XIII Eyes Turned Homeward
I
It is improbable that Bromfield’s weekly paper would have yielded its meagre space for the chronicling of Eileen Trench’s engagement, had that important fact been divulged at home. There were other, more momentous things going on. The entire front page of each issue was plastered with the Stone sensation, which grew by melodramatic leaps to something like an international affair. Fournier Stone had been captured in Montreal, had broken from his captor and leaped into the river. At first it was thought that he had been drowned; but he was an agile swimmer, and it was reported that a man answering his description had been seen near Longueuil, an hour or two after his escape.
From Mrs. Stone’s darkened bedroom came bulletins of one collapse after another. The news that her darling had perished in the treacherous waters beneath the Victoria bridge affected her so profoundly that the physician resorted to nitroglycerine injections to restore her. Lavinia read the accounts with emotions that surged from exultation to a species of envy. The part she had been called upon to play was such a drab one, that Lettie Stone’s colourful rôle stung her. To ease her mind, she fell back on one passage of Scripture after another. She might have known all along that the marriage would end in something like this. It was right that it should end this way ... right that an immoral, unprincipled woman should suffer. And Calvin? No doubt he was suffering, too. But what was the good of going over that ground—ground that she had long since stripped bare of every sprig of comfort or misery?
At last came the startling denouement. Mrs. Calvin Stone was dead. There had been a simple private funeral—attended by everybody in Bromfield. That night Fournier had slipped stealthily into town, and out to the cemetery, where he had ended his life on his mother’s grave. The account of the double tragedy was not news to Lavinia. Ellen Larimore had sent a telegram ... just why, it was difficult to explain. The message came Sunday morning, while David and the girls were at church and Lary was at the office getting out some rush specifications. It conveyed only the bare information that Fournier Stone had shot himself, the night after his mother’s funeral.
“Dead ... Calvin free!” the woman muttered, staring in a daze at the words. And, after a moment of strangling emotion: “But what difference does it make—now? I can’t be there to see it. I wouldn’t go, if I could.”
At this juncture Lavinia’s thoughts took an unexpected turn. She was always thinking things she had no intention of harbouring within her consciousness—as if she had a whole cellar full of ideas she did not know she possessed. The one that came up to her now nauseated her. To see Calvin weeping over the body of his dead wife! Oh, the insolent superiority of the dead! You have no words with which to confront them. All their failings, all their sins are lifted above your most virtuous attack. It would be like this if David should die, and she could no longer upbraid him. No, it was better for people to go on living. You could at least speak your mind, without galling self-reproach.
II
Lavinia was determined to put Calvin Stone definitely and permanently from her thought. He had been amply punished for his monstrous treatment of her. The incident was closed, and at last she could have peace. And then something came to divert all her thinking into a channel that must have been present in the dark valley of her being all the while—unrecognized, because the need for it had been so hazily remote. A story—one of Larimore’s foolish stories. She seldom listened to them; but this one she could not escape. Eileen had gone home with Hal Marksley and had met his sister. It was Wednesday, and the outcome of the Stone imbroglio was still locked in her heart, the telegram having been burned in the kitchen range, Sunday morning, while Drusilla was on the second floor, doing up the bedrooms.
After dinner the Trench family had gravitated, one by one, to Mrs. Ascott’s summer house. David was there, laughing boyishly at something Eileen was telling. What were they talking about? Lavinia’s sharp ears caught a sentence now and then. It was not her wont to be out of things, the things that concerned her family. Her tenant seldom invited her—specifically. But then she never invited Mrs. Ascott, either. Going to the pantry, she filled a plate with raisin muffins, from the afternoon’s baking. Eileen would approach that shrine, armed with a sensational story; but her mother carried breakfast rolls.
III
When Nanny had taken the plate into the house, Judith made room for Mrs. Trench on the settle at her side. David leaned against the solid beam that he had set, seven years ago, to support the arch of the doorway. His blue eyes were full of unwonted content. Theodora was perched on the afternoon tea table, folded now to look like a packing case, steadying herself by a brown hand on her father’s arm. Eileen was on the other bench with Lary. She resumed the narrative that had been interrupted by her mother’s arrival:
“Yes, he’s the most unspeakable beast I ever saw. Oh, by-the-way, mamma, I was telling them about meeting Mr. and Mrs. Nims, this afternoon. Kitten and Hal and I had to go over to the house to get some rugs and things for the play, in the college chapel, and Adelaide opened the door for us.”
“You don’t mean— How did she treat you?”
“Oh, all right. She didn’t know me from anybody else.... But she’s coming to help coach us, the night of dress rehearsal. Mrs. Henderson said, in her talk, that most of the charm in that Sargent portrait was the technique—brush work and colour arrangement. But Adelaide Nims doesn’t need Johnny Sargent or any other artist to tell her how to colour up. She had on an embroidered Chinese robe—the kind the Mandarin women wear in the house—pinkish tan, with a wide band of blue around the sleeves and neck—the kind of blue that fairly made her hair flame. I wanted to eat her, she was so beautiful. And just then I got a glimpse of her husband, through the window. He was sprawled all over a lawn bench that was built to hold three decent-sized people, and his stomach came out like the side of the rain barrel. I was trying to get a good look at his face, when he began to yawn—you know, the kind of a yawn that ate up all the rest of his features. I wanted to giggle ... or scream! And when he finally came into the house, and Kitten and I met him, I couldn’t think of a thing but that awful cavern inside his mouth. Gee! I’d hate to have to live with a man who looks like a hogshead, split down the middle, and an Edam cheese for a head—and no neck at all.”
“I didn’t suppose the nobility looked like that,” Mrs. Trench snapped.
“Humph! He’s only a younger son—and nine brothers and nephews between him and a handle to his name. Adelaide must have been in an awful tight pinch to have married him, money or no money.”
“He may not have been so stout when he courted her,” David ventured. “When your mother married me, no one would have thought of calling me her ‘better three-quarters’—and look at us now.”
“Other three-quarters,” Lavinia corrected. “I never could see the justice in calling a man his wife’s ‘better’ half.”
“There’s historical warrant for your objection, mamma,” Lary said, hoping to avert the revelation his mother was all too prone to make—her callous contempt for David in particular and men as a class.
“You don’t mean the tiresome old story of Adam and the rib,” Eileen demurred.
“Nothing like that. I found the story in some elective Greek we were reading, my third year in college. And as you describe this Mr. Nims, he seems to fit the original model. Seven of us were selected to translate the Symposium of Plato, and I had the story Aristophanes was said to have told at that memorable banquet. It was in response to the toast, ‘The Origin of Love.’ As the gods planned the world, there was no such thing as love. But they had created a race of terribly efficient mortals—hermaphroditic beings, man and woman in one body, their faces looking in opposite directions. They had four legs and a double pair of arms, and when they wanted to go somewhere in a hurry, they rolled over and over, like an exaggerated cart wheel, touching all their hands and feet to the ground in succession. They could see what was going on behind them, and could throw missiles in two directions at the same time.
“As long as they didn’t realize their advantage, it was all right. But one day a leader was born among them. I suspect it was the female half of him who discovered that they were superior to the gods. If they went about it right, they could capture Olympus, and send the gods to earth to toil and offer sacrifices. The one thing the gods cared about was having their vanity fed, by the smoke from countless altars. It was for this service that man was created, in the beginning. So, when it was reported on Mount Olympus that mortals aspired to be gods, Zeus conceived a way to avert the disaster, and at the same time have twice as many creatures on earth to offer sacrifices.
“He made a great feast, and invited all the insolent race of man. And when he had them at his mercy, so that they couldn’t escape, he had them brought to him, one at a time, and cleft them in two, vertically, so that they could look only in one direction, and run on only two feet—”
“O-wee-woo!” Theodora squirmed. “Didn’t they bleed ... terribly?”
“Hush, Theo, it’s only a story,” Mrs. Trench exclaimed, irritably.
“And that’s how a man and his other half came to be separated,” David said, drawing Theodora to him and stroking her pain-puckered brow.
“Yes, the gods thought they had destroyed man, when they cleft him in two,” Lary went on, his brown eyes shining. “But in that act of ruthlessness they sowed the seeds of their own destruction. When they hurled the mutilated creatures out of Paradise, most of the halves became separated. Then began the endless search for their other halves. The men realized that they couldn’t live up to their full capacity, with the feminine side of themselves gone. And when they did find each other, they experienced a rapture that surpassed the highest emotional possibility of the immortals. That thrill was love. The gods heard about it, and condescended to mate with mortals, in the hope of experiencing the thrill. But it was useless. They had not been separated from their other halves.”
“But how did they sow the seeds of their own destruction?” Judith asked.
“It’s the old story of the apple in the Garden of Eden. The thing they couldn’t get became the ultimate desideratum. They devoted all their energy to the quest of love. They deserted all their old godlike pursuits—and in the end, the Greek deities crumbled and were destroyed by the more vigorous gods of the barbarians.”
Theodora pondered the tale. She could not be satisfied by the application to Mr. and Mrs. Nims. The tub-like man, who was far more tublike in her imagination than Eileen’s exaggerated description should have warranted, was undoubtedly the man who was married to Hal’s sister. But Mrs. Nims was thin. And he was her second husband. Manifestly something was wrong.
“But Lary, suppose when those men tried to find their other halves, they couldn’t.... Their right halves had died, or had got tired of waiting and had gone off with some one else....”
“There wouldn’t be any thrill of love, and the man couldn’t do his best, because he lacked the right person to urge him on,” David told her.
“Humph!” this from Eileen, “I guess the woman would be in as bad a fix as the man. Poor Adelaide Nims has had two tries at her other half, and missed it both times. She’s terribly unhappy, for all that she puts up such a good front. Lady Judith, don’t you think she ought to keep on trying till she does find the right one? Or is there a right one for all of us?”
“Yes ... unless we rush off into an alliance that prevents us from recognizing our true mate,” Mrs. Ascott said pointedly.
The girl flushed. The shaft had gone home. She shifted her gaze from the clear gray eyes ... and surprised an inexplicable expression on her mother’s face.
IV
Lavinia had listened, without interest, to the story. But the application—she had been brought up on stories with a Moral at the end. “Unless we rush off into an alliance....” Her face grew hard, a yellow pallor spreading from neck to brow. That was what she had done. That was what Calvin had done. It was his fault, not hers, that she had erred. She ignored the years of waiting, before Calvin had known Lettie. And those two had been mismated, had lived apart most of the time, the first few years of their married life, had quarreled violently when they were together. There must have been a right partner for Calvin. She choked with emotion as she realized—she had never been sure of it, in all those years—that Lettie was not the right one. She would like to see Calvin Stone again, now that it was all over. But what was the use? There was David, forty-eight, and ridiculously healthy. That night she lay awake, into the gray of dawn, thinking, thinking....