Linda Condon

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A great many people, she noticed, talked at length about it; women
in their best wraps and with expensive little prayer books left the
hotels for various Sunday morning services, and ministers came in
later for tea. All this, she understood, was in preparation for
heaven, where everybody, who was not in hell, was to be forever the
same and yet radiantly different. It seemed very vague and far away
to Linda, and, since there was such a number of immediate problems
for her to consider, she had easily ignored the future. When now,
with her mother dying, it was thrust most uncomfortably before her.

She half remembered sentences, admonitions, of the godly--a woman
had once told her that dancing and low gowns were hateful in the
sight of God, some one else that playing-cards were an instrument of
the devil. Pleasure, she had gathered, was considered wrong, and she
instinctively put these opinions, together with a great deal else,
aside as envious.

That expressed her whole experience. She had never keenly associated
the thought of death with herself before, and she was unutterably
revolted by the impending destruction of her fine body, the delicate
care of which formed her main preoccupation in life. Age was
supremely distasteful, but this other ... she shuddered.

Linda wanted desperately to preserve the whiteness of her skin, the
flexible black distinction of her hair, yes--her beauty. Here,
again, with other women the vicarious immortality of children would
be sufficient. But not for her. She was in the room that had been
hers before marriage, with her infinite preparations for the night
at an end; and, her hair loose across the blanched severity of her
attire, her delicately full arms bare, she clasped her cold hands in
stabbing apprehension.

She would do anything, anything, to escape that repulsive fatality
to her lavished care. It was only to be accomplished by being good;
and goodness was in the charge of the minister. She saw clearly and
at once her difficulty--how could she go to a solemn man in a
clerical vest and admit that she was solely concerned by the
impending loss of her beauty. The promised splendor of heaven, in
itself, failed to move her--it threatened to be monotonous; and she
was honest in her recognition that charity, the ugliness of poverty,
repelled her. Linda was certain that she could never change in these
particulars; she could only pretend.

A surprising multiplication of such pretense occurred to her in
people regarded as impressively religious. She had seen men like
that--she vaguely thought of the name Jasper--going off with her
mother in cabs to dinners that must have been "godless." She
wondered if this mere attitude, the public show, were enough. And an
instinctive response told her that it was not. If all she had been
informed about the future were true she decided that her mother's
chance was no worse than that of any false display of virtue.

She, Linda, could do nothing.

The funeral ceremony with its set form--so inappropriate to her
mother's qualities--was even more remote from Linda's sympathies
than was common in her encounters. But Mr. Moses Feldt's grief
appeared to her actual and affecting. He invested every one with the
purity of his own spirit.

She left New York at the first possible moment with the feeling that
she was definitely older. The realization, she discovered, happened
in that way--ordinarily giving the flight of time no consideration
it was brought back to her at intervals of varying length. As she
aged they would grow shorter.

The result of this experience was an added sense of failure; she
tried more than ever to overcome her indifference, get a greater
happiness from her surroundings and activity. Linda cultivated an
attention to Lowrie and Vigne. They responded charmingly but her
shyness with them persisted in the face of her inalienable right to
their full possession. She insisted, too, on going about vigorously
in spite of Arnaud's humorous groans and protests. She forced
herself to talk more to the men attracted to her, and assumed, with
disconcerting ease, an air of sympathetic interest. But, unfortunately,
this brought on her a rapid increase of the love-making that she
found so fatiguing.

She studied her husband thoughtfully through the evenings at home,
before the Franklin stove, or, in summer, in the secluded garden.
Absolutely nothing was wrong with him; he had, after several deaths,
inherited even more money; and, in his deprecating manner where it
was concerned, devoted it to her wishes. Except for books, and the
clothes she was forced to remind him to get, he had no personal
expenses. In addition to the money he never offended her, his
relationships and manner were conducted with an inborn nice
formality that preserved her highest self-opinion.

Yet she was never able to escape from the limitations of a calm
admiration; she couldn't lose herself, disregard herself in a flood
of generous emotion. When, desperately, she tried, he, too, was
perceptibly ill at ease. Usually he was undisturbed, but once, when
she stood beside him with her coffee cup at dinner, he disastrously
lost his equanimity. Tensely putting the cup away he caught her with
straining hands.

"Oh, Linda," he cried, "is it true that you love me! Do you really
belong to us--to Vigne and Lowrie and me? I can't stand it if you
won't ... some day."

She backed away into the opening of a window, against the night, from
the justice of his desire; and she was cold with self-detestation as
her fingers touched the glass. Linda tried to speak, to lie; but,
miserably still, she was unable to deceive him. The animation, the
fervor of his longing, swiftly perished. His arms dropped to his
side. An unbearable constraint deepened with the silence in the room,
and later he lightly said:

"You mustn't trifle with my ancient heart, Linda, folly and age--"

XXVIII

The only other quantity in her life was Dodge Pleydon. He wrote her
again, perhaps three months after the explanation of his love; but
his letter was devoted wholly to his work, and so technical that she
had to ask Arnaud to interpret it. He added:

"That is the mind of an impressive man. He has developed enormously--
curious, so late in life. Pleydon must be fully as old as myself.
It's clear that he has dropped his women. I saw a photograph of the
Cotton Mather reproduced in a weekly, and it was as gaunt as a
Puritan Sunday. Brimmed with power. Why don't we see him oftener?
Write and say I'd like to contradict him again about the Eastlake
period."

He made no further reference to Pleydon then, and Linda failed to
write as Arnaud suggested. Though she wasn't disturbed at the
possibility of a continuation of his admissions of love she was
weary of the thought of its uselessness. Linda was, she told
herself, damned by practicability. Her husband used the familiar
term of reproach, material. She didn't in the least want to be.
Circumstance, she had a feeling, had forced it upon her.

Arnaud, however, who had met Dodge Pleydon in Philadelphia, brought
him home. Linda saw with a strange constriction of the heart that
Pleydon's hair was definitely gray. He had had a recurrence of the
fever contracted in Soochow. The men at once entered on another
discussion which she was unable to follow; but it was clear that her
husband now listened with an increasing surrender of opinion to the
sculptor. Pleydon, it was true, was correspondingly more impatient
with minds that disagreed with his. He was at once thinner and
bigger, his face deeply lined; but his eyes had a steady vital
intensity difficult to encounter.

She considered him in detail as the talk left dinner, the glasses
and candles spent. He drank, from a tall tumbler with a single piece
of ice, the special whisky Arnaud kept. He had been neglecting
himself, too--there were traces of clay about his finger-nails, and
he ate hurriedly and insufficiently. When she had an opportunity,
Linda decided, she would speak to him about these necessary trifles.
Then, she had no chance; and it was not until the following winter,
at a Thursday afternoon concert during the yearly exhibition of the
Academy of Fine Arts, that she could gently complain.

It was gloomy, with a promise of snow outside; and the great space
of the stairway to the galleries was filled with shadow and the
strains of _Armide_ echoing from the orchestra playing at the
railing above the entrance. Pleydon, together with a great many
others, had spread an overcoat on the masonry of the steps, and they
were seated in the obscurity of the balustrade.

"You look as though you hadn't had enough to eat," she observed.
"You used to be almost thick but now you are a thing of terrifying
grimness. You look like a monk. I wonder why you're like a monk,
Dodge?"

"Linda Condon," he replied.

"That can't be it now; I haven't been Linda Condon for years, but
Mrs. Arnaud Hallet. It's very pretty, of course, and I'd like to
think you could keep a young love alive so long. Experience makes me
doubt anything of the sort; but then I was always skeptical."

"You have never been anyone else," he asserted positively. "You were
born Linda Condon and you'll die that, except for some extraordinary
accident. I can't imagine what it would be--a miracle like quaker-ladies
in the Antarctic."

"It sounds uncomplimentary, and I'm sick of being compared with
polar places. What are quaker-ladies?"

"Fragile little flowers in the spring meadows."

"I'd rather listen to the music than you."

"That is why loving you is so eternal, why it doesn't fluctuate like
a human emotion. You can't exhaust it and rest before a new tide
sweeps back; the timeless ecstasy of a worship of God ... breeding
madness."

She failed to understand and turned a troubled gaze to his bitter
repression. "I don't like to make you unhappy, Dodge," she said in a
low tone. "What can I do? I am a horrid disappointment to all of
you, but most to myself. I can't go over it again."

"Beauty has nothing to do with happiness," he declared harshly. He
rose, without consulting her wishes; and Linda followed him as he
proceeded above, irresistibly drawn to the bronze he was showing in
the Rotunda.

It was the head and part of the shoulders of a very old woman,
infinitely worn, starved by want and spent in brutal labor. There
was a thin wisp of hair pinned in a meager knot on her skull; her
bones were mercilessly indicated, barely covered with drum-like
skin; her mouth was stamped with timid humility; while her eyes
peered weakly from their sunken depths.

"Well?" he demanded, interrogating her in the interest of his work.

"I--I suppose it's perfectly done," she replied, at a loss for a
satisfactory appreciation. "It's true, certainly. But isn't it more
unpleasant than necessary?" Pleydon smiled patiently. "Beauty," he
said, with his mobile gesture. "Pity, _Katharsis_--the wringing
out of all dross."

The helpless feeling of her overwhelming ignorance returned. She was
like a woman held beyond the closed door of treasure. "Come over
here." He unceremoniously led her to the modeling of a ruffled
grouse, faithful in every diversified feather. Linda thought it
admirable, really amazing; but he dismissed it with a passionate
energy. "The dull figuriste!" he exclaimed. "Daguerre. Once I could
have done that, yes, and been entertained by its adroitness and
insolence--before you made me. Do you suppose I was able then to
understand the sheer tragic fortitude to live of a scrubwoman! The
head you thought unpleasant--haven't you seen her going home in the
March slush of a city? Did you notice the gaps in her shoes, the
ragged shawl about a body twisted with forty, fifty, sixty years of
wet stone floors and steps? Did you wonder what she had for supper?"

"No, Dodge, I didn't. They always make me wretched."

"Well, to realize all that, to feel the degradation of her nature,
to lie, sick with exhaustion, on the broken slats of her bed under a
ravelled-out travesty of a quilt, and get up morning after morning
in an iron winter dark--to experience that in your spirit and put it
into durable metal, hard stone--is to hold beauty in your hands."

Her interest in his speech was mingled with the knowledge that, in
order to dress comfortably for dinner, she must leave immediately.
Pleydon helped her into the Hallet open motor landaulet. Linda
demanded quantities of air. He was, he told her at the door, leaving
in an hour for New York. "I wish you could be happier," she
insisted. He reminded her that he had had the afternoon with her. It
was so little, she thought, carried rapidly over a smooth wide
street. His love for her increased rather than lessened. How
wonderful it was.... The woman outside that barred door of treasure.

XXIX

Linda thought frequently about Dodge and his feeling for her;
memories of his words, his appearance, speculations, spread through
her tranquil daily affairs like the rich subdued pattern of a fine
carpet on the bare floor of her life. She was puzzled by the depth
of a passion that, apparently, made no demands other than the
occasional necessity to be with her and the knowledge that she
existed. If she had been a very intelligent woman, and, of course,
not quite bad-looking, she might have understood both Pleydon and
Arnaud, the latter a man whose mind was practically absorbed in the
pages of books. There could be no doubt, no question, of their love
for her.

Then there had always been the others--the men at the parties, in
her garden, through the old days of her childhood in hotels. It was
very stupid, very annoying, but at the same time she became
interested in what, with her candid indifference, affected them. She
had never, really, even when she desired, succeeded in giving them
anything, anything conscious or for which they moved. Judith Feldt,
on the contrary, had been prodigal. And, while certainly numbers of
men had been attracted to her, they all tired of her with marked
rapidity. Men met Judith, Linda recalled, with eagerness, they came
immediately and often to see her ... for, perhaps, a month. Then,
temporarily deserted, she was submerged in depression and nervous
tears.

But, while it was obviously impossible for all lovers to be constant,
two extraordinary and superior men would be faithful to her as long
as she lived, no--as long as they lived. This was beyond doubt. One
was celebrated--she watched with a quiet pride Pleydon's fame
penetrate the country--and the other, her husband, a person of
the most exacting delicacy of habits, intellect and wit.

What was it, she wondered, that made the supreme importance of women
to men worth consideration. Linda was thinking of this now in
connection with her daughter. Vigne was fourteen; a larger girl than
she had ever been, with her father's fine abundant cinnamon-brown
hair, a shapely sensitive mouth, and a wide brown gaze with a habit
of straying, at inappropriate moments, from things seen to the
invisible. She was, Linda realized thankfully, transparently honest;
her only affectation was the slight supercilious manner of her
associations; and she read, ridiculously like her father, with
increasing pleasure.

However, what engaged Linda most was the fact that Vigne already
liked men; she had been at the fringe, as it were, of young dances,
with a sparkling satisfaction to herself and the securely nice
youths who "cut in" at her brief appearances.

The truth was that Linda saw that more than a trace of Stella
Condon's warm generosity of emotion had been brought by herself to
Arnaud's daughter. The faults of every life, every circumstance,
were endlessly multiplied through all existence. At fourteen, it was
Linda's frowning impression, her mother had very fully instructed
her in the wiles and structure of admirable marriage, and she had
never completely lost some hard pearls of the elder's wisdom. Should
she, in turn, communicate them to Vigne?

The moment, the anxiety, she dreaded was arriving, and it found her
no freer of doubt than had the other aspects of her own responses.
Yet here she was possessed by the keenest need for absolute
rectitude; and perhaps this, she thought, with an unusual pleasure,
was an evidence of the affection she had seemed to lack. But in the
end she said nothing.

She was still unable to disentangle the flesh from the spirit, love--the
love that so amazingly illuminated Dodge Pleydon--from comfort. Dodge
had disturbed all her sense of values, even to the point of unsettling
her allegiance to the supremacy of a great deal of money. He had worked
this without giving her anything definite, that she could explain to
Vigne, in return. Linda preserved her demand for the actual. If she
could only comprehend the force animating Dodge she felt life would be
clear.

She was tempted to experiment--when had such a possibility occurred
to her before?--and discover just how far in several directions
Pleydon's devotion went. This would be easy now, she was
unrestrained by the fact of Arnaud, and the old shrinking from the
sculptor happily vanished. Yet with him before her, on one of his
infrequent visits to their house, she realized that her courage was
insufficient. Was it that or something deeper--a reluctance to turn
herself like a knife in the source of the profoundest compliment a
woman could be paid. Linda thought too highly of his love for that;
the texture of the carpet had become too gratifying.

They were all three in the library, as customary; and Linda,
restless, saw her reflection in a closed long window. She was
wearing yellow, the color of the jonquils on a candle-stand; but
with her familiar sash tied and the ends falling to the hem of her
skirt. The pointed oval of her face was unchanged, her pallor, the
straight line of her black bang, the blueness of her eyes, were as
they had been a surprisingly long while ago. Arnaud, with a
disconcerting comprehension, demanded, "Well, are you satisfied?"
She replied coolly, "Entirely." Pleydon, seated for over an hour
without moving, or even the trivial relief of a cigarette, followed
her with his luminous uncomfortable gaze, his disembodied passion.

XXX

Linda heard Vigne's laugh, the expression of a sheer lightness of
heart, following a low eager murmur of voices in her daughter's
room, and she was startled by its resemblance to the gay pitch of
Mrs. Moses Feldt's old merriment. Three of Vigne's friends were with
her, all approximately eighteen, talking, Linda knew, men and--it
was autumn--anticipating the excitements of their bow to formal
society that winter. They had, she silently added, little enough to
learn about the latter. Through the year past they had been to a
dancing-class identical, except for an earlier hour and age, with
mature affairs; but before that they had been practically introduced
to the pleasures of their inheritance.

The men were really boys at the university, past the first year,
receptacles of unlimited worldly knowledge and experience. They
belonged to exclusive university societies and eating clubs, and
Linda found their stiff similarity of correct bigoted pattern highly
entertaining. She had no illusions about what might be called their
morals; they were midway in the period of youthful unrestraint; but
she recognized as well that their attitude toward, for example,
Vigne was irreproachable. Such boys affected to disdain the girls of
their associated families ... or imagined themselves incurably in
love.

The girls, for their part, while insisting that forty was the ideal
age for a lover--the terms changed with the seasons, last year
"suitor" had been the common phrase--were occasionally swept in
young company into a high irrational passion. Mostly, through
skillful adult pressure or firm negation, such affairs came to
nothing; but even these were sometimes overcome. And, when Linda had
been disturbed by the echo of old days in her daughter's tones, she
was considering exactly such a state.

One of the nicest youths imaginable, Bailey Sandby, had lost all
trace of superior aloofness in a devotion to Vigne. He was short,
squarely built, with clear pink cheeks, steady light blue eyes and
crisp very fair hair. This was his last season of academic
instruction, after which a number of years, at an absurdly low
payment, awaited him in his father's bond brokerage concern.
However, he was, Linda gathered, imperious in his urgent need for
Vigne's favor.

Ridiculous, she thought, at the same time illogically rehearsing
the resemblances of Vigne to her grandmother. She had no doubt that
the parties Vigne shared on the terraces and wide lawns, in the
informal dancing at country houses, were sufficiently sophisticated;
there was on occasion champagne, and--for the masculine element
anyhow--cocktails. The aroma of wine, lightly clinging to her young
daughter's breath, filled her with an old instinctive sickness.

She had spoken to Arnaud who, in turn, severely addressed Vigne; but
during this Linda had been oppressed by the familiar feeling of
impotence. The girl, of course, had properly heard them; but she
gave her mother the effect of slipping easily beyond their grasp.
When she had gone to bed Arnaud repeated a story brought to him by
the juvenile Lowrie, under the influence of a temporary indignation
at his sister's unwarranted imposition of superiority. Arnaud went
on:

"Actually they had this kissing contest, it was at Chestnut Hill,
with a watch held; and Vigne, or so Lowrie insisted, won the prize
for length of time--something like a minute. Now, when I was young--"

Submerged in apprehensive memory Linda lost most of his account of
the Eden-like youth of his earlier day. When, at last, his
assertions pierced her abstraction, it was only to bring her to the
realization of how pathetically little he knew of either Vigne or
her. She weighed the question of utter frankness here--the quality
enhanced by universal obscurity--but she was obliged to check her
desire for perfect understanding. A purely feminine need to hide,
even from Arnaud, any detracting facts about women shut her into a
diplomatic silence. In reality he could offer them no help; their
problems--in a world created more objectively by the hand of man
than God--were singular to themselves. Women were quite like spoiled
captives to foreign princes, masking, in their apparent complacency,
a necessarily secret but insidiously tyrannical control. It wouldn't
do, in view of this, to expose too much.

The following morning it was Arnaud, rather than herself, who had a
letter from Pleydon. "He wants us to come over to New York and his
studio," the former explained. "He has some commission or other from
a city in the Middle West, and a study to show us. I'd like it very
much; we haven't seen this place, and his surroundings are not to be
overlooked."

Pleydon's rooms were directly off Central Park West, in an apartment
house obviously designed for prosperous creative arts, with a hall
frescoed in the tones of Puvis de Chavannes and an elevator cage
beautifully patterned in iron grilling. Dodge Pleydon met them in
his narrow entry and conducted them into a pleasant reception-room.
"It's a duplex," he explained of his quarters; "the dining-room you
see and the kitchen's beyond, while the baths and all that are over
our heads; the studio fills both floors."

There were low book cases with their continuous top used as a shelf
for a hundred various objects, deep long chairs of caressing ease
and chairs of coffee-colored wicker with amazingly high backs woven
with designs of polished shells into the semblance of spread
peacocks' tails. The yellow silk curtains at the windows, the rug
with the intricate coloring of a cashmere shawl, the Russian tea
service, were in a perfection of order; and Linda almost resentfully
acknowledged the skilful efficiency of his maid. It was surprising
that, without a wife, a man could manage such a degree of comfort!

Over tea far better than hers, in china of an infinitely finer
fragility, she studied Pleydon thoughtfully. He looked still again
perceptibly older, his face continued to grow sparer of flesh,
emphasizing the aggressively bony structure of his head. When he
shut his mouth after a decided statement she could see the
projection of the jaw and the knotted sinews at the base of his
cheeks. No, Dodge didn't seem well. She asked if there had been any
return of the fever and he nodded in an impatient affirmative,
returning at once to the temporarily suspended conversation with
Arnaud. There was a vast difference, too, in the way in which he
talked.

His attitude was as assertive as ever, but it had less expression in
words; unaccountable periods of silence, almost ill-natured,
overtook him, spaces of abstraction when it was plain that he had
forgotten the presence of whoever might be by. Even direct questions
sometimes failed to pierce immediately his consciousness. Dodge,
Linda told herself, lived entirely too much alone. Then she said
this aloud, thoughtlessly, and she was startled by the sudden
intolerable flash of his gaze. An awkward pause followed, broken by
the uprearing of Pleydon's considerable length.

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