"The
Pelican."
A short
story by Edith Wharton
SHE was very pretty when I first knew her,
with the sweet straight nose and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity,
humanized by a dimple that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said
which possessed the outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality.
For the dear lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the
real thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic
problem.
I do not think that nature had meant her to
be "intellectual"; but what can a poor thing do, whose husband has
died of drink when her baby is hardly six months old, and who finds that her
coral necklace and her grandfather's edition of the British Dramatists are
inadequate to the demands of the creditors?
Her mother, the celebrated Irene Astarte
Pratt, had written a poem in blank verse on "The Fall of Man"; one of
her aunts was dean of a girl's college; another had translated Euripides --
with such a family, the poor child's fate was sealed in advance. The only way
of paying her husband's debts and keeping the baby clothed was to be
intellectual; and, after some hesitation as to the form that her mental
activity was to take, it was unanimously decided that she was to give lectures.
They began by being drawing-room lectures.
The first time I saw her she was standing by the piano, against a flippant
background of Dresden china and photographs, telling a roomful of women
preoccupied with their spring bonnets all that she thought she knew about Greek
art. The ladies assembled to hear her had given me to understand that she was
"doing it for the baby," and this fact, together with the shortness
of her upper lip and the bewildering co-operation of her dimple, disposed me to
listen leniently to her dissertation. Happily, at that time Greek art was
still, if I may use the phrase, easily handled; it was as simple as walking
down a museum-gallery lined with pleasant familiar Venuses and Apollos. All the
later complications -- the archaic and archaistic conundrums; the influences of
Assyria and Asia Minor; the conflicting attributions and the wrangles of the
erudite -- still slumbered in the bosom of the future "scientific
critic." Greek art in those days began with Phidias and ended with the
Apollo Belvedere; and a child could travel from one to the other without danger
of losing its way.
Mrs. Amyot had two fatal gifts: a capacious
but inaccurate memory, and an extraordinary fluency of speech. There was
nothing that she did not remember -- wrongly; but her halting facts were
swathed in so many layers of cotton-wool eloquence that their infirmities were
imperceptible to her friendly critics. Besides, she had been taught Greek by
the aunt who had translated Euripides; and the mere sound of the ais and ois
which she now and then not unskilfully let slip (correcting herself, of course,
with a start, and indulgently mistranslating the phrase), struck awe to the
hearts of ladies whose only "accomplishment" was French -- if you
didn't speak too quickly.
I had then but a momentary glimpse of Mrs.
Amyot, but a few months later I came upon her again in the New England
university town where the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt lived on the summit of
a local Parnassus, with lesser muses and college professors respectfully grouped
on the lower ledges of the sacred declivity. Mrs. Amyot, who, after her
husband's death, had returned to the maternal roof (even during her father's
lifetime the roof had been distinctively maternal), Mrs. Amyot, thanks to her
upper lip, her dimple, and her Greek, was already ensconced in a snug hollow of
the Parnassian slope.
After the lecture was over it happened that
I walked home with Mrs. Amyot. Judging from the incensed glances of two or
three learned gentlemen who were hovering on the door-step when we emerged, I
inferred that Mrs. Amyot, at that period, did not often walk home alone; but I
doubt whether any of my discomfited rivals, whatever his claims to favor, was
ever treated to so ravishing a mixture of shyness and self-abandonment, of sham
erudition and real teeth and hair, as it was my privilege to enjoy. Even at the
incipience of her public career Mrs. Amyot had a tender eye for strangers, as
possible links with successive centres of culture to which in due course the torch
of Greek art might be handed on.
She began by telling me that she had never
been so frightened in her life. She knew, of course, how dreadfully learned I
was, and when, just as she was going to begin, her hostess had whispered to her
that I was in the room, she had felt ready to sink through the floor. Then
(with a flying dimple) she had remembered Emerson's line -- wasn't it
Emerson's? -- that beauty is its own excuse for seeing, and that had made her
feel a little more confident, since she was sure that no one saw beauty more
vividly than she -- as a child she used to sit for hours gazing at an Etruscan
vase on the bookcase in the library while her sisters played with their dolls
-- and if seeing beauty was the only excuse one needed for talking about it,
why, she was sure I would make allowances and not be too critical and
sarcastic, especially if, as she thought probable, I had heard of her having
lost her poor husband, and how she had to do it for the baby.
Being over-abundantly assured of my sympathy
on these points, she went on to say that she had always wanted so much to
consult me about her lectures. Of course, one subject wasn't enough (this view
of the limitations of Greek art as a "subject" gave me a startling
idea of the rate at which a successful lecturer might exhaust the universe);
she must find others; she had not ventured on any as yet, but she had thought
of Tennyson -- didn't I love Tennyson? She worshipped him so that she was sure
she could help others to understand him; or what did I think of a
"course" on Raphael or Michaelangelo -- or on the heroines of
Shakespeare? There were some fine steel-engravings of Raphael's Madonnas and of
the Sistine ceiling in her mother's library, and she had seen Miss Cushman in
several Shakespearian roles, so that on these subjects also she felt qualified
to speak with authority.
When we reached her mother's door she begged
me to come in and talk the matter over; she wanted me to see the baby -- she
felt as though I should understand her better if I saw the baby -- and the
dimple flashed through a tear.
The fear of encountering the author of
"The Fall of Man," combined with the opportune recollection of a
dinner engagement, made me evade this appeal with the promise of returning on
the morrow. On the morrow, I left too early to redeem my promise; and for
several years afterward I saw no more of Mrs. Amyot.
My calling at that time took me at irregular
intervals from one to another of our larger cities, and as Mrs. Amyot was also
peripatetic it was inevitable that sooner or later we should cross each other's
path. It was therefore without surprise that, one snowy afternoon in Boston, I
learned from the lady with whom I chanced to be lunching that, as soon as the
meal was over, I was to be taken to hear Mrs. Amyot lecture.
"On Greek art?" I suggested.
"Oh, you've heard her then? No, this is
one of the series called 'Homes and Haunts of the Poets.' Last week we had
Wordsworth and the Lake Poets, to-day we are to have Goethe and Weimar. She is
a wonderful creature -- all the women of her family are geniuses. You know, of
course, that her mother was Irene Astarte Pratt, who wrote a poem on 'The Fall
of Man'; N. P. Willis called her the female Milton of America. One of Mrs.
Amyot's aunts has translated Eurip -- "
"And is she as pretty as ever?" I
irrelevantly interposed.
My hostess stared. "She is excessively
modest and retiring. She says it is actual suffering for her to speak in
public. You know she only does it for the baby."
Punctually at the hour appointed, we took
our seats in a lecture-hall full of strenuous females in ulsters. Mrs. Amyot
was evidently a favorite with these austere sisters, for every corner was
crowded, and as we entered a pale usher with an educated mispronunciation was
setting forth to several dejected applicants the impossibility of supplying
them with seats.
Our own were happily so near the front that
when the curtains at the back of the platform parted, and Mrs. Amyot appeared,
I was at once able to establish a rapid comparison between the lady placidly
dimpling to the applause of her public and the shrinking drawing-room orator of
my earlier recollections.
Mrs. Amyot was as pretty as ever, and there
was the same curious discrepancy between the freshness of her aspect and the
staleness of her theme, but something was gone of the blushing unsteadiness
with which she had fired her first random shots at Greek art. It was not that
the shots were less uncertain, but that she now had an air of assuming that,
for her purpose, the bull's-eye was everywhere, so that there was no need to be
flustered in taking aim. This assurance had so facilitated the flow of her
circumlocutious diction that, as I listened, I had a curious sense that she was
performing a trick analogous to that of the conjuror who pulls hundreds of
yards of white paper out of his mouth. From a large assortment of stock
adjectives she chose, with unerring deftness and rapidity, the one which taste
and discrimination would most surely have rejected, fitting out her subject, as
it were, with a whole wardrobe of slop-shot epithets irrelevant in cut and
size. To the invaluable knack of not disturbing the association of ideas in her
audience, she added the gift of what may be called a confidential manner -- so
that her fluent generalizations about Goethe and his place in literature (the
lecture was, of course, manufactured out of Lewes's book) had the flavor of
personal experience, of views sympathetically exchanged with her audience on
the best way of knitting children's socks, or of putting up preserves for the
winter. It was, I am sure, to this personal accent -- the moral equivalent of
her dimple -- that Mrs. Amyot owed her prodigious, her irrational success. It
was her art of transposing second-hand ideas into first-hand emotions that so
endeared her to her feminine listeners.
To anyone not in search of
"documents" Mrs. Amyot's success was hardly of a kind to make her
more interesting, and my curiosity flagged with the growing conviction that the
"suffering" entailed upon her by public speaking was at most a
retrospective pang. I was sure that, as a matter of fact, she had reached the
point of measuring and enjoying her effects, of deliberately manipulating her
public; and there must indeed have been a certain exhilaration in attaining
results so considerable by means involving so little conscious effort. Mrs.
Amyot's art was simply an extension of coquetry: she flirted with her audience.
In this mood of enlightened skepticism I
responded but languidly to my hostess's suggestion that I should go with her
that evening to see Mrs. Amyot. The aunt who had translated Euripides was at
home on Saturday evenings, and one met "thoughtful" people there, my
hostess explained: it was one of the intellectual centres of Boston. My mood
remained distinctly resentful of any connection between Mrs. Amyot and
intellectuality, and I declined to go; but the next day I met Mrs. Amyot in the
street.
She stopped me reproachfully. She had heard
that I was in Boston; why had I not come last night? She had been told that I
was at her lecture; and it had frightened her -- yes, really, almost as much as
years ago in Hillbridge. She never could get over that stupid shyness, and the
whole business was as distasteful to her as ever; but what could she do? There
was the baby -- he was a big boy now, and boys were so expensive! But did I
really think she had improved the least little bit? And why wouldn't I come
home with her now, and see the boy, and tell her frankly what I had thought of
the lecture? She had plenty of flattery -- people were so kind, and every one
knew that she did it for the baby -- but what she felt the need of was
criticism, severe, discriminating criticism like mine -- oh, she knew that I
was dreadfully discriminating!
I went home with her and saw the boy. In the
early heat of her Tennyson-worship Mrs. Amyot had christened him Lancelot, and
he looked it. Perhaps, however, it was his black velvet dress and the
exasperating length of his yellow curls, together with the fact of his having
been taught to recite Browning to visitors, that raised to fever heat the
itching of my palms in his Infant-Samuel-like presence. I have since had reason
to think that he would have preferred to be called Billy, and to hunt cats with
the other boys in the block: his curls and his poetry were simply another
outlet for Mrs. Amyot's irrepressible coquetry.
But if Lancelot was not genuine, his
mother's love for him was. It justified everything -- the lectures were for the
baby, after all. I had not been ten minutes in the room before I was pledged to
help Mrs. Amyot to carry out her triumphant fraud. If she wanted to lecture on
Plato she should -- Plato must take his chance like the rest of us! There was
no use, of course, in being "discriminating." I preserved sufficient
reason to avoid that pitfall, but I suggested "subjects" and made
lists of books for her with a fatuity that became more obvious as time attenuated
the remembrance of her smile; I even remember thinking that some men might have
cut the knot by marrying her, but I handed over Plato as a hostage, and escaped
by the afternoon train.
The next time I saw her was in New York,
when she had become so fashionable that it was a part of the whole duty of
woman to be seen at her lectures. The lady who suggested that of course I ought
to go and hear Mrs. Amyot, was not very clear about anything except that she
was perfectly lovely, and had had a horrid husband, and was doing it to support
her boy. The subject of the discourse (I think it proved to be on Ruskin) was
clearly of minor importance, not only to my friend, but to the throng of
well-dressed and absent-minded ladies who rustled in late, dropped their muffs
and pocket-books, and undisguisedly lost themselves in the study of each
other's apparel. They received Mrs. Amyot with warmth, but she evidently
represented a social obligation like going to church, rather than any more
personal interest; in fact, I suspect that every one of the ladies would have
remained away, had it been ascertainable that none of the others were coming.
Whether Mrs. Amyot was disheartened by the
lack of sympathy between herself and her hearers, or whether the sport of
arousing it had become a task, she certainly imparted her platitudes with less
convincing warmth than of old. Her voice had the same confidential inflections,
but it was like a voice reproduced by a gramophone: the real woman seemed far
away. She had grown stouter without losing her dewy freshness, and her smart
gown might have been taken to indicate either the potentialities of a settled
income, or a politic concession to the taste of her hearers. As I listened I
reproached myself for ever having suspected her of self-deception in declaring
that she took no pleasure in her work. I was sure now that she did it only for
Lancelot, and judging from the size of her audience and the price of the
tickets I concluded that Lancelot must be receiving a liberal education.
I was living in New York that winter, and in
the rotation of dinners I found myself one evening at Mrs. Amyot's side. The
dimple came out at my greeting as punctually as a cuckoo in a Swiss clock and I
detected the same automatic quality in the tone in which she made her usual
pretty demand for advice. She was like a musical-box charged with popular airs.
They succeeded one another with breathless rapidity, but there was a moment
after each when the cylinders scraped and whizzed.
Mrs. Amyot, as I found when I called upon
her, was living in a pleasant flat, with a sunny sitting-room full of flowers
and a tea-table that had the air of expecting visitors. She owned that she had
been ridiculously successful. It was delightful, of course, on Lancelot's
account. Lancelot had been sent to the best school in the country, and if
things went well and people didn't tire of his silly mother he was to go to
Harvard afterward. During the next two or three years Mrs. Amyot kept her flat
in New York, and radiated art and literature upon the suburbs. I saw her now
and then, always stouter, better dressed, more successful and more automatic:
she had become a lecturing-machine.
I went abroad for a year or two and when I
came back she had disappeared. I asked several people about her, but life had
closed over her. She had been last heard of as lecturing -- still lecturing --
but no one seemed to know when or where.
It was in Boston that I found her at last,
forlornly swaying to the oscillations of an overhead strap in a crowded trolley-car.
Her face had so changed that I lost myself in a startled reckoning of the time
that had elapsed since our parting. She spoke to me shyly, as though aware of
my hurried calculation, and conscious that in five years she ought not to have
altered so much as to upset my notion of time. Then she seemed to set it down
to her dress, for she nervously gathered her cloak over a gown that asked only
to be concealed, and shrank into a vacant seat behind the line of prehensile
bipeds blocking the aisle of the car.
It was perhaps because she so obviously
avoided me that I felt for the first time that I might be of use to her; and
when she left the car I made no excuse for following her.
She said nothing of needing advice and did
not ask me to walk home with her, concealing, as we talked, her transparent
preoccupations under the mask of a sudden interest in all that I had been doing
since she had last seen me. Of what concerned her, I learned only that Lancelot
was well and that for the present she was not lecturing -- she was tired and
her doctor had ordered her to rest. On the doorstep of a shabby house she
paused and held out her hand. She had been so glad to see me and perhaps if I
were in Boston again -- the tired dimple, as it were, bowed me out and closed
the door upon the conclusion of the phrase.
Two or three weeks later, at my club in New
York, I found a letter from her. In it she owned that she was troubled, that of
late she had been unsuccessful, and that, if I chanced to be coming back to
Boston, and could spare her a little of that invaluable advice which -- . A few
days later the advice was at her disposal.
She told me frankly what had happened. Her
public had grown tired of her. She had seen it coming on for some time, and was
shrewd enough in detecting the causes. She had more rivals than formerly --
younger women, she admitted, with a smile which could still afford to be
generous -- and then her audiences had grown more critical and consequently
more exacting. Lecturing -- as she understood it -- used to be simple enough.
You chose your topic -- Raphael, Shakespeare, Gothic Architecture, or some such
big familiar "subject" -- and read up about it for a week or so at
the Athenaeum or the Astor Library, and then told your audience what you had
read. Now, it appeared, that simple process was no longer adequate. People had
tired of familiar "subjects"; it was the fashion to be interested in
things that one hadn't always known about -- natural selection, animal
magnetism, sociology and comparative folk-lore; while, in literature, the
demand had become equally difficult to meet, since Matthew Arnold had
introduced the habit of studying the "influence" of one author on
another. She had tried lecturing on influences, and had done very well as long
as the public was satisfied with the tracing of such obvious influences as that
of Turner on Ruskin, of Schiller on Goethe, of Shakespeare on the English
drama; but such investigations had soon lost all charm for her
too-sophisticated audiences, who now demanded either that the influence or the
influenced should be absolutely unknown, or that there should be no perceptible
connection between the two. The zest of the performance lay in the measure of
ingenuity with which the lecturer established a relation between two people who
had probably never heard of each other, much less read each other's works. A
pretty Miss Williams with red hair had, for instance, been lecturing with great
success on the influence of the Rosicrucians upon the poetry of Keats, while
somebody else had given a "course" on the influence of St. Thomas
Aquinas upon Professor Huxley.
Mrs. Amyot, warmed by my evident
participation in her distress, went on to say that the growing demand for
evolution was what most troubled her. Her grandfather had been a pillar of the
Presbyterian ministry, and the idea of her lecturing on Darwin or Herbert
Spencer was deeply shocking to her mother and aunts. In one sense the family
had staked its literary as well as its spiritual hopes on the literal
inspiration of Genesis: what became of "The Fall of Man" in the light
of modern exegesis?
The upshot of it was that she had ceased to
lecture because she could no longer sell tickets enough to pay for the hire of
a lecture-hall; and as for the managers, they wouldn't look at her. She had
tried her luck all through the Eastern States and as far South as Washington;
but it was of no use, and unless she could get hold of some new subjects -- or,
better still, of some new audiences -- she must simply go out of the business.
That would mean the failure of all she had worked for, since Lancelot would
have to leave Harvard. She paused, and wept some of the unbecoming tears that
spring from real grief. Lancelot, it appeared, was to be a genius. He had
passed his opening examinations brilliantly; he had "literary gifts";
he had written beautiful poetry, much of which his mother had copied out in
reverentially slanting characters upon the pages of a velvet-bound volume which
she drew from a locked drawer.
Lancelot's verse struck me as nothing more
alarming than growing-pains; but it was not to learn this that she had summoned
me. What she wanted was to be assured that he was worth working for, an
assurance which I managed to convey by the simple strategy of remarking that
the poems reminded me of Swinburne -- and so they did, as well as of Browning, Tennyson,
Rossetti, William Morris, and all the other poets who supply young authors with
original inspirations.
This point being satisfactorily established,
it remained to be decided by what means his mother was, in the French phrase,
to pay herself the luxury of a poet. It was obvious that this indulgence could
be bought only with counterfeit coin, and that the one way of helping Mrs.
Amyot was to become a party to the circulation of such currency. My fetish of
intellectual integrity went down like a ninepin before the appeal of a woman no
longer young and distinctly foolish, but full of those dear contradictions and
irrelevances that will always make flesh and blood prevail against a syllogism.
When I took leave of Mrs. Amyot I had promised her a dozen letters to Western
universities and had half-pledged myself to sketch out for her a lecture on the
reconciliation of science and religion.
In the West she achieved a success which for
a year or more embittered my perusal of the morning papers. The fascination
which lures the murderer back to the scene of his crime drew my eye to every
paragraph celebrating Mrs. Amyot's last brilliant lecture on the influence of
something upon somebody; and her own letters -- she overwhelmed me with them --
spared me no detail of the entertainment given in her honor by the Palimpsest
Club of Omaha or of her reception at the University of Leadville. The college
professors were especially kind: she assured me that she had never before met
with such discriminating sympathy. I winced under the adjective, which cast a
sudden light upon the vast machinery of fraud that I had set in motion. All
over my native land, men of hitherto unblemished integrity were conniving with
me in urging their friends to go and hear Mrs. Amyot lecture on the
reconciliation of science and religion! My only hope was that, somewhere among
the number of my accomplices, Mrs. Amyot might find one who would marry her in
the defense of his literary convictions.
None, apparently, resorted to such heroic measures;
for about two years later I was startled by the announcement that Mrs. Amyot
was lecturing in Trenton, N. J., on modern theosophy in the light of the Vedas.
The following week she was at Newark, discussing Schopenhauer in the light of
recent psychology. The week after that I was on the deck of an ocean steamer,
reconsidering my share in Mrs. Amyot's triumphs with the impartiality with
which one views an episode that is being left behind at the rate of twenty
knots an hour. After all, I had been helping a mother to educate her son.
The next decade of my life was spent in
Europe, and when I came home the recollection of Mrs. Amyot had become as
inoffensive as one of those pathetic ghosts who are said to strive in vain to
make themselves visible to the living. I did not even notice the fact that I no
longer heard her spoken of; she had dropped like a dead leaf from the bough of
memory.
A year or two after my return I was
condemned to one of the worst punishments that a worker can undergo -- an enforced
holiday. The doctors who pronounced the inhuman sentence decreed that it should
be worked out in the South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my
thermometer and my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another. In
the vast and melancholy sea of my dis-occupation I clutched like a drowning man
at any human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory
interest in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my
fellow-sufferers; but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I clung with
undiscriminating enthusiasm.
In no other way can I explain, as I look
back upon it, the importance which I attached to the leisurely confidences of a
new arrival with a brown beard who, tilted back at my side on a hotel veranda
hung with roses, imparted to me one afternoon the simple annals of his past.
There was nothing in the tale to kindle the most inflammable imagination, and
though the man had a pleasant frank face and a voice differing agreeably from
the shrill inflections of our fellow-lodgers, it is probable that under
different conditions his discursive history of successful business ventures in
a Western city would have affected me somewhat in the manner of a lullaby.
Even at the time I was not sure that I liked
his agreeable voice. It had a sonorous assertiveness out of keeping with the
humdrum character of his recital, as though a breeze engaged in shaking out a
table-cloth should have fancied itself inflating a banner. But this criticism
may have been a mere mark of my own fastidious humor, for the man seemed a
simple fellow, satisfied with his middling fortunes, and already (he was not
much past thirty) deep-sunk in conjugal content.
He had just entered upon an anecdote
connected with the cutting of his eldest boy's teeth, when a lady whom I knew,
returning from her late drive, paused before us for a moment in the twilight,
with the smile which is the feminine equivalent of beads to savages.
"Won't you take a ticket?" she
said, sweetly.
Of course I would take a ticket -- but for
what? I ventured to inquire.
"Oh, that's so good of you -- for the
lecture this evening. You needn't go, you know; we are none of us going; most
of us have been through it already at Aiken and at Saint Augustine and at Palm
Beach. I've given away my tickets to some new people who've just come from the
North, and some of us are going to send our maids, just to fill up the
room."
"And may I ask to whom you are going to
pay this delicate attention?"
"Oh, I thought you knew -- to poor Mrs.
Amyot. She's been lecturing all over the South this winter; she's simply
haunted me ever since I left New York -- and we had six weeks of her at Bar
Harbor last summer! One has to take tickets, you know, because she's a widow
and does it for her son -- to pay for his education. She's so plucky and nice
about it, and talks about him in such a touching unaffected way, that everybody
is sorry for her, and we all simply ruin ourselves in tickets. I do hope that
boy's nearly educated!"
"Mrs. Amyot? Mrs. Amyot?" I
repeated. "Is she still educating her son?"
"Oh, do you know about her? Has she
been at it long? There's some comfort in that, for I suppose when the boy's
provided for the poor thing will be able to take a rest -- and give us
one!"
She laughed and extended her hand.
"Here's your ticket. Did you say tickets -- two? Oh, thanks. Of course you
needn't go."
"But I mean to go. Mrs. Amyot is an old
friend of mine."
"Do you really? That's awfully good of
you. Perhaps I'll go too if I can persuade Charlie and the others to come. And
I wonder" -- in a well-directed aside -- "if your friend -- ?"
I telegraphed her under cover of the dusk
that my friend was of too recent standing to be drawn into her charitable
toils, and she masked her mistake under a rattle of friendly adjurations not to
be late, and to be sure to keep a seat for her, as she had quite made up her
mind to go even if Charlie and the others wouldn't.
The flutter of her skirts subsided in the
distance, and my neighbor, who had half turned away to light a cigar, made no
effort to reopen the conversation. At length, fearing that he might have
overheard the allusion to himself, I ventured to ask if he were going to the
lecture that evening.
"Much obliged -- I have a ticket,"
he said, abruptly.
This struck me as in such bad taste that I
made no answer; and it was he who spoke next.
"Did I understand you to say that you
were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot's?"
"I think I may claim to be, if it is
the same Mrs. Amyot whom I had the pleasure of knowing many years ago. My Mrs.
Amyot used to lecture too -- "
"To pay for her son's education?"
"I believe so."
"Well -- see you later."
He got up and walked into the house.
In the hotel drawing-room that evening there
was but a meagre sprinkling of guests, among whom I discovered my brown-bearded
friend sitting alone on a sofa, with his head against the wall. It was
certainly not curiosity to see Mrs. Amyot which had impelled him to attend the
performance, for it would have been impossible for him, without shifting his
position, to command the improvised platform at the end of the room. When I
looked at him he seemed lost in contemplation of the chandelier.
The lady from whom I had purchased my
tickets fluttered in late, unattended by Charlie and the others, and assuring
me that she should scream if we had the lecture on Ibsen -- she had heard it
three times already that winter. A glance at the programme reassured her: it
informed us (in the lecturer's own slanting hand) that Mrs. Amyot was to
lecture on the Cosmogony.
After a long pause, during which the small
audience coughed and moved its chairs and showed signs of regretting that it
had come, the door opened, and Mrs. Amyot stepped upon the platform. Ah, poor
lady!
Someone said "Hush!" the coughing
and chair-shifting subsided, and she began.
It was like looking at one's self early in
the morning in a cracked mirror. I had no idea that I had grown so old. As for
Lancelot, he must have a beard. A beard? The word struck me, and without
knowing why I glanced across the room at my bearded friend on the sofa. Oddly
enough he was looking at me, with a half-defiant, half-sullen expression; and
as our glances crossed, and his fell, the conviction came to me that he was
Lancelot.
I don't remember a word of the lecture; and
yet there were enough of them to have filled a good-sized dictionary. The
stream of Mrs. Amyot's eloquence had become a flood: one had the despairing
sense that she had sprung a leak, and that until the plumber came there was
nothing to be done about it.
The plumber came at length, in the shape of
a clock striking ten; my companion, with a sigh of relief, drifted away in
search of Charlie and the others; the audience scattered with the precipitation
of people who had discharged a duty; and, without surprise, I found my brown-bearded
acquaintance at my elbow.
We stood alone in the big bare-floored room,
under the flaring chandelier.
"I think you told me this afternoon
that you were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot's?" he began awkwardly.
I assented.
"Will you come in and see her?"
"Now? I shall be very glad to, if --
"
"She's ready; she's expecting
you," he interposed.
He offered no further explanation, and I
followed him in silence. He led me down the long corridor, and pushed open the
door of a sitting-room.
"Mother," he said, closing the
door after we had entered, "here's the gentleman who says he used to know
you."
Mrs. Amyot, who sat in an easy-chair
stirring a cup of bouillon, looked up with a start. She had evidently not seen
me in the audience, and her son's description had failed to convey my identity.
I saw a frightened look in her eyes; then, like a frost flower on a
window-pane, the dimple expanded on her wrinkled cheek, and she held out her
hand to me.
"I'm so glad," she said, "so
glad!"
She turned to her son, who stood watching
us. "You must have told Lancelot all about me -- you've known me so
long!"
"I haven't had time to talk to your son
-- since I knew he was your son," I explained.
Her brow cleared. "Then you haven't had
time to say anything very dreadful?" she said, with a laugh.
"It is he who has been saying dreadful
things," I returned, trying to fall in with her tone.
I saw my mistake. "What things?"
she faltered.
"Making me feel how old I am by telling
me about his children."
"My grandchildren!" she exclaimed,
with a blush.
"Well, if you choose to put it
so."
She laughed again, vaguely, and was silent.
I hesitated a moment, and then put out my hand.
"I see that you are tired. I shouldn't have
ventured to come in at this hour if your son -- "
The son stepped between us. "Yes, I
asked him to come," he said to his mother, in his clear self-assertive
voice. " I haven't told him anything yet; but you've got to -- now. That's
what I brought him for."
His mother straightened herself, but I saw
her eye waver.
"Lancelot -- " she began.
"Mr. Amyot," I said, turning to
the young man, "if your mother will allow me to come back to-morrow, I
shall be very glad -- "
He struck his hand hard against the table on
which he was leaning.
"No, sir! It won't take long, but it's
got to be said now."
He moved nearer to his mother, and I saw his
lip twitch under his beard. After all, he was younger and less sure of himself
than I had fancied.
"See here, mother," he went on,
"there's something here that's got to be cleared up, and as you say this
gentleman is an old friend of yours it had better be cleared up in his
presence. Maybe he can help explain it -- and if he can't, it's got to be
explained to him."
Mrs. Amyot's lips moved, but she made no
sound. She glanced at me helplessly and reseated herself. My early inclination
to thrash Lancelot was beginning to reassert itself. I took up my hat and moved
toward the door.
"Mrs. Amyot is certainly under no
obligation to explain anything whatever to me," I said, curtly.
"Well! She's under an obligation to me,
then -- to explain something in your presence." He turned to her again.
"Do you know what the people in this hotel are saying? Do you know what he
thinks -- what they all think? That you're doing this lecturing to support me
-- to pay for my education! They say you go round telling them so. That's what
they buy the tickets for -- they do it out of charity. Ask him if it isn't what
they say -- ask him if they weren't joking about it on the piazza before
dinner. The others think I'm a little boy, but he's known you for years, and he
must have known how old I was. He must have known it wasn't to pay for my
education!"
He stood before her with his hands clenched,
the veins beating in his temples. She had grown very pale, and her cheeks
looked hollow. When she spoke her voice had an odd click in it.
"If -- if these ladies and gentlemen
have been coming to my lectures out of charity, I see nothing to be ashamed of
in that -- " she faltered.
"If they've been coming out of charity
to me," he retorted, "don't you see you've been making me a party to
a fraud? Isn't there any shame in that?" His forehead reddened.
"Mother! Can't you see the shame of letting people think that I was a d --
-beat, who sponged on you for my keep? Let alone making us both the
laughing-stock of every place you go to!"
"I never did that, Lancelot!"
"Did what?"
"Made you a laughing-stock -- "
He stepped close to her and caught her
wrist.
"Will you look me in the face and swear
you never told people that you were doing this lecturing business to support
me?"
There was a long silence. He dropped her
wrist, and she lifted a limp handkerchief to her frightened eyes. "I did
do it -- to support you -- to educate you" -- she sobbed.
"We're not talking about what you did
when I was a boy. Everybody who knows me knows I've been a grateful son. Have I
ever taken a penny from you since I left college ten years ago?"
"I never said you had! How can you
accuse your mother of such wickedness, Lancelot?"
"Have you never told anybody in this
hotel -- or anywhere else in the last ten years -- that you were lecturing to
support me? Answer me that!"
"How can you," she wept,
"before a stranger?"
"Haven't you said such things about me
to strangers?" he retorted.
"Lancelot!"
"Well -- answer me, then. Say you
haven't, mother!" His voice broke unexpectedly and he took her hand with a
gentler touch. "I'll believe anything you tell me," he said, almost
humbly.
She mistook his tone and raised her head
with a rash clutch at dignity.
"I think you had better ask this
gentleman to excuse you first."
"No, by God, I won't!" he shouted.
"This gentleman says he knows all about you and I mean him to know all
about me too. I don't mean that he or anybody else under this roof shall go on
thinking for another twenty-four hours that a cent of their money has ever gone
into my pockets since I was old enough to shift for myself. And he sha'n't
leave this room till you've made that clear to him."
He stepped back as he spoke and put his
shoulders against the door.
"My dear young gentleman," I said,
politely, "I shall leave this room exactly when I see fit to do so -- and
that is now. I have already told you that Mrs. Amyot owes me no explanation of
her conduct."
"But I owe you an explanation of mine
-- you and every one who has bought a single one of her lecture tickets. Do you
suppose a man who's been through what I went through while that woman was
talking to you in the porch before dinner is going to hold his tongue, and not
attempt to justify himself? No decent man is going to sit down under that sort
of thing. It's enough to ruin his character. If you're my mother's friend, you
owe it to me to hear what I've got to say."
He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his
forehead.
"Good God, mother!" he burst out
suddenly, "what did you do it for? Haven't you had every thing you wanted
ever since I was able to pay for it? Haven't I paid you back every cent you
spent on me when I was in college? Have I ever gone back on you since I was big
enough to work?" He turned to me with a laugh. "I thought she did it
to amuse herself -- and because there was such a demand for her lectures. Such
a demand! That's what she always told me. When we asked her to come out and
spend this winter with us in Minneapolis, she wrote back that she couldn't
because she had engagements all through the South, and her manager wouldn't let
her off. That's the reason why I came all the way on here to see her. We
thought she was the most popular lecturer in the United States, my wife and I
did! We were awfully proud of it too, I can tell you." He dropped into a
chair, still laughing.
"How can you, Lancelot, how can
you!" His mother, forgetful of my presence, was clinging to him with
tentative caresses. "When you didn't need the money any longer I spent it
all on the children -- you know I did."
"Yes, on lace christening dresses and
life-size rocking-horses with real manes! The kind of thing that children can't
do without."
"Oh, Lancelot, Lancelot -- I loved them
so! How can you believe such falsehoods about me?"
"What falsehoods about you?"
"That I ever told anybody such dreadful
things?"
He put her back gently, keeping his eyes on
hers. "Did you never tell anybody in this house that you were lecturing to
support your son?"
Her hands dropped from his shoulders, and
she flashed round upon me in sudden anger.
"I know what I think of people who call
themselves friends and who come between a mother and her son!"
"Oh, mother, mother!" he groaned.
I went up to him and laid my hand on his
shoulder.
"My dear man," I said, "don't
you see the uselessness of prolonging this?"
"Yes, I do," he answered,
abruptly, and before I could forestall his movement he rose and walked out of
the room.
There was a long silence, measured by the
decreasing reverberations of his footsteps down the wooden floor of the
corridor.
When they ceased I approached Mrs. Amyot,
who had sunk into her chair. I held out my hand and she took it without a trace
of resentment on her ravaged face.
"I sent his wife a seal-skin jacked at
Christmas!" she said, with the tears running down her cheeks.