O Genteel Lady!/Chapter 6

by Esther Louise Forbes

Chapter VI

She Feels the Shadow

1

They came and went through her office on heavy feet that struck brutally through her consciousness. They talked and their voices were as unreal as voices heard through fever. She could not write the story Miss Bigley had ordered by mail, a story to show once again virtue triumphant. Even the little faces of her fashion plates looked peakedly back at her under her pen. Luckily, Mr. Fox, with his shrewd feminine intuition, was in New York with Professor Ripley. They had seen Jones sail. Mr. Trelawney, finding her white and speechless, brooded over her and tried to interest her in medieval thought. She began a poem to fill a four-inch space in Hearth and Home,' three stanzas of four verses each. It was so easy to do things like this, she found. She could write her poem with no more effort than sharpening a pencil. 'Lines,' she wrote for a title, and then, with the idea of deception added, 'to my absent wife.'

'Earth no music for me gives;
Lone my heart without thee lives.
Symphonies, though sweet, are drear,
Unless thou, my love, are near.'

One verse, and she read it over with impersonal interest as though it were the work of some other person. A sudden sense almost of nausea surged over her. She couldn't finish it. She couldn't ever write things like that again. If Paul saw his Saviour in a great light walking towards him on the road to Damascus, so surely was Lanice struck a miraculous blow and saw once and for all the falseness of her false art. She tore the paper to pieces. She would not work on 'Hearth and Home.' She would ask Mr. Fox for a position with the 'Journal,' and if he would not have her...All that she had previously written was an insult to the mad and glorious process of living; she had pulled off the flowers and arranged them in ugly patterns, yet flowers lose their beauty without leaves and stems.

Her green portières were brushed aside and she looked up to meet the eyes of an almost stranger. One of the Scollay girls stood in the doorway; she did not know whether it was Lydia, the pretty one, or Elpsie, the very pretty one.

'Miss Scollay?'

'Yes, and really I don't know your name. But won't you pardon my coming? I know I'm intruding.'

'I'm glad you came,' and after the words were spoken Lanice was surprised to see that they were the truth.

'You see,' said Lydia holding her head with the slightly defiant manner so at variance with her sweet nature, 'I've just gone through it all with Elpsie and I couldn't help but think of you almost all alone here in Boston and how you were the one Anthony really cared the most about. And I thought...well, I couldn't stay away, and I thought perhaps you were going through the same thing as Elpsie. Of course, he liked you much the best. I guessed when he borrowed the black pair from Papa they were for you, and then my Uncle Smith saw you drive through Cambridge. Elpsie was up almost all night listening to hear the horses come back. You'll think I have been spying upon you'—Lydia pushed back her dark furs. In the excitement her pink face was approaching cerise. 'I was just going by. I couldn't help running in to see you because, although he looked so romantic, Anthony Jones was really'—her teeth snapped together—'a skunk,' she finished with engaging vulgarity.

The two young women looked at each other and an instantaneous understanding was established. Lanice resented neither the spying into her affairs nor the idea that her lover was merely a skunk.

'This morning,' Miss Lydia continued in the rapid voice of a child who has learned to speak a piece, 'Papa had an answer to a letter he wrote a friend in England weeks ago. It was such a comfort to Elpsie; I mean, she now hates Anthony Jones, and of course it is almost fun to hate a man in comparison to loving him when he doesn't really care for you.'

'Do sit down. What was in the letter?'

'I can't sit down, but all the time, years before he went to Arabia, or even out to India, he was married to an English girl.'

'Married!' Lanice had become reconciled to the irregularities of his Oriental life, but was unprepared for an Occidental wife.

'No,' she smiled, a bland and terrible smile, 'it doesn't make me hate him.'

'Now that Elpsie hates him she feels so much better.'

'No.' Lanice heard a strange voice miles away saying through the darkness, 'no, it doesn't make me hate him.'

'Oh, my dear, you are so white! Do sit down; I'm afraid you are ill.'

'No, not ill.' She could not see the tumbler that Lydia pressed to her lips, but the water revived her. The mists rolled away and there was Lydia Scollay with her exquisite flushed face bending over her, tears beading her honey-colored lashes.

'I was in love once myself,' said Lydia abruptly. 'I know how you can suffer. It's terrible—but I hope I'll fall in love again sometime. If you don't you miss it and that's worse than being unhappy.'

'Far worse.'

'Sometime we'll go for a drive—you and I and Elpsie.'

'But your sister Elpsie...'

'A rival? Nonsense. He didn't care for Elpsie—not really.'

'Nor for any one really.'

Lydia smiled bewitchingly. 'You and Elpsie will have so much in common.' And then, fearing that her joke was in poor taste, kissed the sleek hair of her new friend.

2

All day long in the office Lanice had one recurrent thought. Pauline and her father were both away, and after four days of the most desperate self-control she could go home and be alone and cry. She could let the unreal, vacant grimace that had settled down over her since Anthony's departure slough off and show the real face set with the lines of human woe like a tragic mask. For four days in the office she had automatically attended to her work. Almost at regular intervals desolation would rise up through her body, running like little hounds upon her arms and legs, but when it came to her throat she could tie something in a strangling knot and refuse to let it pass. Tears would scald her eyes, and she who had cried copiously over the 'Wide, Wide World' and 'The Dying Dove' defied her nature and did not let them fall.

Then Mr. Trelawney would say, 'Miss Bardeen, here's a letter from the New York office suggesting some sort of prize contest. Why not start one? Best lamp-mat design, or way to prepare mutton, or poem on a deceased infant...'

'Thank you, Mr. Trelawney.'

Ten minutes later, and again the terrible upward pressure.

'Miss Bardeen, have you any more letters to be mailed?' And she would shake her head and smile sadly at the big little office boy.

That week she had slept in Pauline's dressing-room because her own bedroom was at last being repapered. Pauline was always chatting about slavery, male tyranny or drink, but even after her 'Good-Night' Lanice would listen for any sound from the bedroom, listen for hours sometimes until her cousin's breathing had lengthened and hoarsened. Then she would pull the bedclothes over her head, and, writhing in this hot and suffocating tent, she would wet the pillows with the tears of her remorse and soak her nightgown with the sweat of her anguish. Neither Anthony's departure nor his duplicity had the power to hurt her as did the memory of the response she had made to his light and violent passions. It was her fault. All was her fault. Again and again she told herself that she never should have let him as much as touch her. And he had kissed her and held her! And she had loved him, and he was gone!

But this evening she would go home to find the house all but empty and she could cry for hours and hours freed from the oppressive presence of Pauline and with Mrs. Andrews, remote in her subterranean cell, too far away to hear her. Church bells and sleigh bells. Lights twinkling across the Common. The air sparkled with bells and lights. She stood with one hand on the key in the lock, her back pressed against the door, and looked at the stars swarming in the tree-tops of the Common and thought of God high up in the windy darkness. She said to herself, 'Nothing really matters. In fifty years I will probably be dead.'

Mrs. Andrews had left one lamp burning in the hall. To light the beautiful chandelier when such a large proportion of the family was away would have seemed to her thrifty nature wasteful. Lanice leaned over the staircase leading to Mrs. Andrews's domain and called, in the loud, falsely cheerful voice which the heartbroken can summon for emergencies, that she had already had her tea, thank you, and would go immediately to bed. Mrs. Andrews had thought Lanice was going to Hopkinton with Pauline; she began to protest that her room, although papered, was not yet put in order.

'I'll do that. Don't come up,' urged Lanice. For the moment it seemed to her the most important thing in life to keep Mrs. Andrews in her own confines. Nothing should now balk Lanice in her sorrow.

She lighted a lamp and set it on the bureau. The tight nosegays on the new paper pleased her and she immediately began to plan curtains and chintz covers. The presence of the paper-hangers was evident. A stepladder shrouded in the big cloth with which Mrs. Andrews had protected the furniture loomed ghostly by the washstand. The room smelled of damp plaster and of paste, slightly of tobacco, too. Lanice looked at herself questioningly in the familiar glass. Had Anthony Jones marked her face as surely as her soul? She looked tired and years older than she had ever seen herself before. Sighing, she turned to her bed and folded back the covers and opened the lavender-scented linen sheets. She had longed for this room for four days, hoping that she might be alone and permitted to cry unrestrainedly. Now she listlessly drew off her clothes, slipped into bed, and, sighing, fell asleep.

The Park Street Church clock struck two and Lanice started up as though it had been in the room with her. Her heart was beating fast and brokenly. She was conscious of having been awakened to keep some tryst. Usually a lamp burned lowly in the hall outside her door; now that she missed its faint crack of light upon her doorsill she was disturbed and lonely. No one in the house but grim Mrs. Andrews in the basement. With the fear of dark there also came a cruel spurt of emotion that welled up in her like a fountain.

She sat down shaking on the edge of her bed and said distinctly, but with a catch in her voice, 'Well, cry if you want to.' Then she began. Terrible tears that scalded her face, sobs that twisted her body, and drove her nails into the flesh of her palms. She called herself without mercy all the ugly names that she had ever read in Shakespeare, in tracts about dissolute women, and in the Bible. Then there was a lull and she lay exhausted, and thought over what she had been saying to herself and judiciously repudiated the most unpleasant of the epithets.

Then again an agonizing torrent of grief. The darkness, the disordered bedclothes, her long hair unbraided and now sweat-dampened and tangled about her, upwelling flood of bitterness within. She listened and heard herself moan. Anthony Jones was relatively unimportant. She did not blame him or call him names. This was a thing between herself and life. Life she blamed, and Nature, for making her what she was. Most bitterly of all she blamed herself. It was an inborn craving for something—something beautiful that had led her on. For the beauty music sometimes promised, for the wild delight that a flick of Anthony's eye and the radiance of his rare smile had suggested. Mystery and loveliness.

She began to laugh, for she believed she had been cheated, and this, mixed with her spasmodic moaning, made an uncouth sound that frightened her. She couldn't stop. The spasms of hysterics took her breath. She started up in the blackness thinking there were choking hands on her throat. She tried to tell herself in a peremptory way that she must stop. The ghastly sound continued and she was terrified. 'You must stop or you'll go crazy.' There was no stopping. She got to her feet. A doctor could end this terrible gasping and laughing. But when she stumbled to the head of the stairs to call down to Mrs. Andrews, she realized that she could not summon enough voice to make herself heard, and she would be ashamed that any one should see her in this state. Better die.

Groping, she felt her way back to her room. The stepladder in its white shroud suddenly seemed to lunge out of the darkness. She cried out, then recognized what it was and flung herself down upon the floor. She dashed her head against the bureau and chair legs, rolled over on her back and sank her teeth into her forearm and wrist, but the hysterical sobbing continued. She decided to take out the silk shawls that Anthony had given her and burn them all in the grate. Beautiful, cruel things. But, even as she decided to do this, some portion of her brain must have retained its sense. Through the suffocation of all her unhappiness she realized that sometime she would not feel like this and then she would wish she had not burned his shawls. Perhaps there was something in the bathroom—smelling-salts, cologne, anything that would stop this strangling and sobbing. She felt her way in and lighted a candle. As her fingers ran over the bottles in the cabinet they happened on one with the red label of danger. Laudanum! She realized that if she drank the contents of this one bottle she would be through, not only with remorse, but with life. She drew out the stopper, but the smell sickened her and she threw the bottle into the tub. By dashing cold water over herself and letting the faucet run on her wrists she managed to get her nerves under control.

The clock struck four, and she was quiet again, lying on the bed in Pauline's dressing-room. Never again in her life could she smell a newly papered room without stifling and a sense of nausea. Odd, she thought. She had had enough sense not to burn up the shawls, and yet she might have drunk the laudanum. As if the miserable night had been a penance, she felt at peace again with herself and the world. Her sorrow, her remorse, and her disappointments had mysteriously passed out of her life. Almost! They were still there in the shadowy background, like dogs that had broken loose in the night and nearly throttled her before she could order them back to their kennels. Now they would lie and through the years occasionally look at her and growl a little, or whine, or sleep. And sometimes, through the years, she would look at them not unkindly and they would wag their tails.

3

Captain Poggy advised an ocean trip, perhaps to the West Indies. Mrs. Andrews recommended a cod-liver oil diet. Pauline thought the best way out of a decline was to cease wasting one's time with Messrs. Redcliffe & Fox and give one's self, heart and soul, to a great absorbing Cause. Mr. Fox advised more outdoor air and less work. 'You might come in late for the next week or two until you get some color back, and then you can easily make it up,' he said, 'by leaving early.' Mr. Trelawney could only offer 'Leaves of Grass.' Professor Ripley gave her the compassion and understanding of his eyes, and urged her to study. At her age Margaret Fuller could read Hebrew, and Abigail Adams composed in Greek. He had, she found, a contempt for all fiction. Why should she not write a history of Spanish literature, or something erudite and worth-while?

True to the formula of her own stories, she faded rather like a flower, but if her heart was broken no one except Professor Ripley and Lydia Scollay knew it. She discovered, however, that one can break one's heart and live. At first it seemed to be a mere existence, but months later she wondered if she were not better off than before. The expression of human faces, the antics of animals, the fresh spring air groping over muddy streets and fingering the naked trees, the richness of weather change, the heat of sun, the beat of rain; these things she had always seen, but now she was identified with them. One thing was certain. She could write no more stories or poems such as she had previously written for 'Hearth and Home.' She stood humbly before life and could not desecrate it because as never before she understood and wistfully worshipped it. Athough she felt an equal contempt for the large canvases that she had accomplished under Mrs. Dummers's flattering eye, she still took pleasure in her portfolio of small things. Under Captain Poggy's inspiration she began to absorb with enthusiasm the art of the Japanese, and admired the skill with which they could carve a rabbit out of fat jade seemingly by a turn of the wrist. She saw how their fishes really swim, and how their improbable coarse ponies are alive while the great Copley shows us General Washington upborne on the back of a dead quadruped.

She still enjoyed her fashion plates because she liked clothes, and they were but diagrams, not art, not life. Believing firmly that love may come but once, and that Anthony was gone forever, she reconciled herself to the thought that her love life was ended. Of all the many regrets she might have had, she really felt but one. She sighed that love for her could not have been diluted a little with the commonplaces of affection. And why had she so bitterly resented Captain Jones? She could remember moments when she had hated him. It was like trying to warm one's self before a bonfire; either you were too hot or too cold. Of course now she would never marry, never. Not even if Lydia's rich young uncle, Smith Scollay, who had first admired her as she whisked through Harvard Square in the red Russian sleigh, should declare himself, as there was reason to believe he might.

Life, by some alchemy, had melted her softer metals in its retort, and now poured her out again in different mould, tempered perhaps into a more precious substance. She felt calm and assured. Time had thrown down its gage, for she was twenty-five and considered herself no longer young, but she did not shrink from its challenge. Years whirling out of the onrushing space would involve and in the end destroy. She breathed upon her palm to feel the body's heat, and thought how it is the gift of many generations of dead men. And she would be cold some day and the teeth she tapped with her pencil and the hair she sleeked with her hand would be the last things to be left of her, except the skeleton waiting within. It did not matter what happened to the soul; perhaps like Mohammedan women she had none. Perhaps she lost it during the hours so bright, always, with firelight and sunshine, spent with Anthony Jones. But she had a sense of peace, a feeling that whatever happened she could endure. To herself it seemed that she had reached the andante passages in her symphony, after having lived through the scherzo, and she sighed and stretched herself in her new-found peace. Thank God she had some money. She would never be so driven for it as Bronson Alcott's girls out in Concord. Poor Louisa, just her age, washed and baked and sewed all day. She had even hired out as a servant and wrote feverishly in odd moments anything that would sell, it hardly mattered what. Lanice had recently gone to see Louisa and the two girls crept to the attic for privacy and seated on the rag-bag exchanged ambitions.

'I must make money. I will teach, act, write stories. Lanice, I'll even sell my one beauty, my hair. I must get some comforts for Marmee. Oh, we've been so poor my soul is all ragged.'

Miss Alcott—Louisa she called her—was the liveliest of all the literary friends she had made through her profession. She liked her boyishness, her candor, her trusty whole-heartedness, and even her gawkiness in the presence of the unsympathetic.

But Lydia, and to a less extent the more mannered Elpsie, she came to love. Pauline despised the pretty girls with their brisk gold hair, their sweet-pea faces, and defiant blue eyes. She flattered them outrageously, but in a way to belittle them. Lydia was clever enough to see through this flattery which favorably impressed her younger sister, especially coming as it did from so high-minded a source as Miss Pauline Poggy. They were much about the Poggy house, sometimes sleeping with Lanice, three in a bed. The three girls, mounted on little round gentle horses that were considered appropriate mounts for females, although their small size and pony backs unfitted them for the cumbersome side-saddles, ambled about the country roads of Brookline or followed the windings of the Charles. A groom followed them wherever they went and gave them the help they must have in mounting and dismounting. Their skirts were so long the hem was faced with leather so it would not wear out against the stones or horses' hoofs. Sometimes their young uncle, Smith Scollay, left his father's counting-house and, mannishly mounted on a big-boned Irish horse, a half taller than the ladies' palfreys, showed them new bridle-paths along the sea or out into the country.

Elpsie, completely cured of her infatuation with the sinful Mr. Jones, wanted to hear everything her dear Lanice could tell her. Lanice herself listened almost without jealousy to Elpsie's repetition of Captain Jones's compliments to her guitar playing and to her charm. When, however, she quoted Mr. Jones as comparing her to flower leaves, a great bubble of rage burst within Lanice, for so on one memorable occasion had Mr. Jones characterized her.