Читать книгу They Stooped to Folly - Ellen Glasgow - Страница 7

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Milly had slipped away while he meditated, and from the window a little later he watched her purple umbrella tossed about by the flying gusts in the street. How slender she looked against the driving rain! How slender and helpless and yet how determined! It was almost six years since she had first come to him, and in those years, though he deplored her liberal behaviour, he had become deeply attached to her. "I wonder if it is possible to be kind to a woman without growing fond of her?" he thought, for his mood was indulgent. Then, since there was still no sign of Victoria, he turned back to his chair and diverted his mind by moralizing upon Milly's unfortunate past. . . .

She had come to him on a stormy afternoon in that dreadful last winter of the war, while Victoria was divided between the Red Cross and an epidemic of influenza, and Mary Victoria was inspiring the American Army in France. Why, he wondered, was that winter fantastically associated in his mind with wild roses in water colour and snowy landscapes on satin sofa pillows? At the time Milly had barely recovered from influenza, and she was still suffering from poverty and frustrated desire. Yet he had felt her charm even then. He had felt her charm in spite of her thinness, her pallor, the heavy circles under her romantic eyes, and the pitiably neglected state of her clothes. After he had engaged her (for good typists, being of adventurous disposition, were scarcer than munition workers that winter), she had fainted from weakness, and he had felt strangely chivalrous and paternal. Not until spring had he discovered that her trouble was as real as her poverty; and by that time the war and contact with loose-living Europe had broadened the sympathies, or softened the moral fibre, of Queenborough. Was it really the war, he asked himself, that had at last loosened the bonds of tradition? Was it the haunting thought of Mary Victoria, lovely and alone, among the predatory males of Europe? Or was it the visit he had endured from a genteel lady in weeds, who broke to him in mournful accents that she was Milly's respectable but unhappy mother?

"I am sure I don't know where she gets her character, sir."

"It is easy to believe that, Mrs. Burden."

"She was always brought up as proper as proper."

"I am sure of it."

"I sent her to Sunday school as soon as she could lisp. I took her with me to church and to missionary societies and prayer meetings whenever I had a decent dress to put on. Those were the only amusements she ever had as a child, except sewing for one of the little converts in Africa. She never ran out at night like other girls, and it isn't my fault if she found there were wild sorts of pleasure. I declare I don't know what the world is coming to now, but it isn't as bad, of course, as if I had any cause to reproach myself. I've been a good mother, and I was a good wife, even if I wasn't treated as well as I ought to have been. However, I didn't hold that against Albert after he died. I've worn mourning for him now going on thirteen years or more."

Such, incredible as it sounded in memory, was the nature of Mrs. Burden's complaint. Though she had lived the better part of three generations, she had remained mentally arrested in the God-fearing posture of evangelical piety. Her long sallow face, hopelessly flattened out by life, had worn an expression of resigned but uninspired martyrdom. Above invisible eyebrows her yellowish-grey hair was plastered down on her forehead, and her pale, tight lips were as rigid, he had said to himself, as a clothespin. That she should be Milly's mother had seemed to him as incomprehensible as almost everything else in the age. Drab features, drab voice, drab spirits. Estimable, in character, no doubt, estimable, but depressing to any husband who had not lost the active instincts of a vertebrate.

"I hope your daughter has been considerate of you," he had remarked, with the sharp recoil every sentimentalist feels in the presence of a repugnant fact.

"She ought to be, sir. I've done my duty by her, if I do say it."

"I am sure she realizes that."

"You'd never know it if she does, sir. I sometimes think she was born without family feeling, like her father before her."

"Indeed!" Mr. Littlepage felt helpless, and wondered why you could be so much more indulgent to human nature when it was not in the room with you. At a reasonable distance, across the street, for instance, he had felt compassionate toward Mrs. Burden, and had been disposed to blame Milly for a deficiency in filial respect. "She seems to be a warm-blooded girl," he had added impressively.

"She is where you don't expect it of her," Mrs. Burden had sighed, while she sank dejectedly into her crape. "That was her father's way, too. He would always pass over the persons who had a right to expect feeling from him and fling himself away on somebody without the shadow of a claim to his affection. And it has been the same with Milly. All this would never have happened if she had inherited a proper sense of duty."

"No, I suppose not. But is this young Welding the only one?"

"You'd think one was enough, sir, if you'd heard the way she took on when he went abroad. That was the first time I knew things were not what they should be between them. It wasn't until three months after he had sailed that I found out she'd gone wrong, and then I begged her on my bended knees to let me write and tell him what I thought of him. I'd have done it without asking her, but I knew if she ever suspected it, she would desert me just as her father did after I had him sent to gaol for his own good."

"Do you know whether she writes to this young man?"

Mrs. Burden had broken into eloquent tears. "Only cheerful letters, she says, only cheerful letters that won't make him reproach himself."

This was indeed a fresh point of view, and a questionable one even to the tolerant masculine mind. Modern, perhaps; yet he felt sure that Mary Victoria, who was as advanced as Milly though in an opposite direction, would have indignantly repudiated such moral evasion. In his youth reproach had been the natural, if by no means the only, weapon of pure womanhood, and he disliked seeing it discarded so easily by a girl who was, to put it mildly, no longer a shining honour to either sex. Still, since he was unpolemical by disposition, he had remarked gently:

"That seems an unfeminine attitude. What is her reason?"

"How do I know? She never tells me anything. When I question her, all she ever answers is that I have no right to interfere with her life. No right to interfere! If I haven't a right to interfere with her, is there anybody who has, sir?"

"Perhaps not. Well, it is a sad case, Mrs. Burden, a very sad case. You have my sympathy. I will talk to your daughter, though she will doubtless consider it an interference, and I will see what can be done for her."

What he could do proved to be, in the end, more than he had hoped, though scarcely less than he had expected. He had talked mildly but gravely to Milly that afternoon, and finding her tragic, mocking, and scornful of the conventions that he esteemed, he had surprised in his heart some deep pulsations of sympathy. Though he had been prepared to counsel the erring, he was soon bewildered, not so much by Milly's unrepentant attitude as by the perilous response in his own nature. It was, he had recognized reluctantly, his duty to discharge her; and he had intended, after making suitable provision, to fulfil his moral obligation. For the sake of his other secretary, the impeccable Miss Dorset, for the sake of Victoria, for the sake of his own unsullied reputation, he told himself, it was undesirable that Milly should remain in his office. Several particulars, nevertheless, he had failed to consider. He had weighed respectability, but not human relations; genteel conduct he had taken for granted; but he had overlooked the fatal indulgence of the paternal heart, and the softening influence of a daughter who is as far away as the Balkans.

"Your mother has been to see me," he had begun sternly.

Light had rippled into Milly's changeable face, and it seemed to him that the sadness in her eyes sparkled with laughter. "I am sorry," she had answered mockingly, "I tried to spare you."

"She is greatly disturbed about you."

"Poor Mother. She is obliged to be disturbed about something. If it isn't about me, it will be about public morals."

"You are making her unhappy."

"I don't make her so. She was born that way."

"She tells me," he had said severely, "that you have been very wild."

Though her voice was defiant when she answered, there was, he remembered, a springtime freshness in her eyes. "Well, we are all wild together, aren't we? There's murder in the air."

"I don't like your levity, Milly. In spite of your manner, I refuse to believe that you are incorrigible." So little, he reflected, had she resembled the proverbial lost woman that Goldsmith himself would scarcely have known her for what she was. It is true that her clothes had harmonized better with the institutional than the romantic idea of a life of sin. Her dress, he had observed, was cheap, faded and carelessly worn, and her shoes had borne, to his inattentive eye, every sign of having trodden the downward path. Touched by her evident poverty, Mr. Littlepage had thought of his daughter, and had felt his harshness dissolve. Many things had softened his heart, but most of all the memory of Mary Victoria as she had looked as a child. In the end, he had decided to reprimand Milly instead of washing his hands of her. Any good woman would have dismissed her without regret; but men, he mused now, pricked by a sensation of guilt, are softer by nature--or is it merely more brittle?

"She tells me you are in trouble," he had said.

"I suppose she would call it that," Milly had retorted, with the flippancy he feared and expected.

"What do you call it?" How unfeminine she was beneath her perverse gaiety!

"I haven't had it long enough to know. I may call it trouble, too, before it is over."

"Why didn't you marry him, Milly?"

"How could I when we hadn't any money and there was Mother to look after?"

"If you couldn't marry him, why didn't you wait?"

An inward storm had darkened her eyes. "I have a right to my life."

No lady of the nineteenth century, neither poor Aunt Agatha, who had been completely crushed, nor Mrs. Dalrymple, who had been merely tarnished, by betrayal, would have asserted an inalienable right to her life. Yet this fantastic notion appeared to be the solitary principle that modern youth was willing to embrace. Even Mary Victoria, who would have been an inspiring example in any period, had taken a firm stand in defence of her natural right to do as she pleased. The difference appeared to be that, while Milly was satisfied with the right to her own life, Mary Victoria demanded, from the purest motives, the right of moral encroachment upon the lives of others. Had duty, which in his youth meant violence to his appetite, become to-day merely a label for unbridled impulse?

"As long as you know what you want most, what do you ever get by waiting?" Milly had asked, turning upon him the unembarrassed scrutiny with which her intrepid age regarded vital statistics. "Look at Mother. She waited for Father until she had dried up to a husk. Of course, if you aren't in love," she added presently, "it is different. But, if you are in love, then you know that nothing else really matters."

He had looked at her attentively. Was there, after all, something more than selfishness in Milly's outlook on life? Unfortunate as her lapse from virtue appeared, he could not deny that she wore that confident air which makes a settled point of view more respectable than a vagrant emotion. Independence of character had acquired, on the surface at least, all the lustre he associated with conversion from sin. It was impossible to imagine Milly either crushed like poor Aunt Agatha or tarnished like Mrs. Dalrymple. In demanding the right to sin, she had, he told himself disconsolately, elevated an improper act into a mistaken theory of conduct. Was not this, after all, the superior advantage attained by the present vocal generation over the reticent feminine mode of the 'nineties? To reduce behaviour to a formula, however wanton, appeared miraculously to invest it with the dignity of an intellectual habitation and a name.

"I refuse to argue with you, Milly," he had said sternly. "I can only tell you that you have opened the door to regret."

He had expected contradiction, but she had astonished him, after a thoughtful pause, by a gesture of agreement. "Oh, well, I should have regretted either way, shouldn't I? I am always regretting things. But the regret for what you have had doesn't last nearly so long as the regret for what you have missed. Life isn't for ever. What is the fun of dying before you have lived?"

"The trouble is that you have learned nothing from the past--nothing from the experience of other women."

"From Mother, you mean?"

"Not only from your mother, but from all women everywhere. You have set out to demolish conventions before you have tested them."

Her eyes had mocked him. "But, you have tested them, haven't you? And where have they led you? Could anything that we do or think end in a greater calamity? No, we'll have to learn the truth for ourselves. Nothing that the older generation can tell us will do any good. We refuse to accept your theories because we saw them all break to pieces. The truth is we are determined to think for ourselves and to make our own sort of ideals. Even if everything you say to me is true, I shouldn't consent to take my experience from you second-hand. I want to find out for myself. I want the freedom to live my life as I please. I want to choose the things I believe in. . . ."

Delusion? Sophistry? Or the simple moonstruck folly of youth? Is it possible to reason, he had asked himself helplessly, with frustrated desire? Useless to argue. Useless either to advise or admonish. Since he was as generous as he was tolerant, what could he do but invoke the forsaken ideal of chivalry and protect her, as far as he was able, from the errors of her own undisciplined heart?