Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Yes?”

  “WOULD you mind telling us something of the MYSTERIOUS Narcissus?”

  “If you’ll be more definite,” I returned, in the tone of a question.

  “There couldn’t be more than one like THAT,” said Miss Elliott, “at least, not in one neighbourhood, could there? I mean a RECKLESSLY charming vision with a WHITE tie and WHITE hair and WHITE flannels.”

  “Oh,” said I, “HE’S not mysterious.”

  “But he IS,” she returned; “I insist on his being MYSTERIOUS! Rarely, grandly, STRANGELY mysterious! You WILL let me think so?” This young lady had a whimsical manner of emphasising words unexpectedly, with a breathless intensity that approached violence, a habit dangerously contagious among nervous persons, so that I answered slowly, out of a fear that I might echo it.

  “It would need a great deal of imagination. He’s a young American, very attractive, very simple—”

  “But he’s MAD!” she interrupted.

  “Oh, no!” I said hastily.

  “But he IS! A person told me so in a garden this VERY afternoon,” she went on eagerly; “a person with a rake and EVER so many moles on his chin. This person told me all about him. His name is Oliver Saffren, and he’s in the charge of a VERY large doctor and quite, QUITE mad!”

  “Jean Ferret, the gardener.” I said deliberately, and with venom, “is fast acquiring notoriety in these parts as an idiot of purest ray, and he had his information from another whose continuance unhanged is every hour more miraculous.”

  “How RUTHLESS of you,” cried Miss Elliott, with exaggerated reproach, “when I have had such a thrilling happiness all day in believing that RIOTOUSLY beautiful creature mad! You are wholly positive he isn’t?”

  Our dialogue was now all that delayed a general departure from the table. This, combined with the naive surprise I have mentioned, served to make us temporarily the centre of attention, and, among the faces turned toward me, my glance fell unexpectedly upon one I had not seen since entering the dining-room. Mrs. Harman had been placed at some distance from me and on the same side of the table, but now she leaned far back in her chair to look at me, so that I saw her behind the shoulders of the people between us. She was watching me with an expression unmistakably of repressed anxiety and excitement, and as our eyes met, hers shone with a certain agitation, as of some odd consciousness shared with me. It was so strangely, suddenly a reminder of the look of secret understanding given me with good night, twenty-four hours earlier, by the man whose sanity was Miss Elliott’s topic, that, puzzled and almost disconcerted for the moment, I did not at once reply to the lively young lady’s question.

  “You’re hesitating!” she cried, clasping her hands. “I believe there’s a DARLING little chance of it, after all! And if it weren’t so, why would he need to be watched over, day AND night, by an ENORMOUS doctor?”

  “This IS romance!” I retorted. “The doctor is Professor Keredec, illustriously known in this country, but not as a physician, and they are following some form of scientific research together, I believe. But, assuming to speak as Mr. Saffren’s friend,” I added, rising with the others upon Miss Ward’s example, “I’m sure if he could come to know of your interest, he would much rather play Hamlet for you than let you find him disappointing.”

  “If he could come to know of my interest!” she echoed, glancing down at herself with mock demureness. “Don’t you think he could come to know something more of me than that?”

  The windows had been thrown open, allowing passage to a veranda. Miss Elizabeth led the way outdoors with the prince, the rest of us following at hazard, and in the mild confusion of this withdrawal I caught a final glimpse of Mrs. Harman, which revealed that she was still looking at me with the same tensity; but with the movement of intervening groups I lost her. Miss Elliott pointedly waited for me until I came round the table, attached me definitely by taking my arm, accompanying her action with a dazzling smile. “Oh, DO you think you can manage it?” she whispered rapturously, to which I replied — as vaguely as I could — that the demands of scientific research upon the time of its followers were apt to be exorbitant.

  Tables and coffee were waiting on the broad terrace below, with a big moon rising in the sky. I descended the steps in charge of this pretty cavalier, allowed her to seat me at the most remote of the tables, and accepted without unwillingness other gallantries of hers in the matter of coffee and cigarettes. “And now,” she said, “now that I’ve done so much for your DEAREST hopes and comfort, look up at the milky moon, and tell me ALL!”

  “If you can bear it?”

  She leaned an elbow on the marble railing that protected the terrace, and, shielding her eyes from the moonlight with her hand, affected to gaze at me dramatically. “Have no distrust,” she bade me. “Who and WHAT is the glorious stranger?”

  Resisting an impulse to chime in with her humour, I gave her so dry and commonplace an account of my young friend at the inn that I presently found myself abandoned to solitude again.

  “I don’t know where to go,” she complained as she rose. “These other people are MOST painful to a girl of my intelligence, but I cannot linger by your side; untruth long ago lost its interest for me, and I prefer to believe Mr. Jean Ferret — if that is the gentleman’s name. I’d join Miss Ward and Cressie Ingle yonder, but Cressie WOULD be indignant! I shall soothe my hurt with SWEETEST airs. Adieu.”

  With that she made me a solemn courtesy and departed, a pretty little figure, not little in attractiveness, the strong moonlight, tinged with blue, shimmering over her blond hair and splashing brightly among the ripples of her silks and laces. She swept across the terrace languidly, offering an effect of comedy not unfairylike, and, ascending the steps of the veranda, disappeared into the orange candle-light of a salon. A moment later some chords were sounded firmly upon a piano in that room, and a bitter song swam out to me over the laughter and talk of the people at the other tables. It was to be observed that Miss Anne Elliott sang very well, though I thought she over-emphasised one line of the stanza:

  “This world is a world of lies!”

  Perhaps she had poisoned another little arrow for me, too. Impelled by the fine night, the groups upon the terrace were tending toward a wider dispersal, drifting over the sloping lawns by threes and couples, and I was able to identify two figures threading the paths of the garden, together, some distance below. Judging by the pace they kept, I should have concluded that Miss Ward and Mr. Cresson Ingle sought the healthful effects of exercise. However, I could see no good reason for wishing their conversation less obviously absorbing, though Miss Elliott’s insinuation that Mr. Ingle might deplore intrusion upon the interview had struck me as too definite to be altogether pleasing. Still, such matters could not discontent me with my solitude. Eastward, over the moonlit roof of the forest, I could see the quiet ocean, its unending lines of foam moving slowly to the long beaches, too far away to be heard. The reproachful voice of the singer came no more from the house, but the piano ran on into “La Vie de Boheme,” and out of that into something else, I did not know what, but it seemed to be music; at least it was musical enough to bring before me some memory of the faces of pretty girls I had danced with long ago in my dancing days, so that, what with the music, and the distant sea, and the soft air, so sparklingly full of moonshine, and the little dancing memories, I was floated off into a reverie that was like a prelude for the person who broke it. She came so quietly that I did not hear her until she was almost beside me and spoke to me. It was the second time that had happened.

  CHAPTER XII

  “MRS. HARMAN,” I said, as she took the chair vacated by the elfin young lady, “you see I can manage it! But perhaps I control myself better when there’s no camp-stool to inspire me. You remember my woodland didoes — I fear?”

  She smiled in a pleasant, comprehending way, but neither directly replied nor made any return speech whatever; instead, she let her forearms rest on the broad railing of the marble balustra
de, and, leaning forward, gazed out over the shining and mysterious slopes below. Somehow it seemed to me that her not answering, and her quiet action, as well as the thoughtful attitude in which it culminated, would have been thought “very like her” by any one who knew her well. “Cousin Louise has her ways,” Miss Elizabeth had told me; this was probably one of them, and I found it singularly attractive. For that matter, from the day of my first sight of her in the woods I had needed no prophet to tell me I should like Mrs. Harman’s ways.

  “After the quiet you have had here, all this must seem,” I said, looking down upon the strollers, “a usurpation.”

  “Oh, they!” She disposed of Quesnay’s guests with a slight movement of her left hand. “You’re an old friend of my cousins — of both of them; but even without that, I know you understand. Elizabeth does it all for her brother, of course.”

  “But she likes it,” I said.

  “And Mr. Ward likes it, too,” she added slowly. “You’ll see, when he comes home.”

  Night’s effect upon me being always to make me venturesome, I took a chance, and ventured perhaps too far. “I hope we’ll see many happy things when he comes home.”

  “It’s her doing things of this sort,” she said, giving no sign of having heard my remark, “that has helped so much to make him the success that he is.”

  “It’s what has been death to his art!” I exclaimed, too quickly — and would have been glad to recall the speech.

  She met it with a murmur of low laughter that sounded pitying. “Wasn’t it always a dubious relation — between him and art?” And without awaiting an answer, she went on, “So it’s all the better that he can have his success!”

  To this I had nothing whatever to say. So far as I remembered, I had never before heard a woman put so much comprehension of a large subject into so few words, but in my capacity as George’s friend, hopeful for his happiness, it made me a little uneasy. During the ensuing pause this feeling, at first uppermost, gave way to another not at all in sequence, but irresponsible and intuitive, that she had something in particular to say to me, had joined me for that purpose, and was awaiting the opportunity. As I have made open confession, my curiosity never needed the spur; and there is no denying that this impression set it off on the gallop; but evidently the moment had not come for her to speak. She seemed content to gaze out over the valley in silence.

  “Mr. Cresson Ingle,” I hazarded; “is he an old, new friend of your cousins? I think he was not above the horizon when I went to Capri, two years ago?”

  “He wants Elizabeth,” she returned, adding quietly, “as you’ve seen.” And when I had verified this assumption with a monosyllable, she continued, “He’s an ‘available,’ but I should hate to have it happen. He’s hard.”

  “He doesn’t seem very hard toward her,” I murmured, looking down into the garden where Mr. Ingle just then happened to be adjusting a scarf about his hostess’s shoulders.

  “He’s led a detestable life,” said Mrs. Harman, “among detestable people!”

  She spoke with sudden, remarkable vigour, and as if she knew. The full-throated emphasis she put upon “detestable” gave the word the sting of a flagellation; it rang with a rightful indignation that brought vividly to my mind the thought of those three years in Mrs. Harman’s life which Elizabeth said “hurt one to think of.” For this was the lady who had rejected good George Ward to run away with a man much deeper in all that was detestable than Mr. Cresson Ingle could ever be!

  “He seems to me much of a type with these others,” I said.

  “Oh, they keep their surfaces about the same.”

  “It made me wish I had a little more surface to-night,” I laughed. “I’d have fitted better. Miss Ward is different at different times. When we are alone together she always has the air of excusing, or at least explaining, these people to me, but this evening I’ve had the disquieting thought that perhaps she also explained me to them.”

  “Oh, no!” said Mrs. Harman, turning to me quickly. “Didn’t you see? She was making up to Mr. Ingle for this morning. It came out that she’d ridden over at daylight to see you; Anne Elliott discovered it in some way and told him.”

  This presented an aspect of things so overwhelmingly novel that out of a confusion of ideas I was able to fasten on only one with which to continue the conversation, and I said irrelevantly that Miss Elliott was a remarkable young woman. At this my companion, who had renewed her observation of the valley, gave me a full, clear look of earnest scrutiny, which set me on the alert, for I thought that now what she desired to say was coming. But I was disappointed, for she spoke lightly, with a ripple of amusement.

  “I suppose she finished her investigations? You told her all you could?”

  “Almost.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t trust ME with the reservation?” she asked, smiling.

  “I would trust you with anything,” I answered seriously.

  “You didn’t gratify that child?” she said, half laughing. Then, to my surprise, her tone changed suddenly, and she began again in a hurried low voice: “You didn’t tell her—” and stopped there, breathless and troubled, letting me see that I had been right after all: this was what she wanted to talk about.

  “I didn’t tell her that young Saffren is mad, no; if that is what you mean.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t,” she said slowly, sinking back in her chair so that her face was in the shadow of the awning which sheltered the little table between us.

  “In the first place, I wouldn’t have told her even if it were true,” I returned, “and in the second, it isn’t true — though YOU have some reason to think it is,” I added.

  “I?” she said. “Why?”

  “His speaking to you as he did; a thing on the face of it inexcusable—”

  “Why did he call me ‘Madame d’Armand’?” she interposed.

  I explained something of the mental processes of Amedee, and she listened till I had finished; then bade me continue.

  “That’s all,” I said blankly, but, with a second thought, caught her meaning. “Oh, about young Saffren, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know him pretty well,” I said, “without really knowing anything about him; but what is stranger, I believe he doesn’t really know a great deal about himself. Of course I have a theory about him, though it’s vague. My idea is that probably through some great illness he lost — not his faculty of memory, but his memories, or, at least, most of them. In regard to what he does remember, Professor Keredec has anxiously impressed upon him some very poignant necessity for reticence. What the necessity may be, or the nature of the professor’s anxieties, I do not know, but I think Keredec’s reasons must be good ones. That’s all, except that there’s something about the young man that draws one to him: I couldn’t tell you how much I like him, nor how sorry I am that he offended you.”

  “He didn’t offend me,” she murmured — almost whispered.

  “He didn’t mean to,” I said warmly. “You understood that?”

  “Yes, I understood.”

  “I am glad. I’d been waiting the chance to try to explain — to ask you to pardon him—”

  “But there wasn’t any need.”

  “You mean because you understood—”

  “No,” she interrupted gently, “not only that. I mean because he has done it himself.”

  “Asked your pardon?” I said, in complete surprise.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s written you?” I cried.

  “No. I saw him to-day,” she answered. “This afternoon when I went for my walk, he was waiting where the paths intersect—”

  Some hasty ejaculation, I do not know what, came from me, but she lifted her hand.

  “Wait,” she said quietly. “As soon as he saw me he came straight toward me—”

  “Oh, but this won’t do at all,” I broke out. “It’s too bad—”

  “Wait.” She leaned forward slightly, lifting her h
and again. “He called me ‘Madame d’Armand,’ and said he must know if he had offended me.”

  “You told him—”

  “I told him ‘No!’” And it seemed to me that her voice, which up to this point had been low but very steady, shook upon the monosyllable. “He walked with me a little way — perhaps It was longer—”

  “Trust me that it sha’n’t happen again!” I exclaimed. “I’ll see that Keredec knows of this at once. He will—”

  “No, no,” she interrupted quickly, “that is just what I want you not to do. Will you promise me?”

  “I’ll promise anything you ask me. But didn’t he frighten you? Didn’t he talk wildly? Didn’t he—”

  “He didn’t frighten me — not as you mean. He was very quiet and—” She broke off unexpectedly, with a little pitying cry, and turned to me, lifting both hands appealingly— “And oh, doesn’t he make one SORRY for him!”

  That was just it. She had gone straight to the heart of his mystery: his strangeness was the strange PATHOS that invested him; the “singularity” of “that other monsieur” was solved for me at last.

  When she had spoken she rose, advanced a step, and stood looking out over the valley again, her skirts pressing the balustrade. One of the moments in my life when I have wished to be a figure painter came then, as she raised her arms, the sleeves, of some filmy texture, falling back from them with the gesture, and clasped her hands lightly behind her neck, the graceful angle of her chin uplifted to the full rain of moonshine. Little Miss Elliott, in the glamour of these same blue showerings, had borrowed gauzy weavings of the fay and the sprite, but Mrs. Harman — tall, straight, delicate to fragility, yet not to thinness — was transfigured with a deeper meaning, wearing the sadder, richer colours of the tragedy that her cruel young romance had put upon her. She might have posed as she stood against the marble railing — and especially in that gesture of lifting her arms — for a bearer of the gift at some foredestined luckless ceremony of votive offerings. So it seemed, at least, to the eyes of a moon-dazed old painter-man.