Читать книгу Women - Booth Tarkington - Страница 6

Table of Contents

MRS. CROMWELL also looked at the new house; then she shook her head. “It’s painful, rather,” she said, and evidently referred to something more than the house itself.

“Outright disgusting!” her friend insisted. “I suppose he’s there as much as ever?”

“Oh, yes. Rather more.”

“Well, I’ll say one thing,” Mrs. Dodge declared; “Amelia Battle won’t get any sympathy from me!”

“Sympathy? My dear, you don’t suppose she dreams she needs sympathy! Doesn’t she show the rest of us every day how she pities us because we’re not married to Roderick Brooks Battle?”

“Yes, and that’s what makes me so furious. But she will need sympathy,” Mrs. Dodge persisted, with a dark glance at the new house across the street. “She will when she knows about that!”

“But maybe she’ll never know.”

“What!” Mrs. Dodge laughed scornfully. “My dear, when a woman builds a man into a god he’s going to assume the privileges of a god.”

“And behave like the devil?”

“Just that,” Mrs. Dodge returned, grimly. “Especially when his idolater has burnt up her youth on his altar and her friends begin to notice she’s getting a skimpy look. What chance has a skimpy-looking slave against a glittering widow rich enough to build a new house every time she wants to have tête-à-têtes with a godlike architect?”

“But she’s only built one,” Mrs. Cromwell cried, protesting.

“So far!” her pessimistic companion said; then laughed at her own extravagance, and became serious again. “I think Amelia ought to know.”

“Oh, no!”

“Yes, she ought,” Mrs. Dodge insisted. “In the first place, she ought to be saved from making herself so horribly ridiculous. Of course, she’s always been ridiculous; but the way she raves about him when he’s raving about another woman—why, it’s too ridiculous! In the second place, if she knew something about the Mrs. Sylvester affair now it might help her to bear a terrific jolt later.”

“What terrific jolt, Lydia?”

“If he leaves her,” Mrs. Dodge said, gravely. “If Mrs. Sylvester decides to make him a permanent fixture. Men do these things nowadays, you know.”

“Yes, I know they do.” Mrs. Cromwell looked as serious as her friend did, though her seriousness was more sympathetically a troubled one than Mrs. Dodge’s. “Poor Amelia! To wear her youth out making a man into such a brilliant figure that a woman of the Sylvester type might consider him worth while taking away from her——”

“Look!” Mrs. Dodge interrupted in a thrilled voice.

A balustraded stone terrace crossed the façade of the new house, and two people emerged from a green door and appeared upon the terrace. One was a man whose youthful figure made a pleasing accompaniment to a fine and scholarly head;—he produced, moreover, an impression of success and distinction obvious to the first glance of a stranger, though what was most of all obvious about him at the present moment was his devoted, even tender, attention to the woman at his side. She was a tall and graceful laughing creature, so sparklingly pretty as to approach the contours and colours of a Beauty. Her rippling hair glimmered with a Venetian ruddiness, and the blue of her twinkling eyes was so vivid that a little flash of it shot clear across the street and was perceptible to the two observant women as brightest azure.

Upon her lovely head she had a little sable hat, and, over a dress of which only a bit of gray silk could be glimpsed at throat and ankle, she wore a sable coat of the kind and dimensions staggering to moderate millionaires. She had the happy and triumphant look of a woman confident through experience that no slightest wish of hers would ever be denied by anybody, herself distinctly included; and, all in all, she was dazzling, spoiled, charming, and fearless.

Certainly she had no fear of the two observant women, neither of their opinion nor of what she might give them cause to tell;—that sparkle of azure she sent across the intervening street was so carelessly amused it was derisive, like the half nod to them with which she accompanied it. She and her companion walked closely together, absorbed in what they were saying, her hand upon his arm; and, when they came to the terrace steps, where a closed foreign car waited, with a handsome young chauffeur at the wheel and a twin of him at attention beside the door, she did a thing that Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Cromwell took to be final and decisive.

Her companion had evidently offered some light pleasantry or witticism at which she took humorous offense, for she removed her white-gloved hand from his arm and struck him several times playfully upon the shoulder—but with the last blow allowed her hand to remain where it was; and, although she might have implied that it was to aid her movement into the car, the white fingers could still be seen remaining upon the shoulder of the man’s brown overcoat as he, moving instantly after her, took his seat beside her in the gray velvet interior. Thus, what appeared to be a playful gesture protracted itself into a caress, and a caress of no great novelty to the participants.

At least, it was so interpreted across the street, where Mrs. Dodge gave utterance to a sound vocal but incoherent, and Mrs. Cromwell said “Oh, my!” in a husky whisper. The French car glided by them, passing them as they openly stared at it, or indeed glared at it, and a moment later it was far down the street, leaving them to turn their glares upon each other.

“That settles it,” Mrs. Dodge gasped. “It ought to have been a gondola.”

“A gondola?”

“A Doge’s wife carrying on with a fool poet or something;—she always has that air to me. What a comedy!”

Mrs. Cromwell shook her head; her expression was of grief and shock. “It’s tragedy, Lydia.”

“Just as you choose to look at it. The practical point of view is that it’s going to happen to Amelia, and pretty soon, too! Some day before long that man’s going to walk in and tell her she’s got to step aside and let him marry somebody else. Doesn’t what we just saw prove it? That woman did it deliberately in our faces, and she knows we’re friends of his wife’s. She deliberately showed us she didn’t care what we saw. And as for him——”

“He didn’t see us, I think,” Mrs. Cromwell murmured.

“See us? He wouldn’t have seen Amelia herself if she’d been with us—and she might have been! That’s why I say she ought to know.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’d like to——”

“Somebody ought to,” Mrs. Dodge said, firmly. “Somebody ought to tell her, and right away, at that.”

“Oh, but——”

“Oughtn’t she to be given the chance to prepare herself for what’s coming to her?” Mrs. Dodge asked, testily. “She’s made that man think he’s Napoleon, and so she’s going to get what Napoleon’s wife got. I think she ought to be warned at once, and a true friend would see to it.”

In genuine distress, Mrs. Cromwell shrank from the idea. “Oh, but I could never——”

“Somebody’s got to,” Mrs. Dodge insisted, implacably. “If you won’t, then somebody else.”

“Oh, but you—you wouldn’t take such a responsibility, would you? You—you wouldn’t, would you, Lydia?”

The severe matron, Lydia Dodge, thus flutteringly questioned, looked more severe than ever. “I shouldn’t care to take such a burden on my shoulders,” she said. “Looking after my own burdens is quite enough for me, and it’s time I was on my way to them.” She moved in departure, but when she had gone a little way, spoke over her shoulder, “Somebody’s got to, though! Good-bye.”

Mrs. Cromwell, murmuring a response, entered her own domain and walked slowly up the wide brick path; then halted, turned irresolutely, and glanced to where her friend marched northward upon the pavement. To Mrs. Cromwell the outlines of Mrs. Dodge, thus firmly moving on, expressed something formidable and imminent. “But, Lydia——” the hesitant lady said, impulsively, though she knew that Lydia was already too distant to hear her. Mrs. Cromwell took an uncertain step or two, as if to follow and remonstrate, but paused, turned again, and went slowly into her house.

A kind-hearted soul, and in a state of sympathetic distress for Amelia Battle, she was beset by compassion and perplexity during what remained of the afternoon; and her husband and daughters found her so preoccupied at the dinner-table that they accused her of concealing a headache. But by this time what she concealed was an acute anxiety; she feared that Lydia’s sense of duty might lead to action, and that the action might be precipitate and destructive. For Mrs. Cromwell knew well enough that Amelia’s slavery was Amelia’s paradise—the only paradise Amelia knew how to build for herself—and paradises are, of all structures, the most perilously fragile.

Mrs. Cromwell was the more fearful because, being a woman, she understood that more than a sense of duty would impel Lydia to action: Lydia herself might interpret her action as the prompting of duty, but the vital incentive was likely to be something much more human; for within the race is a profound willingness to see a proud head lowered, particularly if that head be one that has displayed its pride. Amelia had displayed hers too long and too gallingly for Lydia’s patience;—Lydia had “really meant it,” Mrs. Cromwell thought, recalling the fierceness of Mrs. Dodge’s “I’ve had all I can stand of it!” that afternoon. A sense of duty with gall behind it is indeed to be feared; and the end of Mrs. Cromwell’s anxieties was the conclusion that Amelia’s paradise of slavery was more imminently threatened by the virtuous Lydia than by that gorgeous pagan, Mrs. Sylvester.