Linda Condon Part 15

The only other quant.i.ty in her life was Dodge Pleydon. He wrote her again, perhaps three months after the explanation of his love; but his letter was devoted wholly to his work, and so technical that she had to ask Arnaud to interpret it. He added:

"That is the mind of an impressive man. He has developed enormously--curious, so late in life. Pleydon must be fully as old as myself. It's clear that he has dropped his women. I saw a photograph of the Cotton Mather reproduced in a weekly, and it was as gaunt as a Puritan Sunday. Brimmed with power. Why don't we see him oftener? Write and say I'd like to contradict him again about the Eastlake period."

He made no further reference to Pleydon then, and Linda failed to write as Arnaud suggested. Though she wasn't disturbed at the possibility of a continuation of his admissions of love she was weary of the thought of its uselessness. Linda was, she told herself, d.a.m.ned by practicability.

Her husband used the familiar term of reproach, material. She didn't in the least want to be. Circ.u.mstance, she had a feeling, had forced it upon her.

Arnaud, however, who had met Dodge Pleydon in Philadelphia, brought him home. Linda saw with a strange constriction of the heart that Pleydon's hair was definitely gray. He had had a recurrence of the fever contracted in Soochow. The men at once entered on another discussion which she was unable to follow; but it was clear that her husband now listened with an increasing surrender of opinion to the sculptor.

Pleydon, it was true, was correspondingly more impatient with minds that disagreed with his. He was at once thinner and bigger, his face deeply lined; but his eyes had a steady vital intensity difficult to encounter.

She considered him in detail as the talk left dinner, the gla.s.ses and candles spent. He drank, from a tall tumbler with a single piece of ice, the special whisky Arnaud kept. He had been neglecting himself, too--there were traces of clay about his finger-nails, and he ate hurriedly and insufficiently. When she had an opportunity, Linda decided, she would speak to him about these necessary trifles. Then, she had no chance; and it was not until the following winter, at a Thursday afternoon concert during the yearly exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts, that she could gently complain.

It was gloomy, with a promise of snow outside; and the great s.p.a.ce of the stairway to the galleries was filled with shadow and the strains of _Armide_ echoing from the orchestra playing at the railing above the entrance. Pleydon, together with a great many others, had spread an overcoat on the masonry of the steps, and they were seated in the obscurity of the bal.u.s.trade.

"You look as though you hadn't had enough to eat," she observed. "You used to be almost thick but now you are a thing of terrifying grimness.

You look like a monk. I wonder why you're like a monk, Dodge?"

"Linda Condon," he replied.

"That can't be it now; I haven't been Linda Condon for years, but Mrs.

Arnaud Hallet. It's very pretty, of course, and I'd like to think you could keep a young love alive so long. Experience makes me doubt anything of the sort; but then I was always skeptical."

"You have never been anyone else," he a.s.serted positively. "You were born Linda Condon and you'll die that, except for some extraordinary accident. I can't imagine what it would be--a miracle like quaker-ladies in the Antarctic."

"It sounds uncomplimentary, and I'm sick of being compared with polar places. What are quaker-ladies?"

"Fragile little flowers in the spring meadows."

"I'd rather listen to the music than you."

"That is why loving you is so eternal, why it doesn't fluctuate like a human emotion. You can't exhaust it and rest before a new tide sweeps back; the timeless ecstasy of a wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d ... breeding madness."

She failed to understand and turned a troubled gaze to his bitter repression. "I don't like to make you unhappy, Dodge," she said in a low tone. "What can I do? I am a horrid disappointment to all of you, but most to myself. I can't go over it again."

"Beauty has nothing to do with happiness," he declared harshly. He rose, without consulting her wishes; and Linda followed him as he proceeded above, irresistibly drawn to the bronze he was showing in the Rotunda.

It was the head and part of the shoulders of a very old woman, infinitely worn, starved by want and spent in brutal labor. There was a thin wisp of hair pinned in a meager knot on her skull; her bones were mercilessly indicated, barely covered with drum-like skin; her mouth was stamped with timid humility; while her eyes peered weakly from their sunken depths.

"Well?" he demanded, interrogating her in the interest of his work.

"I--I suppose it's perfectly done," she replied, at a loss for a satisfactory appreciation. "It's true, certainly. But isn't it more unpleasant than necessary?" Pleydon smiled patiently. "Beauty," he said, with his mobile gesture. "Pity, _Katharsis_--the wringing out of all dross."

The helpless feeling of her overwhelming ignorance returned. She was like a woman held beyond the closed door of treasure. "Come over here."

He unceremoniously led her to the modeling of a ruffled grouse, faithful in every diversified feather. Linda thought it admirable, really amazing; but he dismissed it with a pa.s.sionate energy. "The dull figuriste!" he exclaimed. "Daguerre. Once I could have done that, yes, and been entertained by its adroitness and insolence--before you made me. Do you suppose I was able then to understand the sheer tragic fort.i.tude to live of a scrubwoman! The head you thought unpleasant--haven't you seen her going home in the March slush of a city? Did you notice the gaps in her shoes, the ragged shawl about a body twisted with forty, fifty, sixty years of wet stone floors and steps? Did you wonder what she had for supper?"

"No, Dodge, I didn't. They always make me wretched."

"Well, to realize all that, to feel the degradation of her nature, to lie, sick with exhaustion, on the broken slats of her bed under a ravelled-out travesty of a quilt, and get up morning after morning in an iron winter dark--to experience that in your spirit and put it into durable metal, hard stone--is to hold beauty in your hands."

Her interest in his speech was mingled with the knowledge that, in order to dress comfortably for dinner, she must leave immediately. Pleydon helped her into the Hallet open motor landaulet. Linda demanded quant.i.ties of air. He was, he told her at the door, leaving in an hour for New York. "I wish you could be happier," she insisted. He reminded her that he had had the afternoon with her. It was so little, she thought, carried rapidly over a smooth wide street. His love for her increased rather than lessened. How wonderful it was.... The woman outside that barred door of treasure.

XXIX

Linda thought frequently about Dodge and his feeling for her; memories of his words, his appearance, speculations, spread through her tranquil daily affairs like the rich subdued pattern of a fine carpet on the bare floor of her life. She was puzzled by the depth of a pa.s.sion that, apparently, made no demands other than the occasional necessity to be with her and the knowledge that she existed. If she had been a very intelligent woman, and, of course, not quite bad-looking, she might have understood both Pleydon and Arnaud, the latter a man whose mind was practically absorbed in the pages of books. There could be no doubt, no question, of their love for her.

Then there had always been the others--the men at the parties, in her garden, through the old days of her childhood in hotels. It was very stupid, very annoying, but at the same time she became interested in what, with her candid indifference, affected them. She had never, really, even when she desired, succeeded in giving them anything, anything conscious or for which they moved. Judith Feldt, on the contrary, had been prodigal. And, while certainly numbers of men had been attracted to her, they all tired of her with marked rapidity. Men met Judith, Linda recalled, with eagerness, they came immediately and often to see her ... for, perhaps, a month. Then, temporarily deserted, she was submerged in depression and nervous tears.

But, while it was obviously impossible for all lovers to be constant, two extraordinary and superior men would be faithful to her as long as she lived, no--as long as they lived. This was beyond doubt. One was celebrated--she watched with a quiet pride Pleydon's fame penetrate the country--and the other, her husband, a person of the most exacting delicacy of habits, intellect and wit.

What was it, she wondered, that made the supreme importance of women to men worth consideration. Linda was thinking of this now in connection with her daughter. Vigne was fourteen; a larger girl than she had ever been, with her father's fine abundant cinnamon-brown hair, a shapely sensitive mouth, and a wide brown gaze with a habit of straying, at inappropriate moments, from things seen to the invisible. She was, Linda realized thankfully, transparently honest; her only affectation was the slight supercilious manner of her a.s.sociations; and she read, ridiculously like her father, with increasing pleasure.

However, what engaged Linda most was the fact that Vigne already liked men; she had been at the fringe, as it were, of young dances, with a sparkling satisfaction to herself and the securely nice youths who "cut in" at her brief appearances.

The truth was that Linda saw that more than a trace of Stella Condon's warm generosity of emotion had been brought by herself to Arnaud's daughter. The faults of every life, every circ.u.mstance, were endlessly multiplied through all existence. At fourteen, it was Linda's frowning impression, her mother had very fully instructed her in the wiles and structure of admirable marriage, and she had never completely lost some hard pearls of the elder's wisdom. Should she, in turn, communicate them to Vigne?

The moment, the anxiety, she dreaded was arriving, and it found her no freer of doubt than had the other aspects of her own responses. Yet here she was possessed by the keenest need for absolute rect.i.tude; and perhaps this, she thought, with an unusual pleasure, was an evidence of the affection she had seemed to lack. But in the end she said nothing.

She was still unable to disentangle the flesh from the spirit, love--the love that so amazingly illuminated Dodge Pleydon--from comfort. Dodge had disturbed all her sense of values, even to the point of unsettling her allegiance to the supremacy of a great deal of money. He had worked this without giving her anything definite, that she could explain to Vigne, in return. Linda preserved her demand for the actual. If she could only comprehend the force animating Dodge she felt life would be clear.

She was tempted to experiment--when had such a possibility occurred to her before?--and discover just how far in several directions Pleydon's devotion went. This would be easy now, she was unrestrained by the fact of Arnaud, and the old shrinking from the sculptor happily vanished. Yet with him before her, on one of his infrequent visits to their house, she realized that her courage was insufficient. Was it that or something deeper--a reluctance to turn herself like a knife in the source of the profoundest compliment a woman could be paid. Linda thought too highly of his love for that; the texture of the carpet had become too gratifying.

They were all three in the library, as customary; and Linda, restless, saw her reflection in a closed long window. She was wearing yellow, the color of the jonquils on a candle-stand; but with her familiar sash tied and the ends falling to the hem of her skirt. The pointed oval of her face was unchanged, her pallor, the straight line of her black bang, the blueness of her eyes, were as they had been a surprisingly long while ago. Arnaud, with a disconcerting comprehension, demanded, "Well, are you satisfied?" She replied coolly, "Entirely." Pleydon, seated for over an hour without moving, or even the trivial relief of a cigarette, followed her with his luminous uncomfortable gaze, his disembodied pa.s.sion.

x.x.x

Linda heard Vigne's laugh, the expression of a sheer lightness of heart, following a low eager murmur of voices in her daughter's room, and she was startled by its resemblance to the gay pitch of Mrs. Moses Feldt's old merriment. Three of Vigne's friends were with her, all approximately eighteen, talking, Linda knew, men and--it was autumn--antic.i.p.ating the excitements of their bow to formal society that winter. They had, she silently added, little enough to learn about the latter. Through the year past they had been to a dancing-cla.s.s identical, except for an earlier hour and age, with mature affairs; but before that they had been practically introduced to the pleasures of their inheritance.

The men were really boys at the university, past the first year, receptacles of unlimited worldly knowledge and experience. They belonged to exclusive university societies and eating clubs, and Linda found their stiff similarity of correct bigoted pattern highly entertaining.

She had no illusions about what might be called their morals; they were midway in the period of youthful unrestraint; but she recognized as well that their att.i.tude toward, for example, Vigne was irreproachable. Such boys affected to disdain the girls of their a.s.sociated families ... or imagined themselves incurably in love.

The girls, for their part, while insisting that forty was the ideal age for a lover--the terms changed with the seasons, last year "suitor" had been the common phrase--were occasionally swept in young company into a high irrational pa.s.sion. Mostly, through skillful adult pressure or firm negation, such affairs came to nothing; but even these were sometimes overcome. And, when Linda had been disturbed by the echo of old days in her daughter's tones, she was considering exactly such a state.

One of the nicest youths imaginable, Bailey Sandby, had lost all trace of superior aloofness in a devotion to Vigne. He was short, squarely built, with clear pink cheeks, steady light blue eyes and crisp very fair hair. This was his last season of academic instruction, after which a number of years, at an absurdly low payment, awaited him in his father's bond brokerage concern. However, he was, Linda gathered, imperious in his urgent need for Vigne's favor.

Ridiculous, she thought, at the same time illogically rehearsing the resemblances of Vigne to her grandmother. She had no doubt that the parties Vigne shared on the terraces and wide lawns, in the informal dancing at country houses, were sufficiently sophisticated; there was on occasion champagne, and--for the masculine element anyhow--c.o.c.ktails.

The aroma of wine, lightly clinging to her young daughter's breath, filled her with an old instinctive sickness.

She had spoken to Arnaud who, in turn, severely addressed Vigne; but during this Linda had been oppressed by the familiar feeling of impotence. The girl, of course, had properly heard them; but she gave her mother the effect of slipping easily beyond their grasp. When she had gone to bed Arnaud repeated a story brought to him by the juvenile Lowrie, under the influence of a temporary indignation at his sister's unwarranted imposition of superiority. Arnaud went on:

"Actually they had this kissing contest, it was at Chestnut Hill, with a watch held; and Vigne, or so Lowrie insisted, won the prize for length of time--something like a minute. Now, when I was young--"