The Mango-Seed
The two young men looked at each other rather helplessly. Then “Marty” Martin drew a few ragged words over his helplessness. “I’m sorry, Peter—really, awfully. I’ll be back in an hour. And do buck up. But you have bucked up, you really have. You look ever so much better than you did when we went to lunch. And I’ll be back. Oh, you can depend on me.” He drifted off through the door. His muscles were tense with haste, but he fingered chairs and tables as he went—as if trying to put clogs of decency on feet indecorously winged. Even so, he was soon out of sight, and Peter Wayne was alone.
“There’s no point in saying it isn’t rum, because it is,” he murmured to himself. “And here,” he added, looking about. There was no moral support in those crimson walls, those great pier-glasses, those insignificant writing-tables with red-shaded electric lights, those uncomfortable tapestried armchairs. It wasn’t the setting to help you through a crisis. He was in the quietest corner of the most essentially respectable hotel in New York. There were plenty of them—scores—that were incidentally respectable; but at the St. Justin respectability had been cherished through years for its own sake, as more important than the register, the cuisine, or the unimpeachable location that no metropolitan progress could render inconvenient. As a very young bachelor with virtually no family ties, he was not familiar with the St. Justin. It wasn’t a place where you would expect to get the kind of thing his kind of human being wanted. He couldn’t, for example, have induced Marty to lunch there. They had lunched at Plon’s. It was a hotel where you might be perfectly sure your grandparents had stopped. It was natural that his mother should have selected it for their meeting, as she hadn’t been in America for well over twenty years. But there was less backing than he had expected, somehow.
Sitting uncomfortably in one of the corners by a writing-table (his back to the window so that the familiar streets shouldn’t lure him too much to flight), he took the privilege of the consciously crucial moment. He reviewed his life. It was so very short, after all, that it was easily reviewed. He was only a few months out of the university, and he was just twenty-two. The insoluble was there to the point of being either romantic or absurd, he didn’t know which. He had what so many young people long for in vain, a mystery. He had amused himself occasionally with monstrous hypotheses. But what real account could he give of himself? What account, that is, of the sort that Marty Martin and his like had by heart before they could spell? The most that he knew about his parents—except that they were alive and in the tropics—was that they banked in Honolulu and had some natural hold or other on Marty Martin’s uncle. Marty Martin’s uncle had picked out Peter’s school and his college for him, and was telegraphed for when Peter had appendicitis. That was as near the parental relation as anything he had known from experience. Lonely? Well, any fellow was lonely when the other fellows all went trooping home for holidays; but loneliness he had always frankly diagnosed as three-quarters pride. The fellows were always glad to get back to school or college, he noticed. In any case, he had stopped thinking about it much—his plight. That saved his dignity. What he sat now vaguely dreading was the immense, the cataclysmic downfall of his dignity. He tried to put the facts to himself so simply that they should be as reassuring as a primer. Ollendorf, he had once complained to a teacher, would take the zest out of a murder, the sense out of a scandal. Tragedy was a verbal matter. Put a crime into any foreign language, and it sounded like a laundry list. He would try, as it were, to find the French for his situation.
“Oh, rot!” he began, taking his own advice quite seriously. “It isn’t so Sudermannish as all that. My father and my mother chose to go to the tropics to live, a year after I was born. They did not take me with them. They have never sent for me; but they have supported me; they have written to me occasionally; they have got Marty Martin’s uncle to keep me out of the hands of the S.P.C.C., and trained me generally to do without them. I’ve never been invited to go to Tahiti. And Tahiti isn’t like London—if you know any one there, you can’t go without an invitation. They can’t have turned against me, when I was eleven months old, on account of my vices. I’ve kept pretty jolly and managed to regularize the situation with my friends. Now my mother has written that she’s coming to America to see me. Indeed, she has actually come. I wasn’t allowed to meet her at a steamer, decently. I have to meet her here—here.” (He looked gloomily around at the conventional walls.) “Yet she doesn’t seem to be staying here. I don’t know whether she will want tea, or where to take her to dinner. I don’t know her when I see her. I don’t know—oh, hang it, I don’t know anything! And if I could funk it, like Marty, I would. But what can you do when a lady takes the trouble to bring you into the world? If it had been my father, now, I wouldn’t—I positively wouldn’t—have consented to meet him. It’s—it’s no way to treat a fellow.”
His vain attempt at Ollendorfian flatness broke down: the mere facts seemed so very much against him. He had often complained to Marty Martin that it was dashed awkward, this being the only original changeling; but, in point of fact, he had never been so uncomfortable in his life as now, at the prospect of playing the authentic filial rôle. “I’ll make her dine here,” he muttered. He could think of nothing worse without being actually disrespectful. An old lady in a gray shawl walked slowly down the hall past the door, and it suddenly struck him that his mother would perhaps like to dine at the St. Justin. “I ought to have cabled to ask what color her shawl would be,” he began, in a flippant whisper, to himself. The flippant whisper stopped. He was much too genuinely nervous to be flippant any longer without an audience. At the same time, he found himself wondering—oh, insincerely, theatrically, rhetorically wondering—why he had not bought an etiquette book. There was something—well, to be honest, something like an extra gland in his throat, something like a knot in his healthy young nerves—that kept him from putting the question to himself audibly. “If she cries—” he reflected, with anticipatory vindictiveness. What he really meant was: “If she makes me so much as sniff.” For your mother was really the one person in the world who had you necessarily at a disadvantage. Even if you hadn’t the habit of her, you couldn’t count on yourself for reticence. You might be as bored as possible, but that wouldn’t save you. There might be treacheries of the flesh, disloyalties of the cuticle—all manner of reversions to embryonic helplessness. She somehow had your nerves, your physical equilibrium, at her mercy. Old Stein, prodding at you with instruments in the psychological laboratory, was a mere joke in comparison. Even the most deceived, the most docile and voluble student ended respectably in a card catalogue. Peter felt suddenly an immense tenderness for the decencies, the unrealities of “science.” But to meet your mother in conditions like these was the real thing: the naked horror of revelation. “It’s literature,” thought Peter to himself, “and what is literature but just the very worst life can do?” He came back to his familiar conclusive summary. It was rum.
The next quarter of an hour passed more mercifully. The mere empty lapse of time helped him, half duped him into thinking that the scene might not come off at all. It was foolish to be there ahead of time, but what could a man in his predicament do, or pretend to do, between luncheon and an interview like that? They had had, he and Marty, a civilized meal at Plon’s; but he had not been hungry, and to smoke among the stunted box-trees afterward had been—well, impossible. They had got to the St. Justin ridiculously early, and then Marty had bolted. Peter didn’t bear him any grudge for that; of course it was perfectly proper for Marty to bolt. It would have been worse, he began to think, to face her first before a witness.
By this time he had accepted the smallest writing-room of the St. Justin as the predestined scene of the great encounter; accepted it as, perhaps divinely, perhaps diabolically, but at all events supernaturally, appointed. These walls had been decorated by dead people to be unsympathetic and grossly unfit witnesses of Peter Wayne’s embarrassment. To that extent they belonged to him. The sudden superstition was genuine; so genuine that he found himself resenting a bit of chatter that sprang up outside the door and, even more, the immediate quick entrance into the writing-room of one of the chatterers. Why hadn’t his mother given him an appointment in her own sitting-room, at her own hotel—whatever that might be? He didn’t know; he knew nothing of her since the wireless message that had made the appointment; and of course since she was managing the thing that way, he hadn’t even tried to meet her at her steamer, though it had actually docked at some unearthly hour that morning. But she was likely to pay, too, for her perversity, since the lady who had just come in and had sat down rather aimlessly at one of the tables would probably annoy her as much as she did him. He had owned—or pretended?—to Marty Martin a furtive curiosity as to this mother of his, whom he had virtually never seen, of whom he hadn’t so much as a photograph. Now something quite different stirred within him: the instinct to protect her against anything she would not like. He suddenly saw her frail and weary and overwrought and quite old—pathetically, not ironically, like the little old lady who had hobbled past the door—and he resented any detail that might crown her long effort at reunion with an extra thorn. He was sure she would hate this other woman’s being there—the younger woman who had just come in, and sat down so nonchalantly.
This lady obviously intended to stop long enough for their discomfiture, since—just here he got up and looked at his watch as he did so—it lacked scarce two minutes of the appointed hour. He looked at the intruder a little impatiently. She wasn’t writing. Perhaps he could suggest, by some flicker of expression, some implication of gesture, that he wasn’t there in that ridiculous galley for nothing, and still less there for casual company. She was slim and smartly veiled and outrageously made up. That was all he saw out of the corner of his eye, but it was enough to make him feel that she had no such rights at the St. Justin as a reunited mother and child. She wasn’t waiting for a parent, he knew; only for some frivolous friend or other. He was so nervous as to wonder if there were any conceivable way in which one could ask her to go into one of the other rooms. A depopulated chain of them stretched down the corridor. He threw another glance at her. She was well dressed. Peter, though he might know as little as a poodle about the nature of the current fashion, could, like most men, pounce unerringly on the unfashionable. Her exuberance wasn’t a matter of gewgaws; it was all in the meretricious harmonies of her features and complexion. And yet—Peter caught himself away from staring, as he passed her, but one glance was enough to show him that—it was a perfectly honest mask; her paint and powder were as respectable as blue glasses. Again he knew it unerringly. He was glad to recognize it. For at that moment he became so nervous that he did, without a qualm, the most preposterous thing he had ever done, even at two and twenty.
His mother was imminent; he knew it in a hundred ways. The atmosphere was charged with more than the mere prospect, was charged with the actual certainty of her. He found that he was going to put it to the lady who sat there. He stood in the door of the writing-room and looked down the dark hall. It was empty, save for a woman who sat humbly near, bonneted, veiled, faithfully clasping some kind of bag—obviously a servant. Remembering the bit of chatter, he fancied it the maid of the intruding lady. No one else was in sight. Yet somehow he knew that his mother would be on time: the crispness of her earlier cablegrams promised it. The lady really must go elsewhere, and the maid—old and “colored” and manifestly respectable—must move down the hall and sit outside another door. He went back, and this time walked straight across to the stranger.
“Will you pardon me, madam” (“madam” was a deplorable word, but the powder somehow demanded an extravagant formality), “if I speak to you, to ask you something very odd?”
She stared at him through her fantastically patterned veil.
“I have been put in the position of having to meet an elderly lady—a near relative—here for a more or less intimate conversation. I don’t think she realized, in making the appointment, how little privacy you have a right to in a hotel. It is very long since she has been in a great city. Will you pardon the—the really unpardonable—liberty of my asking if you are likely to be here much longer? I mean—ought I to arrange to take her elsewhere in the hotel when she comes? She will be here in a moment.”
It was a dreadful thing to have had to do, and, if he judged by what the veil showed of the lady’s face, it couldn’t have been worse done. She looked dismayed. Peter was angry: so angry that he managed to stop just where he had stationed himself before her; so angry that he didn’t deprecate, that he simply set his teeth and waited. There was nothing he could do now, he felt, to convince her that she hadn’t been insulted.
She lifted her veil ever so little, just freeing her lips, slightly constricted by its tight-drawn mesh. As she did so, she both rose and spoke.
“Aren’t you Peter Wayne?”
He bowed, relieved. If they had a ground of acquaintance, he could perhaps cover it all up, make it plausible, get rid of her on some dishonest, hilarious pretext. “I am.” He waited; there was no use in pretending that he remembered her.
The veil was lifted farther, then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a voice sounded in his astonished ears. “Turn to the light, my son, and let me look at you. I’ve not had a photograph, you remember, since you were a child.”
Even as he faced the light, he was saying to himself that it was rummer than ever; but it was rummest when he turned for his legitimate look at her. She was older than he had assumed the strange lady to be; but she was a long way from the little old lady in the gray shawl. This was his mother, and it was over—he felt it as those sinking for the third time may feel. In another instant he saw his mistake. He had been pulled up out of the surge into the terrible air—this was his mother, and it had just begun! He mastered his breath—his breath that under the water had been playing tricks with him. He looked her over, searching stare for searching stare. Her fair hair had lost what must once have been a golden lustre, but it was carefully, elaborately arranged, waved, curled, braided. It was as fashionable as her clothes. The white mask of powder left clear the contour of the fine, thin nose but cloaked the subtler modellings of the face. The blue eyes, idle yet intent, looked at him from behind it; below them it was rent, once, by the scarlet stab of the mouth. Peter remembered vaguely having heard that the tropical sun necessitated such protection. It was the northern dimness and drizzle that turned make-up into a moral question. Even for the grands boulevards, to be sure, Mrs. Wayne’s make-up would have been overdone. This was the chief result of his searching stare. She wasn’t like one’s mother at all, confound it!—not like any one’s mother. He would have been glad of a little more sophistication than even at wise two-and-twenty he was conscious of possessing.
“Your maid?” he asked, remembering the figure outside the door.
“Oh, yes; my old Frances. She recalls you as a baby. She’ll want to see you. You must speak to her before we go.”
“But you’re not going——”
“I find I’d better get off to-night. I’ve learned since landing, that if I do, I can just get a boat at Vancouver. It’s not as if I had any business to do. You’ll take me to dinner somewhere—some restaurant. I don’t like hotels.”
“But—you don’t mean you’ve come for only twenty-four hours—across all that?”
The straight red mouth elongated itself into a smile. “If there weren’t so much of it to cross, I could, perhaps, stay longer. I came only to say one or two things.”
She spoke as if she had run up from her country place for the day. Peter suddenly revolted against this careless treatment of his plight. He was glad if his prayers had succeeded in averting tragedy. At the same time, he didn’t intend to be turned into farce. He hadn’t let himself in for all this only to be shirked as he had been shirked for more than twenty years. He meant to know things, hang it! He had been afraid of a scene; afraid of twenty years’ emotion expressed in an hour; of a creation of human ties as violent and sudden as the growth of the tree from the mango-seed in the fakir’s hands. “In ten minutes you eat the ripe mango,” a globe-trotting friend had told him. If he hadn’t the fakir’s miracle to fear, well and good; but neither was he going to suffer the other extreme, the complete dehumanizing of the experience. After all, she was his mother, hang it! If she wasn’t going to make him pay—well, he would make her pay. Somebody had to get something out of so preposterous a situation. He leaned forward.
“Things you couldn’t write? Or have you just funked it, on the way?”
“Funked it?” Her vocabulary apparently did not hold the word.
“I mean—oh, I mean, let us talk straight. You’ve let it all go for more than twenty years. Now you take it all up again. I’m a gentleman, I hope. I didn’t bolt, though you can bet I wanted to. It would have been easier never to have seen you at all.”
“You’ve never wanted to see your mother?”
Peter looked out of the window into the familiar street. If it hadn’t been for the utter detachment of her tone, he would have felt that she was hitting below the belt.
“What do you take me for? I’ve nearly died of—well, call it interest, more times than I can count up. No little boy likes to have no mother; likes to have his mother care nothing for him. But I’ve grown perfectly used to it. And I know—I know now, mind you—that you don’t care. Well, it may not be what I should have chosen, but at least it lets me out. It’s too late, now, to make me care.”
It was by no means the whole truth. But it was what he had been trying, and in vain, to say to himself an hour since about it all. There was some triumph in being able to say it now to her.
Her blue eyes turned on him a stranger’s sudden kindness. “Were those years bad, Peter? I thought they’d be less bad if you began them very young. You see, they had to begin some time.”
“Oh, they began—and they lasted. Now, they’re not bad at all. So why rake it all up now?”
If she had been little and old and shaking, he couldn’t have pressed the question, he knew. The powdered cheeks, the elaborate hair, the vermilion lips gave him a kind of sanction. There was a pitiful way of wearing rouge, no doubt; this wasn’t pitiful in the least. He didn’t know what she looked like underneath the mask, but he could almost have sworn she didn’t need it.
“I’m not trying to do that. If I’ve come so late, it’s because I feel quite sure that it’s too late to undo any of it. I am not trying”—her brilliant, dyed smile was extraordinarily little in the maternal tradition—“to get a single claw into you. I’ve come to pay damages, Peter, not to claim them. But you must be very, very, very polite to me. I’m not used to anything else. And America rather frightens me.”
“I don’t want to be anything but polite,” murmured Peter, abashed. “And the freer you really are, the more it’s up to you to play the game, don’t you think?”
She smiled vaguely, and he saw at once that she belonged to the generation that preceded slangy paradox. She might almost have worn a fluffy gray shawl.
“I am sure you don’t wish to be anything but polite,” she brought out, still vaguely. “But—I’ve odd things to say, and I’ve come a long way to say them; and you, my son, must listen.”
“It’s what I’m here for.”
“Evidemment. How much has Spencer Martin told you?”
“Old Martin? Nothing at all, ever—except the figure of my allowance.”
“Not why we first went to Hawaii?”
“Good Lord, no! I might have been a foundling.”
“You didn’t ask?” She had taken off her gray glove; and pushed her veil up farther on her forehead, with beautiful white fingers.
“No,” answered Peter curtly. “A fellow wouldn’t ask. You can see that.”
She seemed to muse. “He would have told you that, I think, if you had. There was no reason why you shouldn’t know.”
“I naturally supposed, if there was no reason why I shouldn’t know, you’d have seen to it that I was told.”
“So you thought there was something disgraceful—something that drove us out of America?”
“It has occurred to me. But I never let myself worry about it. And old Martin himself was a kind of proof that there wasn’t.”
“There wasn’t.” She echoed his words in a disdainful, emphatically affirmative tone. “No, Peter, not that.” She paused for a moment, staring out into the gray street. “These women are very ugly, aren’t they?” she asked irrelevantly. “On the boat, they were horrors. And they jerked about so—did so many things. Do the men like them that way?” Her tone was desultory.
“I suppose so.” He felt a mischievous desire to tell her how little the men he knew would probably like them her way; but, in fact, the slow conviction was encroaching on his mind—not so much penetrating it as fluidically enwrapping it—that she was compounded of many graces. Her gestures, for example: they were all slow, and each showed off something, if only, for an instant, some lesser, some negligible contour. She had the air of not having stirred a limb or a feature for years, except to please, and of being now in the practice infallible. She was very feminine—no, hang it! that dairymaid word wouldn’t do. (Peter had been, in college, the proudest product of his several “theme-courses,” and the quest of the epithet was not unknown to him.) She was very simple and very sophisticated. He had to leave it at that.
“I’ll tell you about our leaving America. You ought to have known long since. And yet—perhaps it was better your sympathies shouldn’t have been touched. If you thought we were brutes, that would leave you free, wouldn’t it?”
“It did.”
“Ah, yes—exactly!” She seemed to triumph for an instant. Then she looked out of the window again, and again spoke irrelevantly. “Are you in love?”
Peter frowned. “No.” He was too young not to be stiff about it.
“That’s rather a pity. I could have explained better.”
“Oh, I know what it stands for.”
She corrected him gently. “It ‘stands for’ nothing whatever. Either you’ve loved or you haven’t. It might have helped me—that’s all.” Then she seemed to brace herself for difficult exposition.
“Listen, Peter. You must know this first. In the months just following your birth, everything changed. Your father developed tuberculosis—alarmingly, it was then supposed. That meant another climate. He owned property in Honolulu. It occurred to him to go there. In not taking you we acted on physicians’ advice. There was no telling what sort of life we might have to live. You were best off here. You were under expert care, and in those days we had news of you constantly. I am quite well aware”—her voice grew surer as she went on; she seemed less fantastically feminine, more simply human—“that many women would have chosen differently. For me there could be no question. You had been brought into the world in the belief that there would be no choice to make. We never dreamed, when you were born, of anything but the normal American life. I insist on your realizing that.”
Peter bowed. It already began to change his vision of himself a little, though he wasn’t sure he liked his mystery to be merely tubercular. Though if that was all, why in the world—but he saw that he could only listen and wait.
“Then—Honolulu didn’t serve very long. We had to go farther away from life. Now we’re in Tahiti. It’s—it’s a very wonderful climate.”
Mrs. Wayne rose, drew the crimson curtain to one side, and looked out. It was a moment before she spoke, and as she spoke she sat down again with helpless grace.
“I find it very hard to tell. I don’t think I can tell you it all.”
“I don’t see why you should have come at all, unless you are going to tell me everything there is to tell. But if you’ve really funked it, I don’t care, you know.” Thus Peter, maintaining his bravado.
“You don’t help me out.” The blue eyes rested on him critically. “But I suppose it’s not your fault. Since you don’t know anything about anything——”
“I can’t give you a leg up. No.”
She frowned a little, as if troubled by his phrasing, but resigned herself to it. “No; you can’t give me a leg up.”
“I say—” He leaned forward with a sudden impulse. “Why don’t I go back with you? Or come out later? Lots of people going to Tahiti now, you know, since they’ve exhausted the Spanish Main. Plenty of attractions: drives round the island, perfect scenery, native customs on tap—ordeal by fire and hot stones. It’s in the advertisements along with the rates and sailings. No reason why I shouldn’t come.”
She had drawn back while he spoke with a perfectly obvious terror. With parted lips, and coiled hair, and her very blood (it seemed) turned white, she looked like Greek tragic masks that he had seen in museums. These he had always thought grinning prevarications; now, he acknowledged their authenticity. His jauntiness faded into a stare. Then she pulled herself together, as Peter would have said, by slow, difficult degrees, like a kaleidoscope turned too slowly—pitiful to see.
“No, Peter, you must never come to Tahiti. He—he couldn’t bear it.”
“He?”
“Your father.”
“Oh—my father.” His imagination had not yet evoked his father. “I had forgotten him, for the moment.”
“Forgotten him! What extraordinary things you say!”
“Well, why shouldn’t I forget him? He hasn’t even taken the trouble to spend twenty-four hours in America to make my acquaintance.” Something acrid had risen in the cup, and Peter’s lips were bitter.
Her white fingers moved again to the folds of her veil, as if the frail mesh weighed intolerably upon her brows.
“If you forget him, of course I can never explain. He is all there is.” She indulged then in an appraising glance. “You look kind and good. I didn’t think you would be undutiful.”
Undutiful! It was her turn to introduce an unfamiliar vocabulary. “Undutiful!” Peter repeated. “What do you mean? That I’m expected to be grateful to him for being my father?”
She smiled. She lifted her hands. She all but applauded him. “Yes, just that!”
Peter stared. He had two favorite words with which to describe the legitimately surprising. One of them was “rum.” But such an idea as this called for the other. It was—positively—“rococo.”
She went on then. Apparently his ironic question had smitten the rock, for the fluent tale gushed forth, watering all the arid past. But to Peter it was as if a man blinded and drenched with spray should try to drink of it. The first sentences came too quickly. In all his two and twenty years they found no context. He had still to learn the way of them. He supposed it was because he was finding out at last what it was to have a real mother.
“It wasn’t always Tahiti,” he heard her saying after a little. “We’ve tried everything south of the equator, I’ve sometimes thought. Valparaiso, for a long time. Perhaps you knew? Spencer Martin——”
“Never even told me when you changed your continent.” He was blandly bitter. Somehow it did hurt, as she went on.
“The climate,” Mrs. Wayne murmured again. And then she named other stages of their progress—all places, Peter reflected, that were in the geographies and in Kipling, and nowhere else. It made his parents sound like vagabonds of fiction. Her trailing narrative did not add to their reality. The details she mentioned were wildly exotic, and those she took for granted he could not supply. Her careful English was interlarded with strange scraps of Spanish and native names for things which left the objects, for him, unrecognizable. He made nothing out of it except that it wasn’t what he should call a life at all. He didn’t even see whether it was whim or necessity that controlled them. As soon as anything in her story became coherent or comprehensible, she doubled on her tracks. At first he threw in occasional questions, but the answers didn’t explain; and soon he stopped asking them. A foreignness like that left his very curiosities unphraseable. He came to the point where he didn’t even know what it was that he wanted to know. There was, to be sure, the irregularly recurrent stress on the hope of health, an obsession, apparently, under which they had faintly struggled and madly rambled; but it didn’t make much more sense than what he had learned in childhood about Ponce de Leon. You might as well ask a firefly to show you your way. Clearly, she hadn’t the gift of biography. He sat very still and intent, trying to make a pattern out of it; but she merely succeeded in dazing him. Then suddenly, when he was most bewildered, it came to an end, ran out in a mere confession of failure.
“And nowhere, at any time, has the miracle happened. He has never been well enough to come back. We have always had to stay away.”
“It must have been a strange life,” Peter mused.
“Strange? It may be. Strange for him, no doubt: so fitted for civilization—for your world.”
“You speak as if it weren’t yours.”
“Oh, mine,” she said simply; “he was mine. I don’t ask for more civilization than that—than my husband.”
It was the most sentimental speech that Peter had ever heard from human lips, and he stared incredulously. But incredulity faded. Her tone of voice worked on him even after she fell silent. He still felt its vibration in the air while the mask shifted subtly before his eyes. Somehow, as she sat there, breathing such simple passion from her intricate adornments, she became at once more astounding and more intelligible. One saw it all—even Peter, in his young and untutored heart, knew infallibly. She had loved her husband supremely, and she had chucked everything for him. She had chucked so much, in fact, that she had even lost all sense of the worth of what she had cast away. She had nothing left to measure it by. Peter felt that America itself was a good deal to have chucked. It soothed his pride a little, to be sure, to have her treat New York so cavalierly. She hadn’t so much as looked at it; and she had circumnavigated the globe for him. It was clear, too, that every moment of the journey was a kind of torture to her. Her very look round the room divulged an agony of strangeness and suspense. She was just longing to be back on her island. Peter thrilled a little foolishly to it. He fancied it was a grande passion. The only grande passion Peter had hitherto known had been that of a sophomore friend for his landlady’s daughter. That, though it had been enhanced by proper detail of elopement, disinheritance, and threats of suicide, had disappointed them all in the end. The bride was rather silly and tried to borrow money; and when Peter and Marty, in their senior year, had re-read Lawrence’s sonnet-sequence, they had found that it didn’t scan. But this—this was different. Whatever his mother had undertaken, she had obviously put it through. After all those years of marriage, to have your voice vibrate like that! It had never occurred to Peter that a fellow’s mother could still be in love with his father. Even in novels mothers weren’t. As for life: he recalled the parents that he knew. He had never seen another woman with just that look, the look of a dedicated being, of some one whose bloom had been, first and last, both jealously hoarded and lavishly spent. She was like a woman out of a harem: a million graces for one man, but a mere veiled bundle to all the rest. That was the secret of her uniqueness. She was a charming woman to whom the notion of charming the world at large would be blasphemous. Her mood had been slowly orientalized to match her exterior, which had gradually grown exotic. She would die in suttee. Peter felt her quality no less poignantly because his words for it were unsure. Of course she didn’t want to stay in America! Of course she was off to Vancouver at midnight! And yet—why, why had she come? Would she never explain?
She had been looking out of the window while he soliloquized—it was part of the whole sub-tropical spectacle of her that she should limit herself to so few hours, and then be as languid as if she had leased a suite at the St. Justin for life. She turned just as Peter had made up his mind to speak.
“There was one summer when you wanted to go to the Caucasus, I remember—a rather queer trip that was going to cost a great deal. We were sorry—I was dreadfully sorry—that you couldn’t go.”
Peter frowned. There you were! She crammed the supreme interview of a lifetime into an hour, and then had the audacity to be irrelevant.
“We couldn’t afford it just then. It—it was a very expensive year. I had to tell Spencer we couldn’t. I hope you didn’t hate us for it.”
Peter laughed. “I didn’t even know you had anything to do with it. Old Martin didn’t tell me it was funds. He just wet-blanketed the whole thing—said it wasn’t safe and he couldn’t hear of it. I didn’t mind much. I went to Murray Bay to visit another chap. But, I say—do you mean old Martin asked you?”
“He cabled.”
“And you?”
“I cabled back.”
“Has he been consulting you about me all these years? In cases like that, when I didn’t dream of it?”
“Oh, only occasionally,” she hastened to say. “We haven’t been spying on you.”
“No, I should hope not.” Then he called himself a queer duck, aggrieved for twenty years because he hadn’t been spied on, and now aggrieved at the thought that he might be.
“Was it you, by the way,” he asked, “who were interested in my affairs, or my father?” Her pronouns had been a little confusing.
“Your father has had, more and more, to leave all correspondence to me.” For the first time, her words came glibly. She had evidently packed that sentence in her trunk before starting.
“Is he so very ill?” Peter had veered at last to an interest in his other parent; it was clear that his other parent was the real clue to the mystery.
“Oh, horribly—horribly!” It was almost a cry. She bent forward. “So ill, Peter, so ill that you mustn’t come now, ever. He loathes it so—being so ill. And he is so very proud—as why shouldn’t he be? Can’t you see how he would mind? Do you think I’d have come if it had been possible to send for you? Do you think I’d have left him if there had been any other way? I’m not sure, as it is, that I ought to have come. It has been terrible, to be getting farther away every day; to know that I’m as far away from him as it is possible to be on this earth. And think what it must be for him, alone—and there!”
Well, she was as pathetic now as any little old lady in a gray shawl could be; only she was, somehow, tragic too. Her face was like the white grave of beauty. Peter was stupefied.
“There?” he repeated.
She flung out her hands. “On a savage island. Think of him on a savage island!”
“I can’t, very well,” murmured Peter inaudibly. Then: “But has he always been so ill? For twenty years? Or”—he fixed her a little more directly—“is there something besides illness?”
She did not answer. She rose and looked out of the window, and as Peter rose and stood beside her, she lifted one hand to his shoulder. There was something ineffably gracious in the gesture. She seemed to be making it all up to him. “Such a patched life, Peter,” she murmured. “You can’t blame him for not having wanted me to come.”
“Oh, he didn’t want you to come?”
She hesitated for an instant. “No. And now I must go.”
“Now?” he asked stupidly.
“Oh, yes, at once. I shan’t have time to dine with you.” She looked helplessly about for a scarf that she had thrown down.
“But no!” Peter broke out. “It’s preposterous. To come like this and go like this! Your train doesn’t go for hours—if you will go to-night.”
“But I haven’t arranged for it. I haven’t packed.”
“Why, you haven’t unpacked!” he cried.
“Oh, I think Frances may have. And I mustn’t fail to get off. There are the tickets to get, too. Peter, I must go.” She spoke as if to delay were unspeakable treason; and, as she spoke, she turned to cross the room to the door.
“I say,” said Peter, standing squarely in her way, “why did you come? You shan’t go without telling me that.” It wasn’t the way to speak to one’s mother, but she had chosen to discard the maternal code.
She broke off in the act of withdrawal and turned to him. Her blue eyes were tearless but very sad. “I loved you dearly when you were very little,” she said simply. “I’ve never quite forgotten that. I suddenly realized that, if I waited any longer, I could never come. I think it was a cruel and foolish thing for me to do, and I’m a little ashamed of it; but—kiss me, Peter.”
Before he obeyed, he clutched at one more straw. “You won’t see old Martin?”
“I said good-bye to him a great many years ago.” She smiled. “I had no one to see in America except you. No—there’s a cab waiting. Good-bye.”
He kissed her then. It was clear to him that he might only watch her go. He saw her stop to rouse the old servant who waited in the hall. Then she passed, with strange grace, out of his life.
There was only one tone to take with Marty, who arrived, as always, late and breathless. “She’s the most charming woman I’ve ever met, and it’s the devil’s own luck that she had to go straight on to Vancouver to get a steamer back. My father—who is apparently a charmer, by the way—is very ill. She’s wonderful. It’s the biggest thing that has ever happened to me. She’s made everything as right as right. But I can’t tell you about it. After twenty years—you understand, old man——”
It was less the loyal friend than the loyal son; but he was still, dining that night at Plon’s (he wondered where the deuce she was dining), very much under her dominion. She had brought with her a rare illumination. He would never forget her voice and her veiled eyes. He hadn’t dreamed a woman could suggest her love in so many silent ways. She just was adoration, implicit and incarnate. It was tremendous to have seen it. The white light it threw on Lawrence’s bride! The white light it threw, for that matter, on all the women he knew! He felt himself bursting with knowledge.
It was not until after dinner, indeed, that he realized just how wonderful in another way she had been, and with how little knowledge of another sort she had left him. She had told him absolutely nothing. So far as he was concerned, her narrative had only concealed events. He couldn’t remember whether New Zealand had followed or preceded Chile; and his sincere impression was that it didn’t matter, even to them. Anything that in all those years had mattered, had been dropped away out of sight between her sentences. If he had been by his hour both racked and inebriated (for that was what his state of tension amounted to), it was not because of any facts she had given him. She had not even answered his plain questions. She had left him in dismay as soon as he had begun to ask them. He saw that now, though in his simplicity he hadn’t seen it before. He had been sacrificed again, as he had always been sacrificed. His mystery was still his mystery, and he was still left alone with his monstrous hypotheses. He wouldn’t have missed it for anything—not even for good old Marty. But he turned to Marty at last with compunction.
“Marty, old man,” he said, “it was rum.”