll be back in an hour. Back to Lucy’s cot where she dwells in untrodden ways. Ma’am, that was a bang-up tea you gave me. I’m so stimulated I could go waltzing and not peter out till morning.”
“Nonsense,” came Miss Pride’s voice. “My rum cakes have gone to your head, Lincoln. Run along now, do.” The Admiral laughed and with him laughed his friend. “Ha! Ha!” her rare bark burst upon me and when the old man opened the door, he found me on the step laughing too, for what reason I was not sure. She was there, behind him. Under the lamplight, she appeared vigorous and even youthful, as if her age which she had passed on to her niece were buried along with Hopestill in New Hampshire. She looked again as she had done when I was five years old in Chichester; her flat, omniscient eyes seized mine, grappled with my brain, extracted what was there, and her meager lips said, “Sonie, my dear, come out of the cold. You’ll never get to be an old lady if you don’t take care of yourself.”