A Fountain Sealed

A >> Anne Douglas Sedgwick >> A Fountain Sealed

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23

But Imogen loved the Pottses, so she told herself. To be sure of loving
the Pottses was a sort of pulse by which one tested one's moral health.
She still went religiously at least twice in every winter to their
receptions--funny, funny affairs, she had to own it--with a kindly smile
and a pleasant sense of benign onlooking at oddity. One met there young
girls dressed in the strangest ways and affecting the manners of budding
Margaret Fullers--young writers or musicians or social workers, and funny
frowsy, solemn young men who talked, usually with defective accents, about
socialism and the larger life over ample platefuls of ice-cream. Sweetness
and light, as Mrs. Potts told Imogen, was the note she tried for in her
reunions, and high endeavor and brotherly love.

Mrs. Potts was a small, stout woman, who held herself very straight indeed;
her hands, on festive occasions, folded on a lace handkerchief before her.
She had smooth, black hair, parted and coiled behind, and a fat face, pale
fawn-color in tint, encompassing with waste of cheek and chin such a small
group of features--the small, straight nose, the small, sharp eyes, the
small, smiling mouth--all placed too high, and spanned, held together, as
it were, by a _pince-nez_ firmly planted, like a bow-shaped ornament
pinning a cluster of minute trinkets on a large cushion.

Mr. Delancy Potts was tall, limp, blond, and, from years of only dubious
recognition, rather querulous. He had a solemn eye under a fringe of
whitened eyebrow, a long nose, that his wife often fondly alluded to as
"aristocratic" (they were keen on "blood," the Delancy Pottses), and a very
retreating chin that one saw sometimes in disastrous silhouette against the
light. Draped in the flowing fullness of hair and beard, his face showed a
pseudo-dignity.

Imogen saw the Pottses with a very candid eye, and her mind drifted from
that distant disposal of them to the contrast of the recent meeting,
recalling their gestures and postures as they sat, with an uneasy
assumption of ease, before her mother, of whom, for so many years, they had
disapproved more, almost, than they disapproved of municipal corruption and
"the smart set." As onlooker she had been forced to own that her mother's
manner toward them had been quite perfect. She had accepted them as her
husband's mourners; had accepted them as Imogen's friends; had, indeed, so
thoroughly accepted them, in whatever capacity they were offered to her,
that Imogen felt that a slight enlightenment would be necessary, and that
her mother must be made to feel that her own, even her father's acceptance
of the Pottses, had had always its reservations.

And some acceptances, some atonements, came too late. The Pottses had not
been the only members of the little circle gathered about her father who
had called forth her mother's wounding levity. She had taken refuge on many
other occasions in the half-playful, half-decisive, "I hate 'em," as if
to throw up the final barrier of her own perversity before pursuit. Not
that she hadn't been decent enough in her actual treatment, it was rather
that she would never take the Pottses, or any of the others--oddities she
evidently considered them-seriously; it was, most of all, that she would
never let them come near enough to try to take her seriously. She held
herself aloof, not disdainful, but indifferently gay, from her father's
instruments, her father's friends, her father's aims.

Later on, as Imogen grew into girlhood, her mother lost most of the gaiety
and all of the levity. Imogen guessed that storms, more violent than any
she was allowed to witness, intervened between young rebellion and the
cautious peace, the hostility that no longer laughed and no longer lost
its temper, but that, quiet, kind, observant, went its own way, leaving
her father to go his. The last memory that came up for her was of what had
followed such a storm. It seemed to mark an epoch, to close the chapter of
struggle and initiate that of acceptance. What the contest had been she
never knew, but she remembered in every detail its sequel, remembered lying
in bed in her placid, fire-lit room and hearing in her mother's room next
hers the sound of violent sobbing.

Imogen had felt, while she listened, a vague, alarmed pity, a pity
mingled with condemnation. Her father never lost his self-control and had
taught her that to do so was selfish; so that, as she listened to the
undisciplined grief, and thought that it might be well for her to go in to
her mother and console her, she thought, too, of the line that, tenderly,
she would say to her--for Imogen, now, was fourteen years old, with an
excellent taste in poetry:

"The gods approve
The depth, but not the tumult, of the soul."

It was a line her father often quoted to her and she always thought of him
when she thought of it.

But, just as she was rising to go on this errand of mercy, her father
himself had come in. He sat down in silence by her bed and put out his hand
to hers and then she seemed to understand all from the very contrast that
his silence made. The sobs they listened to were those of a passionate, a
punished child, of a child, too, who could use unchildlike weapons, could
cut, could pierce; she must not leave her father to go to it. After a
little while the sobs were still and, as her father, without speaking, sat
on, stroking her hair and hand, the door softly opened and her mother came
in. Imogen could see her, in her long white dressing-gown, with her wide
braids falling on either side, all the traces of weeping carefully effaced.
She often came in so to kiss Imogen good-night, gently, and with a slight
touch of shyness, as though she knew herself shut away from the inner
chamber of the child's heart, and the moment was their tenderest, for
Imogen, understanding, though powerless to respond, never felt so sorry
or so fond as then. But to-night her mother, seeing them there together
hand in hand, seeing that they must have listened to her own intemperate
grief,--their eyes gravely, unitedly judging her told her that,--seeing
that her husband, as at the very beginning, had found at once his ally,
drew back quickly and went away without a word. Whatever the cause of
contest, Imogen knew that in this silent confrontation of each other in her
presence was the final severance. After that her mother had acquiesced.

She acquiesced, but she yielded nothing, confessed nothing. One couldn't
tell whether she, too, judged, but one suspected it, and the dim sense
of an alien standard placed over against them more and more closely drew
Imogen and her father together for mutual sustainment. If, however, her
mother judged, she never expressed judgment; and if she felt the need of
sustainment, she never claimed it. It would, indeed, have been rather
fruitless to claim it from the fourth member of the family group. Eddy
seemed so little to belong to the group. As far as he went, to be sure,
he went always with her and against his father, but then Eddy never went
far enough to form any sort of a bulwark. A cheerful, smiling, hard young
pagan, Eddy, frankly bored by his father, coolly fond of his mother,
avoiding the one, but capable of little effective demonstration toward the
other. Eddy liked achievement, exactitude, a serene, smiling outlook, and
was happily absorbed in his own interests.

So it had all gone on,--Imogen traced it, sitting there in her quiet
corner, holding balances in fair, firm hands,--her mother drifting into a
place of mere conventionality in the family life; and Imogen, even now,
could not see quite clearly whether it had been she who had judged and
abandoned her husband, or he who had judged and put her aside. In either
case she could sum it up, her eyes lifted once more to the portrait's
steady eyes, with, "Poor, wonderful papa."

He was gone, the dear, the wonderful one, and she was left single-handed
to carry on his work. What this work was loomed largely, though vaguely,
for her. The three slender volumes, literary and ethical, were the only
permanent testament that her father had given to the world; and dealing, as
in the main they did, with ultimate problems, their keynote an illumined
democracy that saw in most of the results as yet achieved by his country a
base travesty of the doctrine, the largeness of their grasp was perhaps a
trifle loose. Imogen did not see it. Her appreciation was more of aims than
of achievements; but she felt that her father's writings were the body,
only, of his message; its spirit lived--lived in herself and in all those
with whom he had come in fruitful--contact. It was to hand on the meaning
of that spirit that she felt herself dedicated. Perfect, unflinching truth;
the unfaltering bearing witness to all men of his conception of right;
the seeing of her own personality as but an instrument in the service of
good--these were the chief words of the gospel. Life in its realest sense
meant only this dedication. To serve, to love, to be the truth. Her eyes
on her father's pictured eyes, Imogen smiled into them, promising him and
herself that she would not fail.

VII

It was in the library next morning that Valerie asked Imogen to join her,
and the girl, who had come into the room with her light, soft step, paused
to kiss her mother's forehead before going to the opposite seat.

"Deep in ways and means, mamma dear?" she asked her. "Why, you are quite
a business woman." "Quite," Valerie replied. "I have been going over
things with Mr. Haliwell, you know." She smiled thoughtfully at Imogen,
preoccupied, as the girl could see, by what she had to say.

Imogen was slightly ruffled by the flavor of assurance that she felt in
her mother, as of someone who, after gently and vaguely fumbling about for
a clue to her own meaning in new conditions, had suddenly found something
to which she held very firmly. Imogen was rejoiced for her that she
should find a field of real usefulness-were it only that of housekeeping
and seeing to weekly bills; but there was certainly a touch of the
inappropriate, perhaps of the grotesque, in any assumption on her mother's
part of maturity and competence. She therefore smiled back at her with
much the same tolerantly interested smile that a parent might bestow on a
child's brick-building of a castle.

"I'm so glad that you have that to give yourself to, mama dear," she said.
"You shall most certainly be our business woman and add figures and keep
an eye on investment to your heart's content. I know absolutely nothing of
the technical side of money--I've thought of it only as an instrument, a
responsibility, a power given me in trust for others."

Valerie, whose warmth of tint and softness of outline seemed dimmed and
sharpened, as though by a controlled anxiety, glanced at her daughter,
gravely and a little timidly. And as, in silence, she lightly dotted her
pen over the paper under her hand, uncertain, apparently, with what words
to approach the subject, it was Imogen, again, who spoke, kindly, but with
a touch of impatience.

"We mustn't be too long over our talk, dear. I must meet Miss Bocock at
twelve."

"Miss Bocock?" Valerie was vague. "Have I met her?"

"Not yet. She is a _protegee_ of mine--English--a Newnham woman--a
folk-lorist. I heard of her from some Boston friends, read her books, and
induced her to come over and lecture to us this winter. We are arranging
about the lectures now. I've got up a big class for her--when I say 'I,' I
mean, of course, with the help of all my dear, good friends who are always
so ready to back me up in my undertakings. She is an immensely interesting
woman; ugly, dresses tastelessly; but one doesn't think of that when one is
listening to her. She has a wonderful mind; strong, disciplined,
stimulating. I'm very happy that I've been able to give America to her and
her to America."

"She must be very interesting," said Valerie. "I shall like hearing her. We
will get through our business as soon as possible so that you may keep your
appointment." And now, after this digression, she seemed to find it easier
to plunge. "You knew that your father had left very little money, Imogen."

Imogen, her hands lightly folded in her lap, sat across the table, all mild
attention.

"No, I didn't, mama. We never talked about money, he and I."

"No; still--you spent it."

"Papa considered himself only a steward for what he had. He used his money,
he did not hoard it, mama dear. Indeed, I know that his feeling against
accumulations of capital, against all private property, unless used for the
benefit of all, was very strong."

"Yes," said Valerie, after a slight pause, in which she did not raise her
eyes from the paper where her pen now drew a few neat lines. "Yes. But
he has left very little for Eddy, very little for you; it was that I was
thinking of."

At this Imogen's face from gentle grew very grave.

"Mama dear, I don't think that you and papa would have agreed about the
upbringing of a man. You have the European standpoint; we don't hold with
that over here. We believe in equipping the man, giving him power for
independence, and we expect him to make his own way. Papa would rather have
had Eddy work on the roads for his bread than turn him into a _faineant_."

Valerie drew her lines into a square before saying, "I, you know, with Mr.
Haliwell, am one of your trustees. He tells me that your father gave you a
great deal."

"Whatever I asked. He had perfect trust in me. Our aims were the same."

"And how did you spend it? Don't imagine that I'm finding fault."

"Oh, I know that you couldn't well do that!" said Imogen with a smile a
little bitter. "I spent very little on myself." And she continued, with
somewhat the manner of humoring an exacting child: "You see, I helped a
great many people; I sent two girls to college; I sent a boy--such a dear,
fine boy--for three years' art-study in Paris; he is getting on so well.
There is my girls' club on the East side, my girls' club in Vermont; there
is the Crippled Children's Home,--quite numberless charities I'm interested
in. It's been one thing after another, money has not lacked,--but time has,
to answer all the claims upon me. And then," here Imogen smiled again,
"I believe in the claims of the self, too, when they are disciplined
and harmonized into a larger experience. There has been music to keep
up; friends to see and to make things nice for; flowers to send to sick
friends; concerts to send poor friends to; dinners and lunches to give so
that friends may meet--all the thousand and one little things that a large,
rich life demands of one."

"Yes, yes," said Valerie, who had nodded at intervals during the list.
"I quite see all that. You are a dear, generous child and love to give
pleasure; and your father refused you nothing. It's my fault, too. My more
mercenary mind should have been near to keep watch. Because, as a, result,
there's very little, dear, very, very little."

"Oh, your being here would not have changed our ideas as to the right way
to spend money, mama. Don't blame yourself for that. We should have bled
_you_, too!"

"Oh, no, you wouldn't," Valerie said quickly. "I've too much of the
instinctive, selfish mother-thing in me to have allowed myself to be bled
for cripples and clubs and artistic boys. I don't care about them a bit
compared to you and Eddy. But this is all beside the mark. The question now
is, What are we to do? Because that generous, expensive life of yours has
come to an end, for the present at all events."

Imogen at this sat silent for some moments, fixing eyes of deep, and
somewhat confused, cogitation upon her mother's face.

"Why--but--I supposed that you _had_ minded for Eddy and me, mama," she
said at last.

"I have very little money, Imogen."

Imogen hesitated, blushing a little, before saying, "Surely you were quite
rich when papa married you."

"Hardly rich; but, yes, quite well off."

"And you spent it all--on yourself?"

Valerie's color, too, had faintly risen. "Not so much on myself, Imogen,
though I wish now that I had been more economical; but I was ignorant
of your father's rather reckless expenditure. In the first years of my
marriage, before the selfish mother-thing was developed in me, I handed a
good deal of my capital over to him, for his work, his various projects; in
order to leave him as free for these projects as possible, I educated you
and Eddy--that, too, came out of my capital. And the building of the house
in Vermont swallowed a good deal of money."

Imogen's blush had deepened. "Of course," she said, "there is no more
reckless expenditure possible--since you use the term, mama--than keeping
up two establishments for one family; that, of course, was your own choice.
But, putting that aside, you must surely, still, have a good deal left. See
how you live; see how you are taken care of, with a maid,--I've never had
a maid, papa, as you know, thought them self-indulgences,--see how you
dress," she cast a glance upon the refinements of her mother's black.

"How I dress, my child! May I ask what that dress you have on cost you?"

"I believe only in getting the best. This, for the best, was inexpensive.
One hundred dollars."

"Twenty pounds," Valerie translated, as if to impress the sum more fully on
her mind. "I know that clothes over here are ruinous. Now mine cost only
eight pounds and was made by a very little woman in London."

Imogen cast another glance, now of some helpless wonder, at the dress.

"Of course you are so clever about such things; I shouldn't wish to spend
my thought--and I couldn't spend my time--on clothes. And then the standard
of wages is so scandalously low in Europe; I confess that I would rather
not profit by it."

"I am a very economical woman, Imogen," said Valerie, with some briskness
of utterance. "My cottage in Surrey costs me fifty pounds a year. I keep
two maids, my own maid, a cook, a gardener; there's a pony and trap and a
stable-boy. I have friends with me constantly and pay a good many visits.
Yet my income is only eight hundred pounds a year."

"Eight hundred--four thousand dollars," Imogen translated, a note of sharp
alarm in her voice. "That, of course, would not be nearly enough for all of
us."

"Not living as you have, certainly, dear."

"But papa? Surely papa has left something! He must have made money at his
legal practice."

"Never much. His profession was always a by-issue with him. I find that his
affairs are a good deal involved; when all the encumbrances are cleared
off, we think, Mr. Haliwell and I, that we may secure an amount that will
bring our whole income to about five thousand dollars a year. If we go on
living in New York it will require the greatest care to be comfortable on
that. We must find a flat somewhere, unless you cared to live in England,
where we could be very comfortable indeed, without effort, on what we
have."

Imogen was keeping a quiet face, but her mother, with a pang of helpless
pity and compunction, saw tears near the surface, and that, to control
them, she fixed herself on the meaning of the last words. "Live out of my
own country! Never!"

"No, dear, I didn't think that you would want to; I didn't want it for you,
either; I only suggested it so that you might see clearly just where we
stand, and in case you might prefer it, with our limited means."

Imogen's next words broke out even more vehemently. "I can't leave this
house! I _can't_! It is my home." The tears ran down her face.

"My poor darling!" her mother exclaimed. She rose quickly and came round
the table to her, putting her arm around her and trying to draw her near.

But Imogen, covering her eyes with one hand, held her off. "It's wrong.
It's unfair. I should have been told before."

"Imogen, _I_ did not know. I was not admitted to your father's confidence.
I used to speak to you sometimes, you must remember, about being careful."

"I never thought about it. I thought he made a great deal--I thought you
had a great deal of money," Imogen sobbed.

"It _is_ my fault, in one sense, I know," her mother said, still standing
beside her, her hand on her shoulder. "If I had been here I could have
prevented some of it. But--it has seemed so inevitable." The tears rose in
Valerie's eyes also; she looked away to conquer them. "Don't blame me too
much, dear. I shall try to do my best now. And then, after all, it's not of
such tragic importance, is it? We can be very happy with what we have."

Imogen wept on: "Leave my home!"

"There, there. Don't cry so. We won't leave it. We will manage somehow. We
will stay on here, for a time at least--until you marry, Imogen. You will
probably marry," and Valerie attempted a softly rallying smile, "before so
very long."

But the attempt was an unfortunately timed one. "Oh, mama!
don't--don't--bring your horrible European point of view into _that_, too!"
cried Imogen.

"What point of view? Indeed, indeed, dear, I didn't mean to hurt you, to be
indiscreet--"

"The economic, materialistic, worldly point of view--that money problems
can be solved by a thing that is sacred, sacred!" Imogen passionately
declared, her face still hidden.

Her mother now guessed that the self-abandonment was over and that, with
recovered control, she found it difficult to pick up her usual dignity. The
insight added to her tenderness. She touched the girl's hair softly, said,
in a soothing voice, that she had meant nothing, nothing gross or
unfeeling, and, seeing that her nearness was not, at the moment, welcome,
returned to her own place at the other end of the table.

Imogen now dried her eyes. In the consternation that her mother's
statements had caused her there had, indeed, almost at once, arisen the
consoling figure of Jack Pennington, and she did not know whether she were
the more humiliated by her own grief, for such a mercenary cause, or by
this stilling of it, this swift realization that the cramped life need
last no longer, for herself, than she chose. To feel so keenly the need of
escape was to feel herself imprisoned by the new conditions; for never,
never for one moment, must the need of escape weigh with her in her
decision as to Jack's place in her life. She must accept the burden, not
knowing that it would ever be lifted, and with this acceptance the sense of
humiliation left her, so that she could more clearly see that she had had a
right to her dismay. Her crippled life would hurt not only herself, but all
that she meant to others--her beneficence, her radiance, her loving power;
so hurt it, that, for one dark moment, had come just a dart of severity
toward her father. The memory of her mother's implied criticism had
repulsed it; dear, wonderful, transcendentalist, she must be worthy of him
and not allow her thoughts, in their coward panic, to sink to the mother's
level. This was the deepest call upon her courage that had ever come to
her. Calls to courage were the very breath of the spiritual life. Imogen
lifted her heart to the realm of spirit, where strength was to be found,
and, though her mother, with those implied criticisms, had pierced her, she
could now, with her recovered tranquility of soul, be very patient with
her. In a voice slightly muffled and uncertain, but very gentle, she said
that she thought it best to live on in the dear home. "We must retrench in
other places, mama. I would rather give up almost anything than this. _He_
is here to me." Her tears rose again, but they were no longer tears of
bitterness. "It would be like leaving him."

"Yes, dear, yes; that shall be as you wish," said Valerie, who was deeply
considering what these retrenchments should be. She, too, was knowing a
qualm of humiliation over self-revelations. She had not expected that it
would be really so painful, in such trivial matters, to adjust herself to
the most ordinary maternal sacrifices. It only showed her the more plainly
how fatal, how almost fatal, it was to the right impulses, to live away
from family ties; so that at their first pressure upon her, in a place that
sharply pinched, she found herself rueful.

For the first retrenchment, of course, must be the sending back to
England of her dear, staunch Felkin, who had taken such care of her for
so many years. Her heart was heavy with the thought. She was very fond
of Felkin, and to part with her would be, in a chill, almost an ominous
way, like parting with the last link that bound her to "over there."
Besides,--Valerie was a luxurious woman,--unpleasant visions went through
her mind of mud to be brushed off and braid to be put on the bottoms of
skirts; stockings to darn-she was sure that it was loathsome to darn
stockings; buttons to keep in their places; all the thousand and one little
rudiments of life, to which one had never had to give a thought, looming,
suddenly, in the foreground of one's consciousness. And how very tiresome
to do one's own hair. Well, it couldn't be helped. She accepted the
accompanying humiliation, finding no refuge in Imogen's spiritual
consolations.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23