Part 44 (1/2)
I'm visiting Aunt Victoria here for a while. Lawrence is a Freshman at....”
He broke in, his hollow voice resounding in the immense, vault-like s.p.a.ces around them. ”You'd better go home,” he said. ”I'd leave tonight, if I were you.” She looked at him startled, half-scared, thinking that she had been right to fancy him out of his mind. She saw with relief a burly attendant in a blue uniform lounging near a group of statuary. She could call to him, if it became necessary.
”You'd better go away from her at once,” went on the man, advancing aimlessly from one bay of the frescoes to another.
Sylvia knew now of whom he was speaking, and as he continued talking with a slow, dreary monotony, her mind raced back over the years, picking up a sc.r.a.p here, a half-forgotten phrase there, an intercepted look between her father and mother, a recollection of her own, a half-finished sentence of Arnold's ...
”She can't be fatal for you in the same way she has been for the others, of course,” the man was saying. ”What she'll do for you is to turn you into a woman like herself. I remember now, I have thought many times, that you _were_ like her ... of the same clay. But you have something else too, you have something that she'll take away from you if you stay. You can't keep her from doing it. No one can get the better of her. She doesn't fight. But she always takes life. She has taken mine. She must have taken her bogie-husband's, she took young Gilbert's, she took Gilbert's wife's, she took Arnold's in another way.... G.o.d! think of leaving a young, growing, weak soul in the care of a woman like Victoria! She took that poet's, I forget his name; I suppose by this time Felix Morrison is ...”
At this name, a terrible contraction of the heart told Sylvia that she was listening to what he said. ”Felix Morrison!” she cried in stern, angry protest. ”I don't know what you're talking about--but if you think that Aunt Victoria--if you think Felix Morrison--” She was inarticulate in her indignation. ”He was married last autumn to a beautiful girl--and Aunt Victoria--what an idea!--_no_ one was more pleased than she--why--you are _crazy_!” She flung out at him the word, which two moments before she would not have been so cruel as to think.
It gave him no discomfort. ”Oh no, I'm not,” he said with a spectral laugh, which had in it, to Sylvia's dismay, the very essence of sanity. She did not know why she now shrank away from him, far more frightened than before. ”I'm about everything else you might mention, but I'm not crazy. And you take my word for it and get out while you still can ... _if_ you still can?” He faintly indicated an inquiry, looking at her sideways, his dirty hand stroking the dishonoring gray stubble of his unshaven face. ”As for Morrison's wife ... let her get out too. Gilbert tried marrying, tried it in all unconsciousness. It's only when they try to get away from her that they know she's in the marrow of their bones. She lets them try. She doesn't even care. She knows they'll come back. Gilbert did. And his wife ... well, I'm sorry for Morrison's wife.”
”She's dead,” said Sylvia abruptly.
He took this in with a nod of the head. ”So much the better for her.
How did it happen that _you_ didn't fall for Morrison's ...” he looked at her sharply at a change in her face she could not control. ”Oh, you did,” he commented slackly. ”Well, you'd better start home for La Chance tonight,” he said again.
They were circling around and around the shadowy interior, making no pretense of looking at the frescoed walls, to examine which had been their ostensible purpose in entering. Sylvia was indeed aware of great pictured s.p.a.ces, crowded dimly with thronging figures, men, horses, women--they reached no more than the outer retina of her eye. She remembered fleetingly that they had something to do with the story of Ste. Genevieve. She wanted intensely to escape from this phantom whom she herself had called up from the void to stalk at her side. But she felt she ought not to let pa.s.s, even coming from such a source, such utterly frenzied imaginings against one to whom she owed loyalty. She spoke coldly, with extreme distaste for the subject: ”You're entirely wrong about Aunt Victoria. She's not in the least that kind of a woman.”
He shook his head slowly. ”No, no; you misunderstand me. Your Aunt Victoria is quite irreproachable, she always has been, she always will be. She is always in the right. She always will be. She did nothing to me but hire me to teach her stepson, and when my habits became too bad, discharge me, as any one would have done. She did nothing to Arnold except to leave him to the best schools and the best tutors money could buy. What more could any one have done? She had not the slightest idea that Horace Gilbert would try to poison his wife, had not the slightest connection with their quarrel. The young poet,--Adams was his name, now I remember--did not consult her before he took to cocaine. Morphine is my own specialty. Victoria of course deplored it as much as any one could. No, I'm not for a minute intimating that Victoria is a Messalina. We'd all be better off if she were. It's only our grossness that finds fault with her. Your aunt is one of the most respectable women who ever lived, as 'chaste as unsunned snow--the very ice of chast.i.ty is in her!' Indeed, I've often wondered if the redoubtable Ephraim Smith himself, for all that he succeeded in marrying her, fared any better than the rest of us.
Victoria would be quite capable of cheating him out of his pay. She parches, yes, she dries up the blood--but it's not by her pa.s.sion, not even by ours. Honest pa.s.sion never kills. It's the Sahara sands of her egotism into which we've all emptied our veins.”
Sylvia was frozen to the spot by her outraged indignation that any one should dare speak to her thus. She found herself facing a fresco of a tall, austere figure in an enveloping white garment, an elderly woman with a thin, worn, n.o.ble face, who laid one fine old hand on a stone parapet and with divine compa.s.sion and tenderness looked out over a sleeping city. The man followed the direction of her eyes. ”It's Puvis de Chavannes' Ste. Genevieve as an old woman, guarding and praying for the city. Very good, isn't it? I especially admire the suggestion of the plain bare cell she has stepped out from. I often come here to look at it when I've nothing to eat.” He seemed as flaccidly willing to speak on this as on any other topic; to find it no more interesting than the subject of his former speech.
Sylvia was overcome with horror of him. She walked rapidly away, towards the door, hoping he would not follow her. He did not. When she glanced back fearfully over her shoulder, she saw him still standing there, looking up at the gaunt gray figure of beneficent old age. His dreadful broken felt hat was in his hand, the water dripped from his frayed trousers over the rotting leather of his shoes. As she looked, he began to cough, loudly, terribly, so that the echoing reaches of the great nave resounded to the sound. Sylvia ran back to him and thrust her purse into his hand. At first he could not speak, for coughing, but in a moment he found breath to ask, ”Is it Victoria's money?”
She did not answer.
He held it for a moment, and then opening his hand let it drop. As she turned away Sylvia heard it fall clinking on the stone floor. At the door she turned for one last look, and saw him weakly stooping to pick it up again. She fairly burst out of the door.
It was almost dusk when she was on the street again, looking down the steep incline to the Luxembourg Gardens. In the rainy twilight the fierce tension of the Rodin ”Thinker” in front of the Pantheon loomed huge and tragic. She gave it a glance of startled sympathy. She had never understood the statue before. Now she was a prey to those same ravaging throes. There was for the moment no escaping them. She felt none of her former wild impulse to run away. What she had been running away from had overtaken her. She faced it now, looked at it squarely, gave it her ear for the first time; the grinding, dissonant note under the rich harmony of the life she had known for all these past months, the obscure vaults underlying the s.h.i.+ning temple in which she had been living.
What beauty could there be which was founded on such an action as Felix' marriage to Molly--Molly, whose pa.s.sionate directness had known the only way out of the impa.s.se into which Felix should never have let her go?... An echo from what she had heard in the ma.s.s at Notre Dame rang in her ears, and now the sound was louder--Austin's voice, Austin's words: ”A beauty that can't endure disharmony in conduct, the fine true ear for the deeper values, the foundations--” It was Austin, asking himself what beauty could be in any life founded, even remotely as his was, on any one's misery?
For a long time she stood there, silent, motionless, her hands clenched at her sides, looking straight before her in the rain. Above her on his pedestal, the great, bronze, naked, tortured man ground his teeth as he glared out from under the inexorable limitations of his ape-like forehead, and strove wildly against the barriers of his flesh....
Wildly and vainly, against inexorable limitations! Sylvia was aware that an insolent young man, with moist protuberant eyes, had come up where she stood there, alone, motionless on the public street. He put his arm in hers, clasped her hand in a fat, soft palm, and, ”_Allons, ma belle!_” he said with a revolting gayety.
Sylvia pulled away from him, cried out fiercely in English, ”Don't you dare to touch me!” and darted away.
He made no attempt at pursuit, acknowledging his mistake with an easy shrug and turning off to roam, a dim, predatory figure, along the dusky street. He had startled and frightened the girl so that she was trembling when she ventured to slow down to a walk under the glaring lights of the Boulevard St. Michel. She was also s.h.i.+vering with wet and cold, and without knowing it, she was extremely hungry. As she fled along the boulevard in the direction of her own quarter of the city, her eye caught the lighted clock at the kiosk near Cluny. She was astonished to see that it was after seven o'clock. How long could she have stood there, under the shadow of that terrific Thinker, consumed quite as much as he by the pain of trying to rise above mere nature? An hour--more than an hour, she must have been there. The Pantheon must have closed during that time, and the dreadful, sick man must have pa.s.sed close by her. Where was he now? What makes.h.i.+ft shelter harbored that cough, those dirty, skeleton hands, those awful eyes which had outlived endurance and come to know peace before death....
She s.h.i.+vered and tried to shrink away from her wet, clinging clothing.
She had never, in all her life before, been wet and cold and hungry and frightened, she had never known from what she had been protected.
And now the absence of money meant that she must walk miles in the rain before she could reach safety and food. For three cents she could ride. But she had not three cents. How idiotic she had been not to keep a few sous from her purse. What a sickening thing it had been to see him stoop to pick it up after he had tried to have the pride not to touch it. That was what morphine had done for him. And he would buy more morphine with that money, that was the reason he had not been able to let it lie ... the man who had been to her little girlhood the radiant embodiment of strength and fineness!
Her teeth were chattering, her feet soaked and cold. She tried to walk faster to warm her blood, and discovered that she was exhausted, tired to the marrow of her bones. Her feet dragged on the pavement, her arms hung heavily by her side, but she dared not stop a moment lest some other man with abhorrent eyes should approach her.
She set her teeth and walked; walked across the Seine without a glance at its misted lights blinking through the rain, walked on past the prison of Marie Antoinette, without a thought of that other harmless woman who had loved bright and lovely things while others suffered: walked on upon the bridge across the Seine again. This bewildered her, making her think that she was so dazed she had doubled on her tracks.