Linda Condon

J >> Joseph Hergesheimer >> Linda Condon

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Here in Dodge's room she was as placid, almost, as though she were
in the library at home. That customary term took its place in her
thoughts before she recognized that, with her, it had shifted.
However, it was unimportant--home had never been a magical word to
her; it belonged in the vast category which, of such universal
weight, left her unstirred. She resembled those Eastern people
restlessly and perpetually moving across sandy deserts as they
exhausted, one after another, widely separated scanty oases.

She studied the objects around her with the pleased recognition that
they were unique, valuable, and in faultless taste. Then she fell to
wondering at the difference had Dodge been poor: she would have come
to him, Linda knew, just the same. But, she admitted frankly, it
would have been uncomfortable. Perhaps that--actual poverty, actual
deprivation--was what her character needed. A popular sentiment
upheld such a view; she decided it was without foundation. There was
no reason why beauty, finely appropriate surroundings, should damage
the spirit.

Her mind turned to an examination of her desertion of Arnaud, but
she could find no trace of conventional regret; of what, she felt,
her sensation ought to be. The instinctive revolt from oblivion was
an infinitely stronger reality than any allegiance to abstract duty.
She was consumed by the passionate need to preserve the integrity of
being herself. The word selfish occurred to her but to be met
unabashed by the query, why not? Selfishness was a reproach applied
by those who failed to get what they wanted to all who succeeded.
Linda wasn't afraid of public opinion, censure; she didn't shrink
even from the injury to her husband. What Dodge would think,
however, was hidden from her.

She had no doubt of his complete acceptance of all she offered;
ordinary obligations to society bound him as little as they held
her. It would be enough that she wanted to come to him.

She would bother him, change his habit of living, very little. Long
years of loneliness had taught her to be self-sufficient. Linda
would be too wise to insist on distasteful regularity in the
interest of a comparatively unimportant well-being. In short, she
wouldn't bother him. That must be made clear at once.

More than anything else he would be inexpressibly delighted to have
her with him, to find--at last--his love. Little intimacies of satin
mules, glimpses, charming to an artist! He'd be faultless, too, in
the relationships where Arnaud as well had never for a moment
deviated from beautiful consideration. Two remarkable men. While her
deficiency in humor was admitted, she saw a glimmer of the absurd in
her attitude and present situation. The combination, at least, was
uncommon. There had been no change in her feeling for either Arnaud
or Dodge, their places in her being were undisturbed; she liked her
husband no less, Dodge no better.

Lunch was announced, a small ceremony of covered silver dishes,
heavy crystal, Nankin china, and flowers. The linen, which was old,
bore a monogram unfamiliar to her--that of Dodge's mother, probably.
When she had finished, but was still lingering at the narrow
refectory table, she heard Pleydon enter the hall and the
explanatory voice of the servant. An unexpected embarrassment
pervaded her, but she overcame it by the realization that there was
no need for an immediate announcement of her purpose. Dodge would
naturally suppose that she was in New York shopping.

He did, to her intense relief, with a moving pleasure that she had
lunched with him. "It's seldom," he went on, "that you are so
sensible. I hope you haven't any plans or concerts to drag you away
immediately. I owe you a million strawberries; but, aside from that,
I'd like you to stay as long as possible."

"Very well," she replied quietly; "I will."

She hadn't seen him since the statue at Hesperia had been destroyed,
and she tried faintly to tell him how much that outrage had hurt
her. It had injured him too, she realized; just as Arnaud predicted.
He showed his age more gauntly, more absolutely, than the other. His
skin was dry as though the vitality of his countenance had been
burned out by the flame visible in his eyes.

"The drunken fools!" he exclaimed of the mob that had torn Simon
Downige from his eminence; "they came by way of all the saloons in
the city. Free drinks! That is the disturbing thing about what the
optimistic call civilization--the fact that it is always at the
mercy of the ignorant and the brutal. There is no security; none,
that is, except in the individual spirit. And they, mostly, are the
victims of a singular insane resentment--Savonarola and there were
greater.

"But you mustn't think, you mustn't suppose, that I mean it's
hopeless. How could I? Who has had more from living? Love and
complete self-expression. That exhausts every possibility. Three
words. Remember Cottarsport. But the love--ah," he smiled, but not
directly at her. Linda was at once reassured and disturbed; and she
rose, proceeding into the drawing-room.

There she sat gracefully composed and with still hands; she never
embroidered or employed her leisure with trivial useful tasks.
Pleydon was extended on a chair, his fingers caught beyond his head
and his long legs thrust out and crossed at the ankles. His gaze was
fixed on her unwaveringly; and yet, when she tried to meet its
focus, it went behind her as though it pierced the solidity of her
body and the walls in the contemplation of a far-removed shining
image. Her disturbance grew to the inclusion of a degree of
fretfulness at his unbroken silence, his apparent absorption in
whatever his meditation projected or found.

XXXIX

Now, she decided, was the moment for her revelation; or rather, it
couldn't very well be further deferred, for it promised to be
halting. But, with her lips forming the words, he abruptly spoke:

"I have lived so long with your spirit, it has become so familiar--I
mean the ability of completely making you out of my heart--that when
you are here the difference isn't staggering. You see, you are never
away. I have that ability; it came out of the other wreck. But you
know about it--from years back. Time has only managed a greater
power. Lately, and I have nothing to do with it, I have been seeing
you again as a girl; as young as at Markue's party; younger. Not
more than ten. I don't mean that there is anything--isn't the
present fashionable word subliminal?--esoteric. God forbid. You'll
remember my hatred of that brutal deception.

"No, it's only a part of my ability to create the shape of feeling,
of Simon's hope. I see things as realities capable of exact
statement; and, naturally, more than all the rest, you come to me
that way. But as a child--who knows why?" he relinquished the answer
with an opened palm. "And young like that, perhaps ten, I love you
more sharply, more unutterably, than at any other age. What is it I
love? Not your adorable plastic body, not that. It isn't necessary
to understand.

"You have, as a child, a quality of blinding loveliness in a world I
absolutely distrust. An Elysian flower. Is it possible, do you
suppose, to worship an abstract idea? It's not important to insist
on my sanity."

The question of that had occurred independently to Linda; his
hurried voice and lost gaze filled her with apprehension. A dull
reddish patch, she saw, burned in either thin cheek; and she told
herself that the fever had revived in him. Pleydon continued:

"Yet it is a timeless vision, because you never get old. I see
Hallet failing year by year, and your children, only yesterday dabs
of soft flesh, grow up and pass through college and marry. I hear
myself in the studio with an old man's cough; the chisels slip under
the mall and I can't move the clay about without help--all fading,
decaying, but you. Candles burn out, hundreds of them, while your
whiteness, your flame--

"Strange, too, how you light a world, a sky, eternity. A word we
have no business with; a high-sounding word for a penny purpose.
Look, we try to keep alive because it's necessary to life, to
nature; and the effort, the struggle, breeds the dream. You can
understand that. Men who ought to know say that love is nothing
more." He rose and stood over her, towering and portentous against
the curtained light. "I don't pretend to guess. I'm a creative
artist--Simon Downige at Cottarsport--I have you. If it's God so
much the better."

What principally swept over Linda was the knowledge that his
possession of her must keep them always apart. The reality, all
realities, were veils to Pleydon. Her momentary vision of things
beyond brick and earth was magnified in him until everything else
was obliterated. The fever! Oh, yes, that and his passion for work
merged in his passion for her. She could bring him nothing; and she
had a curious picture of two Lindas visible to him here--the Linda
that was actual and the other, the child. And of them it was the
latter he cared most for, recreated out of his desire to defraud his
loneliness, to repay the damage to his spirit realized in bronze.

She was, suddenly, too weary to stir or lift her hand; a depression
as absolute as her flare of rage enveloped her. Now the reason for
her coming seemed inexplicable, as if, for the while, her mind had
failed. She repressed a shudder at the thought of being, through the
long nights of his restlessness and wandering voice, alone with
Pleydon. She hadn't, Linda discovered, any of the transmuting
feeling for him which alone made surrender possible. She calculated
mentally how long it would take her to reach the station, what train
would be available.

Linda accepted dumbly the fatality to her own hope; for a few hours
she had thought it possible to break out of the prison of
circumstance, to walk free from all hindrance; but it had been vain.
She gazed at Dodge Pleydon intensely--a comprehensive view of the
man she had so nearly married, and who, more than any other force,
dominated her being. It was already too late for anything but
memory; she saw--filled with pity for them both--hardly more than a
strange old man with deadened hair and a yellow parchment-like skin.
His suit of loose gray flannel gave her a feeling that it had been
borrowed from some one she lovingly knew. The gesture of his hand,
too, had been copied from a brilliant personage with a consuming
impatience at all impotence.

"Remember me to Arnaud," he said, holding her gloves and the short
fur cape. "Wait!" he cried sharply, turning to the bookcase against
the wall. Pleydon fumbled in a box of lacquered gilt with a silk
cord and produced a glove once white but now brown and fragile with
age. "You never missed it," he proceeded in a gleeful triumph; "but
then you had so many pairs. Once I sent you nine dozen together from
Grenoble. They were nothing, but this you had worn. For a long while
it kept the shape of your hand."

"Dodge," she tried without success to steady her voice, "it stayed
with you anyhow, my--my hand."

"But yes," he answered impatiently. He returned the glove to its
box, carefully tying the tasselled cord. Then, after clumsily
helping her with the cape, he accompanied her to the elevator.
"There were other things," he told her. "Did you see the letters
about the Hesperia affair? Heaps of them. Rodin.... But what can you
expect in a world where there is no safety--" The stopping cage cut
off his remark. She held out the hand that was less real to him than
the dream.

"Good-by, Dodge."

"Yes, Linda. But watch that door, your skirt might easily be caught
in it." He fussed over her safety until, abruptly, he seemed to rise
in space, shut out from her by the limitations of her faith.

The evening overshadowed her in the train, as though she were
whirling in the swiftest passage possible, through an indeterminate
grayness, from day to night. The latter descended on her as she
reached the steps of her home. It was still that; now it would
continue to be until death. Nothing could ever again offer her
change, release, vindication; nothing, that was, which might give
her, for a day, what even her mother had plentifully experienced--the
igniting exultation of the body.

It was inevitable, she thought, for Arnaud to be in the library. He
rose unsteadily as she stood in the doorway. "Linda," he articulated
with difficulty. A book had rested open on the table beside him and,
closing it, he put it back in its place. His arm trembled so that it
took a painfully long while. Then he moved forward, still confused.

"What a confounded time you were gone. I had the most idiotic fancy.
You see, it was so unlike you; none more exact in habit. All day. I
didn't get to the Historical Society, it seemed so devilish far off.
I'd never blame you for leaving an old man without any gumption." He
must never think that again, she replied. Wasn't she, too, middle-aged?

XL

Linda admitted, definitely, the loss of her youth; and yet a
stubborn inner conviction remained that she was unchanged. In this
she had for support her appearance; practically she was as freshly
and gracefully pale as the girl who had married Arnaud Hallet. Even
Vigne, with indelible traces of her motherhood, had faint lines
absent from Linda's flawless countenance. Her children, and Arnaud,
were immensely proud of her beauty; it had become a part--in the
form of her ridiculously young air--of the family conversational
resources. She was increasingly aware of its supreme significance to
her.

One of her few certainties had been the discovery that, while small
truths might be had from others, all that intimately and deeply
concerned her was beyond questioning and advice. The importance of
her attractiveness, for example, which seemed the base of her entire
being, was completely out of accord with the accepted standard of
values for middle-aged women. Other things, called moral and spiritual,
she inferred, should take up her days and thoughts. There was a
course of discipline--exactly like exercises in the morning--for the
preparation of the willingness to die.

But such an attitude was eternally beyond her; she repudiated it
with a revolt stringing every nerve indignantly tense. She had had,
on the whole, singularly little from life but her fine body; it had
always been the temple and altar of her service, and no mere wordy
reassurance could now repay her for its swift or gradual
destruction. The latter, except for accident, would be her fate; she
was remarkably sound. In her social adventures, the balls to which,
without Arnaud, she occasionally went, she was morbid in her
sensitive dread of discovering, through a waning admiration, that
she was faded.

It would be impossible to spend more care on her person than she had
in the past; but that was unrelenting. Linda was inexorable in her
demands on the establishments that made her suits and dresses. The
slightest imperfection of fit exasperated her; and she regarded the
endless change of fashions with contempt. This same shifting, she
observed, occurred not only in women's clothes but in the women
themselves.

Linda remembered her mother, eternal in gaiety, but very obviously
different from her in states of mind affecting her appearance. She
was unable to define the change; but it was unmistakable--Stella
Condon seemed a little old-fashioned. When now, to Lowrie's wife,
Linda was unmistakably out-of-date. Lowrie, fast accomplishing all
that had been predicted for him, had married a girl incomprehensible
to his mother. Observing this later feminine development she had the
baffled feeling of inspecting a creature of a new order.

To Linda, Jean Tynedale, now a Hallet, seemed harder than ever her
own famous coldness had succeeded in being. This came mostly from
Jean's imposing education; there had been, in addition to the
politest of finishing schools, college--a woman's concern, Bryn
Mawr--and then post-graduate honors in a noteworthy university. She
was entirely addressed, in a concrete way, to the abstract problems
of social progress and hygiene; and, under thirty, the animating
spirit, as well as financial support, of an incredible number of
Settlements and allied undertakings. She spoke crisply before civic
and other clubs; even, in the interest of suffrage, addressing
nondescript audiences from a box on the street.

But it was her unperturbed dissection of the motives of sex, the
denouncement of a criminal mysterious ignorance, that most daunted
Linda. She listened to Jean with a series of distinct shocks to her
sense of propriety. What she had agreed to consider a nameless
attribute of women, or, if anything more exact, the power of their
charm over men, the other defined in unequivocal scientific terms.
She understood every impulse veiled for Linda in a reticence
absolutely needful to its appeal.

This, of course, the elder distrusted; just as she had no approval
for Jean's public activities. Linda didn't like public women; her
every instinct cried for a fine seclusion, fine in the meaning of an
appropriate setting for feminine distinction, the magic of dress and
cut roses. Her private inelegant word for Lowrie's wife was "bold;"
indeed, describing to herself the younger woman's patronage of her
bearing, she descended to her mother's colloquialism "brass."

She thought this sitting at a dinner-table which held Vigne and her
husband and Lowrie and Jean Hallet. Arnaud, drawing life from the
vitality of an atmosphere charged with youth, was unflagging in
splendid spirits and his valorous wit. Jean would never inspire the
affection Arnaud had given her; nor the passion that, in Pleydon,
had burned unfed even by hope.

Her thoughts slipped away from the present to the sculptor. Three
years had vanished since she had gone with an intention of finality
to his apartment, and in that time he had neither been in their
house nor written. Linda had expected this; she was without the
desire to see or hear from him. Dodge Pleydon was finished for her;
as a man, a potentiality, he had departed from her life. He was a
piece with her memories, the triumphs of her young days. Without an
actual knowledge of the moment of its accomplishment she had passed
over the border of that land, leaving it complete and fair and
radiant for her lingering view. Whether or not she had been happy
was now of no importance; the magic of its light showed only a
garden and a girl in white with a black bang against her blue eyes.

The bang, the blueness of gaze, were still hers; but, only this
morning, brush in hand, the former had offered less resistance in
its arrangement; it was thinner, and the color perceptibly not so
dense. At this, with a chill edge of fear, she had determined to go
at once to her hairdresser; no one, neither Arnaud, who loved its
luster, nor an unsympathetic bold scrutiny, a scrutiny of brass,
should see that she was getting gray. There was no fault about her
figure; she had that for her satisfaction; she was more graceful
than Jean's square thinness, more slim than Vigne's maternal
presence.

Linda had the feeling that she was engaged in a struggle with time,
a ruthless antagonist whom she viewed with a personal enmity. Time
must, would, of course, triumph in the end; but there would be no
sign of her surrender in the meanwhile; she wouldn't bend an inch,
relinquish by a fraction the pride and delicacy of her person. The
skilful dyeing of her hair to its old absolute blackness, as natural
and becoming in appearance as ever, was a symbol of her
determination to cheat an intolerable tyranny.

The process, dismaying her soul, she bore with a rigid fortitude; as
she endured the coldness of a morning bath from which, often, she
was slow to react. This, to her, was widely different from the
futile efforts of her mother, those women of the past, to preserve
for practical ends their flushes of youth and exhilaration. She felt
obscurely that she was serving a deeper reality created by the hands
of Pleydon, Arnaud's faith and pure pleasure, all that countless men
had seen in her for admiration, solace and power.

But it was inevitable, she told herself bitterly, that she should
hear the first intimation of her decline from Jean Hallet. Rather,
she overheard it, the discussion of her, from the loiterers at
breakfast as she moved about the communicating library. Jean's
emphatic slightly rough-textured voice arrested her in the
arrangement of a bowl of zinnias:

"You can't say just where she has failed, but it's evident. Perhaps
a general dryness. Perfectly natural. Thoroughly silly to fight
against it--" Vigne interrupted her. "I think mother's wonderful. I
can't remember any other woman nearly her age who looks so
enchanting in the evening."

Linda quietly left the flowers as they were and went up to the room
that had been her father's. It was now used as a spare bedroom; and
she had turned into it, in place of her own chamber, instinctively,
without reason. She had kept it exactly as it had been when Amelia
Lowrie first conducted her there, as it was when her father, a boy,
slept under the white canopy.

Linda advanced to the mirror; and, her hands so tightly clenched
that the finger-nails dug into the palms, forced herself to gaze
steadily at the wavering reflection. It seemed to her that there had
been a malicious magic in Jean's detraction; for immediately, as
though the harm had been wrought by the girl's voice, she saw that
her clear freshness had gone. Her face had a wax-like quality, the
violet shadows under her eyes were brown. Who had once called her a
gardenia? Now she was wilting--how many gardenias had she seen
droop, turn brown. Her heart beat with a disturbing echo in her
ears, and, with a slight gasp that resembled a sob, she sank on one
of the uncomfortable painted chairs.

What, above every other sensation, oppressed her was a feeling of
terrific loneliness--the familiar isolation magnified until it was
past bearing. Yet, there was Arnaud, infallible in his tender
comprehension, she ought to go to him at once and find support. But
it was impossible; all that he could give her was, to her special
necessity, useless. She had never been able to establish herself in
his sympathy; the reason for that lay in the fact that she could
bring nothing similar in return.

The room--except for the timed clangor of the electric cars, like
the measure of lost minutes--was quiet. The photograph of Bartram
Hallet in cricketing clothes had faded until it was almost
indistinguishable. Soon the faint figure would disappear entirely,
as though the picture were amenable to the relentless principle
operating in her.

The peace about her finally lessened her acute suffering, stilled
her heart. She told herself with a show of vigor that she was a
coward, a charge that roused an unexpected activity of denial. She
discovered that cowardice was intolerable to her. What had happened,
too, was so far out of her hands that a trace of philosophical
acceptance, recognition, came to her support. The loveliest woman
alive must do the same, meet in a looking-glass--that eternal
accompanying sibyl--her disaster. She rose, her lips firmly set,
composed and pale, and returned to the neglected flowers in the
library.

Vigne entered and put an affectionate arm about her shoulders,
repeating--unconscious that Linda had heard the discussion which had
given it being--the conviction that her mother was wonderful,
specially in the black dinner dress with the girdle of jet. With no
facility of expression she gave her daughter's arm a quick light
pressure.

From then she watched the slow progress of age with a new
realization, but an unabated distaste and, wherever it was possible,
a determined artifice. Arnaud had failed swiftly in the past months;
and, while she was inspecting the impaired supports of an arbor in
the garden, he came to her with an unopened telegram. "I abhor these
things," he declared fretfully; "they are so sudden. Why don't
people write decent letters any more! It's like the telephone....
Good manners have been ruined."

She tore open the envelope, read the brief line within, and, a hand
suddenly put out to the arbor, sank on its bench. There had been
rain, but a late sun was again pouring over the sparkling grass, and
robins were singing with a lyrical clearness. "What is it?" Arnaud
demanded anxiously, tremulous in the unsparing sunlight. She
replied:

"Dodge died this morning."

His concern was as much for her as for Pleydon's death. "I'm sorry,
Linda," his hand was on her shoulder. "It is a shock to you. A fine
man, a genius--none stronger in our day. When you were young and for
so long after.... I was lucky, Linda, to get you; have you all this
while. Nothing in Pleydon's life, not even his success, could have
made up for your loss."

She wondered dully if Dodge had missed her, if Arnaud Hallet had
ever had her in his possession. The robins filled the immaculate air
with song. It was impossible that Dodge, who was so imperious in his
certainty that he would never say good-by to her, was dead.

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