Edith Wharton - SSC 09 Page 6

  No one answered my knock, so I opened the door and went in. The studio was empty, but from the room beyond Stephen’s voice called out irritably: “Who is it?” and then, in answer to my name: “Oh, Norcutt—come in.”

  Stephen Glenn lay in bed, in a small room with a window opening on a dimly-lit inner courtyard. The room was bare and untidy, the bed-clothes were tumbled, and he looked at me with the sick man’s instinctive resentfulness at any intrusion on his lonely pain. “Above all,” the look seemed to say, “don’t try to be kind.”

  Seeing that moral pillow-smoothing would be resented I sat down beside him without any comment on the dismalness of the scene, or on his own aspect, much as it disquieted me.

  “Well, old man—” I began, wondering how to go on; but he cut short my hesitation. “I’ve been wanting to see you for ever so long,” he said.

  In my surprise I had nearly replied: “That’s not what I’d been told”—but, resolved to go warily, I rejoined with a sham gaiety: “Well, here I am!”

  Stephen gave me the remote look which the sick turn on those arch-aliens, the healthy. “Only,” he pursued, “I was afraid if you did come you’d begin and lecture me; and I couldn’t stand that—I can’t stand anything. I’m raw!” he burst out.

  “You might have known me better than to think I’d lecture you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Naturally the one person you care about in all this is—mother Kit.”

  “Your mother,” I interposed.

  He raised his eyebrows with the familiar ironic movement; then they drew together again over his sunken eyes. “I wanted to wait till I was up to discussing things. I wanted to get this fever out of me.”

  “You don’t look feverish now.”

  “No; they’ve brought it down. But I’m down with it. I’m very low,” he said, with a sort of chill impartiality, as though speaking of some one whose disabilities did not greatly move him. I replied that the best way for him to pull himself up again was to get out of his present quarters, and let himself be nursed and looked after.

  “Oh, don’t argue!” he interrupted.

  “Argue—?”

  “You’re going to tell me to go back to—to my mother. To let her fatten me up. Well, it’s no use. I won’t take another dollar from her—not one.”

  I met this in silence, and after a moment perceived that my silence irritated him more than any attempt at argument. I did not want to irritate him, and I began: “Then why don’t you go off again with the Browns? There’s nothing you can do that your mother won’t understand—”

  “And suffer from!” he interjected.

  “Oh, as to suffering—she’s seasoned.”

  He bent his slow feverish stare on me. “So am I.”

  “Well, at any rate, you can spare her by going off at once into good air, and trying your level best to get well. You know as well as I do that nothing else matters to her. She’ll be glad to have you go away with the Browns—I’ll answer for that.”

  He gave a short laugh, so harsh and disenchanted that I suddenly felt he was right: to laugh like that he must be suffering as much as his mother. I laid my hand on his thin wrist. “Old man—”

  He jerked away. “No, no. Go away with the Browns? I’d rather be dead. I’d rather hang on here till I am dead.”

  The outburst was so unexpected that I sat in silent perplexity. Mrs. Brown had told the truth, then, when she said he hated them too? Yet he saw them, he accepted their money … The darkness deepened as I peered into it.

  Stephen lay with half-closed lids, and I saw that whatever enlightenment he had to give would have to be forced from him. The perception made me take a sudden resolve.

  “When one is physically down and out one is raw, as you say: one hates everybody. I know you don’t really feel like that about the Browns; but if they’ve got on your nerves, and you want to go off by yourself, you might at least accept the money they’re ready to give you—”

  He raised himself on his elbow with an ironical stare. “Money? They borrow money; they don’t give it.”

  “Ah—” I thought; but aloud I continued: “They’re prepared to give it now. Mrs. Brown tells me—”

  He lifted his hand with a gesture that cut me short; then he leaned back, and drew a painful breath or two. Beads of moisture came out on his forehead. “If she told you that, it means she’s got more out of Kit. Or out of Kit through you—is that it?” he brought out roughly.

  His clairvoyance frightened me almost as much as his physical distress—and the one seemed, somehow, a function of the other, as though the wearing down of his flesh had made other people’s diaphanous to him, and he could see through it to their hearts. “Stephen—” I began imploringly.

  Again his lifted hand checked me. “No, wait.” He breathed hard again and shut his eyes. Then he opened them and looked into mine. “There’s only one way out of this.”

  “For you to be reasonable.”

  “Call it that if you like. I’ve got to see mother Kit—and without their knowing it.”

  My perplexity grew, and my agitation with it. Could it be that the end of the Browns was in sight? I tried to remember that my first business was to avoid communicating my agitation to Stephen. In a tone that I did my best to keep steady I said: “Nothing could make your mother happier. You’re all she lives for.”

  “She’ll have to find something else soon.”

  “No, no. Only let her come, and she’ll make you well. Mothers work miracles—”

  His inscrutable gaze rested on mine. “So they say. Only, you see, she’s not my mother.”

  He spoke so quietly, in such a low detached tone, that at first the words carried no meaning to me. If he had been excited I should have suspected fever, delirium; but voice and eyes were clear. “Now you understand,” he added.

  I sat beside him stupidly, speechless, unable to think. “I don’t understand anything,” I stammered. Such a possibility as his words suggested had never once occurred to me. Yet he wasn’t delirious, he wasn’t raving—it was I whose brain was reeling as if in fever.

  “Well, I’m not the long-lost child. The Browns are not her Browns. It’s all a lie and an imposture. We faked it up between us, Chrissy and I did—her simplicity made it so cursedly easy for us. Boy didn’t have much to do with it; poor old Boy! He just sat back and took his share … Now you do see,” he repeated, in the cool explanatory tone in which he might have set forth some one else’s shortcomings.

  My mind was still a blur while he poured out, in broken sentences, the details of the conspiracy—the sordid tale of a trio of society adventurers come to the end of their resources, and suddenly clutching at this unheard-of chance of rescue, affluence, peace. But gradually, as I listened, the glare of horror with which he was blinding me turned into a strangely clear and penetrating light, forcing its way into obscure crannies, elucidating the incomprehensible, picking out one by one the links that bound together his fragments of fact. I saw—but what I saw my gaze shrank from.

  “Well,” I heard him say, between his difficult breaths, “now do you begin to believe me?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell. Why on earth,” I broke out, suddenly relieved at the idea, “should you want to see your mother if this isn’t all a ghastly invention?”

  “To tell her what I’ve just told you—make a clean breast of it. Can’t you see?”

  “If that’s the reason, I see you want to kill her—that’s all.”

  He grew paler under his paleness. “Norcutt, I can’t go on like this; I’ve got to tell her. I want to do it at once. I thought I could keep up the lie a little longer—let things go on drifting—but I can’t. I held out because I wanted to get well first, and paint her picture—leave her that to be proud of, anyhow! Now that’s all over, and there’s nothing left but the naked shame …” He opened his eyes and fixed them again on mine. “I want you to bring her here today—without their knowing it. You’ve got to manage it somehow. It’ll be the
first decent thing I’ve done in years.”

  “It will be the most unpardonable,” I interrupted angrily. “The time’s past for trying to square your own conscience. What you’ve got to do now is to go on lying to her—you’ve got to get well, if only to go on lying to her!”

  A thin smile flickered over his face. “I can’t get well.”

  “That’s as it may be. You can spare her, anyhow.”

  “By letting things go on like this?” He lay for a long time silent; then his lips drew up in a queer grimace. “It’ll be horrible enough to be a sort of expiation—”

  “It’s the only one.”

  “It’s the worst.”

  He sank back wearily. I saw that fatigue had silenced him, and wondered if I ought to steal away. My presence could not but be agitating; yet in his present state it seemed almost as dangerous to leave him as to stay. I saw a flask of brandy on the table, a glass beside it. I poured out some brandy and held it to his lips. He emptied the glass slowly, and as his head fell back I heard him say: “Before I knew her I thought I could pull it off … But, you see, her sweetness …”

  “If she heard you say that it would make up for everything.”

  “Even for what I’ve just told you?”

  “Even for that. For God’s sake hold your tongue, and just let her come here and nurse you.”

  He made no answer, but under his lids I saw a tear or two.

  “Let her come—let her come,” I pleaded, taking his dying hand in mine.

  

  XI.

  Nature does not seem to care for dramatic climaxes. Instead of allowing Stephen to die at once, his secret on his lips, she laid on him the harsher task of living on through weary weeks, and keeping back the truth till the end.

  As the result of my visit, he consented, the next day, to be carried back in an ambulance to Mrs. Glenn’s; and when I saw their meeting it seemed to me that ties of blood were frail compared to what drew those two together. After she had fallen on her knees at his bedside, and drawn his head to her breast, I was almost sure he would not speak; and he did not.

  I was able to stay with Mrs. Glenn till Stephen died; then I had to hurry back to my post in Washington. When I took leave of her she told me that she was following on the next steamer with Stephen’s body. She wished her son to have a New York funeral, a funeral like his father’s, at which all their old friends could be present. “Not like poor Phil’s, you know—” and I recalled the importance she had attached to the presence of her husband’s friends at his funeral. “It’s something to remember afterwards,” she said, with dry eyes. “And it will be their only way of knowing my Stephen …” It was of course impossible to exclude Mr. and Mrs. Brown from these melancholy rites; and accordingly they sailed with her.

  If Stephen had recovered she had meant, as I knew, to reopen her New York house; but now that was not to be thought of. She sold the house, and all it contained, and a few weeks later sailed once more for Paris—again with the Browns.

  I had resolved, after Stephen’s death—when the first shock was over—to do what I could toward relieving her of the Browns’ presence. Though I could not tell her the truth about them, I might perhaps help her to effect some transaction which would relieve her of their company. But I soon saw that this was out of the question; and the reason deepened my perplexity. It was simply that the Browns—or at least Mrs. Brown—had become Mrs. Glenn’s chief consolation in her sorrow. The two women, so incessantly at odds while Stephen lived, were now joined in a common desolation. It seemed like profaning Catherine Glenn’s grief to compare Mrs. Brown’s to it; yet, in the first weeks after Stephen’s death, I had to admit that Mrs. Brown mourned him as genuinely, as inconsolably, as his supposed mother. Indeed, it would be nearer the truth to say that Mrs. Brown’s grief was more hopeless and rebellious than the other’s. After all, as Mrs. Glenn said, it was much worse for Chrissy. “She had so little compared to me; and she gave as much, I suppose. Think what I had that she’s never known; those precious months of waiting for him, when he was part of me, when we were one body and one soul. And then, years afterward, when I was searching for him, and knowing all the while I should find him; and after that, our perfect life together—our perfect understanding. All that—there’s all that left to me! And what did she have? Why, when she shows me his little socks and shoes (she’s kept them all so carefully) they’re my baby’s socks and shoes, not hers—and I know she’s thinking of it when we cry over them. I see now that I’ve been unjust to her … and cruel … For he did love me best; and that ought to have made me kinder—”

  Yes; I had to recognise that Mrs. Brown’s grief was as genuine as her rival’s, that she suffered more bleakly and bitterly. Every turn of the strange story had been improbable and incalculable, and this new freak of fate was the most unexpected. But since it brought a softening to my poor friend’s affliction, and offered a new pretext for her self-devotion, I could only hold my tongue and be thankful that the Browns were at last serving some humaner purpose.

  The next time I returned to Paris the strange trio were still together, and still living in Mrs. Glenn’s apartment. Its walls were now hung with Stephen’s paintings and sketches—among them many unfinished attempts at a portrait of Mrs. Glenn—and the one mother seemed as eager as the other to tell me that a well-known collector of modern art had been so struck by their quality that there was already some talk of a posthumous exhibition. Mrs. Brown triumphed peculiarly in the affair. It was she who had brought the collector to see the pictures, she who had always known that Stephen had genius; it was with the Browns’ meagre pennies that he had been able to carry on his studies at Julian’s, long before Mrs. Glenn had appeared. “Catherine doesn’t pretend to know much about art. Do you, my dear? But, as I tell her, when you’re a picture yourself you don’t have to bother about other people’s pictures. There—your hat’s crooked again! Just let me straighten it, darling—” I saw Mrs. Glenn wince a little, as she had winced the day at Les Calanques when Mrs. Brown, with an arch side-glance at me, had given a more artful twist to her friend’s white hair.

  It was evident that time, in drying up the source which had nourished the two women’s sympathy, had revived their fundamental antagonism. It was equally clear, however, that Mrs. Brown was making every effort to keep on good terms with Mrs. Glenn. That substantial benefits thereby accrued to her I had no doubt; but at least she kept up in Catherine’s mind the illusion of the tie between them.

  Mrs. Brown had certainly sorrowed for Stephen as profoundly as a woman of her kind could sorrow; more profoundly, indeed, than I had thought possible. Even now, when she spoke of him, her metallic voice broke, her metallic mask softened. On the rare occasions when I found myself alone with her (and I had an idea she saw to it that they were rare), she spoke so tenderly of Stephen, so affectionately of Mrs. Glenn, that I could only suppose she knew nothing of my last talk with the poor fellow. If she had, she would almost certainly have tried to ensure my silence; unless, as I sometimes imagined, a supreme art led her to feign unawareness. But, as always when I speculated on Mrs. Brown, I ended up against a blank wall.

  The exhibition of Stephen’s pictures took place, and caused (I learned from Mrs. Glenn) a little flutter in the inner circle of connoisseurs. Mrs. Glenn deluged me with newspaper rhapsodies which she doubtless never imagined had been bought. But presently, as a result of the show, a new difference arose between the two women. The pictures had been sufficiently remarked for several purchasers to present themselves, and their offers were so handsome that Mrs. Brown thought they should be accepted. After all, Stephen would have regarded the sale of the pictures as the best proof of his success; if they remained hidden away at Mrs. Glenn’s, she, who had the custody of his name, was obviously dooming it to obscurity. Nevertheless she persisted in refusing. If selling her darling’s pictures was the price of glory, then she must cherish his genius in secret. Could any one imagine that she would ever part with a single stro
ke of his brush? She was his mother; no one else had a voice in the matter. I divined that the struggle between herself and Mrs. Brown had been not only sharp but prolonged, and marked by a painful interchange of taunts. “If it hadn’t been for me,” Mrs. Brown argued, “the pictures would never have existed”; and “If it hadn’t been for me,” the other retorted, “my Stephen would never have existed.” It ended—as I had foreseen—in the adoptive parents accepting from Mrs. Glenn a sum equivalent to the value at which they estimated the pictures. The quarrel quieted down, and a few months later Mrs. Glenn was remorsefully accusing herself of having been too hard on Chrissy.

  So the months passed. With their passage news came to me more rarely; but I gathered from Mrs. Glenn’s infrequent letters that she had been ill, and from her almost illegible writing that her poor hands were stiffening with rheumatism. Finally, a year later, a letter announced that the doctors had warned her against spending her winters in the damp climate of Paris, and that the apartment had been disposed of, and its contents (including, of course, Stephen’s pictures) transported to a villa at Nice. The Browns had found the villa and managed the translation—with their usual kindness. After that there was a long silence.

  It was not until over two years later that I returned to Europe; and as my short holiday was taken in winter, and I meant to spend it in Italy, I took steamer directly to Villefranche. I had not announced my visit to Mrs. Glenn. I was not sure till the last moment of being able to get off; but that was not the chief cause of my silence. Though relations between the incongruous trio seemed to have become harmonious, it was not without apprehension that I had seen Mrs. Glenn leave New York with the Browns. She was old, she was tired and stricken; how long would it be before she became a burden to her beneficiaries? This was what I wanted to find out without giving them time to prepare themselves or their companion for my visit. Mrs. Glenn had written that she wished very particularly to see me, and had begged me to let her know if there were a chance of my coming abroad; but though this increased my anxiety it strengthened my resolve to arrive unannounced, and I merely replied that she could count on seeing me as soon as I was able to get away.