The Descent of Man and Other Stories Page 5

  In a flash he understood that she knew the extent of Haskett’s claims. Perhaps it was not the first time she had resisted them.

  “My objecting has nothing to do with it,” he said coldly; “if Haskett has a right to be consulted you must consult him.”

  She burst into tears, and he saw that she expected him to regard her as a victim.

  Haskett did not abuse his rights. Waythorn had felt miserably sure that he would not. But the governess was dismissed, and from time to time the little man demanded an interview with Alice. After the first outburst she accepted the situation with her usual adaptability. Haskett had once reminded Waythorn of the piano-tuner, and Mrs. Waythorn, after a month or two, appeared to class him with that domestic familiar. Waythorn could not but respect the father’s tenacity. At first he had tried to cultivate the suspicion that Haskett might be “up to” something, that he had an object in securing a foothold in the house. But in his heart Waythorn was sure of Haskett’s single-mindedness; he even guessed in the latter a mild contempt for such advantages as his relation with the Waythorns might offer. Haskett’s sincerity of purpose made him invulnerable, and his successor had to accept him as a lien on the property.

  Mr. Sellers was sent to Europe to recover from his gout, and Varick’s affairs hung on Waythorn’s hands. The negotiations were prolonged and complicated; they necessitated frequent conferences between the two men, and the interests of the firm forbade Waythorn’s suggesting that his client should transfer his business to another office.

  Varick appeared well in the transaction. In moments of relaxation his coarse streak appeared, and Waythorn dreaded his geniality; but in the office he was concise and clear-headed, with a flattering deference to Waythorn’s judgment. Their business relations being so affably established, it would have been absurd for the two men to ignore each other in society. The first time they met in a drawing-room, Varick took up their intercourse in the same easy key, and his hostess’s grateful glance obliged Waythorn to respond to it. After that they ran across each other frequently, and one evening at a ball Waythorn, wandering through the remoter rooms, came upon Varick seated beside his wife. She colored a little, and faltered in what she was saying; but Varick nodded to Waythorn without rising, and the latter strolled on.

  In the carriage, on the way home, he broke out nervously: “I didn’t know you spoke to Varick.”

  Her voice trembled a little. “It’s the first time—he happened to be standing near me; I didn’t know what to do. It’s so awkward, meeting everywhere—and he said you had been very kind about some business.”

  “That’s different,” said Waythorn.

  She paused a moment. “I’ll do just as you wish,” she returned pliantly. “I thought it would be less awkward to speak to him when we meet.”

  Her pliancy was beginning to sicken him. Had she really no will of her own—no theory about her relation to these men? She had accepted Haskett—did she mean to accept Varick? It was “less awkward,” as she had said, and her instinct was to evade difficulties or to circumvent them. With sudden vividness Waythorn saw how the instinct had developed. She was “as easy as an old shoe”—a shoe that too many feet had worn. Her elasticity was the result of tension in too many different directions. Alice Haskett—Alice Varick—Alice Waythorn—she had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name a little of her privacy, a little of her personality, a little of the inmost self where the unknown god abides.

  “Yes—it’s better to speak to Varick,” said Waythorn wearily.

  “Earth’s Martyrs.” By Stephen Phillips.

  V

  THE WINTER wore on, and society took advantage of the Waythorns’ acceptance of Varick. Harassed hostesses were grateful to them for bridging over a social difficulty, and Mrs. Waythorn was held up as a miracle of good taste. Some experimental spirits could not resist the diversion of throwing Varick and his former wife together, and there were those who thought he found a zest in the propinquity. But Mrs. Waythorn’s conduct remained irreproachable. She neither avoided Varick nor sought him out. Even Waythorn could not but admit that she had discovered the solution of the newest social problem.

  He had married her without giving much thought to that problem. He had fancied that a woman can shed her past like a man. But now he saw that Alice was bound to hers both by the circumstances which forced her into continued relation with it, and by the traces it had left on her nature. With grim irony Waythorn compared himself to a member of a syndicate. He held so many shares in his wife’s personality and his predecessors were his partners in the business. If there had been any element of passion in the transaction he would have felt less deteriorated by it. The fact that Alice took her change of husbands like a change of weather reduced the situation to mediocrity. He could have forgiven her for blunders, for excesses; for resisting Hackett, for yielding to Varick; for anything but her acquiescence and her tact. She reminded him of a juggler tossing knives; but the knives were blunt and she knew they would never cut her.

  And then, gradually, habit formed a protecting surface for his sensibilities. If he paid for each day’s comfort with the small change of his illusions, he grew daily to value the comfort more and set less store upon the coin. He had drifted into a dulling propinquity with Haskett and Varick and he took refuge in the cheap revenge of satirizing the situation. He even began to reckon up the advantages which accrued from it, to ask himself if it were not better to own a third of a wife who knew how to make a man happy than a whole one who had lacked opportunity to acquire the art. For it was an art, and made up, like all others, of concessions, eliminations and embellishments; of lights judiciously thrown and shadows skillfully softened. His wife knew exactly how to manage the lights, and he knew exactly to what training she owed her skill. He even tried to trace the source of his obligations, to discriminate between the influences which had combined to produce his domestic happiness: he perceived that Haskett’s commonness had made Alice worship good breeding, while Varick’s liberal construction of the marriage bond had taught her to value the conjugal virtues; so that he was directly indebted to his predecessors for the devotion which made his life easy if not inspiring.

  From this phase he passed into that of complete acceptance. He ceased to satirize himself because time dulled the irony of the situation and the joke lost its humor with its sting. Even the sight of Haskett’s hat on the hall table had ceased to touch the springs of epigram. The hat was often seen there now, for it had been decided that it was better for Lily’s father to visit her than for the little girl to go to his boarding-house. Waythorn, having acquiesced in this arrangement, had been surprised to find how little difference it made. Haskett was never obtrusive, and the few visitors who met him on the stairs were unaware of his identity. Waythorn did not know how often he saw Alice, but with himself Haskett was seldom in contact.

  One afternoon, however, he learned on entering that Lily’s father was waiting to see him. In the library he found Haskett occupying a chair in his usual provisional way. Waythorn always felt grateful to him for not leaning back.

  “I hope you’ll excuse me, Mr. Waythorn,” he said rising. “I wanted to see Mrs. Waythorn about Lily, and your man asked me to wait here till she came in.”

  “Of course,” said Waythorn, remembering that a sudden leak had that morning given over the drawing-room to the plumbers.

  He opened his cigar-case and held it out to his visitor, and Haskett’s acceptance seemed to mark a fresh stage in their intercourse. The spring evening was chilly, and Waythorn invited his guest to draw up his chair to the fire. He meant to find an excuse to leave Haskett in a moment; but he was tired and cold, and after all the little man no longer jarred on him.

  The two were inclosed in the intimacy of their blended cigar-smoke when the door opened and Varick walked into the room. Waythorn rose abruptly. It was the first time that Varick had come to the house, and the surprise of seeing him, combined with the singular inopportuneness of his arri
val, gave a new edge to Waythorn’s blunted sensibilities. He stared at his visitor without speaking.

  Varick seemed too preoccupied to notice his host’s embarrassment.

  “My dear fellow,” he exclaimed in his most expansive tone, “I must apologize for tumbling in on you in this way, but I was too late to catch you down town, and so I thought—” He stopped short, catching sight of Haskett, and his sanguine color deepened to a flush which spread vividly under his scant blond hair. But in a moment he recovered himself and nodded slightly. Haskett returned the bow in silence, and Waythorn was still groping for speech when the footman came in carrying a tea-table.

  The intrusion offered a welcome vent to Waythorn’s nerves. “What the deuce are you bringing this here for?” he said sharply.

  “I beg your pardon, sir, but the plumbers are still in the drawing-room, and Mrs. Waythorn said she would have tea in the library.” The footman’s perfectly respectful tone implied a reflection on Waythorn’s reasonableness.

  “Oh, very well,” said the latter resignedly, and the footman proceeded to open the folding tea-table and set out its complicated appointments. While this interminable process continued the three men stood motionless, watching it with a fascinated stare, till Waythorn, to break the silence, said to Varick: “Won’t you have a cigar?”

  He held out the case he had just tendered to Haskett, and Varick helped himself with a smile. Waythorn looked about for a match, and finding none, proffered a light from his own cigar. Haskett, in the background, held his ground mildly, examining his cigar-tip now and then, and stepping forward at the right moment to knock its ashes into the fire.

  The footman at last withdrew, and Varick immediately began: “If I could just say half a word to you about this business—”

  “Certainly,” stammered Waythorn; “in the dining-room—”

  But as he placed his hand on the door it opened from without, and his wife appeared on the threshold.

  She came in fresh and smiling, in her street dress and hat, shedding a fragrance from the boa which she loosened in advancing.

  “Shall we have tea in here, dear?” she began; and then she caught sight of Varick. Her smile deepened, veiling a slight tremor of surprise. “Why, how do you do?” she said with a distinct note of pleasure.

  As she shook hands with Varick she saw Haskett standing behind him. Her smile faded for a moment, but she recalled it quickly, with a scarcely perceptible side-glance at Waythorn.

  “How do you do, Mr. Haskett?” she said, and shook hands with him a shade less cordially.

  The three men stood awkwardly before her, till Varick, always the most self-possessed, dashed into an explanatory phrase.

  “We—I had to see Waythorn a moment on business,” he stammered, brick-red from chin to nape.

  Haskett stepped forward with his air of mild obstinacy. “I am sorry to intrude; but you appointed five o’clock—” he directed his resigned glance to the time-piece on the mantel.

  She swept aside their embarrassment with a charming gesture of hospitality.

  “I’m so sorry—I’m always late; but the afternoon was so lovely.” She stood drawing her gloves off, propitiatory and graceful, diffusing about her a sense of ease and familiarity in which the situation lost its grotesqueness. “But before talking business,” she added brightly, “I’m sure every one wants a cup of tea.”

  She dropped into her low chair by the tea-table, and the two visitors, as if drawn by her smile, advanced to receive the cups she held out.

  She glanced about for Waythorn, and he took the third cup with a laugh.

  EXPIATION

  I.

  “I CAN never,” said Mrs. Fetherel, “hear the bell ring without a shudder.”

  Her unruffled aspect—she was the kind of woman whose emotions never communicate themselves to her clothes—and the conventional background of the New York drawing-room, with its pervading implication of an imminent tea-tray and of an atmosphere in which the social functions have become purely reflex, lent to her declaration a relief not lost on her cousin Mrs. Clinch, who, from the other side of the fireplace, agreed with a glance at the clock, that it was the hour for bores.

  “Bores!” cried Mrs. Fetherel impatiently. “If I shuddered at them, I should have a chronic ague!”

  She leaned forward and laid a sparkling finger on her cousin’s shabby black knee. “I mean the newspaper clippings,” she whispered.

  Mrs. Clinch returned a glance of intelligence. “They’ve begun already?”

  “Not yet; but they’re sure to now, at any minute, my publisher tells me.”

  Mrs. Fetherel’s look of apprehension sat oddly on her small features, which had an air of neat symmetry somehow suggestive of being set in order every morning by the housemaid. Some one (there were rumors that it was her cousin) had once said that Paula Fetherel would have been very pretty if she hadn’t looked so like a moral axiom in a copy-book hand.

  Mrs. Clinch received her confidence with a smile. “Well,” she said, “I suppose you were prepared for the consequences of authorship?”

  Mrs. Fetherel blushed brightly. “It isn’t their coming,” she owned—“it’s their coming now.”

  “Now?”

  “The Bishop’s in town.”

  Mrs. Clinch leaned back and shaped her lips to a whistle which deflected in a laugh. “Well!” she said.

  “You see!” Mrs. Fetherel triumphed.

  “Well—weren’t you prepared for the Bishop?”

  “Not now—at least, I hadn’t thought of his seeing the clippings.”

  “And why should he see them?”

  “Bella—_won’t_ you understand? It’s John.”

  “John?”

  “Who has taken the most unexpected tone—one might almost say out of perversity.”

  “Oh, perversity—” Mrs. Clinch murmured, observing her cousin between lids wrinkled by amusement. “What tone has John taken?”

  Mrs. Fetherel threw out her answer with the desperate gesture of a woman who lays bare the traces of a marital fist. “The tone of being proud of my book.”

  The measure of Mrs. Clinch’s enjoyment overflowed in laughter.

  “Oh, you may laugh,” Mrs. Fetherel insisted, “but it’s no joke to me. In the first place, John’s liking the book is so—so—such a false note—it puts me in such a ridiculous position; and then it has set him watching for the reviews—who would ever have suspected John of knowing that books were reviewed? Why, he’s actually found out about the Clipping Bureau, and whenever the postman rings I hear John rush out of the library to see if there are any yellow envelopes. Of course, when they do come he’ll bring them into the drawing-room and read them aloud to everybody who happens to be here—and the Bishop is sure to happen to be here!”

  Mrs. Clinch repressed her amusement. “The picture you draw is a lurid one,” she conceded, “but your modesty strikes me as abnormal, especially in an author. The chances are that some of the clippings will be rather pleasant reading. The critics are not all union men.”

  Mrs. Fetherel stared. “Union men?”

  “Well, I mean they don’t all belong to the well-known Society-for-the-Persecution-of-Rising-Authors. Some of them have even been known to defy its regulations and say a good word for a new writer.”

  “Oh, I dare say,” said Mrs. Fetherel, with the laugh her cousin’s epigram exacted. “But you don’t quite see my point. I’m not at all nervous about the success of my book—my publisher tells me I have no need to be—but I am afraid of its being a succes de scandale.”

  “Mercy!” said Mrs. Clinch, sitting up.

  The butler and footman at this moment appeared with the tea-tray, and when they had withdrawn, Mrs. Fetherel, bending her brightly rippled head above the kettle, continued in a murmur of avowal, “The title, even, is a kind of challenge.”

  “‘Fast and Loose,’” Mrs. Clinch mused. “Yes, it ought to take.”

  “I didn’t choose it for that reason!” the
author protested. “I should have preferred something quieter—less pronounced; but I was determined not to shirk the responsibility of what I had written. I want people to know beforehand exactly what kind of book they are buying.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Clinch, “that’s a degree of conscientiousness that I’ve never met with before. So few books fulfil the promise of their titles that experienced readers never expect the fare to come up to the menu.”

  “‘Fast and Loose’ will be no disappointment on that score,” her cousin significantly returned. “I’ve handled the subject without gloves. I’ve called a spade a spade.”

  “You simply make my mouth water! And to think I haven’t been able to read it yet because every spare minute of my time has been given to correcting the proofs of ‘How the Birds Keep Christmas’! There’s an instance of the hardships of an author’s life!”

  Mrs. Fetherel’s eye clouded. “Don’t joke, Bella, please. I suppose to experienced authors there’s always something absurd in the nervousness of a new writer, but in my case so much is at stake; I’ve put so much of myself into this book and I’m so afraid of being misunderstood…of being, as it were, in advance of my time… like poor Flaubert….I know you’ll think me ridiculous… and if only my own reputation were at stake, I should never give it a thought…but the idea of dragging John’s name through the mire…”

  Mrs. Clinch, who had risen and gathered her cloak about her, stood surveying from her genial height her cousin’s agitated countenance.

  “Why did you use John’s name, then?”

  “That’s another of my difficulties! I had to. There would have been no merit in publishing such a book under an assumed name; it would have been an act of moral cowardice. ‘Fast and Loose’ is not an ordinary novel. A writer who dares to show up the hollowness of social conventions must have the courage of her convictions and be willing to accept the consequences of defying society. Can you imagine Ibsen or Tolstoy writing under a false name?” Mrs. Fetherel lifted a tragic eye to her cousin. “You don’t know, Bella, how often I’ve envied you since I began to write. I used to wonder sometimes—you won’t mind my saying so?—why, with all your cleverness, you hadn’t taken up some more exciting subject than natural history; but I see now how wise you were. Whatever happens, you will never be denounced by the press!”