Читать книгу The Crystal Cup - Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton - Страница 4

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Gita stood with her hands in the pockets of her sport skirt surveying the old manor house from the drive. It was built of oblong blocks of stone obviously cemented together in the fashion of so many Northern Colonial mansions: a great square box of a house, surmounted by a gabled roof; without architectural grace but solid and imposing, and immune to the elements and time. The gardener was as old as her grandmother and the lawns were thin, the rose-bushes and other flowering plants looked as senile as himself. But the pine woods on three sides were beautiful and dim and old, and Gita was conscious of a thrill of pride in her inheritance. She frowned, then shrugged her shoulders philosophically.

“Why not? It’s all I’ve got. And perhaps a background is something to lean against, anyhow.” She would not admit that she had felt curiously at home from the hour of her arrival.

She sauntered out of the park and across the bridge of the Thoroughfare, a narrow body of salt water dividing the mainland from the most famous of its islands. Atlantic City amused her, but she did not turn toward the town. Some distance to the south, below the hotels, the Boardwalk had been demolished during a storm uncommonly heavy for even that wild part of the Atlantic coast; with its record, during the days of sailing vessels, of thousands of wrecks and bodies washed ashore, of evil men and false lights and ghouls crouching in wait.

Since the disaster to this end of the promenade it was deserted by idle saunterers. Walking briskly, sometimes running, with elbows pressed close to her sides, Gita made directly for this solitary spot and sat down on the sands, embracing her knees and staring out at the tossing ocean. Gradually her hard spine drooped forlornly, and although she scorned tears and self-pity, her mouth relaxed into the soft and charming curves of her youth. She felt small and desolate and alone. What was a dilapidated old manor to a girl who had been deprived of a far more significant birthright? If she could have grown up in that old place, a Carteret of the Carterets, she would have been a normal innocent girl, full of hope and day-dreams and every kind of delightful nonsense. At twenty-two she had not an illusion, and a horror and hatred of life. And her mother, the one person she had ever been able to care for, the one person who had it in her power to make her feel young and human and necessary, was dead.

More than once she had taken herself to task, scowled ferociously at her distorted ego. Common sense dictated that she should ignore her unfortunate experience of life as too uncommon to warp any educated woman’s viewpoint, readjust, reorient, herself. Other girls had had unfortunate experiences—but not hers. Not hers.

Her earliest memory was of Paris ... an old detached house in Passy ... a constant uproar downstairs that kept her awake in the nursery under the roof ... ribald laughter and singing, brawls, banging doors all over the house.... Sometimes she would hang over the banisters in her nightgown, shivering with cold, fretful but curious.... Her mother with white desperate face, running up the stairs, snatching the child, darting into the nearest room, locking the door ... a man running after her ... mumbling at the keyhole, cursing.... Gerald Carteret, later, pounding on the door, commanding her to return to his guests and not make a silly little fool of herself.... Her mother’s terrified sobbing, then quailing obedience lest he keep his threat and break down the door.

And moving, always moving. As Gita grew older she learned that her father and his guests not only drank and caroused but gambled, sometimes all day as all night ... that his friends persecuted her mother, whom they called the Blonde Madonna. She received little protection from her husband, with whom, nevertheless, she was at that time infatuated; she hated him later. Gita begged her mother to leave him and return to San Francisco, but this seemed a poor alternative to the tormented Millicent. Her parents were dead, her only relative was an aunt, whom she disliked. She had no desire to return to a city, where, in her first season, and to the envy of the other girls, she had captured the handsome and dashing Easterner, visiting polo friends in Burlingame. Now they thought of her as living brilliantly in Europe, although it must have struck them as odd sometimes that they never were able to communicate with her in their many trips abroad.

Moreover, a wife’s duty was to her husband, no matter what he might be. Even at the age of ten Gita sniffed. But her lovely mother was the one perfect being in a too imperfect world, and if she said it was right to live with a man who was intoxicated most of the time, hit her, subjected her to every form of insult, then right it must be. But she conceived a strong distaste for husbands and abominated her father, informing him more than once she wished he were dead. He would scowl or grin down at the small child, straight and defiant, and smack her or toss her to the ceiling, according to his mood.

Carteret was an unlucky gambler, on the whole, and lived “on the interest of his debts,” after his own and his wife’s inheritances had expired. When his creditors became too pressing he bundled his family out in the night and set up in another capital. When fortune ran with him he was charming and generous; when luck jibed he struck his wife, his child, his servants, whoever got in his raging way, raved like a madman, then collapsed in drunken tears at his Madonna’s feet and implored her forgiveness....

Gita hated him increasingly, hated the other men, with their well-bred dissipated faces, who persecuted her mother ... in time herself.... Herself! These were the ugliest and most indelible memories of all....

This life, in which the war made no appreciable difference, ended abruptly when Gita was sixteen. Gerald Carteret died of typhoid fever in a French provincial town where he was hiding from his creditors. Gita sold her grandmother Sears’ engagement-ring, the only remaining jewel, and buried him thankfully; then sat for three months at her mother’s bedside in the charity ward of a hospital, exercising her will frantically to keep life in her mother’s exhausted body; a poor family in the neighborhood keeping life in her own.

Mrs. Carteret recovered and the two faced starvation. Then for her child’s sake Millicent wrote to her aunt, and received much scornful criticism in return, more sound advice, and a promise of a hundred dollars a month.

After that life was a succession of cheap pensions, with poor food, dingy company, and always some idle husband who made love to the indestructibly charming Millicent; to the expressed indignation of his wife. Constant peregrinations interfered with Gita’s schooling but she received an education of sorts. She was quick at languages and had ample opportunity to pick them up. As men ogled her on the street as well as in the pensions she abandoned the graceful languid carriage that had been a part of her anxious training, throwing back her shoulders and striding along like a stiff young soldier on parade; finally, to her mother’s wailing accompaniment, cut off her abundant black hair.

“I should have been a boy anyhow,” she told the superlatively feminine Millicent. “It was a horrid mistake of Nature. Then I not only could have taken you out of this rotten poverty-stricken life one day, and given you lovely gowns and delicate food, but I could have stood up to these awful men that annoy you.”

When she was seventeen the old aunt died and left her small fortune and the house built by the first Sears to adventure in California, to “my only remaining relative and not unloved niece, Millicent Sears Carteret.” The heiress decided to leave Europe, which she frankly hoped never to see again, and take her child to San Francisco. It was far from Carteret Manor, pride had gone the way of vanity, and she longed for her old friends; moreover, Gita could finish her education and have proper associates for the first time.

In San Francisco Gita was almost happy for two years. She enjoyed her school, the cool electric climate, the magnificent views, the drifting fogs, the long walks over the hills, and the Chinese cook’s admirable confections. Millicent’s friends were as faithful as she had anticipated, and Gita drifted into a semi-intimacy with girls who filled her at first with wonder and then with emulation. They were very modern young people, with the wisdom of the serpent, a fixed intent to do as they pleased, and a canny ability to take care of themselves. Gita, with her extensive and barely interrupted knowledge of the nocuous side of life and the hideous lust of men, at times felt old enough to be their grandmother, at others like the little sister of these amused and cynical maidens. Her mother had inculcated obedience, to one’s maternal parent, at least, as the first law of nature, and the only time Gita had ever defied her was when she had done her best to transform herself into a boy. She had been as severely chaperoned as was possible and admonished against all things unladylike, particularly cigarettes. It had been unnecessary to warn her against too free a manner with men as she hated all men, and never danced as she would have preferred to be embraced by a snake; but the consequence was that she had not the most elementary knowledge of flirtation.

Flirtation, however, she was informed by her new friends, was out of date. Past was the day of subtle methods, of practiced coquetry, of recourse to every feminine device to win and keep a man, while he, poor dupe, played the hollow rôle of hunter. The girls called the “boys” up on the telephone as often as the boys called them, and even took them out to restaurants and paid the bill. This was the day of fifty-fifty, of equality of the sexes. Gita looked in vain for romance, still in a measure the mainspring of fiction. But these girls laughed at the word, in spite of the movies, where, in the intervals between parties, they took their followers of an evening; conversation, apparently, was among the lost arts. One young married woman told Gita casually that her husband, after a more or less desultory wooing, suggested they “hitch up,” and she had accepted him, not because she liked him better than several others, but because his type pleased her, she was in the mood to marry, and wanted a baby. By this time Gita had ceased to blush at a frankness which would have horrified her mother, and at one time herself, accustomed to the finesse of Europeans (when sober); and, with the plasticity of youth, superimposed something of a new self upon what she had believed to be a finished and permanent structure.

But although, after her graduation, she went out to dinners, she refused to go to parties, since that would have meant dancing, and she recoiled from contact with even these innocuous young men. Not, as she was aware, that she would have been importuned for dances, for the boys had “no use for her,” she was a “highbrow,” wasn’t a “regular girl,” “ought to have been a boy and tried to look like one.” The girls, with whom she was popular, tried to give her “points,” but desisted when they understood that her dislike of men was sincere, although they did not guess the cause. If she could have brought herself to tell the story of both her surface and her psychic life to these wise maidens, no doubt they would have blown the chaff from the wheat with their laughing common sense, told her to “forget it,” remember that youth was the only thing that mattered, and, when she had had a good time for a year or two, marry and have a baby. But Gita would rather have gone out into the breakers at the Cliff House and drowned herself than to have revealed the festering sores in her soul to anyone. And no less than three noxious experiences with married men, fascinated by her vivid youth and intolerance of their sex, extinguished any possibility she may have unconsciously cherished of forgetting the past.

Upon one occasion only did she appear to attract a “boy.” He had made an average record in the war, was the son of a rich man, and although he “played about” with the girls he “fell for” none of them. The other young men disliked and criticized him, but the girls retorted that he was too good a dancer and mah-jongg player to lose. One night he met Gita at a dinner, and more than once she saw him watching her with covert speculation. Later, with considerable finesse for a San Francisco youth, he lured her into the conservatory, and after telling her admiringly that she looked the real thing and made chromos of the other dear little daisies, seized her in his arms and tried to kiss her. He received an abraded shin, a scratch across his cheek, and a loosened front tooth, which sent him cursing out of her presence to find an exit at the back of the house. They met some weeks later and he said airily: “My mistake. Sorry. Hope you’ll forget it.” But she knew that he hated her and looked exultingly at the gold band across his front teeth.

The girls discussed her psychoanalytically and decided she had a complex, induced no doubt by resentment that she had not been born a boy. On the other hand she had not “rushed” any of them and was anything but masculine, in spite of her funny little swagger and lack of feminine adornment. Ann Melrose came nearer the truth. “She is so precocious on one side of her that she may have had a desperate love-affair at the age of sixteen, and the man turned out a rotter. Did something that horrified her. But if she doesn’t mend her ways she’ll never give any other man the chance to administer the right kind of shock. She’s about as approachable as a hedgehog and as adaptable as a wire fence. ’Fraid she’s got too much brains and not enough common sense. Something gave her a bad twist. That’s good enough for me. I’m sick of psycho. Too bad! She’s a game kid and as straight as they come. Wonder how she’ll turn out.”

When Gita was nineteen misfortune once more fell upon them. The trustee of the small estate, failing in his wooing of Millicent, absconded with all but the house, which was mortgaged. Life was gray once more. They took in lodgers, dismissed the cook, and did their own work. Gita saw less of her friends, although they ran in every few days and occasionally made the beds. Millicent’s friends sent her hampers from the country and carried her off now and then for a day in San Mateo, Menlo Park, Burlingame, or San Rafael. One of her old beaux proposed for the fifth time since her arrival, but Millicent had had her fill of marriage. Moreover, she knew that if she married again she would lose her daughter; of whom, although she was a rather silly woman, she had a considerable understanding.

The enterprise was not a success. The lodgers either made love to their pretty landlady or did not pay their rent and had to be evicted. Finally Gita turned them all out and took in only women; to find that some were respectable and others not. Recommendations were easily forged. After a scandal Millicent sold the house for a little more than the mortgage and accepted the position of housekeeper to one of her friends in San Mateo, while Gita taught French and Italian to a class of youngsters hastily assembled. Neither would accept invitations for “long visits until something turns up.”

Gita, saw her friends constantly once more although she refused to go to dinners or luncheons. Her clothes barely held together, and they dared not offer her presents. But she learned to ride, to play tennis, to swim (in pools), and her naturally robust health, which had been impaired by too much confinement and hard indoor work, was restored.

By this time Millicent’s spirit was broken and her strength had been failing for some time. Gita took her to a sanitarium for the tubercular on the California desert, paying the expenses with the few hundreds left from the sale of the house. On her death-bed Millicent wrote to Mrs. Carteret.