Linda Condon

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Pleydon remained until the following afternoon, and then was lost--in
the foundry casting his statue--for six months. Arnaud went over to
view the completion of the bronze and returned filled with enthusiasm.
"Its simplicity is the surprising part," he told her. "The barest
statement possible. But Pleydon himself is in a disturbing condition;
I can't decide if it is mental or physical. The fever of course; yet
that doesn't account for his distance from ordinary living. The truth
is, I suppose, that men weren't designed for great arts, and nature,
like the jealous God of the Hebrews, retaliates. It is absurd, but
Pleydon reminds me of you; you're totally different. I suppose it's
because of the detachment you have in common." He veered to a detail
of Lowrie's first year at a university, and exhibited, against a
decent endeavor to the contrary, his boundless pride in their son.

The boy was, Linda acknowledged, more than commonly dependable and
able. He was heavy, like his father, and so diffident that he almost
stuttered; but his mental processes flashed in quick intuitive
perceptions. Lowrie was an easy and brilliant student; and, perhaps
because of this, of his mental certainty, he was not intimate with
her as Arnaud had hoped and predicted. It seemed to Linda that he
instinctively penetrated her inner doubt and regarded it without
sympathy. In this he was her son. Lowrie was a confident and
unsympathetic critic of humanity.

Even now, so soon, there was no question of his success in the law
his fitness had elected. The springs of his being were purely
intellectual, reasoning. In him Linda saw magnified her own
coldness; and, turned on herself, she viewed it with an arbitrary
feminine resentment. He was actually courteous to her; but under all
their intercourse there was a perceptible impatience. His scorn of
other women, girls, however, was openly expressed and honest; it had
no trace of the mere affectation of pessimism natural to his age.
Arnaud, less thoughtful than she, was vastly entertained by this,
and drew Lowrie out in countless sly sallies and contradictions.

Yes, he would succeed, but, after all, what would his success be
worth--placed, that was, against Vigne's radiant happiness, Bailey
Sandby's quiet eyes and the quality of his return home each evening?

Her thoughts came back to Pleydon--she had before her a New York
paper describing the ceremony of unveiling his Simon Downige at
Hesperia. There was a long learned article praising its beauty and
emphasizing Pleydon's eminence. He was, it proceeded, an anomaly in
an age of momentary experimental talents--a humanized Greek force.
He didn't belong to to-day but to yesterday and to-morrow. This gave
her an uncomfortable vision of Dodge in space, with no warm points
of contact. She, too, was suspended in that vague emptiness. Linda
had the sensation of grasping at streamers, forms, of sparkling
mist. A strange position in view of her undeniable common sense, the
solid foundations of her temperament and experience. She saw from
the paper, further, that the Downige who had commissioned the
monument was dead.

XXXVI

In the middle of the festive period that connected Christmas with
the new year Arnaud turned animatedly from his breakfast scanning of
the news. "It seems," he told her, "that a big rumpus has developed
in Hesperia over the Pleydon statue--the present Downige omnipotence,
never friendly with our old gentleman, has condemned its bronze founder.
You know what I mean. It's an insult to their pride, their money and
position, to see him perpetuated as a tramp. On the contrary he was a
very respectable individual from a prominent family and town.

"They have been moving the local heavens, ever since the monument
was placed, to have it set aside. I suppose they would have
succeeded, too, if a large amount given to the city were not
contingent on its preservation. But then they can always donate more
money in the cause of their sacred respectability."

Linda had never, she exclaimed, heard of anything more disgusting.
It was plain that Hesperia knew nothing of art. "Every one," she ran
on in the heat of her resentment, "every one, that is, who should
decide, agrees it's magnificent. They were frightfully lucky to get
it--Dodge's finest work." She wrote at once to Pleydon commanding
his presence and expressing her contempt of such depravity of
opinion. To her surprise he was undisturbed, apparently, by the
condemnation of his monument.

He even laughed at her energy of scorn. She was hurt, perceptibly
silenced, with a feeling of having been misunderstood or rather
undervalued. Her disturbance at any blame attached to the statue of
Simon Downige was extremely acute. But, she thought, if it failed to
worry Dodge why should she bother. She did, in spite of this
philosophy; Simon was tremendously important to her.

He stood for things: she had watched his evolution from the clay
sketch, and in Pleydon's mind, to the final heroic proportions; and
she had taken for granted that a grateful world would see him in her
light. A woman, she decided, had made the trouble; and she hated her
with a personal vigor. Pleydon said:

"I told you that old Simon was unbalanced; now you can see it by his
reception in a successful city. The sculptor--do you remember him, a
Beaux-Arts graduate?--admits that he had always opposed it, but that
political motives overbore his pure protest. There is a scheme now
to build a pavilion, for babies, and shut out the monument from open
view. They may do that but time will sweep away their walls. If I
had modeled Simon Downige, yes, he would go; but I modeled his
vision, his aspiration--the hope of all men for release and purity.

"Downige and the individual babies are unimportant compared to a
vision of perfection, of escape. As long as men live, if they live,
they'll reach up; and that gesture in itself is heaven. Not
accomplishment. The spirit dragging the flesh higher; but spirit
alone--empty balloons. A dream in bronze, harder even than men's
heads, more durable than their prejudices, so permanent that it will
wear out their ignorance; and in the end--always in the end--they'll
bring their wreath.

"A replica has gone to Cottarsport, from me; and you ought to see it
there, on a block of New England granite. It's in the Common, a
windswept reach with low houses and a white steeple and the sea. It
might have been there from the beginning, rising on rock against the
pale salt day. They can go to hell in Hesperia."

Still Linda's hurt persisted; she saw the unfortunate occurrence as
a direct blow at her pride. Arnaud, too, failed her; he was splendid
in his assault upon such rapacious stupidity; but it was only an
impersonal concern. His manner expressed the conviction that it
might have been expected. He was blind to her special enthusiasm,
her long intimate connection with the statue. Exasperated she almost
told him that it was more real to her than their house, than Vigne
and Lowrie, than he. She was stopped, fortunately, by the perception
that, amazingly, the statue was more actual than Dodge Pleydon. It
touched the center of her life more nearly.

Why, she didn't know.

If her mental confusion increased by as much as a feeling, Linda
thought, she would be close to madness. It was unbearable at
practically forty.

Lowrie said, at the worst possible moment, that he found the entire
episode ridiculously overemphasized. A statue more or less was of
small importance. If the Downige family were upset why didn't they
employ an able lawyer to dispose of it? There were many ways for
such a proceeding--

"I have no desire to hear them," she interrupted. "You seem to know
a tremendous lot, but what good it will do you in the end who can
say! And, with all your cleverness, you haven't an ounce of
appreciation for art. Besides, I hate to see any one as young as you
so sure of himself. Often I suspect you are patronizing your father
and me. It's not pretty nor polite."

Lowrie was obviously embarrassed by her attack, and managed the
abrupt semblance of an apology. Arnaud, who had put down his eternal
book, said nothing until the boy had vanished. "Wasn't that rather
sharp?" he asked mildly. "Perhaps," she replied in a tone without
warmth or regret. "Somehow I am never comfortable with Lowrie."

"You are too much alike," he shrewdly observed. "It is laughable at
times. Did you expect your children to be fountains of sentiment?
And, look here--if I can get along in comfort with you for life you
in particular ought to put up peacefully with Lowrie. He is a damned
sight more human than, at bottom, you are; a woman of alabaster."

"I loathe quarrels," she admitted; "they are so vulgar. You know
that they are not like me and just said so. Oh, Arnaud, why does
life get harder instead of easier?"

He put his book aside completely and gazed at her in patient
thought. "Linda," he said finally, "I have never heard anything that
stirred me so much; not what you said, my dear, but the recognition
in your voice." A wistfulness of love for her enveloped him; an
ineffable desire as vain as the passion she struggled to give him in
return. She smiled in an unhappiness of apology.

"Perhaps--" he stopped, waiting any assurance whatever, his face
eager like a dusty lamp in which the light had been turned sharply
up. She was unable to stir, to move her gaze from his hopeful eyes,
to mitigate by a breath her slender white aloofness. A smile
different from hers, tender with remission, lingered in his fading
irradiation. The dusk was gathering, adding its melancholy to his
age--sixty-five now. Why that was an old man! Her sympathy vanished
in her shrinking from the twilight that was, as well, slowly,
inevitably, deepening about her.

It was laughable that, as she approached an age whose only resource
was tranquillity, she grew more restless. Her present vague
agitation belonged ridiculously to youth. The philosophy of the
evident that had supported her so firmly was breaking at the most
inopportune time. And it was, she told herself, too late for
anything new; the years for that had been spent insensibly with
Arnaud. Linda was very angry with herself, for, in all her shifting
state of mind, she preserved an inner necessity for the quality of
exactness expressed in her clothes. There were literally no
neglected spaces in her conscious living.

Her thoughts finally centered about the statue in Hesperia--it
presented an actual mark for her fleeting resentments. She wondered
why it so largely occupied her thoughts, moved her so personally.
She watched the papers for the scattered reports of the progress of
the contention it had roused, some ill-natured, others supposedly
humorous, and nearly all uninformed. She became, Arnaud said, the
champion of the esthetic against Dagon. He elaborated this picture
until she was forced to smile against her inclination, her profound
seriousness. Linda had the feeling that she, too, was on the
pedestal that held the bronze effigy of Simon Downige challenging
the fog that obscured men. Its fate was hers. She didn't pretend to
explain how.

As time passed it seemed to her that it took her longer and longer
to dress in the morning, while her preparations couldn't be simpler;
her habit of deliberation had become nearly a vice, the precision of
her ruffles, her hair, a tyranny. She never quite lost the
satisfaction of her mirror's faultless reflection; and stopped, now,
for a moment's calm interrogation of the being--hardly more silvery
cool than the reality--before her.

Arnaud was at the table, and the gaze with which he met her was
troubled. The morning paper, she saw, was, against custom, at her
place, and she picked it up with an instinctive sense of calamity.
The blackly printed sensational headline that immediately
established her fear sank vivid and entire into her brain: an
anonymous inflamed mob in Hesperia had pulled down and destroyed
Pleydon's statue. Their act was described as a tribute to the
liberality of the present Downige family in the light of its
objection to the monument.

As if in the development of her feeling Linda had a sensation of
crashing with a sickening violence from a pedestal to the ground.
Actually, it seemed, the catastrophe had happened to her. She heard,
with a sense of inutility, Arnaud denouncing the outrage; he had a
pencil in his hand for the composition of a telegram to Dodge. He
paid--but perhaps only naturally--no attention to her, suffering
dully from her fall. She shuddered before the recreated lawless
approaching voice of the mob; the naked ugly violence froze her with
terror; she felt the gross hurried hands winding ropes about her,
the rending brutality of force--

She sat and automatically took a small carved glass of orange-juice
from a bed of ice, and her chilled fingers recalled a dim image of
her mother. Arnaud was speaking, "I'm afraid this will cut through
Pleydon's security, it was such a wanton destruction of his unique
power. You see, he worked lovingly over the cast with little files
and countless finite improvements. The mold, I think, was broken.
What a piece of luck the thing's at Cottarsport." He paused,
obviously expecting her to comment; but suddenly phrases failed her.

In place of herself she should be considering Dodge; her sympathy
even for him was submerged in her own extraordinary injury. However,
she recovered from her first gasping shock, and made an utterly
commonplace remark. Never had her sense of isolation been stronger.
"I must admit," her husband continued, "that I looked for some small
display of concern. I give you my word there are moments when I
think Pleydon himself cut you out of stone. He isn't great enough
for that, though; in the way of perfection you successfully gild the
lily. A thing held to be impossible."

Linda told him with amazing inanity that his opinion of her was
unreliable; and, contented, he lightly pursued his admiration of
what he called her boreal charm. At intervals she responded
appropriately and proceeded with breakfast. She had entered a region
of dispassionate consideration, her characteristic detachment, she
thought, regained. She mentally, calmly, reconstructed the motives
and events that had led to the destruction of the statue; they, at
least, were evident to her. She reaffirmed silently her conviction
that it had resulted from the stupidity, the vanity, of a woman. The
limitations of men, fully as narrow, operated in other directions.

Then, with an incredulous surprise, she was aware that the clear
space of her reason was filling with anger. Never before had such a
flood of emotion possessed her; and she surrendered herself, in an
enormous relief, to the novelty of its obliterating tide. It
deepened immeasurably, sweeping her far from the security of old
positions of indifference and critical self-possession. Linda became
enraged at a world that had concentrated all its degraded vulgarity
in one unspeakable act.

XXXVII

It was fall, October, and the day was a space of pale gold foliage
wreathed in blue garlands of mist. The gardener was busy with a
wooden rake and wheelbarrow in which he carted away dead leaves for
burning. The fire was back of the low fence, in the rear, and Linda,
at the dining-room window, could hear the fierce small crackle of
flames; the drifting pungent smoke was like a faint breath of
ammonia. Arnaud had left for the day, Lowrie was at the university,
while Vigne and her husband--moving toward their ultimate colonial
threshold--had taken a small house. She was alone.

As usual.

However, in her present state her solitude had lost its
inevitability; she failed to see why it must continue until the end
of time. She could no longer discover a sufficient reason for her
limitless endurance, her placid acceptance of all that chance, or
any inconsiderable person, happened to dictate. She wasn't like that
in the least. Her temper had solidified as though it were ice,
taking everywhere the form in which it was held. It was a reality.
She determined, as well, that her feeling should not melt back into
the familiar acceptance of a routine that had led her blindfolded
across such an extent of life.

She understood now, in a large part, her disturbance at the
indignity to Dodge's monument--he had assured her that she was its
inspiration; except for her it would never have been realized, he
would have kept on modeling those Newport fountains, continued with
the Susanna Nodas, spending himself ignobly. He loved her, and that
love had resulted in a statue the world of art, of taste, honored.
But it was she all the while they were approving, discussing,
writing about, Linda Condon.

She had always been that, Pleydon had informed her, never Linda
Hallet--in spite of Arnaud and their children. It sounded like
nonsense; but, at the bottom, it was truth. Of course it couldn't be
explained, for example, to the man who had every right, every
evidence, to consider himself her husband. Nothing was susceptible
of explanation. Absolutely nothing! There was the earth, which
appeared to be everything, the houses you entered, the streets you
passed over, the people among whom you lived, yet that wasn't all.
Heavens, no! It was quite unimportant compared with--with other
facts latent in the mind and blood.

Dodge Pleydon's love was one of those other facts; it was simply
impossible to deny its existence, its power. Dodge had been totally
changed by it, born over again. But she, who had been the source,
had had no good from it, nothing except the thrill that had always
been hers. No one knew of it, counted it as her achievement, paid
the slightest attention to her. Arnaud smiled indulgently, Lowrie
scoffed. When the statue had been thrown down they thought of it
merely as a deplorable part of the day's news. They hadn't seen that
she, Linda Condon, was unspeakably insulted.

She doubted if she could bring them to comprehend what had happened--to
her. Or if Arnaud understood, if she made it plain, what good would be
done! That wouldn't save her, put her back again on the pedestal. The
latter was necessary. Linda recognized that a great deal of her feeling
was based on pride; but it was a pride entirely justified. She had no
intention of submitting to the coarse hands and ropes of public affront.
Throughout her life she had rebelled against any profanation of her
person, she had hated to be touched.

Every instinct, she found, every delicate self-opinion, was bound
into Pleydon's success; the latter had kept her alive. Without it
existence would have been intolerable. It was unbearable now.

She discharged the small daily duties of her efficient housekeeping
with a contemptuous exactness; for years she had accomplished, in
herself, nothing more. But at last a break had come. Linda
recognized this without any knowledge of what reparation it would
find. She wasn't concerned with that, a small detail. It would be
apparent. Arnaud was silent through dinner; tired, it seemed. She
saw him as if at the distant end of a dull corridor--as she looked
back. There was no change in her liking for him. Mechanically she
noticed the disorder of his scant hair and rumpled sleeves.

Not until, waking sharply, in the middle of the night, did she have
a glimpse of a possible course--she might live with Dodge and
perfectly express both her retaliation and her accomplishment. In
that way she would reestablish herself beside him and place their
vision in bronze on an elevation beyond the spite of the envious and
the blind.

It was so directly simple that she was surprised it hadn't occurred
to her before. The possibility had always been a part, unsuspected
and valuable, of her special being; the largely condemned faults of
her character and experience had at least brought her this--a not
inconsiderable freedom in a world everywhere barred by the necessity
for upholding a hypocritical show of superiority to honest desire.
The detachment that deprived her of life's conventional joys
released her from its common obligations. That conviction, however,
was too intimately connected with all her inheritance to bring her
any conscious dramatic sense of rebellion or high feeling of
justified indignation.

Sleep had deserted her, and she waited for the dawn in the windows
that would bring her escape. It was very slow coming; the blackness
took on a grayer tone, like ink with added faint infusions of water.
Slowly the blackness dissolved and she heard the stir of the
sparrows in the ivy. There was the passing rumble of an early
electric car on the paved aged street, the blurred hurried shuffle
of a workman's clumsy shoes. The brightening morning was cool with a
premonitory touch of frost; at the window she saw a vanishing silver
sheen on the lawn and board fence.

A sensation of youth pervaded her; and while, perhaps, it was out of
keeping with her years, she had still her vitality unspent; she was
without a trace of the momentary frost on the grass. She was
tranquil, leisurely; her heart evenly sent its life through her
unflushed body. Piece by piece she put on her web-like garments,
black and white; brushing the heavy stream of her hair and tying the
inevitable sash about her supple waist.

Below she met Arnaud with an unpleasant shock--she hadn't given him
a thought. Her feeling now was hardly more than annoyance at her
forgetfulness. He would be terribly distressed at her going, and she
was genuinely sorry for this, poised at the edge of an explanation
of her purpose. Arnaud was putting butter and salt into his egg-cup,
after that he would grind the pepper from a French mill--pure spices
were a precision of his--and she waited until the operation was
completed.

Then it occurred to her that all she could hope to accomplish by
admitting her intention was the ruin of his last hour alone with
her. He was happier, gayer, than usual. But his age was evident in
his voice, his gestures. Linda marveled at her coldness, her
ruthless disregard of Arnaud's claim on her, of his affection as
deep as Pleydon's, perhaps no less fine but not so imperative. Yet
Arnaud had had over twenty years of her life, the best; and she had
never deceived him about the quality of her gift. It was right, now,
for Dodge to have the remainder. But whether it were right or wrong,
there was no failure of her determination to go to Pleydon in the
vindication of her existence.

She delayed speaking to Arnaud until, suddenly, breakfast was over.
He seldom went to the law office where he had been a partner, but
stayed about the lower floor of his house, in the library or
directing small outside undertakings. Either that or he left, late,
for the Historical Society, with which his connection and interest
were uninterrupted. As Linda passed him in the hall he was fumbling
in the green bag that accompanied all his journeyings into the city;
and she gathered that he intended to make one of his occasional
sallies. She proceeded above, to her room, where with steady hands
she pinned on her hat. It would be impossible to take any additional
clothes, and she'd have to content herself with something ready-made
until she could order others in the establishment of her living with
Dodge. Her close-fitting jacket, gloves, and a short cape of sables
were collected; she gazed finally, thoughtfully, about the room, and
then, with a subdued whisper of skirts, descended the stair. Arnaud
was in the library, bending over the table that bore his accumulation
of papers and serious journals. A lingering impulse to speak was
overborne by the memory of what, lately, she had endured--she saw him
at the dusty end of that long corridor through which she had
monotonously journeyed, denied of her one triumph, lost in
inconsequential shadows--and she continued firmly to the door which
closed behind her with a normal mute smoothness, an inanimate
silence.

XXXVIII

The maid who admitted Linda to Pleydon's apartment, first replying,
"Yes, Mrs. Hallet. No, Mrs. Hallet," to her questions, continued in
fuller sentences expressing a triumph of sympathy over mere
correctness. She lingered at the door of the informal drawing-room,
imparting the information that Mr. Pleydon had become very irregular
indeed about his meals, and that his return for lunch was uncertain.
Something, however, would be prepared for her. Linda acknowledged
this briefly. Often, with Mr. Pleydon at home, he wouldn't so much
as look at his dinner. Times, too, it seemed as though he had been
in the studio all night. He went out but seldom now, and rarely
remained away for more than an hour or two. Linda heard this without
an indication of responsive interest, and the servant, returning
abruptly from the excursion into humanity, disappeared.

She was glad to have this opportunity alone to accustom herself to a
novel position. But she was once more annoyingly calm. Annoyingly,
she reiterated; the fervor of her anger, which at the same time had
been bitterly cold, had lessened. She was practically normal. She
regarded this, the loss of her unprecedented emotion, in the light
of a fraud on her sanguine decision. Linda had counted on its
support, its generous irresistible tide, to carry her through the
remainder of her life with the exhilaration she had so largely
missed.

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