Part 4

“You didn’t ask?” She had taken off her gray glove; and pushed her veil up farther on her forehead, with beautiful white fingers.

“No,” answered Peter curtly. “A fellow wouldn’t ask. You can see that.”

She seemed to muse. “He would have told you that, I think, if you had. There was no reason why you shouldn’t know.”

“I naturally supposed, if there was no reason why I shouldn’t know, you’d have seen to it that I was told.”

“So you thought there was something disgraceful--something that drove us out of America?”

“It has occurred to me. But I never let myself worry about it. And old Martin himself was a kind of proof that there wasn’t.”

“There wasn’t.” She echoed his words in a disdainful, emphatically affirmative tone. “No, Peter, not that.” She paused for a moment, staring out into the gray street. “These women are very ugly, aren’t they?” she asked irrelevantly. “On the boat, they were horrors. And they jerked about so--_did_ so many things. Do the men like them that way?” Her tone was desultory.

“I suppose so.” He felt a mischievous desire to tell her how little the men he knew would probably like them _her_ way; but, in fact, the slow conviction was encroaching on his mind--not so much penetrating it as fluidically enwrapping it--that she was compounded of many graces. Her gestures, for example: they were all slow, and each showed off something, if only, for an instant, some lesser, some negligible contour. She had the air of not having stirred a limb or a feature for years, except to please, and of being now in the practice infallible. She was very feminine--no, hang it! that dairymaid word wouldn’t do. (Peter had been, in college, the proudest product of his several “theme-courses,” and the quest of the epithet was not unknown to him.) She was very simple and very sophisticated. He had to leave it at that.

“I’ll tell you about our leaving America. You ought to have known long since. And yet--perhaps it was better your sympathies shouldn’t have been touched. If you thought we were brutes, that would leave you free, wouldn’t it?”

“It did.”

“Ah, yes--exactly!” She seemed to triumph for an instant. Then she looked out of the window again, and again spoke irrelevantly. “Are you in love?”

Peter frowned. “No.” He was too young not to be stiff about it.

“That’s rather a pity. I could have explained better.”

“Oh, I know what it stands for.”

She corrected him gently. “It ‘stands for’ nothing whatever. Either you’ve loved or you haven’t. It might have helped me--that’s all.” Then she seemed to brace herself for difficult exposition.

“Listen, Peter. You must know this first. In the months just following your birth, everything changed. Your father developed tuberculosis--alarmingly, it was then supposed. That meant another climate. He owned property in Honolulu. It occurred to him to go there. In not taking you we acted on physicians’ advice. There was no telling what sort of life we might have to live. You were best off here. You were under expert care, and in those days we had news of you constantly. I am quite well aware”--her voice grew surer as she went on; she seemed less fantastically feminine, more simply human--“that many women would have chosen differently. For me there could be no question. You had been brought into the world in the belief that there would be no choice to make. We never dreamed, when you were born, of anything but the normal American life. I insist on your realizing that.”

Peter bowed. It already began to change his vision of himself a little, though he wasn’t sure he liked his mystery to be merely tubercular. Though if that was all, why in the world--but he saw that he could only listen and wait.

“Then--Honolulu didn’t serve very long. We had to go farther away from life. Now we’re in Tahiti. It’s--it’s a very wonderful climate.”

Mrs. Wayne rose, drew the crimson curtain to one side, and looked out. It was a moment before she spoke, and as she spoke she sat down again with helpless grace.

“I find it very hard to tell. I don’t think I can tell you it all.”

“I don’t see why you should have come at all, unless you are going to tell me everything there is to tell. But if you’ve really funked it, I don’t care, you know.” Thus Peter, maintaining his bravado.

“You don’t help me out.” The blue eyes rested on him critically. “But I suppose it’s not your fault. Since you don’t know anything about anything----”

“I can’t give you a leg up. No.”

She frowned a little, as if troubled by his phrasing, but resigned herself to it. “No; you can’t give me a leg up.”

“I say--” He leaned forward with a sudden impulse. “Why don’t I go back with you? Or come out later? Lots of people going to Tahiti now, you know, since they’ve exhausted the Spanish Main. Plenty of attractions: drives round the island, perfect scenery, native customs on tap--ordeal by fire and hot stones. It’s in the advertisements along with the rates and sailings. No reason why I shouldn’t come.”

She had drawn back while he spoke with a perfectly obvious terror. With parted lips, and coiled hair, and her very blood (it seemed) turned white, she looked like Greek tragic masks that he had seen in museums. These he had always thought grinning prevarications; now, he acknowledged their authenticity. His jauntiness faded into a stare. Then she pulled herself together, as Peter would have said, by slow, difficult degrees, like a kaleidoscope turned too slowly--pitiful to see.

“No, Peter, you must never come to Tahiti. He--he couldn’t bear it.”

“He?”

“Your father.”

“Oh--my father.” His imagination had not yet evoked his father. “I had forgotten him, for the moment.”

“Forgotten him! What extraordinary things you say!”

“Well, why shouldn’t I forget him? He hasn’t even taken the trouble to spend twenty-four hours in America to make my acquaintance.” Something acrid _had_ risen in the cup, and Peter’s lips were bitter.

Her white fingers moved again to the folds of her veil, as if the frail mesh weighed intolerably upon her brows.

“If you forget him, of course I can never explain. He is all there is.” She indulged then in an appraising glance. “You look kind and good. I didn’t think you would be undutiful.”

Undutiful! It was her turn to introduce an unfamiliar vocabulary. “Undutiful!” Peter repeated. “What do you mean? That I’m expected to be grateful to him for being my father?”

She smiled. She lifted her hands. She all but applauded him. “Yes, just that!”

Peter stared. He had two favorite words with which to describe the legitimately surprising. One of them was “rum.” But such an idea as this called for the other. It was--positively--“rococo.”

She went on then. Apparently his ironic question had smitten the rock, for the fluent tale gushed forth, watering all the arid past. But to Peter it was as if a man blinded and drenched with spray should try to drink of it. The first sentences came too quickly. In all his two and twenty years they found no context. He had still to learn the way of them. He supposed it was because he was finding out at last what it was to have a real mother.

“It wasn’t always Tahiti,” he heard her saying after a little. “We’ve tried everything south of the equator, I’ve sometimes thought. Valparaiso, for a long time. Perhaps you knew? Spencer Martin----”

“Never even told me when you changed your continent.” He was blandly bitter. Somehow it did hurt, as she went on.

“The climate,” Mrs. Wayne murmured again. And then she named other stages of their progress--all places, Peter reflected, that were in the geographies and in Kipling, and nowhere else. It made his parents sound like vagabonds of fiction. Her trailing narrative did not add to their reality. The details she mentioned were wildly exotic, and those she took for granted he could not supply. Her careful English was interlarded with strange scraps of Spanish and native names for things which left the objects, for him, unrecognizable. He made nothing out of it except that it wasn’t what he should call a life at all. He didn’t even see whether it was whim or necessity that controlled them. As soon as anything in her story became coherent or comprehensible, she doubled on her tracks. At first he threw in occasional questions, but the answers didn’t explain; and soon he stopped asking them. A foreignness like that left his very curiosities unphraseable. He came to the point where he didn’t even know what it was that he wanted to know. There was, to be sure, the irregularly recurrent stress on the hope of health, an obsession, apparently, under which they had faintly struggled and madly rambled; but it didn’t make much more sense than what he had learned in childhood about Ponce de Leon. You might as well ask a firefly to show you your way. Clearly, she hadn’t the gift of biography. He sat very still and intent, trying to make a pattern out of it; but she merely succeeded in dazing him. Then suddenly, when he was most bewildered, it came to an end, ran out in a mere confession of failure.

“And nowhere, at any time, has the miracle happened. He has never been well enough to come back. We have always had to stay away.”

“It must have been a strange life,” Peter mused.

“Strange? It may be. Strange for him, no doubt: so fitted for civilization--for your world.”

“You speak as if it weren’t yours.”

“Oh, mine,” she said simply; “_he_ was mine. I don’t ask for more civilization than that--than my husband.”

It was the most sentimental speech that Peter had ever heard from human lips, and he stared incredulously. But incredulity faded. Her tone of voice worked on him even after she fell silent. He still felt its vibration in the air while the mask shifted subtly before his eyes. Somehow, as she sat there, breathing such simple passion from her intricate adornments, she became at once more astounding and more intelligible. One saw it all--even Peter, in his young and untutored heart, knew infallibly. She had loved her husband supremely, and she had chucked everything for him. She had chucked so much, in fact, that she had even lost all sense of the worth of what she had cast away. She had nothing left to measure it by. Peter felt that America itself was a good deal to have chucked. It soothed his pride a little, to be sure, to have her treat New York so cavalierly. She hadn’t so much as looked at it; and she had circumnavigated the globe for him. It was clear, too, that every moment of the journey was a kind of torture to her. Her very look round the room divulged an agony of strangeness and suspense. She was just longing to be back on her island. Peter thrilled a little foolishly to it. He fancied it was a _grande passion_. The only _grande passion_ Peter had hitherto known had been that of a sophomore friend for his landlady’s daughter. That, though it had been enhanced by proper detail of elopement, disinheritance, and threats of suicide, had disappointed them all in the end. The bride was rather silly and tried to borrow money; and when Peter and Marty, in their senior year, had re-read Lawrence’s sonnet-sequence, they had found that it didn’t scan. But this--this was different. Whatever his mother had undertaken, she had obviously put it through. After all those years of marriage, to have your voice vibrate like that! It had never occurred to Peter that a fellow’s mother could still be in love with his father. Even in novels mothers weren’t. As for life: he recalled the parents that he knew. He had never seen another woman with just that look, the look of a dedicated being, of some one whose bloom had been, first and last, both jealously hoarded and lavishly spent. She was like a woman out of a harem: a million graces for one man, but a mere veiled bundle to all the rest. That was the secret of her uniqueness. She was a charming woman to whom the notion of charming the world at large would be blasphemous. Her mood had been slowly orientalized to match her exterior, which had gradually grown exotic. She would die in suttee. Peter felt her quality no less poignantly because his words for it were unsure. Of course she didn’t want to stay in America! Of course she was off to Vancouver at midnight! And yet--why, why had she come? Would she never explain?

She had been looking out of the window while he soliloquized--it was part of the whole sub-tropical spectacle of her that she should limit herself to so few hours, and then be as languid as if she had leased a suite at the St. Justin for life. She turned just as Peter had made up his mind to speak.

“There was one summer when you wanted to go to the Caucasus, I remember--a rather queer trip that was going to cost a great deal. We were sorry--I was dreadfully sorry--that you couldn’t go.”

Peter frowned. There you were! She crammed the supreme interview of a lifetime into an hour, and then had the audacity to be irrelevant.

“We couldn’t afford it just then. It--it was a very expensive year. I had to tell Spencer we couldn’t. I hope you didn’t hate us for it.”

Peter laughed. “I didn’t even know you had anything to do with it. Old Martin didn’t tell me it was funds. He just wet-blanketed the whole thing--said it wasn’t safe and he couldn’t hear of it. I didn’t mind much. I went to Murray Bay to visit another chap. But, I say--do you mean old Martin asked you?”

“He cabled.”

“And you?”

“I cabled back.”

“Has he been consulting you about me all these years? In cases like that, when I didn’t dream of it?”

“Oh, only occasionally,” she hastened to say. “We haven’t been spying on you.”

“No, I should hope not.” Then he called himself a queer duck, aggrieved for twenty years because he hadn’t been spied on, and now aggrieved at the thought that he might be.

“Was it you, by the way,” he asked, “who were interested in my affairs, or my father?” Her pronouns had been a little confusing.

“Your father has had, more and more, to leave all correspondence to me.” For the first time, her words came glibly. She had evidently packed that sentence in her trunk before starting.

“Is he so very ill?” Peter had veered at last to an interest in his other parent; it was clear that his other parent was the real clue to the mystery.

“Oh, horribly--horribly!” It was almost a cry. She bent forward. “So ill, Peter, so ill that you mustn’t come now, ever. He loathes it so--being so ill. And he is so very proud--as why shouldn’t he be? Can’t you see how he would mind? Do you think I’d have come if it had been possible to send for you? Do you think I’d have left him if there had been any other way? I’m not sure, as it is, that I ought to have come. It has been terrible, to be getting farther away every day; to know that I’m as far away from him as it is possible to be on this earth. And think what it must be for him, alone--and _there_!”

Well, she was as pathetic now as any little old lady in a gray shawl could be; only she was, somehow, tragic too. Her face was like the white grave of beauty. Peter was stupefied.

“There?” he repeated.

She flung out her hands. “On a savage island. Think of him on a savage island!”

“I can’t, very well,” murmured Peter inaudibly. Then: “But has he always been so ill? For twenty years? Or”--he fixed her a little more directly--“is there something besides illness?”

She did not answer. She rose and looked out of the window, and as Peter rose and stood beside her, she lifted one hand to his shoulder. There was something ineffably gracious in the gesture. She seemed to be making it all up to him. “Such a patched life, Peter,” she murmured. “You can’t blame him for not having wanted me to come.”

“Oh, he didn’t want you to come?”

She hesitated for an instant. “No. And now I must go.”

“Now?” he asked stupidly.

“Oh, yes, at once. I shan’t have time to dine with you.” She looked helplessly about for a scarf that she had thrown down.

“But no!” Peter broke out. “It’s preposterous. To come like this and go like this! Your train doesn’t go for hours--if you will go to-night.”

“But I haven’t arranged for it. I haven’t packed.”

“Why, you haven’t unpacked!” he cried.

“Oh, I think Frances may have. And I mustn’t fail to get off. There are the tickets to get, too. Peter, I _must_ go.” She spoke as if to delay were unspeakable treason; and, as she spoke, she turned to cross the room to the door.

“I say,” said Peter, standing squarely in her way, “why did you come? You shan’t go without telling me that.” It wasn’t the way to speak to one’s mother, but she had chosen to discard the maternal code.

She broke off in the act of withdrawal and turned to him. Her blue eyes were tearless but very sad. “I loved you dearly when you were very little,” she said simply. “I’ve never quite forgotten that. I suddenly realized that, if I waited any longer, I could never come. I think it was a cruel and foolish thing for me to do, and I’m a little ashamed of it; but--kiss me, Peter.”

Before he obeyed, he clutched at one more straw. “You won’t see old Martin?”

“I said good-bye to him a great many years ago.” She smiled. “I had no one to see in America except you. No--there’s a cab waiting. Good-bye.”

He kissed her then. It was clear to him that he might only watch her go. He saw her stop to rouse the old servant who waited in the hall. Then she passed, with strange grace, out of his life.

* * * * *

There was only one tone to take with Marty, who arrived, as always, late and breathless. “She’s the most charming woman I’ve ever met, and it’s the devil’s own luck that she had to go straight on to Vancouver to get a steamer back. My father--who is apparently a charmer, by the way--is very ill. She’s wonderful. It’s the biggest thing that has ever happened to me. She’s made everything as right as right. But I can’t tell you about it. After twenty years--you understand, old man----”

It was less the loyal friend than the loyal son; but he was still, dining that night at Plon’s (he wondered where the deuce she was dining), very much under her dominion. She had brought with her a rare illumination. He would never forget her voice and her veiled eyes. He hadn’t dreamed a woman could suggest her love in so many silent ways. She just _was_ adoration, implicit and incarnate. It was tremendous to have seen it. The white light it threw on Lawrence’s bride! The white light it threw, for that matter, on all the women he knew! He felt himself bursting with knowledge.

It was not until after dinner, indeed, that he realized just how wonderful in another way she had been, and with how little knowledge of another sort she had left him. She had told him absolutely nothing. So far as he was concerned, her narrative had only concealed events. He couldn’t remember whether New Zealand had followed or preceded Chile; and his sincere impression was that it didn’t matter, even to them. Anything that in all those years _had_ mattered, had been dropped away out of sight between her sentences. If he had been by his hour both racked and inebriated (for that was what his state of tension amounted to), it was not because of any facts she had given him. She had not even answered his plain questions. She had left him in dismay as soon as he had begun to ask them. He saw that now, though in his simplicity he hadn’t seen it before. He had been sacrificed again, as he had always been sacrificed. His mystery was still his mystery, and he was still left alone with his monstrous hypotheses. He wouldn’t have missed it for anything--not even for good old Marty. But he turned to Marty at last with compunction.

“Marty, old man,” he said, “it _was_ rum.”

THE WINE OF VIOLENCE

I am an old man now, and, like many other old men, I feel like making confession. Not of my own sins. I have always been called, I am well aware, a dilettante, and I could hardly have sinned in the ways of the particular sinners of whom I am about to speak. But I have the dilettante’s liking for all realities that do not brush him too close. Throughout the case of Filippo and Rachel Upcher, I was always on the safe side of the footlights. I have no excuse for not being honest, and I have at last an excuse for speaking. It is wonderful how the death of acquaintances frees one; and I am discovering, at the end of life, the strange, lonely luxury of being able to tell the truth about nearly every one I used to know. All the prolonged conventional disloyalties are passed away. It is extraordinary how often one is prevented from telling the blessed truth about the familiar dead because of some irrelevant survivor.

I do not know that there was much to choose between Filippo and Rachel Upcher--though the world would not agree with me. Both of them, in Solomon’s words, “drank the wine of violence.” I never really liked either of them, and I have never been caught by the sentimental adage that to understand is to forgive. If we are damned, it is God who damns us, and no one ventures to accuse Him of misunderstanding. It is a little late for a mere acquaintance to hark back to the Upchers, but by accident I, and I only, know the main facts that the world has so long been mistaken about. They were a lurid pair; they were not of my clan. But I cannot resist the wholly pious temptation to set my clan right about them. I should have done it long ago, in years when it would have made “scare-heads” in the same papers that of old had had so many “scare-heads” about the Upchers, but for my dear wife. She simply could not have borne it. To tell the story is part of the melancholy freedom her death has bestowed on me.