“You do understand? I’d found out—and I hated you, hated you. I knew you were in love with Delphin—and I was afraid; afraid of you, of your quiet ways, your sweetness… your… well, I wanted you out of the way, that’s all. Just for a few weeks; just till I was sure of him. So in a blind fury I wrote that letter… I don’t know why I’m telling you now.”
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Ansley slowly, “it’s because you’ve always gone on hating me.”
“Perhaps. Or because I wanted to get the whole thing off my mind.” She paused. “I’m glad you destroyed the letter. Of course I never thought you’d die.”
Mrs. Ansley relapsed into silence, and Mrs. Slade, leaning above her, was conscious of a strange sense of isolation, of being cut off from the warm current of human communion. “You think me a monster!”
“I don’t know… It was the only letter I had, and you say he didn’t write it”
“Ah, how you care for him still!”
“I cared for that memory,” said Mrs. Ansley.
Mrs. Slade continued to look down on her. She seemed physically reduced by the blow—as if, when she got up, the wind might scatter her like a puff of dust. Mrs. Slade’s jealousy suddenly leaped up again at the sight. All these years the woman had been living on that letter. How she must have loved him, to treasure the mere memory of its ashes! The letter of the man her friend was engaged to. Wasn’t it she who was the monster?
“You tried your best to get him away from me, didn’t you? But you failed; and I kept him. That’s all.”
“Yes. That’s all.”
“I wish now I hadn’t told you. I’d no idea you’d feel about it as you do; I thought you’d be amused. It all happened so long ago, as you say; and you must do me the justice to remember that I had no reason to think you’d ever taken it seriously. How could I, when you were married to Horace Ansley two months afterward? As soon as you could get out of bed your mother rushed you off to Florence and married you. People were rather surprised—they wondered at its being done so quickly; but I thought I knew. I had an idea you did it out of pique—to be able to say you’d got ahead of Delphin and me. Kids have such silly reasons for doing the most serious things. And your marrying so soon convinced me that you’d never really cared.”
“Yes. I suppose it would,” Mrs. Ansley assented.
The clear heaven overhead was emptied of all its gold. Dusk spread over it, abruptly darkening the Seven Hills. Here and there lights began to twinkle through the foliage at their feet. Steps were coming and going on the deserted terrace—waiters looking out of the doorway at the head of the stairs, then reappearing with trays and napkins and flasks of wine. Tables were moved, chairs straightened. A feeble string of electric lights flickered out. A stout lady in a dustcoat suddenly appeared, asking in broken Italian if anyone had seen the elastic band which held together her tattered Baedeker. She poked with her stick under the table at which she had lunched, the waiters assisting.
The corner where Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley sat was still shadowy and deserted. For a long time neither of them spoke. At length Mrs. Slade began again: “I suppose I did it as a sort of joke—”
“A joke?”
“Well, girls are ferocious sometimes, you know. Girls in love especially. And I remember laughing to myself all that evening at the idea that you were waiting around there in the dark, dodging out of sight, listening for every sound, trying to get in—of course I was upset when I heard you were so ill afterward.”
Mrs. Ansley had not moved for a long time. But now she turned slowly toward her companion. “But I didn’t wait. He’d arranged everything. He was there. We were let in at once,” she said.
Mrs. Slade sprang up from her leaning position. “Delphin there! They let you in! Ah, now you’re lying!” she burst out with violence.
Mrs. Ansley’s voice grew clearer, and full of surprise. “But of course he was there. Naturally he came—”
“Came? How did he know he’d find you there? You must be raving!”
Mrs. Ansley hesitated, as though reflecting. “But I answered the letter. I told him I’d be there. So he came.”
Mrs. Slade flung her hands up to her face. “Oh, God—you answered! I never thought of your answering….”
“It’s odd you never thought of it, if you wrote the letter.”
“Yes. I was blind with rage.”
Mrs. Ansley rose, and drew her fur scarf about her. “It is cold here. We’d better go…. I’m sorry for you,” she said, as she clasped the fur about her throat.
The unexpected words sent a pang through Mrs. Slade. “Yes; we’d better go.” She gathered up her bag and cloak. “I don’t know why you should be sorry for me,” she muttered.
Mrs. Ansley stood looking away from her toward the dusky mass of the Colosseum. “Well—because I didn’t have to wait that night.”
Mrs. Slade gave an unquiet laugh. “Yes, I was beaten there. But I oughtn’t to begrudge it to you, I suppose. At the end of all these years. After all, I had everything; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter that he didn’t write.”
Mrs. Ansley was again silent. At length she took a step toward the door of the terrace, and turned back, facing her companion.
“I had Barbara,” she said, and began to move ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the stairway.
(Liberty 11, 10 November 1934)
The Looking-Glass.
I.
Mrs. Attlee had never been able to understand why there was any harm in giving people a little encouragement when they needed it.
Sitting back in her comfortable armchair by the fire, her working-days over, and her muscular masseuse’s hands lying swollen and powerless on her knee, she was at leisure to turn the problem over, and ponder it as there had never been time to do before.
Mrs. Attlee was so infirm now that, when her widowed daughter-in-law was away for the day, her granddaughter Moyra Attlee had to stay with her until the kitchen-girl had prepared the cold supper, and could come in and sit in the parlour.
“You’d be surprised, you know, my dear, to find how discouraged the grand people get, in those big houses with all the help, and the silver dinner plates, and a bell always handy if the fire wants poking, or the pet dog asks for a drink… And what’d a masseuse be good for, if she didn’t jolly up their minds a little along with their muscles?—as Dr. Welbridge used to say to me many a time, when he’d given me a difficult patient. And he always gave me the most difficult,” she added proudly.
She paused, aware (for even now little escaped her) that Moyra had ceased to listen, but accepting the fact resignedly, as she did most things in the slow decline of her days.
“It’s a fine afternoon,” she reflected, “and likely she’s fidgety because there’s a new movie on; or that young fellow’s fixed it up to get back earlier from New York…”
She relapsed into silence, following her thoughts; but presently, as happens with old people, they came to the surface again.
“And I hope I’m a good Catholic, as I said to Father Divott the other day, and at peace with heaven, if ever I was took suddenly—but no matter what happens I’ve got to risk my punishment for the wrong I did to Mrs. Clingsland, because as long as I’ve never repented it there’s no use telling Father Divott about it. Is there?”
Mrs. Attlee heaved an introspective sigh. Like many humble persons of her kind and creed, she had a vague idea that a sin unrevealed was, as far as the consequences went, a sin uncommitted; and this conviction had often helped her in the difficult task of reconciling doctrine and practice.
II.
Moyra Attlee interrupted her listless stare down the empty Sunday street of the New Jersey suburb, and turned an astonished glance on her grandmother.
“Mrs. Clingsland? A wrong you did to Mrs. Clingsland?”
Hitherto she had lent an inattentive ear to her grandmother’s ramblings; the talk of old people seemed to be a
language hardly worth learning. But it was not always so with Mrs. Attlee’s. Her activities among the rich had ceased before the first symptoms of the financial depression; but her tenacious memory was stored with pictures of the luxurious days of which her granddaughter’s generation, even in a wider world, knew only by hearsay. Mrs. Attlee had a gift for evoking in a few words scenes of half-understood opulence and leisure, like a guide leading a stranger through the gallery of a palace in the twilight, and now and then lifting a lamp to a shimmering Rembrandt or a jewelled Rubens; and it was particularly when she mentioned Mrs. Clingsland that Moyra caught these dazzling glimpses. Mrs. Clingsland had always been something more than a name to the Attlee family. They knew (though they did not know why) that it was through her help that Grandmother Attiee had been able, years ago, to buy the little house at Montclair, with a patch of garden behind it, where, all through the depression, she had held out, thanks to fortunate investments made on the advice of Mrs. Clingsland’s great friend, the banker.
“She had so many friends, and they were all high-up people, you understand. Many’s the time she’d say to me: ‘Cora’ (think of the loveliness of her calling me Cora), ‘Cora, I’m going to buy some Golden Flyer shares on Mr. Stoner’s advice; Mr. Stoner of the National Union Bank, you know. He’s getting me in on the ground floor, as they say, and if you want to step in with me, why come along. There’s nothing too good for you, in my opinion,’ she used to say. And, as it turned out, those shares have kept their head above water all through the bad years, and now I think they’ll see me through, and be there when I’m gone, to help out you children.”
Today Moyra Attlee heard the revered name with a new interest. The phrase: “The wrong I did to Mrs. Clingsland,” had struck through her listlessness, rousing her to sudden curiosity. What could her grandmother mean by saying she had done a wrong to the benefactress whose bounties she was never tired of recording? Moyra believed her grandmother to be a very good woman—certainly she had been wonderfully generous in all her dealings with her children and grandchildren; and it seemed incredible that, if there had been one grave lapse in her life, it should have taken the form of an injury to Mrs. Clingsland. True, whatever the lapse was, she seemed to have made peace with herself about it; yet it was clear that its being unconfessed lurked disquietingly in the back of her mind.
“How can you say you ever did harm to a friend like Mrs. Clingsland, Gran?”
Mrs. Attlee’s eyes grew sharp behind her spectacles, and she fixed them half distrustfully on the girl’s face. But in a moment she seemed to recover herself. “Not harm, I don’t say; I’ll never think I harmed her. Bless you, it wasn’t to harm her I’d ever have lifted a finger. All I wanted was to help. But when you try to help too many people at once, the devil sometimes takes note of it. You see, there’s quotas nowadays for everything, doing good included, my darling.”
Moyra made an impatient movement. She did not care to hear her grandmother philosophize. “Well—but you said you did a wrong to Mrs. Clingsland.”
Mrs. Attlee’s sharp eyes seemed to draw back behind a mist of age. She sat silent, her hands lying heavily over one another in their tragic uselessness.
“What would you have done, I wonder,” she began suddenly, “if you’d ha’ come in on her that morning, and seen her laying in her lovely great bed, with the lace a yard deep on the sheets, and her face buried in the pillows, so I knew she was crying? Would you have opened your bag same as usual, and got out your cocoanut cream and talcum powder, and the nail polishers, and all the rest of it, and waited there like a statue till she turned over to you; or’d you have gone up to her, and turned her softly round, like you would a baby, and said to her: ‘Now, my dear, I guess you can tell Cora Attlee what’s the trouble’? Well, that’s what I did, anyhow; and there she was, with her face streaming with tears, and looking like a martyred saint on an altar, and when I said to her: ‘Come, now, you tell me, and it’ll help you,’ she just sobbed out: ‘Nothing can ever help me, now I’ve lost it’.”
“‘Lost what?’ I said, thinking first of her boy, the Lord help me, though I’d heard him whistling on the stairs as I went up; but she said: ‘My beauty, Cora—I saw it suddenly slipping out of the door from me this morning’… Well, at that I had to laugh, and half angrily too. ‘Your beauty,’ I said to her, ‘and is that all? And me that thought it was your husband, or your son—or your fortune even. If it’s only your beauty, can’t I give it back to you with these hands of mine? But what are you saying to me about beauty, with that seraph’s face looking up at me this minute?’ I said to her, for she angered me as if she’d been blaspheming.”
“Well, was it true?” Moyra broke in, impatient and yet curious.
“True that she’d lost her beauty?” Mrs. Attlee paused to consider. “Do you know how it is, sometimes when you’re doing a bit of fine darning, sitting by the window in the afternoon; and one minute it’s full daylight, and your needle seems to find the way of itself; and the next minute you say: ‘Is it my eyes?’ because the work seems blurred; and presently you see it’s the daylight going, stealing away, soft-like, from your corner, though there’s plenty left overhead. Well—it was that way with her…”
But Moyra had never done fine darning, or strained her eyes in fading light, and she intervened again, more impatiently: “Well, what did she do?”
Mrs. Attlee once more reflected. “Why, she made me tell her every morning that it wasn’t true; and every morning she believed me a little less. And she asked everybody in the house, beginning with her husband, poor man—him so bewildered when you asked him anything outside of his business, or his club or his horses, and never noticing any difference in her looks since the day he’d led her home as his bride, twenty years before, maybe…
“But there—nothing he could have said, if he’d had the wit to say it, would have made any difference. From the day she saw the first little line around her eyes she thought of herself as an old woman, and the thought never left her for more than a few minutes at a time. Oh, when she was dressed up, and laughing, and receiving company; then I don’t say the faith in her beauty wouldn’t come back to her, and go to her head like champagne; but it wore off quicker than champagne, and I’ve seen her run upstairs with the foot of a girl, and then, before she’d tossed off her finery, sit down in a heap in front of one of her big looking-glasses—it was looking-glasses everywhere in her room—and stare and stare till the tears ran down over her powder.”
“Oh, well, I suppose it’s always hateful growing old,” said Moyra, her indifference returning.
Mrs. Attlee smiled retrospectively. “How can I say that, when my own old age has been made so peaceful by all her goodness to me?”
Moyra stood up with a shrug. “And yet you tell me you acted wrong to her. How am I to know what you mean?”
Her grandmother made no answer. She closed her eyes, and leaned her head against the little cushion behind her neck. Her lips seemed to murmur, but no words came. Moyra reflected that she was probably falling asleep, and that when she woke she would not remember what she had been about to reveal.
“It’s not much fun sitting here all this time, if you can’t even keep awake long enough to tell me what you mean about Mrs. Clingsland,” she grumbled.
Mrs. Attiee roused herself with a start.
III.
Well (she began) you know what happened in the war—I mean, the way all the fine ladies, and the poor shabby ones too, took to running to the mediums and the clairvoyants, or whatever the stylish folk call ’em. The women had to have news of their men; and they were made to pay high enough for it… Oh, the stories I used to hear—and the price paid wasn’t only money, either! There was a fair lot of swindlers and blackmailers in the business, there was. I’d sooner have trusted a gypsy at a fair… But the women just had to go to them.
Well, my dear, I’d always had a way of seeing things; from the cradle, even. I don’t mean reading the tea-leave
s, or dealing the cards; that’s for the kitchen. No, no; I mean, feeling there’s things about you, behind you, whispering over your shoulder… Once my mother, on the Connemara hills, saw the leprechauns at dusk; and she said they smelt fine and high, too… Well, when I used to go from one grand house to another, to give my massage and face-treatment, I got more and more sorry for those poor wretches that the sooth-saying swindlers were dragging the money out of for a pack of lies; and one day I couldn’t stand it any longer, and though I knew the Church was against it, when I saw one lady nearly crazy, because for months she’d had no news of her boy at the front, I said to her: “If you’ll come over to my place tomorrow, I might have a word for you.” And the wonder of it was that I had! For that night I dreamt a message came saying there was good news for her, and the next day, sure enough, she had a cable, telling her her son had escaped from a German camp…
After that the ladies came in flocks—in flocks fairly… You’re too young to remember, child; but your mother could tell you. Only she wouldn’t, because after a bit the priest got wind of it, and then it had to stop … so she won’t even talk of it any more. But I always said: How could I help it? For I did see things, and hear things, at that time… And of course the ladies were supposed to come just for the face-treatment … and was I to blame if I kept hearing those messages for them, poor souls, or seeing things they wanted me to see?
It’s no matter now, for I made it all straight with Father Divott years ago; and now nobody comes after me any more, as you can see for yourself. And all I ask is to be left alone in my chair…
But with Mrs. Clingsland—well, that was different. To begin with, she was the patient I liked best. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for you, if ever for a minute you could get her to stop thinking of herself … and that’s saying a good deal, for a rich lady. Money’s an armour, you see; and there’s few cracks in it. But Mrs. Clingsland was a loving nature, if only anybody’d shown her how to love… Oh, dear, and wouldn’t she have been surprised if you’d told her that! Her that thought she was living up to her chin in love and love-making. But as soon as the lines began to come about her eyes, she didn’t believe in it any more. And she had to be always hunting for new people to tell her she was as beautiful as ever; because she wore the others out, forever asking them: “Don’t you think I’m beginning to go off a little?”—till finally fewer and fewer came to the house, and as far as a poor masseuse like me can judge, I didn’t much fancy the looks of those that did; and I saw Mr. Clingsland didn’t either.
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