Linda Condon
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Joseph Hergesheimer >> Linda Condon
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THE WORKS OF JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
THE LAY ANTHONY
MOUNTAIN BLOOD
THE THREE BLACK PENNYS
GOLD AND IRON
JAVA HEAD
THE HAPPY END
LINDA CONDON
LINDA CONDON
BY
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
_To_ CARL VAN VECHTEN
_This, Linda Condon's Gravest Bow._
LINDA CONDON
I
A black bang was, but not ultimately, the most notable feature of
her uncommon personality--straight and severe and dense across her
clear pale brow and eyes. Her eyes were the last thing to remember
and wonder about; in shade blue, they had a velvet richness, a
poignant intensity of lovely color, that surprised the heart. Aside
from that she was slim, perhaps ten years old, and graver than gay.
Her mother was gay for them both, and, therefore, for the entire
family. No father was in evidence; he was dead and never spoken of,
and Linda was the only child. Linda's dresses, those significant
trivialities, plainly showed two tendencies--the gaiety of her
mother and her own always formal gravity. If Linda appeared at dinner,
in the massive Renaissance materialism of the hotel dining-room, with
a preposterous magenta hair-ribbon on her shapely head, her mother
had succeeded in expressing her sense of the appropriately decorative;
while if Linda wore an unornamented but equally "unsuitable" frock of
dark velvet, she, in her turn, had been vindicated.
Again, but far more rarely, the child's selection was evident on the
woman. As a rule Mrs. Condon garbed her flamboyant body in large and
expensive patterns or extremely tailored suits; and of the two, the
evening satins and powdered arms barely retaining an admissible
line, and the suits, the latter were the most, well--spectacular.
She was not dark in color but brightly golden; a gold, it must be
said in all honesty, her own, a metallic gold crisply and solidly
marcelled; with hazel-brown eyes, and a mouth which, set against her
daughter's deep-blue gaze, was her particular attraction. It was
rouged to a nicety, the under lip a little full and never quite
against the upper. If Linda's effect was cool and remote, Mrs.
Condon, thanks to her mouth, was reassuringly imminent. She was,
too, friendly; she talked to women--in her not overfrequent
opportunities--in a rapid warm inaccurate confession of almost
everything they desired to hear. The women, of course, were
continually hampered by the unfortunate fact that the questions
nearest their hearts, or curiosity, were entirely inadmissible.
Viewed objectively, they all, with the exception of Linda, seemed
alike; but that might have been due to their common impressive
setting. The Boscombe, in its way, was as lavish as Mrs. Condon's
dresses. The main place of congregation, for instance, was a great
space of white marble columns, Turkey-red carpet and growing palms.
It was lighted at night indirectly by alabaster bowls hanging on
gilded chains--a soft bright flood of radiance falling on the seated
or slowly promenading women with bare shoulders.
Usually they were going with a restrained sharp eagerness toward the
dining-room or leaving it in a more languid flushed repletion. There
were, among them, men; but somehow the men never seemed to be of the
least account. It was a women's paradise. The glow from above always
emphasized the gowns, the gowns like orchids and tea-roses and the
leaves of magnolias. It sparkled in the red and green and crystal
jewels like exotic dew scattered over the exotic human flowers. Very
occasionally there was a complacent or irritable masculine utterance,
and then it was immediately lost in the dominant feminine sibilance.
Other children than Linda sped in the manner of brilliant fretful
tops literally on the elaborate outskirts of the throng; but they
were as different from her as she was from the elders. Indeed Linda
resembled the latter, rather than her proper age, remarkably. She
had an air of responsibility, sometimes expressed in a troubled
frown, and again by the way she hurried sedately through drifting
figures toward a definite purpose and end.
Usually it was in the service of one of her mother's small
innumerable requests or necessities; if the latter were sitting with
a gentleman on the open hotel promenade that overlooked the sea and
needed a heavier wrap, Linda returned immediately with a furred
cloak on her arm; if the elder, going out after dinner, had brought
down the wrong gloves, Linda knew the exact wanted pair in the long
perfumed box; while countless trifles were needed from the
convenient drug-store.
The latter was a place of white mosaic floor and glittering glass,
with a marble counter heaped with vivid fruit and silver-covered
bowls of sirups and creams with chopped nuts. Linda often found time
to stop here for a delectable glass of assorted sweet compounds. She
was on terms of intimacy with the colored man in a crisp linen coat
who presided over the refreshments, and he invariably gave her an
extra spoonful of the marron paste she preferred. When at lunch, it
might be, she cared for very little, her mother would complain
absently:
"You must stop eating those sickening mixtures. They'd ruin any
skin." At this she invariably found the diminutive mirror in the bag
on her lap and glanced at her own slightly improved color. The
burden of the feminine conversations in which Mrs. Condon was
privileged to join, Linda discovered, was directed toward these
overwhelming considerations of appearance. And their importance,
communicated to her, resulted in a struggle between the desire to
preserve her skin from ruin and the seductions of marron paste and
maple chocolates.
Now, with an uncomfortable sense of impending disaster, she would
hastily consume one or the other; again, supported by a beginning
self-imposed inflexibility, she would turn steadily away from
temptation. In the end the latter triumphed; and her normal
appetite, always moderate, was unimpaired.
This spirit of resolution, it sometimes happened, was a cause of
humorous dismay to her mother. "I declare, Linda," she would observe
with an air of helplessness, "you make me feel like the giddy one
and as if you were mama. It's the way you look, so disapproving. I
have to remind myself you're only--just how old are you? I keep
forgetting." Linda would inform her exactly and the other sigh:
"The years slip around disgustingly. It seems only yesterday I was
at my first party." Usually, in spite of Linda's eagerness to hear
of that time when her mother was a girl, the elder would stop
abruptly. On rare occasions solitary facts emerged from the recalled
existence of a small town in the country. There were such details as
buggy-riding and prayer-meetings and excursions to a Boiling Springs
where the dancing-floor, open among the trees, was splendid. At
these memories Mrs. Condon had been known to cry.
But she would recover shortly. Her emotions were like that--easily
roused, highly colored and soon forgotten. She forgot, Linda
realized leniently, a great deal. It wasn't safe to rely on her
promises. However, if she neglected a particular desire of Linda's,
she continually brought back unexpected gifts of candy, boxes of
silk stockings, or lovely half-wilted flowers.
The flowers, they discovered, although they stayed fresh for a long
while pinned to Linda's slim waist, died almost at once if worn by
her mother. "It's my warm nature, I am certain," the latter
proclaimed to her daughter; "while you are a little refrigerator. I
must say it's wonderful how you keep your clothes the same. Neat as
a pin." Somehow, with this commendation, she managed to include a
slight uncomplimentary impatience. Linda didn't specially want to
resemble a pin, a disagreeable object with a sharp point. She
considered this in the long periods when, partly by preference, she
was alone.
Seated, perhaps, in the elaborate marble and deep red of the
Boscombe's reception-rooms, isolated in the brilliant expensive
throng, she would speculate over what passed in the light of her own
special problems. But nothing, really, came out to her satisfaction.
There was, notably, no one she might ask. Her mother, approached
seriously, declared that Linda gave her the creeps; while others
made it plain that it was their duty to repress the forwardness
inevitable from the scandalous neglect of her upbringing.
They, the women of the Boscombe, glancing at their finger-nails
stained and buffed to a shining pale vermilion, lightly rubbing
their rings on the dry palm of a hand, wondered pessimistically
within Linda's hearing what could come out of such an association.
That term, she vaguely gathered, referred to her mother. The latter
evidently interested them tremendously; because, she explained, they
had no affairs of their own to attend to. This was perfectly clear
to Linda until Mrs. Condon further characterized them as "busy."
The women, stopped by conventions from really satisfactory
investigation at the source, drew her on occasion into a laboriously
light inquisition. How long would Linda and her mama stay at the
Boscombe? Had they closed their apartment? Where was it? Hadn't Mrs.
Condon mentioned Cleveland? Wasn't Linda lonely with her mama out so
much--they even said late--in rolling chairs? Had she ever seen Mr.
Jasper before his arrival last week?
No, of course she hadn't.
Here they exchanged skeptical glances beneath relentlessly pulled
eyebrows. He was really very nice, Mr. Jasper. Linda in a matter-of-fact
voice replied that he had given her a twenty-dollar gold piece. Mr.
Jasper was very generous. But perhaps he had rewarded her for being
a good little girl and not--not bothering or hanging about. "Why
should he?" was Linda's just perceptibly impatient response. Then
they told her to be quiet because they wanted to listen to the music.
This consisted in studying, through suspended glasses in chased
platinum, a discreet programme. At the end of a selection they
either applauded condescendingly or told each other that they hadn't
cared for that last--really too peculiar. Whichever happened, the
leader of the small orchestra, an extravagant Italian with a supple
waist, turned and bowed repeatedly with a grimacing smile. The
music, usually Viennese, was muted and emotional; its strains
blended perfectly with the floating scents of the women and the
faintly perceptible pungent odors of dinner. Every little while a
specially insinuating melody became, apparently, tangled in the
women's breathing, and their breasts, cunningly traced and caressed
in tulle, would be disturbed.
Mrs. Condon applauded more vigorously than was sanctioned by the
others' necessity for elegance; the frank clapping of her pink palms
never failed to betray a battery of affected and significant
surprise in eyes like--polished cold agates. Linda, seated beside
her parent, could be seen to lay a hand, narrow and blanched and
marked by an emerald, on the elder's knee. Her pale fine lips moved
rapidly with the shadow of trouble beneath the intense black bang.
"I wish you wouldn't do it so loudly, mother," was what she
whispered.
II
The jealously guarded truth was that, by her daughter at least, Mrs.
Condon was adored. Linda observed that she was not like an ordinary
mother, but more nearly resembled a youthful companion. Mrs. Condon's
gaiety was as genuine as her fair hair. Not kept for formal occasion,
it got out of bed with her, remained through the considerable
difficulties of dressing with no maid but Linda, and if the other
were not asleep called a cheerful or funny good night.
Their rooms were separated by a bath, but Linda was scarcely ever in
her own--her mother's lovely things, acting like a magnet,
constantly drew her to their arrangement in the drawers. When the
laundry came up, crisp and fragile webs heaped on the bed, Linda
laid it away in a sort of ritual. Even with these publicly invisible
garments a difference of choice existed between the two: Mrs.
Condon's preference was for insertions, and Linda's for shadow
embroidery and fine shell edges. Mrs. Condon, shaking into position
a foam of ribbon and lace, would say with her gurgle of amusement,
"I want to be ready when I fall down; if I followed your advice
they'd take me for a nun."
This brought out Linda's low clear laugh, the expression of her
extreme happiness. It sounded, for an instant, like a chime of small
silver bells; then died away, leaving the faintest perceptible flush
on her healthy pallor. At other times her mother's humor made her
vaguely uncomfortable, usually after wine or other drinks that left
the elder's breath thick and oppressive. Linda failed completely to
grasp the allusions of this wit but a sharp uneasiness always
responded like the lingering stale memory of a bad dream.
Once, at the Boscombe, her mother had been too silly for words: she
had giggled and embraced her sweet little girl, torn an expensive
veil to shreds and dropped a French model hat into the tub. After a
distressing sickness she had gone to sleep fully dressed, and Linda,
unable to move or wake her, had sat long beyond dinner into the
night, fearful of the entrance of the chambermaid.
The next day Mrs. Condon had been humble with remorse. Men, she
said, were too beastly for description. This was not an unusual
opinion. Linda observed that she was always condemning men in
general and dressing for them in particular. She offered Linda
endless advice in an abstracted manner:
"They're all liars, Lin, and stingy about everything but their
pleasure. Women are different but men are all alike. You get sick to
death of them! Never bother them when they are smoking a cigar;
cigarettes don't matter. Leave the cigarette-smokers alone, anyhow;
they're not as dependable as the others. A man with a good cigar--you
must know the good from the bad--is usually discreet. I ought to
bring you up different, but, Lord, life's too short. Besides, you
will learn more useful things right with mama, whose eyes are open,
than anywhere else.
"Powder my back, darling; I can't reach. If I'm a little late to-night
go to sleep like a duck. You think Mr. Jasper's nice, don't you?
So does mother. But you mustn't let him give you any more money.
It'll make him conceited."
Linda wondered what she meant by the last phrase. How could it make
Mr. Jasper conceited to give her a gold piece? However, she decided
that she had better not ask.
It was like that with a great many of her mother's mysterious
remarks--Linda had an instinctive feeling of drawing away. The other
kissed her warmly and left a print of vivid red on her cheek.
She examined the mark in the mirror when her mother had gone; it
was, she decided, the kiss made visible. Then she laid away the
things scattered about the room by Mrs. Condon's hasty dressing. Her
own belongings were always in precise order.
A sudden hesitation seized her at the thought of going down to the
crowd at the music. The women made her uncomfortable. It wasn't what
they said, but the way they said it; and the endless questions
wearied her. She was, as well, continually bothered by her inability
to impress upon them how splendid her mother was. Some of them she
was certain did not appreciate her. Mrs. Condon at once admitted and
was entertained by this, but it disturbed Linda. However, she
understood the reason--when any nice men came along they always
liked her mother best. This made the women mad.
The world, she gathered, was a place where women played a game of
men with each other. It was very difficult, she couldn't comprehend
the rules or reason; and Linda was afraid that she would be
unsuccessful and never have the perfect time her mother wanted for
her. In the first place, she was too thin, and then she knew that
she could never talk like her dearest. Perhaps when she had had some
wine it would be different.
She decided, after all, to go down to the assemblage; and, by one of
the white marble pillars, Mrs. Randall captured her. "Why, here's
Linda-all-alone," Mrs. Randall said. "Mama out again?" Linda replied
stoutly, "She has a dreadful lot of invitations."
Mrs. Randall, who wore much brighter clothes than her mother, was
called by the latter an old buzzard. She was very old, Linda could
see, with perfectly useless staring patches of paint on her wrinkled
cheeks, and eyes that look as though they might come right out of
her head. Her frizzled hair supported a dead false twist with a
glittering diamond pin, and her soft cold hands were loaded with
jewels. She frightened Linda, really, although she could not say
why. Mrs. Randall was a great deal like the witch in a fairy-story,
but that wasn't it. Linda hadn't the belief in witches necessary for
dread. It might be her scratching voice; or the way she turned her
head, without any chin at all, like a turtle; or her dresses, which
led you to expect a person very different from an old buzzard.
"Of course she does," said Mrs. Randall, "any number of invitations,
and why shouldn't she? Your mother is very pleasant, to be sure."
She nodded wisely to the woman beside her, Miss Skillern.
Miss Skillern was short and broad and, in the evening, always wore
curled ostrich plumes on tightly filled gray puffs. She reminded
Linda of a wadded chair. Mrs. Randall, after the other's slight
stiff assent, continued:
"Your mama would never be lonely, not she. All I wonder is she
doesn't get married again--with that blondine of hers. Wouldn't you
rather have one papa than, in a way of speaking, a different one at
every hotel?"
Linda, completely at a loss for answer, studied Mrs. Randall with
her direct deep blue gaze. Miss Skillern again inclined her plumes.
With the rest of her immobile she was surprisingly like one of those
fat china figures with a nodding head. Linda was assaulted by the
familiar bewildered feeling of not understanding what was said and,
at the same time, passionately resenting it from an inner sensitive
recognition of something wrong.
"How could I have that?" she finally asked.
"How?" repeated Miss Skillern, breathing loudly.
"Yes, how?" Mrs. Randall echoed. "You can ask your mama. You really
can. And you may say that, as a matter of fact, the question came
from us," she included her companion.
"From you," Miss Skillern exactly corrected her.
"Indeed," the other cried heatedly, "from me! I think not. Didn't
you ask? Answer me that, if you please. I heard you with my own ears
say, 'How?' While now, before my face, you try to deny it." It was
plain to Linda that Miss Skillern was totally unmoved by the charge.
She moved her lorgnette up, gazing stolidly at the musical
programme. "From you," she said again, after a little. Mrs. Randall
suddenly regained her equilibrium.
"If the ladies of this hotel are afraid to face that creature I--I--am
not. I'll tell her in a minute what a respectable person thinks of
her goings-on. More than that, I shall complain to Mr. Rennert. 'Mr.
Rennert,' I'll say, 'either she leaves or me. Choose as you will. The
reputation of your hotel--'" she spluttered and paused.
"Proof," Miss Skillern pronounced judicially; "proof. We know, but
that's not proof."
"He has a wife," Mrs. Randall replied in a shrill whisper; "a wife
who is an invalid. Mrs. Zoock, she who had St. Vitus' dance and left
yesterday, heard it direct. George A. Jasper, woolen mills in
Frankford, Pennsylvania. Mr. Rennert would thank me for that
information."
They had forgotten Linda. She stood rigid and cold--they were
blaming her mother for going out in a rolling chair with Mr. Jasper
because he was married. But her mother didn't know that; probably
Mr. Jasper had not given it a thought. She was at the point of
making this clear, when it seemed to her that it might be better to
say that her mother knew everything there was about Mr. Jasper's
wife; she could even add that they were all friends.
Linda would have to tell her mother the second she came in, and
then, of course, she'd stop going with Mr. Jasper. Men, she thought
in the elder's phrase, were too beastly for words.
"After all," Mrs. Randall was addressing her again, "you needn't say
anything at all to your mama. It might make her so cross that she'd
spank you."
"Mother never spanks me," Linda replied with dignity.
"If you were my little girl," said Miss Skillern, with rolling lips,
"I'd put you over my knee with your skirts up and paddle you."
Never, Linda thought, had she heard anything worse; she was
profoundly shocked. The vision of Miss Skillern performing such an
operation as she had described cut its horror on her mind. There was
a sinking at her heart and a misty threat of tears.
To avert this she walked slowly away. It was hardly past nine o'clock;
her mother wouldn't be back for a long while, and she was too
restless and unhappy to sit quietly above. Instead, she continued
down to the floor where there were various games in the corridor
leading to the billiard-room. The hall was dull, no one was clicking
the balls about the green tables, and a solitary sick-looking man,
with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was smoking a cigarette in a
chair across from the cigar-stand.
He looked over a thick magazine in a chocolate cover, his gaze
arrested by her irresolute passage. "Hello, Bellina," he said.
She stopped. "Linda," she corrected him, "Linda Condon." Obeying a
sudden impulse, she dropped, with a sigh, into a place beside him.
"You're bored," he went on, the magazine put away. "So am I, but my
term is short."
She wondered, principally, what he was doing, among so many women,
at the Boscombe. He was different from Mr. Jasper, or the other men
with fat stomachs, the old men with dragging feet. It embarrassed
her to meet his gaze, it was so--so investigating. She guessed he
was by the sea because he felt as badly as he looked. He asked
surprisingly:
"Why are you here?"
"On the account of my mother," she explained. "But it doesn't matter
much where I am. Places are all alike," she continued conversationally.
"We're mostly at hotels--Florida in winter and Lake George in summer.
This is kind of between."
"Oh!" he said; and she was sure, from that short single exclamation,
he understood everything.
"Like all true beauty," he added, "it's plain that you are durable."
"I don't like the seashore," she went on easily; "I'd rather be in a
garden with piles of flowers and a big hedge."
"Have you ever lived in a garden-close?"
"No," she admitted; "it's just an idea. I told mother but she
laughed at me and said a roof-garden was her choice."
"Some day you'll have the place you describe," he assured her. "It
is written all over you. I would like to see you, Bellina, in a
space of emerald sod and geraniums." She decided to accept without
further protest his name for her. "You are right, too, about the
hedge--the highest and thickest in creation. I should recommend a
pseudo-classic house, Georgian, rather small, a white facade against
the grass. A Jacobean dining-room, dark certainly, the French
windows open on dipping candle flames. You'd wear white, with your
hair low and the midnight bang as it is now."
"That would be awfully nice," Linda replied vaguely. She sighed.
"But a very light drawing-room!" he cried. "White panels and arches
and Canton-blue rugs--the brothers Adam. A fluted mantel, McIntires,
and a brass hod. Curiously enough, I always see you in the evening
... at the piano. I'm not so bored, now." Little flames of red
burned in either thin cheek. "What nonsense!" Suddenly he was tired.
"This is a practical and earnest world," his voice grew thin and
hurt her. "Yet beauty is relentless. You'll have your garden, but I
shouldn't be surprised at difficulties first."
"It won't be so hard to get," she declared confidently. "I mean to
choose the right man. Mother says that's the answer. Women, she
says, won't use their senses."
"Ah."
Linda began to think this was a most unpleasant monosyllable.
"So that's the lay! Has she succeeded?"
"She has a splendid time. She's out tonight with Mr. Jasper in a
rolling chair, and he has loads and loads of money. It makes all the
other women cross."
"Here you are, then, till she gets back?"
"There's no one else."
"But, as a parent, infinitely preferable to the righteous," he
murmured. "And you--"
"I think mother's perfect," she answered simply.
He shook his head. "You won't succeed at it, though. Your mother,
for example, isn't dark."
"The loveliest gold hair," she said ecstatically. "She's much much
prettier than I'll ever be."
"Prettier, yes. The trouble is, you are lovely, magical. You will
stay for a lifetime in the memory. The merest touch of you will be
more potent than any duty or fidelity. A man's only salvation will
be his blindness."
Although she didn't understand a word of this, Linda liked to hear
him; he was talking as though she were grown up, and in response to
the flattery she was magnetic and eager.
"One time," he said, "very long ago, beauty was worshiped. Men, you
see, know better now. They want their dollar's worth. The world was
absolutely different then--there were deep adventurous forests with
holy chapels in the green combe for an orison, and hermits rising to
Paradise on the _Te Deum Laudamus_ of the angels and archangels.
There were black castles and, in the broad meadows, silk tents with
ivory pegs and poles of gold.
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