Joseph Hergesheimer

“ Linda was not interested in this, but it left her free to explore her own emotions. The night had been eventful because it had shaken all the foundation of what she intended. That single momentary delicious thrill had been enough to threaten the entire rest. At the same time her native contempt of the other women, of Judith with her tumbled hair, persisted. Was there no other way to capture such happiness? Was it all hopelessly messy with drinks and unpleasant familiarity?
What did Pleydon mean by spirit? Surely there must be more kinds of love than one—he had intimated that. ”

“ XIII
“There's nothing special to say about Markue's parties,” Judith, dressing, told Linda. “You will simply have to take what comes your way. There is always some one serious at them, if you insist, as usual, on dignity.” She stood slim and seductive, like a perverse pierrot, before the oppressive depths of a black mirror. Linda had finished her preparations for the evening. There was no departure from her customary blanched exactness. She studied her reflection across Judith's shoulder; her intense blue eyes, under the level blot of her bang, were grave on the delicate pallor of her face. ”

“ Dodge, Linda told herself, lived entirely too much alone. Then she said this aloud, thoughtlessly, and she was startled by the sudden intolerable flash of his gaze. An awkward pause followed, broken by the uprearing of Pleydon's considerable length.
“I must take you into the studio before it is too dark,” he proceeded. “Every creative spirit knows when its great moment has come. Well, mine is here.” The men stood aside as Linda, her head positively ringing with the thrill that was like a strain of Gluck, the happy sadness, entered the bare high spaciousness of Dodge Pleydon's workroom. ”

“ To be loved was not love itself, but only the edge of its cloak; response was an indivisible part of realization. No, sterility was the measure—of its absence. And she was, Linda felt, in spite of Vigné and Lowrie, the latter a specially vigorous contradiction, the most sterile woman alive. There were always Dodge's assurances, but clay, stone, metal, were cold for a belief to embrace. ”

“ The days passed in a pleasant deliberation, with Arnaud Hallet constantly about the house or garden, while Linda's thoughts continually returned to the sculptor. He was clearer than the actuality of her mother and the Feldts or the recreated image of her father. At times she was thrilled by the familiar obscure sense of music, of longing slowly translated into happiness. Then more actual problems would envelop her in doubt. Mostly she was confused—in her cool material necessity for understanding—by the temper of her feeling for Dodge Pleydon. Linda wondered if this were love. ”

“ She smiled at him with half-closed eyes and the conviction that, with Pleydon, she could easily be different. He leaned forward and his voice startled her with the impression that he had read her mind:
“If you could care for any one a lifetime would be short to get you. Look, you have never been out of my thoughts—or within my reach. It seems a myth that I kissed you; impossible ... Linda.”
“But you did,” she told him, gaining happiness from the mere assurance. They were alone in the drawing-room, and he rose, sweeping her up into his arms. ”

“ A dread greater than her fright at Arnaud held her in the portico, her hand lifted to the polished knob of the inner door. Linda turned slowly, cold and white, “Wait,” she said to his shoulder in an admirable coat; then she gazed steadily into his frank pained eyes.
“How do you know that you love Vigné?” she demanded. “You are so young to be certain it will last always. And Vigné—”
“How does any one know?” he replied. “How did you? Married people always forget their own experiences, the happy way things went with them. From all I see money hasn't much to do with loving each other. ”

“ Linda thought about Dodge Pleydon on a warm evening of the following May. At four o'clock, in a hotel, Pansy had been married; and the entire Feldt connection had risen to a greater height of clamorous cheer than ever before. Extravagant unseasonable dishes, wines and banked flowers were lavishly mingled with sentimental speeches, healths and tears. Linda had been acutely restless, impatient of all the loud good humor and stupid compliments. The sense of her isolation from their life was unbearably keen. She would have a very different wedding with a man in no particular like Pansy's. ”

“ Moses Feldt deepened. She thought about him a great deal and very seriously; the things he said, the warm impact of his being, vibrated in her memory. He had the effect on her of the music of Christopher Gluck—the effect of a pure fine chord.
Pansy she now thought of with a faint contempt: she was rapidly growing thick-waisted and heavy, and she was engaged to a dull young man not rich enough to be interesting. They sat about in frank embraces and indulged in a sentimental speech that united Judith and Linda in common oppression. ”

“ The delicate perfection of her youth would never perish, never be dulled by old age or corrupted in death. It had inspired and entered into Pleydon's being, and he had lifted it on the pedestal rising between the sea and sky.
She was in the Luxembourg, in that statue of Cotton Mather, the somber flame, about which he had written with a comment on the changing subjects of his creations. From the moment when he sat beside her on the divan in that room stifling with incense, with the naked glimmer of women's shoulders, she had been the source of his power. She had been his power. ”

“ The solid fact of Arnaud, of what Dodge, more than seven years before, had robbed her, put everything else aside, crushed it.
She realized that she would never get from life what supremely repaid the suffering of other women, made up for them the failure of practically every vision. She was sorry for herself, yes, and for Dodge Pleydon. Yet he had his figures in metal and stone; his sense of the importance of his work had increased enormously; and, well, there were Lowrie and Vigné; it would be difficult, every one agreed, to find better or handsomer children. ”

“ You are right, Dodge. I was the dull one. This girl will be immensely loved; perhaps by you. A calamity, I promise you. Men are pigs,” she turned again to Linda; “no—imbeciles, for only idiots destroy the beauty that is given to them. They take your reputation with a smile, they take your heart with iron fingers; your beauty they waste like a drunken Russian with gold.”
“Susanna, like all spendthrifts, is amazed by poverty.”
Even in the gloom Linda could see the pallor spreading over the other's face; she was glad that Susanna Noda spoke in Russian. ”

“ The walls were paneled in white, with white ruffled curtains at small windows; and the furniture, the dull mahogany ranged against the immaculate paint, the rocking-chairs of high slatted walnut and rush bottoms, the slender formality of tables with fluted legs, was dignified but austere. There were some portraits in heavy old gilt—men with florid faces and tied hair, and the delicate replicas of high-breasted women in brocades.
There was, plainly, an air of the exceptional in Amelia Lowrie's conduction of Linda to her room. ”

“ Now, however, the unexpected element of Dodge Pleydon disturbed her philosophy.
Suddenly all the lacing and painting and crimping, the pretense and lies and carefully planned accidental effects, filled her with revolt. The insinuations of women, the bareness of their revelations, her mother returning unsteady and mussed from a dinner, were unutterably disgusting. Even to think of them hurt her fundamentally: so much of what she was, of what she had determined, had been destroyed by an emotion apparently as slight as echoed music. ”

“ She saw Linda descending the marble stairs to the lower floor where the games were kept in a somber corridor, and heard a voice halting her irresolute passage:
“Hello, Bellina.”
That wasn't her name, and she corrected him, waiting afterward to listen to a strange fairy-like tale. The solitary, sick-looking man, with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was so actual that she recaptured the pungent drift of his burning cigarette. He talked about love in a bitter intensity that hurt her. Yet, at first, he had said that she was lovely, a touch of her ... forever in the memory. ”

“ For a moment Linda thought Pleydon would shake her. “You feel that way now,” he declared; “and perhaps next month; but you will change; in the end I'll have you.”
“No,” she told him, with a certainty from a source outside her consciousness. “It has been spoiled.”
He replied, “Time will discover which of us is right. I'm almost willing to stay away till you send for me. But that would only make you more stubborn. What a strong little devil you are, Linda. I have no doubt I'd do better to marry a human being. ”

“ Linda was glad that Pleydon was rich; and there were, she remembered, moments for surrender.
As usual these problems, multiplying toward night, were fewer in the bright flood of morning. She laughed at the memory of Arnaud Hallet's humor; and then, it was late afternoon, the maid told her that Pleydon was in the drawing room. Her appearance satisfactory she was able to see him at once. To her great pleasure neither Pleydon nor his clothes had changed. He was dressed in light-gray flannels; a big easy man with a crushing palm, large features and an expression of intolerance. ”

“ The yellow silk curtains at the windows, the rug with the intricate coloring of a cashmere shawl, the Russian tea service, were in a perfection of order; and Linda almost resentfully acknowledged the skilful efficiency of his maid. It was surprising that, without a wife, a man could manage such a degree of comfort!
Over tea far better than hers, in china of an infinitely finer fragility, she studied Pleydon thoughtfully. He looked still again perceptibly older, his face continued to grow sparer of flesh, emphasizing the aggressively bony structure of his head. ”

“ I doubted if I could make you happy, and did everything possible, exhausted all the arguments, but it was no good.
“Linda, dear, I adore you.”
She was glad, without the slightest answering emotion, that Arnaud, well—liked her. At the same time all her wisdom declared that she couldn't marry him; and, with the unsparing frankness of youth and her individual detachment, she told him exactly why.
“I need a great deal of money,” she proceeded, “because I am frightfully extravagant. All I have is expensive; I hate cheap things—even what satisfies most rich girls. ”

“ The truth was that Linda saw that more than a trace of Stella Condon's warm generosity of emotion had been brought by herself to Arnaud's daughter. The faults of every life, every circumstance, were endlessly multiplied through all existence. At fourteen, it was Linda's frowning impression, her mother had very fully instructed her in the wiles and structure of admirable marriage, and she had never completely lost some hard pearls of the elder's wisdom. Should she, in turn, communicate them to Vigné? ”

“ Look, we try to keep alive because it's necessary to life, to nature; and the effort, the struggle, breeds the dream. You can understand that. Men who ought to know say that love is nothing more.” He rose and stood over her, towering and portentous against the curtained light. “I don't pretend to guess. I'm a creative artist—Simon Downige at Cottarsport—I have you. If it's God so much the better.”
What principally swept over Linda was the knowledge that his possession of her must keep them always apart. The reality, all realities, were veils to Pleydon. ”

“ Her mother, in the beginning, had informed her that love was a nuisance. To be happy, a man must love you without any corresponding return; this was necessary to his complete management, the securing of the greatest possible amount of new clothes. It was as far as love should be allowed to enter marriage. But that reality, with a complete expression in shopping, was distant from the immaterial and delicate emotions that in her responded to Pleydon.
Linda had been familiar with the materials, the processes, of what, she had been assured, was veritable love since early childhood. ”

“ Linda, at the entrance to the apartment, found to her great surprise—in place of the motor she had expected—a small graceful single-horse victoria, the driver buttoned into a sealskin rug. Deep in furs, beside Pleydon, she was remarkably comfortable, and she was soothed by the rhythmic beat of the hoofs, the even progress through the crystal night of Fifth Avenue.
Her companion flooded his being with the frozen air. They had, it seemed, lost all desire to talk. The memory of Markue's party lingered like the last vanishing odor of his incense ”

“ Markue, with his parties, had dropped from Judith's world, his place taken by a serious older dealer in Dutch masters with an impressive gallery just off Fifth Avenue.
That she would see him Linda was convinced; this feeling absorbed any desire; it was no good wanting it or not wanting it; consequently she was undisturbed. She considered him gravely and in detail. Had there been any more Susanna Nodas in his stay south? She had heard somewhere that the women of Argentine were irresistible. Her life had taught her nothing if not the fact that a number of women figured in every man's history. ”

“ A new dislike of Judith Feldt deepened in Linda's being. She had no reason for it, but suddenly she felt absolutely opposed to her. The manner in which Judith rested against the man by her was very distasteful. It offended Linda inexplicably; she wanted to draw into an infinity of distance from all contact with men and life.
She didn't even want to make one of those marriages that had nothing to do with love, but was only a sensible arrangement for the securing of gowns and velvet hangings and the luxury of enclosed automobiles. ”

“ Miss Skillern was short and broad and, in the evening, always wore curled ostrich plumes on tightly filled gray puffs. She reminded Linda of a wadded chair. Mrs. Randall, after the other's slight stiff assent, continued:
“Your mama would never be lonely, not she. All I wonder is she doesn't get married again—with that blondine of hers. Wouldn't you rather have one papa than, in a way of speaking, a different one at every hotel?”
Linda, completely at a loss for answer, studied Mrs. Randall with her direct deep blue gaze. Miss Skillern again inclined her plumes. ”