Part 20 (2/2)
I wish you would marry.”
”I tried to,” she coolly replied, ”but you spoiled my young dream of happiness.”
”That isn't true,” he a.s.serted sharply, perturbed. ”Anything that happened, or didn't happen, was only the result of yourself, of what you are. I am extremely anxious to have you settled, and your legs out of the Sunday papers. I--I am opposed to your present existence; it's gone on too long. I believe I'd rather see you orating on the streets, like Eliza Provost. And, by thunder, I never thought I should come to that!
Champagne and those d.a.m.nable syncopated tunes played by hysterical n.i.g.g.e.rs make a poor jig.” He spoke impetuously, unconscious of any reversal of previous judgments, opinions.
”You are so difficult to please, Howat,” she said wearily; ”you were aghast at the thought of my marrying James, and now you are complaining of the natural alternative. The truth is,” she added brutally, ”you are old-fas.h.i.+oned; you think life goes on just as it did when the Academy of Music was the centre of your world. And nothing is the same.” She rose, and, with a lighted cigarette and half-shut eyes, fell into a rhythmic step of sensuous abandon. ”You see,” she remarked, pausing. An increasing dread for her filled his heart. He felt, in response to her challenge, a sudden bewilderment in the world of to-day. Things, Howat Penny told himself, were marching to the devil. He said this irritably, loud, and she laughed. ”I'm going in by an early train,” she proceeded.
”We have left the country. Will you stop for me on the thirtieth? Early, Howat, so we can be sure of a good place.”
His helplessness included the subject of her remarks; he would, he realized, be at James Polder's wedding, but he persisted in his opinion.
”A low piece of business,” Howat declared. When she had gone he felt that he had not penetrated her actual att.i.tude toward Polder's deflection. He had not for a moment got beneath her casual manner, her lightness, pretended or actual. He wished vehemently that he were back again in the past he comprehended, among the familiar figures that had thronged the notable dinner to Patti, the women who had floated so graciously through the poetry of departed waltzes. He got out his alb.u.ms once more, scrutinized through his polished gla.s.s the programmes of evenings famous in song. But he went to bed a full two hours earlier than customary; his feet positively dragged up the stairs; above he sat strangely exhausted, breathing heavily for, apparently, no reason whatever.
He retraced, with Mariana, the course over the broad, asphalt way into the north end of the city early on the evening of the thirtieth. They found the church easily, by reason of a striped canvas tunnel stretched out to the curb; and a young man with plastered hair and a gardenia led them, Mariana on his arm, to a place on the centre aisle. The church had a high nave newly vaulted in maple, and stained gla.s.s windows draped with smilax, garish in colour against electric lights. Above the altar a great illuminated cross maintained an unsteady flickering; and--it was unseasonably cold--heating steam pipes gave out an expanding racket.
The pews through the centre filled rapidly; there was a low, excited chatter of voices, and a spreading tropical expanse of the dyed feathers and iridescent foliage of womens' hats. An overpowering scent of mingled perfumes rose and filled the interior. The strains of an organ grew audible, contesting with the rattle of the steam pipes. Howat Penny was detached, critical. Mariana, in a dull, black satin wrap of innumerable soft folds and wide paisley collar slipping from a sheath-like bodice of gleaming, cut steel beading, was silent, incurious. He turned to her, to point out an extravagant figure, but he said nothing. She was, evidently, in no mood for the enjoyment of the ridiculous. This disturbed him; he had not thought that she would be so--so concerned. He suppressed an impatient exclamation, and returned to the scrutiny of the culminating ceremony.
Here was a sphere, vastly larger than his own, to the habits and prejudices of which he was complete stranger. It was as James Polder had said--as if one or the other spoke Patagonian. He had no wish to acquire the language about him; a positive antagonism to his surrounding possessed him, beyond reason. He thought--how different Mariana is from all this, and was annoyed again at her serious bearing. Then he was surprised by his presence there at all; confound the girl, why didn't she play with her own kind! Yet only the other day the glimpse she had given him of her natural a.s.sociates had filled him with dread. His mind, striving to encompa.s.s the problem of Mariana's existence, failed to overcome the walls built about him by time, by habit. He gave it up. The louder pealing of the organ announced immediate developments.
There was a stir in the front of the church, a clergyman in white vestment advanced; and, at a sudden murmurous interest, a twisting of heads, the wedding procession moved slowly up the aisle. The ushers, painstakingly adopting various lengths of stride to the requirements of the organ, pa.s.sed in pairs; then followed an equal number of young women, among whom he instantly recognized the handsome presence of Kate Polder, in drooping blue bonnets, with prodigious panniers of celestial-hued silk, carrying white enamelled shepherd's crooks from which depended loops of artificial b.u.t.tercups. An open s.p.a.ce ensued, in the centre of which advanced a child with starched white skirts springing out in a lacy wheel about spare, bare knees, her pale yellow hair tied in an overwhelming blue bow; and holding outstretched, in a species of intense and quivering agony, a white velvet cus.h.i.+on to which were pinned two gold wedding bands.
After that, Howat Penny thought, the prospective bride could furnish only the diminished spectacle of an anti-climax. Led by the virginal presence of Isabella Polder she floated forward in a foam of white tulle and dragging satin attached below her bare, full shoulders. A floating veil, pinned with a wreath of orange blossoms, manifestly wax, covered the metallic gold of her hair. Her countenance was unperturbed, statuesque, and pink. As the sentimental clamour of the organ died the steam pipes took up, with renewed vigour, their utilitarian noise. ”Why don't they turn them off?” Mariana exclaimed in his ear. Personally he enjoyed such an accompaniment to what he designated as the performance.
He cast the partic.i.p.ants in their inevitable roles--the bride as prima donna, James Polder the heroic tenor. Mrs. Corinne de Barry, a thin, concerned figure in glistening lavender, supported a lamenting mezzo, the bulky, masculine figure at her side, with an imposing diamond on a hand like two bricks, was beautifully ba.s.so--
His train of thought was abruptly upset by James Polder's familiar, staccato utterance. The precipitant young man! It stamped out all Howat Penny's humorous condescension; his sensitive ear was conscious of a note, almost, of desperation. He avoided looking at Mariana. d.a.m.n it, the thing unexpectedly cut at him like a knife. James Polder said, ”I will.” The clear, studied tones of Harriet de Barry, understudy to Vivian Blane, were spoiled by the crackling of steam. Howat moved uneasily; he had an absurd sense of guilt; he hated the whole proceeding. What was that Polder, whose voice persisted so darkly in his hearing, about, getting himself into such a snarl? He recalled what the younger had said on his porch--”women with better hearts.” He had implored him, Howat Penny, to be ”more human.” The memory, too, of the shaken tone of that request bothered him. Now it appeared that he might have been, well, more human. He composed himself, facing such sentimental illusions, into a savage indifference to what remained of the ceremony; he ignored the pa.s.sage of Polder, with Harriet Polder on his arm; the relief of the unspeakable child carrying the white velvet cus.h.i.+on no longer in the manner of a hot plate; the united bridesmaids and ushers. ”Thank heaven, that's over!” he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed in the deeply-comfortable s.p.a.ce of the Jannan's motor laundalet. ”But it isn't,” Mariana said briefly. She sat silent, with her head turned from him, through the remainder of the short drive about Rittenhouse Square.
Then she went abruptly to her room.
Charlotte Jannan and her oldest child, Sophie Lewis, were above in the living room. The former was handsome in a rigid way; her countenance, squarely and harshly formed, with grey hair exactly waved and pinned, had an expression of cold firmness; her voice was a.s.sertive and final.
Sophie, apparently midway in appearance between Kingsfrere and Mariana, was gracefully proportioned, and gave an impression of illusive beauty by means of a mystery of veils, such as were caught up on her hat now.
They were discussing, he discovered, the family.
”It's an outrage, Howat,” Charlotte told him, ”you never married, and that the name will go. Here's Mariana at twenty-seven, almost, and nothing in sight; and Sophie flatly refuses, after only one, to have another child. I wish now I'd had a dozen. It is really the duty of the proper people. And Eliza Provost won't hear of a man! I tell Sophie it's their own fault when they complain about society to-day. It's the fault of this charity work and athletics, too; both extremely levelling.
Hundreds of women wind bandages or go to the hunt races and gabble about votes for no reason under heaven but superior a.s.sociates.”
”Howat will feelingly curse the present with you,” Sophie said rising.
”I must go. Borrow the motor, if you don't mind. I saw in the paper a Polder was married.” Howat Penny lit a cigarette, admirably stolid. ”A name I never repeat,” Charlotte Jannan said when her daughter had left.
He heard again the echo of James Polder's intense voice, ”I will.”
Something of his dislike for him, he discovered, had evaporated. Howat thought of Mariana, in her room--alone with what feelings? He realized that Charlotte would never have forgiven her for any excursion in that direction. He himself had been, was, entirely opposed to such a connection. However, he could now dismiss it into the past that held a mult.i.tude of similarly futile imaginings.
Charlotte, he inferred, had no elasticity; it was a quality the absence of which he had not before noted. She was a little narrow in her complacency. Her patent satisfaction in Sophie was a shade too--too worldly. Sam Lewis was, of course, irreproachably situated; but he was, at the same time, thick-witted, an indolent appendage for his name.
Suddenly he felt poignantly sorry for Mariana; in a way she seemed to have been trapped by life. James Polder resembled her in that he had been caught in an ugly net of circ.u.mstance. A great deal had been upset since his day, when the boxes and pit had been so conveniently separated; old boundaries no longer defined, limited, their content; social demarcations were being obliterated by a growing disaffection. It was very unfortunate, for, as he was seeing, unhappiness ensued. It was bound to. An irritability seized him at being dragged into such useless conjecturing; into, at his age, confusing complications; and he greeted with relief the long, low front of his dwelling at Shadrach, its old grey stone a seeming outcropping of the old green turf, the aged, surrounding trees.
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