Chapter XVII: Part 17

Pressing his hand more tightly, she whispered, “How could I be hard? Nothing matters ... only one thing.”

He coughed and continued. “She has done everything. She has risked the rest of her life to save me. Chausson is the great Chausson ... the surgeon from Neuilly. She knows him and he knows her husband. They are old friends. That was why he came. He is a busy man and a great surgeon. You see, she risked everything ... her reputation, her future ... everything. She did not hesitate to send for him.”

She knew now why the name had been familiar. She had heard it everywhere in the journals, from her friends in Paris. If the great Chausson believed there was no hope....

“She is a good woman ... a charming woman, Ellen. Madame Nozières is not her name. If she chooses to tell you who she is, be good to her, because I loved her.”

“I will do what you wish.”

He grinned again suddenly. “Think of it ... to get it now, after three years ... to get it now on the asphalt a block from the Trocadéro!” And then his face grew bitter. “It’s a joke ... that is!” And then, dimly, sleepily, he murmured, “We must hurry ... we must hurry.”

Ellen, still silent, found that she was praying idiotically for a thing which could never be. She knew now, sharply and cruelly, what the war, that grand parade, had been. Fergus who had loved life so passionately, who found pleasure and excitement everywhere! Fergus whom they had all loved so that they had spoiled him! Fergus lying there with his blond, curly head against the white pillows under the flying gilt swans! Those voluptuous, sensual swans! Eagles they should have been!

She could do nothing but wait. The minutes rushed past her, furiously. (We must hurry, he had said.) On the gilt dressing table one of the candles had begun to gutter and fade.

“Call them back,” he said faintly. And she rose and opened the door. Outside Doctor Chausson had taken both Madame Nozières’ small, exquisite hands and was talking to her, in a soft low voice, warm with a sort of understanding that moved Ellen queerly. They were so absorbed that they did not even notice her as she opened the door.

“Madame Nozières,” she said softly, and the woman turned toward her. She was beautiful, more beautiful than Ellen had supposed, even with the tears swimming in her blue eyes. She was small and beautiful and exquisite like a bit of Dresden china. She understood the whole thing clearly; she understood perhaps even the profundity of the love which Madame Nozières had for Fergus.

Doctor Chausson refused to come in with them. “I will stay here.... There is nothing I can do.” And so they left him, pale and hollow-eyed from work and want of sleep, to wait in the dark hallway.

Inside the room the one candle had gone out and the only light came from the single flame before the tall mirror. Fergus had closed his eyes once more, and the lids showed against the dead whiteness of the skin in a faint shade of purple. The two women sat one on each side of the gilded bed, watching in silence. Presently he opened his eyes and looking at Ellen said in English:

“This man....” He had grown weaker now and spoke with difficulty. “This man ... Callendar. Are you going to marry him?”

“I don’t know.”

He smiled. “I saw you when I came in.... That’s how I knew. I saw your hand.” And after a pause. “It’s funny ... I knew this was coming ... I knew it as I stood outside your door.”

Then he closed his eyes once more and when he spoke again it was to say weakly, “You must tell Ma.... It will be hard.... And you must not.... You must not tell her the truth.... She could never face the truth. She has never faced it.”

He reached out weakly and took the hand, on one side of Ellen and on the other of Madame Nozières. Raising himself, he grinned again and murmured in French this time, “My life.... It’s running away ... inside me. You can hear it.... I hear it ... now.” And then for a moment there was an echo of triumph, a sudden flash of Gramp whom Fergus himself had named The Everlasting. He grinned again and said, “It was a good life.... I missed nothing ... nothing at all.”

And again slowly ... “This man Callendar ... this man....”

But he never finished the sentence. He sighed and slipped back into the pillows of the bed surmounted by the four gilded swans. Madame Nozières began to weep wildly and flung herself upon him, kissing him again and again. For Ellen there was no such relief. She sat now, stark upright and tragic, bound by all the years in which she had shown a proud and scornful face to the world. No, there was no such relief for her. She knew it. She could only sit there, quietly cold and white, and all the time she wanted to scream, to cry out, to beat her head against the stone floor of the corridor where Doctor Chausson stood waiting gravely. She could only sit and watch while Madame Nozières wept out her heart.

* * * * *

It was the sound of weeping, wild and passionate, that summoned Doctor Chausson. The two women had forgotten him, but the good man knew well enough what the sound signified. Softly he opened the door and came into the frivolous room. There beside the gilded bed he saw the sister, a strange, silent, handsome woman, dressed in black with her fur coat slipped to the floor at her feet, a woman (he thought) _bien Anglaise_, who could not weep. He knew that she suffered more than the other, more than Colette who had flung herself on the boy to weep hysterically. Colette, the charming, the fastidious, the beautiful, flung down in utter disarray, her eyes red and swollen with weeping, her golden hair all disheveled.... Colette whom he had seen but two nights before flushed and radiant at the Princesse de Guermantes’. He understood now why she had been so beautiful and so happy. But the boy could not see her now, and so nothing mattered.

He stood for a moment in silence, as if in respect for the grief of the two women. All this he had seen before, many times, ... a young man, a boy, who had loved life as this one had loved it, who could jest, as this one had jested, with his very last breath. A boy whom women loved as these two women, the one so wildly, the other so profoundly, with such an intense, secret flame. It was cruel ... hideous....

He moved forward and touched Madame Nozières on her slim shoulder. And all the while he was conscious that the eyes of the other woman were watching him, stony and cold and tragic.

“Colette,” he said softly. “Colette.... You must not.... You must be quiet.” With a gentle strength he lifted her from the bed. “Colette, it is nearly dawn.... You must be discreet. There will be questions asked.”

But she paid no heed. She was sobbing now, bitterly and without shame. “You must be discreet,” he repeated.

“What difference does that make now?... It is nothing ... less than nothing....” And she fell to weeping once more.

He mixed for her a powder and forced her to drink it, saying, “There is the necessary business. You must not be seen here ... like this.”

But she would not go. It was Ellen who at last stirred herself and succeeded in quieting Madame Nozières. “I will take him to my house,” she said, quietly. “You may come there.... You may stay there if you like. It is a big house ... in the Rue Raynouard.... No one will ever know.”

She drew Doctor Chausson aside and gave him the address. “I will take care of things,” she said. “I will stay here if you will arrange for the rest. I would like to stay ... alone. It was good of you.... There is nothing I can say.”

So at last, in care of the great Doctor Chausson, Madame Nozières, pale and with swollen eyes and disheveled hair, was led away, across the stone courtyard, gray now with the faint rising light of dawn, into the big gray motor that had followed him from Neuilly to the Avenue Kléber. Ellen watched them as they crossed the yard between the empty stone urns and summer chairs piled high in the corners.

* * * * *

When they had gone, she returned to the room and, locking the door, sat down to wait. Slowly, in the gray solitude, the relief of tears came to her. She wept silently. She understood now her fear of returning too late, that vague, nameless fear for which there had been no explanation until now. She had come so near to being late ... only a matter of a few hours, of a single night. For he had escaped them all now, forever. They would never possess him again....

She looked at him, lying here white and still in the gay blue trousers with the silver braid and the yellow sash, and she understood why it was that he had seemed so young. It was because he had never really belonged to any of them. He had not even had a country of his own. He had gone out into a war which was none of his concern. There was nothing which tied him down, not even the nonsense which people talked of “la gloire” and “la patrie.” For she, in her aloofness, had known it for the nonsense it was, just as he in his good-nature and love for all the world had known it. She remembered what he had once written her.... “_A man of our generation who has missed the war will not have lived at all.... He will be a poor thing compared to the others. It is a game in which one must take a chance. It is better to die than to have missed it._”

He had believed that to the very end. Perhaps this was the secret of Old Gramp who had roamed the world and lived in this very Paris under the Second Empire. He had lived. He had done everything, and now in his old age he had a stock of memories that would last forever, a life which none of the others ever knew. He had been certain of only one life and he had made the most of it, so that he was ready when his time came to die with satisfaction, to take his chance on what lay beyond.

And as she sat there with the black dog by her side, in the slow, gray light, it occurred to her that perhaps the end of Fergus had not been after all so tragic. He had died in the very midst of life with the woman he loved at his side. If he had lived.... Who could tell? There was small place in the world for men like him. He never had the strength, the fierce aloofness of Old Gramp, the savage contempt of the old man for the drones and grubbers of life.

It was all a strange business, surely. Strange and confused and without sense. In the beginning, when she had first come into this frivolous room (so cold and dead now in the gray light) she had been angry and jealous at his deception, and bitter at Madame Nozières for having caused his death. She had thought, “If he had not been going to meet her, he would not have been killed.”

But she knew better now. She had been a fool. It was absurd and monstrous that any one, even herself, should fancy he could bend fate to his own ends. It was too imbecile, too senseless. No, she was wiser now. She was not the headlong fool she had once been. In the face of all that had happened in this one terrible night, she was utterly humbled. Who was she to question the behavior of this brother who lay dead under the gilded swans? Who was she, a cold, hard woman, to question a love of which she knew nothing? And what did it matter now? She was glad suddenly, with a strange, wild happiness, that he had known this Madame Nozières. Her blondeness, her beauty, her fine clothes, her spirit ... all these things had made him happy, on how many leaves in Paris?

What did it matter now? One lived but an instant, frantically, and time rushed on and on....

But he was right. Their mother must never know the truth.

* * * * *

She thought too of Callendar, for he was with her all the time, almost as if he had never gone away. The old foreboding returned to her--that phrase out of Lily’s letter--_And then he rode away into the darkness. I am certain he is dead._ He had gone away and she did not know where. Perhaps she had been wrong to refuse him, cruel to have denied him the happiness that Madame Nozières had given to Fergus. Things mattered so little now. It seemed to her that she stood somewhere on a lofty pinnacle, looking down on the spectacle ... a pitiful spectacle, so full of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The old quotation came back to her out of the dim memories of the past when she had hated Shakespeare with an intense passion. “Sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That was it. It was far better to be like her mother, the invincible Hattie, who never mounted to the heights but kept her eyes always on the ground, frantically occupied with a thousand tiny things, never willing, as Fergus had said, to face the truth. And now that he was gone, her favorite of them all, what would she do? There remained nothing now except the one truth which none could in the end escape.

It was daylight and the ghastly smell of picric acid had died away before she stirred herself. The morning sun, pouring in at the window, seemed to say, “This is another day. We must all go on. This is not the end of everything.”

(The sun, she thought bitterly, which Fergus had always loved even as a baby.)

So she had stirred herself wearily and gone over to the little escritoire which stood in one corner of the room. There, with the pen of gold and mother-of-pearl that belonged to Madame Nozières, she seated herself and wrote, one letter to Callendar and one to her mother. To Callendar she wrote that she would marry him as soon as it was possible. To her mother she wrote a lie. She wrote that Fergus had died in the house in the Rue Raynouard, alone with herself and Doctor Chausson who was a great doctor and came only because he was a friend of hers. Everything had been done which could be done. He would be buried not in a grave at the front nor in a lonely Paris graveyard but at Trilport, in the friendly cemetery where Madame Gigon lay, a little way off from Germigny l’Evec where Lily went in the summer.

And in the end she added another lie, because she knew it was the one thing above all else that Hattie Tolliver would want to hear. She even framed the sentence shrewdly, sentimentally, though it was false to her very nature. She wrote, “He died thinking of you. Your name was the last word he said.”

For Hattie had at last to face the truth, and one must make it as easy as possible for her.

Almost the last word he had said was, “Callendar.... This man ... Callendar.” ... And she would never know now what it was that he had meant to say.

There was a knock at the door. She knew what it was ... the men sent by Doctor Chausson.

Ignoring it, she knelt beside the bed and pressed her cheek close to the cold face of her brother. She was alone now, more alone than she had ever been in all her life, where none could see her. Then as she stood, looking down at him, it occurred to her that this death had been in a strange way a perfect thing.... He had escaped in the midst of life, happier than he had ever been before.... There were worse things than death. It was only to those who remained that death was cruel.... It was cruel to understand, in that frivolous room with the bright spring sun streaming in at the window, that she had come to know him only when he was dead. There had never been time before.... There had been only the business of fame and glory and success.

When at last she opened the door, the men sent by Doctor Chausson saw a handsome woman hard and cold, without sympathy, who stood holding by his collar a great black dog who growled at them savagely.

* * * * *

In the days that followed Madame Nozières came twice to the Rue Raynouard, once on foot and once in a taxicab though it was quite clear that she was far more used to a motor of her own--a small, very expensive motor like that of Sabine. She it was who had candles placed in the room with Fergus and had masses said for him. And to all this, which old Jacob Barr would have called “popery” and denounced as rubbish, Ellen offered no resistance; for, not being sure any longer that she herself believed in anything, she saw no harm so long as it gave comfort to others. Fergus himself, she knew, would have smiled and allowed it.

Madame Nozières wept and thanked Ellen and made her ill at ease and miserable, but she did not say who she was or whence she came. Indeed, Ellen learned no more of her identity than she had discovered from Fergus himself, as he lay dying. She was a lady, a _femme du monde_, a creature of charm and (despite her grief) of gaiety. She came out of mystery and returned to it. “Madame Nozières” was a label, perhaps as good as any other. Twice, long afterward, Ellen fancied that she saw her,--once walking in the Bois and talking earnestly with Doctor Chausson and once in the establishment of Reboux, but she could not be certain because each time she turned quickly away lest Madame Nozières should recognize her. She respected the mystery; she was afraid to intrude upon it. In some way it seemed better to leave the tragedy with its proper ending--in that frivolous room by candlelight in the Avenue Kléber. It had been in its way a complete, a perfect thing. To follow it further could lead only into triviality and disillusionment. She had no desire to know too much of Madame Nozières.

But the sense of mystery fascinated her and, in the lonely days in the Rue Raynouard, it appeared to change and soften all her beliefs. She saw now that mystery had its place in the scheme of things, that it possessed a beauty of its own which lent fascination to all life. There were others, she knew, besides Callendar who were never to be understood completely, never to be pinned down and taken apart as this or that. In all her haste, she had fancied that life was thus and so, that people were easy to fathom and understand. She doubted now whether she would ever know any one--even Lily or Rebecca. There was always something which escaped knowledge, something which lay hidden deep beneath layer upon layer of caution, of shyness, of deceit, or mockery, of a thousand things ... the something which in the end was one’s own self, the same self she had guarded with savagery through so many years.

For all that people might say or think, she understood that this Fergus, the one who stood in the candlelit room in the Avenue Kléber, had been more beautiful than any other ... as he lay there clasping with one hand his sister and with the other Madame Nozières!

57

It is true that Ellen in life and even Fergus in death did not really know their own mother. They had said that she would not be able to face the truth; yet she had done it, bravely and with a dignity that none of them would have recognized; for they had not seen her on the day she forced Judge Weissman, her enemy, to aid her because her children were the ones at stake.

So the premonition which had troubled her for so long came now to be a reality. With Ellen in Paris, Robert joined up with his own army, and Fergus (her beloved Fergus) dead, there remained only Gramp, cold and aloof and ageless, in his chamber surrounded by books.

It was the grim old man who found her lying in the darkness of the tiny living room of the flat with Ellen’s letter crushed in her hand. In his unearthly fashion he had divined the tragedy. He saw that she did not weep; she did not even moan. She lay quite still, unconscious that he stood there in the shadows watching her. It is impossible to imagine what his thoughts could have been. For a time at least the hardness which had protected him for so long must have melted a little; for Fergus had been of all the family his favorite. It was Fergus to whom he lent his precious books. It was Fergus who had seemed at times the very incarnation of his own youth--so remote now, so buried beneath all his intolerant scorn of those who were afraid to live.

For a long time he stood there watching his daughter-in-law, silently and with an intense concentration as if he were obsessed by a desire to study her sorrow with the passion of an anatomist. And then he had gone up to her and quietly taken the damp, crumpled letter with a strange gentleness out of the strong, worn hand. She did not resist; she did not even stir. She lay quite still while he held the letter close to the light and peering at it read it through, though he knew all the time what was in it.

When he had finished he laid it again by her side and said in a low voice, “The boy loved life, Hattie. And for those who die, death is not hard. There are worse things.”

In thirty years it was the first time there had passed between the two any speech purified of anger or resentment.

* * * * *

To one of Hattie’s nature there is consolation in the possession of the dead. The grim small tasks, the polite and empty phrases of condolence, the coming and going of those who care for the dead ... all this empty hubbub and commerce serves in a fashion to conceal and break the anguish of loss. But for Hattie there were not even these things. She was left alone with Gramp in a flat which, though it had seemed empty before, now achieved a desolation beyond all belief. She (who had lived only in her children) had no friends about her; the very flat was not in the proper sense a home, such as the house in Sycamore Street had been. It was a barren, inhuman cave occupied before her by a procession of strangers which, when she left, would again close over the brief years of her tenancy. She found herself alone save for that ancient man her father-in-law, in a strange city, without even the body of her son for a bitter consolation.

So this woman, who had lived her life so richly ... a life florid and overflowing with sentiment, a life that churned and raced along in an overwhelming current of vitality, achieved in the face of tragedy a calm and a dignity which she had never shown before. She understood, in the primitive depths of her nature, that this truth which she must face was the final one, from which there was no appeal. Always before there had been some hope ahead, some chance of turning events by a vast energy and a crude wilfulness to her own ends. There was nothing now ... nothing save a few old clothes, some books and the Bible she had given him on his tenth birthday. To these she clung with the tenacity of a savage, and they were pitiful remnants to a woman whose love demanded the very bodies of her children.

For Hattie there were none of those shades of grief and joy which are the lot of those more completely civilized. She had no capacity for seeing herself, or, like Ellen, for finding in the death of Fergus an illumination which served in a mysterious fashion to light up the long progression of her life. In her sorrow, Hattie no longer even pitied herself; and this, of course, may have been the secret of her dignity. Hattie, the martyr, who bore her cross and flung herself before her family like the Pope before the Visigoths, no longer existed. In her place there was a strong, almost grim woman, who was silent and did not complain.

Nor had she, like the more civilized, the pleasure of books and of philosophic reflection. Her life since the very beginning had been far too active for such things; and now, when at last there was time, when she had no one to care for save the independent old man, she could not read, she could not reflect. Books were poor pale things by comparison with the ferocious activity of life itself. There were no stockings to darn, no one for whom she might make meringues, no dog to place upon his mat before locking up the house. (To the apartment there was but one door and it locked of itself. It was, properly speaking, no real home at all.) So she came to invent things for herself to do. She lingered over her work and took (though she was rich now) to such pale tasks as embroidery and knitting, only to find that the objects of her labor, having been created for no real purpose, accumulated dismally in the drawers and cupboards.

She had letters both from Ellen and Robert which she kept in the family Bible to read over and over again; and sometimes a shameful, bitter thought crept into the recesses of her active mind. It was a terrible thought, which she thrust hastily aside as impious and touched with blasphemy; but it returned nevertheless again and again to torment her. She thought, “If only it had been Robert instead of Fergus!” (Robert who was so steadfast and reliable, who already was the youngest captain of his division). She was proud of him too, but in a different way. She could not say how....

The awful thought would not die. She would have given Robert to keep Fergus, though in the solitude of the empty flat she sometimes cried out, “It is not true. I could not think such a horrible thing!”

The squabbling with Gramp came quietly to an end, though neither of them ever made any allusion to the change. They lived together for the most part in silence but the old man ceased to torment and worry her. And on her side without ever knowing why, she came to treat him in a new way, almost to cherish and protect him like some brittle piece of glass, as all that remained of the old life. She even made for him little delicacies and had him to eat at the table with her. At such times they sat, awkwardly, and without conversation, each perhaps abashed by the weakness that lay in this strange truce.

In the long empty days there came to Hattie a mysterious sense of having turned a corner, of having stepped from one room into another. The door between had, she knew, closed forever, though she did not understand why. She had come now into the borders of Gramp’s country. She was growing old and so she came to understand a little the old man’s vast indifference.

* * * * *

Before he sailed, Robert, dressed in his captain’s uniform, neat and spotless, every button properly arranged, came to bid farewell. She could feel certain of him. There would be no mad exploits, no wild surges of temperament ending in disaster, no idle heroics undertaken for their own selfish thrill. These things Robert would never understand.

As he sat talking to her (trying bravely in his solid, unspectacular way to take the place of Fergus) he seemed square and massive and eternal as her father, old Jacob Barr, had been. There was reassurance in the snub nose, the solid jaw and the unruly red hair. Where Fergus had not even been able to look out for himself, she knew that this other son would care for his men with a detached and efficient thoroughness. There was nothing in the death of Fergus which could be counted as a material loss, even to herself. It was Robert who had earned money when it was most needed; it was Robert who looked out for her and stood between her and the world. It was upon men like Robert that the whole world rested; he was a foundation, the beginning and end of all order and worth. And yet.... And yet.... Even while he sat there doing his clumsy best to make up for the loss of his brother, the old wicked thought kept tormenting her.... She wanted to tear it out by its roots, to destroy it forever; but there it was, always with her.... _If only it had been Robert._

“You need not worry over me,” he assured her. “I will take no chances. There’s nothing romantic about war ... at least not about this one. It’s simply business. The side which is most efficient is bound to win. There won’t be any nonsense. I’ll look out for myself.”

She said to him almost with indifference, “You’re all I have left, because I don’t see much of Ellen any more. She’s too busy.”

But she was not thinking of what she said: she was thinking that war _was_ romantic. It must be so else it would not excite men as it excited Fergus. It was the romance that was the bait in the trap ... romance and the excitement. So long as these things existed, there would be wars, for there would be men like Fergus who did not take their places efficiently but went because (she remembered one of the phrases he had used again and again in the face of her reproaches) “it was too big a show to be missed.” It was not men like Robert who made war possible; it was men like Fergus. She saw it all with a vision uncluttered by talk of economics and politics; and so in her own fashion she came far nearer to the truth than this solid, logical son of hers.

But he was sure of himself, Robert. You could fancy him ordering his men about, ably and dispassionately, leading them admirably when it was necessary, as his grandfather Barr, the Citizen, had done before him in the Civil War. He would make a good job of it. You could see that he would quietly and thoroughly win distinction, not as Fergus had done, without once thinking of it, but because he had arranged it so. You could see him being decorated with medals, as his brother had been decorated, again and again; but not for the same reason. He would not wear them as Fergus had done, with a swagger. He would cherish them, in neat leather cases, and bring them out to show his children and his grandchildren, because he could not tell them what the war was like, give them the feel of it, as Fergus could have done ... Fergus who (if he had lived) would have lost the medals or thrown them away long ago in disgust like his Grandfather Tolliver, who found the Siege of Paris more romantic than Bull Run or Gettysburg. He had, one fancied, already counted his medals. One could see that he was cut out for a good officer.

“I will see Ellen as soon as I have leave,” he murmured and thought, “And I will not be walking about the streets during an air raid as if I were at a church sociable.”

Yet he was not bitter because Fergus was the better loved; that fact he had come long since to accept. He was scornful only because it seemed to him an idiotic thing to be wandering carelessly into the midst of danger. There could be no reason for it ... none on earth.

Before he left, Hattie burdened him with a great bundle of sweaters and socks, all admirably made in the hours when she had been distracted by her terror of idleness.

“You must wear them all yourself,” she said. “You’ll need them in time. They’ll wear out and you’ll lose them. I’ll send you others from time to time. It’s all I have to do nowadays.”

And on the way past the cell occupied by The Everlasting he must have heard the squeaking of his grandfather’s chair as the old man rocked and rocked, lost again in a torrent of memories; but he did not stop.

“Say good-by for me to The Everlasting,” he said and then, after kissing her abruptly, he turned and disappeared quickly down the stairs, so that she could not see his tears. For Robert was, unlike the others, sentimental, though he had never once allowed his mother the joy of discovering it. It was a thing which he thought shameful.

Even he had caught a sense of her terrible desolation.

* * * * *

There is a rhythm in life, a certain beauty which operates by a variation of lights and shadows, happiness alternating with sorrow, content with discontent, distilling in this process of contrast a sense of satisfaction, of richness that can be captured and pinned down only by those who possess the gift of awareness. Old Gramp in his solitude knew well its workings, and Ellen, in Paris, had become, as the tempo of her own life began to lose its intensity, to understand it dimly. For Hattie, in the fretful ebb and flow of her existence there could never be such knowledge. This rhythm, this beauty, existed outside her, a thing apart, beyond the wall of her consciousness.

Gramp, in his solitude, knew too that there were in each life hills and valleys and, rising above them all, one peak which pierced the clouds. Out of the depths of his uncanny perception he came to understand that Hattie’s life had passed its solitary peak. It had begun now to slip down the other side; what remained could be but a gradual falling away, a gentle decline until the end. What he knew from the summit of a monstrous detachment came to Hattie vaguely through her senses; she knew it as she knew the approach of damp weather by its effect upon her rheumatism. It was that sense of having passed from one room into another, with the door behind her closed and bolted forever.

And Ellen.... She too stood now on the summit, for ambition had been the beginning and end of her existence. She had accomplished; she had won. There would never be another peak so lofty, so enveloped in heady invigorating air; nor one so lonely. But there remained the things which lie always on the opposite slope of the peak--the things which the wise, like Gramp, place above all the hurry, the scramble, the headlong turmoil of the long ascent. There were the gentle pastures of reflection, of kindliness, of warmth and fine thoughts, all the rewards which succeed the terrible struggle. Ellen, he knew, had crossed the summit; and she was still a young woman.

58

One bright spring morning as Hattie sat looking out into the street while she sewed and thought, round and and round, over and over again, those same thoughts which stole in upon her so frequently in these days of idleness, the postman brought a letter from Ellen. It was a brief letter, written it seemed in haste, but it contained two bits of news that changed the whole face of the world.

Ellen was to be married, and she wanted Hattie to come to Paris and make her home there.

“I have talked it over with Lily,” she wrote, “and she is delighted with the plan. Her house here is enormous and comfortable, and Lily is rarely in it save in the spring and autumn. You could do as you chose with no one to annoy you. And you need never think or worry about housekeeping. I am sending a cheque, and Rebecca’s uncle Mr. Schönberg is arranging for tickets. It is difficult to travel nowadays, but I have talked to Mrs. Callendar and she has written to a friend of hers, Malcolm Travers, the banker, who will arrange passports for you. You will hear from him within a few days after this letter.”

And about her own plans she wrote, “I am marrying Richard Callendar, the son of the same Mrs. Callendar. You remember her? You met her on the night of my first concert in America, a small, fat dark woman covered with dirty diamonds. You may have read of the family in the papers, for they are well known. They are very rich. He is four years older than me. I have known him for nearly ten years. He wanted to marry me before, years ago. (And then a sudden flash of the old Ellen who had walked away in the sunlight to skate on Walker’s Pond.) Fancy me, marrying a millionaire!”

So, in an instant, everything was changed and Hattie’s world grew bright once more. It was all so preposterous--to have Ellen arranging everything in this grand manner, the tickets, the passports, as if her mother were a queen whose journey was to be made as simple and free of trouble as possible. And the cheque and the millionaire husband! Yet, when the sense of excitement had abated a little, she remembered that she had always known her children were not of ordinary flesh and blood. There had been something extraordinary about them. Look at Ellen! Famous and rich and now marrying a millionaire.

But her satisfaction was not free from the old doubts. Was he--this Callendar--good enough for her? Clarence had never been. It was a good thing, she reflected, that he had died. What could she have done with him during all these years ... Clarence, a poor thing at best, always complaining of his health.

But this Callendar. Who was he and why had she never spoken of him before? Surely she was a strange girl who kept such secrets so passionately hidden. Where had he come from? Was he of good healthy stock? What had his life been? For a time she paced up and down the room in a ferment of curiosity. She tried to imagine what sort of man Ellen would choose to marry. (This time she must be marrying only for love; there could be no other reason.) She tried again and again to picture him and she found herself baffled. It was impossible to imagine....

And when she had grown more calm and the sense of the dreary flat was borne in upon her once more, she remembered The Everlasting. He was ninety-five, and yet not really an old man; his mind had never faltered in its course. But he was feeble and needed care. She could not desert him now. She deceived herself into believing that it was her duty to care for him until he died; and only the Almighty knew when that would be. No, she must take him with her. She could not leave him, as Ellen suggested, in some home for the aged. That would be wrong; it would be, in a sense, indecent. He was after all the father of her husband, the grandfather of her children. One could not do a thing like that. She debated the matter with herself for hours, thinking, strangely enough, only of reasons why she _should_ take him; and it never once occurred to her that she really had no desire _not_ to take him. The arguments against it were simply the habit of an intermittent civil war that had endured for more than thirty years. She could not bear to leave him behind, any more than she could have borne it to leave behind the old clothes, the worn shoes, and the Bible she had given Fergus on his tenth birthday. Gramp was a fixture now, a part of the past. Without him she would feel lost and lonely.

When she told him the intoxicating news, the old man, with a wariness that placed no trust in their unreal truce, looked at her sharply and said, doubtfully, “I don’t know, Hattie. I’m too old and too feeble. I think perhaps I’d better stay behind.” He opposed the idea in the belief that if he opposed it she would insist upon its being carried through.

But she was firm. She would not even argue the matter. He must go with her to Paris. He would be quite as well off there as anywhere else and he would at least be where she could look after him.

“Much better off,” thought Gramp, whose only desire was to see Paris again before he died. But he still maintained a resentful air as if he opposed the idea with his last breath but was far too feeble to offer any real resistance.

59

In Paris the house in the Rue Raynouard was got ready for the arrival. It had begun again to take on a little of the old gaiety and sense of life, for it had passed through the depths of its depression in the days which first Lily and then Ellen had spent there alone in their sorrow. All things pass in time and so the grief and loneliness had begun to pass from the house. Lily, as the shrewd Rebecca predicted during her first quarrel with Ellen, found in time some one to console her for the loss of César. It was impossible that one so simple, so without complexities, should have gone on mourning; Lily lived as much in the present as Ellen lived in the future. Her consoler was the grave, dignified Monsieur de Cyon (the same white-haired gentleman connected with the government, whom Fergus had met at tea) the widower of “Tiens! Tiens!” de Cyon, whom Ellen had loathed long ago when she first came to the Rue Raynouard. He was glad no doubt to have been freed by death from the crêpe-laden “Tiens! Tiens!” and satisfied to have found so agreeable a creature as Lily--a woman whom he described to his friends as dignified, worldly, cultivated and beautiful, not omitting the fact that she was very rich and that she was an American, a factor of political importance at a moment when America was so necessary to Europe in general and to France in particular.

And Lily too was, in her casual way, content with such a marriage. In the room, smelling of scent and powder, where she had exchanged other confidences with Ellen, she said, “He is a gentleman and distinguished. Perhaps he may be in the next cabinet. I am rich. I can help him. And as for me....” She laughed softly, with a touch of the old abandon in her voice. “He will not bother me much. He is an old man.” But she was grave too when she spoke again. “And I ... I am no longer young. I am forty-three. I must begin to look about for something to take the place of youth. I shall make him a good wife. I shall be able to entertain and give dinners that will help him and I will have a position that I have never had before.”

And then she grew thoughtful and added, “It will be good for Jean too. It is time he had a father ... a thing he has never had. It is time that I stepped out of the picture and made way for him.”

She had lived, if not a life beyond reproach, one that was at least discreet and marked by good taste, and so the other things, since the world is as it is, did not matter. Of those who had really known her secret only three remained ... Ellen and Hattie and Jean. César and Madame Gigon and Old Julia were dead. It did not, of course, occur to her to include The Everlasting, who had known all the while.

* * * * *

Jean too was happier now, for he had grown used to wandering about on crutches and had become accustomed to a new leg, made so admirably that he could still ride as much as he liked. It would have been impossible for him to have remained depressed; there was too much of Lily in him and, it must not be forgotten, he resembled Fergus greatly. The old friendship between him and Ellen waxed stronger than ever. It seemed to her at times that Fergus had returned or had never died at all. In the evenings while his mother sat talking quietly in the big soft drawing room with Monsieur de Cyon, Ellen joined him at the piano in playing with four hands the wildest songs out of the music halls. Rebecca in rare moments of good humor added to the gaiety with imitations of poor old Sarah Bernhardt or Mistinguette or Spinelly.

Rebecca had long since come to make herself at home in the big house. She was settled now in one of the rooms opening on the long gallery and she was perpetually with them, for it never occurred to Lily to offer objections to one more guest; but, having nothing to occupy her time, she grew irritable and restless. Her occupation had gone suddenly and there remained nothing to absorb her energy. Ellen remained stubborn and mysterious. She would not return to America where there was a fortune awaiting her.

“I have enough,” she said. “I need not work myself to death. I am rich now. I am through with struggling. Whenever I see fit I can return.”

But to Rebecca, it must have seemed that Ellen had slipped somehow out of her reach, beyond the control which she had once held over her. She would not even quarrel as they had once done so often and with such vigor. She would simply repeat, “No. When I am ready, I will tell you. I am going to rest for a time.”

It was her contentment that clearly had the power of disturbing Rebecca. She seemed at times almost happy. The old wilfulness and caprice were gone, and when she sat at the piano with Jean, there were times when it even seemed that she was enveloped by a hard, bright gaiety, touched, it is true, by hysteria and bitterness. She was unmanageable in a way she had never been.

“You are deceiving me,” Rebecca reproached her. “There is something that I don’t know. You are keeping something from me.” And she would grow tearful and descend to the rich depths of Oriental sentiment. “Me,” she would repeat, beating her thin breast, “who have given my life for you ... who have worked myself to the bone ... given all my time.... For no other reason than to make you a success. It is shameful.”

And Ellen, in her new wisdom, might have answered, “Because you have found the thing you were born to do. Because you were aimless till you fastened upon me.... Because you found happiness in taking possession of me and my life.”

But she said none of these things because it seemed to her that quarreling was useless. She only laughed and replied, “And you told the most wonderful lies about me.... You created Lilli Barr but Lilli Barr is having a rest now. I am being myself ... Ellen Tolliver ... for a little time.”

Still Rebecca, too wise to be put off with such answers, only looked at her with suspicion and remained sulky. She could not run off now to visit Uncle Otto and Aunt Lina in Vienna nor the aunt in Riga nor the cousins in Trieste. She could not even make a round of the watering places, for all those which were not closed or filled with wounded soldiers lay on the other side of the circus parade that had begun to draw near to the end. One could almost hear the distant toots of the steam calliope, manned and manipulated by politicians, that fetched up the rear.

July had passed and with it the last peril to Paris, but still Callendar did not return. She heard from him whenever he had time to write. They were busy now (he wrote). They were beginning to look toward the end. The arrival of the Americans had done much for the French, not that they counted for much because there were not enough of them, but because, simply, they were _there_. He had kept on the _qui vive_ for her other brother--Robert--but he had not come across him. It was not strange since his own division was nowhere near the Americans. Still he might see him.... One could never tell.... They expected to be shifted soon eastward in the direction of the (here the word was deleted), quite near to the Americans. It was easy for him to make himself acquainted since he was, after all, half-American.

And he would write again and again, “Do not worry about me. I have the most incredible luck--always. There are some men who go through the thing _knowing_ that nothing will ever happen to them. I _know_ it. It’s a feeling that is in the bones. In the worst messes, I have that feeling ... so strong that it is physical. ‘Nothing will happen to me ... nothing whatever,’ I find myself repeating over and over again.”

And as she read this, it occurred to her again that such a belief belonged to the part of him which had always been strange to her--the part which escaped in some nameless fashion even the limits of her imagination. It was mystical and profound and uncanny. At the very moment that she knew he must be right in his faith, she was terrified too because he was so certain. She could not believe with such intensity save in herself. Her beliefs were related always to the power, the force which she herself had at her own command; and in all the senseless, miserable killing there was no power which lay in one’s self. It was simply a monstrous game of chance with the odds all against one.

But she found a happiness in those letters of a sort which she had never imagined. It seemed to her that in some way a part of herself was there with him enduring the same hardships and dangers, and for the first time in all her life she touched the borders of the satisfaction which comes of sharing an experience. She was troubled no longer by doubts; now that she had given her word, it never occurred to her to change. There was relief in the knowledge that all the years of indecision were at an end. There was satisfaction in feeling that the thing had been settled.

But she was abashed at the bold passion with which he wrote, shamelessly, assailing the wall of her fierce reserve. She was abashed and yet triumphant, for in all the years of struggle she had forgotten at times that she was a woman and young. His letters made her know for a little time some of the joy which Lily had possessed since the beginning.

He wrote at length that Sabine’s divorce was completed. “I am free now and will have a leave soon, so we can try then to make up for all the wasted years. Because they have been wasted. We should have been married long ago. We should have been courageous enough to have cut through the tangle and set things right. We were cowardly then. It is tragic that we only learn through long experience that wastes so much of joy, so much of happiness. But you are mine now ... mine forever. I shall never lose you again....”