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

"Queer? In what way queer?" Jack asked, placing himself on the sofa, his
legs stretched out before him, his hands in his pockets.

"I hardly know how to express it. She is so light, yet so deep; and I can't
make out why or where she is deep; it's there that the queerness comes in.
I feel it in her smile, the way she looks at you; I believe I feel it more
than she does. She doesn't know she's deep."

"Not really found herself yet, you think?" Jack questioned; the phrase was
one often in use between these young people.

Mary mused. "Somehow that doesn't apply to her--I don't believe she'll ever
look for herself."

"You think it's you she finds," Jack suggested; voicing a dim suspicion
that had come to him once or twice of late.

"What do you mean, exactly, Jack?"

"I'm sure I don't know," he laughed a little. "So you like her?" he
questioned.

"I think I do; against my judgment, against my will, as it were. But that
doesn't imply that one approves of her."

"Why not?"

"Why, Jack, you know the way _you_ felt about it, the day you and I and
Rose talked it over."

"But we hadn't seen her then. What I want to know is just what _you_ feel,
now that you have seen her."

Mary had another conscientious pause. "How can one approve of her while
Imogen is there?" she said at last.

"You mean that Imogen makes one remember everything?"

"Yes. And Imogen is everything she isn't."

"So that, by contrast, she loses."

"Yes, and do you know, Jack," Mary lowered her voice while she glanced up
at Mrs. Upton's portrait, "I can hardly believe that she has suffered,
really suffered, about him, at all. She is so unlike a widow."

"I suppose she felt herself a widow long ago."

"She had no right to feel it, Jack. His death should cast a deeper shadow
on her."

As Jack, shamefully, could see Mr. Upton as shadow removed, he only said,
after a slight pause: "Perhaps that's another of the things she doesn't
obviously show--suffering, I mean."

"I'm afraid that she's incapable of feeling any conviction of sin," said
Mary, "and that wise, old-fashioned phrase expresses just what I mean as to
a lack in her. On the other hand, in a warmhearted, pagan sort of way, she
is, I'm quite sure, one of the kindest of people. Her maid, when she went
back to England the other day, cried dreadfully at leaving her, and Mrs.
Upton cried too. I happened to find them together just before Felkin went.
Now I had imagined, in my narrow way, that a spoilt beauty was always a
tyrant to her maid."

"Oh, so her maid's gone! How does she do her hair, then?"

"Do her hair, Jack? What a funny question. As we all do, of course, with
her wits and her hands, I suppose. Any one with common-sense can do their
hair."

Jack kept silence, reflecting on the picture that Imogen had drawn for
him--the child bereft of its toy. Had it given it up willingly, or had it
been forced to relinquish it by the pressure of circumstance? Remembering
his own stringent words, he felt a qualm of compunction. Had he armed
Imogen for this ruthlessness?

The lustrous folds of Mrs. Upton's hair, at lunch, reassured him as to her
fitness to do without Felkin in that particular, but his mind still dwelt
on the picture of the crying child and he asked Imogen, when he was next
alone with her, how the departure of Felkin had been effected.

"You couldn't manage to let her keep the toy, then?"

"The toy?" Imogen was blank.

He enlightened her. "Her maid, you know, who had to do her hair."

"Oh, Felkin! No," Imogen's face was a little quizzical, "it couldn't be
managed. I thought it over, what you said about sacrificing other people's
needs to her luxuries, and felt that you were right. So I put it to her,
very, very gently, of course, very tactfully, so that I believe that she
thinks that it was she who initiated the idea. Perhaps she _had_ intended
from the first to send her back; it was so obvious that a woman as poor as
she is ought not to have a maid. All the same, I felt that she was a little
vexed with me, poor dear. But, apart from the economical question, I'm glad
I insisted. It's so much better for her not to be so dependent on another
woman. It's a little degrading for both of them, I think."

Jack, who theoretically disapproved of all such undemocratic gauds, was
sure that Mrs. Upton was much better off without her maid; yet something of
the pathos of that image remained with him--the child deprived of its toy;
something, too, of discomfort over that echo of her father that he now and
then detected in Imogen's serene sense of rightness.

This discomfort, this uneasy sense of echoes, returned more than once
in the days that followed. Mrs. Upton seemed, as yet, to have made very
little difference in the situation; she had glided into it smoothly,
unobtrusively--a silken shadow; when she was among them it was of that she
made him think; and in her shadowed quietness, as of a tranquil mist at
evening or at dawn, he more and more came to feel a peace and sweetness.
But it was always in this sweetness and this peace that the contrasting
throb of restlessness stirred.

He saw her at the meals he frequently attended, meals where the
conversation, for the most part, was carried on by Imogen. Mrs. Wake, also
a frequent guest, was a very silent one, and Mary an earnest listener.

If Imogen's talk had ceased to be very interesting to Jack, that was only
because he knew it so well. He knew it so well that, while she talked,
quietly, fluently, dominatingly, he was able to remain the dispassionate
observer and to wonder how it impressed her mother. Jack watched Mrs.
Upton, while Imogen talked, leaning her head on her hand and raising
contemplative eyes to her daughter. Those soft, dark eyes, eyes almost
somnolent under their dusky brows and half-drooped lashes,--how different
they were from Imogen's, as different as dusk from daylight. And they
were not really sad, not really sleepy, eyes; that was the surprise of
them when, after the downcast mystery, they raised to one suddenly their
penetrating intelligence. The poetry of their aspect was constantly
contradicted by the prose of their glance. But she did more than turn her
own poetry into prose, so he told himself; she turned other people's into
prose, too. Her glance became to him a running translation into sane,
almost merry, commonplace, of Imogen's soarings. He knew that she made the
translation and he knew that it was a prose one, but its meaning she kept
for herself. It was when, now and then, he felt that he had hit upon a
word, a phrase, that the discomfort, the bewilderment, came; and he would
then turn resolutely to Imogen and grasp firmly his own conception of her
essential meaning, a meaning that could bear any amount of renderings.

She was so beautiful, sitting there, the girl he loved, her pearly face
and throat, her coronet of pale, bright gold, rising from the pathetic
blackness, that it might well be that the mother felt only his own joy in
her loveliness and could spare no margin of consciousness for critical
comment. She was so lovely, so young, so good; so jaded, too, with all
the labor, the giving of herself, the long thoughts for others; why
shouldn't she be dominant and assured? Why shouldn't she even be didactic
and slightly complacent? If there was sometimes a triteness in her
pronouncements, a lack of humor, of spontaneity, in her enthusiasms, surely
no one who loved her could recognize them with any but the tenderest of
smiles. He felt quite sure that Mrs. Upton recognized them with nothing
else. He felt quite sure that the "deepest" thing in Mrs. Upton was the
most intense interest in Imogen; but he felt sure, too, that the thing
above it, the thing that gazed so quietly, so dispassionately, was complete
indifference as to what Imogen might be saying. Didn't her prose, with its
unemphatic evenness, imply that some enthusiasms went quite without saying
and that some questions were quite disposed of for talk just because they
were so firmly established for action? When he had reached this point
of query, Jack felt rising within him that former sense of irritation
on Imogen's behalf, and on his own. After all, youthful triteness and
enthusiasm were preferable to indifference. In the stress of this
irritation he felt, at moments, a shock of keen sympathy for the departed
Mr. Upton, who had, no doubt, often felt that disconcerting mingling of
interest and indifference weigh upon his dithyrambic ardors. He often felt
very sorry for Mr. Upton as he looked at his widow. It was better to feel
that than to feel sorry for her while he listened to Imogen. It did not do
to realize too keenly, through Imogen's echo, what it must have been to
listen to Mr. Upton for a lifetime. When, on rare occasions, he had Mrs.
Upton to himself, his impulse always was to "draw her out," to extract from
her what were her impressions of things in general and what her attitude
toward life. She must really, by this time, have enough accepted him as
one of themselves to feel his right to hear all sorts of impressions. He
was used to talking things over, talking them, indeed, over and over;
turning them, surveying them, making the very most of all their possible
significance, with men and women to whom his relationship was half
brotherly and wholly comradely, and whom, in the small, fresh, clear world,
where he had spent his life, he had known since boyhood. It was a very
ethical and intellectual little world, this of Jack's, where impressions
passed from each to each, as if by right, where some suspicion was felt for
those that could not be shared, and where to keep anything so worth while
to oneself was almost to rob a whole circle. Reticence had the distinct
flavor of selfishness and uncertainty of mind, the flavor of laxity. If one
were earnest and ardent and disciplined one either knew what one thought,
and shared it, or one knew what one wanted to think, and one sought it.
Jack suspected Mrs. Upton of being neither earnest, nor ardent, nor
disciplined; but he found it difficult to believe that, as a new inmate of
his world, she couldn't be, if only she would make the effort, as clear as
the rest of it, and that she wasn't as ready, if manipulated with tact and
sympathy, to give and to receive.

Wandering about the drawing-room, while, as usual in her leisure moments,
she crocheted a small jacket, Tison in her lap, he wondered, for instance,
what she thought of the drawing-room. He knew that it was very different
from the drawing-room in her Surrey cottage, and very different from the
drawing-rooms with which, as he had heard from Imogen, she was familiar in
the capitals of Europe. Mrs. Upton was, to-day, crocheting a blue border as
peacefully as though she had faced pseudo-Correggios and crimson brocade
and embossed wall-paper all her life, so that either her tastes shared the
indifference of her intelligence or else her power of self-control was
commendably complete.

"I hope that you are coming to Boston some day," he said to her on this
occasion, the occasion of the blue border. "I'd like so much to show you my
studio there, and my work. I'm not such an idler as you might imagine."

Mrs. Upton replied that she should never for a moment imagine him an idler
and that since she was going to Boston to stay with his great-aunt, a dear
but too infrequently seen friend of hers, she hoped soon for the pleasure
of seeing his work. "I hear that you are very talented," she added.

Jack, who considered that he was, did not protest with a false modesty,
but went on to talk of the field of art in general, and questioning her,
skeptical as to her statement that her artistic tastes were a mere medley,
he put together by degrees a conception of vague dislikes and sharp
preferences. But, in spite of his persistence in keeping her to Chardin and
Japanese prints, she would pass on from herself to Imogen, emphasizing her
satisfaction in Imogen's great interest in art. "It's such a delightful
bond between people," And Mrs. Upton, with her more than American parental
discretion, smiled her approval of such bonds.

Jack reflected some moments before saying that Imogen knew, perhaps, more
than she cared. He didn't think that Imogen had, exactly, the esthetic
temperament. And that there was no confidential flavor in these remarks he
demonstrated by adding that it was a point he and Imogen often discussed;
he had often told her that she should try to feel more and to think less,
so that Valerie might amusedly have recalled Imogen's explanation to her
of the fundamental frankness that made lovers in America such "remarkable
young men." Jack's frankness, evidently, would be restrained by neither
diffidence nor affection. She received his diagnosis of her daughter's case
without comment, saying only, after a moment, while she turned a corner of
her jacket, "And you are of the artistic temperament, I suppose?"

"Well, yes," he owned, "in a sense; though not in that in which the word
has been so often misused. I don't see the artist as a performing acrobat
nor as an anarchist in ethics, either. I think that art is one of the big
aspects of life and that through it one gets hold of a big part of
reality."

Mrs. Upton, mildly intent on her corner, looked acquiescent.

"I think," Jack went on, "that, like everything else in life worth having,
it's a harmony only attained by discipline and by sacrifice. And it's
essentially a social, not a selfish attainment; it widens our boundaries of
comprehension and sympathy; it reveals brotherhood. The artist's is a high
form of service."

He suspected Mrs. Upton, while he spoke, of disagreement; he suspected her,
also, of finding him sententious; but she continued to look interested, so
that, quite conscious of his didactic purpose and amused by all the things
he saw in their situation, he unfolded to her his conception of the
artist's place in the social organism.

She said, finally, "I should have thought that art was much more of an end
in itself."

"Ah, there we come to the philosophy of it," said Jack. "It _is_, of
course, a sort of mysticism. One lays hold of something eternal in all
achievement; but then, you see, one finds out that the eternal isn't cut up
into sections, as it were--art here, ethics there--intellect yonder; one
finds out that all that is eternal is bound up with the whole, so that you
can't separate beauty from goodness and truth any more than you can divide
a man's moral sense from his artistic and rational interests."

"Still, it's in sections for us, surely? What very horrid people can be
great artists," Mrs. Upton half questioned, half mused.

"Ah, I don't believe it! I don't believe it!" Jack broke out. "You'll find
a flaw in his art, if you find a moral chaos in him. It must be a harmony!"

The corner was long since turned, and on a simple stretch of blue Mrs.
Upton now looked up at him with a smile that showed him that whether she
liked what he said or not, she certainly liked him. It was here that the
slight bewilderment came in, to feel that he had been upholding some
unmoral doctrine she would have smiled in just the same way; and the
bewilderment was greater on feeling how much he liked her to like him. Over
the didactic intentions, a boyish, an answering, smile irradiated his face.

"I'm not much of a thinker, but I suppose that it does all come together,
somehow," she said.

"I'm sure that you make a great deal of beauty, wherever you are," Jack
answered irrelevantly. "I've heard that your cottage in England is so
charming. Mrs. Wake was telling me about it."

"It is a dear little place."

He remembered, suddenly, that the room where they talked contradicted his
assertion, and, glancing about it furtively, his eye traversed the highly
glazed surface of the Correggio. Mrs. Upton's glance followed his. "I don't
think I ever cared, so seriously, about beauty," she said, smiling quietly.
"I lived, you see, for a good many years in this room, just as it is."
There was no pathos in her voice. Jack brought it out for her.

"I am sure you hated it!"

"I thought it ugly, of course; but I didn't mind so much as all that. I
didn't mind, really, so much as you would."

"Not enough to try to have it right?"

He was marching his ethics into it, and, with his question, he felt now
that he had brought Mr. Upton right down from the wall and between them.
Mr. Upton had not minded the room at all, or had minded only in the sense
that he made it a matter of conscience not to mind. And aspects of it Mr.
Upton had thought beautiful. And that Mrs. Upton felt all this he was sure
from the very vagueness of her answer.

"That would have meant caring more for beauty than for more important
things in life."

He knew that it was in horribly bad taste, but he couldn't help having it
out, now that he had, involuntarily, gone so far. "If you like Chardin, I'm
sure that that hurts you," and he indicated the pseudo-Correggio, this time
openly.

She followed his gesture with brows of mildly lifted inquiry, "You mean
it's not genuine?"

"That, and a great deal more. It's imitation, and it's bad imitation; and,
anyway, the original would be out of place here--on that wall-paper."

But Mrs. Upton wouldn't be clear; wouldn't be drawn; wouldn't, simply,
share. She shook her head; she smiled, as though he must accept from her
her lack of proper feeling, repeating, "I didn't like it, but, really, I
never minded much." And he had to extract what satisfaction he could from
her final, vague summing-up. "It went with the chairs--and all the rest."

X

"Mama," said Imogen, "who is Sir Basil?" She had picked up a letter from
the hall table as she and Jack passed on their way up-stairs after their
walk, and she carried it into the library with the question.

Mrs. Upton was making tea beside the fire, Mrs. Wake and Mary with her,
and as Imogen held out the letter with its English stamp and masculine
handwriting a dusky rose-color mounted to her face. Indeed, in taking the
letter from her daughter's hand, her blush was so obvious that a slight
silence of recognized and shared embarrassment made itself felt.

It was Jack who felt it most. After his swiftly averted glance at Mrs.
Upton his own cheeks had flamed in ignorant sympathy. He was able, in a
moment, to see that it might have been the fire, or the tea, or the mere
suddenness of an unexpected question that had caused the look of helpless
girlishness, but the memory stayed with him, a tenderness and a solicitude
in it.

Imogen had apparently seen nothing. She went on, pulling off her gloves,
taking off her hat, glancing at her radiant white and rose in the glass
while she questioned. "I remember him in your letters, but remember him so
little--a dull, kind old country squire, the impression, I think. But what
does a dull, kind old country squire find to write about so often?"

If Mrs. Upton couldn't control her cheeks she could perfectly control
her manner, and though Jack's sympathy guessed at some pretty decisive
irritation under it, he could but feel that its calm disposed of any absurd
interpretations that the blush might have aroused.

"Yes, I have often, I think, mentioned him in my letters, Imogen, though
not in those terms. He is a neighbor of mine in Surrey and a friend."

"Is he clever?" Imogen asked, ignoring the coolness in her mother's voice.

"Not particularly."

"What does he do, mama?"

"He takes care of his property."

"Sport and feudal philanthropy, I suppose," Imogen smiled.

"Very much just that," Mrs. Upton answered, pouring out her daughter's tea.

Jack, who almost expected to see Imogen's brow darken with reprobation for
the type of existence so described, was relieved, and at the same time
perturbed, to observe that the humorous kindliness of her manner remained
unclouded. No doubt she found the subject too trivial and too remote for
gravity. Jack himself had a general idea that serious friendships between
man and woman were adapted only to the young and the unmated. After
marriage, according to this conception, the sexes became, even in social
intercourse, monogamous, and he couldn't feel the bond between Mrs. Upton
and a feudal country squire as a matter of much importance. But, on the
other hand, Mrs. Upton had said "friend" with decision, and though the
word, for her, could not mean what it meant to people like himself and
Imogen--a grave, a beautiful bond of mutual help, mutual endeavor, mutual
rejoicing in the wonder and splendor of life--even a trivial relationship
was not a fit subject for playful patronage. It was with sharp
disapprobation that he heard Imogen go on to say, "I should like to meet a
man like that--really to know. One imagines that they are as extinct as the
dodo, and suddenly, if one goes to England, one finds them swarming. Happy,
decorative, empty people; perfectly kind, perfectly contented, perfectly
useless. Oh, I don't mean your Sir Basil a bit, mama darling. I'm quite
sure, since you like him, that he is a more interesting variation of the
type. Only I can't help wondering what he _does_ find to write about."

"I think, as I am wondering myself, I will ask you all to excuse me if
I open my letter," said Mrs. Upton, and, making no offer of satisfying
Imogen's curiosity, she unfolded two stout sheets of paper and proceeded
to read them.

Imogen did not lose her look of lightness, but Jack fancied in the
steadiness of the gaze that she bent upon her mother a controlled anger.

"One may be useful, Imogen, without wearing any badge of usefulness," Mrs.
Wake now observed. Her bonnet, as usual, on one side, and her hair much
disarranged, she had listened to the colloquy in silence.

Imogen was always very sweet with Mrs. Wake. She had the air of a full,
deep river benignly willing to receive without a ripple any number of such
tossed pebbles, to engulf and flow over them. She had told Jack that Mrs.
Wake's dry aggressiveness did not blind her for a moment to Mrs. Wake's
noble qualities. Mrs. Wake was a brave, a splendid person, and she had the
greatest admiration for her; but, beneath these appreciations, a complete
indifference as to Mrs. Wake's opinions and personality showed always in
her demeanor toward her. She was a splendid person, but she was of no
importance to Imogen whatever.

"I don't think that one can be useful unless one is actively helping on the
world's work, dear Mrs. Wake," she now said. "Mary, we have tickets for
Carnegie Hall to-morrow night; won't that be a treat? I long for a deep
draft of music."

"One does help it on," said Mrs. Wake, skipping, as it were, another
pebble, "if one fills one's place in life and does one's duty."

Imogen now gave her a more undivided attention. "Precisely. And one must
grow all the time to do that. One's place in life is a growing thing, It
doesn't remain fixed and changeless--as English conservatism usually
implies. Are you a friend of Sir Basil's, too?"

"I met him while I was with your mother, and I thought it a pity we didn't
produce more men like him over here--simple, unselfconscious men, contented
to be themselves and to do the duty that is nearest them."

"Anglomaniac!" Imogen smiled, sugaring her second cup of tea.

Mrs. Wake flushed slightly. "Because I see the good qualities of another
country?"

"Because you see its defects with a glamour over them."

"Is it a defect to do well by instinct what we have not yet learned to do
without effort!"

"Ah,--but the danger there is--" Jack here broke in, much interested, "the
danger there is that you merge the individual in the function. When
function becomes instinctive it atrophies unless it can grow into higher
forms of function. Imogen's right, you know."

"In a sense, no doubt. But all the same our defect is that we have so
little interest except as individuals."

"What more interest can any one have than that?"

"In older civilizations people may have all the accumulated interest of the
deep background, the long past, that, quite unconsciously, they embody."

"We have the interest of the future."

"I don't think so, quite; for the individual, the future doesn't seem to
count. The individual is sacrificed to the future, but the past is, in a
sense, sacrificed for the individual; in the right sort it's all
there--summed up."

Imogen had listened, still with her steady smile, to these heresies and to
Jack's over-lenient dealing with them. She picked up a review, turning the
pages and glancing through it while she said, ever so lightly and gently:

"I think that you would find most aristocrats against you in our country,
dear Mrs. Wake. With all the depth of our background, the length of our
past, you would find, in Jack and Mary and me, for instance, that it's our
sense of the future, of our own purposes for it, that makes our truest
reality."

Jack was rather pleased with this apt summing-up, too pleased, in his
masculine ingenuousness, to feel that for Mrs. Wake, with no ancestry at
all to speak of, such a summing could not be very gratifying. He didn't see
this at all until Mrs. Upton, folding her letter, came into the slightly
awkward silence that followed Imogen's speech, with the decisiveness that
had subtly animated her manner since Imogen's entrance. She remarked that
the past, in that sense of hereditary tradition handed on by hereditary
power, didn't exist at all in America; it was just that fact that made
America so different and so interesting; its aristocrats so often had the
shallowest of backgrounds. And in her gliding to a change of subject, in
her addressing of an entirely foreign question to Mrs. Wake, Jack guessed
at a little flare of resentment on her friend's behalf.

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