Читать книгу They Stooped to Folly - Ellen Glasgow - Страница 4

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Mr. Virginius Curle Littlepage, who had his reason apart from the weather for a melancholy view of life, stood at the window of his law office and looked out upon a depressing afternoon in November. Against blown sheets of rain his large, benign head was dimly etched by the firelight. At fifty-seven, his dark hair was still thick and only a little grey on the temples; his ruddy Georgian features were still noble in contour; and his short, well-fed figure, though a trifle stout at the waist, was still imposing in carriage. For he was one of those Virginian pillars of society that are held upright less by singleness of heart than by the firm support of woman's influence.

Without, he saw clouds, rain, mist, a few scudding yellow leaves from a tormented elm, and all the uniform ugliness of a commercial invasion. Within, illumined by the sunken fire of his youth, he looked back upon the creditable years of his life, and felt that he hated them. When had he really lived? When, in all his successful career, had he reached after happiness? When, even for an hour, had he taken the thing that he wanted? Gazing down on the flooded High Street in Queenborough, he told himself that he had learned to bridle his impulses from the hour of his birth. He had respected convention; he had deferred to tradition. Yet to-day, by this dying flare of the years, all the sober pleasures he had known appeared as worthless as cinders. "What is the meaning of it?" he asked, with a start of dismay. "Is it middle age? Is it the fatal inadequacy of all human experience? Or is it merely that I have become a disappointed idealist?"

A philosopher by habit of mind, he persisted in his search for the cause beneath his disenchantment with life. "I've had more than most men," he continued precisely. "I've been successful beyond my deserts. I was born with the things for which other men sacrifice pleasure and health, and I've gone as far, at least in Virginia, as my profession can take me. Moreover, I've one of the best wives in the world, and no man could ask for three finer children. Duncan, to be sure, contracted a form of moral dyspepsia in the war; but any father ought to be satisfied with so normal a son as Curle. Common, perhaps, in spite of his blood, though a taint of vulgarity, as Marmaduke would say, helps a man to feel at home in his world. And Mary Victoria! A girl like Mary Victoria, blessed with beauty, sense, character, and determination, scarcely needed a world at war and a white veil to turn her into a heroine. True, she stayed abroad too long when she went back after the Armistice. But in a few hours she will be home again, and we shall soon have forgotten how we've missed her. . . . Yes, my children are all right, and so, of course, is their mother. When I think of the nervous and naggling wives that drive men to despair, I ought to be thankful that Victoria has never lost control of herself since she married me. No, it is not that. Something else must be wrong. I seem to have had everything, yet I feel--I've felt for months--as if I'd never had anything that I wanted. The war, I suppose. But the war has been over for five years, and I've had time enough to grow used to the changes. Unless"--he drew his breath in horror--"I've all along missed the excitement we lived in." Though he told himself that the memory of the war had sunk in a black chill to the very pit of his soul, he knew that nothing else could be compared in vehemence with that witches' sabbath of released desires. "For once we were natural," he thought, while the sensation of cold nausea crept from its retreat and invaded his mind. "We were trying to be too superior, and it was a relief, even to the women, especially to the women, when the savage hunger broke through the thin crust we call civilization. It was a relief to us all, no doubt, to be able to think murder and call it idealism. But the war wasn't the worst thing," he concluded grimly. "The worst thing is this sense of having lost our way in the universe. The worst thing is that the war has made peace seem so futile. It is just as if the bottom had dropped out of idealism. . . ."

Behind him the door opened and shut. Without turning, he was aware that the younger of his two secretaries laid a pile of letters in front of the immense ebony inkstand, shaped like an elephant, which his wife had given him on his birthday a few weeks before. While he looked at the rain, he could see the ivory and dusk of the girl in the firelight. Her name was Milly Burden, and he had found her attractive enough to arrest his attention without unsettling the stable equilibrium of his emotions. For nearly six years she had remained more or less of a mystery; and though she had remained more or less of a mystery, he had always respected her. In the beginning his ideals had restrained him; and after he had lost his ideals, an obscure aversion, familiar to him as the instincts of a gentleman, had adequately taken their place. He pitied her; he had become sincerely attached to her; but all modern youth was too hard, too flippant, too brazen, he felt, to awaken romantic desire. Had he been capable of desire without romance, he would still have harboured a prejudice in favour of severe virtue in women. Not all his affection for Milly Burden, not all his admiration for her courage and the flower-like blue of her eyes, could blind him to the fact that she had once forgotten her modesty. Other women, it is true, had forgotten their modesty even in Queenborough, where modesty, though artfully preserved, was by no means invulnerable. But these other women, though one of them was his own poor Aunt Agatha and another was his attractive, if unfortunate, neighbour, Mrs. Dalrymple, were all safely provided for either by the code of a gentleman or by the wages of sin. With Milly Burden, however, there was a difference. From the beginning of their acquaintance she had treated the feminine sense of sin with the casual modern--or was it merely the casual masculine touch? Ever since the unhappy occasion near the end of the war, when she had become involved in those troubles that overtake women who are more generous than prudent, he had waited in vain for the first sign of repentance. She had, he knew, suffered desperately. Not even poor Aunt Agatha, wrapped in her sense of sin as in perpetual widow's weeds, had loved more unwisely than Milly. The difference, he perceived reluctantly, was less in the measure than in the nature of their guilty passions. While poor Aunt Agatha, condemned by the precepts of beautiful behaviour to her third-story back bedroom, had mourned the loss of her virtue, Milly Burden, typing his letters with light fingers and a despairing heart, had mourned only the loss of her lover. The war had taken him away from her; and, with a dark and bitter passion, she had hated the war and all the contagious war idealism which had swept Mary Victoria, like a winged victory in a Red Cross uniform, as far as the distressed but animated Balkan kingdoms. Though he had disapproved of Milly, it was pleasant to remember now that he had protected her. Her youth, her gallantry, and her imprudent passion, had stirred him more deeply than he had ever dared to confess. Assisted by his wife, he had helped the girl in her trouble, and, opposed by his wife, he had received her again when her trouble was over. Her story was common enough, but he was sufficiently discerning to realize that Milly herself was unusual. Her indifference to what in a Victorian lady he would have called her frailty, appeared in some incredible fashion to redeem her character. "After all, is it the sense of sin that makes the fallen woman?" he asked himself in serious disturbance of mind.

This had occurred more than five years before, and while he had meditated on the painful nature of her problems, Milly had looked up at him with disaster, and yet something stronger than disaster in her deep blue eyes.

"Does he know of--of this?" Mr. Littlepage had asked, with sternness.

"I haven't told him. He couldn't do anything, and besides, he is miserable. He isn't a fighter. He was always afraid of life. Some men are, you know. That makes it harder for me. I am living with his fear all the time."

"And not with your own?"

"Oh, I'm not like that. I haven't enough imagination. I take what comes, but I don't go out looking for trouble. Martin does."

"Is his name Martin?"

"Martin Welding. Do you know him?"

"I am not sure. Was his mother an Annersley?" Vaguely he had remembered that one of the obscure Annersley girls had married a Welding, who had proved worthless and finally taken to drink.

"Yes. She is dead now."

"What does he do?"

"He was in a bank. There wasn't much in that, but he was trying to write. He is only twenty-two."

Twenty-two, and Milly, at the time, was not yet nineteen! "Well, if I were you, my dear, I should let him know of this," he had said gently, while Milly wept with a violence that penetrated his heart.

"I am not thinking about this. I am thinking that I may never see him again," she had sobbed, as she dried her eyes.

Whether she had told Martin or not, Mr. Littlepage had never discovered. By the time she came out of the hospital, where the child, blighted by Mrs. Burden's moral sense, had withered immediately, the war was already over, and he had thought it wiser, as well as kinder, to ask no questions. Then, three years later, she had broken through her reserve in the hope that his daughter, who was employed in the reconstruction of Europe, might help to find Martin Welding.

"But the war has been over for almost three years, my dear. Where has he been all this time?"

"He was sent home in a hospital ship. For six months they kept him in St. Elizabeth's. I went there every Sunday when they would let me see him."

"And you said nothing about it?"

"What was there to say? I saved all my money for those trips. I never spent a penny on myself."

"So that was why--" Overwhelmed by the discovery, Mr. Littlepage had gazed at her through an iridescent film of emotion. That was why she had appeared so much shabbier than Miss Dorset, who was independent in means and superior to men.

"Yes, that was why."

"And I never suspected."

"There wasn't anything to suspect."

"In all that time did you tell him?"

A look of agony, which he had never forgotten, convulsed her thin features. "How could I? They said in the hospital that we must tell him nothing depressing. I always hoped that when he was well again everything would be just as it was before. Love can keep alive on so little hope."

"But didn't you see him after he left the hospital?"

"Not often. After he got his discharge, he tried to find work in New York. That was too far for me to go, and he could not afford to come home. Then suddenly he went back to France."

"Didn't he see you before he sailed?"

"No, he wrote from the ship. He was at the end of his luck, he said. Everything had failed him, and he had had to borrow money to go back in the steerage. He hated America, and he hoped that, if he went back to France, he might be able to write what he felt about it. If he ever got on his feet again, he said, he would send for me, and he added that but for me he should have given up hope. When he was in the hospital he wanted to kill himself."

An unmitigated cad, Mr. Littlepage had reflected; and while he watched her stricken eyes (the eyes of a dying hope, he thought sentimentally), he had mused upon the singular power that masculine cads exercise over the feminine mind.

"Did he write after he went back to France?"

"Only in the beginning. At first he was lonely and miserable, and he seemed eager for me to write to him. Then his letters stopped suddenly. It has been almost six months since I heard from him. I want to find out the truth. Even if he is dead, even if he has killed himself, I must find out the truth. Anything is better than this suspense."

"Well, I'll see what I can do, my child." Mr. Littlepage had promised readily, for he had one of the kindest hearts in the world; and before going to bed that night, he had written a vague but urgent letter to his daughter. If anything could be done, he assured himself in distress, Mary Victoria, who had a firm hand with an emergency, would he equal to the occasion. Not only was Milly as dear, by this time, as a second and less formidable daughter, but he was sentimental enough to deal mildly with love when it did not endanger either his peace or his prospects. That Mary Victoria was more than equal to the event was proved, within a reasonable space of time, by a triumphant cable which announced that Martin Welding had been found in a provincial French hospital. He was suffering, the message briefly divulged, from "a nervous collapse," and this was followed by the encouraging words, "We are helping him." Several months later she had written that Martin was out of the hospital, but still subject to attacks of depression, and unwilling to return to America because he felt he had made a failure of life. "We have offered him the position of secretary in our orphanage," she had concluded, "and he may go back with us to the Balkans. It seems the best thing for him to do." Two years had passed since that letter, but there had been no other mention of Martin. Though Mr. Littlepage had asked many questions, Mary Victoria had neglected to answer them. Apparently the young man with the inadequate nervous system had dropped out of her noble and active life, and she seemed to be occupied with more important affairs.