Linda Condon

J >> Joseph Hergesheimer >> Linda Condon

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"The enchantments were as thick as shadows under the trees: perhaps
the loveliest of women riding a snow-white mule, with a saddle cloth
of red samite, or, wrapped in her shining hair, on a leopard with
yellow eyes, lured you to a pavilion, scattered with rushes and
flowers and magical herbs, and a shameful end. Or a silver doe would
weep, begging you to pierce her with your sword, and, when you did,
there knelt the daughter of the King of Wales.

"But I started to tell you about the worship of beauty. Plato
started it although Cardinal Pietro Bembo was responsible for the
creed. He lived in Italy, in an age like a lily. It developed mostly
at Florence in the Platonic Academy of Cosomo and Pico della
Mirandola. Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression a
desire beyond the body."

He gazed at Linda with a quizzical light in his eyes deep in shadow.

"Love," he said again, and then paused. "One set of words will do as
well as another. You will understand, or not, with something far
different from intellectual comprehension. The endless service of
beauty. Of course, a woman--but never the animal; the spirit always.
Born in the spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A
direct contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality
and the sacred symbol of the dollar.

"It wouldn't please your Mr. Jasper, with his heaps and heaps of
money. Mr. Jasper would consider himself sold. But Novalis, not so
very long ago, understood.... A dead girl more real than all earth.
You mustn't suppose it to be mere mysticism."

Linda said, "Very well, I won't."

He nodded. "No one could call Michelangelo hysterical. Sometime in
the history of man, of a salt solution, this divinity has touched
them. Touched them hopefully, and perhaps gone--banished by the
other destination. Or I can comprehend nature killing it relentlessly,
since it didn't lead to propagation. Then, too, as much as was useful
was turned into a dogma for politics and priests.

"You saw in the rushlight a woman against the arras; there was a
humming of viola d'amore from the musicians' balcony; she smiled at
you, lingering, and then vanished with a whisper of brocade de Lyons
on a sanded floor. Nothing else but a soft white glove, eternally
fragrant, in your habergeon, an eternally fragrant memory; the dim
vision in stone street and coppice; a word, a message, it might be,
sent across the world of steel at death. And then, in the last
flicker of vision, the arras and the clear insistent strings, the
whispering brocade de Lyons on the landing.

"The philosophy of it," he said in a different tone, "is exact, even
a scientific truth. But men have been more concerned with turning
lead into gold; naturally the spirit has been neglected. The science
of love has been incredibly soiled:

"The old gesture toward the stars, the bridge of perfection, the
escape from the fatality of flesh. Yet it was a service of the body
made incredibly lovely in actuality and still never to be grasped.
Never to be won. It ought to be clear to you that realized it would
diminish into quite a different thing--

"'_La figlia della sua mente, l'amorosa idea._'"

His voice grew so faint that Linda could scarcely distinguish
articulate sounds. All that he said, without meaning for her,
stirred her heart. She was used to elder enigmas of speech; her
normal response was instinctively emotional, and nothing detracted
from the gravity of her attention.

"Not in pious men," he continued, more uncertain; "nor in seminaries
of virtue. They have their reward. But in men whose bitterness of
longing grew out of hideous fault. The distinction of beauty--not a
payment for prayers or chastity. The distinction of love ... above
chests of linen and a banker's talent and patents of nobility....
Divine need. Idiotic. But what else, what better, offers?"

He was, she saw, terribly sick. His hands were clenched and his
entire being strained and rigid, as though he were trying to do
something tremendously difficult. At last, with infinite pain, he
succeeded.

"I must get away," he articulated.

Linda was surprised at the effort necessary for this slight
accomplishment when he had said the most bewildering things with
complete ease. Well, the elevators were right in front of him. He
rose slowly, and, with Linda standing at his side, dug a sharp hand
into her shoulder. It hurt, but instinctively she bore it and,
moving forward, partly supported him. She pressed the bell that
signaled for the elevator and it almost immediately sank into view.
"Hurry," he said harshly to the colored operator in a green uniform;
and quite suddenly, leaving a sense of profound mystery, he disappeared.

III

Linda decided that he had told her a rather stupid fairy story. She
was too old for such ridiculous things as ladies in their shining
hair on a leopard. She remembered clearly seeing one of the latter
at a zoological garden. It had yellow eyes, but no one would care to
ride on it. Her mother, she was certain, knew more about love than
any man. His words faded quickly from her memory, but a confused
rich sense stirred her heart, a feeling such as she experienced
after an unusually happy day: white gloves and music and Mr. Jasper
displeased.

A clock chimed ten, and she proceeded to her mother's room, where
she must wait up with her information about Mr. Jasper's wife. She
was furious at him for a carelessness that had brought her mother
such unfavorable criticism. Everything had been put away before
going down, and there was nothing for her to do. The time dragged
tediously. The hands of the traveling-clock in purple leather on the
dressing-table moved deliberately around to eleven. A ringing of ice
in one of the metal pitchers carried by the bell boys sounded from
the corridor. There was the faint wail of a baby.

Suddenly and acutely Linda was lonely--a new kind of loneliness that
had nothing to do with the fact that she was by herself. It was a
strange cold unhappiness, pressing over her like a cloud and, at the
same time, it was nothing at all. That is, there was no reason for
it. The room was brightly lighted and, anyhow, she wasn't afraid of
"things." She thought that at any minute she must cry like that
baby. After a little she felt better; rather the unhappiness changed
to wanting. What she wanted was a puzzle; but nothing else would
satisfy her. It might be a necklace of little pearls, but it wasn't.
It might be--. Now it was twelve o'clock. Dear, dear, why didn't she
come back!

Music, awfully faint, and a whisper, like a dress, across the floor.
Her emotion changed again, to an extraordinary delight, a glow like
that which filled her at the expression of her adoration for her
mother, but infinitely greater. She was seated, and she lifted her
head with her eyes closed and hands clasped. The clock pointed to
one and her parent came into the room.

"Linda," she exclaimed crossly, "whatever are you doing up? A bad
little girl. I told you to be asleep hours before this."

"There is something you had to know right away," Linda informed her
solemnly. "I only just heard it from Mrs. Randall and Miss
Skillern." Her mother's flushed face hardened. "Mr. Jasper is
married," Linda said.

Mrs. Condon dropped with an angry flounce into a chair. Her broad
scarf of sealskin slipped from one shoulder. Her hat was crooked and
her hair disarranged. "So that's it," she said bitterly; "and they
went to you. The dam' old foxes. They went to you, nothing more than
a child."

Linda put in, "They didn't mean to; it just sort of came out. I knew
you'd stop as soon as you heard. Wasn't it horrid of him?"

"And this," Mrs. Condon declared, "is what I get for being, yes--proper.

"I said to-night, 'George,' I said, 'go right back home. It's the
only thing. They have a right to you.' I told him that only to-night.
And, 'No, I must consider my little Linda.' If I had held up my
finger," she held up a finger to show the smallness of the act
necessary, "where would we have all been?

"But this is what I get. You might think the world would notice a
woman's best efforts. No, they all try to crowd her and see her
slip. If they don't watch out I'll skid, all right, and with some
one they least expect. I have opportunities."

Linda realized with a sense of confusion that her mother had known
of Mr. Jasper's marriage all the while. But she had nobly tried to
save him from something; just what Linda couldn't make out. The
other's breath was heavy with drinking.

"You go to bed, Lin," she continued; "and thank you for taking care
of mama. I hope to goodness you'll learn from all this--pick out
what you want and make for it. Don't bother with the antique frumps,
the disappointed old tabbies. Have your fun. There's nothing else.
If you like a man, be on the level with him--give and take. Men are
not saints and we're better for it; we don't live in a heaven.
You've got a sweet little figure. Always remember mama telling you
that the most expensive corsets are the cheapest in the end."

Linda undressed slowly and methodically, her mother's words ringing
in her head. Always remember--but of course she would have the
nicest things possible.... A keepsake and faint music. She thought,
privately, that she was too thin; she'd rather be her mother, with
shoulders like bunches of smooth pink roses. In bed, just as she was
falling asleep, a sound disturbed her from the corridor above--the
slow tramping of heavy feet, like a number of men carefully bearing
an awkward object. She listened with suspended breath while they
passed. The footfalls seemed to pound on her heart. Slowly, slowly
they went, unnatural and measured. They were gone now, but she still
heard them. The crashing of her mother into bed followed with a deep
sigh. The long fall of a wave on the shore was audible. Two things
contended in her stilled brain--the mysterious feeling of desire and
her mother's advice. They were separate and fought, yet they were
strangely incomprehensibly joined.

IV

In the morning Mrs. Condon, with a very late breakfast-tray in bed,
had regained her usual cheerful manner. "The truth is," she told
Linda, "I'm glad that Jasper man has gone. He had no idea of
discretion; tired of them anyhow." Linda radiated happiness. This
was the mother she loved above all others. Her mind turned a little
to the man who had talked to her the night before. She wondered if
he were better. His thin blanched face, his eyes gleaming uncomfortably
in smudges, recurred to her. Perhaps he'd be down by the cigar-stand
again. She went, presently, to see, but the row of chairs was empty.

However, the neglected thick brown-covered magazine was still on the
ledge by which he had been sitting. There was a name on it, and while,
ordinarily, she couldn't read handwriting, this was so clear and
regular, but minutely small, that she was able to spell it out--Howard
Welles.

It disappointed her not to find him; at lunch she observed nearly
every one present, but still he was lost. He wasn't listening to the
music after dinner, nor below. A deep sense of disappointment grew
within her. Linda wanted to see him, hear him talk; at times a sharp
hurt in the shoulder he had grasped brought him back vividly. The
next day it was the same, and finally, diffidently, she approached
the hotel desk. A clerk she knew, Mr. Fiske, was rapidly sorting
mail, and she waited politely until he had finished.

"Well?" he asked.

"I found this down-stairs," she said, giving him the magazine.
"Perhaps he'll want it." Mr. Fiske looked at the written name, and
then glanced sharply at her. "No," he told her brusquely, "he won't
want it." He turned away with the magazine and left Linda standing
irresolutely. She wanted to ask if Mr. Welles were still at the
Boscombe; if the latter didn't want the magazine she'd love to have
it, Linda couldn't tell why. But the clerk went into the treasurer's
office and she was forced to move away.

Later, lingering inexplicably about the spot where she had heard so
many bewildering words, a very different man spoke to her. He, Linda
observed, was smoking a cigar, a good one, she was certain. He was
smallish and had a short bristling mustache and head partly bald.
His shoes were very shiny and altogether he had a look of prosperity.
"Hello, cutie!" he cried, capturing her arm. She responded listlessly.
The other produced a crisp dollar bill. "Do you see the chocolates
in that case?" he said, indicating the cigar-stand. "Well, get the
best. If they cost more, let me know. Our financial rating is number
one." Linda answered that she didn't think she cared for any. "All
right," the man agreed; "sink the note in the First National Ladies
Bank, if you know where that is."

He engineered her unwillingly onto a knee. "How's papa?" he
demanded. "I suppose he will be here Saturday to take his family
through the stores?"

She replied with dignity, "There is only my mother and me."

At this information he exclaimed "Ah!" and touched his mustache with
a diminutive gold-backed brush from a leather case. "That's more
than I have," he confided to her; "there is only myself. Isn't that
sad? You must be sorry for the lonely old boy."

She wasn't. Probably he, too, had a wife somewhere; men were
beastly. "I guess your mother wants a little company at times
herself?"

Linda, straining away from him, replied, "Oh, dear, no; there are
just packs of gentlemen whenever she likes. But she is tired of them
all." She escaped and he settled his waistcoat.

"You mustn't run away," he admonished her; "nice children don't.
Your mother didn't bring you up like that, I'm sure. She wouldn't
like it."

Linda hesitated, plainly conveying the fact that, if she were to
wait, he would have to say something really important.

"Just you two," he deliberated; "Miss and Mrs. Jones."

"Not at all," Linda asserted shortly; "our name is Condon."

"I wonder if you'd tell her this," he went on: "a gentleman's here
by himself named Bardwell, who has seen her and admires her a whole
lot. Tell her he's no young sprig but he likes a good time all the
better. Dependable, too. Remember that, cutie. And he wouldn't
presume if he had a short pocket. He knows class when he sees it."

"It won't do any good," Linda assured him in her gravest manner.
"She said only this morning she was sick of them."

"That was before dinner," he replied cheerfully. "Things look
different later in the day. You do what I tell you."

All this Linda dutifully repeated. Her mother was at the dressing-table,
rubbing cream into her cheeks, and she paused, surveying her
reflection in the mirror. "He was smoking a big cigar," Linda added.
The other laughed. "What a sharp little thing you are!" she
exclaimed. "A body ought to be careful what they tell you." She
wiped off the cream and rubbed a soft pinkish powder into her skin.

"He saw me, did he?" she apparently addressed the glass. "Admired me
a whole lot. Was he nice, Linda?" she turned. "Were his clothes
right? You must point him out to me to-night. But do it carefully,
darling. No one should notice. Your mother isn't on the shelf yet;
she can hold her own, even in the Boscombe, against the whole
barnyard."

Linda, at the entrance to the dining-room, whispered, "There he is."
But immediately Mr. Bardwell was smiling and speaking to them.

"I had a delightful conversation with your little girl to-day," he
told Mrs. Condon; "such a pretty child and well brought up."

"And good, too," her mother replied; "not a minute's trouble. The
common sense of the grown; you'd never believe it."

"Why shouldn't I?" he protested gallantly. "Every reason to." Mrs.
Condon blushed becomingly.

"She had to make up for a lot," she sighed.

An hour or more after dinner Mrs. Randall stopped Linda in the hall
beyond the music. "Mama out?" she inquired brightly. "I thought Mr.
Jasper left this morning?"

Linda told her that Mr. Jasper had gone; she added nothing else.

"I must look at the register," Mrs. Randall continued; "I really
must."

Obeying an uncontrollable impulse Linda half cried, "I'd like to see
you riding on a leopard!" A flood of misery enveloped her, and she
hurried up to the silence of her mother's deserted room.

V

It was on her fourteenth birthday that Linda noticed a decided
change in her mother; a change, unfortunately, that most of all
affected the celebrated good humors. In the first place Mrs. Condon
spent an increasingly large part of the day before the mirror of her
dressing-table, but without any proportionate pleasure; or, if there
was a proportion kept, it exhibited the negative result of a growing
annoyance. "God knows why they all show at once," she exclaimed
discontentedly, seated--as customary--before the eminently truthful
reflection of a newly discovered set of lines. "I'm not old enough
to begin to look like a hag."

"Oh, mother," Linda protested, shocked, "you mustn't say such horrid
things about yourself. Why, you're perfectly lovely, and you don't
seem a speck older than you did years ago."

The other, biting her full underlip at the unwelcome fact in turn
biting a full lower lip back at her, made no reply. Linda lingered
for a moment at her mother's ruffled pink shoulders; then, with a
sigh, she turned to the reception-room of their small suite at the
Hotel Gontram. It was a somber chamber furnished in red plush, with
a complication of shades and gray-white net curtains at long windows
and a deep green carpet. There was a fireplace, with a grate,
supported by varnished oak pillars and elaborate mantel and glass, a
glittering reddish center-table with a great many small odd shelves
below, a desk with sheaves of hotel writing paper and the telephone.

The Gontram was entirely different from the hotels at the lakes or
seashore or in the South. It was a solid part of a short block west
of Fifth Avenue in the middle of the city. Sherry's filled a corner
with its massive stone bulk and glimpses of dining-rooms with
glittering chandeliers and solemn gaiety, then impressive clubs and
wide entrances under heavy glass and metal, tall porters in splendid
livery, succeeded each other to the Hotel Gontram and the dull
thunder of the elevated trains beyond.

The revolving door, through which Linda sedately permitted herself
to be moved, opened into a high space of numerous columns and
benches, writing-desks and palms. At the back was the white room
where, usually alone, she had breakfast, while the dining-room,
discreetly lighted, was at the left. It was more interesting here
than, for example, at the Boscombe; people were always coming in or
going, and there were quantities of men. She watched them arriving
with shoals of leather bags in the brisk care of the bellboys,
disappear into the elevator, and, if it was evening, come down in
dinner coats with vivid silk scarfs folded over their white shirts.

The women were perpetually in street clothes or muffled in satin
wraps; Linda only regarded them when they were exceptional. Usually
she was intent on the men. It often happened that they returned her
frank gaze with a smile, or stopped to converse with her. Sometimes
it was an actor with a face dryly pink like a woman's from make-up;
they were familiar and pinched her cheeks, calling her endearing
names in conscious echoing voices as if they were quite hollow
within. Then there were simply business men, who never appeared to
take off their derby hats, and spoke to her of their little girls at
home. She was entirely at ease with the latter--so many of her
mother's friends were similar--and critically valued the details of
their dress, the cigar-cases with or without gold corners, the
watch-chains with jeweled insignia, the cuff-links and embroidered
handkerchiefs.

If her mother approached while Linda was so engaged the elder would
linger with a faint smile, at which, now, the girl was conscious of
a growing impatience. She'd rise with dignity and, if possible,
escape with her parent from florid courtesies. This sense of
annoyance oppressed her, too, in the dining-room, where her mother,
a cocktail in her hand, would engage in long cheerful discussions
with the captains or waiters. Other women, Linda observed, spoke
with complete indifference and their attention on the _carte de
jour_. Of course it was much more friendly to be interested in
the servants' affairs--they told her mother about their wives and
the number of their children, the difficulties of bringing both ends
together, and served her with the promptest care; but instinctively
Linda avoided any but the most formal contact.

She had to insist, as well, on paying the tips; for Mrs. Condon, her
sympathies engaged, was quite apt to leave on the table a five-dollar
bill or an indiscriminate heap of silver. "You are a regular little
Jew," she would reply lightly to Linda's protests. This, the latter
thought, was unfair; for the only Jew she knew, Mr. Moses Feldt, an
acquaintance of their present period in New York, was quite the most
generous person she knew. "Certainly you don't take after your mama."

After she said this she always paused with tight lips. It was
charged with the assumption that, while Linda didn't resemble her,
she did very much a mysterious and unfavorably regarded personage.
Her father, probably. More and more Linda wondered about him. He was
dead, she knew, but that, she began to see, was no reason for the
positive prohibition to mention him at all. Perhaps he had done
something dreadful, with money, and had disgraced them all. Yet she
was convinced that this was not so.

She had heard a great many uncomplimentary words applied to
husbands, most of which she had been unable to comprehend; and she
speculated blankly on them in her mother's connection. On the whole
the women agreed that they were remarkably stupid and transparent,
they protested that they understood and guided every move husbands
made; and this surely gave her father no opportunity for independent
crime. She was held from questioning not so much by her mother's
command--at times she calmly and successfully ignored that--as from
its unfortunate effect on the elder.

Mrs. Condon would burn with a generalized anger that sank to a
despondency fortified by the brandy flask. Straining embraces and
tears, painful to support, would follow, or more unbearable
silliness. The old difficulties with giggling or sympathetic
chambermaid;--Linda couldn't decide which was worse--then confronted
her with the necessity for rigid lies, misery, and the procuring of
sums of money from the bag in the top drawer. Altogether, and
specially with the fresh difficulties of her mother's unaccountable
irritation and apprehensions, things were frightfully complicated.

It was late afternoon in November, and the electric lights were on;
however, they were lighted when they rose, whenever they were in the
rooms, for it was always gloomy if not positively dark; the bedroom
looked into a deep exterior well and the windows of the other
chamber opened on an uncompromising blank wall. Yet Linda, now
widely learned in such settings, rather liked her present situation.
They had occupied the same suite before, for one thing; and going
back into it had given her a sense of familiarity in so much that
always shifted.

Linda, personally, had changed very little; she was taller than four
years before, but not a great deal; she was, perhaps, more graceful--her
movements had become less sudden--more assured, the rapidly maturing
qualities of her mind made visible; and she had gained a surprising
repose.

Now, for example, she sat in a huge chair cushioned with black
leather and thought, with a frowning brow, of her mother. It was
clear that the latter was obviously worried about--to put it
frankly--her face. Her figure, she repeatedly asserted, could be
reasoned with; she had always been reconciled to a certain jolly
stoutness, but her face, the lines that appeared about her eyes
overnight, fairly drove her to hot indiscreet tears. She had been to
see about it, Linda knew; and returned from numerous beauty-parlors
marvelously rejuvenated--for the evening.

She had been painted, enameled, vibrated, massaged; she had had
electric treatment, rays and tissue builders; and once she had been
baked. To-day the toilet table would be loaded with milkweed,
cerates and vanishing cream; tomorrow they would all be swept away,
given to delighted chambermaids, while Mrs. Condon declared that,
when all was said, cold water and a rough towel was nature's way.

This afternoon, apparently everything, including hope, had failed.
She was as cross as cross. From the manner in which she spoke it
might have been Linda's fault. The worst of it was that even the
latter saw that nothing could be done. Her mother was growing--well,
a little tired in appearance. Swift tears gathered in Linda's eyes.
She hadn't been quite truthful in that reassuring speech of hers.
She set herself to the examination of various older women with whom
she had more or less lately come in contact. How had they regarded
and met the loss of whatever good looks they had possessed?

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