XXXII The Statue and the Bust
I
Autumn was on the threshold of winter when Lavinia decided that things had to take a turn. Eileen was spending three mornings a week at the college, which necessitated her absence from home practically half the time. She was uniformly polite and gentle with her mother, an attitude that was not wholly the result of Judith’s stern schooling. Under the whip of her own discipline, she sought to round off the rough corners, to modulate her voice and temper her diction. Her outbursts of picturesque speech were reserved for Dr. Schubert and Syd, with Nanny in the background, shaking her ample sides with adoring laughter. Now there would be a fortnightly concert trip, and some elective work in the academic department, which promised further separation from the chilly atmosphere of her home.
“Judith, I want to have a talk with you,” Mrs. Trench began, and the stern set of her jaw left no doubt that the interview would be unpleasant. “I don’t like the way Eileen is acting.”
“Every one else does.” Judith sought to be impersonal. She had been expecting some such outburst and had framed a line of defence, against a possible attack.
“That’s just it! Everybody in Springdale thinks she has done something fine in going away to New York and Europe, and coming back here to teach in the college before she’s even been a student. You are making a rank hypocrite of her.”
“Yes, you—who else but you? You did the whole thing. I am sure Larimore is as disgusted as I am; but he doesn’t dare to say—”
“We won’t discuss my relations with my husband.”
Lavinia’s face flamed scarlet and she tugged at the collar of her elaborate silk waist. But speech was not wanting, for more than the fraction of a second.
“Well, I want to know what other wild-goose schemes you have for her.”
Judith shifted impatiently in her chair. “You have a grievance. I wish you would be specific. Eileen is surely not causing you any anxiety. She is growing into a beautiful young woman and she has the respect of the entire community.”
“Respect! Yes!” The words crackled. “The whole town respects her. You can’t see what that means. You have no religion and no moral sense of your own. For a girl to do what she did—and then walk right back here into a position that she never would have had, if she’d been a good girl, is a positive slur on religion.”
Judith gasped. She wanted to laugh—to take her mother-in-law by the shoulders and shake her. But Lavinia had not done speaking:
“It says in the Bible—”
“It says a good many things in the Bible. You take from it what appeals to you—and shape your religion to suit your own needs.”
Lavinia was not slow to catch an idea that could be stopped by the mesh of her mental net. Her son’s philosophy usually passed through without leaving a fragment. But this idea was large enough to be arrested. Two facts conspired to give it substance and form. For his Sunday sermon, the minister had combined a passage from Isaiah with another from the Epistle to the Hebrews. And—wholly unrelated, but subtly significant—Lavinia had just finished an elaborate gelatine dessert for dinner.
“You mean that we pick from the Bible what we want and fit it together.”
“Practically that. We can’t get anything out of a book unless we have in our own minds the vessels to carry away the meaning. A cult or a religion is nothing more than the solidifying of a group of ideas. The Christian religion—”
“Like lemon jelly in a mould,” the woman said, thinking aloud. Then, arousing herself to the business at hand, she pursued: “That may be all true enough about religion; but it has nothing to do with Eileen, and the way she’s acting.”
“I asked you to be definite. What has she done that displeased you?”
“Staying at Dr. Schubert’s, three nights in the week—with no woman there except a housekeeper. What will the neighbours say?”
“Have you heard them say anything?”
“No, but they’re likely to. I’m sure I’d think it was queer if Ina Stevens—”
“I wouldn’t suggest it to them. And another thing—I wouldn’t say a word to Eileen—if I were you. She is doing so well that it would break Lary’s heart to have her thrown back on the old life. There is only one danger, as he sees it. She has a strong vein of stubbornness in her nature.”
“Yes, she gets that from her father,” Lavinia snapped.
“No, she doesn’t get it from her father. There is no obstinacy in father, except his stubborn clinging to his ideals. You can’t deal with Eileen as you did with Sylvia, and you’ll play havoc with her if you try.”
“No! Sylvia never caused me a moment’s anxiety in her life.”
Judith ignored the palpable falsehood. “You must know that Eileen couldn’t have finer moral influence than that of Dr. Schubert and his son. And my faithful Nanny is no ordinary servant. She was more to me than my own mother, when I was a girl.”
The innocent remark was flint and steel, with Lavinia’s powder heap in dangerous proximity. “I suppose your mother was delighted with that. But of course she was a rich woman, and glad to be rid of the moral training of her children. I can say for myself that I never shirked my duty—and I don’t intend to hand it over to you or Nanny or Dr. Schubert now. I made up my mind that I wouldn’t say a word about this; but it’s grinding my heart out. I can’t stand it any longer.”
“Mother, I don’t follow you at all. I asked you to be frank with me.”
“Very well, I’ll put it so plain that you can’t pretend you don’t understand. How would you feel if you had a daughter, and some stranger came along and took that girl’s life clear out of your hands? I haven’t a word to say about her. She runs to you for all sorts of things—clothes—as if I wouldn’t know what was stylish or becoming. If she’s in doubt about what to do, she talks it over with Larimore or Syd. When anything comes along to make her proud, she tells her father. She talks to Theodora by the hour about the things she saw when she was abroad—and she never tells me one thing. I’m simply shut out on every side, and it’s killing me!” She burst into hysterical weeping.
“I’m so sorry, mother. I hadn’t realized. Perhaps if you weren’t always so short and critical with her—”
“Oh, I’m to go down on my knees to her? Indeed I won’t. As long as she is under eighteen, she takes her orders from me. She’ll go to the dogs, with all this flattery and praise—”
“The surest way to ruin Eileen is to take that attitude towards her.”
“Well, she is my child, and I have a right to do with her as I please.”
“No—you—have—not!” Judith’s eyes flashed and her voice was hoarse with indignation. “Rather than permit you to wreck her chance for happiness, I’ll send her to Laura Ramsay—or even to my mother.”
II
Lavinia fled weeping through the door. She would tell Larimore how his wife had insulted her. Unfortunately he was in New York. At least she could write to him ... and the letter had distinct advantages. She would be spared interruption. Larimore always broke the point of her lance before she had time to drive it home. She wrote. She read the long letter through twice—and tore it into shreds. A second letter followed the first one. Then it was time to go down to luncheon.
When the noonday meal was over, and David and Theo had gone, she went again to Vine Cottage. Judith was in the library, an open volume of Browning on the table before her. Her face was pale and her eyes showed flecks of hazel.
“We had a misunderstanding this morning, my dear, and I don’t want to leave things that way.” The words came with a brave show of confidence, but Lavinia Trench looked like a corpse, an automaton that was made to speak by a force other than its own. “I am going to ask you to forgive me, and help me as you did Eileen.”
“Oh, mother!” The cry was from her heart.
“I knew you would be surprised. I never apologized to any one in my life. I’ve been fighting it for a week. When I said those things, this morning, it was to keep from saying what—what I’m going to say now. Since Eileen came home, I’ve been going over my life. David said she had missed the path, and you showed her the right way. I am the most unhappy woman in the world. If you could do that for Eileen, you could do it for me.”
It was a challenge, flung like a pelting of hail stones. Judith looked at her with troubled gaze. How could she deal with a mentality so different from her own? Eileen was young, and Eileen loved her. That her mother-in-law cordially detested her, she could not doubt.
“You know I would gladly....”
“It’s all perfectly simple—excepting two points. By all the rules of right and wrong, Eileen ought to be a miserable girl, broken in soul and body—and not respected by good people. It doesn’t make a particle of difference that she hid her wickedness. God knows what she did, and it is God that punishes sin. Instead of that, she comes back here better in every way than she was before. She’s prettier now than Sylvia. She used to be cross and hateful most of the time. Now she laughs and sings and whistles till I wish she would pout for a change. She sits up and discusses the most serious topics with grown men and women—and you know how she used to rattle slang, and sneer at people who were serious.”
“Her experience developed her marvellously. It might have wrecked her, just as a powerful dose of medicine might destroy your body, if administered in the wrong way. It was fearful medicine, but it was what her sick mind needed.”
“That takes care of one of the points,” Lavinia cried, her black eyes dilating. “You call it medicine. I saw it only as the consequences of sin.”
“The name doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, the name does matter. I want to get this thing down in black and white. All my life I have been discontented. It’s just one crushing disappointment after another. Eileen was the same way. I never used to think she was like me—but in some respects she is. I had a chance to marry the son of the richest man in town. But I have always been virtuous and upright—”
“Mother, perhaps if you—”
“Don’t interrupt me. I have to say this all at once, while it’s connected. You call Eileen’s discontentment and rebellious nature a kind of disease. Well then, I had the same disease, and she got it from me. After my grandmother died, there wasn’t one in the family that understood me. And the man I was engaged to—” She brought her teeth together, as if she were biting off and forcing back the words that strove to assert themselves in spite of her. “I threw him over, when I found out that he was an unprincipled scoundrel, like Hal Marksley. If I had gone on, as she did—but I never could have done such a thing.”
“Probably not. You were brought up in a provincial New York town. You were hedged about by customs and convictions that don’t obtain in Springdale, or among Eileen’s associates. You must make allowance for that.”
Lavinia sidestepped the interruption. “Eileen was sick—and God picked out a remedy that I thought God, in His purity, wouldn’t know anything about. I was taught that it was the devil that—well, I’ve been figuring that she had to come to grief, because she went over to Satan. That’s the only way I could square things with my religious training. I don’t believe, now, that she will ever be punished. That shows that it was God and not the devil that did it. I’m willing to admit that I was mistaken, if you’ll show me how to find happiness.”
“It isn’t a recipe, like the ingredients for a cake. And you must remember that I didn’t prescribe the remedy, in Eileen’s case. I only nursed her, after she had taken it. I haven’t the faintest idea why you are unhappy.”
“And I would have to tell you the whole story?”
“I wouldn’t pry into your heart. I would do anything in my power to give you peace. You are Lary’s mother. I have never overlooked my obligation to you.”
III
Lavinia took from the words an implication more humiliating than her daughter-in-law had intended. But this was no time for recrimination. She must hold on to herself. The canker in her heart had eaten so deep that help must come, or she would go mad. Mechanically she reached for the volume on the table. Her mind went back to those first years in Springdale, when she had conned Browning in an effort to shine in Mrs. Henderson’s club. Was it indeed for this that she had memorized poems, delved in abstruse literary criticism—that she might win Mrs. Henderson’s approbation? One half of her knew that it was not, while the other half as stoutly denied an ulterior motive for this, or for any other deliberate act of her life.
While she was giving the attic its annual overhauling, she had come upon the yellow files of the Bromfield Sentinel, the edges broken like pie crust. She had read again the spirited account of the meeting at which Mrs. David Trench was elected secretary of the most intellectual club in Springdale. Who was there in her girlhood home for whom this triumph would provide a thrill of gratification or a sting of envy? Ellen knew all about it. Isabel had long since removed to California. Her mother was dead. The girls of her social circle? The Browning craze had not invaded Bromfield, and there was not one among her old friends for whose opinion she cared a straw.
IV
She came back to herself with a start. “The Statue and the Bust,” she muttered. “We did that one, the winter before Isabel was born. I had to drop out—and Mrs. Henderson sent me her notes. It was a shockingly immoral thing, for the wife of a college president—a Presbyterian minister, at that. I never had quite the same opinion of her, after I read those notes. She said the lady who sat at the window and watched for the duke to ride by—would have been less wicked if she had actually run away with him. She said it was just as bad to want to commit sin as to actually commit it—”
“Yes, if they restrained themselves only because of fear of the consequences. There is no virtue in that kind of repression.”
To Lavinia Trench everything was personal. She turned the thought over in her mind ... “afraid of the consequences” ... “no virtue in that kind of repression.” Her whole life had been one of repression. Mrs. Henderson had stressed the lines:
“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.”
“That isn’t my idea of sin. At least it wasn’t, until....” She trailed off into incoherence, thumbing the pages nervously. “Judith, do you think a woman—a married woman—could go on caring for some other man—” She struggled with the obstruction in her throat. “I mean the bride of Riccardi, in the poem. I can’t see how caring, and just thinking how much she would like to be with him—was—wrong. She didn’t commit any act of sin—didn’t break the seventh commandment.”
“In the eyes of the world she was a virtuous woman. In her own heart she was an unsatisfied wanton. She added hypocrisy to the sin of desire, and on that hypocrisy she wrecked her only chance for happiness.”
V
Once before, Judith had attempted to implant an abstract idea in Mrs. Trench’s mind. Now she was betrayed into a discussion of moral responsibility, with no intent other than that of bridging over a trying period of her none too comfortable relations with her mother-in-law. That Lavinia would carry away even a germ of an idea, she did not suspect. She had merely reiterated what Mrs. Henderson had said, twenty years ago. As yet she had not fully perceived, in that warped mind, one dominating characteristic: the ability to find justification for anything that seemed desirable. True, Eileen had said—but Eileen was not always fair in her old-time strictures on her mother.
Judith looked at the abject figure, the pallid face and the hard mouth ... and pity overmastered her. She wanted to say something comforting. The door was shut, the discussion ended. Lavinia sat there, pondering. It was all so different from the groundwork of her religious training. Probably Browning and Judith and Mrs. Henderson were wrong. To her literal mind, their idea could not accord with the stern dictum: “The wages of sin is death.” Still, their theory would serve to explain Eileen. In her pondering, she went the length of formulating the postulate: “Eileen sinned and became happy. Her sin was the source of her regeneration.”
There must be something to it. She, Vine Larimore, had been virtuous—and disaster had overtaken her. Lettie Fournier had sinned ... and for all the years of her subsequent life she had worn the name of Calvin Stone. That this distinction brought her rival scant happiness, was beside the point. The transgression of the moral law was the barrier which both Lettie and Eileen had passed to the kind of satisfaction that had been denied her. Judith had not told her of the days and nights of self-purging. She saw only externals, and these were all in favour of the Browning theory. After a long interval she said:
“Would you mind telling her—Eileen—that I want her to come to me? You know better how to get hold of her. She thinks I don’t love her—that I’m partial to Sylvia. I do love her ... and I want her at home with me, where I can study her. It will be bitter enough dose for me to take my lesson from her. But I am willing to do it, if she can show me the way to happiness.” She looked incredibly old and tired and hopeless. “And would you mind lending me your copy of Browning? I want to read ‘The Statue and the Bust’ through. Sylvia took mine with her when she moved to Detroit. I didn’t think I would ever look at it again.”