XI Vicarious Living
I
Hal Marksley called regularly in his car to take the two girls to school. Theo, in the rôle of chaperone, was novel, to say the least. Occasionally he and Eileen went for long rides in the country when classes were over. Once they were delayed by the amusing annoyance of three punctures, and it was dinner time when they neared home. Hal took the precaution to leave the roadster on Grant Drive, traversing the three short blocks to Elm Street on foot. On other occasions, when there was no danger of encountering the men-folk of the family, Mrs. Trench would invite him in for lemonade and cake, after which she would command Eileen to play her latest violin piece—usually a bravura of technique, quite as incomprehensible to Mrs. Trench’s accustomed ears as to Hal’s—during which the youth would drum the window sill with impatient fingers.
It was understood between the young people that Mrs. Ascott alone was in the secret, and that the engagement ring had been placed with some of her valuables in Dr. Schubert’s vault, against the time when it would be safe to display it. There was one drop of bitter in Eileen’s great happiness. Her father. Even since her talk with Judith, she had been conscious of something essentially dishonourable in her conduct. She was beginning to look at her father with awakened eyes. He had always been a person of little consequence in his home. Lavinia was the dynamo that drove the plant. David was a belt or a fly-wheel, a driving rod or some such nonessential—easily replaced if he should break or rust. But David Trench would never rust. His wife kept him going at such a rate that a high polish was his only alternative. Rust gathers on unused metal. Eileen wondered what her father was like—inside. What her mother was like, for that matter. David talked little and Lavinia talked all the time, and the revelation of silence was, if anything, more informing than that of incessant chatter.
Mrs. Ascott might win Lary over to a reluctant acceptance of the engagement; but that would have small bearing on the problem of her father. It was the way with pliant natures. You can bend them without in the least influencing their ultimate resistance. Lavinia might be shattered by a well directed blow, whereas David would yield courteous response. There might be a dent in his feelings, but his convictions would remain as they were.
II
One Friday afternoon, as April lingered tiptoe on the threshold of May, Dr. Schubert sent for Lary to assist him with a peculiarly difficult experiment, one calling for strong nerves and a quick perception. When it was finished, Lary and Judith walked home together, crossing the campus to avoid the thoroughfare that connected the old residence quarter with the fashionable section that had rooted itself in the once fertile farms of Springdale’s newer society.
“Would you mind going a little out of your way?” the man asked, consulting his watch. “It’s early, and I have a troublesome problem. You know women—I don’t.”
“An estimate of a possible Mrs. Trench? Take my advice, Lary. Have her sized up for you by a man—never by another woman. Women can’t be just to each other when they meet on ... mating ground. Besides, no woman ever tells a man quite what she thinks of another woman. The other woman’s secret is, in part, her own. She must guard it—as you guarded the silly secrets of your college fraternity. If you ever saw the inside of one of us, you’d know how little there is to conceal. But the mystery ... that’s the important thing. Still, I’ll do my best. I’m old enough to be your mother, and ought to trust my judgment.”
“There is no potential Mrs. Trench in this problem. The thing that’s worrying me is the inglenook in a house I’m building in Roosevelt Place. The woman—who has exceptionally definite ideas of architecture—has changed her mind three times. Now she’s as dissatisfied with her own planning as she is with mine. We’re at our wits’ end, and I must find—”
“Look, Lary, those birds! They’re fighting!”
The woman seized his arm and whirled him about. They were nearing the end of the campus walk, where the maples cast slow-dancing shadows on the hard gravel. Larimore Trench almost lost his footing, as the pebbles scurried across the grass. He looked at his companion in astonishment. She was not one to go off her head at trifles, yet her tone revealed genuine alarm. In the grass, not ten feet away, two chesty robins were battling like miniature game cocks, their cries denoting a grotesque kind of rage.
“La femme in the case is over there on that syringa,” Lary told her, “estimating the prospects for the posterity she expects to mother. I have never been satisfied with the age I have to live in. But I’m glad I wasn’t born a troglodyte, in a world crying for population.”
As he spoke, his back to the street, Hal and Eileen whisked by in their car and disappeared around the corner. The two watched the birds a moment. Then they resumed their walk. The easy confidence that had grown, quite unnoticed, between them was interrupted. Strive as they would they could find no common ground. Judith was vexed with Eileen. Why should she come along, with her crashing discord, at just that moment? And again, why did it matter whether she and Larimore Trench had a pleasant walk or a sullen one? They had long since discussed every problem under the sun—and had found all of them hopelessly old. As they turned from Grant Drive and were entering Roosevelt Place, she paused to lay an arresting hand on his arm.
“Lary, there are three houses here under construction. The one near the middle of the block is yours. You haven’t even a bowing acquaintance with the other two.”
The man—not the architect—flushed with pleasure. He had never talked shop to Mrs. Ascott, and her recognition of one of his ideas, simply rendered in rough concrete and blue-green tile, pleased him. She would help him to compromise with Mrs. Morton about that inglenook. But the inglenook was only a subterfuge. He wanted to talk to her about his sister. She alone could make Eileen see that her admirer was uncouth, a good-looking animal devoid of a single quality to survive the honeymoon.
III
As they picked their way cautiously between paint cans and piles of building refuse, Lary discovered that the workmen had erected a barricade between the front hall and the living-room, and the angle of the stairway shut the chimney corner from view. On the second floor there was another obstacle. The floors had been newly waxed, and a stern “Verboten” flaunted its impotent arrogance in their path. They continued their climb to the third floor, where children, servants, billiards, and winter garments would be harboured. Judith paused in the door to the nursery, crossed the room and sank, exhausted, in the wide window seat. Lary found place beside her, as he told her of the clever girl who had done the Peter Pan frieze above the yellow painted wall.
“Are you fond of children, Lary?” She was thinking of Eileen.
“No, I detest them.”
“You— But how can you say such a thing? Your understanding with Theodora is perfect. You kindle, you glow, when you are telling her stories from the classics.”
“That’s because she isn’t a child. I believe she never was. But my affection for her didn’t begin when she was.... The first few months, I believe I hated her. I may tell you about it some time. When I lose patience with my mother—and other women—I think about that hideous afternoon, twelve years ago last December. I don’t believe any child—or anything else that men and women are at such a bother to create and leave behind them—is worth all that suffering.”
Mrs. Ascott withdrew, ever so little. She did not like Larimore Trench when his tone revealed that peculiar timbre, that quality of boyish cynicism. He had seen so much of books, so little of life. And then it came to her that he viewed everything in the sordid world—the world outside his imagination—through the distorting lenses of his mother’s personality, her limitations and her prejudices. In his most violent opposition he was, nevertheless, directed by her. He would go to the south pole ... because she stood obstinately at the north. It was she who shaped his course, determined his stand. Her insistence on the fundamental importance of material progress drove him early to the post of disinterested onlooker. That he did his work, and did it well, was a reflex of his inner nature, the nature that came to him when David’s fineness and Lavinia’s dynamic ardour were fused, in a moment of unthinking contact. And it was the penalty of such fusing, that neither of his parents comprehended the nature they had given him.
IV
The silence towered, opaque and forbidding, between them. But they had come with a purpose, groping their way to the same objective, neither one guessing what was in the other’s mind. By a devious path, that was nevertheless essentially feminine, Judith approached:
“Lary, do you want to tell me about your brother? It would have made such a difference in Eileen’s life—if he had lived.”
“You would have enjoyed Bob—a tremendous fellow, every phase of him. He played half-back on the college team when he was sixteen. And at that, he took the state cup in the half mile dash. He had medals for hammer throwing and pole vault. There is a whole case of his cups and ribbons in the college library. He’s the only one of us who inherited my mother’s energy. Oh, Sylvia, of course. She can rattle around and make a great showing—and she does actually accomplish things when she has a definite purpose ... something she wants to do. The rest of us are a listless pack. We’d rather climb a tree and watch the parade go by. But Bob was in everything, for the sheer fun of living. It looks to me like a stupid blunder ... to cut off such virility before it had perpetuated itself.”
“Eileen told me she had lost her respect for God, since her brother was drowned. She was so naïve and in such deadly earnest.”
“Eileen was a born doubter. I was sixteen when I revolted against the idea of a Deity with the duties of an ordinary stockroom clerk—and it was one of Eileen’s searching questions that set me thinking. Not bad for six years old. Mamma holds to the old orthodox belief as one of the hallmarks of respectability. In her day, and town, the iconoclasts were pool-room keepers and saloon bums. The catechism was drilled into us as soon as we could talk. My mother would have been a great ritualist, if she had had the luck to be born an Anglican. There isn’t much in her church to hang your hat on.”
“But your father, Lary—religion means something to him.”
“Yes ... it’s about all he has. Eileen breaks his heart with her irreverent flings. I spare him. Not because I am more considerate than she. More selfish, perhaps. I can’t take the consequences of inflicting pain. You’ll call it crass spiritual weakness—a flaw in the casting. I’ve tried to overcome it. I couldn’t have endured....” His voice wavered, “Last night I heard my father praying for Eileen. It was ghastly. I wanted to tell her how she is torturing him. But it would only provoke a fresh outburst of scoffing.”
“Lary, will you give Eileen into my hands—stop worrying about her—you and your father? Will you persuade him that I have been sent ‘from on high’ to guide her through this wilderness? I may fail; but I have her confidence.”
“Papa was afraid, because you were rich, that you would share her mother’s view. Oh, not that Eileen took refuge in your sympathy. She’s too proud, too good a sport, for that. She only told him that money, per se, was no obstacle—vide Mrs. Ascott. Before she was through with it, she told him that if he kept on, she would go to the devil with Hal Marksley. It was after that that he carried his trouble to the God who is said to answer prayers.”
“As a substitute for the Deity.... But at least, Lary, I know the premises. And at the worst, it is only the working out of her own nature. No one can live Eileen’s life for her, not even her father. But there’s the tower clock, striking six. You will be late for dinner—and we haven’t looked at that inglenook.”