Читать книгу They Stooped to Folly - Ellen Glasgow - Страница 6

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"Mr. Littlepage, you have forgotten to sign your letters."

The voice was reproachful, and he glanced round with a whimsical apology in his soft brown eyes. "I'm sorry, Milly. I am not often so careless. You must find excuses for me to-day," he added in the playful tone he reserved for sentiment. "I am as useless as an expectant lover."

Milly looked at him with the composed tolerance of modern youth. "Your daughter has been away a long time."

"She went the week you came. That, I think, is one of the reasons I've always felt you were related to me."

"Well, it wouldn't have made any difference. You couldn't have been kinder."

"There were perhaps better ways, but I was too stupid to think of them. Whenever you looked unhappy I thought of Mary Victoria in the Balkans--or even in Paris."

"She wasn't obliged to go back, was she?" There was an accent of derision in Milly's voice.

He smiled indulgently, for his sense of humour, unlike Victoria's, embraced not only his wife and himself, but his children as well. "She thought so. You see, the war didn't last long enough to exhaust her moral energy. She was obliged to use up a good deal that was left over. She remembered the distress in the Balkans, and of course there is always Armenia."

"Anyhow, I'm glad for your sake that she is coming home."

"Yes, I'm glad, of course, but--I may as well admit it--I'm a little afraid--"

"Afraid? You mean she may have changed?"

"It isn't only that. I suppose I've missed her too much. Are you waiting for these letters?"

"No, I'll come back after I've got my coat. Everyone else has gone."

As the girl left the room, he turned back to his desk, while his whole being was swept by paternal solicitude. Was Victoria, he wondered, suffering from this anxious expectancy? Could even a mother have hungered more acutely for the sight of a daughter? All day it had been impossible to govern his mind properly when he remembered that every hour, every minute, was bringing Mary Victoria nearer his arms. Ever since she had cabled him the date of her sailing, he had waited her return with a curious mingling of delight and reluctance. Hope and fear were so blended that he had long ago ceased to distinguish between the conflicting emotions. Whenever he thought of Mary Victoria, it seemed to him that his heart dissolved into a rainbow mist, and flowered anew in the vision of a little girl wearing a short white frock with starched frills and a blue sash tied in a big bow at the back of her waist. Always she came to him like this; never older, never younger, than she had looked at the age of seven. He saw again her shining auburn curls, confined by a blue ribbon, her innocent grey eyes beneath winged eyebrows, her sturdy sunburned legs in white socks that were ribbed at the top, and her blunt childish feet in black kid slippers with prim straps at the ankles. Nothing in his whole life, not Victoria in her bridal veil, not Curle in his soldier's uniform, not Mary Victoria marching in a Red Cross parade, had ever touched him so deeply as the image of those helpless feet in white socks and black slippers. The living Mary Victoria had outgrown his protection. She had advanced so far ahead of him that her nearness as a daughter had diminished while her stature as a philanthropist increased with the distance. What remained to him, he sometimes felt, was only a vision painted on air of a child with clustering curls, eyes as innocent as stars, and bare sunburned knees above the ribbed bands of her socks.

Having signed the letters, he lighted a cigar and sat nervously smoking until Milly returned.

"You've been working too hard," he remarked as he looked up at her.

She shook her head. "No, it isn't that. It isn't work." Her face looked pale and tired; her usually smooth dark hair had drifted down in a mist over her forehead; her dress, an old one that she wore on wet days, was faded and unbecoming; but her eyes, large, deep, radiantly blue, were burning with life. Judged by the waxen ideal of the 'nineties, he knew that she was not beautiful. Beside Mrs. Dalrymple's rose-leaf bloom and texture, Milly's face, he reflected, would appear almost wasted. There were hollows in her thin cheeks and her small, white teeth were uneven; yet these hollows and this unevenness became, when she smiled, a part of her indescribable charm. Months went by, since few men were less predatory, when he was scarcely aware of her presence. Then, suddenly, without warning, the recollection of his absent daughter would bring Milly into his mind, and he would awaken to the bright audacity in her laugh, or to the look of wistful expectancy in her April eyes. For an instant he would become intensely alive to her gaiety, her suffering, and her defiant courage. "Is it possible," he would ask himself, with a start, "that a woman can be noble without goodness or good without virtue?"

"If it isn't work," he said gently, "it must be worry, Milly."

The corners of her lips quivered. "Well, you can't help worrying, can you?"

"I am not sure. People who don't worry tell us we can."

"Then they've never been in love. I sometimes think love isn't anything else."

"Are you still unhappy, my dear?"

Her eyes darkened with pain. "I want Martin. I've always wanted him."

"I had hoped you were getting over the worst."

"No, I haven't got over it. I haven't got over it even a little."

"Perhaps you will when you hear something definite. I'll ask my daughter as soon as I can see her alone. But don't hope for too much. It is a mistake to hope for too much or you are sure to be disappointed. If there had been good news, Mary Victoria would have told us."

"You said just the opposite a year ago."

"Then I was trying to keep up your courage. Now I am preparing you for a blow."

"Well, I shan't have long to wait. But the last hours are the hardest."

"I'll call you up as soon as I speak to her. No, I'll come to see you, that will be better. I'll have a talk with her to-night, and if it isn't too late, I'll come straight to see you."

"If anything has happened to Martin, I don't want to live, I don't want to live."

"Do you still care as much as that?"

"As much as that?" Her tears were brimming over. "I love him. I've loved him since the first minute."

"How old were you then?"

"I wasn't eighteen until August, but I knew what I wanted."

"Well, you can't blame your mother for thinking you were too young."

"She hated Martin. She never had happiness and she could not bear the thought of my having it."

"You must not say things like that, Milly."

"But it is true." She looked at him defiantly. "What good comes of lying about things? People used to believe in lying, but we don't any longer."

"Do you believe in anything now, Milly?"

"Not in shams. I have a right to my own happiness as long as I play the game fairly."

"And you think that you have played the game fairly?"

"Haven't I?" Her eyes were like blue flames. "My life is my own. I haven't hurt anybody but myself."

"Are you sure of that, Milly? You must have brought pain to your mother."

"It was her own fault. She tried to manage my life. She tried to make me into what she was at my age."

"Can you blame her for that? She believed it was best, for you."

"No, it wasn't that. She simply couldn't bear my having a life of my own. She has always thought happiness immoral. That was why I had to run out to Martin at night after she went to bed. She never let me see him at home. She never let me see anybody."

"I suppose she thought she was right."

"She has always thought that. Her thinking that drove father away from home."

He looked at her sternly. Oh, modern youth, modern youth! "You must control yourself, Milly."

"Would you rather I'd be deceitful?"

"I'd rather you'd show proper respect for your mother."

"Do you want me to say I love her? I don't. I don't even like her. She has ruined my life. I had a right to my life, and she has ruined it."

"Other people can't ruin our lives."

"You wouldn't say that if you knew mother better. She could ruin anybody's life. She was afraid that I'd be like father if I once found out that there is such a thing as happiness."

"She was mistaken in that. You must remember, however, that her own life had been tragic. She had lost her other children, and your father had deserted her."

"She drove him to it. I never blamed father."

Nor, if the truth must be told, could Mr. Littlepage, who was imperfectly acquainted with Mrs. Burden, find it in his heart to blame the fugitive husband. There are human rights, he mused sadly, that should be respected even in marriage. There are virtues so prickly that no mortal thing, not even a husband, could be expected to live in the house with them. "No, I may be wrong in principle and deficient in moral constitution, but I have never felt that I could blame him." Erring, no doubt; yet how human, how comprehensible, how heroic, some desertions appear to a philosopher! In spite of his own happy marriage, he had suffered all his life from a secret leaning toward faithless husbands and other undesirable acquaintances. Vainly he had tried to trample down these low but vigorous impulses. Vainly he had endeavoured to prefer the right-minded and to pity only the deserving. But something stronger than his will--was it a secret pulse of wildness in his heart?--had urged him to an irregular alliance with the obscure and the profligate. How much of this, he had often speculated, was owing to his childish admiration for his elder brother, Marmaduke, who, after driving an ambulance under fire, and leaving a sturdy right leg in the war zone, had climbed as high as the picturesque attic of Mrs. Burden's lodging-house? Not that Marmaduke was impoverished; merely that he was more or less disreputable in his opinions. Had the repressed longings of their mother, whose nervous temperament had overflowed into water colour, achieved a more or less permanent form in Marmaduke's pictures? Or was it merely the prevailing fashion of fancy-work, as his father pretended, which had festooned their French mirrors with wild roses and decorated their satin sofa pillows with snowy landscapes? Marmaduke, because of his turn for painting and his zest for experience, had been in childhood his mother's favourite; and there were glimpses of her still in the reformed romantic, who now occupied, with the hilarity that recollections of a well-spent life so seldom afford, a dormered room overlooking the sunsets on James River. Beneath this once imposing though now ramshackle roof, in an obscure street, which had been as conspicuous for fashion as it was now safe for bootlegging, Marmaduke painted with vehemence in firm strokes of red, blue, and yellow. As if, Mr. Littlepage had reasoned sadly, an artist could be sincere only in primary colours. Devoted as he was to his brother, Marmaduke's pictures had always seemed to Virginius too unpleasant to be natural, and too--yes, even if he did sound like Curle and the New South--too un-American to be really modern. For if Marmaduke had stayed in America, and painted the outside instead of the inside of his subjects, he might have won by now an enviable reputation, and probably have sold his more flattering portraits of women. Even in Queenborough, where, until recent years, conversation had been the favourite and almost the only art patronized by the best circles, wealthy citizens were beginning to realize that, if books look well in a library, pictures lend even more emphatically the right note in decoration to the walls of a drawing-room. All this and even more Marmaduke had forfeited by his light conduct and his intemperate opinions. . . . And the worst of it was that Virginius found it impossible to blame either the hostilities inEurope or the bad example of the German army for the profligate disposition of his elder brother. Many evils he held against them, but, being a just man, he could not charge them with this one. Milly's wildness, he felt, might have sprung, however indirectly, from the invasion of Belgium; but he must look deeper and perhaps further, he knew, to find the source of Marmaduke's moral infirmity.

While he meditated he had almost forgotten that Milly was waiting, a small black hat pushed down over her eyebrows and a purple umbrella swinging by a cord from her hand. Beneath the dark cloud of hair, her eyes were starry and watchful.

"How long has it been since you heard from Martin?" he asked suddenly.

"Oh, an age! He was going to the Balkans, he wrote, because it was either that or starvation. Relief work made him sick, but there wasn't anything else ahead of him. He told me he wasn't worth thinking about and I'd better forget him. As if I could!" she added passionately. "As if I could forget him just because he is a failure!"

"It is a pity you can't, my dear."

"But I don't want to. I don't want to forget him."

"Well, that's even more of a pity."

"For a time I tried not to think of him. Everything but a part of me seemed to forget."

"Was that the best part of you?"

"It was the deepest part. It was the little hard kernel of memory that makes a sore all round its edge." Her features, swept by tremulous wings of longing, were rapt and enkindled. How could any man who had been loved like that have forgotten her? Was the fellow mad? Or was he already dead and well out of the way?

"It was a pity you never told him about--about your trouble, Milly."

"I tried to spare him." At her voice, which was a mere thread of emotion, he turned to her quickly. "I never told him because I wanted him to have only happy memories. Even if he ceased to care, I wanted him to have only happy memories."

Looking at her, as she stood there in her youth and her despairing passion, which was the youngest thing, he reflected, about her, Mr. Littlepage reminded himself for the hundredth time that it was impossible for a man to understand women. The firm ones were necessarily less difficult to comprehend than the frail; but even the firm ones were not so easy to understand as they used to be. In the old days, Mr. Littlepage admitted, a man had only himself to blame if he did not soon discover at least where he stood with a woman. He thought of his father, a Virginia gentleman of Georgian morals but Victorian manners, who had found it less embarrassing to commit adultery than to pronounce the word in the presence of a lady. Well, it was fortunate, no doubt, that he had not survived the decorous nineteenth century. Certainly the conversation, if not the conduct, of the post-war age would have been the end of him. For the modern revolt, Mr. Littlepage was beginning to realize, was less immoral than experimental. The change was not merely a breaking away, as in the case of poor Aunt Agatha or even of Mrs. Dalrymple, from social conventions that one still respected and Sabbath observances in which one still believed. No, the saddest thing about Milly's past, he mused, was that she had been able to leave it so lightly behind her. Considered merely as the sort of impediment that had figured depressingly in fin de siècle drama. Milly's wild oats looked as small and almost as harmless as canary seed.

"If her life had not been spoiled, she would have made some man a fine wife," he meditated regretfully. Though he considered a passive attitude in love more feminine, and preferred an amiable softness to a tragic intensity, he felt that a man who was unacquainted with Mrs. Dalrymple might surrender to the sheer variety of Milly's charm. What a pity it was, indeed, to discover that charm is so often divorced from the cardinal virtues. What a pity it was that deserving characters, who made the most excellent wives by daylight, should be so frequently denied the magic that works best in darkness. There was, for example, Victoria's closest friend, Louisa Goddard, an admirable spinster, who would have made the reputation of any man she had chosen to marry. Tall, majestic, silver-haired, and as subdued in bosom as she was emphatic in gesture. Louisa was scarcely less distinguished than Mrs. Dalrymple--but with what a difference! He admired Louisa cordially; he even liked her, though she held what he still called "advanced opinions," and lectured upon the obscure morals of civilizations that have crumbled to dust and are therefore safe topics. Conspicuous in her youth for sound sense, a handsome figure, and discreet manners, she had developed an intrepid intellect in later years, and since the war she had discoursed publicly but prudently upon the more interesting theories of social reform. In this enterprise, to his mild astonishment, Victoria, who thought evil of no persons and of few reforms, supported her friend. "It is so important to look at these subjects from the right moral angle," his wife had explained, with her usual generous simplicity, "and if there is a woman in Queenborough capable of doing this, surely it is Louisa." To-day, after a lecture upon the Morals of Babylon, Louisa, who was wealthy by inheritance but saving by constitution, would certainly drive home in Victoria's car. In common with other men Virginius admired frugality in woman almost as fervently as he respected chastity, and even when, as in the case of Louisa (who could never spend her income, but refused to employ a chauffeur), economy approached the border of avarice, he felt that the fault was merely a defect in a sterling virtue. And what a mind she possessed! It was almost incredible, he had confided to Victoria after an informing talk with Louisa, how much you could learn about human depravity without vital contact with life. Not, of course, that she was ever indelicate. She was, on the contrary, refined enough in tone to satisfy Marmaduke, who had the fastidious taste in such matters of a confirmed libertine. That, Mr. Littlepage assured himself, was a reasonable explanation not only of Marmaduke's loose living, but of his prolonged absence from the flesh-pots of Europe. He was still hoping, with the sanguine temper peculiar, his brother had observed, to reformers and reprobates, that Louisa, who had refused him at twenty and thirty, would relent at fifty and supply him with a good and sufficient excuse for mending his habits.