The Greater Inclination

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Mrs. Amyot, warmed by my participation in her distress, went on to say
that the growing demand for evolution was what most troubled her. Her
grandfather had been a pillar of the Presbyterian ministry, and the idea
of her lecturing on Darwin or Herbert Spencer was deeply shocking to her
mother and aunts. In one sense the family had staked its literary as well
as its spiritual hopes on the literal inspiration of Genesis: what became
of "The Fall of Man" in the light of modern exegesis?

The upshot of it was that she had ceased to lecture because she could no
longer sell tickets enough to pay for the hire of a lecture-hall; and as
for the managers, they wouldn't look at her. She had tried her luck all
through the Eastern States and as far south as Washington; but it was of
no use, and unless she could get hold of some new subjects--or, better
still, of some new audiences--she must simply go out of the business. That
would mean the failure of all she had worked for, since Lancelot would
have to leave Harvard. She paused, and wept some of the unbecoming tears
that spring from real grief. Lancelot, it appeared, was to be a genius. He
had passed his opening examinations brilliantly; he had "literary gifts";
he had written beautiful poetry, much of which his mother had copied out,
in reverentially slanting characters, in a velvet-bound volume which she
drew from a locked drawer.

Lancelot's verse struck me as nothing more alarming than growing-pains;
but it was not to learn this that she had summoned me. What she wanted was
to be assured that he was worth working for, an assurance which I managed
to convey by the simple stratagem of remarking that the poems reminded me
of Swinburne--and so they did, as well as of Browning, Tennyson, Rossetti,
and all the other poets who supply young authors with original
inspirations.

This point being established, it remained to be decided by what means his
mother was, in the French phrase, to pay herself the luxury of a poet. It
was clear that this indulgence could be bought only with counterfeit coin,
and that the one way of helping Mrs. Amyot was to become a party to the
circulation of such currency. My fetish of intellectual integrity went
down like a ninepin before the appeal of a woman no longer young and
distinctly foolish, but full of those dear contradictions and
irrelevancies that will always make flesh and blood prevail against a
syllogism. When I took leave of Mrs. Amyot I had promised her a dozen
letters to Western universities and had half pledged myself to sketch out
a lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion.

In the West she achieved a success which for a year or more embittered my
perusal of the morning papers. The fascination that lures the murderer
back to the scene of his crime drew my eye to every paragraph celebrating
Mrs. Amyot's last brilliant lecture on the influence of something upon
somebody; and her own letters--she overwhelmed me with them--spared me no
detail of the entertainment given in her honor by the Palimpsest Club of
Omaha or of her reception at the University of Leadville. The college
professors were especially kind: she assured me that she had never before
met with such discriminating sympathy. I winced at the adjective, which
cast a sudden light on the vast machinery of fraud that I had set in
motion. All over my native land, men of hitherto unblemished integrity
were conniving with me in urging their friends to go and hear Mrs. Amyot
lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion! My only hope was
that, somewhere among the number of my accomplices, Mrs. Amyot might find
one who would marry her in the defense of his convictions.

None, apparently, resorted to such heroic measures; for about two years
later I was startled by the announcement that Mrs. Amyot was lecturing in
Trenton, New Jersey, on modern theosophy in the light of the Vedas. The
following week she was at Newark, discussing Schopenhauer in the light of
recent psychology. The week after that I was on the deck of an ocean
steamer, reconsidering my share in Mrs. Amyot's triumphs with the
impartiality with which one views an episode that is being left behind at
the rate of twenty knots an hour. After all, I had been helping a mother
to educate her son.

The next ten years of my life were spent in Europe, and when I came home
the recollection of Mrs. Amyot had become as inoffensive as one of those
pathetic ghosts who are said to strive in vain to make themselves visible
to the living. I did not even notice the fact that I no longer heard her
spoken of; she had dropped like a dead leaf from the bough of memory.

A year or two after my return I was condemned to one of the worst
punishments a worker can undergo--an enforced holiday. The doctors who
pronounced the inhuman sentence decreed that it should be worked out in
the South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my thermometer and
my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another. In the vast and
melancholy sea of my disoccupation I clutched like a drowning man at any
human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory interest
in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my fellow-sufferers;
but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I clung with
undiscriminating enthusiasm.

In no other way can I explain, as I look back on it, the importance I
attached to the leisurely confidences of a new arrival with a brown beard
who, tilted back at my side on a hotel veranda hung with roses, imparted
to me one afternoon the simple annals of his past. There was nothing in
the tale to kindle the most inflammable imagination, and though the man
had a pleasant frank face and a voice differing agreeably from the shrill
inflections of our fellow-lodgers, it is probable that under different
conditions his discursive history of successful business ventures in a
Western city would have affected me somewhat in the manner of a lullaby.

Even at the tune I was not sure I liked his agreeable voice: it had a
self-importance out of keeping with the humdrum nature of his story, as
though a breeze engaged in shaking out a table-cloth should have fancied
itself inflating a banner. But this criticism may have been a mere mark of
my own fastidiousness, for the man seemed a simple fellow, satisfied with
his middling fortunes, and already (he was not much past thirty) deep-sunk
in conjugal content.

He had just started on an anecdote connected with the cutting of his
eldest boy's teeth, when a lady I knew, returning from her late drive,
paused before us for a moment in the twilight, with the smile which is the
feminine equivalent of beads to savages.

"Won't you take a ticket?" she said sweetly.

Of course I would take a ticket--but for what? I ventured to inquire.

"Oh, that's _so_ good of you--for the lecture this evening. You needn't
go, you know; we're none of us going; most of us have been through it
already at Aiken and at Saint Augustine and at Palm Beach. I've given away
my tickets to some new people who've just come from the North, and some of
us are going to send our maids, just to fill up the room."

"And may I ask to whom you are going to pay this delicate attention?"

"Oh, I thought you knew--to poor Mrs. Amyot. She's been lecturing all over
the South this winter; she's simply _haunted_ me ever since I left New
York--and we had six weeks of her at Bar Harbor last summer! One has to
take tickets, you know, because she's a widow and does it for her son--to
pay for his education. She's so plucky and nice about it, and talks about
him in such a touching unaffected way, that everybody is sorry for her,
and we all simply ruin ourselves in tickets. I do hope that boy's nearly
educated!"

"Mrs. Amyot? Mrs. Amyot?" I repeated. "Is she _still_ educating her son?"

"Oh, do you know about her? Has she been at it long? There's some comfort
in that, for I suppose when the boy's provided for the poor thing will be
able to take a rest--and give us one!"

She laughed and held out her hand.

"Here's your ticket. Did you say _tickets_--two? Oh, thanks. Of course you
needn't go."

"But I mean to go. Mrs. Amyot is an old friend of mine."

"Do you really? That's awfully good of you. Perhaps I'll go too if I can
persuade Charlie and the others to come. And I wonder"--in a well-directed
aside--"if your friend--?"

I telegraphed her under cover of the dusk that my friend was of too recent
standing to be drawn into her charitable toils, and she masked her mistake
under a rattle of friendly adjurations not to be late, and to be sure to
keep a seat for her, as she had quite made up her mind to go even if
Charlie and the others wouldn't.

The flutter of her skirts subsided in the distance, and my neighbor, who
had half turned away to light a cigar, made no effort to reopen the
conversation. At length, fearing he might have overheard the allusion to
himself, I ventured to ask if he were going to the lecture that evening.

"Much obliged--I have a ticket," he said abruptly.

This struck me as in such bad taste that I made no answer; and it was he
who spoke next.

"Did I understand you to say that you were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot's?"

"I think I may claim to be, if it is the same Mrs. Amyot I had the
pleasure of knowing many years ago. My Mrs. Amyot used to lecture too--"

"To pay for her son's education?"

"I believe so."

"Well--see you later."

He got up and walked into the house.

In the hotel drawing-room that evening there was but a meagre sprinkling
of guests, among whom I saw my brown-bearded friend sitting alone on a
sofa, with his head against the wall. It could not have been curiosity to
see Mrs. Amyot that had impelled him to attend the performance, for it
would have been impossible for him, without changing his place, to command
the improvised platform at the end of the room. When I looked at him he
seemed lost in contemplation of the chandelier.

The lady from whom I had bought my tickets fluttered in late, unattended
by Charlie and the others, and assuring me that she would _scream_ if we
had the lecture on Ibsen--she had heard it three times already that
winter. A glance at the programme reassured her: it informed us (in the
lecturer's own slanting hand) that Mrs. Amyot was to lecture on the
Cosmogony.

After a long pause, during which the small audience coughed and moved its
chairs and showed signs of regretting that it had come, the door opened,
and Mrs. Amyot stepped upon the platform. Ah, poor lady!

Some one said "Hush!", the coughing and chair-shifting subsided, and she
began.

It was like looking at one's self early in the morning in a cracked
mirror. I had no idea I had grown so old. As for Lancelot, he must have a
beard. A beard? The word struck me, and without knowing why I glanced
across the room at my bearded friend on the sofa. Oddly enough he was
looking at me, with a half-defiant, half-sullen expression; and as our
glances crossed, and his fell, the conviction came to me that _he was
Lancelot_.

I don't remember a word of the lecture; and yet there were enough of them
to have filled a good-sized dictionary. The stream of Mrs. Amyot's
eloquence had become a flood: one had the despairing sense that she had
sprung a leak, and that until the plumber came there was nothing to be
done about it.

The plumber came at length, in the shape of a clock striking ten; my
companion, with a sigh of relief, drifted away in search of Charlie and
the others; the audience scattered with the precipitation of people who
had discharged a duty; and, without surprise, I found the brown-bearded
stranger at my elbow.

We stood alone in the bare-floored room, under the flaring chandelier.

"I think you told me this afternoon that you were an old friend of Mrs.
Amyot's?" he began awkwardly.

I assented.

"Will you come in and see her?"

"Now? I shall be very glad to, if--"

"She's ready; she's expecting you," he interposed.

He offered no further explanation, and I followed him in silence. He led
me down the long corridor, and pushed open the door of a sitting-room.

"Mother," he said, closing the door after we had entered, "here's the
gentleman who says he used to know you."

Mrs. Amyot, who sat in an easy-chair stirring a cup of bouillon, looked up
with a start. She had evidently not seen me in the audience, and her son's
description had failed to convey my identity. I saw a frightened look in
her eyes; then, like a frost flower on a window-pane, the dimple expanded
on her wrinkled cheek, and she held out her hand.

"I'm so glad," she said, "so glad!"

She turned to her son, who stood watching us. "You must have told Lancelot
all about me--you've known me so long!"

"I haven't had time to talk to your son--since I knew he was your son," I
explained.

Her brow cleared. "Then you haven't had time to say anything very
dreadful?" she said with a laugh.

"It is he who has been saying dreadful things," I returned, trying to fall
in with her tone.

I saw my mistake. "What things?" she faltered.

"Making me feel how old I am by telling me about his children."

"My grandchildren!" she exclaimed with a blush.

"Well, if you choose to put it so."

She laughed again, vaguely, and was silent. I hesitated a moment and then
put out my hand.

"I see you are tired. I shouldn't have ventured to come in at this hour if
your son--"

The son stepped between us. "Yes, I asked him to come," he said to his
mother, in his clear self-assertive voice. "_I_ haven't told him anything
yet; but you've got to--now. That's what I brought him for."

His mother straightened herself, but I saw her eye waver.

"Lancelot--" she began.

"Mr. Amyot," I said, turning to the young man, "if your mother will let me
come back to-morrow, I shall be very glad--"

He struck his hand hard against the table on which he was leaning.

"No, sir! It won't take long, but it's got to be said now."

He moved nearer to his mother, and I saw his lip twitch under his beard.
After all, he was younger and less sure of himself than I had fancied.

"See here, mother," he went on, "there's something here that's got to be
cleared up, and as you say this gentleman is an old friend of yours it had
better be cleared up in his presence. Maybe he can help explain it--and if
he can't, it's got to be explained to _him."_

Mrs. Amyot's lips moved, but she made no sound. She glanced at me
helplessly and sat down. My early inclination to thrash Lancelot was
beginning to reassert itself. I took up my hat and moved toward the door.

"Mrs. Amyot is under no obligation to explain anything whatever to me," I
said curtly.

"Well! She's under an obligation to me, then--to explain something in your
presence." He turned to her again. "Do you know what the people in this
hotel are saying? Do you know what he thinks--what they all think? That
you're doing this lecturing to support me--to pay for my education! They
say you go round telling them so. That's what they buy the tickets for--
they do it out of charity. Ask him if it isn't what they say--ask him if
they weren't joking about it on the piazza before dinner. The others think
I'm a little boy, but he's known you for years, and he must have known how
old I was. _He_ must have known it wasn't to pay for my education!"

He stood before her with his hands clenched, the veins beating in his
temples. She had grown very pale, and her cheeks looked hollow. When she
spoke her voice had an odd click in it.

"If--if these ladies and gentlemen have been coming to my lectures out of
charity, I see nothing to be ashamed of in that--" she faltered.

"If they've been coming out of charity to _me_," he retorted, "don't you
see you've been making me a party to a fraud? Isn't there any shame in
that?" His forehead reddened. "Mother! Can't you see the shame of letting
people think I was a d--beat, who sponged on you for my keep? Let alone
making us both the laughing-stock of every place you go to!"

"I never did that, Lancelot!"

"Did what?"

"Made you a laughing-stock--"

He stepped close to her and caught her wrist.

"Will you look me in the face and swear you never told people you were
doing this lecturing business to support me?"

There was a long silence. He dropped her wrist and she lifted a limp
handkerchief to her frightened eyes. "I did do it--to support you--to
educate you"--she sobbed.

"We're not talking about what you did when I was a boy. Everybody who
knows me knows I've been a grateful son. Have I ever taken a penny from
you since I left college ten years ago?"

"I never said you had! How can you accuse your mother of such wickedness,
Lancelot?"

"Have you never told anybody in this hotel--or anywhere else in the last
ten years--that you were lecturing to support me? Answer me that!"

"How can you," she wept, "before a stranger?"

"Haven't you said such things about _me_ to strangers?" he retorted.

"Lancelot!"

"Well--answer me, then. Say you haven't, mother!" His voice broke
unexpectedly and he took her hand with a gentler touch. "I'll believe
anything you tell me," he said almost humbly.

She mistook his tone and raised her head with a rash clutch at dignity.

"I think you'd better ask this gentleman to excuse you first."

"No, by God, I won't!" he cried. "This gentleman says he knows all about
you and I mean him to know all about me too. I don't mean that he or
anybody else under this roof shall go on thinking for another twenty-four
hours that a cent of their money has ever gone into my pockets since I was
old enough to shift for myself. And he sha'n't leave this room till you've
made that clear to him."

He stepped back as he spoke and put his shoulders against the door.

"My dear young gentleman," I said politely, "I shall leave this room
exactly when I see fit to do so--and that is now. I have already told you
that Mrs. Amyot owes me no explanation of her conduct."

"But I owe you an explanation of mine--you and every one who has bought a
single one of her lecture tickets. Do you suppose a man who's been through
what I went through while that woman was talking to you in the porch
before dinner is going to hold his tongue, and not attempt to justify
himself? No decent man is going to sit down under that sort of thing. It's
enough to ruin his character. If you're my mother's friend, you owe it to
me to hear what I've got to say."

He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

"Good God, mother!" he burst out suddenly, "what did you do it for?
Haven't you had everything you wanted ever since I was able to pay for it?
Haven't I paid you back every cent you spent on me when I was in college?
Have I ever gone back on you since I was big enough to work?" He turned to
me with a laugh. "I thought she did it to amuse herself--and because there
was such a demand for her lectures. _Such a demand!_ That's what she
always told me. When we asked her to come out and spend this winter with
us in Minneapolis, she wrote back that she couldn't because she had
engagements all through the south, and her manager wouldn't let her off.
That's the reason why I came all the way on here to see her. We thought
she was the most popular lecturer in the United States, my wife and I did!
We were awfully proud of it too, I can tell you." He dropped into a chair,
still laughing.

"How can you, Lancelot, how can you!" His mother, forgetful of my
presence, was clinging to him with tentative caresses. "When you didn't
need the money any longer I spent it all on the children--you know I did."

"Yes, on lace christening dresses and life-size rocking-horses with real
manes! The kind of thing children can't do without."

"Oh, Lancelot, Lancelot--I loved them so! How can you believe such
falsehoods about me?"

"What falsehoods about you?"

"That I ever told anybody such dreadful things?"

He put her back gently, keeping his eyes on hers. "Did you never tell
anybody in this house that you were lecturing to support your son?"

Her hands dropped from his shoulders and she flashed round on me in sudden
anger.

"I know what I think of people who call themselves friends and who come
between a mother and her son!"

"Oh, mother, mother!" he groaned.

I went up to him and laid my hand on his shoulder.

"My dear man," I said, "don't you see the uselessness of prolonging this?"

"Yes, I do," he answered abruptly; and before I could forestall his
movement he rose and walked out of the room.

There was a long silence, measured by the lessening reverberations of his
footsteps down the wooden floor of the corridor.

When they ceased I approached Mrs. Amyot, who had sunk into her chair. I
held out my hand and she took it without a trace of resentment on her
ravaged face.

"I sent his wife a seal-skin jacket at Christmas!" she said, with the
tears running down her cheeks.

SOULS BELATED

Their railway-carriage had been full when the train left Bologna; but at
the first station beyond Milan their only remaining companion--a courtly
person who ate garlic out of a carpet-bag--had left his crumb-strewn seat
with a bow.

Lydia's eye regretfully followed the shiny broadcloth of his retreating
back till it lost itself in the cloud of touts and cab-drivers hanging
about the station; then she glanced across at Gannett and caught the same
regret in his look. They were both sorry to be alone.

"_Par-ten-za!_" shouted the guard. The train vibrated to a sudden slamming
of doors; a waiter ran along the platform with a tray of fossilized
sandwiches; a belated porter flung a bundle of shawls and band-boxes into
a third-class carriage; the guard snapped out a brief _Partensa!_ which
indicated the purely ornamental nature of his first shout; and the train
swung out of the station.

The direction of the road had changed, and a shaft of sunlight struck
across the dusty red velvet seats into Lydia's corner. Gannett did not
notice it. He had returned to his _Revue de Paris,_ and she had to rise
and lower the shade of the farther window. Against the vast horizon of
their leisure such incidents stood out sharply.

Having lowered the shade, Lydia sat down, leaving the length of the
carriage between herself and Gannett. At length he missed her and looked
up.

"I moved out of the sun," she hastily explained.

He looked at her curiously: the sun was beating on her through the shade.

"Very well," he said pleasantly; adding, "You don't mind?" as he drew a
cigarette-case from his pocket.

It was a refreshing touch, relieving the tension of her spirit with the
suggestion that, after all, if he could _smoke_--! The relief was only
momentary. Her experience of smokers was limited (her husband had
disapproved of the use of tobacco) but she knew from hearsay that men
sometimes smoked to get away from things; that a cigar might be the
masculine equivalent of darkened windows and a headache. Gannett, after a
puff or two, returned to his review.

It was just as she had foreseen; he feared to speak as much as she did. It
was one of the misfortunes of their situation that they were never busy
enough to necessitate, or even to justify, the postponement of unpleasant
discussions. If they avoided a question it was obviously, unconcealably
because the question was disagreeable. They had unlimited leisure and an
accumulation of mental energy to devote to any subject that presented
itself; new topics were in fact at a premium. Lydia sometimes had
premonitions of a famine-stricken period when there would he nothing left
to talk about, and she had already caught herself doling out piecemeal
what, in the first prodigality of their confidences, she would have flung
to him in a breath. Their silence therefore might simply mean that they
had nothing to say; but it was another disadvantage of their position that
it allowed infinite opportunity for the classification of minute
differences. Lydia had learned to distinguish between real and factitious
silences; and under Gannett's she now detected a hum of speech to which
her own thoughts made breathless answer.

How could it be otherwise, with that thing between them? She glanced up at
the rack overhead. The _thing_ was there, in her dressing-bag,
symbolically suspended over her head and his. He was thinking of it now,
just as she was; they had been thinking of it in unison ever since they
had entered the train. While the carriage had held other travellers they
had screened her from his thoughts; but now that he and she were alone she
knew exactly what was passing through his mind; she could almost hear him
asking himself what he should say to her....

* * * * *

The thing had come that morning, brought up to her in an innocent-looking
envelope with the rest of their letters, as they were leaving the hotel at
Bologna. As she tore it open, she and Gannett were laughing over some
ineptitude of the local guide-book--they had been driven, of late, to
make the most of such incidental humors of travel. Even when she had
unfolded the document she took it for some unimportant business paper sent
abroad for her signature, and her eye travelled inattentively over the
curly _Whereases_ of the preamble until a word arrested her:--Divorce.
There it stood, an impassable barrier, between her husband's name and
hers.

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