Читать книгу They Stooped to Folly - Ellen Glasgow - Страница 5

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"I wonder why Mary Victoria never told us what happened," he mused this afternoon, while his mind turned back to the silence and anxiety of all the years since the war. "Did something occur that she couldn't bear writing us? Is it possible that the chap went out of his mind or even made away with himself?" Well, whatever had happened, he could do no good by beginning this futile speculation all over again. In a few hours, unless there had been a delay with the Customs, his daughter would be in his arms and could no longer evade a reply. Suspense had been hard; but it was unfair to expect Mary Victoria to realize the slow torture of a referred catastrophe. Meanwhile, the best way was to put Milly's anxiety out of his thoughts. . . . Should he go on to his club in the hope of diversion? Or would it be easier, as well as more prudent, to wait, as he had promised, until Victoria stopped by for him? . . .

Through his slow but thorough mind there floated a disquieting vision of his favourite club. Shivering in the chill dawn of prohibition, he watched a few timid drinkers (Ah, degenerate scions of the Virginian throats of hickory!) measure out their evening thimblefuls of old Bourbon. "No, there's nothing in that for me," he thought gloomily, and decided that it would be wiser to wait until his wife picked him up on her way home from a lecture.

Victoria, he knew, could be trusted to come early. Though she had found time, since the children were grown, to take part in several major reforms, she had never failed to put the duties of marriage above the urgent needs of philanthropy. There was, too, this other reason to expect promptness to-day, since their only daughter, and the youngest of their three fine children, was coming home after a long absence. Having gone abroad with the Red Cross in the last year of the war, she had returned after the Armistice to do her independent duty by the Balkan Peninsula. A girl of much character, which she had inherited from her mother, handsome, capable, high-minded, and almost automatically inspiring, she was one of those earnest women who are designed to curb the lower nature of man. Even at a tender age, when she had left her play to guide her blind uncle Stephen Brooke through the decorous shadows of Washington Street, she had inclined her infant ear by choice rather than compulsion to the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God. At seventeen she had become engaged, against the wishes of her parents, to a youthful missionary, Episcopal but devout, who had been indiscreetly assigned to the Congo. From this mistaken sacrifice she was saved only by the invasion of Belgium; and Mr. Littlepage had become ignobly reconciled to a world conflict that diverted Mary Victoria's mission from the Congo, where faces are incurably black, to the Balkan kingdoms, where, he charitably assumed, they are merely sallow. But it was a relief, nevertheless, to find how all the romantic satyrs of the Balkans were repulsed by Mary Victoria's moral idealism. After all, there was more than a grain of truth in that favourite proverb of the Southern gentleman, "A woman's virtue is its best defence." Though he had missed her sadly, for he was a devoted father, he had been prevented by a legal conference from meeting her on the dock, and in his place he had sent Curle, a popular young man, without charm, but as loud and bright and brisk as the New South. In spite of Mr. Littlepage's love for his daughter, and his sincere pride in her achievements abroad (were not her boxes filled with glittering decorations bestowed by those countries that are content to honour rather than imitate altruism?), he was unable, when he thought of her, to dismiss a feeling of paternal inadequacy. For Mary Victoria deserved, he felt, a more celebrated father; a father who had distinguished himself, if not in war, which is an exclusive field, at least in the less favourable path of private virtue. She deserved a second parent after the finer pattern of her mother, who was, as Mr. Littlepage had every reason to know, a match for any moral necessity.

After thirty years of married happiness, he could still remind himself that Victoria was endowed with every charm except the thrilling touch of human frailty. Though her perfection discouraged pleasures, especially the pleasures of love, he had learned in time to feel the pride of a husband in her natural frigidity. For he still clung, amid the decay of moral platitudes, to the discredited ideal of chivalry. In his youth the world was suffused with the after-glow of the long Victorian age, and a graceful feminine style had softened the manners, if not the natures, of men. At the end of that interesting epoch, when womanhood was exalted from a biological fact into a miraculous power, Virginius Littlepage, the younger son of an old and affluent family, had married Victoria Brooke, the grand-daughter of a tobacco planter, who had made a satisfactory fortune by forsaking his plantation and converting tobacco into cigarettes. While Virginius had been trained by stern tradition to respect every woman who had not stooped to folly, the virtue peculiar to her sex was among the least of his reasons for admiring Victoria. She was not only modest, which was usual in the 'nineties, but she was beautiful, which is unusual in any decade. In the beginning of their acquaintance he had gone even further and ascribed intellect to her; but a few months of marriage had shown this to be merely one of the many delusions created by perfect features and a noble expression. Everything about her had been smooth and definite, even the tones of her voice and the way her light brown hair, which she wore à la Pompadour, was rolled stiffly back from her forehead and coiled in a burnished rope on the top of her head. A serious young man, ambitious to attain a place in the world more brilliant than the secluded seat of his ancestors, he had been impressed at their first meeting by the compactness and precision of Victoria's orderly mind. For in that earnest period the minds, as well as the emotions, of lovers were orderly. It was an age when eager young men flocked to church on Sunday morning, and eloquent divines discoursed upon the Victorian poets in the middle of the week. He could afford to smile now when he recalled the solemn Browning class in which he had first lost his heart. How passionately he had admired Victoria's virginal features! How fervently he had envied her competent but caressing way with the poet! Incredible as it seemed to him now, he had fallen in love with her while she recited from the more ponderous passages in The Ring and the Book. He had fallen in love with her then, though he had never really enjoyed Browning, and it had been a relief to him when the Unseen, in company with its illustrious poet, had at last gone out of fashion. Yet, since he was disposed to admire all the qualities he did not possess, he had never ceased to respect the firmness with which Victoria continued to deal in other forms with the Absolute. As the placid years passed, and she came to rely less upon her virginal features, it seemed to him that the ripe opinions of her youth began to shrink and flatten as fruit does that has hung too long on the tree. She had never changed, he realized, since he had first known her; she had become merely riper, softer, and sweeter in nature. Her advantage rested where advantage never fails to rest, in moral fervour. To be invariably right was her single wifely failing. For his wife, he sighed, with the vague unrest of a husband whose infidelities are imaginary, was a genuinely good woman. She was as far removed from pretence as she was from the posturing virtues that flourish in the credulous world of the drama. The pity of it was that even the least exacting husband should so often desire something more piquant than goodness.

Although he had been contented with Victoria, he could not deny that there had been troubled periods when he had craved something more than marriage. This was nobody's fault, he assured himself; least of all was it the fault of his wife. What it meant, he supposed, was simply that marriage, like life itself, is not superior to the migratory impulses of spring and autumn. And if he had suffered from his thwarted longings, it was a comfort to remember that he had made Victoria perfectly happy. It was a comfort to remember that, like all pure women everywhere, she was satisfied with monogamy.

In his own vagrant seasons, since the nature of man is more urgent, he had found himself thinking wistfully of Mrs. Dalrymple, who, when she was not repairing her charms or her reputation in Europe, lived on the opposite corner of Washington Street. Too alluring for her widow's weeds, to which she imparted a festive air by the summer bloom in her cheeks, he remembered her as one of those fair, fond, clinging women whom men long either to protect or to ruin. Frivolous, no doubt, yet how appealing, how fascinating, how feminine, in her light-hearted bereavement! Why is it, he had often wondered, that not only a wife but even a widow appears more attractive when she is adorned with a sprightly demeanour? When he thought of Amy Dalrymple in his hours of leisure (the only hours in which he permitted himself to think sentimentally of any woman), there was a motion, a surge, a buried whirlpool, far below in some primeval flood of his being. For the last ten years (while Mrs. Dalrymple found her widow's ruche becoming and continued to wear it lightly), he had asked himself, in those vagabond moods that visit husbands in April and November, if he might have been happier with a woman who was sometimes indiscreet, but always amusing. It was true, he conceded reluctantly, that Amy Dalrymple was very far indeed from what in Victorian days they had called an inspiring example. Before her fortunate second marriage, and even more fortunate widowhood, she was the heroine of a scandal that had shaken the canons of refined conduct to their solid foundation. While her husband, conforming to the dramatic style of the period, had promptly transfixed her by a divorce, her lover, a practical rather than a theoretical exponent of chivalry, had discreetly married a lady of sober views and impeccable conduct. Moved by her youth, her loneliness, her amber-coloured hair, and the drenched brown velvet of her eyes, Mr. Littlepage, though he usually avoided the divorce court, had consented to act as her counsel. Victoria, who was unfashionable enough to be called a "woman's woman," had stood by him steadfastly, and had even appeared in the street with his amiable client. Yes, Victoria had been wonderful from the beginning to the end of that trying experience. Only the public conviction that she was too frigid to harbour designs on the male sex in general had enabled her to emerge unspotted from her noble behaviour. "She never liked Amy Paget," mused Mr. Littlepage now. "She never liked her, yet she was at her side when all the fair-weather friends fell away." Strange, how often in the last few months that one generous act had commanded his loyalty. Fifteen years ago, and it seemed only yesterday! At the time Amy Paget, though a ruined woman, was still young and beautiful, and nobody was astonished when, within the next five years, she married Peter Dalrymple in Paris and safely buried him in Père Lachaise. Mr. Littlepage had visited the imposing marble tomb in that wilderness of lost illusions, and he had been favourably impressed by the style, as well as by the substance, of Mrs. Dalrymple's grief. "Fortunately her heart was too light to sink," he thought now, with tender compassion. "After all, she was deeply wronged, poor lady." Attired in her soft French mourning, she had continued to flit airily between Paris and Queenborough, until, on one of her summer flights to her old home, Mr. Littlepage was tempted to become more than a friend, though, perhaps, a little less than an advocate.

Many sober years had come and gone since that August even when he had lingered beside Mrs. Dalrymple on the vine-draped veranda at the back of her house. His home had seemed empty while Victoria and the children completed an art pilgrimage in Europe; and swayed by a fluttering impulse of curiosity, he had wandered through the darkness toward the friendly light in Mrs. Dalrymple's window. A business matter, she explained, had brought her back in the dull season, which was the only season that encouraged her to defy the gossips of Queenborough. Then she had slipped through the French window, out under the dark and fragrant grape-leaves, where the moonlight clustered like flowers over her blue dress. They had talked casually of many subjects, and not until she touched on the past had that sweet and perilous emotion rushed like a burning wine through his senses. Still glowing, still intoxicated, he had followed her when she fled into the dimly lighted hall, and enfolded her in his arms. After ten years and a world war, he could see again the way her white lids closed like flowers over her dark eyes and her red lips (at a period when a scarlet mouth was a badge of shame) parted with the quivering sound of her breath. All those years and all that conflict between them! Yet only a few hours before he had watched her cross the pavement and step into her car, and he had suffered again the dull ache of unsatisfied longing. That one glimpse after her long absence (for she also had obeyed the summons to world service) had shown him that she was still youthful, still seductive, though her once shapely figure was now severely repressed and her lustrous hair was flattened in shallow waves over her ears. Just the sight of her in the street had made him feel suddenly ardent within, as if that flitting view of charms he might once have possessed was a reminder that he was not yet too old for temptation. For he had not forgotten that beneath those Bacchic garlands he might have been, but was not, a conqueror. Even to-day the memory vibrated in his steady nerves, while he felt that some remembered delight awakened a faint echo of rapture. Of all his tender recollections this, he told himself, was the only one that aroused a reminiscent emotion. This was the only one, too, that he had been able to bury away from Victoria. Other secrets he had kept, but they were all of an innocent nature. He had, it is true, suppressed the obscure indiscretions of railways; he had even suppressed the simple indiscretions of secretaries; but his share in these hidden misdemeanours had been invariably blameless.

After the rapture of that August evening why, he wondered now, had he awakened the next morning with diminished ardour? Why had his desire, with the innate perversity that makes desire so unsound as a guide to behaviour, dissolved into a mixture of bitterness and regret? Where was that hidden flaw in his nature which made it harder for him to commit a pleasure than to perform a duty, which compelled him to hesitate and fail in the hour of adventure? Where was the moral scruple that commanded him to give up Mrs. Dalrymple before he had fallen in love with her? The following evening, though he knew that she waited for him, he had taken a heartless satisfaction in the thought of her disappointment. While he wrote a long and unusually demonstrative letter to Victoria, he had been astonished to find that even an imaginary infidelity had restored his relish for the temperate joys of marriage. To-day he could reflect, with the surprise of a husband and the complacency of a philosopher, that he loved Victoria the more because he had been so nearly unfaithful. Such, he meditated deeply, are the inscrutable contradictions of passion. Such are the concessions to nature in the code of a gentleman. Was modern youth, he asked despondently, capable of these logical inconsistencies and these swift recoils? Was there, after all, so great a disparity between two social epochs as people liked to pretend? Women appeared different on the surface; but had they actually changed beneath their figures? Was the heart in Milly's flat little chest still as erratic as the heart in Mrs. Dalrymple's once opulent bosom? For even Mrs. Dalrymple's bosom, he had not failed to observe, was no longer opulent. Almost insensibly this led him to a deeper and more delicate speculation. Could she have changed also within? Had her ardent temperament decreased with her diminishing shape? For was it reasonable to imagine that a flat bosom could contain all the true womanliness provided by the ample curves of the 'nineties?

A few weeks after his old desertion of her Amy Dalrymple had closed her house and sailed for Europe. Before he heard of her again his wife and children had returned with improved opinions and modest but fashionable appearances. Dullness has no right to grow middle-aged, he had mused the first evening at dinner, while he listened to the opinions that Victoria had assembled as methodically as Curle had supplied his album with postage stamps. Then, aided by his disastrous adventure, his marriage had relapsed into the serene monotony that so often wears the aspect of happiness. He had believed himself to be contented until the war in Europe had inflamed all those repressions that it failed to set free, and the Peace of Versailles had extended more important frontiers than physical boundaries. Presently, when the flood of war idealism had subsided, he discovered that Mrs. Dalrymple's indiscretion had diminished in size. New and perhaps ignoble standards had emerged from the conflict. For the decadence of Europe was slowly undermining Virginian tradition, and even the Southern gentleman, he told himself, was beginning to suspect that the ruined woman is an invention of man. Was it possible, Mr. Littlepage inquired, fearfully but hopefully, that there was something wrong with the past? Deeper than law, sharper than logic, this corroding doubt penetrated his mind. Was there a fatal flaw even in the Episcopal Church? Was the ideal of pure womanhood infested with moth and decay? Beneath these derisive questions, it seemed to him that the stern but noble features of the categorical imperative had been battered beyond recognition. How often in his youth had he heard his father lament somebody's "loss of faith," as if such a deprivation were a calamity. Yet he himself had found that a world without earnest conviction could be far from uncomfortable. It afforded, among other luxuries, ample leisure to regret all the pleasant opportunities that one had missed in the past. And gradually, as he grew more relaxed in principle, he began to sweeten disapproval with tenderness when he thought of Amy Dalrymple's frailty.