The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow

by Patrick Quentin

  The girl moved past him and sat down on the piano stool.

  “I am a woman. I cannot help that. But …”

  She began to play. The same Prokofieff sonata sounded very different. There was a crispness, a virility, an almost brutal candor. After a few pages, she stopped and swung round on the stool.

  “You see? There is nothing cute in Prokofieff.”

  John Tuthill Crane’s experience of girls had been almost as limited as his experience of criticism. Ever since the attack of polio which had left him semi-invalid at the age of eighteen, his mother had carefully shielded him from dull contact with the boorish world outside their own beautifully simple drawing room. The few carefully cultured daughters and nieces who had slipped, as it were, through the mesh of the net had almost all fallen meekly in love with his good looks and his talent and had served only to afford Claire and John with material for gay little private jokes when they were alone.

  The girl, with her boldly carried neck and her Eastern eyes, challenging him as an equal, was something utterly new. The art connoisseur in him, trained by Claire in many prewar trips to Europe, reacted to a beauty that might have bloomed in a Tiepolo, or perhaps in a Delacroix. But the beauty seemed too close, as if a figure in a canvas was leaning out of its frame, making some personal demand on him. Ill at ease, he murmured, “You play very well.”

  “No. I do not do anything very well.” She reached in the pocket of her dirndl, brought out a package of cigarettes and lit one. The heavy-lidded eyes, still frankly curious, were on his face. “I’ve noticed you. You are by far the most interesting-looking person in the hotel. What are you doing in a place like this?”

  “I hardly know.” John Tuthill Crane acknowledged the compliment with a faint bow. “I might ask you the same question.”

  “I have to be here. I work here. The gift shop in the lobby.”

  “Oh.” The extra unfamiliarity of a girl who worked for her living added to his awkwardness. To bring the conversation back to something more accustomed and cosmopolitan, he said, “You’re not an American, are you?”

  “Austrian. My mother and I got out of Vienna in 1938 when they killed my father. I was only a child then, of course. Mother’s dead. That’s why I’m working here.” She was still watching him through cigarette smoke. “You’re bored, aren’t you?”

  His laugh sounded weak, almost a giggle, to him. “I wouldn’t call this place exactly stimulating.”

  “That’s because you do what everyone else does. Go to the beach. That dull, dull beach. Sit on the terrace. You should go inland. Up the mountain. No one goes there. There is a waterfall. Do you know it? It’s wonderful. A great sheet of water falling, falling, with little detailed ferns. It’s like the Dolomites. No, more like Norway, like an illustration from Hans Christian Andersen.”

  Memories of pictures in the edition of Hans Christian Andersen read to him as a child by Claire rose in his mind. Fairy-tale landscapes and, in front, disturbingly, some dark water nymph or some mysterious fatal queen.

  She was saying, “I’ll show it you. It’s wonderful at night. There is a moon tonight. Shall we go after dinner? Around eight?”

  Every night at eight-thirty, Claire called from Philadelphia. It was the part of the day to which he looked forward most. Some strange quirk kept him from wanting the girl to know about Claire’s call.

  While he hesitated, she glanced quickly at his cane and began, “It’s not very steep. I don’t think …”

  John Tuthill Crane flushed. “Thank you. But I’m not a cripple.”

  His friends never mentioned his limp. But this girl showed no embarrassment at his delicate reproach. “All right then? At eight?”

  “I’m sorry. But I’m expecting an important call at eight-thirty and—”

  “Then we’ll make it later. Ten?” She got up from the piano stool, suddenly smiling. The smile brought an unaccountable thrill, like the touch of a cold finger. “What’s your room number?”

  Some little voice in him said, Don’t tell. How absurd. As if there was any reason to avoid taking a delightful moonlit walk to a beauty spot.

  “Thirty-eight,” he said.

  “I’ll come and get you. By the way, my name’s Lotte—Lotte Rank.”

  She smiled again and left the recreation hall, the full skirt of the dirndl swinging around her sun-dark legs.

  Claire seemed almost at his side. Get yourself a pretty little girl. When she’d said it, he had recognized the ironic timbre in her voice. She hadn’t meant it, of course. It had been one of their subtle private jokes—a reminder of how completely self-sufficient they were, just the two of them.

  John Tuthill Crane sat down again at the piano. His fingers stumbled as he tried a little Debussy.

  He did not feel like playing.

  She moved ahead of him up the mountain track. She was wearing white. In the clear moonlight her bare arms and legs, emerging from the shadowy whiteness, gleamed with a faint blue sheen. The other girls he had known would have chattered, half-nervous, half-coquettish. Lotte walked in silence, and her silence seemed part of the magic of the night which had brought John Crane an unwonted sensation of exhilaration. Almost forgetting his cane, he strode after her. Life seemed to have a new intensity of meaning, heady and rather alarming too.

  Always ascending, they passed through a forest of milky black, fragrant evergreens. Gradually the silence became impregnated with a humming which, as they climbed, swelled to a roar. A sudden turn in the path revealed the waterfall.

  In his peculiar mood, the scene before him had an unearthly beauty. They were standing on the brink of a chasm. Beyond the gorge, tumbling past night-black crags, the white cascade roared down into a foam-swept pool perilously far below. Around it, smaller falls, thin and gentle as muslin, shimmered in the moonlight. The air was cool and wet with spray.

  Lotte stood in front of him, silhouetted against the galloping white water, something beautiful and strange from before history. He searched for poetic images. Thetis. A Norwegian witch girl. La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

  Still without speaking, she took his hand and drew him down to a flat rock on the very edge of the sheer drop. Curling ferns sprouted around them. Their delicate fronds caressed John Tuthill Crane’s legs. He let his cane fall, unnoticed.

  When they had left the hotel, John had thought, How Claire would love this, but gradually, on their trip up the mountain, the image of his mother had faded to the gossamer thinness of a ghost. Now, suddenly, as his heart pounded to the beat of the waterfall, he thought, This is too big for Claire. She’d be lost here away from her Derain sketches, her Queen Anne silver tea set, her retinue. It was the first consciously heretical thought he had ever had against his mother, and yet its enormity seemed quite natural.

  Lotte had not removed her hand. At last her voice came, soft, foreign, framed in the ringing of the water.

  “Who telephoned you tonight? Your wife?”

  “No. I’m not married.”

  “A girl then?”

  “No. It wasn’t a girl either. It was my mother.”

  The admission came quite naturally too.

  “Your mother? Why does she call? Someone is ill?”

  “Oh, no. No reason. Mother calls me every night at eight-thirty. We’re very close. We always have been.”

  As if she had challenged him, he felt an urgent need to explain to her his relationship with his mother, somehow to justify it. All his New England reserve, his training in cultured diffidence seemed to slip away. He was telling her of the trips to Europe which had begun after he had become well enough to travel, of Claire’s wonderful feeling for art which she had passed on to him, of the beautiful life she had built for the two of them in their own little world of paintings and music and books. And yet, as he talked, the picture he evoked did not seem quite the way he had expected it to seem. Something new was being released in him by the surge of the water, the moonlight, and this girl, something with the stature of a man, for which his
former life seemed not the paradise he had thought it but a cage. Why do you play Prokofieff like an old woman? The remembered sentence was like a stab in his manhood.

  When he finished, Lotte turned closer to him. In the moonlight her eyes were dark as the spray-wet rocks.

  “She must be a remarkable woman, your mother.”

  The sarcasm in her voice neither escaped nor shocked him.

  “Oh, yes, she is.”

  “And rich too?”

  He was startled by that crude question. “Rich? Why, do you…?”

  “You said your father left a great deal of money. Did he leave it to you or to your mother?”

  “To Claire—to Mother, of course.”

  “I thought so.” Her laugh was hard and bitter.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “They need money to do it, women like that. How I loathe them, these evil, cannibal mothers who eat their young.”

  Suddenly her hands were on his arms. He saw her face, soft, dusky as a night flower, moving up to his. Then the image was obliterated as her lips found his mouth. She pressed herself against him. He could feel her heart pounding through her breast, infinitely strange and wonderful to him like the pounding of the cascade. His whole being seemed to rush to his lips and from them to hers. There was nothing left in him to protest against her terrible slander of Claire.

  Her cheeks were wet with spray. He kissed them tempestuously. And as he kissed, her voice came in a near, warm whisper.

  “I need you. I am so lonely. And you need me. You need a woman before it’s too late.”

  The words meant nothing. He thought only of the breath from her lips on his cheek. Suddenly she drew away, leaving her hand curled in his.

  “Come on. We will swim. There is a path down to the pool. It is cold, but it fizzes like champagne.”

  She jumped up, releasing his hand. A shadow of the old John Tuthill Crane reasserted itself.

  “Swim? But we have no suits!”

  Her laughter was clear, exciting, unhuman as a water nymph’s.

  “Hang your clothes on a hickory limb.”

  She turned back to him, half-stooping over him so that her dark hair brushed his cheek.

  “Come.”

  John leaped impetuously to his feet. He stumbled. He had to grope for his cane.

  Lotte was disappearing into the shadows towards the path which wound down the chasm.

  John Tuthill Crane limped after her, panting slightly.

  Next morning John awoke to a feeling of shame, almost of panic. The sight of Claire’s daily letter on the breakfast table was as welcome as a life line to a drowning sailor. He avidly consumed its usual quota of charming reflections, sly gossip, and warm intimacy. But a sensation of guilt, of betrayal, made a barrier. He avoided the gift shop and spent the whole day on the beach waiting, fanatically eager, for Claire’s telephone call. That evening, when it came and he heard his mother’s gay, bantering voice, it was like returning home from a perilous voyage. His protestations of loneliness were so wistful that she gave her soft crooning laugh.

  “My poor baby, you really are sad. How tiresome of these wretched infants to contract such a silly disease.”

  “I could join you in Philadelphia,” he suggested impulsively.

  “Now, darling, be sensible. You know you never had measles. What would we do with a measly Lord Byron?”

  Claire rang off. As John put down the receiver, there was a tap on the unlocked door and Lotte came in. She glanced from the telephone to him. At the sight of her, he felt his knees go weak. She moved to him without speaking. She slipped her arms, cool and soft, around him.

  “Johnny, all day I have been in a dream, waiting.”

  Her lips came up to his, sure of themselves, possessive. With their touch, John Tuthill Crane forgot his pitiful need for Claire. He was taller, stronger, swaggeringly capable of anything.

  “The waterfall again, Johnny?”

  “Yes, Lotte.”

  From a great height, he looked down with contemptuous distaste at the little male spinster who had been chattering over the phone with its mother.

  His mouth moved to kiss Lotte’s open eyes. The thick lashes stirred against his lips.

  And then I closed her wild, wild eyes with kisses four….

  After that evening he always called her in his mind La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Not because her enchantment was evil. But because it was sheer, delirious enchantment. Every night they would go to the waterfall. Sometimes they would sit together on the brink of the chasm in enraptured silence. Sometimes Lotte reluctantly would talk of the hardship, the bitterness, the loneliness of her life before she met him. During the day, when Lotte could leave her work, they went horseback riding or swimming in the ocean. Claire had always zealously guarded the invalid in him. With Lotte he found he thrived on exercise. Lotte had a phonograph in her little room. Some afternoons they would sit together listening to Landowska play the Goldberg Variations or Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. With Lotte, even music seemed new and wonderful.

  It was as if a poison he had never detected was being drawn out of his veins. And every day, he realized more clearly the sterile perversity of his former life with Claire. Although Lotte never again mentioned his mother’s name, he looked back on her with different eyes and saw behind the porcelain smile, the little fluttering caresses, to the true woman. The cannibal mother who had been trying to eat her young. The Enemy. That was what she had always been—The Enemy.

  But something—either cowardice or a vestige of loyalty—kept him writing to his mother every day and brought him to his room punctually at eight-thirty to await her call. Sometimes, when he chattered with her over the phone and he heard the same old tenderness in his own voice, he was appalled at his deception.

  The moment he was back with Lotte, however, nothing seemed to matter. Lotte was hungry for him. There was a force, a flame in her that almost consumed him. His soul and body knew heights of whose existence he had never dreamed before he met her. Sometimes he felt that his frame was too fragile to endure such ecstasy. But, if there were fleeting moments when he regretted the small tranquillity of his life in Worcester, he was not afraid of them, for he realized that it was not Johnny Crane who was experiencing them. It was The Victim—the little male spinster….

  One evening, about a week after they had met, they took a picnic supper up the mountain and ate together while the light faded over the foaming cascade. Lotte was gay, wild. Exalted by her wayward love-making, John Tuthill Crane forgot the time. When he happened to glance at his watch, it was ten minutes past eight. A pang of conscience caught him.

  “I’d better get right back or I’ll miss Mother’s call.”

  “No!” Lotte swung round, her eyes blazing with an intensity that startled him. “No,” she shouted. “Damn her. No.”

  She flung herself into his arms, kissing his cheek, his mouth, his eyes. “Stay with me, Johnny. Stay with me. Don’t let her spoil it. Don’t, Johnny.”

  Philadelphia seemed suddenly farther away than the Great Bear.

  When they returned, about two o’clock, to the hotel, Lotte came with him to his room. They had hardly entered when the phone rang. A chill shivered through John Tuthill Crane.

  “Mother.”

  “Don’t answer. Don’t answer.”

  The phone rang again. John’s hand hovered and then picked up the receiver. The operator’s voice was followed by Claire’s.

  “John, my dear, my darling, is it you?”

  He was surprised at the sound of her voice. It was hoarse with a quivering intensity that somehow brought memories of Lotte’s voice.

  “Yes, Claire.”

  “My darling, what happened? I’ve been terrified, terrified. An accident? Oh, John, don’t tell me you’re hurt.”

  John Tuthill Crane felt himself dwindling in size. With a feeble attempt to be both conciliatory and casual, he said, “I’m sorry, Claire. You see, there was a picnic, and—”

 
“Picnic!” His mother’s voice rose in shrill, throbbing anger. “You torment me for hours. You stay out until two o’clock in the morning for a picnic!”

  “But, Claire—”

  Her laughter tilted dangerously upwards. “I was calling to let you know I would be able to get home in four days. I thought it would please you. But now, apparently, that you’ve discovered the exquisite pleasure of picnics, you won’t want to return.”

  “But, Claire, please listen—”

  “Listen? I cannot imagine there is anything interesting for me to listen to. Nor can I see any particular reason for calling again. You know my number. If you need anything. Money, for example …”

  “Mother—”

  He heard the receiver clatter on its stand. It was the first time he had ever quarrelled with Claire and the shocking ferocity of it horrified him. It was the first time too that she had stripped off pretense and shown herself to him nakedly covetous and hungry, the Cannibal Mother. An obscene picture came of a praying mantis, green jaws about little withered insect paws.

  Suddenly Lotte’s hands were on his arms. Beneath the swinging hair, her eyes were fixed implacably on his.

  “I heard. It’s a bondage. Don’t you see? A bondage not of your own choosing.”

  He gave a weak shrug.

  “Johnny.” She took his arms roughly. “Johnny, love me, marry me.”

  But his manhood had left him. With dreadful clarity, he saw now the picture of himself as he really was. You can’t sweep away the past overnight. He was thirty-six. It was only Claire who called him a boy. For thirty-six years the poison had been at work. He was crippled not only in body. He whispered, “She’d never let me.”

  Her hands slid up to his shoulders. “What difference does that make, Johnny? What difference?”

  “You know. I have no money. She’d never give me a penny. I don’t know anything useful. My piano, sketching. I’ve never been trained to work.”

  “But you could, Johnny. You could.”

  She was kissing him, but the warm, clinging kisses did not seem to be for him. They were for someone else who didn’t exist, for Johnny Crane, not for the little male spinster.