Louis Bromfield

“ Fergus, in silence, watched him now with a look of intense curiosity. Perhaps he guessed what it was Ellen had done to him. Perhaps he realized that, without knowing it, he had himself come to look upon Clarence in the same fashion that his sister regarded him ... as a nice, kind, good man whom one tolerated. He was older and paler and more insignificant than he had been in the days when he courted May Seton. What the man needed perhaps was some one—a wife—who would lean upon him, who would think him a wonderful creature. And instead of that he had Ellen. ”

“ But Thérèse Callendar never married again; she devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and to the husbanding of a great fortune which by shrewdness and will she had long since doubled and tripled. She was, in her soul, a Levantine; thrift and shrewdness were a part of her very flesh and bones. She lived here and there, always on the move, now in Constantinople, now in Paris, now in London, now in Cannes, now in New York, even making at times trips to such outlandish places as Bombay and Sumatra; a woman of sorts, of vast energy and sharp intelligence. ”

“ Lily was married, even with distinction. There were no more secrets. In some ways life had grown simple, yet in others its complexity had been increased, again and again.
Ellen, sitting there in her own pool of tragic silence, watched them all with the old knowledge that their lives were all in some way entangled and bound up together ... all that absurd and ill assorted group, Monsieur de Cyon, gentle and white haired, Hattie, Rebecca, Jean, Lily, Callendar and herself; and even Gramp who had disappeared already into the solitude of the room which Lily had given him. ”

“ Sabine, watching them from the window of her tiny motor, was thankful again in a comfortable indefinite fashion that she had escaped from their insufferable pomp into the tiny, exquisite house in the Rue Tilsit.
Of late she had come at times to forget all the secret misery of the twelve years; she had been almost happy, as nearly happy as it was possible for her to be. It seemed to her now that circumstances had been cruel. She should have been born a man; and as a man, with a freedom from all the world of Mrs. Champion and her Virgins, she would have turned her mind to science. ”

“ She, like Hattie, felt with every fiber of her body, the very sensations of all those people who listened—people from great houses of the rich who had heard of Lilli Barr from friends in Europe, people from the suburbs who would rush away in frantic haste for the last train home, people—young people—like the one who sat next to Hattie, in shabby clothes and worn shoes, who were fighting now desperately, as Ellen had once fought, to reach that same platform, that same brilliant shower of light. ”

“ There was all the stifled emotion pent so long in a heart dedicated to secrecy, and the triumph of wild dreams; and there was too a vast amount of passion for that little company who believed in her, whom she dared not betray by failure ... for Lily whose very gown she wore, and the withered Miss Ogilvie; for Gramp, and young Fergus who worshiped her with his eyes, for her gentle father and the fierce old woman in Shane’s Castle; but most of all for that indomitable and emotional woman whom she must repay one day by forcing all the world to envy her. ”

“ Being wise, they knew perhaps the uselessness of violence. They waited, each knowing well enough that there was much more concerned than simple romance. Thérèse knew, no doubt, that the young woman who, stripped now of her fierce secrecy, sat opposite her, frightened and tearful, was not simply an adventuress seeking to gain a husband and a vast fortune. She knew, too, how much these things would have meant to the girl, and she understood well enough that Ellen, face to face with an unaccustomed tangle, lacked the experience which could have helped her. ”

“ It was the gesture of an ardent housekeeper burning incense before the Gods of Domesticity, the abandoned devotion of an artist striving for perfection.
For an instant Ellen stood in the doorway watching her mother as if somewhere in the recesses of her clever brain she considered this parent as she might consider a stranger, marking the woman’s strong face, her vigorous black hair, the rosiness of her healthy{19} cheeks. Ellen, her mother said, had a disconcerting way of studying people, of prying into their lives, even of imagining things about them that could not possibly have been true. ”

“ She did not protest, because Rebecca Schönberg did not annoy her; on the contrary she was vastly amusing. In her restless energy there was a quality akin to the vitality of Ellen herself. They went everywhere; they saw everything; they absorbed the people about them, and returned late at night as fresh as they had started.
“Vitality,” observed Rebecca, as they lunched at the Ritz on the day she left for Riga, “is nine-tenths of success. With one grain of genius and nine of vitality, any one can succeed.” ”

“ Like Hattie, like Thérèse, like a million other women she was helpless, and the feeling terrified her, who had never been really helpless before. This war, which she had damned for a nuisance that interrupted her own triumphant way, became a monster, overwhelming and bestial, before which she was powerless. And in her terror she was softened by a new sort of humanity. She became merely a woman whose men were at war, a woman who could do nothing, who must sit behind and suffer in terror and in doubt. ”

“ Some leaned forward; others feigned indifference. One or two of the men assumed expressions of boredom. For none of them, save in brothels in Paris, had ever seen a woman dancing without tights, utterly naked.
Withdrawn a little from the others Thérèse Callendar sat staring at the dancer through her lorgnettes. She was immovable but interested, as if the barbaric music and the sight of the Hindu woman’s naked body roused in her a train of dim racial memories. And slowly in another part of the room Sabine Cane became aware that Thérèse Callendar’s son no longer had any interest in her. ”

“ He had not subdued Lilli Barr. She belonged once more to Rebecca and to the world. And in the end it was women who defeated him—women who had always been his obsession, the women who surrounded Ellen—Lily and Hattie and Rebecca, the subtle Sabine and even Thérèse with her gift that made Ellen unpregnably secure. He had not broken her spirit, for he had never possessed her even for a moment; it was her awareness which had baffled him, standing like a wall across his path.
The perverse experiment had failed; there had not even been much pleasure in it. Youth lay behind him. What lay ahead? ”

“ Unconsciously she came to compare the humbleness of Schneidermann and Clarence with the cat-like virility of Callendar. It was as if she were putting aside all other men in the knowledge that some day, at some time if she waited long enough, she would come to possess him. Yet when she thought of him, as she frequently did after she had gone up to the luxurious room looking out upon the white pavilion, she grew angry at the memory of that last visit to the Babylon Arms.{294} He had watched her, cat-like, until, driven by some obscure desire, he could no longer play the game of waiting. ”

“ Schönberg, after telling one or two risqué stories, held a match to Ellen’s cigarette, Hattie frowned again and the old look of suspicion came into her eyes. It was Lily Shane who had taught her daughter to behave like a fast woman. She knew that.
It was only when the first excitement of Ellen’s return had worn away that Hattie began to feel the dull ache of an unhappiness which she could neither understand nor define. With all the vast optimism of her nature she had fancied the return of Ellen as something quite different from the reality. ”

“ In the window overlooking Fifth Avenue there were moments when she must have forgotten everything save the future, hours when they talked of Europe, when he described to her with something very close to passion the brilliance of Paris or the smoky glow of London. Both were naïve, Ellen in the fashion of the inexperienced and Callendar, so dark, so charming, so utterly new, in the fashion of a man whose directness of action had nothing to do with the question of conventions. ”

“ The hours spent at the old harmonium in her father’s parlor were hours stolen from cooking and baking, from caring for her younger brothers and sisters, hours which, so long ago, had raised in her imagination sounds and scenes more glamorous than anything found in the borders of the country that was her home. They were not great, these two melodies—one born of Evangelism and the other out of the gaiety of an Austrian city—yet they were in a fashion the little parcel of glamour which life had dealt out to Hattie Tolliver. ”

“ Ellen was to be married.... Ellen was to be married.... She must have a child.... She must have a child.... These things she thought over and over again until she came at length to repeat them aloud to herself as she walked, bracing her body against the gale, through the darkness. She had joined Thérèse Callendar in this passionate desire for a grandchild, but it was not for the same reason. To Hattie a grandchild would alter everything. It would be for her like being young again, almost like bearing a child of her own. ”

“ Under the spell of her own tale she began to speak half in French, half in English, but Ellen, listening, became so caught up in the magic of the story that she understood it all, even those things which Thérèse Callendar related in an alien tongue. The tale set fire to a vein of warmth in the girl which until now had gone undiscovered, save only at times when, lost in her music, it had emerged translated into a beauty of sound. For the moment even the plump Greek woman herself appeared no longer to be old and ugly and covered with diamonds in need of cleaning. ”

“ Belonging now in a sense to the whole world she was no longer absolute mistress of her own fortune; such freedom was, after all, the privilege only of the obscure. She was in truth, she thought bitterly, still a mountebank, an entertainer, who waited behind a painted screen to entertain the public. The stage was greater now and the audience had grown from the fashionable little group in the Callendar drawing-room to all the world. That was the only difference.
But stronger than any sense of duty or obligation was the old terror of a terrible poverty which forced one to keep up appearances. ”