How often had he seen Dolores since late 1907? He could not remember. Four times, five? He could not remember. He had not as yet seen his grandson; he and Cornelia would visit the new parents on their way to the Riviera next month. What had happened to prevent more frequent visits in the past six years? “Everything,” he said aloud to the senator, in a tone of distraction, “has always been in such a hurry. I was against the marriage from the very start, when Cornelia was all for it. Nothing against the man, personally, though.”
“You’ve forgotten I was one of the guests, at the church in Portersville,” said the senator with hidden pity.
“Yes, so you were. I don’t know,” added Allan. “Dolores writes she is very happy and contented. I’ll find out for myself; I’m going to give myself more time.”
“And Tony?”
Allan began to smile, and some of the distraught darkness lifted from his face. “Oh, Tony! He was ordained last year, you know. And he’s Father Dugan’s young curate, in the very church where I was baptized! Funny. It’s been rebuilt, the church, and is very impressive now. I think there are two curates. I donated a lot of money to the rebuilding, and to the Sisters’ Hospital. Tony’s very happy. He wasn’t pleased with Dolores’s marriage, though. But he and Dolores drifted apart, and there was nothing he could say or do.”
The senator thoughtfully filled his pipe. He said, “And how is your boy DeWitt since he married that pretty Peale girl last June?”
Allan laughed softly. “DeWitt is a natural-born railroader. And he only twenty-three! He’s taken a lot of burdens off me lately. By the way, Mary is ‘expecting,’ too. How time passes. Children yesterday, men and parents today. It’s confusing. You know, of course, that Miles Peale married Ruth Purcell, very quietly, two years ago last September? It surprised everybody, except Cornelia, who has taken quite a liking to Miles. I thought the marriage unsuitable, myself. Ruth is nearly ten years older than Miles, but then he is very mature for twentyfive—twenty-six? Just about Tony’s age. Miles is doing very well; one of our best superintendents. He moved in with Ruth in old Jim Purcell’s house near the river. I took on his brother Fielding as Miles’s assistant. Fielding’s going to marry old Brownell’s granddaughter—the banker.”
Allan’s face had become black, though he had talked casually enough. The Pharisee, Patrick Peale, had succeeded. His sons were in the Interstate Railroad Company. One of them now was in control of the Purcell money and the Purcell railroad holdings. Patrick had his own control, and through his wife Laura, even more dangerous control. (I wish to God he’d die, thought Allan. Perhaps I’ll get my wish; he looks like death itself these days.) Allan thought of Ruth, thirty-five years old, with a pang. A sweet and innocent woman, for all her age. She adored her young husband, and there again was a danger.
The senator considerately puffed his pipe and did not look at Allan. “By the way,” he said, “I understand that your brother-in-law, Norman deWitt, has made quite a stir in literary circles with his book Design for the New Order. Read it myself. Have you?”
Allan stood up; he lit a cigarette. ‘Yes. He’s one of the enemy. I thought his brother Jon was, but it was he all the time. Funny. He always seemed to me to be a youth, soft and without shape, just smiling and hanging around his mother, and never a thought in his head. It just proves that you never know. Lives in London a lot of the time, talking Fabian socialism. And he with all that damned money he is scheduled to inherit when his damn—I mean, his old mother dies. He’s got a lot of his own, too. You can be sure those Socialists are very miserly with their cash; he lives somewhere in the neighborhood of Soho, in a run-down house practically in the slums. ‘The wealth of the world should be justly shared,’ the imbeciles like him say. But they don’t mean their own wealth, which they hang on to with both hands. They just mean yours, and mine.”
“He never married?”
Allan said viciously, “No. You see, he couldn’t marry his mother.”
He refilled his glass automatically, without invitation. Sometimes,” he said, “life gets too much for me. I’d like to move off somewhere. I can’t recall a single day, during the past twenty years or so, when I’ve known an hour of peace or happiness. A man of my age surely deserves a little quiet once in a while, a time to think. But things move faster and faster. …”
He smiled with difficulty at the senator. “I suppose they always do, for men like me. I’m not the kind old Rufus was.”
44
Allan and Cornelia and Estelle did not arrive in England until late in May.
Allan was acquainted with London, which he reluctantly admired for its mighty feeling of power and strength, and which he disliked for its all-pervading stench of coal gas. The south of England, where his son-in-law Lord Gibson-Hamilton had his country seat, was unknown to him. He and the two women left London on a particularly warm and humid day, went by train for a considerable distance, and then were picked up by a huge black limousine, with a chauffeur and assistant chauffeur, at a country way-station, where all was wind and rolling sky of vivid blue and brilliant white. Allan watched the little English villages fly past, with their quiet and curving streets and little crowding shops, thatched roofs, and brick or cobbled roads. The limousine rolled cautiously up and down country lanes sunken far below neat fields walled with earth thickly overgrown with ferns and buttercups. He caught glimpses of towering purple rhododendrons and the pink candles of chestnut trees. Then the hot sun poured down like a flood of light on the plushy green hills of Devon studded with trees like a great park. Here and there an ancient farmhouse with stone walls stood alone on the moors, and golden gorse sprang from the spring earth like twisted torches.
The moors, green, brown, and russet, particularly interested him; and their wild and isolated hills, on which roamed the famous untamed horses, called to some deep instinct in him. The party wheeled over old stone bridges, which cast their shadows on blue and green water. They stopped for luncheon at a hoary inn, reputed to have been patronized by Drake. Then the limousine swung along the silent countryside, winding its way through dim green lanes between high banks, and passing woods spotted with sunshine, and clumps of lilacs in full bloom, and copses of plane trees. Now, occasionally, the sea flashed into view like a purple mirror. “It is more like the south of France than England,” said Allan with pleasure. He was amazed when he saw an occasional cactus and a lonely palm tree, as they rushed south.
“It’s England, all right,” said Cornelia dryly. “This happens to be a fine day, but it’s likely to be as cold as death tonight, and tomorrow. I wonder if the cacti and the palms really grow here, or are they set out in tubs?”
She was just as cynical about Cockington, with its winding streets and thatched whitewashed cottages and antique smithy. But Allan was charmed. While Estelle remained in the limousine, he and Cornelia walked up a sweet-smelling lane to the little church of St. George and St. Mary, moldering softly under the sun. They strolled through gardens unbelievably beautiful, up and down long paths about which gigantic rhododendrons bloomed in all shades of pale and dark lilac, magenta, and rose, and great twisted trees stood at a distance in gauzy and dreamlike light. Allan became more and more entranced by the gently dim and fragrant lushness of the country; he stopped, with Cornelia, at The Ponds, sheets of still water in which the rhododendrons were reflected in masses of color, and on which floated tame ducks who came nearer to inspect the visitors with inquisitive and fearless eyes. England’s green and pleasant land, thought Allan, and he came to believe in the old stories that this was once a merry land also, full of legends and lusty men, castles and strange forests heavy with silence and specters, Merlin and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. What remained was a mysterious memory, hanging in space, without sound, while the mills of Lancashire roared over the horizon of dreams, and the mighty heart of London beat incessantly in some far distance.
“But still,” said Allan to Cornelia, “the English respect their land. In America, we do
not respect it. We ravish it, as if with greedy contempt.”
“Dear, let’s not talk about your obsession concerning agriculture again,” said Cornelia, slipping her gloved hand into his arm affectionately. “Remember, our resources in America are practically inexhaustible, while here they must conserve everything.”
“No,” said Allan obstinately, “our resources are not inexhaustible. And we’ll learn that we, too, must conserve, perhaps when it is too late. Think of the lumbermen who are destroying our forests. …”
“Estelle will be getting impatient,” said Cornelia, and twinkled indulgently at her husband. “We have no respect for the earth,” Allan repeated, but Cornelia did not answer him.
The palms became more numerous as they went on, though Allan had to admit to himself that they appeared a little unhappy and unhealthy in this country. The long English twilight was setting in. Estelle drowsed under a robe, Cornelia yawned and drowsed also. But Allan watched with an eagerness he had not felt for a long time. A lovely country, he thought, a beautiful land. He smiled at the villagers, pinkcheeked men and women and children, who stopped to gape at them as they passed down the lanes and through the quiet little streets. They smiled in return, and one old man waved his pipe in salute, and an old woman curtsied. What had changed the English? Allan asked himself. Of course, they say that they must have industry, and export, or they will starve. But what had become of their legendary spirit, their boldness, their wine-drinking hilarity, their fearless men? Have they all died in the factories and the mills and in the bleak and dreary streets of their industrial cities? Or is it all waiting there, asleep, for some trumpet call? Will King Arthur ever gather his knights about him again, and will Merlin weave spells, and will these green and silent lanes ever hear the tread of brave men once more, and the laughter of full-bodied wenches? Will there ever be another Elizabeth to move poets and set great fleets on the seas and make the inns resound with the thump of goblets and the courtyards ring with horses?
They were closer to the sea now, which had turned to a gray mistiness under a sky of faded rose. The woods had become cloudy, and wisps of fog curled on the flowery banks along the lanes. The hills drifted in mauve and heliotrope. The limousine bowled along a sealane, and the quiet became an intense and present thing. Then they were turning from the ocean and entering through high iron gates opened for them by two countrymen, who removed their caps in a servile gesture which Allan found irritating. Now they were in a green and rising park-land filled with monster oaks and larch trees and rhododendrons, the grass almost covered with tiny white daisies, dreamlike vistas opening everywhere and colored with flowers. They seemed to go on forever. Allan said, “Is this all part of Dick’s land?” Cornelia nodded. “You’ve never seen a real English estate before,” she said. “This is only one small section of it. He has a huge farm, too, at some distance.”
The land rose steadily, and there, on a low hill, stood a great mansion of gray stone, turreted against the sunset sky, its battlements floating in mist, its high and narrow leaded windows flaming with scarlet. Again, Allan was entranced, though he thought wryly to himself that the Interstate Railroad Company had probably restored the castle to habitability, and was responsible for the fine condition of the park.
But he was really happy that his beloved daughter lived among such beauty and in such splendor, and he was glad that he had made it possible for her. When the bronze doors of the mansion opened, and servants appeared, he looked for Dolores anxiously, for he had a “plebeian” idea that she would be there to greet him at once, with her child in her arms, her pale blond hair blowing about her face. However, there was no sign of the family as Allan and the two women entered a massive stone hall whose walls were lined with armor and pennants and banners, and which was lighted with candles set in a huge iron chandelier. He smelled mustiness and an indefinable odor of antiquity and felt a chill which a fire, burning briskly in a gray stone fireplace, could not banish. A broad stone staircase, ponderous and dim, wound upward into growing dusk.
The candlelight winked back from the old dimmed armor, and the banners lifted a little in the breeze that came through the yawning entrance. The house echoed spectrally as the party was conducted upstairs. All at once Allan was over-poweringly depressed, and he was afraid for his daughter in this mass of stone and iron, in this cold silence overlooking the gray sea and the dreaming, unreal park.
But the suite of rooms assigned to Allan and Cornelia was pleasant enough, all big old furniture and tapestried walls and fires and lamplight. “Damned old-fashioned and inconvenient,” said Cornelia, discovering commodes and accompanying china. “But then, it’s the country. Smell those lamps! Shades of my childhood!”
Allan said nothing, for he liked these rooms. He examined the enormous old bed in his bedroom, with the black posts carved intricately, and tested the hard mattress. He rubbed his hands before the good fire. It could be peaceful, he told himself, as a neat maid entered with a copper pitcher of hot water and extra towels.
I have a feeling they know how to live, Allan thought, washing his face and hands. His spirits rose a little. It was possible that Dolores liked all this, after all. He momentarily forgot that she wrote very seldom, and then in the most impersonal manner. As he wiped his hands the house suddenly vibrated to the sound of a brazen bell, the announcement that it was time to dress for dinner. Its echoes remained, and once more Allan was depressed. While a valet deftly unpacked his bag containing his evening clothes, Allan went to the leaded casements and pushed them open and looked out beyond the park to the darkening sea. A lighthouse blinked on a pile of rock; a wind blew in scented with grass and roses, and ivy rustled on the old walls. Where is my daughter? thought Allan, with the perfumed dampness on his face. And he repeated despondently: Where is my daughter? The distant sea answered dolorously, and again he experienced fear.
It was not until three in the morning that Allan fell into the sharpest and uneasiest of his dreams, in spite of the fact that he had drunk heavily before going to bed to loosen, without result, the awful tension in him. Within half an hour after he had fallen into this nightmare-ridden doze, the kaleidoscope of bodiless faces and shifting images which had printed themselves on his closed eyelids faded away, and he dreamed clearly and sharply. He was walking down a rain-driven street again, with the gutters awash at his right and the dripping walls of lonely buildings at his left. He could see the misty lamplight on each corner of the street, glistening faintly on the steel lines of the rain slanting away from it. He was young again, and he was whistling “Killarney,” and the sweet and piercing music rang back from the closed walls he was passing. There was a tattered election poster on a wall, and he tore it loose and looked at it. But it was not the young Patrick Peale’s face now; it was the face of a man of sixty, a sick and broken man with white hair, haunted features, and fanatical yet vulnerable eyes. “You should not have done it,” said the pictured face to Allan sadly. And the young Allan, in his shabby and streaming clothing, replied, “There is so much each man should not do to another.”
The poster was torn from his hands and it fled down the street like a tattered ghost, and Allan called after it, “Lord have mercy upon us both.” A man’s voice began to sing in the darkness: “Now was it Abel, was it Cain—who suffered death, who suffered pain?”
I must hurry, thought Allan. He shook his head, which was aching unbearably. The mouse ran across his path, and he kicked it and it flew in the air. In its passage it looked at him; it had his own face in miniature, his face as it was in his middle years, and it cried out in a loud and bitter voice. It fell in the rushing gutter, and Allan watched it as it was borne away in the murky water. He said again, “Lord have mercy upon us.” He began to run, and the walls closed in upon him and he was in a crevice and he shouted desperately for help. But the walls narrowed until he could not move and they rose far up into the blackness toward the sky, and he was trapped and he knew he would never be free again, not until he died.
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br /> He struggled against the horror of the dream, in which loneliness seemed the greatest terror of all. He panted and gasped, and then he was awake in a ghostly flood of moonlight and in a torrent of dark wind gushing in through the casements from the sea. He was sitting upright and his silk nightshirt was soaked with sweat and his heart was beating wildly. “Christ, what a dream!” he said to himself. He could not lie down again. He fumbled for his slippers and robe, and they were damp. He went to the casements and leaned on the wide ledge beyond them. The sea, flowing almost silently, lay beyond the dusky gardens, and it was a plain of silver, breaking here and there into silver fire. The moon floated over it, cold and calm, and the wet air ran over Allan’s shivering body like water. He closed the casements tightly, and locked them to shut out the wind and the eerie sound of the whispering ivy, and he lit a lamp.
Never Victorious, Never Defeated Page 63
