Orrick Johns

“ Ellen loved to hear the music going at full tilt, the new jazz music that was just coming in. She didn’t mind, as much as she should have, the young men getting tipsy. She was thrilled to watch the couples disappear down through the trees, laughing and chatting, eager to escape the floods of light that poured from every window in the house; or slip into their motors for a drive along the dark roads.
She had always thought of Sterling Blaydon as a reserved and serious man, and she wondered how he stood so much excitement. ”

“ Moira familiarly uttered the names of grown young men who to Ellen were no more than shadows from an upper world, coldly courteous ghosts who did not see her even when they looked at her. Every season the little girl extended her interests and knowledge into a wider world and grew more alien. And gradually as the years flew by even the servants who had been in the old Trezevant place when they came there, and who somehow seemed to preserve for her, by their presence, the actuality of her motherhood, passed, until there was not one left. ”

“ It was toward the end of a coppery afternoon, the hazy air aflame with the sun taking on the colour of the burnished trees. To Moira, it had been an unreal day too, for her thoughts were running upon revolutionary impulses, plans that would have seemed impossibly romantic a few months before. Was it only because of this suddenly important comradeship with Miles Harlindew that she had quite painfully realized a sense of loss? She needed much more than life was giving her, much more than her mere comfort and independence, even than her painting. ”

“ In the spring the lawn and the fields which rolled out downward from the house were thickly starred with buttercups whose tiny yellow bowls glistened like lacquered buttons in the sun. Later the same meadows turned to a waving lake of red clover.
Potter Osprey, when upbraided by his friends for not making more of his handful of acres, declared he was no gardener. He could neither adorn nature nor gain his feed from her by his own hands, for she was a wild beast whose moods and colours and contours he had struggled with [222] all his life, and there was no quarter between them. ”

“ I hate this little business of one man with a pen, one man with a brush and another with a piano, none of them understanding each other.”
“A synthesis of the arts is contradictory,” said Osprey. “Only Nature can accomplish it, at any [24] rate, and Nature and art are sworn enemies. Nature takes a tree and gives it form and colour; its leaves rustle and its branches are wood-winds. Then in certain lights the tree will have the elusive, the startling quality of poetry. There you have sculpture, painting, music and literature—but it isn’t art, and, thank God, art never will be such a pudding.” ”

“ Moira had considered Mathilda not at all in the swift, sudden, almost cyclonic romance with Hal Blaydon, no more indeed than in any of her flirtations. There had been many others, of all ages, from her own up to fifty, and she had vaguely realized that when her choice was made, if she made a choice, her mother would have to be counted in. At times during the past week of incredible magic, she had feared the possibility of a clash between them, owing to the good Episcopalian views, to which Mathilda still clung, despite the advanced and advancing habits of thought that surrounded her. ”

“ Seymour’s reasons for adopting the child at once, as she explained to Schottman, was that the boys were young enough to grow up none the wiser. Ellen did not deceive herself. Moira would never know her, never think of her except as a servant.
She recalled sorrowfully the two happy prospects she had brought with her into that house, “Moira will love me when she is grown up, and we will do so many nice things together,” and “Who knows, some day Moira may have a father....” But Moira would never have a real father now through her, and Moira would never love her in the sense she had meant. ”

“ Moira’s mood changed the moment she stood in the rotunda. The powerful magic of the city [158] stirred her. Had it been raining as only it can rain in New York, had the streets been ice-bound or blistering in mid-summer heat, she would have felt that great surge unabated.
But to-day the city was in one of its magnificent sunny moods, laughing at its own comic and gracile charms, whimsical with unreliable winds, one of those startling, extravagant days when a walk in any street has the effect of champagne. On a sudden impulse she ordered the cab to the Ritz. ”

“ Under that momentary glamour forgetfulness took possession of them.
“She said,” recalled Potter, “that was the first time she had been thoroughly happy and secure.”
He ruminated on, connecting this sudden, vivid pleasure of hers, this mood of safety and surrender, with the deadening outcome they now faced. His own fear had never left him since that night—that one night, for it had had no sequel. Now he interpreted the event fatalistically. Nature had waited for that happy mood of Ellen’s before making her a mother. Nature was a subtle monster, a thing of scheming purposes. ”

“ The quaint modesty of Florissant lane, its uselessness and hidden charm—the thick maples and high shrubbery cutting off even the sight of neighbouring windows—made it a fairy road, a retreat in which Potter had already learned to spend fine mornings of October and May when his mother thought him safely at school. As for Ellen, her first autumn glimpse of it, nearly a year ago, had taken her back to greener memories in the north. [16] She could never walk there too often; it was as near to complete demoralization and unbounded luxury as anything her starved imagination could picture. ”

“ Moira laughed a little bitterly. “Something happened to me too when I was young.... But I am free.... I tore myself free from it.”
“I thought so,” he said gently. “There is a great difference in our ages, but if I may say so, we seem to have—well, had something alike to face in life. No, I do not mean just that—it’s presumptuous. I have never, I think, before met any woman quite like you. Strength and the genius for insight, such as yours, rarely meet in the same body.” ”

“ She led him back to the cribs with candelabra in her hand, and he looked longest at the blond-haired little Joanna, seeing in her broad, upturned, warm face some misty resemblance to his earliest vision of her mother.
“They’re great kids, Moira. But I won’t bluff—I like ’em all best when they’re asleep.”
They came out into the shadowy, haphazard studio, and she knew he felt uneasy and shocked at her surroundings.
“Well,” he said coolly, “of course you’re going to let me help you. I’ve got plenty—more than is good for me—and nobody has more right to it than you. ”

“ Sommers glanced at Moira for consent, and she gave it with a brisk nod. These people knew more about the man than she and no doubt were justified in what they said; nevertheless she felt a vague resentment. What would they say if they knew all there was to be known about herself? Experience had already taught her that beneath the literal and semi-bohemian veneer of her friends there was a stern core of respectability.
Harlindew came and was sober. He was painfully and tiresomely sober, and she heartily wished they had saved some of Arthur’s cocktails. ”

“ At least, you really like it.”
“I have invented a litany, Hal. Will you listen to it? I invented it for the saddest people in the world. It goes like this: O God, be merciful to those who are free and must live with the fettered; to the scornful laughers who are bound to the humourless; [131] to the swift who walk by the slow; and the idle who are bondsmen to the busy—and especially, O God, be merciful to all those whose spirits were young and whose generation denied them youth’s chance, amen. There must have been many like Daddy in his day.” ”

“ The ugliness of the little apartment in a building which held perhaps fifty tiresome families, the dreary parade of bourgeois virtues, and fourth or fifth rate finery, the strident female voices in the street and halls, the newness of everything one touched and looked at, the lack of shadows and mystery and ease, the pervasive, obvious travail [203] for money—all these things were to Moira an education in American life which her youth had escaped. ”

“ Blaydon smoked his cigar in silence, while she finished her second black coffee and leaned back in her chair swinging a tiny foot of which she was proud. In the shimmering, palpable light, shot with many colours, Mathilda’s face and hair were [77] still amazingly pretty. There were many who would have accepted the kind of slavery that marriage with her would have entailed, and some among them who had no need for her money. But she was not thinking of that. The arts of vanity had ceased to be a conscious lure; they were the essentials of well-bred self-cultivation. ”

“ He reached her table and thrust out his hand.
“Well, Rob Blaydon!” she cried.
“Moira.”
She had recognized him at once, but she looked him over more carefully as he sat down opposite her. He was stouter. She found herself experiencing a sensation she had never known before, that of meeting a youthful companion grown mature in her absence, one she was fond of. It wasn’t such an extraordinary sensation. It might have been only a few days ago when she was seeing Rob constantly. Nothing happened to people at all. ”

“ After luncheon, Eberhard, the man, took her back by motor to the train as he had brought her.
Ellen was always glad to see her visits begin, not only because Miss Cheyney was very democratic and “nice” to her, and proud of Moira’s progress, but because they ushered in the Fall. She loved the glorious colours that spread out in widening and deepening hues over the wooded hills, until all the world seemed to have put on a flaming cloak. She and the children would fill the house with sumach and maple branches then. ”

“ To Moira, the obstacles were more significant, and yet they had diminished amazingly in the last three months. The prospect that Osprey would take their friendship seriously did have about it a quality of dark adventure which made even her steady pulses jump uncomfortably. But to the young woman who sees her marriage being slowly broken up before her eyes, while she is helpless to restore it, everything is touched by the shimmer of madness. ”

“ There was no place for a honeymoon like New York: it meant that the honeymoon never ended.
Marriage had hardly changed an outward detail of their lives. She had refused to give up her job, which he somehow expected she could do. Perhaps she could paint and try to sell her work. It appeared to him so much more fitting. But Moira did not wish to sell her paintings, even if she had thought them worth any money. All that could wait. Wasn’t his work waiting too? Poor boy! How could any one expect him to write with his time all taken up? ”

“ It was hard to think of Ellen ever having had a baby. She stopped herself from pursuing this obsession a half a dozen times, but the spell of curiosity lingered. And still she could not bring herself to speak to the woman. By nightfall she was scattered and depressed, with the feeling of having spent a wasted day.
She went to bed early and tried again to read Hugo, but instead, she found herself rereading the McCoy letter. It drew her like a sinister charm. She threw on a dressing gown and began walking in the room. ”

“ The knowledge that gave her most courage was her illegitimacy—which was clear from Ellen’s reticence. Better that a thousand times, better a complete outcast, than a respectable nobody. She would go, of course, go in secret, that day. She could take the fewest possible things, put them in her car when no one was looking, and drive to town. What money she needed to get established elsewhere she would have to take from her own account at the bank, as a loan. Ellen had been sworn to say nothing of the discovery. ”

“ That would go on, no matter what happened, whether Miles returned or stayed away, and it would go on according to her own terms.
The notion of herself as an entity, surviving, growing, separate and alone, filled her for the first time with a curious excitement. It released so many fresh and irresistible currents within her. She began to think more consciously of other men, of Potter Osprey in particular. She rose and went out into the orchard. ”

“ Waves of passionate self-pity swept over her; she rebelled aloud against the bitter meanness of her betrayal; the awful burden of carrying her secret alone.
In the end it was wise that she did not deny [168] these moods when they came to her and did not try to control them. From them she rose calm and clear-headed, charged with newly stored courage. They were spiritual baths, which cleaned her, a sort of self-asserting prayer. When they had gone not a vestige of rebellion was left in her; she felt grown in stature, ready to carry her fate like a flag. ”