XXXII Lavinia Flounders
I
It was like the home-coming of a national hero. The college paper and the little local daily had announced that Miss Eileen Trench had played at a private audience with the King of Belgium—the paragraph inspired by her mother, when one of the letters from Brussels brought the humorous announcement that His Majesty had stopped his motor car in front of her window while she was practicing a brilliant Chopin number.
Judith thought the crowd was at the station as a tribute to Lary’s recent triumphs. And Lary thought, bitterly, that his New York success had won him the plaudits of his native town. Theodora told them both the truth, on the way home. She was afraid too much adulation would turn Eileen’s head.
At first they did not miss David in the throng. A year ago he and Theodora had stood alone on the little station platform. Judith knew why he was not there now. Eileen knew, too, and her eyes darkened with suffering. He was at the gate as they approached. Lary caught his breath sharply, as he took in the shrunken figure and the mournful eyes. Eileen leaped from the cab and ran to greet him.
“Papa, darling!”
He looked at her as one awakening from deep sleep. Then all at once the smile broke ... it spread, like ripples on the surface of a placid pool. Every emotion of his heart was recorded on that transparent face. The blue eyes beamed with incredible joy, as he held out his arms.
“It’s my little girl. I thought I had lost you.”
“No, daddy dear, it’s only that I have found myself.”
Lavinia hurried into the house. She could not bear such spectacles in public. What would the neighbours think?
II
The following day an astounding thing came to pass. The president of the college and the dean of the musical faculty called on Miss Trench. They wanted to offer her a position in the conservatory. Naturally it could not be an actual professorship. A seventeen-year-old girl ... without a degree. They thought she might give recitals in the neighbouring towns, and take pupils in advanced technique. It would mean much to the college to announce an instructor who had studied with the great Ysaye. No one need know how young she was. Indeed she was altogether different from the immature girl they remembered—quite dignified and impressive. Marvellously changed.
“If they knew what changed her,” Mrs. Trench reflected, her gorge rising, “they wouldn’t be flattering her this way.” It was a mistake to tell that about the King of Belgium. She hadn’t thought about the effect on Eileen. Of late she blundered at every turn. Somehow things were slipping out of her grasp.
After they had gone, Eileen ran breathless to Vine Cottage to tell Judith. She could not contemplate any step without that guidance or approval.
“Lary will be pleased. This will put an end to your mother’s plan of having you enter the freshman class next Monday. But ... Eileen, I have an idea. You are not going to stop studying. I wonder if you and I couldn’t—I’m a horribly uneducated person.”
“With Lary for tutor, you mean? Well, in the first place, my brother’s no salesman when it comes to the things he knows. He can lay them out on the counter and let you pick what you want. What I want most is Latin. And he thinks it is bald and plebeian, compared with Greek. Syd reads Horace, in the original, to rest him when he’s tired and can’t get his mind off of the sick babies and their fool mothers. I’m crazy to translate Ovid and—”
“Syd’s just the thing. Don’t tell Lary, but I foundered on the Greek alphabet. It simply wouldn’t stick in my memory. I substituted organic chemistry. My classicist husband would be disgusted.”
“Lary’s a prig—and I love him! Judith, it was worth it—just to get acquainted with my brother.”
III
From Vine Cottage she went to the office for David’s stamp of approval. She had once called her father a rubber stamp. She thought of it now, with stinging chagrin. Would not he serve as her anchor, as Judith had been her pilot? Had she anything to fear? As she walked past the clump of shrubbery on the campus, where Hal Marksley had kissed her that first time, she thought with a thrill of exultation that her craft had outrun the storm.
From her father’s arms she hurried to Dr. Schubert’s office to tell the joyful and as yet half apprehended news. And the man who had heard her first shrill cry of protest against the life that was not of her choosing, drew her to him and kissed her. The act was paternal. She had always been more at home with him than with those of her own blood.
“Poor old Syd,” she beamed, “he doesn’t know what he’s in for.” And Sydney, coming through the laboratory door with a microscope slide in one hand and a bottle of red colouring fluid in the other, put up his mouth for the customary salutation.
“No more of that, old fellow. I’m a young lady now. Besides you’re going to be my preceptor, and it’s bad form for the dominie to kiss his pupils. You’re to teach Judith and me, and you couldn’t bestow osculations on one and not on the other. Now could you?”
“I should think Judith would be lovely to kiss.”
“She is ... but you and Lary can’t go out in the alley and fight duels. And while we are on the subject—you and Papa Schubert are ages behind the times—with all your X-rays and bacteriological tests. In Europe they have decided that kissing is unsanitary. Disease germs are carried that way.”
“Yes,” the elder assented, “the dangerous little amorococcus is usually conveyed from lip to lip.”
Syd changed the subject. He had never been seriously touched by love. But he thought the shaft of his father’s playful humour might carry a poisoned barb for the girl. He demanded, with a grimace:
“Why don’t you take me into your confidence about the preceptorship? What do you need to learn ... after Brussels and Paris?”
“We had thought about Latin—and anything else you happen to have in your system that would help us to shine as intellectuals. But, seriously, Syd, I want you to do one thing for me. Get this teaching idea across to me. You remember how you gave me the legato—when Prexie Irwin was making us whack the strings with the bow—everything jumpy staccato, don’t you remember? And how you showed me, in five minutes, how to produce the singing tones? I know how to do it; but you’ll have to show me how to teach the other fellow.”
IV
When the door had closed behind her, Dr. Schubert said jubilantly:
“The child isn’t spoiled a bit. I’ve been afraid she’d come home sophisticated and world-wise. She’s just an innocent girl, in spite of her long skirts.”
“Yes,” Sydney said, with a catch in his throat, “she’s as pure and fair as a May morning—and the fairest mornings are always the ones that follow the darkest nights. Father, couldn’t you trump up some excuse to bring her here to stay with us ... keep her away from her mother as much as possible?”
“Curious, Syd, but I was going to speak to you about that very thing. David came to me, when he knew Eileen was coming home and asked me—oh, it was tough for him to do it. He’s so damnably loyal! Don’t you think we could fit up the room next to Nanny’s, so that the child could sleep here, the nights when she’s going to have early classes at the college? It’s a shame to deprive David of even that much of her company. But we’ll make it up to him in ways his wife doesn’t suspect—if we can inject enough guile into him to enable him to play his part without fumbling. He feels that she must, must be kept away from her mother.”
“What is the trouble with David?” Syd asked abruptly. “You’ve doped him on tonics all summer, and he doesn’t improve in the least.”
“The climacteric—and his wife’s merciless tongue. David is approaching fifty. A man’s mental and physical being undergoes a subtle change in that year. It’s not so crucial as the grand climacteric—the transformation from manhood to age—that comes at sixty-three. You young doctors will be telling us that it is an exploded theory; but I have followed it for forty years. To a sensitive chap like David Trench, it’s serious. Just this year, when he ought to be coddled and petted, his wife seasons his food with gall and puts a dash of aqua fortis in his tea.
“I’ve ordered him to sleep in a room by himself, with the door locked, so that she couldn’t wake him up with her nagging and upbraiding. I told her, point-blank, that she was killing him—and she did what I might have expected.”
“Yes, she ‘slipped from under’ by writing Lary that she was being terribly set upon by his father, and it was his duty to come home. Father”—Syd’s blue eyes blazed—“why didn’t David take a riding whip to his wife the first time she—”
The man who could look beneath sex interrupted with an impatient gesture.
“David is a woman. More than that, Sydney, Mrs. Trench is a man—trapped in a woman’s body. When nature makes a blunder like that, there’s usually the devil to pay. I have to keep reminding myself of that fact—or I’d be in danger of poisoning Lavinia Trench.”