Chapter 7

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_ CHAPTER VII

Madame Beattie was near, and had that morning telegraphed Esther. The message was explicit, and, in the point of affection, diffuse. Old-fashioned, too: she longed to hold her niece in her arms. A more terrified young woman could not easily have been come on that day than Esther Blake, as she opened the envelope, afraid of detectives, of reporters, of anything connected with a husband lately returned from jail. But this was worse than she could have guessed. In face of an ordinary incursion she might shut herself up in her room and send Sophy to tell smooth fictions at the door. Reporters could hardly get at her, and her husband himself, if he should try, could presumably be routed. Aunt Patricia Beattie was another matter. Esther was so panicky that she ran upstairs with the telegram and tapped at grandmother's door. Rhoda Knox came in answer. She was a large woman of a fine presence, red cheekbones with high lights, and smooth black hair brushed glossy and carefully coiled. She was grandmother's attendant, helplessly hated by grandmother but professionally unmoved by it, a general who carried on intricate calculations to avoid what she called "steps." In the matter of steps, she laid bonds on high and low. A deed that would have taken her five minutes to do she passed on to the next available creature, even if it required twenty minutes' planning to hocus him into accepting it. She had the intent look of the schemer: yet she was one who meant well and simply preferred by nature to be stationary. Grandmother feared her besides hating her, though loving the order she brought to pass.

Esther slipped by her, and went to the bed where grandmother was lying propped on pillows, an exceedingly small old woman who was even to life-long friends an enigma presumably without an answer. She had the remote air of hating her state of age, which did not seem a natural necessity but a unique calamity, a trap sprung on her and, after the nature of traps, most unexpectedly. When she was young she had believed the old walked into the trap deliberately because it was provided on a path they were tired of. But she wasn't tired, and yet the trap had clutched her. She had a small face beautifully wrought upon by lines, as if she had given a cunning artificer the preparation of a mask she was paying dearly for and yet didn't prize at all. An old-fashioned nightcap with a frill covered her head, and she had tied herself so tightly into it that he must be a bold adventurer who would get at the thoughts inside. Her little hands were shaded by fine frills. She looked, on the whole, like a disenchanted lingerer in the living world, a useless creature for whom fostering had done so much that you might ask: "What is this illustration of a clean old woman? What is it for? What does it teach?"

Esther, with her telegram, stood beside the bed.

"Grandmother," said she, in the perfect tone she used toward her, clear and not too loud, "Aunt Patricia Beattie is coming."

Grandmother lifted large black eyes dulled by the broken surface of age, to Esther's face. There was no envy in the gaze but wonder chiefly.

"Is that youth?" the eyes inquired. "Useless, not especially admirable--but curious."

Esther, waiting there for recognition, felt the discomfort grandmother always seemed to stir into her mood. Her rose-touched skin was a little more suffused, though not beyond a furtherance of beauty.

"Aunt Patricia is coming," she repeated. "When I heard from her last she was in Poland."

"Her name is Martha," said grandmother. "Don't let her come in here." She had a surprising voice, of a barbaric quality, the ring of metal. Hearing it you were mentally translated for an instant, and thought of far-off, palm-girt islands and savages beating strange instruments and chanting to them uncouth syllables. "Rhoda Knox, don't let her get up here."

"How can I keep her out?" asked Esther. "You'll have to see her. I can't live down there alone with her. I couldn't make her happy."

A satirical light shivered across grandmother's eyes.

"Where is your husband?" she inquired. "Here?"

"Here?" repeated Esther. "In this house?"

"Yes."

"He isn't coming here. It would be very painful for him."

The time had been when grandmother, newer to life, would have asked, "Why?" But she knew Esther minutely now; all her turns of speech and habits of thought were as a tale long told. Once it had been a mildly fascinating game to see through what Esther said to what she really meant. It was easy, once you had the clue, too easy, all certainties, with none of the hazards of a game. Esther, she knew, lived with a lovely ideal of herself. The imaginary Esther was all sympathy; she was even self-sacrificing. No shining quality lay in the shop window of the world's praise but the real Esther snatched it and adorned herself with it. The Esther that was talked in the language of the Esther that ought to be. If she didn't want to see you, she told you it would be inconvenient for you to come. If she wanted to tell you somebody had praised the rose of her cheek, she told you she was so touched by everybody's goodness in loving to give pleasure; then she proved her point by naive repetition of the pretty speech. Sometimes she even, in the humility of the other Esther, deprecated the flattery as insincere; but not before she had told you what it was.

"I haven't seen her since--I haven't seen her for years," she said. "She wasn't happy with me then. She'll be much less likely to be now."

"Older," said grandmother. "More difficult. Keep her out of here."

It seemed to Esther there was no sympathy for her in the world, even if she got drum and fife and went out to beat it up. One empty victory she had achieved: grandmother had at least spoken to her. Sometimes she turned her face to the wall and lay there, not even a ruffle quivering. Esther moved away, but Rhoda Knox was beforehand with her. Rhoda held a letter.

"Mrs. Blake, could you take this down?" she asked, in a faultless manner, and yet implacably. "And let it go out when somebody is going?"

Esther accepted the letter helplessly. She knew how Rhoda sat planning to get her errands done. Yet there was never any reason why you should not do them. She ran downstairs carrying the letter, hating it because it had got itself carried against her will, and went at once to the telephone. And there her voice had more than its natural appeal, because she was so baffled and angry and pitied herself so much.

"Could you come in? I'm bothered. Yes," in answer to his question, "in trouble, I'm afraid."

Alston Choate came at once; her voice must have told him moving things, for he was full of warm concern. Esther met him with a dash of agitation admirably controlled. She was not the woman to alarm a man at the start. Let him get into a run, let him forget the spectators by the way, and even the terrifying goal where he might be crowned victor even before he chose. Only whip up his blood until the guidance of them both was hers, not his. So he felt at once her need of him and at the same time her distance from him. It was a wonderfully vivifying call: nothing to fear from her, but exhilarating feats to be undertaken for her sake.

"I'm frightened at last," she told him. That she was a brave woman the woman she had created for her double had persuaded her. "I had to speak to somebody."

Choate looked really splendid in the panoply of his simplicity and restraints and courtesy. A man can be imposing in spite of a broken nose.

"What's gone wrong?" he asked.

"Aunt Patricia is coming."

Choate had quite forgotten Aunt Patricia. She had been too far in the depths of Poland for Esther to summon up her shade. Possibly it was a dangerous shade to summon, lest the substance follow. But now she sketched Aunt Patricia with hesitating candour, but so that he lost none of her undesirability, and he listened with a painstaking courtesy.

"You say you're afraid of her?" he said, at the end. "Let her come. She may not want to stay."

"She is so--different," faltered Esther. She looked at him with humid eyes. It was apparent that Aunt Patricia was different in a way not to be commended.

Now Choate thought he saw how it was.

"You mean she's been banging about Europe," he said, "living in _pensions_, trailing round with second-rate professionals. I get that idea, at least. Am I right?"

"She's frightfully bohemian, of course," said Esther. "Yes, that's what I did mean."

"But she's not young, you know," said Choate, in an indulgent kindliness Esther was quite sure he kept for her alone. "She won't be very rackety. People don't want the same things after they're sixty."

"She smokes," said Esther, in a burst of confidence. "She did years ago when nice women weren't doing it."

He smiled at this, but tenderly. He didn't leave Addington very often, but he did know what a blaze the vestals of the time keep up.

"No matter," said he, "so long as you don't."

"She drinks brandy," said Esther, "and tells things. I can't repeat what she tells. She's different from anybody I ever met--and I don't see how I can make her happy."

By this time Choate saw there was nothing he could do about Aunt Patricia, and dismissed her from his orderly mind. She was not absolutely pertinent to Esther's happiness. But he looked grave. There was somebody, he knew, who was pertinent.

"I haven't succeeded in seeing Jeff yet," he began, with a slight hesitation. It seemed to him it might be easier for her to hear that name than the formal words, "your husband". She winced. Choate saw it and pitied her, as she knew he would. "Is he coming--here?"

She looked at him with large, imploring eyes.

"Must I?" he heard her whispering, it seemed really to herself.

"I don't see how you can help it, dear," he answered. The last word surprised him mightily. He had never called her "dear". She hadn't even been "Esther" to him. But the warmth of his compassion and an irritation that had been working in him with Jeff's return--something like jealousy, it might even be--drove the little word out of doors and bade it lodge with her and so betray him. Esther heard the word quite clearly and knew what volumes of commentary it carried; but Choate, relieved, thought it had passed her by. She was still beseeching him, even caressing him, with the liquid eyes.

"You see," she said, "he and I are strangers--almost. He's been away so long."

"You haven't seen him," said Choate, like an accusation. He had often had to bruise that snake. He hoped she'd step on it for good.

"No," said Esther. "He didn't wish it."

Choate's sane sense told him that no man could fail to wish it. If Jeff had forbidden her to come at the intervals when he could see his kin, she should have battered down his denials and gone to him. She should have left on his face the warm touch of hers and the cleansing of her tears. Choate had a tremendous idea of the obligations of what he called love. He hid what he thought of it in the fastnesses of a shy heart, but he took delight and found strength, too, in the certainty that there is unconquerable love, and that it laughs at even the locksmiths that fasten prison doors. He knew what a pang it would have been to him if he had seen Esther Blake going year after year to carry her hoarded sweetness to another man. But he wished she had done it. Some hardy, righteous fibre in him would have been appeased.

"He's happier away from me," said Esther, shaking her head. "His father understands him. I don't. Why, before he went away we weren't so very happy. Didn't you know that?"

Choate was glad and sorry.

"Weren't you?" he responded. "Poor child!"

"No. We'd begun to be strangers, in a way. And it's gone on and on, and of course we're really strangers now."

The Esther she meant to be gave her a sharp little prick here--that Esther seemed to carry a needle for the purpose of these occasional pricks, though she used it less and less as time went on--and said to her, "Strangers before he went away? Oh, no! I'd like to think that. It makes the web we're spinning stronger. But I can't. No. That isn't true."

"So you see," said the real Esther to Choate, "I can't do anything. I sit here alone with my hands tied, and grandma upstairs--of course I can't leave grandma--and I can't do anything. Do you think--" she looked very challenging and pure--"do you think it would be wicked of me to dream of a divorce?"

Choate got up and walked to the fireplace. He put both hands on the mantel and gripped it, and Esther, with that sense of implacable mastery women feel at moments of sexual triumph, saw the knuckles whiten.

"Wouldn't it be better," she said, "for him? I don't care for myself, though I'm very lonely, very much at sea; but it does seem to me it would be better for him if he could be free and build his life up again from the beginning."

Choate answered in a choked voice that made him shake his head impatiently:

"It isn't better for any man to be free."

"Not if he doesn't care for his wife?" the master torturer proceeded, more and more at ease now she saw how tight she had him.

Choate turned upon her. His pale face was scarred with an emotion as deep as the source of tears, though she exulted to see he had no tears to show her. Men should, she felt, be strong.

"Don't you know you mustn't say that kind of thing to me?" he asked her. "Don't you see it's a temptation? I can't listen to it. I can't consider it for a minute."

"Is it a temptation?" she asked, in a whisper, born, it seemed, of unacknowledged intimacies between them. The whisper said, "If it is a temptation, it is not a temptation to you alone."

Choate was not looking at her, but he saw her, with the eyes of the mind: the brown limpid look, the uplift of her quivering face, the curve of her throat and the long ripple to her feet. He walked out of the room; it was the only thing for a decent man to do, in the face of incarnate appeal, challenge, a vitality so intense, and yet so unconscious of itself, he knew, that it was, in its purity, almost irresistible. In the street he was deaf to the call of a friend and passed another without seeing him. They chaffed him about it afterward. He was, they told him, thinking of a case.

Esther went about the house in an exhilarated lightness. She sang a little, in a formless way. She could not manage a tune, but she had a rhythmic style of humming that was not unpleasant to hear and gave her occasional outlet. It was the animal in the desert droning and purring to itself in excess of ease. She felt equal to meeting Aunt Patricia even.

About dusk Aunt Patricia came in the mediaeval cab with Denny driving. There was no luggage. Esther hoped a great deal from that. But it proved there was too much to come by cab, and Denny brought it afterward, shabby trunks of a sophisticated look, spattered with labels. Madame Beattie alighted from the cab, a large woman in worn black velvet, with a stale perfume about her. Esther was at the door to meet her, and even in this outer air she could hardly help putting up her nose a little at the exotic smell. Madame Beattie was swarthy and strong-featured with a soft wrinkled skin unnatural from over-cherishing. She had bright, humorously satirical eyes; and her mouth was large. Therefore you were surprised at her slight lisp, a curious childishness which Esther had always considered pure affectation. She had forgotten it in these later years, but now the sound of it awakened all the distaste and curiosity she had felt of old. She had always believed if Aunt Patricia spoke out, the lisp would go. The voice underneath the lisp was a sad thing when you remembered it had once been "golden ". It was raucous yet husky, a gin voice, Jeffrey had called it, adding that she had a gin cough. All this Esther remembered as she went forward prettily and submitted to Aunt Patricia's perfumed kiss. The ostrich feathers in the worn velvet travelling hat cascaded over them both, and bangles clinked in a thin discord with curious trinkets hanging from her chatelaine. Evidently the desire to hold her niece in her arms had been for telegraphic purposes only.

When they had gone in and Aunt Patricia was removing her gloves and accepting tea--she said she would not take her hat off until she went upstairs--she asked, with a cheerful boldness:

"Where's your husband?"

Esther shrank perceptibly. No one but Lydia had felt at liberty to pelt her with the incarcerated husband, and she was not only sensitive in fact but from an intuition of the prettiest thing to do.

"Oh, I knew he was out," said Madame Beattie. "I keep track of your American papers. Isn't he here?"

"He's in town," said Esther, in a low voice. Her cheeks burned with hatred of the insolence of kin which could force you into the open and strip you naked.

"Where?"

"With his father."

"Does his father live alone?"

"No. He has step-daughters."

"Children of that woman that married him out of hand when he was over sixty? Ridiculous business! Well, what's Jeff there for? Why isn't he with you?"

Madame Beattie had a direct habit of address, and, although she spoke many other languages fluently, in the best of English. There were times when she used English with an extreme of her lisping accent, but that was when it seemed good business so to do. This she modified if she found herself cruising where New England standards called for plain New England speech.

"Why isn't he with you?" she asked again.

The tea had come and Madame Beattie lifted her cup in a manner elegantly calculated to display, though ingenuously, a hand loaded with rings.

"Dear auntie," said Esther, widening eyes that had been potent with Alston Choate but would do slight execution among a feminine contingent, "Jeffrey wouldn't be happy with me."

"Nonsense," said Aunt Patricia, herself taking the teapot and strengthening her cup. "What do you mean by happy?"

"He is completely estranged," said Esther. "He is a different man from what he used to be."

"Of course he's different. You're different. So am I. He can't take up things where he left them, but he's got to take them up somewhere. What's he going to do?"

"I don't know," said Esther. She drank her tea nervously. It seemed to her she needed a vivifying draught. "Auntie, you don't quite understand. We are divorced in every sense."

That sounded complete, and she hoped for some slight change of position on the part of the inquisitor.

"Of course you went to see him while he was in prison?" auntie pursued inexorably.

"No," said Esther, in a voice thrillingly sweet. "He didn't wish it."

Auntie helped herself to tea. Esther made a mental note that an extra quantity must be brewed next time.

"You see," said Madame Beattie, putting her cup down and settling back into her chair with an undue prominence of frontal velvet, "you have to take these things like a woman of the world. What's all this talk about feelings, and Jeff's being unhappy and happy? He's married you, and it's a good thing for you both you've got each other to turn to. This kind of sentimental talk does very well before marriage. It has its place. You'd never marry without it. But after the first you might as well take things as they come. There was my husband. I bore everything from him. Then I kicked over the traces and he bore everything from me. But when we found everybody was doing us and we should be a great deal stronger together than apart, we came together again. And he died very happily."

Esther thought, in her physical aversion to auntie, that he must indeed have been happy in the only escape left open to him.

"Where is Susan?" auntie inquired, after a brief interlude of coughing. It could never be known whether her coughs were real. She had little dry coughs of doubt, of derision, of good-natured tolerance; but perhaps she herself couldn't have said now whether they had their origin in any disability.

"Grandma is in her room," said Esther faintly. She felt a savage distaste for facing the prospect of them together, auntie who would be sure to see grandmother, and grandmother who would not be seen. "She lies in bed."

"All the time?"

"Yes."

"Not all the time!"

"Why, yes, auntie, she lies in bed all the time."

"What for? Is she crippled, or paralysed or what?"

"She says she is old."

"Old? Susan is seventy-six. She's a fool. Doesn't she know you don't have to give up your faculties at all unless you stop using them?"

"She says she is old," repeated Esther obstinately. It seemed to her a sensible thing for grandmother to say. Being old kept her happily in retirement. She wished auntie had a similar recognition of decencies.

"I'll go to my room now," said Madame Beattie. "What a nice house! This is Susan's house, isn't it?"

"Yes." Esther had now retired to the last defences. She saw auntie settling upon them in a jovial ease. It might have been different, she thought, if Alston Choate had got her a divorce years ago and then married her. "Come," she said, with an undiminished sweetness, "I'll take you to your room." _

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