Linda Condon Part 16

Submerged in apprehensive memory Linda lost most of his account of the Eden-like youth of his earlier day. When, at last, his a.s.sertions pierced her abstraction, it was only to bring her to the realization of how pathetically little he knew of either Vigne or her. She weighed the question of utter frankness here--the quality enhanced by universal obscurity--but she was obliged to check her desire for perfect understanding. A purely feminine need to hide, even from Arnaud, any detracting facts about women shut her into a diplomatic silence. In reality he could offer them no help; their problems--in a world created more objectively by the hand of man than G.o.d--were singular to themselves. Women were quite like spoiled captives to foreign princes, masking, in their apparent complacency, a necessarily secret but insidiously tyrannical control. It wouldn't do, in view of this, to expose too much.

The following morning it was Arnaud, rather than herself, who had a letter from Pleydon. "He wants us to come over to New York and his studio," the former explained. "He has some commission or other from a city in the Middle West, and a study to show us. I'd like it very much; we haven't seen this place, and his surroundings are not to be overlooked."

Pleydon's rooms were directly off Central Park West, in an apartment house obviously designed for prosperous creative arts, with a hall frescoed in the tones of Puvis de Chavannes and an elevator cage beautifully patterned in iron grilling. Dodge Pleydon met them in his narrow entry and conducted them into a pleasant reception-room. "It's a duplex," he explained of his quarters; "the dining-room you see and the kitchen's beyond, while the baths and all that are over our heads; the studio fills both floors."

There were low book cases with their continuous top used as a shelf for a hundred various objects, deep long chairs of caressing ease and chairs of coffee-colored wicker with amazingly high backs woven with designs of polished sh.e.l.ls into the semblance of spread peac.o.c.ks' tails. The yellow silk curtains at the windows, the rug with the intricate coloring of a cashmere shawl, the Russian tea service, were in a perfection of order; and Linda almost resentfully acknowledged the skilful efficiency of his maid. It was surprising that, without a wife, a man could manage such a degree of comfort!

Over tea far better than hers, in china of an infinitely finer fragility, she studied Pleydon thoughtfully. He looked still again perceptibly older, his face continued to grow sparer of flesh, emphasizing the aggressively bony structure of his head. When he shut his mouth after a decided statement she could see the projection of the jaw and the knotted sinews at the base of his cheeks. No, Dodge didn't seem well. She asked if there had been any return of the fever and he nodded in an impatient affirmative, returning at once to the temporarily suspended conversation with Arnaud. There was a vast difference, too, in the way in which he talked.

His att.i.tude was as a.s.sertive as ever, but it had less expression in words; unaccountable periods of silence, almost ill-natured, overtook him, s.p.a.ces of abstraction when it was plain that he had forgotten the presence of whoever might be by. Even direct questions sometimes failed to pierce immediately his consciousness. Dodge, Linda told herself, lived entirely too much alone. Then she said this aloud, thoughtlessly, and she was startled by the sudden intolerable flash of his gaze.

An awkward pause followed, broken by the uprearing of Pleydon's considerable length.

"I must take you into the studio before it is too dark," he proceeded.

"Every creative spirit knows when its great moment has come. Well, mine is here." The men stood aside as Linda, her head positively ringing with the thrill that was like a strain of Gluck, the happy sadness, entered the bare high s.p.a.ciousness of Dodge Pleydon's workroom.

x.x.xI

Everything she saw, the stripped floor, the white walls bare but for some casts like the dismembered fragments of flawless blanched bodies, the inclined plane of the wide skylight, bore an impalpable white dust of dried clay. In a corner, enclosed in low boards, a stooped individual with wood-soled shoes and a shovel was working a ma.s.s of clay over which at intervals he sprinkled water, and at intervals halted to make pliable lumps of a uniform size which he added to a pile wrapped in damp cloths.

There were a number of modeling stands with twisted wires grotesquely resembling a child's line drawing of a human being; while a stand with some modeling tools on its edge bore an upright figure shapeless in its swathing of dampened cloths.

"The great moment," Pleydon said again, in a vibrant tone. "But you know nothing of all this," he directly addressed Linda. "Neither, probably, will you have heard of Simon Downige. He was born at Cottarsport, in Ma.s.sachusetts, about eighteen forty; and, after--in the support of his hatred of any slavery--he fought through the Civil War, he came home and found that his town stifled him. He didn't marry at once, as so many returning soldiers did; instead he was wedded to a vision of freedom, freedom of opinion, of spirit, wors.h.i.+p--any kind of s.p.a.ciousness whatever. And, in the pursuit of that, he went West.

"He told them that he was going to find--but found was the word--a place where men could live together in a purity of motives and air. No more, you understand; he hadn't a personal fanatical belief to exploit and attract the hysteria of women and insufficient men. He was not a pathological messiah; but only Simon Downige, an individual who couldn't comfortably breathe the lies and injustice and hypocrisy of the ordinary community. No doubt he was unbalanced--his sensitiveness to a universal condition would prove that. Normally people remain undisturbed by such trivialities. If they didn't an end would come to one or the other, the lies or the world.

"He traveled part way in a Conestoga wagon--a flight out of Egypt; they were common then, slow canvas-covered processions with entire families drawn by the mysterious magnetism of the West. Then, leaving even such wayfarers, he walked, alone, until he came on a meadow by a little river and a grove of trees, probably cottonwoods.... That was Simon Downige, and that, too, was Hesperia. Yes, he was unbalanced--the old Greek name for beautiful lands. It is a city now, successful and corruptly administered--what always happens to such visions.

"It is necessary, Linda, as I've always told you, to understand the whole motive behind a creation in permanent form. A son of Simon's--yes, he finally married--a unique and very rich character, wife dead and no children, commissioned a monument to the founder of Hesperia, in Ohio, and of his fortune.

"They even have a civic body for the control of public building; and they came East to approve my statue, or rather the clay sketch for it.

They were very solemn, and one, himself a sculptor, a graduate of the Beaux Arts, ran a suggestive thumb over Simon and did incredible damage.

But, after a great deal of hesitation, and a description from the sculptor of what he thought excellently appropriate for such magnificence, they accepted my study. The present Downige, really--though I understand there is another pretentious branch in Hesperia--bullied them into it. He cursed the Beaux-Arts graduate with the most brutal and satisfactory freedom--the tyranny of his money; the crown, you see, of Simon's hope."

He unwrapped one by one the wet cloths; and Linda, in an eagerness sharp like anxiety, finally saw the statue, under life-size, of a seated man with a rough stick and bundle at his feet. A limp hat was in his hand, and, beneath a brow to which the hair was plastered by sweat, his eyes gazed fixed and aspiring into a hidden dream perfectly created by his desire. Here, she realized at last, she had a glimmer of the beauty, the creative force, that animated Dodge Pleydon. Simon Downige's shoes were clogged with mud, his entire body, she felt, ached with weariness; but his gaze--nothing Linda discovered but shadows over two depressions--was far away in the attainment of his place of justice and truth.

She found a stool and, careless of the film of dust, sat absorbed in the figure. Pleydon again had lost all consciousness of their presence; he stood, hands in pockets, his left foot slightly advanced, looking at his work from under drawn brows. Arnaud spoke first:

"It's impertinent to congratulate you, Pleydon. You know what you've done better than any one else could. You have all our admiration." Linda watched the tenderness with which the other covered Simon Downige's vision in clay. Later, returning home after dinner, Arnaud speculated about Pleydon's remarkable increase in power. "I had given him up," he went on; "I thought he was lost in those notorious debauches of esthetic emotions. Does he still speak of loving you?"

"Yes," Linda replied. "Are you annoyed by it?" He answered, "What good if I were?" She considered him, turned in his chair to face her, thoughtfully. "I haven't the slightest doubt of its quality, however--all in that Hesperia of old Downige's. To love you, my dear Linda, has certain well-defined resemblances to a calamity. If you ask me if I object to what you do give him, my answer must shock the G.o.ds of art. I would rather you didn't."

"What is it, Arnaud?" she demanded. "I haven't the slightest idea. I wish I had."

"Platonic," he told her shortly. "The term has been hopelessly ruined, yet the sense, the truth, I am forced to believe, remains."

"But you know how stupid I am and that I can't understand you."

"The woman in whom a man sees G.o.d," he proceeded irritably:

"'_La figlia della sua mente, l'amorosa, idea_.'"

"Oh," she cried, wrung with a sharp obscure hurt. "I know that, I've heard it before." Her excitement faded at her absolute inability to place the circ.u.mstances of her memory. The sound of the words vanished, leaving no more than the familiar deep trouble, the disappointing sensation of almost grasping--Linda was unable to think what.

"After all, you are my wife." He had recovered his normal shy humor.

"I can prove it. You are the irreproachable mother of our unsurpa.s.sed children. You have a hopeless vision--like this Simon's--of seeing me polished and decently pressed; and I insist on your continuing with the whole show."

Her mind arbitrarily s.h.i.+fted to the thought of her father, who had walked out of his house, left--yes--his family, without any intimation.

Then, erratically, it turned to Vigne, to Vigne and young Sandby with his fresh cheeks and impending penniless years acquiring a comprehension of the bond market. She said, "I wonder if she really likes Bailey?"

Arnaud's energy of dismay was laughable, "What criminal folly! They haven't finished Mother Goose yet."

XXII

Linda, who expected to see Pleydon's statue of Simon Downige finished immediately in a national recognition of its splendor, was disappointed by his explanation that, probably, it would not be ready for casting within two years. He intended to model it again, life-size, before he was ready for the heroic. April, the vivifying, had returned; and, as always in the spring, Linda was mainly conscious of the mingled a.s.suaging sounds of life newly admitted through open windows. A single shaded lamp was lighted by a far table, where Arnaud sat cutting the pages of _The Living Age_ with an ivory blade; Dodge was blurred in the semi-obscurity.

He came over to see them more frequently now, through what he called the great moment--so tiresomely extended--of his life. Pleydon came oftener but he said infinitely less. It was his custom to arrive for dinner and suddenly depart early or late in the evening. At times she went up to her room and left the two almost morosely silent men to their own thoughts or pages; at others she complained--no other woman alive would stay with such uninteresting and thoroughly selfish creatures. They never made the pretense of an effort to consider or amuse her. At this Arnaud would put aside his book and begin an absurd social conversation in the manner of Vigne's a.s.sociates. Pleydon, however, wouldn't speak; nothing broke the somberness of his pa.s.sionate absorption in invisible tyrannies. She gave up, finally, a persistent effort to lighten his moods. Annoyed she told him that if he did not change he'd be sick, and then where would everything be.

All at once, through the open window, she heard Stella, her mother, laughing; the carelessly gay sound overwhelmed her with an instinctive unreasoning dread. Linda rose with a half gasp--but of course it was Vigne in the garden with Bailey Sandby.

She sank back angry because she had been startled; but her irritation perished in disturbing thought. It wasn't, she told herself, Vigne's actions that made her fear the future so much as her, Linda's, knowledge of the possibilities of the past. Her undying hatred of that existence choked in her throat; the chance of its least breath touching Vigne, Arnaud's daughter, roused her to any embittered hazard.

The girl, she was certain, returned a part at least of Bailey's feeling.

Linda expected no confidences--what had she done to have them?--and Arnaud was right, affairs of the heart were never revealed until consummated. Her conclusion had been reached by indirect quiet deductions. Vigne, lately, was different; her att.i.tude toward her mother had changed to the subtle reserve of feminine maturity. Her appearance, overnight, it seemed, had improved; her color was deeper, a delicate flush burned at any surprise in her cheeks, and the miracle of her body was perfected.

It wasn't, Linda continued silently, that Vigne could ever follow the example of Stella Condon through the hotels and lives of men partly bald, prodigal, and with distant families. Whatever happened to her would be in excellent surroundings and taste; but the result--the sordid havoc, inside and out, the satiety alternating with the points of brilliancy, and finally, inexorably, sweeping over them in a leaden tide--would be identical. She wondered a little at the strength of her detestation for such living; it wasn't moral in any sense with which she was familiar; in fact it appeared to have a vague connection with her own revolt from the destruction of death. She wanted Vigne as well to escape that catastrophe, to hold inviolate the beauty of her youth, her fineness and courage.

She was convinced, too, that if she loved Bailey, and was disappointed, some of the harm would be done immediately; Linda saw, in imagination, the pure flame of Vigne's pa.s.sion fanned and then arbitrarily extinguished. She saw the resemblance of the dead woman, all those other painted shades, made stronger. A sentence formed so vividly in her mind that she looked up apprehensively, certain that she had spoken it aloud:

If Vigne does come to care for him they must marry.

Her thoughts left the girl for Arnaud--he would absolutely oppose her there, and she speculated about the probable length his opposition would reach. What would he say to her? It couldn't be helped, in particular it couldn't be explained, neither to him nor to the friendly correctness of Bailey Sandby's mother. She, alone, must accept any responsibility, all blame.

The threatened situation developed more quickly than she had antic.i.p.ated. Linda met Bailey, obviously disturbed, in the portico, leaving their house; his manner, mechanically, was good; and then, with an irrepressible boyish rush of feeling, he stopped her:

"Vigne and I love each other and Mr. Hallet won't hear of it. He insulted us with the verse about the old woman who went to the cupboard to get a bone, and if he hadn't been her father--" he breathed a portentous and difficult self-repression. "Then he took a cowardly advantage of my having no money, just now; right after I explained how I was going to make wads--with Vigne."

An indefinable excitement possessed Linda, accompanied by a sudden acute fear of what Arnaud might say. She wanted more than anything else in life to go quickly, inattentively, past Bailey Sandby and up to her room. Nothing could be easier, more obvious, than her disapproval of a moneyless boy. She made a step forward with an a.s.sumed resolute ignoring of his disturbed presence. It was useless. A dread greater than her fright at Arnaud held her in the portico, her hand lifted to the polished k.n.o.b of the inner door. Linda turned slowly, cold and white, "Wait," she said to his shoulder in an admirable coat; then she gazed steadily into his frank pained eyes.

"How do you know that you love Vigne?" she demanded. "You are so young to be certain it will last always. And Vigne--"

"How does any one know?" he replied. "How did you? Married people always forget their own experiences, the happy way things went with them.

From all I see money hasn't much to do with loving each other. But, of course, I'm not going to be poor, not with Vigne. n.o.body could. She'd inspire them. Mr. Hallet knows all about me, too; and he's the oldest kind of a friend of the family. I suppose when he sees father at the Rittenhouse Club they'll have a laugh--a laugh at Vigne and me." His hand, holding the brim of a soft brown hat, clenched tensely.