Part Five
I
Several days ago, I was taken by surprise at receiving a visit from Nicholas Van Suydam. It has been almost a year since Eva Litchfield’s death; and during this time we had known scarcely more of his movements than that he was abroad. That he had recently come back I also knew, because by chance I had witnessed his return.
I had gone down to the docks to meet a friend who was arriving from Europe. It was a dingy day, and the smell of the ocean suggested but too forcibly man’s enslavement to machinery; for on its breath which could not rise through the fog it bore the horrid taint of oil. There was tumultuous noise—of winches, of the heterogeneous bulky things that are dropped into the holds of ships, of cart horses stamping their large hoofs and trucks unnecessarily back-firing. But on the cobbled expanse whose sweep connects the piers with the asphalt of the streets the maroon brougham waited, and enthroned upon the box was one of the two composed persons in New York. The irreproachable Higginson flicked from the ear of the off bay one of the few remaining horse-flies in town, but this necessary flourish of his whip did not cause a ripple of the puce livery. The bays were older; it was with more difficulty that he got an occasional curvet from them; but the brougham had been repainted and on Higginson’s top hat was a new cockade. For the little house in West Eleventh Street was empty; a renting agent’s sign creaked dismally above its white stoop.
I was early, and the waiting-room as disheartening a sight as ever, so that I hastened out on the stripped length of the pier. Walking slowly ahead of me was Mrs. Van Suydam. To all appearance, she wore the same garments which had decently restricted her form three years ago; the same bonnet-like hat protected the head it scorned to adorn, and drawn tightly across her nose was a wisp of veil which might have been cut from the same piece. But she, like her horses, was older; she went directly to the barrier and clutched it with trembling hands. There was no way of avoiding her eye, which finally rested upon me. She inclined her head slightly. The ship was not yet in sight; we would have some time together. I went up to her. After the most perfunctory hand shake, she said, her words dropping like plummets: “I am meeting my son.” I realized that she said this because, at sight of me, she had asked herself: “Why shouldn’t I feel free to mention my son?”
With equally savage intent, I threw at the silence which otherwise might envelop us the statement that I had heard he had been abroad since his wife’s death. She nodded soberly. She told me that she had refused to accompany him on his now accomplished pilgrimage. She had wished him, alone and free from feminine espionage, to plunge into the mild dissipations suitable to a young gentleman of modest means. That he had done nothing of the sort, but had immediately plunged into an orgy more to his liking—had, in fact, submerged himself in the joy occasioned by his renewed fond acquaintance with the architectural masterpieces of Europe—she had gathered from his letters. “Not that his letters are frivolous, Mrs. Avery,” she explained punctiliously; they had had to do with the surface of his life, she went into it. I gathered, then, from what she merely hinted at, that behind his letters was of course what he had not told her; and that the untold had intimately to do with Eva’s last days neither his mother nor I for a moment doubted.
“Mrs. Avery, you were unhappily present at the only two portentous interviews that ever took place between my daughter-in-law and myself. The stand I took I am satisfied was for my son’s best interests.” Sharply she inspected my face. Something that she denied by her manner had shaken her. She did not know how much of what she had said to Eva had been repeated to her son. She had no way of knowing what her son would think—what he did in fact think of things he might only guess. It was with apprehension, therefore, that she had come to meet him today. Herself incapable of suffering deeply except through her son, she feared what she might be about to experience through a possible devastation of his spirit.
She said to me that life had resolved itself into a pattern and she could almost see where the pattern ran out. She had used to regret that she was so much older than her son, while now she had reached the point where it seemed a fortunate thing, for of the two of them she at least saw that few things happening in life were irremediable. Things came about, and they all fitted into the design, and the repeat of the pattern was the next generation, so that there might be said to be a pattern for each family. And what she did not put into words I read in her bleak eyes. One brought a son into a world that one was powerless to order for his security; one stood aside while life buffeted him; and the most that one got out of it was the realization that life is a ball tossed from hand to hand, and that hands sometimes slip but the ball is not always lost. Her lashes were pushed up by her veil in a look of astonishment.
I asked if I might not find her a seat. She refused with determination; and I realized that she feared she might not be able to go on with the day if for a moment she slid into dependency. She stood rigidly upright, holding to the barrier with her gloved hands. Only with the backing of her spirit could she get through something lying dead ahead.
We stood side by side, divided by our memories. The sparks struck from the pavement by the hoofs of her bays, on her coming drive home with her son restored to her single-minded purpose, would be the sparks of the triumph that had lain in wait in her decorous breast so tightly buttoned into its absurd costume. This single-minded purpose might have directly derived from her old house, from its portraits, its family silver, its furniture that had never been neglected. I fancied that I heard the flap of the page which she, with determination, turned. Nicholas, the harvest of his soul’s wild oats garnered, would return; and, preparing for his return, his mother pieced together in her mind the things that had taken place: things she had seen, things she had been told and things she had through her motherhood divined—the mistakes of others and her own aloof waiting. But even now, before his landing, a faint uneasiness had evidently dropped down into her complacent knowledge that once more she was to have him safely under her wing. The tautness of her spare body showed at once that she suspected, and denied the suspicion, that they could never return to their old-time serenity. The most they could hope for was to shut, with the door of their house, the door through which they had ventured forth to play their part in the present life of New York. And New York as we knew it, by invading her home, must have begun to seem dreadful to her. I wondered if, with even her conviction of right, she could bear to look at her son on the drive downtown: for they would eventually reach the intersection of Eleventh Street and Fifth Avenue. Would she know, without glancing at him, that he had turned his head, with the fixity of a purpose to last him through life, that he might look east? I might have been invisibly in the brougham with them: for distinctly I saw the policeman hold up his gloved hand. Almost rising, triumphantly, on the box-seat, Higginson would give the impression that it required strength to hold in his horses. And, refusing to recognize the traffic lights, Mrs. Van Suydam would lift the speaking-trumpet to her controlled lips and direct: “Drive on!”
She must have been very sure of the nature of my preoccupation; she said: “It’s dreadful—and good—to be so old that one knows when things are impossible.” The sun had broken through the fog, but she looked as if she felt that the shadows of the pier were shadows waiting to engulf her and her son. She stood shivering. And yet, with Higginson, she obeyed her own command: “Drive on!” She turned her head, with that creaking turn of the aged, and looked me full in the eye. “Mrs. Avery, you know so much about the intimate personal affairs of my son and his late wife—” and her old distaste was on her face, and in her sharpened voice—“that I must ask you: have you the slightest idea what took place between them at the last?”
I replied, truthfully and with some wonder, that I did not. I explained that I had been out of town when Eva returned from Hollywood, and that before she set out for New York she had written me but one letter. I said nothing of the contents of the letter. Looking squarely at her in my determination that she should give me an answer, I asked: “Mrs. Van Suydam, how did Eva really die?”
She had turned more fully towards me, and as I spoke I saw her hand thrust behind to again grasp the rail of the barrier. A tremor started at her head and ran down through her body. She said simply that Eva had died of pneumonia, brought on, she believed, by exposure on the train from California to the East. But we had arrived at a state of tension wherein I almost heard her call out to her God: “I’ve never known all!” From the fact that again her dreadful, steady trembling took possession of her I felt sure that part of what had happened had taken place before her eyes, and that she had been daunted by it. In those quiet hours of the night when old people sleep lightly, she would forever after awaken to the same horror that had fallen upon her then. She glared at me, but it was an appeal. She gave the impression of wildly desiring to clutch some human being and hold on, and of a complete aversion to physically touching me because I had received her intimate revelations. But she said, directly to whatever I might oppose: “It was undoubtedly pneumonia. It could have been nothing else. The doctor diagnosed it as pneumonia. The way she breathed——”
“I meant,” I said softly, “her other death.”
She looked away. I saw that she took a long breath. When she again turned her eyes were under control. She said at once, then: “I beg you to believe me when I say that I know no more than you. What I may surmise, and what you may suspect, are probably different. But I shouldn’t be doing my duty to my son if I let you go away without plain speaking on my part. My son has told me nothing. So far as I know, he never had an approach to a quarrel with Eva.”
“Her friends,” I said slowly, “have wondered. You can’t be surprised at that.”
Her dry cheeks flushed an angry red. With her deep resentment of a mother, she almost hurled her words in my face: “How despicably cruel!” Through her frail body there now surged such energy in defense of her son that she might have been rushing at me with upraised fist. “How calculatingly cruel you can be, Mrs. Avery!” She closed her eyes: it might have been to recover her self-control, and it might have been that she refused to longer see me. “You force me to tell you something that I had never thought to let pass my lips.” And her eternal hatred of me because I forced her to tell it stared through her blazing eyes.
She had gone to the little house in Eleventh Street, running through the night because death had arrived before her. She had understood, from the message, that her son had hesitated to throw upon his mother’s age the burden of those details immediately following death, and that she had only been notified when she could enter on a scene of that dignity arranged by man to cover the careless arrangement of nature. Transfixed in the door of Eva’s room, she witnessed the scene on which she had sealed her lips and to which she had vainly tried to shut the eyes of her memory. And again, saying this, she darted at me her look of a terrible resentment. Not daring to withdraw lest her son realize that by the accident of her haste he had been overheard in his last appeal to his wife, Mrs. Van Suydam had then experienced the complete agony. For, before her shrinking eyes, her son came across the floor and took the dead girl in his desperate arms.
Mrs. Van Suydam said to me: “I am telling you this to show you that my son loved his wife. You can never after this suspect him of an indifference that might have caused her to wish to die.”
Her soul had called for help to bear it. She listened, because she could not move, as Nicholas accused some Great Juggler of having shuffled the cards. He had said: “Eva, you’ve always been so cold. I’ve never believed that you’d yielded yourself to me body and soul. Won’t you soften just once, and leave me that to remember?”
I had hurt her, deliberately, through the one profound instinct of a woman’s life, her child. An appalling disintegration began, running through her, turning her blood to water, I thought as I watched the resentment drain from her cheeks. She seemed to be shaking to pieces. She said under her breath—and I knew she did not speak to me: “Why is everything good dying before my eyes?” She held tightly to the rail while she gathered her forces.
I faltered: “I’m very sorry I asked.”
She lifted her eyes. Her lashes pulled against the mesh of her veil and again lent her her look of astonishment. She said distantly: “My son loved Eva, and his life is probably spoiled. He has ideas in his head which only time can eradicate. I am convinced that he never said a cross word to her. But, as you know, I myself had several conversations with my daughter-in-law which in the light of her death I regret. You will be doing me a favour if you tell your friends that I—and not my son—undoubtedly upset her. And, Mrs. Avery, you will kindly refrain from repeating to my son, if you should see him, what his wife said in your presence about his work.” With superb dismissal of me from her life, she put up her lorgnette and inspected me. Her eyes swept over me, remotely speculative. With the slightest of nods, she turned away.
The ship had docked. She clung to the barrier with both hands. Her white kid gloves, pinching her hands, must have supplied the physical pain she now welcomed. For she lifted to the deck, where she would see her son, a face from which she had erased all that would distress him.