The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

Marcia read the remaining notes: placed them all back in their envelopes upon the table: took her book. She read for an hour. She called the maid, ordered a bath, undressed. She stood for a moment before her cheval glass, hesitant to throw her bath-robe over her nakedness. With a free delight she watched the bright strength of her body. Her hips were slight and firm: her breasts were two swift standing rondures: her abdomen drew tautly down into the straight and narrowly set legs. Marcia knew from statues she had seen that this faint triangle of strain, tracing and pointing downward at her thighs, was almost masculine. There was voluptuousness in this: and in the dear black hair falling about her body, making its whiteness burn. Marcia hated that flabbiness of mind and form which she called feminine. Coquettishly, as if to bar another’s pleasure, she threw a robe across her shoulders. She seemed to be outside desiring to be in. With the check to her nibbling sense, her mind went free, and she began to think of Thomas Rennard.

How was he able to be sure she would not take his presuming letter to the lady he was assiduously courting—and exploiting? Marcia caught herself so forming her question. She tried to change it: “How does he know I won’t?... Well, I will.” She wondered if she would. Imperceptibly, she had returned to the first form of her question. She resented Tom. Her mother was working for him with far greater will than any of the other “friends” had been able to inspire. It was dear already that this young flasher from Ohio was going to have the dull but golden Lomney for a partner. A bit dangerous, thought Marcia. What if next year, her mother tired of him? What if he proved too false? Marcia smiled. There seemed small doubt of that. There he would be, deep in their Group, inextricable. Matters must not go so fast. Marcia must delay them. She pictured the pair, lost in their confidences, and was troubled how.

She came back to the note. What had heartened him to send it? Was Mr. Rennard after all a rash importunate, one easily ruined? Marcia did not doubt the true purpose of the note. He wanted her to tea. He could not pay attention to her here. That was enough. Did he truly desire this enough to risk his hold on her mother? A dangerous—compliment.

She went over the always chance occasions she had seen him. Never alone. She had felt the pointedness of his glances toward her: caught him talking to her mother with a strained interest in her own mood. She had tested this by changing her mood and watching his rapid awareness. He was a curious man: bright, lithe in all senses, unbelievably hard, yet fraught with a glow that she was sure impact might turn to fire. She wandered over his personality. She felt he was too clever and too sensible to be sincere. Yet his standards seemed too directly those of his intelligence and strength to lend reason to insincerity. She did not know. She did know she would have tea with him: and say nothing to her mother.

It was easily reasoned. “I’ll control him, myself. If he goes too far or too fast, I’ll have the weapon of a word to Mamma. What a brazen, simple country boy it is!...”

She went: she was right at least in this, that Tom had nothing to impart to her “of interest” beyond that he liked her and of course couldn’t see her really at her mother’s. In all else, she was wrong. She could not understand this sudden, cold-passionate man. In writing to Marcia Duffield, he had not understood himself.

“Perhaps I’ll know better when I have talked to her across a table.”

She came with a spur of adventure. She was trapping her foe. While he reveled in his success, letting his pleasure out, she would enmesh him. Thereafter, should he ever move in a direction she did not like, Marcia would soon show him in whose hands he was. Marcia was so astir with her scheme that she thought herself cool and collected. She had a dogged affection for her mother: a sort of animal loyalty in which was properly admixed a very human loyalty to herself. Here, she was quite sure, there was question only of her mother.

Tom, meantime, waited and went over in his mind the impressions in confidence of which he had dared write his letter.

“A girl absolutely incapable of carrying an altruistic act to an end ... and yet—a Christian! If she resolved to serve her mother by telling her I was flirting with her daughter—and she is convinced that this would serve her mother: she must be hostile instinctively to her mother’s friend—she would have to be sure, first, she did not care for me. She is coming to-day to find out. It all depends on to-day. If she does not like me she will betray me with a sense of serving her mother. If she does like me, she will take secret delight in making her mother a fool.... Dear little fool herself! If she knew how much I love her black straight hair and her white straight body, how little I care in contrast for her mother’s interest in my future! If she knew—well, she must know.”