Linda Condon

J >> Joseph Hergesheimer >> Linda Condon

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In the middle of the night she had wakened oppressed by a dread
resulting in an uncontrollable chill. She thought first that her
mother was bending a malignant face over her; and then realized that
her feeling was caused by her promise to Dodge Pleydon. It had grown
worse instead of vanishing, waves of nameless shrinking swept over
her; and in the morning, further harrowed by the actualities of
being, she had sent a telegram to Arnaud Hallet--to Arnaud's
kindness and affection, his detachment not unlike her own.

They were married immediately; and through the ceremony and the
succeeding days she had been almost entirely absorbed in a sensation
of escape. At the death of Amelia Lowrie, soon after, Arnaud had
suggested a temporary period in the house she remembered with
pleasure; and, making small alterations with the months and years,
they had tacitly agreed to remain.

Linda often wondered, walking about the lower floor, why it seemed
so familiar to her: she would stand in the dining-room, with its
ceiling of darkened beams, and gaze absent-minded through the long
windows at the close-cut walled greenery without. The formal
drawing-room, at the right of the street entrance, equally held her--a
cool interior with slatted wooden blinds, a white mantelpiece with
delicately reeded supports and a bas-relief of Minerva on the
center panel, a polished brass scuttle for cannel-coal and chairs
with wide severely fretted backs upholstered in old pale damask.

The house seemed familiar, but she could never grow accustomed to
the undeniable facts of her husband, the children and her completely
changed atmosphere. She admitted to herself that her principal
feeling in connection with Lowrie and Vigne was embarrassment. Here
she always condemned herself as an indifferent, perhaps unnatural,
mother. She couldn't help it. In the same sense she must be an
unsatisfactory wife. Linda was unable to shake off the conviction
that it was like a play in which she had no more than a spectator's
part.

This was her old disability, the result of her habit of sitting, as
a child, apart from the concerns and stir of living. She made every
possible effort to overcome it, to surrender to her new conditions;
but, if nothing else, an instinctive shyness prevented. It went back
further, even, she thought, than her own experience, and she
recalled all she had heard and reconstructed of her father--a man
shut in on himself who had, one day, without a word walked out of
the door and left his wife, never to return. These realizations,
however, did little to clarify her vision; she was continually
trying to adjust her being to circumstances that persistently
remained a little distant and blurred.

In appearance, anyhow, Linda told herself with a measure of
reassurance, she was practically unchanged. She still, with the
support of Arnaud, disregarding current fashion, wore her hair in a
straight bang across her brow and blue gaze. She was as slender as
formerly, but more gracefully round, in spite of the faint
characteristic stiffness that was the result of her mental
hesitation. Her clothes, too, had hardly varied--she wore, whenever
possible, white lawns ruffled about the throat and hem, with broad
soft black sashes, while her more formal dresses were sheaths of
dull unornamented satin extravagant in the perfection of their
simplicity.

XXIV

Arnaud Hallet stirred, sharply closing his book. He had changed--except
for a palpable settling down of grayness--as little as Linda. For a
while she had tried to bring about an improvement in his appearance,
and he had met her expressed wish whenever he remembered it; but this
was not often. In the morning a servant polished his shoes, brushed
and ironed his suits; yet by evening, somehow, he managed to look as
though he hadn't been attended to for days. She would have liked him
to change for dinner; other men of his connection did, it was a part
of his inheritance. Arnaud, however, in his slight scoffing
disparagement, declined individually to annoy himself. He was, she
learned, enormously absorbed in his historical studies and papers.

"Did you enjoy it?" she asked politely of his reading. "Extremely,"
he replied. "The American Impressions of Tyrone Power, the English
actor, through eighteen thirty-three and four. His account of a
European packet with its handbells and Saratoga water and breakfast
of spitch-cock is inimitable. I'd like to have sat at Cato's then,
with a julep or hail-storm, and watched the trotting races."

Elouise Lowrie rose unsteadily, confused with dozing; but almost
immediately she gathered herself into a relentless propriety and a
formal goodnight.

"What has been running through that mysterious mind of yours?"

"I had a letter from Dodge," she told him simply; "and I was
thinking a little about the past." He exhibited the nice unstrained
interest of his admirable personality. "Is he still in France?" he
queried. "Pleydon should be a strong man; I am sure we are both
conscious of a little disappointment in him." She said: "I'll read
you his letter, it's on the table.

"'You will see, my dear Linda, that I have not moved from the Rue de
Penthievre, although I have given up the place at Etretat, and I am
not going to renew the lease here. Rodin insists, and I coming to
agree with him, that I ought to be in America. But the serious
attitude here toward art, how impossible that word has been made, is
charming. And you will be glad to know that I have had some success
in the French good opinion. A marble, Cotton Mather, that I cut from
the stone, has been bought for the Luxembourg.

"'I can hear you both exclaim at the subject, but it is very
representative of me now. I am tired of mythological naiads in a
constant state of pursuit. Get Hallet to tell you something about
Mather. What a somber flame! I have a part Puritan ancestry, as any
Lowrie will inform you. Well, I shall be back in a few months, very
serious, and a politician--a sculptor has to be that if he means to
land any public monuments in America.

"'I hope to see you.'"

The letter ended abruptly, with the signature, "Pleydon."

"Are you happy, Linda?" Arnaud Hallet asked unexpectedly after a
short silence. So abruptly interrogated she was unable to respond.
"What I mean is," he explained, "do you think you would have been
happier married to him? I knew, certainly, that it was the closest
possible thing between us." Now, however, she was able to satisfy
him:

"I couldn't marry Dodge."

"Is it possible to tell me why?"

"He hurt me very much once. I tried to marry him, I tried to forget
it, but it was useless. I was dreadfully unhappy, in a great many
ways--"

"So you sent for me," he put in as she paused reflectively. "I
didn't hurt you, at any rate." It seemed to her that his tone was
shadowed. "You have never hurt me, Arnaud," she assured him,
conscious of the inadequacy of her words. "You were everything I
wanted."

"Except for my hats," he said in a brief flash of his saving humor.
"It would be better for me, perhaps, if I could hurt you. That
ability comes dangerously close to a constant of love. You mustn't
think I am complaining. I haven't the slightest reason in the face
of your devastating honesty. I didn't distress you and I had the
necessary minimum--the fifty thousand." His manner was so even, so
devoid of sting, that she could smile at the expression of her
material ambitions. "I realize exactly your feeling for myself, but
what puzzles me is your attitude toward the children."

"I don't understand it either," she admitted, "except that I am
quite afraid of them. They are so different from all my own
childhood; often they are too much for me. Then I dread the time
when they will discover how stupid and uneducated I am at bottom.
I'm sure you already ask questions before them to amuse yourself at
my doubt. What shall I do, Arnaud, when they are really at school
and bring home their books?"

"Retreat behind your dignity as a parent," he advised. "They are
certain to display their knowledge and ask you to bound things or
name the capital of Louisiana." She cried, "Oh, but I know that,
it's New Orleans!" She saw at once, from his entertained expression,
that she was wrong again, and became conscious of a faint flush of
annoyance. "It will be even worse," she continued, "when Vigne looks
to me for advice; I mean when she is older and has lovers."

"She won't seriously; they never do. She'll tell you when it's all
over. Lowrie will depend more on you. I may have my fun about the
capital of Louisiana, Linda, but I have the greatest confidence in
your wisdom. God knows what an unhappy experience your childhood
was, but it has given you a superb worldly balance."

"I suppose you're saying that I am cold," she told him. "It must be
true, because it is repeated by every one. Yet, at times, I used to be
very different--you'd never imagine what a romantic thrill or strange
ideas were inside of me. Like a memory of a deep woods, and--and the
loveliest adventure. Often I would hear music as clearly as possible,
and it made me want I don't know what terrifically."

"An early experience," he replied. Suddenly she saw that he was
tired, his face was lined and dejected. "You read too much," Linda
declared. He said: "But only out of the printed book." She wondered
vainly what he meant. As he stood before the glimmering coals, in
the room saturated in repose, she wished that she might give him
more; she wanted to spend herself in a riot of feeling on Arnaud and
their children. What a detestable character she had! Her desire, her
efforts, were wasted.

He went about putting up the windows and closing the outside
shutters, a confirmed habit. Linda rose with her invariable sense of
separation, the feeling that, bound on a journey with a hidden
destination, she was only temporarily in a place of little
importance. It was like being always in her hat and jacket. Arnaud
shook down the grate; then he gazed over the room; it was all, she
was sure, as it had been a century ago, as it should be--all except
herself.

XXV

Yet her marriage had realized in almost every particular what she
had--so much younger--planned. The early suggestion, becoming
through constant reiteration a part of her knowledge, had been
followed and accomplished; and, as well, her later needs were
served. Linda told herself that, in a world where a very great deal
was muddled, she had been unusually fortunate. And this made her
angry at her pervading lack of interest in whatever she had
obtained.

Other women, she observed, obviously less fortunate than she, were
volubly and warmly absorbed in any number of engagements and
pleasures; she continually heard them, Arnaud's connections--the
whole superior society, eternally and vigorously discussing servants
and bridge, family and cotillions, indiscretions and charities.
These seemed enough for them; their lives were filled, satisfied,
extraordinarily busy. Linda, for the most part, had but little to
do. Her servants, managed with remote exactness, gave no trouble;
she had an excellent woman for the children; her dress presented no
new points of anxiety nor departure ... she was, in short, Arnaud
admitted, perfectly efficient. She disposed of such details
mechanically, almost impatiently, and was contemptuous, no envious,
of the women whose demands they contented.

At the dinners, the balls, to which Arnaud's sense of obligation
both to family and her took them against his inclination, it was the
same--everyone, it appeared to Linda, was flushed with an intentness
she could not share. Men, she found, some of them extremely
pleasant, still made adroit and reassuring efforts for her favor;
the air here, she discovered, was even freer than the bravado of her
earlier surroundings. This love-making didn't disturb her--it was,
ultimately, the men who were fretted--indeed, she had rather hoped
that it would bring her the relief she lacked.

But again the observations and speculation of her mature childhood,
what she had heard revealed in the most skillful feminine
dissections, had cleared her understanding to a point that made the
advances of hopeful men quite entertainingly obvious. Their method
was appallingly similar and monotonous. She liked, rather than not,
the younger ones, whose confidence that their passion was something
new on earth at times refreshed her; but the navigated materialism
of greater experience finally became distasteful. She discussed this
sharply with Arnaud:

"You simply can't help believing that most women are complete
idiots."

"You haven't said much more for men."

"The whole thing is too silly! Why is it, Arnaud? It ought to be
impressive and sweep you off your feet, up--"

"Instead of merely behind some rented palms," he added. "But I must
say, Linda, that you are not a very highly qualified judge of
sentiment." He pronounced this equably, but she was conscious of the
presence of an injury in his voice. She was a little weary at being
eternally condemned for what she couldn't help. Any failure was as
much Arnaud Hallet's as hers; he had had his opportunity, all that
for which he had implored her. Her thoughts returned to Dodge
Pleydon. April was well advanced, and he had written that he'd be
back and see them in the spring. Linda listened to her heart but it
was unhastened by a beat. She would be very glad to have him at
hand, in her life again, of course.

Then the direction of her mind veered--what did he still think of
her? Probably he had altogether recovered from his love for her. It
had been a warm day, and Arnaud had opened a window; but now she was
aware of a cold air on her shoulder and she asked him abruptly to
lower the sash. Linda remembered, with a lingering sense of triumph,
the Susanna Noda whom Dodge had left at a party for her. There had
been a great many Susannas in his life; the reason for this was the
absence of any overwhelming single influence. It might be that now--he
had written of the change in the subjects of his work--such a guide
had come into his existence. She hoped she had. Yet, in view of the
announced silliness of women, she didn't want him to be cheaply
deluded.

He was an extremely human man.

But she, Linda, it seemed, was an inhuman woman. The days ran into
weeks that added another month to spring; a June advanced sultry
with heat; and, suddenly as usual, a maid at the door of her room
announced Pleydon. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, she had to
dress, and she sent him a message that he mustn't expect her in a
hurry. She paused in her deliberate preparations for a long
thoughtful gaze into a mirror; there was not yet a shadow on her
face, the trace of a line at her eyes. The sharp smooth turning and
absolute whiteness of her bare shoulders were flawless.

At first it appeared to Linda that he, too, had not changed. They
were in the library opening into the dining-room, a space shut
against the sun by the Venetian blinds, and faintly scented by a
bowl of early tea roses. He appeared the same--large and informally
clad in gray flannels, with aggressive features and sensitive strong
hands. He was quiet but plainly happy to be with her again and sat
leaning forward on his knees, watching her intently as she chose a
seat.

Then it slowly dawned on her that he had changed, yes--tragically.
Pleydon, in every way, was years older. His voice, less arbitrary,
had new depths of questioning, his mouth was more repressed, his
face notably sparer of flesh. He was immediately aware of the result
of her scrutiny. "I have been working like a fool," he explained. "A
breath of sickness, too, four years ago in Soochow. One of the
damnable Asiatic fevers that a European is supposed to be immune
from. You are a miracle, Linda. How long has it been--nearly eight
years; you have two children and Arnaud Hallet and yet you are the
girl I met at Markue's. I wanted to see you different, just a
little, a trace of something that should have happened to you. It
hasn't. You're the most remarkable mother alive."

"If I am," she returned, "it is not as a success, or at least for
me. Lowrie and Vigne are healthy, and happy enough; but I can't lose
myself in them, Dodge; I can't lose myself at all."

He was quiet at this, the smoke of his cigarette climbing bluely in
a space with the aqueous stillness of a lake's depths. "The same,"
he went on after a long pause; "nothing has touched you. I ought to
be relieved but, do you know, it frightens me. You are relentless.
You have no right, at the same time, to be beautiful. I have seen a
great many celebrated women at their best moments, but you are
lovelier than any. It isn't a simple affair of proportion and
features--I wish I could hold it in a phrase, the turn of a chisel.
I can't. It's deathless romance in a bang cut blackly across
heavenly blue." He was silent again, and Linda glad that he still
found her attractive. She discovered that the misery his presence
once caused her had entirely vanished, its place taken by an eager
interest in his affairs, a lightness of spirit at the realization
that, while his love for her might have grown calm, no other woman
possessed it.

At the dinner-table she listened--cool and fresh, Arnaud complained,
in spite of the heat--to the talk of the two men. By her side
Elouise Lowrie occasionally repeated, in a voice like the faint
jangle of an old thin piano, the facts of a family connection or a
commendation of the Dodges. Arnaud really knew a surprising lot, and
his conversation with Pleydon was strung with terms completely
unintelligible to her. It developed, finally, into an argument over
the treatment of the acanthus motive in rococo ornament. France was
summoned against Spain; the architectural degrading of Italy
deplored.... It amazed her that any one could remember so much.

Linda without a conscious reason suddenly stopped the investigation
of her feeling for Pleydon. Even in the privacy of her thoughts an
added obscurity kept her from the customary clear reasoning. After
dinner, out in the close gloom of the garden, she watched the
flicker of the cigarettes. There was thunder, so distant and vague
that for a long while Linda thought she was deceived. She had a keen
rushing sensation of the strangeness of her situation here--Linda
Hallet. The night was like a dream from which she would stir, sigh,
to find herself back again in the past waiting for the return of her
mother from one of her late parties.

But it was Arnaud who moved and, accompanying Elouise Lowrie, went
into the house for his interminable reading. Pleydon's voice began
in a low remembering tone:

"What a fantastic place the Feldt apartment was, with that smothered
room where you said you would marry me. You must have got hold of
Hallet in the devil of a hurry. I've often tried to understand what
happened; why, all the time, you were upset--why, why, why?"

"In a way it was because a ridiculous hairdresser burned out some of
my mother's front wave," she explained.

"Of course," he replied derisively, "nothing could be plainer."

She agreed calmly. "It was very plain. If you want me to try to tell
you don't interrupt. It isn't a happy memory, and I am only doing it
because I was so rotten to you.

"Yes, I can see now that it was the hairdresser and a hundred other
things exactly the same. My mother, all the women we knew, did
nothing but lace and paint and frizzle for men. I used to think it
was a game they played and wonder where the fun was. There were even
hints about that and later they particularized and it made me as
sick as possible. The men, too, were odious; mostly fat and bald;
and after a while, when they pinched or kissed me, I wanted to die.

"That was all I knew about love, I had never heard of any other--men
away from their families for what they called a good time and women
plotting and planning to give it to them or not give it to them.
Then mother, after her looks were spoiled, married Mr. Moses Feldt,
and I met Judith, who only existed for men and men's rooms and told
me worse things, I'm sure, than mother ever dreamed; and, on top of
that, I met you and you kissed me.

"But it was different from any other; it didn't shock me, and it
brought back a thrill I have always had. I wanted, then, to love
you, and have you ask me to marry you, more than anything else in
the world. I was sure, if you would only be patient, that I could
change what had hurt me into a beautiful feeling. I couldn't tell
you because I didn't understand myself." She stopped, and Pleydon
repeated, bitterly and slow:

"Fat old bald men; and I was one with them destroying your exquisite
hope." She heard the creak of the basket chair as he leaned forward,
his face masked in darkness. "Perhaps you think I haven't paid.

"You will never know what love is unless I can manage somehow to
make you understand how much I love you. Hallet will have to endure
your hearing it. This doesn't belong to him; it has not touched the
earth. Every one, more or less, talks about love; but not one in a
thousand, not one in a million, has such an experience. If they did
it would tear the world into shreds. It would tear them as it has
me. I realize the other, the common thing--who experimented more!
This has nothing to do with it. A boy lost in the idealism of his
first worship has a faint reflection. Listen:

"I can always, with a wish, see you standing before me. You
yourself--the folds of your sash, the sharp narrow print of your
slippers on the pavement or the matting or the rug, the ruffles
about your hands. I have the feeling of you near me with your
breathing disturbing the delicacy of your breast. There is the odor
and shimmer of your hair ... your lips move ... but without a sound.

"This vision is more real than reality, than an opera-house full of
people or the Place Vendome; and it, you, is all I care for, all I
think about, all I want. I find quiet places and stay there for
hours, with you; or, if that isn't possible, I turn into a blind
man, a dead man warm again at the bare thought of your face. Listen:

"I've been in shining heaven with you. I have been melted to nothing
and made over again, in you, good. We have been walking together in
a new world with rapture instead of air to breathe. A slow walk
through dark trees--God knows why--like pines. And every time I
think of you it is exactly as though I could never die, as though
you had burned all the corruption out of me and I was made of silver
fire. And listen:

"Nothing else is of any importance, now or afterward, you are now
and the hereafter. I see people and people and hear words and words,
and I forget them the moment they have gone, the second they are
still. But I haven't lost an inflection of your voice. When I work
in clay or stone I model and cut you into every surface and fold. I
see you looking back at me out of marble and bronze. And here, in
this garden, you tried to give me more--"

The infinitely removed thunder was like the continued echo of his
voice. There was a stirring of the leaves above her head; and the
light that had shone against the house in Elouise Lowrie's window
was suddenly extinguished. All that she felt was weariness and a
confused dejection, the weight of an insuperable disappointment. She
could say nothing. Words, even Pleydon's, seemed to her vain. The
solid fact of Arnaud, of what Dodge, more than seven years before,
had robbed her, put everything else aside, crushed it.

She realized that she would never get from life what supremely
repaid the suffering of other women, made up for them the failure of
practically every vision. She was sorry for herself, yes, and for
Dodge Pleydon. Yet he had his figures in metal and stone; his sense
of the importance of his work had increased enormously; and, well,
there were Lowrie and Vigne; it would be difficult, every one
agreed, to find better or handsomer children. But they seemed no
more than shadows or colored mist. This terrified her--what a
hopelessly deficient woman she must be! But even in the profundity
of her depression the old vibration of nameless joy reached her
heart.

In the morning there was a telegram from Judith Feldt, saying that
her mother was dangerously sick, and she had lunch on the train for
New York. The apartment seemed stuffy; there was a trace of
dinginess, neglect, about the black velvet rugs and hangings. Her
mother, she found, had pneumonia; there was practically no chance of
her recovering. Linda sat for a short while by the elder's bed,
intent upon a totally strange woman, darkly flushed and ravished in
an agonizing difficulty of breathing. Linda had a remembered vision
of her gold-haired and gay in floating chiffons, and suddenly life
seemed shockingly brief. A serious-visaged clergyman entered the
room as she left and she heard the rich soothing murmur of a
confident phrase.

The Stella Condon who had become Mrs. Moses Feldt had had little
time for the support of the church; although Linda recalled that she
had uniformly spoken well of its offices. To condemn Christianity,
she had asserted, was to invite bad luck. She treated this in
exactly the way she regarded walking under ladders or spilling salt
or putting on a stocking wrong. Linda, however, had disregarded
these possibilities of disaster and, with them, religion.

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