THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT 5 страница
She took it in, appearing to have no hardness of rancour that could bar discussion. «Do you mean by his idea his proposal that I should grandmother his wife? And if you do is the proposal your reason for calling him wonderful?»
Sutton laughed. «Pray what's yours?» As this was a question, however, that she took her time to answer or not to answer-only appearing interested for a moment in a combination that had formed itself on the other side of the room-he presently went on. «What's this?-What would seem to be the point. His, I mean, for having decided on the extraordinary step of throwing his little wife, bound hands and feet, into your arms. Intelligent as you are, and with these three or four hours to have thought it over, I yet don't see how that can fail still to mystify you.»
She continued to watch their opposite neighbors. «"Little," you call her. Is she so very small?»
«Tiny, tiny-she must be; as different as possible in every way-of necessity-from you. They always are the opposite pole, you know,» said Shirley Sutton.
She glanced at him now. «You strike me as of an impudence-!»
«No, no. I only like to make it out with you.»
She looked away again and after a little went on. «I'm sure she's charming, and only hope one isn't to gather he's already tired of her.»
«Not a bit! He's tremendously in love, and hell remain so.»
«So much the better. And if it's a question,» said Mrs. Grantham, «of one's doing what one can for her, he has only, as I told him when you had gone, to give me the chance.»
«Good! So he is to commit her to you?»
«You use extraordinary expressions, but it's settled that he brings her.»
«And you'll really and truly help her?»
«Really and truly?» said Mrs. Grantham with her eyes again on him. «Why not? For what do you take me?»
«Ah isn't that just what I still have the discomfort, every day I live, of asking myself?»
She had made, as she spoke, a movement to rise, which, as if she was tired of his tone, his last words appeared to determine. But, also getting up, he held her, when they were on their feet, long enough to hear the rest of what he had to say. «If you do help her, you know, you'll show him you've understood.»
«Understood what?»
«Why, his idea-the deep acute train of reasoning that has led him to take, as one may say, the bull by the horns; to reflect that as you might, as you probably would, in any case, get at her, he plays the wise game, as well as the bold one, by treating your generosity as a real thing and placing himself publicly under an obligation to you.»
Mrs. Grantham showed not only that she had listened, but that she had for an instant considered. «What is it you elegantly describe as my getting "at" her?»
«He takes his risk, but puts you, you see, on your honor.» She thought a moment more. «What profundities indeed then over the simplest of matters! And if your idea is » she went on, «that if I do help her I shall show him I've understood them, so it will be that if I don't-»
«You'll show him»-Sutton took her up-«that you haven't? Precisely. But in spite of not wanting to appear to have understood too much-»
«I may still be depended on to do what I can? Quite certainly. You'll see what I may still be depended on to do.» And she moved away.
III
It was not, doubtless, that there had been anything in their rather sharp separation at that moment to sustain or prolong the interruption; yet it definitely befell that, circumstances aiding, they practically failed to meet again before the great party at Burbeck. This occasion was to gather in some thirty persons from a certain Friday to the following Monday, and it was on the Friday that Sutton went down. He had known in advance that Mrs. Grantham was to be there, and this perhaps, during the interval of hindrance, had helped him a little to be patient. He had before him the certitude of a real full cup-two days brimming over with the sight of her. He found, however, on his arrival that she was not yet in the field, and presently learned that her place would be in a small contingent that was to join the party on the morrow. This knowledge he extracted from Miss Banker, who was always the first to present herself at any gathering that was to enjoy her, and whom moreover-partly on that very account-the wary not less than the speculative were apt to hold themselves well-advised to engage with at as early as possible a stage of the business. She was stout red rich mature universal-a massive much-fingered volume,
alphabetical wonderful indexed, that opened of itself at the right place. She opened for Stilton instinctively at G—, which happened to be remarkably convenient «What she's really waiting over for is to bring down Lady Gwyther.»
«Ah the Gwythers are coming?»
«Yes; caught, through Mrs. Grantham, just in time. She'll be the feature-every one wants to see her.»
Speculation and wariness met and combined at this moment in Shirley Sutton. «Do you mean-a-Mrs. Grant-ham?»
«Dear no! Poor little Lady Gwyther, who, but just arrived in England, appears now literally for the first time in her life in any society whatever, and whom (don't you know the extraordinary story? you ought to-you!) she, of all people, has so wonderfully taken up. It will be quite-here- as if she were "presenting" her.»
Sutton of course took in more things than even appeared. «I never know what I ought to know; I only know, inveterately, what I oughtn't. So what is the extraordinary story?»
«You really haven't heard?»
«Really,» he replied without winking.
«It happened indeed but the other day,» said Miss Banker, «yet every one's already wondering. Gwyther has thrown his wife on her mercy-but I won't believe you if you pretend to me you don't know why he shouldn't.»
Sutton asked himself then what he could pretend. «Do you mean because she's merciless?»
She hesitated. «If you don't know perhaps I oughtn't to tell you.»
He liked Miss Banker and found just the right tone to plead. «Do tell me.»
«Well,» she sighed, «it will be your own fault-! They have been such friends that there could have been but one name for the crudity of his original precede. When I
was a girl we used to call il throwing over. They call it in French to lacker. But I refer not so much to the act itself as to the manner of it, though you may say indeed of course that there's in such cases after all only one manner. Least said soonest mended.»
Sutton seemed to wonder. «Oh he said too much?»
«He said nothing. That was it.»
Sutton kept it up. «But was what?»
«Why, what she must, like any woman in her shoes, have felt to be his perfidy. He simply went and did it-took to himself this child, that is, without the preliminary of a scandal or a rupture-before she could turn round.»
«I follow you. But it would appear from what you say that she has turned round now.»
«Well,» Miss Banker laughed, «we shall see for ourselves how far. It will be what every one will try to see.»
«Oh then we've work cut out!» And Sutton certainly felt that he himself had-an impression that lost nothing from a further talk with Miss Banker in the course of a short stroll in the grounds with her the next day. He spoke as one who had now considered many things.
«Did I understand from you yesterday that Lady Gwyther's a "child"?»
«Nobody knows. It's prodigious the way she has managed.»
«The way Lady Gwyther has-?»
«No, the way May Grantham has kept her till this hour in her pocket.»
He was quick at his watch. «Do you mean by "this hour" that they're due now?»
«Not till tea. All the others arrive together in time for that.» Miss Banker had clearly, since the previous day, filled in gaps and become, as it were, revised and enlarged. «She'll have kept a cat from seeing her, so as to produce her entirely herself.»
«Well,» Sutton mused, «that will have been a very noble sort of return-»
«For Gwyther's behaviour? Very. Yet I feel creepy.»
«Creepy?»
«Because so much depends for the girl-in the way of the right start or the wrong start-on the signs and omens of this first appearance. It's a great house and a great occasion, and we're assembled here, it strikes me, very much as the Roman mob at the circus used to be to see the next Christian maiden brought out to the tigers.»
«Oh if she is a Christian maiden-!» Sutton murmured. But he stopped at what his imagination called up.
It perhaps fed that faculty a little that Miss Banker had the effect of making out that Mrs. Grantham might individually be, in any case, something of a Roman matron. «She has kept her in the dark so that we may only take her from her hand. She'll have formed her for us.»
«In so few days?»
«Well, she'll have prepared her-decked her for the sacrifice with ribbons and flowers.»
«Ah if you only mean that she'll have taken her to her dressmaker-!» And it came to Sutton, at once as a new light and as a check, almost, to anxiety, that this was all poor Gwyther, mistrustful probably of a taste formed by Stuttgart, might have desired of their friend.
There were usually at Burbeck many things taking place at once; so that wherever else, on such occasions, tea might be served, it went forward with matchless pomp, weather permitting, on a shaded stretch of one of the terraces and in presence of one of the prospects. Shirley Sutton, moving, as the afternoon waned, more restlessly about and mingling in dispersed groups only to find they had nothing to keep him quiet, came upon it as he turned a corner of the house-saw it seated there in all its state. It might be said that at Burbeck it was, like everything else,
made the most of. It constituted immediately, with multiplied tables and glittering plate, with rugs and cushions d ices and fruit and wonderful porcelain and beautiful women, a scene of splendor, almost an incident of grand opera. One of the beautiful women might quite have been expected to rise with a gold cup and a celebrated song.
One of them did rise, as happened, while Sutton drew near, and he found himself a moment later seeing nothing and nobody but Mrs. Grantham. They met on the terrace, just away from the others, and the movement in which he had the effect of arresting her might have been that of withdrawal. He quickly saw, however, that if she had been about to pass into the house it was only on some errand-to get something or to call some one-that would immediately have restored her to her public. It somehow struck him on the spot-and more than ever yet, though the impression was not wholly new to him-that she felt herself a figure for the forefront of the stage and indeed would have been recognized by any one at a glance as the prima donna assoluta. She caused, in fact, during the few minutes he stood talking to her, an extraordinary series of waves to roll extraordinarily fast over his sense, not the least mark of the matter being that the appearance with which it ended was again the one with which it had begun. «The face-the face,» as he kept dumbly repeating; that was at last, as at first, all he could clearly see. She had a perfection resplendent, but what in the world had it done, this perfection, to her beauty? It was her beauty doubtless that looked out at him, but it was into something else that, as their eyes met, he strangely found himself looking.
It was as if something had happened in consequence of which she had changed, and there was that in this swift perception that made him glance eagerly about for Lady Gwyther. But as he took in the recruited group-identities of the hour added to those of the previous twenty-four-he recognitions, one of which was the husband of the person missing, that Lady Gwylher was not there. Nothing in the whole business was more singular than his consciousness that, as he came back to his interlocutress after the nods and smiles and hand-waves he had launched, she knew what had been his thought. She knew for whom he had looked without success; but why should this knowledge visibly have hardened and sharpened her, and precisely at a moment when she was unprecedentedly magnificent? The indefinable apprehension that had somewhat sunk after his second talk with Miss Banker and then had perversely risen again-this nameless anxiety now produced on him, with a sudden sharper pinch, the effect of a great suspense. The action of that, in turn, was to show him that he hadn't yet fully known how much he had at stake on a final view. It was revealed to him for the first time that he «really cared» whether Mrs. Grantham were a safe nature. It was too ridiculous by what a thread it hung, but something was certainly in the air that would definitely tell him. What was in the air descended the next moment to earth. He turned round as he caught the expression with which her eyes attached themselves to something that approached. A little person, very young and very much dressed, had come out of the house, and the expression in Mrs. Grantham's eyes was that of the artist confronted with her work and interested, even to impatience, in the judgement of others. The little person drew nearer, and though Sutton's companion, without looking at him now, gave it a name and met it, he had jumped for himself at certitude. He saw many things-too many, and they appeared to be feathers, frills, excrescences of silk and lace-massed together and conflicting, and after a moment also saw struggling out of them a small face that struck him as either scared or sick. Then, with his eyes again returning to Mrs. Grantham, he saw another. He had no more talk with Miss Banker till late that evening-an evening during which he had felt himself too noticeably silent; but something had passed between this pair, across dinner-table and drawing-room, without speech, and when they at last found words it was in the needed ease of a quiet end of the long, lighted gallery, where she opened again at the very paragraph.
«You were right-that was it. She did the only thing that, at such short notice, she could do. She took her to her dressmaker.»
Sutton, with his back to the reach of the gallery, had, as if to banish a vision, buried his eyes for a minute in his hands. «And oh the face-the face!»
«Which?» Miss Banker asked.
«Whichever one looks at.»
«But May Grantham's glorious. She has turned herself out-»
«With a splendour of taste and a sense of effect, eh? Yes.» Sutton showed he saw far.
«She has the sense of effect. The sense of effect as exhibited in Lady Gwyther's clothes-!» was something Miss Banker failed of words to express. «Everybody's overwhelmed. Here, you know, that sort of thing's grave. The poor creature's lost.» «Lost?»
«Since on the first impression, as we said, so much depends. The first impression's made-oh made! I defy her now ever to unmake it. Her husband, who's proud, won't like her the better for it. And I don't see,» Miss Banker went on, «that her prettiness was enough-a mere little feverish frightened freshness; what did he see in her?-to be so blasted. It has been done with an atrocity of art-» «That supposes the dressmaker then also a devil?» «Oh your London women and their dressmakers!» Miss Banker laughed.
«But the face-the face!» Sutton woefully repeated. «May's?»
«The little girl's. It's exquisite.»
«Exquisite?»
«For unimaginable pathos.»
«Oh!» Miss Banker dropped.
«She has at last begun to see.» Sutton showed again how far he saw. «It glimmers upon her innocence, she makes it dimly out-what has been done with her. She's even worse this evening-the way, my eye, she looked at dinner'-than when she came. Yes»-he was confident-*!! has dawned (how couldn't it, out of all of you?) and she knows.»
«She ought to have known before!» Miss Banker intelligently sighed.
«No; she wouldn't in that case have been so beautiful.»
«Beautiful?» cried Miss Banker; «overloaded like a monkey in a show!»
«The face, yes; which goes to the heart. It's that that
makes it,» said Shirley Sutton. «And it's that»-he thought
it out-»that makes the other.»
«I see. Conscious?»
«Horrible!»
«You take it hard,» said Miss Banker.
Lord Gwyther, just before she spoke, had come in sight and now was near the'm. Sutton on this, appearing to wish to avoid him, reached, before answering his companion's observation, a door that opened close at hand. «So hard,» he replied from that point, «that I shall be off tomorrow morning.»
«And not see the rest?» she called after him.
But he had already gone, and Lord Gwyther, arriving, amiably took up her question. «The rest of what?» Miss Banker looked him well in the eyes. «Of Mrs. Grantham's clothes.»
Edith Wharton
THE DILETTANTE
It was on an impulse hardly needing the arguments he found himself advancing in its favour, that Thursdale, on his way to the club, turned as usual into Mrs. Vervain's
street.
The «as usual» was his own qualification of the act; a convenient way of bridging the interval-in days and other sequences-that lay between this visit and the last. It was characteristic of him that he instinctively excluded his call two days earlier, with Ruth Gaynor, from the list of his visits to Mrs. Vervain: the special conditions attending it had made it no more like a visit to Mrs. Vervain than an engraved dinner invitation is like a personal letter. Yet it was to talk over his call with Miss Gaynor that he was now returning to the scene of that episode; and it was because Mrs. Vervain could be trusted to handle the talking over as skilfully as the interview itself that, at her corner, he had felt the dilettante's irresistible craving to take a last look at a work of art that was passing out of his possession.
On the whole, he knew no one better fitted to deal with the unexpected than Mrs. Vervain. She excelled in the rare art of taking things for granted, and Thursdale felt a pardonable pride in the thought that she owed her excellence to his training. Early in his career Thursdale had made the mistake, at the outset of his acquaintance with a lady, of telling her that he loved her and exacting the same avowal in return. The latter part of that episode had been like the long walk back from a picnic, when one has to carry all the crockery one has finished using: it was (he last time Thursdale ever allowed himself to be encumbered with the debris of a feast. He thus incidentally learned that the privilege of loving her is one of the least favors that a charming woman can accord; and in seeking to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment he had developed a science of evasion in which the woman of the moment became a mere implement of the game. He owed a great deal of delicate enjoyment to the cultivation of this art. The perils from which it had been his refuge became naively harmless: was it possible that he who now took his easy way along the levels had once preferred to gasp on the raw heights of emotion? Youth is a high-colored season; but he had the satisfaction of feeling that he had entered earlier than most into that chiaro-oscuro of sensation where every half-tone has its value.
As a promoter of this pleasure no one he had known was comparable to Mrs. Vervain. He had taught a good many women not to betray their feelings, but he had never before had such fine material to work in. She had been surprisingly crude when he first knew her; capable of making the most awkward inferences, of plunging through thin ice, of recklessly undressing her emotions; but she had acquired, under the discipline of his reticences and evasions, a skill almost equal to his own, and perhaps more remarkable in that it involved keeping time with any tune he played and reading at sight some uncommonly difficult passages.
It had taken Thursdale seven years to form this fine talent; but the result justified the effort. At the crucial moment she had been perfect: her way of greeting Miss Gaynor had made him regret that he had announced his engagement by letter. It was an evasion that confessed a difficulty; a deviation implying an obstacle, where, by common consent, it was agreed to see none; it betrayed, in short, a lack of confidence in the completeness of his method. It had been his pride never to put himself in a position which had to be quitted, as it were, by the back door; but here, as he perceived, the main portals would have opened for him of their own accord. All this, and much more, he read in the finished naturalness with which Mrs. Vervain had met Miss Gaynor. He had never seen a better piece of work: there was no over-eagerness, no suspicious warmth, above all (and this gave her art the grace of a natural quality) there were none of those damnable implications whereby a woman, in welcoming her friend's betrothed, may keep him on pins and needles while she laps the lady in complacency. So masterly a performance, indeed, hardly needed the offset of Miss Gaynor's door-step words-»To be so kind to me, how she must have liked you!»-though he caught himself wishing it lay within the bounds of fitness to transmit them, as a final tribute, to the one woman he knew who was unfailingly certain to enjoy a good thing. It was perhaps the one drawback to his new situation that it might develop good things which it would be impossible to hand on to Margaret Vervain.
The fact that he had made the mistake of underrating his friend's powers, the consciousness that his writing must have betrayed his distrust of her efficiency, seemed an added reason for turning down her street instead of going on to the club. He would show her that he knew how to value her; he would ask her to achieve with him a feat infinitely rarer and more delicate than the one he had appeared to avoid. Incidentally, he would also dispose of the interval of time before dinner: ever since he had seen Miss Gaynor off, an hour earlier, on her return journey to Buffalo, he had been wondering how he should put in the rest of the afternoon. It was absurd, how he missed the girl... Yes, that was it: the desire to talk about her was, after all, at the bottom of his impulse to call on Mrs. Vervain! It was absurd, if you like-but it was delightfully rejuvenating. He could recall the time when he had been afraid of being obvious: now he felt that this return to the primitive emotions might be as restorative as a holiday in the Canadian woods. And it was precisely by the girl's candour, her directness, her lack of complications, that he was taken. The sense that she might say something rash at any moment was positively exhilarating: if she had thrown her arms about him at the station he would not have given a thought to his crumpled dignity. It surprised Thursdale to find what freshness of heart he brought to the adventure; and though his sense of irony prevented his ascribing his intactness to any conscious purpose, he could but rejoice in the fact that his sentimental economies had left him such a large surplus to draw upon.
Mrs. Vervain was at home-as usual. When one visits the cemetery one expects to find the angel on the tombstone, and it struck Thursdale as another proof of his friend's good taste that she had been in no undue haste to change her habits. The whole house appeared to count on his coming; the footman took his hat and overcoat as naturally as though there had been no lapse in his visits; and the drawing-room at once enveloped him in that atmosphere of tacit intelligence which Mrs. Vervain imparted to her very furniture.
It was a surprise that, in this general harmony of circumstances, Mrs. Vervain should herself sound the first false note.
«You?» she exclaimed; and the book she held slipped from her hand.
It was crude, certainly; unless it were a touch of the finest art. The difficulty of classifying it disturbed Thurs-dale's balance.
«Why not?» he said, restoring the book. «Isn't it my hour?» And as she made no answer, he added gently, «Unless it's some one else's?»
She laid the book aside and sank back into her chair. «Mine, merely,» she said.
«1 hope that doesn't mean that you're unwilling to share it?»
«With you? By no means. You're welcome to my last crust.»
He looked at her reproachfully. «Do you call this the last?»
She smiled as he dropped into the seat across the hearth. «It's a way of giving it more flavour!»
He returned the smile. «A visit to you doesn't need such condiments.»
She took this with just the right measure of retrospective amusement.
«Ah, but I want to put into this one a very special taste,» she confessed.
Her smile was so confident, so reassuring, that it lulled him into the imprudence of saying: «Why should you want it to be different from what was always so perfectly right?»
She hesitated. «Doesn't the fact that it's the last constitute a difference?»
«The last-my visit to you?»
«Oh, metaphorically, I mean-there's a break in the continuity.»
Decidedly, she was pressing too hard: unlearning his arts already!
«I don't recognise it,» he said. «Unless you make me-» he added, with a note that slightly stirred her attitude of languid attention.
She turned to him with grave eyes. «You recognize no difference whatever?»
«None-except an added link in the chain.»
«An added link?»
«In having one more thing to like you for-your letting Miss Gaynor see why I had already so many.» He flattered himself that this turn had taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase.
Mrs. Vervain sank into her former easy pose. «Was it that you came for?» she asked, almost gaily.
«If it is necessary to have a reason-that was one.»
«To talk to me about Miss Gaynor?»
«To tell you how she talks about you.»
«That will be very interesting-especially if you have seen her since her second visit to me.»
«Her second visit?» Thursdale pushed his chair back with a start and moved to another. «She came to see you again?»
«This morning, yes-by appointment.»
He continued to look at her blankly. «You sent for her?»
«I didn't have to-she wrote and asked me last night. But no doubt you have seen her since.»
Thursdale sat silent. He was trying to separate his words from his thoughts, but they still clung together inextricably. «I saw her off just now at the station.»
«And she didn't tell you that she had been here again?»
«There was hardly time, I suppose-there were people about-» he floundered.
«Ah, she'll write, then.»
He regained his composure. «Of course she'll write: very often, I hope. You know I'm absurdly in love,» he cried audaciously.
She tilted her head back, looking up at him as he leaned against the chimney-piece. He had leaned there so often that the attitude touched a pulse which set up a throbbing in her throat. «Oh, my poor Thursdale!» she murmured.
«I suppose it's rather ridiculous,» he owned; and as she remained silent, he added, with a sudden break-«0r have you another reason for pitying me?» Her answer was another question. «Have you been back to your rooms since you left her?»
«Since I left her at the station? 1 came straight here.» «All, yes-you could: there was no reason-» Her words passed into a silent musing.
Thursdale moved nervously nearer. «You said you had something to tell me?»
«Perhaps I had better let her do so. There may be a letter at your rooms.»
«A letter? What do you mean? A letter from her? What has happened?»
His paleness shook her, and she raised a hand of reassurance. «Nothing has happened-perhaps that is just the worst of it You always hated, you know,» she added incoherently, «to have things happen: you never would let them.» «And now-?»
«Well, that was what she came here for: I supposed you had guessed. To know if anything had happened.»
«Had happened?» He gazed at her slowly. «Between you and me?» he said with a rush of light.
The words were so much cruder than any that had ever passed between them, that the colour rose to her face; but she held his startled gaze.
«You know girls are not quite as unsophisticated as they used to be. Are you surprised that such an idea should occur to her?»
His own color answered hers: it was the only reply that came to him.
Mrs. Vervain went on smoothly: «I supposed it might have struck you that there were times when we presented that appearance.»
He made an impatient gesture. «A man's past is his own!»
«Perhaps-it certainly never belongs to the woman who has shared it. But one learns such truths only by experience; and Miss Gaynor is naturally inexperienced.»
«Of course-but-supposing her act a natural one-» In-floundered lamentably among his innuendoes-! still don't see-how there was anything-»
«Anything to take hold of? There wasn't-»
«Well, then-?» escaped him, in undisguised satisfaction; but as she did not complete the sentence he went on with a faltering laugh: «She can hardly object to the existence of a mere friendship between us!»