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“LORD! I’ll be glad when this is over!” said Andrée. “And this is Father’s idea of a holiday! The poor thing actually said he envied us!”
Her younger sister was engaged in drawing on her stockings.
“Come on, Andrée!” she said. “We’ll be late for lunch and Mother does hate that so.... No: I suppose this would be a treat for poor Father, after being shut up in a hot office all the time.”
“I’d like to see him stand it for one week!” said Andrée, grimly. “Just for one week, that’s all!”
“And then, of course, it’s cheap,” said the sensible Edna. “I suppose he has to think of that, poor thing, with Bertie going to college and you and your awful Mr. MacGregor. We must be a tremendous expense.”
“I don’t want to be!” cried Andrée. “And I wouldn’t be, either, if he wasn’t so darned obstinate. I’ve told him and told him that I could easily earn enough to pay for my lessons by teaching. Mr. MacGregor says I’m thoroughly qualified, and that he’d help me to get pupils. But no! Father pretends to be so advanced, and says he wants us to be able to earn our own livings, and then when we can, he stops it. He and Mother are both hoping and praying I’ll get married before I have a chance to do anything. But I won’t! I’m going to—”
“Oh, Andrée! For pity’s sake! Not that! Do get your shoes and stockings on! It’s after twelve!”
They were sitting on the bank of a wide, shallow stream running its hasty course down the mountain side; a favourite spot with them. They liked to come there in the morning and with bare feet and skirts pinned up, to pick their way over the stones, with the cold water lapping about their ankles. It was like a broad and deserted highway, lined with trees. On either side were the dark woods, of which they were both a little afraid. They would ascend the stream, “stepping stones,” past the sombre belt of woodland to the wide meadows basking in the sun, and then suddenly the banks grew high and rocky, the stream went out of the sunlight and entered a ravine, gloomy and mysterious, and was no longer a stream but a deep and ice-cold pool, fed by a trickling waterfall. Farther than this they had never gone, the climb up the rocks beside the waterfall would have been a very difficult one, and moreover it was a spot where they didn’t care to linger. City born and bred, they had a sort of horror of this silent, imprisoned place.
The stream—the “crick,” the country people called it, had an unfailing charm for them. They came to it every fine morning and indulged in pursuits which they were a little ashamed of and which they justified by their ennui—an ennui more pretended than real. They talked to each other and to their mother a great deal about the horrible dulness of the little Catskill Mountains summer resort, but they were really very happy in it, and they secretly enjoyed their infantile amusements. They whittled little boats of soft wood and sailed them; they brought tin pails and scooped up the lazy, fat pollywogs that lay along the edges of the shallow pools in long rows, nasty creatures with a sort of horrible fascination about them. Andrée would watch them wriggling sluggishly in the pail for a long time, with the sun shining through their translucent, speckled tails, and sniff the queer primeval smell of them.
“Aren’t they horrible!” she would cry.
“Don’t look at them, idiot!” her sister would say. “You’ll be having nightmares about them again to-night.”
Andrée was very irritating about such matters. She wouldn’t keep away from things and people and facts that troubled and tormented her. That pool, for instance.... She would argue Edna into going there with her and insist upon lingering beside it, looking into the dark depths of the water, standing in its icy shallows, laying her hands against the wet moss-grown rocks, until she became so filled with her absurd dreads and fancies that even the sensible Edna would become infected.
They had been there that morning; they had sat on a fallen tree and stared at the quiet pool, the dark face of the cliff over which the puny trickle of water ran, ran, ran, had been running, just in this way, for God knows how many centuries. And suddenly they had seen a great black snake, swimming rapidly and silently on its way. They had fled in a panic, barefooted over the stones and rough ground, out to the ravine and into the sun again.
Edna had been angry.
“Why will you go there!” she cried. “You’re so morbid!”
There was nothing morbid about Edna; she was a distractingly pretty thing of nineteen, very like her mother in her young days as far as appearance went—small, slight, self-confident, with crisp fair hair like a halo about a flower-like face. She was alert, independent and unsociable; her most profound instinct was to keep silent, to stay alone, to be untouched, undisturbed while her strong spirit grew. She was a disappointment to her mother because she was so difficult, so impossible to influence. She wished to take every new idea and run off with it, to examine it alone, in peace; she never wanted to talk over anything. Nor did she care much for reading. She observed, and she made deductions from her observations, she formed intelligent opinions, she judged people with sane and kindly indifference.
But she did not understand, as Andrée did. Andrée apparently never did any thinking. She simply knew things, spontaneously. She knew what people would do, what they were, she loved them or hated them. And she was forced to discuss everything with everybody, to talk, to think, until her brain was sick and frightened. She couldn’t quite believe anything or quite doubt anything. She was a thin, tall girl of twenty, pale, distrait, not very pretty, but with a face wonderfully mobile and sensitive. There was a perverse charm about her, about her moods, her immature high-mindedness, her terrible dependence upon others. She would ask your opinion, and if it differed from hers she would begin to doubt herself, and if you agreed with her, she was obliged to change her mind....
They had got their shoes and stockings on and set off by a convenient path for the little hotel.
“If only we didn’t have to eat with all those people!” said Andrée, sighing. “It takes my appetite away. I do so hate the noise they make ... and those awful babies!”
Edna laughed at her.
“Poor grandma always used to call you ‘pernicketty.’ And you are, aren’t you? They’re not such bad people.”
“How could they be worse? They’re stupid and vulgar and horrible to look at and horrible to listen to. We wouldn’t think of bothering with such people when we’re at home, and I can’t see why we should here. They’re not any better in the summer time or in the mountains, than they are in the winter, in the city.”
“Mother hates snobbishness—”
“Ha! Does she? She’s the worst sort of snob in the world. She doesn’t like anybody at all. She’s bored with everyone, just as much bored with right people as with wrong ones.”
They had come now to the hotel grounds, and were walking across the lawn with great decorum. And just on time, for a bell rang out with a loud and hostile clamour, and the embroidering ladies on the porch began to collect their work and rise.
Andrée and Edna hurried up to their room for the process of “neatening,” which their mother considered indispensable. She was there, in the adjoining bedroom, standing before the mirror.
“How hot you are!” she said. “Hurry, I’ll wait for you.”
She was a pleasure to the eye, as she always was. She had a well-deserved reputation for being the best-dressed woman in her set, and she took infinite pains to sustain it. She wasn’t by any means beautiful, the promise of her young days had never been fulfilled; she was pale, colourless, except for her bright hair still untouched by grey; she was thin and angular, and her features were as tranquil and expressionless as a statue’s. But the dignity of the small creature! She was absolutely imposing, she had a look of melancholy and resignation, but a melancholy without lassitude, a resignation without weakness. She had a passion for reserve. Even in her limitless devotion to her children she was a little formal, a little aloof. She was certainly in no way tyrannical or severe, but she commanded unfailing respect. They adored her like a goddess, instead of loving her like a human being. She was a perpetual mystery to them.
Poor Claudine! Like a strayed nymph, forever astonished and affrighted at the strange world into which she had been betrayed! She had known no way of adapting herself, she could never feel at home, her one refuge had been to withdraw into herself.
She was courteous and agreeable enough to all her fellow-guests, but she fled from them. She went off every morning after breakfast, her thin form, straight as a dart, charmingly dressed in clear summer colours, a parasol held over her burnished head, and two or three portentous volumes under her arm, to find a secluded spot in the woods where she could read undisturbed. She read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Schopenhauer and Emerson, with ardent attention, marking passages, meditating on them, trying to appease and fortify her desperate spirit.
The idea of her being desperate would have seemed ludicrous to anyone who knew her. She was calm, so self-possessed, so well-poised! She had a great social success in her own milieu, she was something of an authority upon correctness in dress and manner. She was moreover a lady of unblemished reputation, she was never even indiscreet or stupid. She was quite perfect. Not even the resentful Gilbert could find a flaw in her public demeanour.
And yet, in her own heart, she was bewildered and lost.