A Fountain Sealed
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Anne Douglas Sedgwick >> A Fountain Sealed
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Imogen kept her calm, and while her mother talked to Mrs. Wake she talked
to Mary; but that the calm was assumed she showed him presently when they
were left alone. She then showed him, indeed, that she was frankly angry.
"One doesn't mind Mrs. Wake," she said; "it's that type among us, the
type without background, without traditions, that is so influenced by
the European thing; you saw the little sop mama threw to her--she an
aristocrat!--because of a generation of great wealth; that could be her
only claim; but to have mama so dead to all we mean!"
Jack, rather embarrassed by the pressure of his enlightenments, said that
he hadn't felt that; it seemed to him that she did see what they meant, it
was their future that counted, in the main.
"A rootless future, according to her!"
"Why, we have our past; it's the way we possess it that's new in the world;
that's what she meant. Any little advantage that you or I may have in our
half-dozen or so generations of respectability and responsibility, is ours
only to share, to make us _tell_ more in the general uplifting,"
"You think that you need say that to _me_, Jack! As for respectability,
that homespun word hardly applies; we do have lineage here, and in the
European sense, even if without the European power. But that's no matter.
It's the pressing down on me of this alien standard, whether expressed or
not, that stifles me. I could feel mama's hostility in every word, every
glance."
"Hardly hostility, Imogen. Perhaps a touch of vexation on Mrs. Wake's
account. You didn't mean it, of course, but it might have hurt, what you
said."
"That! That was a mere opportunity. Didn't you feel and see that it was!"
Jack's aspect now took on its air of serious and reasonable demonstration.
"Well, you know, Imogen, you were a little tactless about her
friendship--about this Sir Basil."
He expected wonder and denial, but, on the contrary, after going to the
window and looking out silently for some moments, Imogen, without turning,
said, "It's not a friendship I care about."
"Why not?" Jack asked, taken aback.
"I don't like it," Imogen repeated.
"Why under the sun should you dislike it? What do you know about it,
anyway?"
Imogen still gazed from the window. "Jack, I don't believe that mama is at
all the woman to have friends, as we understand the word. I don't believe
that it is simply a friendship. Yes, you may well look surprised,"--she
had turned to him now--"I've never told you. It seemed unfair to her. But
again and again I've caught her whispers, hints, about the sentimental
attachments mama inspires. You may imagine how I've felt, living here with
_him_, in his loneliness. I don't say, I don't believe, that mama was ever
a flirt; she is too dignified, too distinguished a woman for that; but the
fact remains that whispers of this sort do attach themselves to her name,
and a woman is always to blame, in some sense, for that."
Jack, looking as startled as she had hoped he would, gazed now with
frowning intentness on the ground and made no reply.
"As for this Sir Basil," Imogen went on, "I used to wonder if he were
another of these triflers with the sanctity of love, and of late I've
wondered more. He writes to her constantly. What can the bond between mama
and a man of that type be unless it's a sentimental one? And didn't you see
her blush to-day?"
Jack now raised his eyes to her and she saw that he, at all events, was
blushing. "I can't bear to hear you talk like this, Imogen," he said.
Imogen's own cheeks flamed at the implied reproach. "Do you mean that I
must lock everything, everything I have to suffer, into my own heart? I
thought that to you, Jack, I could say anything."
"Of course, of course, dear. Only don't _think_ in this way."
"I accuse her of nothing but accepting this sort of homage."
"I know; of course,--only not even to me. They are friends. We have no
right to spy upon them; it's almost as if you had laid a trap for her and
then pointed her out to me in it. Oh, I know that you didn't mean it so."
"Spy on her! I only wanted to know!"
"But your tone was, well, rather offensively--humorous."
"Can you feel that a friendship to be taken seriously? The very kindest
thing is to treat it lightly, humorously, as I did. She ought to be laughed
out of tolerating such an unbecoming relationship. A woman of her age ought
not to be able to blush like that."
Looking down again, still with his deep flush, Jack said, "Really, Imogen,
I think that you take too much upon yourself."
Imogen felt her cheeks whiten. She fixed her eyes hard on his downcast
face.
"It will be the last touch to all I have to bear, Jack, if mama brings
a misunderstanding between you and me. If you can feel it fitting,
appropriate, that a widow of barely four months should encourage the
infatuation of a stupid old Englishman, then I have no more to say. We
have different conceptions of right and wrong, that is all." Imogen's lips
trembled slightly in pronouncing the words.
"I should agree with you if that were the case, Imogen. I don't believe
that it is."
"Very well. Wait and see if it isn't the case," said Imogen.
It was Jack who broached another subject, asking her about some concerts
she had gone to recently; but, turned from him again and looking out into
the evening, her answers were so vague and chill, that presently, casting a
glance half mournful and half alarmed upon her, he bade her good-by and
left her.
Imogen stood looking out unseeingly, a sense of indignation and of fear
weighing upon her. Jack had never before left her like this. But she could
not yield to the impulse to call out to him, run after him, beg him not to
go with a misunderstanding unresolved between them, for she was right and
he was wrong. She had told him to wait and see if it wasn't the case, what
she had said; and now they must wait. She believed that it was the case,
and the thought filled her with a sense of personal humiliation.
Since her summing up of the situation in the library, not three months ago,
that first quiet sense of mastery had been much shaken, and now for weeks
there had been with her constantly a strange gliding of new realizations.
This one seemed the last touch to her mother's wrongness--a wrongness that
had threatened nothing, had crushed down on nothing, and that yet pervaded
more and more the whole of life--that she should bring back to her old
deserted home not a touch of penitence and the incense of absurd devotions.
Friends of that sort, middle-aged, dull Englishmen, didn't, Imogen had
wisely surmised, write to one every week. It wasn't as if they had uniting
interests to bind them. Even a literary, a political, a philanthropic,
correspondence Imogen would have felt as something of an affront to her
father's memory, now, at this time; such links with the life that had
always been a sore upon their family dignity should have been laid aside
while the official mourning lasted, so to speak. But Sir Basil, she felt
sure, had no mitigating interests to write about, and the large, square
envelope that lay so often on the hall-table seemed to her like a pert,
placid face gazing in at the house of mourning. To-day, yes, she had wanted
to know, to see, and suspicions and resentments from dim had become keen.
And now, to complete it all, Jack did not understand. Jack thought her
unfair, unkind. He had left her with that unresolved discord between them.
A sense of bereavement, foreboding, and desolation filled her heart. On the
table beside her stood a tall vase of lilies that he had sent her, and as
she stood, thinking sad and bitter thoughts, she passed her hand over them
from time to time, bending her face to them, till, suddenly, the tears rose
and fell and, closing her eyes, holding the flowers against her cheek, she
began to cry.
That was what she had meant to be like, the pure, sweet aroma of these
flowers, filling all the lives about her with a spiritual fragrance. She
did so want to be good and lovely, to make goodness and loveliness grow
about her. It was hard, hard, when that was what she wanted--all that she
wanted--to receive these buffets from loved hands, to see loved eyes look
at her with trouble and severity. It was nothing, indeed,--it was, indeed,
only to be expected,--that her mother should not recognize the spiritual
fragrance; that Jack should be so insensible to it pierced her. And feeling
herself alone in a blind and hostile world, she sobbed and sobbed, finding
a sad relief in tears. She was able to think, while she wept, that though
it was a relief she mustn't let it become a weakness; mustn't let herself
slide into the danger of allowing grief and desolation to blur outlines for
her. That others were blind mustn't blind her; that others did not see her
as good and lovely must not make her, with cowardly complaisance, forswear
her own clear consciousness of right. She was thinking this, and her sobs
were becoming a little quieter, when her mother, now in her evening
tea-gown, came back into the room.
Imogen was not displeased that her grief should have this particular
witness. Besides all the deep, unspoken wrongs, her mother must be
conscious of smaller wrongs against her this afternoon, must know that she
had--well--tried to put her, as it were, in her place, first about the
letter and then about Mrs. Wake's lack of aristocratic instinct. She must
know this and must know that Imogen knew it. These were trivial matters,
not to be recognized between them; and how completely indifferent they
were to her her present grief would demonstrate. Such tears fell only for
great sorrows. Holding the flowers to her cheek, she wept on, turning her
face away. She knew that her mother had paused, startled, at a loss; and,
gravely, without one word, she intended, in a moment, unless her mother
should think it becoming to withdraw, to leave the room, still weeping. But
she had not time to carry this resolution into effect. Suddenly, and much
to her dismay, she felt her mother's arms around her, while her mother's
voice, alarmed, tender, tearful, came to her: "Poor darling, my poor
darling, what is it? Please tell me."
Physical demonstrations were never pleasing to Imogen, who, indeed,
disliked being touched; and now, though she submitted to having her head
drawn down to her mother's shoulder, she could not feel that the physical
contact in any way bridged the chasm between them. She felt, presently,
from her mother's inarticulate murmurs of compunction and pity, that this
was, apparently, what she had hoped for. It was evidently with difficulty,
before her child's unresponsive silence, that she found words.
"Is it anything that I've done?" she questioned. "Have I seemed cross this
afternoon? I _was_ a little cross, I know. Do forgive me, dear."
Enveloped as she was in her mother's arms, so near that she could feel the
warmth and smoothness of her shoulder through the fine texture of her gown,
so near that a fresh fragrance, like that from a bank of violets, seemed
to breathe upon her, Imogen found it a little difficult to control the
discomfort that the contact aroused in her. "Of course I forgive you, dear
mama," she said, in a voice that had regained its composure. "But, oh
no!--it was not at all for that--I hardly noticed it. It's nothing that you
can help, dear."
"But I can't bear to have you cry and not know what's the matter."
"Your knowing wouldn't help me, would it?" said Imogen, with a faint smile,
lifting her hand to press her handkerchief to her eyes.
"No, of course not; but it would help _me_--for my sake, then."
"Then, if it helps you, it was papa I was thinking of. I miss him so." And
with the words, that placed before her suddenly a picture of her own
desolation, a great sob again shook her. "I'm so lonely now, so lonely."
Her mother held her, not speaking, though Imogen now felt that she, too,
wept, and a greater bitterness rose in her at the thought that it was not
for her dead father that the tears fell but in pure weak sympathy and
helplessness. She, herself, was the only lonely one. She alone, remembered.
She alone longed for him. In this sharpened realization of her own sorrow
she forgot that it had not been the actual cause of her grief.
"Poor darling; poor child," her mother said at last. "Imogen, I know that
I've failed, in so much. But I want so to make up for things, if I can; to
be near you; to fill the loneliness a little; to have you love me, too,
with time."
"Love you, my dear mother? Why, I am full of love for you. Haven't you felt
that?" Imogen drew herself away to look her grieved wonder into her
mother's eyes. "Oh, mama, how little you know me!"
Valerie, flushed, the tears on her cheeks, oddly shaken from her usual
serenity, still clasped her daughter's hands and still spoke on. "I know, I
know,--but it's not in the way it ought to be. It's not your fault, Imogen;
it's mine; it must be the mother's fault if she can't make herself needed.
Only you can't know how it all began, from so far back--that sense that you
didn't need me. But I shirked; I know that I shirked. Things seemed too
hard for me--I didn't know how to bear them. Perhaps you might have come
almost to hate me, if I had stayed, as things were. I'm not making any
appeal. I'm not trying to force anything. But I so want you to know how I
long to have my chance--to begin all over again. I so want you to help."
Imogen, troubled and confused by her mother's soft yet almost passionate
eagerness, that seemed to pull her down to some childish, inferior
place, just as her mother's arms had drawn down her head to an attitude
incongruous with its own benignant loftiness, had yet been able, while she
spoke, to gather her thoughts into a keen, moral concentration upon her
actual words. She was accustomed, in moments of moral stress, to a quick
lifting of her heart and mind for help and insight toward the highest that
she knew, and she felt herself pray now, "Help me to be true, to her, for
her." The prayer seemed to raise her from some threatened abasement, and
from her regained height she spoke with a sense of assured revelation.
"We can't have things by merely _wanting_, them. To gain anything we must
_work_ for it. You left us. We didn't shut you out. You were
different.--You _are_ different."
But her mother's vehemence was still too great to be thrown back by
salutary truths.
"Yes; that's just it; we were different. It was that that seemed to shut me
out. You were with him--against me. And I'm not asking for any change in
you; I don't think that I expect any change in myself,--I am not asking for
any place in your heart that is his, dear child; I know that that can't be,
should not be. But people can be different, and yet near. They can be
different and yet love each other very much. That's all I want--that you
should see how I care for you and trust me."
"I do trust you, darling mama. I do see that you are warm-hearted, full of
kind impulses. But I think that your life is confused, uncertain of any
goal. If you are to be near me in the way you crave, you must change. And
we _can_, dear, with faith and effort. When you have found yourself, found
a goal, I shall feel you near."
"Ah, but don't be so over-logical, dear child. You're my goal!" Valerie
smiled and appealed at once.
Imogen, though smiling gravely too, shook her head. "I'm afraid that I'm
only your last toy, mama darling. You have come over here to see if you can
make me happy, just as if you were refurnishing a house. But, you see, my
happiness doesn't depend on you."
"You are hard on me, Imogen."
"No; no; I mean to be so gentle. It's such a dangerous view of life--that
centering it on some one else, making them an end. I feel so differently
about life. I think that our love for others is only sound and true when it
helps them to power of service to some shared ideal. Your love for me isn't
like that. It's only an instinctive craving. Forgive me if I seem ruthless.
I only want to help you to see clearly, dear."
Valerie, still holding her daughter's hands, looked away from her and
around the room with a glance at once vague and a little wild.
"I don't know what to say to you," she murmured. "You make all that I mean
wither." She was sad; her ardor had dropped from her. She was not at all
convicted of error; indeed, she was trying, so it seemed, to convict her,
Imogen, of one.
Imogen felt a cold resistance rising within her to meet this
misinterpretation. "On the contrary, dear," she said, "it is just the
poetry, the reality of life, in all its stern glory,--because it is and
must be stern if it is to be spiritual,--it is just that, it seems to me,
that you are trying to reduce to a sort of pretty, facile lyric."
Valerie still held the girl's hands very tightly, as though grasping hard
some dying hope. And looking down upon the ground she stood silent for some
moments. Presently she said, not raising her eyes, "I have won no right, I
suppose, to be seen more significantly by you. Only, I want you to
understand that I don't see myself like that."
Again Imogen felt the unpleasant sensation of being made to seem young
and inexperienced. Her mother's very quiet before exhortation; her sad
relapse into grave kindliness, a kindliness, too, not without its touch of
severity, showed that she possessed, or thought that she possessed, some
inner assurance for which Imogen could find no ground. In answering her she
grasped at all her own.
"I'm very sure you don't," she said, "for I don't for one moment misjudge
your sincerity. And what I want you to believe, my dear mother, is that I
long for the time when any strength and insight I may have gained through
my long fight, by _his_ side, may be of use to you. _Trust_ your own best
vision of yourself and it will some day realize itself. I will trust it
too, indeed, indeed, I will. We must grow if we keep a vision,"
Mrs. Upton now raised her eyes and looked swiftly but deeply at her
daughter. It was a look that left many hopes behind it. It was a look
that armed other, and quite selfless, hopes, with its grave and watchful
understanding. The understanding would not have been so clear had it not
been fed by all the springs of baffled tenderness that only so could find
their uses. Giving her daughter's hands a final shake, as if over some
compact, perhaps over that of growth, she turned away. Tison, who had
followed her into the room and had stood for long looking up at the
colloquy that ignored him, jumped against her dress and she stooped and
picked him up, pressing her cheek against his silken side.
"You had better dress now, Imogen," she said, in tones of astonishing
commonplace. "You've only time. I've kept you so long." And holding Tison
against her cheek she went to the window.
XI
The tableaux were not to come off until the end of April, and Jack, having
set things in motion, was in Boston at the beginning of the month. It was
at this time that Mrs. Upton, too, was in Boston, with her old friend and
his great-aunt, and it was at this time that he came, as he phrased it to
himself, really into touch with her.
Jack's aunt lived in a spacious, peaceful house on the hill, and the
windows of Jack's large flat, near by, looked over the Common, the Gardens,
the Charles River, a cheerful, bird's-eye view of the tranquil city,
breathed upon now by the first, faint green of spring.
Jack was pleased that Mrs. Upton and his aunt--a mild, blanched old lady
with silvery side-curls under the arch of an old-fashioned bonnet-should
often come to tea with him, for in the arrangement of his rooms-that
looked so unarranged--he felt sure that she must recognize a taste as fine
and fastidious as her own. He suspected Mrs. Upton of finding him merely
ethical and he was eager that she should see that his grasp on life was
larger than she might imagine. His taste was fine and fastidious; it was
also disciplined and gracefully vagrant; she must see that in the few but
perfect pictures and mezzotints on his walls; the collection of old white
Chinese porcelain standing about the room on black carved stands; in his
wonderful black lacquer cabinets and in all the charming medley of the rare
and the appropriate.
Certainly, whatever was Mrs. Upton's impression of him, she frequently
expressed herself as delighted with his rooms, and as they sat in the deep
window-seat, which commanded the view of the city, he felt more and more
sure that whatever that impression of him might be, it rested upon an
essential liking. It was pleasant to Jack to feel sure of this, little as
he might be able to justify to himself his gratification. Somehow, with
Mrs. Upton, he didn't find himself occupied with justifying things. The
ease that she had always made for him shone out, now, uninterruptedly, and
as they talked, while the dear old aunt sat near, turning the leaves of a
book, joining in with a word now and then, it was, in the main, the soft,
sweet sense of ease, like the breath of violets in the air, that surrounded
him. They talked of all sorts of things, or rather, as he said to himself,
they babbled, for real talk could hardly be so discursive, so aimless,
so merely merry. She made him think of a child playing with a lapful of
flowers; that was what her talk was like. She would spread them out in
formal rows, arrange them in pretty, intricate posies, or, suddenly, gather
them into generous handfuls which she gave you with a pleased glance and
laugh. It was queer to find a person who took all "talk" so lightly and who
yet, he felt quite sure, took some things hard. It was like the contrast
between her indolent face and her clear, unbiased gaze, that would not
flinch or deceive itself from or about anything that it met. Apparently
most of the things that it met she didn't take solemnly. The world, as far
as he could guess, was for her mainly made up of rather trivial things,
whether hours or people; but, with his new sense of enlightenment, he
more and more came to realize that it might be so made up and yet, to her
apprehension, be very bad, very sad, and very worth while too. And after
seeing her as a child playing with flowers he could imagine her in some
suddenly heroic role--as one of the softly nurtured women of the French
Revolution, for instance, a creature made up of little gaieties, little
griefs; of sprigged silk and gossamer, powder and patches; blossoming,
among the horrors of a hopeless prison, into courageous graces. She would
smile, talk, play cards with them, those doomed ones, she herself doomed;
she would make life's last day livable, in every exquisite sense of the
word. And he could see her in the tumbril, her arm round a terrified girl;
he could see her mounting the steps of the guillotine, perhaps with no
upward glance to heaven, but with a composure as resolute and as serene as
any saint's.
These were strange visions to cross his mind as they sat and talked, while
she made posies for him, and even when they did not hover he often found
himself dwelling with a sort of touched tenderness upon something vaguely
pathetic in her. Perhaps it was only that he found it pathetic to see her
look so young when, measured beside his own contrasted youth, he felt how
old she was. It was pathetic that eyes so clear should fade, that a cheek
so rounded should wither, that the bloom and softness and freshness that
her whole being expressed should be evanescent. Jack was not given to such
meditations, having a robust, transcendental indifference to earthly gauds
unless he could fit them into ethical significances. It was, indeed, no
beauty such as Imogen's that he felt in Mrs. Upton. He was not consciously
aware that her loveliness was of a subtler, finer quality than her
daughter's. She did not remind him of a Madonna nor of anything to do with
a temple. But the very fact that he couldn't tabulate and pigeon-hole her
with some uplifting analogy made her appeal the most direct that he had
ever experienced. The dimness of her lashes; the Japanese-like oddity of
her smile; the very way in which her hair turned up from her neck with an
eddy of escaping tendrils,--these things pervaded his consciousness. He
didn't like to think of her being hurt and unhappy, and he often wondered
if she wasn't bound to be both. He wondered about her a great deal. He
received, on every day they met, hints and illuminations, but never the
clear revealment that he hoped for. The thing that grew surer and surer
for him was her essential liking, and the thing that became sweeter and
sweeter, though the old perplexity mingled with it, was the superficial
amusement he caused her. One of the things that, he began to see, amused
her a little was the catholicity of taste displayed in the books scattered
about his rooms, the volumes of French and Italian that the great-aunt
would take up while they talked. They were books that she felt, he was
quite sure, as funnily incongruous with his whole significance, and that
their presence there meant none of the things that in another environment
they would have stood for; neither cosmopolitanism nor an unbiased
connoisseurship interested in all the flowers--_du mal_ among the rest--of
the human intelligence. That they meant for him his own omniscient
appreciation, unshakenly sure of the ethical category into which he could
place each fruit, however ominous its tainted ripeness; each flower,
however freaked with perverse tints, left her mildly skeptical; so
that he felt, with just a flicker of his old irritation, that the very
plentifulness of esthetic corruption that he could display to her testified
for her to his essential guilelessness, and, perhaps, to a blandness and
narrowness of nature that lacked even the capacity for infection. Jack had
to own to himself that, though he strove to make it rigorously esthetic,
his seeing of d'Annunzio--to take at random one of the _fleurs du mal_--was
as a shining, a luridly splendid warning of what happened to decadent
people in unpleasant Latin countries. Such lurid splendor was as far from
him as the horrors of the Orestean Trilogy. In Mrs. Upton's eyes this
distance, though a distinct advantage for him, was the result of no choice
or conflict, but of environment merely, and she probably thought that the
problems of Nietzschean ethics were not to be solved and disposed of by
people whom they could never touch. But all the same, and it was here that
the atoning softness came in, he felt that she liked him the better for
being able to see a _fleur du mal_ only as if it were a weird pressed
product under a glass case. And if he amused her it was not because of
any sense of superior wisdom; she didn't deny her consciousness of wider
contrasts, but she made no claim at all for deeper insight;--the very way
in which she talked over the sinister people with him showed that,--asking
him his opinion about this or that and opening a volume here and there to
read out in her exquisite French or Italian some passage whose full beauty
he had never before so realized. Any criticism or comment that she offered
was, evidently, of the slightest weight in her own estimation; but, there
again one must remember, so many things seemed light to Mrs. Upton, so
light, indeed, that he had often with her a sense of pressures removed and
an easier world altogether.
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