Chapter XII: Part 12

She spoke with the air of an experienced traveler,--Hattie who had never been outside the state. She begrudged every moment that she stayed in the Town as a moment which kept her out of the future.

Bidding her not to worry and observing that eventually the train would come as all trains did, her husband turned away and began to walk silently up and down the worn bricks of the platform--the same bricks, he remembered, that he had trod on the night he set out upon his futile pursuit of his daughter.

It was one of those moments which occur sometimes between lover and mistress, between husband and wife, between those who have loved each other for years--a moment when it is impossible for the one to tell the other what is in his heart because it is quite beyond understanding. He could not say to her that he was sad because he was leaving so much that he had loved; she, his own wife who loathed it all so deeply, would think him a little mad. He could not say that he was sad because he would never again see the pleasant farms of the county, never again talk with his cronies of the Grand Circuit and quarrel about Pop Geers and how he had driven his latest race. Never again would he have those long arguments over horses in hotel bars and parlors during racing week, never again see the sap running from the trees in maple sugar time, never again talk with old Bayliss and Judge Wilkins about their Guernseys and Shorthorns. He was leaving a world which, despite all the disappointments it had brought him, he loved. There were friends in this world which it pained him to believe that he would never meet again.

He was lonely in a way he had never known until now.

For a moment, at the far end of the platform, the gentle man halted and fell to regarding his wife and his father with a strange and distant expression, as if they were strangers to him. The one was so restless, the other so indifferent. The one had love only for her children, the other had love for nobody and nothing. No, they could not understand. It was easy for them....

Far off a whistle sounded and he saw his wife hasten for the fifth time to put all the luggage in order and pry old Gramp loose from his throne of indifference upon the baggage truck. At the sight he turned and as he moved, walking slowly toward them over the worn bricks, it occurred to him that it was Ellen whom they were all pursuing and that he was being dragged along with all the others.

He knew then what he had known before--that they would never recapture her. She was gone forever.

* * * * *

From his eminence on the baggage truck old Gramp had been meditating the selfishness of Julia Shane. She had left Hattie a fat sum of money, enough to escape, but she had kept it until she died, allowing Hattie to live for years on the very edge of poverty. Poor Hattie! She never saw the reason; she never understood that the old woman had kept her poor so that she might have her by her side as illness and old age claimed her. It was poverty that gave Julia Shane possession over her niece, and she had guarded the possession until the day her will was read, long after she had grown cold in her grave on the bleak hill above the Town. She was beyond help from Hattie now, and so, when she could keep her niece no longer, she had set her free.

The train screeched over the crossing, through the mills and into the station and Hattie, all agitation and worry now, jarred the old man loose from his meditation and steered him in the direction of their car.

Five minutes passed and the great locomotive with a series of demoniacal snorts pulled the train out of the station into the unknown. It carried an old man, a middle-aged woman, her mild husband and a boy. It was the last time that any of them ever saw the Town that bore the name of Hattie’s grandfather.

42

The house in Paris to which Sabine and Richard Callendar returned after their honeymoon stood in the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. It belonged, properly speaking, to Thérèse herself, an enormous florid house of white stone built in the baroque German style which came to dominate the new parts of Paris in the early part of the twentieth century. In all honesty it could be said that Thérèse was not responsible either for its architecture or its decoration; the house came to her in partial payment for the loans she had made a year or two before the mysterious collapse of the international banking firm, Wolff and Simon. It had been the property of Wolff, and Thérèse, examining it one day shortly after the transfer to her possession, decided that it would suit her admirably as a _pied-à-terre_ in Paris. Instead of turning it into cash she kept it and used it, unchanged, during her visits.

Wolff, in the heyday of his prosperity (long before he shot himself after fleeing half-way across Europe from such tender creditors as Thérèse) had fancied himself as a collector of art. The house remained as a monument to his bad judgment in this matter; in a German fashion he had absorbed quantities of sentimental pictures and rococo bronzes that hung or stood on marble pedestals between enormous second-rate tapestries. All pieces of any value had vanished long ago when Wolff, in a frantic effort to save the collapse of his firm, had summoned a dealer who stripped the place of its Degas, its Rodins, and even the Seurat and the Rousseau which a mistress had led Wolff into buying against his will because she thought it chic to “buy moderns.” All that remained were remnants, grandiose, vulgar and sentimental, among which Thérèse Callendar moved and lived with as great an indifference as she displayed toward the solid house on Murray Hill. The vast mass of marble and tapestry satisfied, it seemed, an Oriental longing for pomp and splendor. All that was Greek in her and much that was French exulted in this phantasmagoria of marble, red plush and mirrors.

The house depressed Sabine from the very moment she crossed the threshold and beheld with a shudder the expanse of tesselated floor, the red plush stair rail and the drawing-room beyond with its modern gilt furniture set upon an authentic Savonnerie beneath sentimental German pictures of the Dresden school. Unlike her mother-in-law she had an Anglo-Saxon feeling that a home should be a place in which one was surrounded by warm and beautiful things. To Thérèse Callendar a house was a house. She owned houses in London, New York, Paris and Constantinople. A house was simply four walls within which one found rich food and soft beds during the brief weeks between journeys from one capital to another; and so the houses she possessed, like the one in the Avenue du Bois and the one on Murray Hill, came to have the indifferent air of great caravanseries. The only rooms which might have attained the dignity of the word “home” were those occupied by the concierges and the caretakers.

* * * * *

It was in this house, after the turbulence of her honeymoon, that Sabine found the time to analyze, with all her passion for such things, the exact character of her position. The process began during the first week when her husband, a little gruff over her dislike for the place, left her a great deal in solitude. She found that he expected her, during the day, to amuse herself; at night he was devoted enough, but the days clearly were to be his to be spent among his friends of the Jockey Club and elsewhere. The afternoons she passed languidly in a sitting room which adjourned their bed-chamber and had once served as a boudoir for the same mistress who led Wolff into buying a Seurat.

Sabine understood perfectly the character of the room; indeed, she found amusement in reconstructing from the evidence furnished by the atrocious house, the character and history of the suicide banker; and, though she never knew it, she came miraculously close to the truth.

The former boudoir had a marble floor on which were spread a tiger skin from India and a white bearskin from Siberia. There were mirrors on every side; the lady who had once occupied the room could not have turned her head without encountering a dozen reflections of her pink voluptuous body. (Wolff, being a German and a Jew, was certain to choose that sort of mistress.) The walls were covered with black satin on which had been painted a Parisian decorator’s version of Tokyo in cherry blossom time. The chaise longue, fashioned like an Egyptian couch with carved lions’ heads at both ends, stood almost hidden beneath great piles of cushions of fanciful design and color ... mauve, yellow, green, crimson and black, all decorated with a profusion of tassels and gold lace. Lying upon it Sabine gazed at her innumerable reflections and thought that being a lady was much more satisfactory than being a demi-mondaine; only to laugh aloud the very next moment at the picture of her mother-in-law in respectable black satin and jet moving complacently about amid such vulgar and guilty splendor.

But all her thoughts were not amusing ones. For a bride, they were remarkably cynical and disillusioned. She was troubled by the change which had come over Callendar since their marriage ... a change of which she had become aware almost at the moment she turned away from the altar of St. Bart’s. Being the wife of Richard Callendar, she understood, was not the same as being his friend. This new relationship had altered everything. As a friend she might have found him satisfactory until the day of her death; as a husband ... she did not know. She was puzzled. It seemed to her that in gaining a husband, she had lost a friend.

She understood, quite coldly and without conceit, that she was much more clever than most women of her age. She was not silly; she had few illusions. Nor was she, perhaps, romantic; though of this she could not be so certain.

It puzzled her that in becoming the wife of Richard Callendar, she had forfeited so quickly the old understanding, the habit they had of exchanging jests and of mocking people in the manner of naughty school children. She had tried from the first to revive the old intimacy, but when he failed to respond to her sallies and regarded her with a queer look of disapproval, she had grown depressed. It was as if the new intimacy, so intensely physical with a man like Callendar, had killed the old; as if by becoming his wife she had attained a position immeasurably remote from that of his friend.

Would he, she wondered, treat a mistress in this fashion, as if she were an institution? And an institution over which he had complete authority?

* * * * *

It was not that she thought him in love with her. Reflecting now with some bitterness, she knew why he had married her. From his point of view, the time had come for him to marry; she was suitable, and he must have known that a woman so clear-headed would cause him no difficulties, no scenes, no unpleasantnesses. His mother had desired it because she liked Sabine and because it increased the already vast fortune for which she cared so tenderly. Lately, when they dined out together, she had come to understand even more--that he had perhaps chosen her because she made the best of herself, because she was a woman of spirit who, on entering a room, made an impression. There was in Callendar a strange sort of vanity which demanded satisfaction, a vanity which was, perhaps, another and a masculine manifestation of his mother’s passionate sense of property. It would have been impossible for him to have married a woman, no matter how pretty she might have been, who was simply commonplace, sweet and insipid. He demanded in his wife an element of the spectacular. He had devoted himself to the tawny Lorna Vale, to the black and glittering Mrs. Sigourney, and to that strange, uncivilized musician from the middle west. About them all, there had been a spectacular quality, an undercurrent of fierce vitality, of outward distinction from the mob which appeared to have fascinated him.

She did not flatter herself that he had married her through desire; yet from the moment of their marriage he had been passionate after a fashion which shocked her. It was confusing to find that a man who was so polite and indifferent, so free from the little tendernesses which, to be honest, she had never expected, could at times display a passion so fierce and unexpected. It was as if in some way, love, passion, desire--she could not in his case define it precisely--were isolated, a thing apart.

* * * * *

There were reasons enough why she had married him. He was a great match; women would have desired him even if he had not been rich. And, she reflected with astonishing coldness, to have won him in the face of so much competition was a triumph worth paying for with much unhappiness. It was a victory over women who hated her and had sought with all the bag of their nasty feminine tricks to outwit her. She had married him too because she had come very nearly to the conclusion that she could never fall passionately in love with any man and that, therefore, it was far better to choose an interesting husband than a dull one. It was impossible, she felt, for love to survive such a passion as hers for dissection and analysis; love could not stand being pinned down and pulled apart. She did not then expect great love, and for the rest of it, Callendar had fascinated her as no other man had ever done, because he had always eluded her, just as he was eluding her now that he was her husband. In a sense, he offered her material vigorous enough to last a lifetime.

More than once in the midst of such reflections there returned to her the memory of the night when the raw young creature, whom she now thought of as “that musician,” had fainted. She remembered how, on this occasion, she had regarded Callendar minutely as he stood, his hands clenching the back of a chair, watching the naked Burmese dancer swaying to the insidious rhythm of tom-tom and flageolet. She remembered how the dancer and the barbaric music had shocked her a little as being wildly out of place in the big stuffy drawing-room. It was music which to her meant very little save that it was mildly exciting. Upon Callendar and his mother it had produced the most astonishing effect. Could it be that in this lay the clue alike to his fascination and to her failure to fathom that obscure thing which people called his soul? Though he had been her husband, even her lover, for a long time, she knew him no better than she had known him on the night of his mother’s absurd soirée.

And lying in that preposterous boudoir that had once belonged to the mistress of Wolff, she found herself admitting that slowly and certainly he was gaining complete possession of her imagination. It troubled her because she valued above all else in the world her own aloofness; so long as she did not lose her sense of being a spectator, no one could hurt her, not even her own husband. It troubled her too because she could not be certain whether this new interest had any relation to love or whether it had its roots in a sort of perverse attraction, fundamentally intellectual in quality ... an attraction which carried an element of the sensual hitherto entirely foreign to her nature. Day after day she found herself smiling over the thought that this sensual attraction should have been a little shocking and was not. In one sense he had overwhelmed her. He was a cruel, a passionate lover. If she had been less intelligent, more innocent, more sentimental, he might have wounded her very soul; but the curse which made romantic love impossible also saved her. Never, for more than a passing moment, had he been able to dissipate her awful awareness.

He had come to her, after all, from Lorna Vale, from Mrs. Sigourney, perhaps even from that American girl (though of this she could not be certain) and, doubtless, from many other women. So much experience, she understood, made him dangerous to any woman possessed of curiosity.

* * * * *

During those first weeks in Paris, it amazed Sabine to find that her husband knew so few of his own countrymen; he told her that most Americans who chose to live in Paris were either silly or depraved and so revealed for the first time the fact that he did not consider himself American. He became sulky when she asked him to dine with a school friend of hers whose husband chose to live in Paris.

“I know her husband,” he answered in contempt. “He is an ass who tries to live like the French. He’s not a Frenchman. His money comes out of a New England shoe factory.”

But he went all the same, perhaps because she managed to convey to him without saying it, that he was neglecting her. During the day she spent a great deal of time with friends and acquaintances, mostly women who had married foreigners of one sort or another. In their company she went from shop to shop buying an endless number of clothes. The same taste which caused her to shudder at the monstrous house in the Avenue du Bois led her to love clothes passionately. She knew too that beautiful clothes satisfied the strain of vanity in her husband which demanded a wife who was dressed with taste and distinction. She had begun already to plan how she might attract and keep him.

One evening, while they were dressing for the Opera, he said to her as she came out of the boudoir and faced him, “It is true what Jacques said at the club to-day. It takes the Parisian to make the clothes and the American to wear them. The Americans are the best dressed women in the world.”

And he looked at her in such a way that she grew warm suddenly in the knowledge that her figure was superb, that her shoulders were marvelously white and beautiful, and that her clothes were perfect. Until lately she had dressed, like most American women, for the sake of other women; now she understood that, without knowing it, she had been dressing of late to please a man, because she had found one who understood the beauty and importance of clothes. There was, despite all her other doubts, great satisfaction in that.

She discovered too that his friends were not among the Americans and the English but among the French and the Russians. She found herself, night after night, at dinners watching him as he stood, straight, dark and handsome, his queer gray eyes wrinkled a little with laughter, talking to some friend who was a foreigner, and at such moments she was aware of his great difference from her own people. He was, in some obscure fashion, linked with that preposterous boudoir and its florid decorations. Perhaps, secretly, he really liked the awful house as much as his mother liked it.

She saw too, with the green eyes which took in everything, that the women about her were intensely conscious of him, and she knew then that she had been at the same time lucky and tragically unlucky. It would be so easy for him ... a man of so much intelligence and a beauty like that of a fine animal.

* * * * *

Toward the end of the first winter, a day or two after she had made certain that she was to have a baby, she interrupted her shopping long enough to have lunch at the Ritz. She had a table, alone, in one corner of the big room and, having no one to talk with her, she fell to observing the types at the other tables and reflecting upon the vulgarity and self-conscious glitter which marked the patrons of such hotels the world over. So she was startled when she found that the personality of some one who entered the room at that moment had the power of distracting her.

Two women came in together and stood for a time surveying the room. The one (it was she who was disturbing) was tall, slender and handsome, dressed smartly in a black suit with a black fur. The other, plainly a Jewess (who understood perfectly the manipulation of head-waiters) was small, with a ferrety, good-natured face and an energetic, chattering manner. They took a table at a little distance so that Sabine was able to watch them.

In the beginning, as she realized that there was some reason for her having noticed the pair, she became aware of a sense of familiarity in the taller woman. Then, as she watched them, the reason became quite clear. It was the American girl ... the musician, in Paris and in the Ritz of all places, and no longer dowdy but handsomely dressed!

By long established precedent, Sabine made no move toward approaching the newcomer. It was her habit to avoid involving herself with too many people; such a course made life far too tiresome and complicated. She had known the girl well enough, but there was no point now in renewing the acquaintance; indeed, it seemed idiotic even to consider the idea. Vaguely, she reflected, it was a good idea to leave what was well enough alone.

But the old, insatiable curiosity had been aroused; she found herself puzzled as to the presence of Ellen ... (Tolliver, that was her name) ... in Paris. She had been poor. She had been, she told Sabine during those stark conversations in the house on Murray Hill, hindered by a hundred obstacles. Yet here she was, in Paris, dressed handsomely in clothes which the appraising eye of Sabine told her had come from one of the best establishments, probably Worth or Chanel. Sabine was curious too regarding the whereabouts of the husband ... the husband whom she had once mistaken very stupidly for the girl’s lover. And slowly, in the midst of the noisy room filled with a fantastic assortment of people, there rose in her memory a picture of that vulgar apartment the Babylon Arms, and a glimpse as they opened the door of the tiny top floor flat, of a mild little man in shirt sleeves. What had become of him?

She remembered too the confidences which she had exchanged with her mother-in-law in the days when the young musician seemed so near to upsetting their carefully laid plans. Mrs. Callendar had mentioned the mild little man, saying, “I’m certain the girl doesn’t care a fig for him. She’s tied to him by pity. That’s all. But we can be thankful for him. He stands between her and Richard.”

Where was the little man to whom she was tied by pity?

* * * * *

Any one noticing Sabine as she made ready to leave the dining room might easily have taken her for an adventuress. She drew her veil over her face and holding her fur almost up to her eyes, she hastened out, taking care on the way that her back was toward the tall girl and the busy little Jewess. In the battle between an overwhelming curiosity and a vague instinct of fear, it was fear which, unaccountably, won the victory.

As her motor, very small and very expensive, sped away along the Rue de Rivoli and across the white spaces of the Place de la Concorde into the Avenue des Champs Elysées, Sabine succumbed to an inexplicable sense of depression. It occurred to her that she did not really know whether the girl had ever been the mistress of her husband. She could not even be certain that Callendar had ever asked Ellen Tolliver to be his wife. Thérèse Callendar had the word of the girl that there had been nothing; yet with Callendar, it was impossible to know. If he had asked her to marry him, it must have been but a step toward seducing her from her husband, the mild little man. It did not occur to Sabine that with two women a man might be two quite different persons.

The motor sped smoothly along the asphalt past the Elysée Palace, around the Arc de Triomphe and on toward the huge house in the Avenue du Bois.

It might be, she thought, that Callendar himself knew the girl was in Paris. It might even be that he had arranged it for her to be there.

And again Sabine reflected that in her good fortune there was a tragic element of bad luck.

Callendar came in late for tea. She heard the footman speaking to him as he came through the vast hall across the tesselated floor. She waited for him, sitting behind the silver tea things in the small sitting room at the back of the house, and as he entered she was seized again by the disturbing fear of losing herself. He kissed her, casually, and said, “Well, have you had a busy day?”

“Nothing.... I went shopping with Madeleine and lunched alone at the Ritz.”

She might easily have added, “And whom do you think I saw there?” But she did not. On the contrary, she said, “It’s a funny show ... the Ritz.... And you?... What have you done?”

She did not hear his answer, because her attention was swallowed up by a sharp sense of his presence ... a vivid image of the dark face and the fine, muscular hand as he raised his silk kerchief in a familiar gesture to stroke his mustaches. In the back of her mind a small voice told her that it was perilous and awful to have such emotions.

She poured his tea but he did not drink it.

“I’ll have a glass of port,” was his reply. And then, “I had luck to-day. I won eleven thousand francs at baccarat ... playing with Henri and Posselt, the Russian.”

“Good,” was her reply, and again it was not what she might have said. This gambling worried her. It was not that he would bring them to poverty by it; that was almost impossible. But there was in her mind a feeling of disgust at the picture of men spending five hours of daylight in gambling. She tried to reproach herself by the thought that the idea was American and provincial. But she understood why his mother sometimes reproached him for not thinking more of his business. (Always he retorted that she liked business and he did not.)

There was silence and presently Sabine said, “I wonder, Dick, if we can’t do something about this house ... either take one of our own or clear out some of this rubbish.”

“It’s very comfortable.... There’s every luxury.”

She laughed. “Too much luxury.... I feel at times like a kept woman. Wolff had it for his mistress.... I’m sure he did.”

Callendar smiled. “That’s true,” he replied. “Some of it is very bad, but can’t we stick it out until spring? We’ll go to the country then or to England for a time.”

She had spoken of the matter before and the answer had always been the same. She now revived the discussion without hoping for any solution; she wanted to know whether he really liked it, whether he was really linked in some way to the extravagance of that awful boudoir. Watching him as she spoke, she believed that he did.

For a time they smoked in silence and then Sabine, crushing out the ash of her cigarette, observed with a magnificent air of indifference, “I wonder what has become of that American girl ... the musician. You remember, ‘Miss Tolliver’ was her name.”

She saw that he looked at her sharply and then, disarmed by her indifference, that his face assumed an expression which matched her own.

“I don’t know. I suppose she’s still in New York. She was very talented.”

“She planned to come to Paris some day. If she does, it would be a nice thing to do to look her up.”

Her husband smiled before he answered her, a quiet amused smile such as he used to display when he caught his mother in some intricate feminine plot.

“I don’t see why we should. She probably wouldn’t like it. After all, it wouldn’t be the same, would it?”

From this she could make nothing. All that he had said might mean anything at all. It seemed to her that the more she talked, the more confusing, the less clear everything became.

“I simply happened to think of her. She’s a remarkable girl. She’s had a struggle from the beginning.”

“A damned fine lot,” was his comment. “You’ll hear from her some day.”

She must have understood that all her slyness was of no use, that methods such as this brought her nowhere, for she fell silent after this until Dick rose and said, “Shall we go up? My nerves are on edge from playing all afternoon. I think I’ll sleep a bit.”

Then while she watched him, as from a great distance, it occurred to her that all this was scarcely the behavior of a bridegroom on his honeymoon; it was, on the contrary, as if already they had been married for years.

As she rose to go with him, a sudden decision crossed her mind. Without thinking why she was employing it, she used the one stake which she had at hand.

“Dick,” she said abruptly, “I am going to have a baby.”

He turned, and into his face came an expression of pleasure the like of which she had not seen there before. He smiled and, moving toward her, took her gently into his arms.

“That’s fine,” he said softly. “That’s wonderful.” And she felt him kiss her gently after a fashion that was new and disarming. It was neither a casual kiss, nor a passionate one; those two moods she knew very well. This was something new. She felt almost that she were an animal, a pet for whom he had a great affection and a strong desire to protect.

“Your mother will be pleased,” she said, frightened again by the old dread of losing herself. (She was ashamed too that he should feel her tremble so.)

“She will be delighted. She wants an heir. She thinks I’m not much good at taking care of all her money.” And he kissed her again in the same tender fashion.

“But it might be a girl.”

He laughed a little. “No, I’m lucky.... Think of my eleven thousand francs!”

But she saw that he wanted a boy, desperately, that he was not in the least interested in a girl. It was very foreign of him ... that desire for some one to carry on the name, to inherit all the fortune.

* * * * *

After they had gone up the stairs with the rail of red plush, he came into the sitting room again to kiss her gently and to ask if she were feeling well, and when he had gone Sabine, as she lay in the darkness among the gaudy pillows of the chaise longue, understood clearly and bitterly for the first time the change which their marriage had brought about. He was being gentle and loving not because she was a woman or because he loved her, but because she had become now by the course of nature an institution, a wife, a prospective mother. He was being tender not toward her but toward an idea. He placed her a little apart, so that the old sense of companionship was no longer possible. She was a symbol now ... the wife and mother who was the rock and foundation, the one who produced sons to carry on name and property, but not by any chance the one who was loved because she was a woman.

43

Of all the events, the emotions and the tragedy that occurred during the turbulent years spent in the Babylon Arms, nothing had hurt Ellen so much as the fashion in which Mrs. Callendar, after such a show of friendship and interest, vanished quickly and completely from her life. Even the affair with the son and the death of Clarence had had in them elements which her feminine mind found not unpleasing; there was a certain romance in the idea that it was herself whom Callendar really desired and not Sabine at all; there was even more romance, though perhaps a trifle bitter, in the idea that a man had taken his own life because he loved her too much to spoil her existence. In her headlong fashion, she was conscious that these elements contributed to her own personality; they made her an important figure with enhancing shades of romance and tragedy. That the facts were known to so few persons as to be almost secret, only increased their fascination. Sometimes, as she walked along the boulevards or rode in the Bois beside Schneidermann, paying little heed to the accompaniment of his pretty speeches and comment upon people, pictures or music, she found herself filled with a triumph at her secret knowledge. She thought, “People who see me and talk with me little know all that has happened. They do not know that they are talking with a powerful person. They do not know the mystery and tragedy.”

She began even to think that she had consciously planned each step of her progress, and she came after a time to forget that all that had happened to her had been born either of headlong impulse or through some senseless operation of circumstance.

Nevertheless there were times when she grew troubled by a sensation of insecurity. Mrs. Callendar had deserted her without a word. Rebecca might easily do the same. It was only Lily in whom she placed any real trust; with Lily there were ties of family and of blood.

She was troubled too because she knew that there was still need of the Jewess. For all the arrogance that came more and more to assert itself in her nature, for all the confidence and the secret triumph with which she looked out upon the strangers who passed by her on the boulevards and in the Bois, she understood that she was not yet ready to stand alone. She needed the guidance of persons like the gentle Schneidermann and the busy Rebecca. They knew the world; they knew the tricks by which one advanced to fame; they knew the people who were the right ones to know. She could not try her own wings because they were not yet strong enough.

Yet she must have the aid of such as Schneidermann and Rebecca without once acknowledging it. The old, twisted pride forbade her to lean upon any of them. It was a hard business.

And she would pull in her horse so that the languid Schneidermann might come abreast of her and talk without having to shout at her back. She would smile indifferently at him and say, “It is a beautiful morning.... Look at the dew shining beneath the hedge. And the spider webs like nets of shining silver.”

Sometimes Schneidermann rode silently by her side, stealing glances at the color in her cheeks and the blue black of her hair as she rode so straight and so proud and yet so careless of her horse, reining him in at will or galloping him madly through the long tunnels under the dripping linden trees. He was a tall thin man with an arched nose and a blond drooping mustache, rather pale and mild, who never disputed with her the choice of bridle paths or the hour they were to return. She understood that he was interested in her; he had helped her with her accent, though in this they had made little progress, for she had a stubborn, careless way of sticking to her own version of the tongue just as she had never lost completely her way of saying “dawg” for dog and “watter” for water, and persisted in the burr which came to her doubly through a Scottish heritage and a middle-western childhood. She suspected sometimes that he might even be falling in love with her and this made her knit up her brows and scowl at him furtively. She did not want him, even with all his money. She had had one husband who was mild and gentle and a bit stupid. Schneidermann was, to be sure, more intelligent than Clarence, and he knew far more of the world; it amused her to talk with him of music and art and politics, but a relationship more intimate was to her inconceivable. Aside from this worldly knowledge he was like Clarence; he possessed the same humbleness, the same physical paleness. It annoyed her to believe that she attracted only men who must be dominated.

Yet there was Callendar. Unconsciously she came to compare the humbleness of Schneidermann and Clarence with the cat-like virility of Callendar. It was as if she were putting aside all other men in the knowledge that some day, at some time if she waited long enough, she would come to possess him. Yet when she thought of him, as she frequently did after she had gone up to the luxurious room looking out upon the white pavilion, she grew angry at the memory of that last visit to the Babylon Arms. He had watched her, cat-like, until, driven by some obscure desire, he could no longer play the game of waiting.

She came slowly, as she grew to know and understand the world, to see that he had looked upon her always as a naïve and helpless creature, awkward and a little ridiculous. It gave her a sort of restless and unhappy satisfaction that she had shown herself the more powerful.

* * * * *

It was not strange that she did not encounter the Callendars in Paris. The world in which they moved was more remote from hers than the Babylon Arms had been from the house on Murray Hill. True, the crêpe-hung Madame de Cyon was an acquaintance of Thérèse, but Ellen took good care that this fat, bedizened gossip should never learn of her acquaintance with the Callendars, and so it did not occur to “Tiens! Tiens!” ever to mention them. Of their life Ellen sometimes read a paragraph or two in the Daily Mail or the Herald; they were off to New York or England or had just returned to their house in the Avenue du Bois. She knew nothing of the feverish, cosmopolitan society which surrounded them, nothing of the seedy, impoverished Royalists who were the poor relations of Thérèse and lived in fine, damp, decaying houses in the remote provinces, clinging to the splendor of the past because so little else remained; she knew nothing of the rich American women who had married titles.

At the lovely old house in the Rue Raynouard there were always the friends of Lily and Madame Gigon, dowdy, bourgeois and dull, among whom Lily moved with the calm of perfect security, as the one American who had ever penetrated with any success the inmost circle about the doddering Prince Bonaparte. The presence of so vigorous and arrogant a creature as Ellen they resented bitterly and sometimes openly, so that Ellen in the end was thrown for companionship, a thing of which she stood very little in need, upon Rebecca Schönberg, Schneidermann and all their hodgepodge of musicians, artists, writers and patrons of art.

Rebecca, as the months turned into years, had come to devote more and more of her time to the house in the Rue Raynouard. When she returned from Danzig, or Rome, or Vienna or wherever it happened to be, she came day after day to Numéro Dix where it was her habit to sit quietly in the big empty music room and listen with extraordinary attention while Ellen played hour upon hour. She watched Ellen’s progress with an interest of such intensity that Ellen at times grew ill-tempered and wished heartily that the sandy haired creature would disappear forever. She would, doubtless, have committed some act to sever their relationship forever save that always in the back of her mind was the certainty that the Jewess was valuable to her.

It was really the sense of Rebecca’s domination which at once annoyed and confused her; otherwise she liked her well enough. It was Rebecca who suggested the number of hours which she should practise; it was Rebecca who bullied her into going out in the world; it was Rebecca who insisted on helping her choose her clothes; it was Rebecca who even brought to the Rue Raynouard people who sent Madame Gigon into the most distant part of the house where she would be safe from the noise of their violent, modern music. It was Rebecca who at times set the house by the ears and threatened to bring about an open quarrel between Ellen and the Baron.

For a long time the enmity between these two had grown less and less concealed. Lily must have sensed conflict and in her quiet, indolent way have chosen to pretend that no strain existed. There was irony in the fact that a woman who sought only quiet and leave to do as she pleased should have found herself suddenly the battleground between two natures so violent. In dealing either with insolence or domination Lily had no difficulty; always she had gone quietly her own way achieving in the end by some unviolent coup her own desire. When she chose, even the dark, bumptious César obeyed her as a pet dog might have obeyed. She was even able to cope with Ellen (though she seldom interfered) in the very midst of the girl’s most stubborn moods. Yet when César and her cousin came into conflict, she grew helpless; it was like living perpetually on the edge of a volcano. She knew, perhaps by instinct, what it was that caused the trouble ... that each of them sought to rule the household.

So the peace had gone presently from the lovely old house. On one side were ranged César and his aunt, the blind old Madame Gigon, reënforced by the cohorts of crêpe-laden old women who came to her salons and impressed upon her the sense of her injury. On the other were ranged Ellen and her ally, the shrewd Rebecca. Between the opposing armies stood Lily who wished only peace and luxury and indolence.

* * * * *

One night early in May, before Lily’s household had moved to Germigny, Rebecca failed to appear for a concert they had planned to attend. There had been good reason; an aunt of Rebecca’s, very rich, had arrived without warning from Vienna. Yet Ellen was unreasonable and believed that Rebecca had failed her deliberately. She had gone out for a time to walk sullenly along the Seine and when she returned, she went silently to her room and locked the door. The disappointment, the softness of the evening, the look of the lights floating in the river ... all these things created an overwhelming and terrible nostalgia.

Once inside the room she flung herself down on the canopied bed, her blue black hair all tossed and disheveled, and, weeping, reproached herself bitterly. She was, she believed, a horrible creature. She had treated her mother cruelly; she had forgotten the existence of her brother--of Fergus, with his humorous blue eyes and magical sympathy and his uncanny way of understanding what it was that terrified her, what it was that made her unhappy, what it was that drove her on and on without rest or peace. She saw too her father, a mild man who loved her without making any claim, without once speaking of love. On all these she had turned her back in a heartless fashion.

And Clarence ... poor Clarence ... was always with her in these terrible moments of solitude. She knew him then as she had never known him in life; she saw him with a terrible clarity, moving about meekly with the awful look of pleading in his near-sighted eyes. He had not been like that in the beginning; he had changed while he lived with her, changed, as it were, beneath her very eyes. And she saw him too as he lay for the last time on the divan of the little flat in the Babylon Arms, peaceful at last and untormented by a woman who always eluded him, a woman whom he loved so much that he made way with himself that he might hinder her no longer. And _him_ she could never repay; it was impossible even to explain or to beg for forgiveness, though he would have said, no doubt, that there was nothing to forgive.

Then growing a little more quiet, she asked herself in one of her rare moments of reflection what power had driven her to act as she had done. To this there was no answer; it was quite beyond her. She knew, as indeed she had always known, that she must go her way, solitary and ruthless, to fulfil a rather shadowy ambition, a confused desire for vindication, a hunger for the sight of the world at her feet.

It would do no good now to turn back, because such a course could only create disaster. Sitting up among the pillows of the canopied bed she fell to staring hopelessly into the darkness. For a long time she sat thus, pale and disheveled, her long black hair streaming over the crimson peignoir. She had discovered an awful thing. She, Ellen Tolliver, who had wanted only to be free, was entangled and caught beyond all escape. She could not turn back. She could only go forward along the path which she herself had chosen, and it was a lonely path, a path so enveloped in solitude that she fell to weeping again over the desolate waste of its loneliness.

* * * * *

There was a moon which painted all the garden outside with a pale green light; the pastry-cake pavilion of Le Nôtre had turned to silver and the leaves of the old plane trees, rustling together now in the soft spring air, cast black shadows across the white terrace. Lured by the faint stream of silver that spilled in through the darkness at the tall window, Ellen rose presently and, sitting on the chaise longue, looked out over the garden. To-night the familiar, distant sound of the boat whistles along the Seine seemed very close. The hoofs of a horse passing along the cobblestones of the Rue de Passy struck up a slow tattoo that leapt the garden wall and came up to the very window. It was a foreign horse, passing along a foreign street and the garden had become remote and melancholy with a new sort of beauty. It was as if she suffered from an enchantment, as if all that had happened since the day she had gone off to skate alone on Walke’s Pond had been an hallucination, detached from all reality. She might wake and find herself once more in the shabby comfortable sitting room of the house on Sycamore Street. Still it could not be a dream; because if she returned to that shabby room, she would find it occupied by strangers she had never seen. Her mother would no longer be there, darning in the firelight, nor her father sleeping on the great divan, nor Fergus, nor Robert. They were all gone now ... gone, strange to say, in pursuit of herself. Perhaps one day they would come as far as this lovely garden. Ma would like it only because her children were there, but Fergus would know its meaning, how much of old beauty that was beyond expression lay in the silver pavilion, in the mottled trunks of the old trees and in the black filigree of shadows across the white terrace. If only Fergus could be there she would not be lonely....

And for the first time in all her life, she became sharply aware of the passing of time. She heard it rushing past her and knew that slowly, like a tide rising upon a beach of shingle, the years were stealing upon her, the years and a desperate haunting loneliness which it seemed impossible ever to escape.

* * * * *

Sitting there in the moonlight, the whole of the past rose up in a queer, muddled procession. There had been in the progression of events neither rule nor reason. Fate, one might call it, but fate was a silly name. It meant nothing; it could not explain how Clarence had turned toward her and so changed all the course of her existence; it did not explain Mr. Wyck and his muddled part in the suicide of Clarence; it did not solve that sudden, passionate interval with Richard Callendar. It was all senseless and muddled.

People might judge her as hard and cold and calculating but that, she thought, would be unjust. She had been forced to make her own way, to clear her path by the best means at hand. She had tried always to do it without harm to others. She was not, like Sabine Cane, born with all that one needed in this world. If she had been born, having those things, she might have been more happy, less lonely, less aloof. Sabine, she reflected bitterly, had everything ... wealth and friends and happiness. Even her husband had been delivered into her hands, a man who, if chance had been less cruel, might not have been hers. She envied Sabine.

So she fell to thinking of Callendar. What might have happened if she had hurt Clarence deliberately and gone away with her lover? Callendar would have married her. She would have been rich. She would have been free. There would have been no more of this struggle.

But she could not be certain. For the first time, thinking of him now out of the detachment of her loneliness, she doubted him. He might not have married her, after all. Why should he have done it? And if he had married her he might not have been stronger than this other thing which kept driving her on, this terrible ambition that was like a disease with which one was born.

What would love have been with a man like Callendar? She trembled a little at the memory of him, grown softer now with the passing of time and more sentimental. With Clarence love had been a poor timid growth, choked and inarticulate, a thing that somehow he made shameful. Callendar was not like that. Love with him must be a great glowing passion that would overwhelm all else, even her own terrible awareness.

She sighed and bound up her hair. All that had passed long ago and was done. She might die now without ever knowing anything more wonderful than the stifled, timid embraces of Clarence.

Idly, out of nowhere, into her brain there strayed presently a memory of old Julia Shane. It had happened when Ellen was a little girl and she could not think why she had remembered it, yet unaccountably it was there in her head, very clear, like an old photograph found by chance after many years. She saw old Julia sitting in the big drawing-room of Shane’s Castle on a Christmas day talking with Grandpa Barr. She was thin and hawklike and leaned forward now and then on her ebony stick to give the coals in the grate an angry poke. She had been quarreling with the vigorous old man and presently she said sharply, poking the fire for emphasis, “Fate! Pooh! Robert! Fate is no great tide that sweeps everything before it. It is a river that goes this way and that, and the smart fellow is the one who jumps when it turns in his direction!”

Aunt Julia has been right. Fate was like that and, Ellen reflected, she had jumped when she saw it coming her way, but by ill luck she had jumped sometimes full into the midst of the stream and been swept along by it.

* * * * *