'Meaning Albert's and Belle's and Jack's and mine and the lics of all six children?' smiled Cicily. 'Jvlumsy, don't be hysterical!*
'But you are, Cicily,' said Jane. 'You're wrecking them all for your own indiWdual pleasure. You're utterly selfish. You don't care what havoc you make '
'I'm not making havoc!' cried Cicily indignantly. 'I'm not making havoc, any more than a surgeon is who performs a necessary operation. No one likes operations. They're very unpleasant. But they save lives. People cry and carry on.
but later they're glad they had them. It takes time, of course, to get over a major incision. But you wait, Mumsy. In two years' time we'll all be a great deal happier. A great deal happier than we've been for years.'
'You will, perhaps,' said Jane. 'And possibly Albert. But what about Jack and Belle?'
'Don't talk about Belle!' cried Cicily contemptuously.
*I have to talk about her,' said Jane very seriously. *You have to think of her. You're doing her a great wrong.*
'Mumsy,' cried Cicily, 'you are not civilized. You have the morals of the Stone Age! You really have! I'm not wronging Belle! She doesn't love Albert. She just wants to hang on to him because she doesn't love any one else! If she did, she'd be all smiles. No one likes to be left, Mumsy, but if Belle were doing the leaving *
'But she's not,' said Jane firmly. 'Facts are facts. Belle says she loves her husband.'
'Well, she's never said that to me,' said Cicily. 'And she's never had the nerve to say it to Albert either. Do you know what she said to Albert?' Cicily's voice was rising excitedly. 'She told Albert to take me for his mistress. She told Albert she didn't care what he did, if he wouldn't ask for divorce!'
'She was thinking of the children,' said Jane defensively.
'Bunk!' said Cicily succinctly. She rose, as she spoke, from the little French sofa. 'It would be fine for my children, wouldn't it? A situation like that? Jack's been great about it, Mumsy. He really has. He didn't talk like that.'
'Where is he?' said Jane. 'I'd like to speak to him.*
'He moved out yesterday,' said Cicily calmly. 'He's living at the University Club.'
'Oh, Cicily!' said Jane pitifully.
For the first time in this distressing interview, Cicily herself seemed slightly shaken. She walked across the room and
stood with her back to Jane, fingering the white and yellow heads of the jonquils and narcissus in the window-boxes. Her hands were trembhng a little.
'I won't say, Mumsy,' she said — and her voice was slightly tremulous — 'I won't say that it wasn't a bad moment when he left this house. But it's always a bad moment when you go up to the operating room. And for divorce they can't give you ether. I wish they could. I wish we could all just go to sleep and wake up when it was safely over.' She turned from the window-boxes to face her mother. *It will be safely over, Mumsy. I'm not going to weaken. I'm not going to be sentimental.' She took her stand on the hearthrug and looked firmly at Jane. 'It's utter nonsense to think that if you love one man you can be happy living with another. You don't understand that, Mumsy, because you've always loved Dad.
There never was any one else. If there had been *
Cicily's voice trailed suddenly off into silence. She was staring at Jane. *Mumsy!' she cried quickly. 'Don't tell me there ever was any one else? Mumsy! was there?'
'Yes,' said Jane soberly. Suddenly she telt very near to Cicily. It seemed important to tell her the whole truth. 'Yes. There was.'
Cicily's face was alight with sympathy. 'Before Dad, Mumsy — or after?'
Jane suddenly felt that the whole truth could not be told= 'B-beforc,' she said.
Cicily looked at her. 'And after, Mumsy? Never after?'
Jane's eyes fell before her daughter's. 'Once,' she said.
'Mumsy!' cried Cicily. ^Tell me! I never '
'I don't want to tell you,* said Jane.
'Did you tell Dad?'
'No,' said Jane.
'Mumsy!' cried Cicily. 'Did you really deceive him?*
•I deceived him,' said Jane soberly.
•My God!' said Cicily. 'When and how?'
'Oh, long ago,' said Jane. *And just as every one else does, I suppose. I loved a man who loved me. And when he told me, I told him. And I — I said I'd go away with him. But I didn't.'
'What next?' said Cicily.
'Nothing next,' said Jane.
'Was that all?" said Cicily.
'Yes,' said Jane.
'You didn't go away with him, nor — nor — you know, Mumsy — you didn't — without going away?'
'I didn't.'
'You just loved him, and didn't?'
'Yes.'
'And you call that deception?'
'I call that deception,' said Jane.
Cicily's eyes were unbelievably twinkling. 'Mumsy,' she said, 'is thai all the story?'
'That's all the story,' said Jane.
Cicily drew a long breath. 'Well, I believe you,' she said. 'But I don't know why I do. Resisted temptations become lost opportunities, Mumsy. Haven't you always regretted it?'
'I've never regretted it,' said Jane.
'Not the loving, of course,' said Cicily, 'but the not going away.'
'Not that either,' said Jane.
'Mumsy,' said Cicily, 'you are simply incredible. You arc not civilized. You have the morals of the Stone Age! I should think an experience like that would make you see how wise I am to take my happiness '
'You don't achieve happiness,' said Jane very seriously, *by taking it.'
'How do you know?' said Cicily promptly. 'You never tried!'
'I've always been happy,' said Jane with dignity, 'with your father.'
'I can't believe that, Mumsy. Not after what you've told me.'
'Well, I'm happy now,' said Jane. 'Much happier now than if '
'But that's what you don't know, Mumsy!' said Cicily, smiling. 'And what I'll never know either. You have to choose in life!'
Jane rose slowly from the little French sofa. 'Cicily,' she said, 'how can I stop you?'
'You can't,' said Cicily.
It was terribly true.
'But you can love me,' said Cicily. She walked quickly across the room and took Jane in her arms. 'You can love me always. You will love me, won't you, Mumsy — whatever happens?'
Jane felt the hot tears running down her cheeks.
'Cicily!' she cried. *I love you — terribly. I want to help you — I want to save you! I want you to be happy, but I know you won't be!'
*I shall be for a while,' said Cicily cheerfully. 'And after that we'll see.'
It was on that philosophic utterance that Jane left her. VVTien she reached her living-room again, she found Jack standing on the hearthrug. He was facing Isabel and Stephen a trifle belligerently. He looked tired and worn and worried. He had no smile for Jane.
'I know you think, sir,' he was saying wearily, 'that I ought to be able to keep her — that I ought to refuse to let her go. But how can I? You can't insist on living with a woman
who doesn't want to live with you — if you love her, you can't.'
'Well, Jane?' said Isabel. 'Did you make any headway?'
Jane shook her head.
'Jack,' she said slowly, 'I'm ashamed of my daughter.'
Jack threw her a little t^visted smile. 'Don't say that, Aunt Jane. I'm proud of my wife. I always have been and I can't break the habit. Cicily's all right. She'll pull through. We'll aU pull through, somehow.'
'But what will you do, Jack?' wailed Isabel.
*I haven't thought it out,' said Jack. 'But you can always do something. The world is wide, you know.' He looked, rather hesitatingly, at Stephen. 'I thought I'd leave the bank, sir, for a time, at any rate.' That would be hard on Stephen, thought Jane swiftly. 'I'd hke to take up my engineering. I want to leave Lakewood, and I thought if I began to fool around with those old problems again — go back to school, perhaps '
'Attaboy!' It was Jenny's cheerful voice. She was standiiig in the d
oorway, smiling in at them all very tranquilly.
'Jenny, come in,' sziid Stephen soberly. 'We have something to tell you.'
'I've known about it for weeks. Dad,' said Jenny affably. She advanced to the hearthrug and thrust her arm through Jack's. 'Cicily's a fool, but she must run through her folly. It's a great shame that the world was organized with two sexes. It makes for a lot of trouble. I'm all on Jack's side. 1 have been from the start. I'm thinking of marrying him myself, if he'll turn that old bean of his to the raising of Russian wolfhounds!'
Jack met his sister-in-law's levity with rather an uncertain Bmilc. She grinned cheerfully at him.
'Want a drink, Jacky?'
*Jenny!' cried Isabel, in shocked accents.
*Of course he does!' persisted Jenny coolly. 'I'll ring for a cocktail.' As she walked toward the bell, her clear young eyes wandered brightly over the ravaged faces of the older generation. 'Do you know, you're all taking this a great de^ too seriously? It's not the end of the world. It's not even the end of CicUy and Jack and Albert and Belle. They're all going to live to make you a great deal more trouble. Save your strength, boys and girls, for future crises!' She turned to meet the maid. *A whiskey sour, Irma, and some anchovy sandwiches. You'll all feel better when you've had a drink.*
It was, Jane was reflecting, an incredible generation. Xtiey took nothing seriously. Unless, perhaps, the preserva-don of the light touch. But Jack looked distinctly cheered.
And very grateful to Jenny. Yet Jack loved Cicily When
the whiskey arrived, Jane was very much surprised to find herself drinking it. She drank two cocktails Isabel did, too, and ate four anchovy sandwiches as well.
*I had no lunch,* she remarked in melancholy explanation. Then, *I'U run you in town. Jack,' she said, putting down her glass.
*No, I'm going over to call on the kids,* said Jack very surprisingly. 'They leave in three days.* He turned toward the door.
'I'll see you at the Winters' musicale to-night,' said Jenny.
'I'm not — quite sure,' said Jack slowly.
'Nonsense!'said Jenny. 'Of course I will. The Casino, at nine. You must make Belle go, Aunt Isabel. You must make her wear her prettiest frock!'
'Belle wouldn't dream of going,' said Isabel with dignity.
*I bet she does,' said Jenny. 'And righdy so!'
Jenny,' said Jane gently, 'don't.*
'Cicily and Albert won't be there, Mumsy He'll be out
here with her, as she's going in three days. And if they were, what of it? What of it? Why carry on so about it? It's all in the day's work. Can't you take divorce a little more calmly?'
No, she couldn't, thought Jane, when Jack and Isabel had gone and Jenny had returned to her room and 'The American Kennels Gazette' and she was left alone with Stephen before the living-room fire. She really couldn't and she did not want to. What was the world coming to? What had gone out of life? What was missing in the moral fibre of the rising generation? Did decency mean nothing to them? Did loyalty? Did love? Did love mean too much, perhaps? One kind of love. It vas a sex-ridden age. For the last twenty years the writers and doctors, the scientists and philosophers, had been preaching sex — illuminating its urges, justifying its demands, prophesying its victory. But the province of writers and doctors, of scientists and philosophers, was preaching, not practice. Could it be possible that ordinary men and women, like Jack and Cicily, like Albert and Belle, on whom the work of the world and the future of children depended, had been naive enough to take this nonsense about sex-fulfilment seriously? Did they really believe it to be predominantiy important? Sex-fulfilment, Jane thought hotly, was predominantly important only in the monkey house. Elsewhere character counted.
But these children had character. They had managed this appalling affair with extraordinary ability and restraint. They had a code, Jane dimly perceived, a code that was based — on what? Bravado and barbarism or courage and common-sense? It was very perplexing. It was very complicated. It was wrecking the older generation. But it was not a clear-cut issue, Jane admitted \dth a sigh, between the apes and the angels.
CHAPTER VI
I New York was shining and shimmering in the first summer heat. Jane stood at her window in the Plaza Hotel, looking out over the feathery green tree-tops of Central Park at the long grey line of skyscrapers that reared their incredible towers against the serene background of the blue June sky. A black river of traffic streamed up and down Fifth Avenue. Here and there, like high lights on the water, Jane could catch the glint of a yellow taxi, the sheen of a green bus, the flash of sunlight from a moving windshield. New York looked cleaner and smarter and gayer than Chicago. It looked brand-new. Chicago, Jane thought, had a curious quality of antiquity. Like London. Looking down Adams Street, for instance, toward the smoke-stained portico of the Art Institute, with the old grey lions on guard. It was probably merely a question of the soot-smirched fa9ades. New York, however, could boast a blue sky and a bright sun, just like the country. But it was much hotter than Lakewood. In spite of their unholy errand, Jane was glad that she and Stephen were going to sail in the morning.
The room behind her was crowded with luggage, neatly ticketed for the steamer. Stephen was seated in a plush armchair, perusing the columns of the 'New York Times.' Jenny had met them at the Century, two hours before, looking very chic and New-Yorky, Jane had thought, in a new grey covert-cloth suit and a little black skull cap, pulled smartly back from her round forehead. She had come up with them to the Plaza and had perched on top of a trunk, swinging her heels and talking of her kennels in Bedford Hills. She had bought
forty dogs and found a good man to take charge of them, but the repairs on the farmhouse had been rather delayed. She and Barbara could not move out until the first of July. It was just as well, Jenny had said, for now Jane and Stephen could see their penthouse on East Seventy-Ninth Street. They were to dine there that evening with Steve, who was coming from Boston on a late afternoon train to wave his parents off from the dock the next morning.
Jenny had talked for two hours, Jane was just realizing, and had run off for a luncheon engagement, without mentioning Cicily's name. Without referring to the unholy errand. No one would have gleaned, from Jenny's cheerful conversation, that her parents were not bound on a casual summer spree, a sight-seeing tour, a light-hearted holiday. No one could have gathered that they had embarked on a monstrous pilgrimage to the divorce courts of France, that in three short weeks they would see one marriage of Cicily's outrageously dissolved and another outrageously consecrated.
They would not have embarked on it, Jane thought with a sigh, if it had not been for the grandchildren. Albert was already in Paris. Muriel and Ed Brown, completing their circuit of the globe, were to meet him there for the wedding. Stephen would have washed his hands of the whole affair, would have left his daughter to the tender ministrations of Flora and Muriel, would have let her be given away at the altar by even Ed Brown, if it had not been so pathetically obvious that no one but Molly, the nurse, was going to look after the twins and Robin Redbreast.
Cicily was going to Russia for her honeymoon. To Russia and across Siberia and over the Gobi Desert to Pekin, where Albert's new job awaited him in the legation. The twins and Robin Redbreast were to summer at Gull Rocks. At Gull Rocks and Lakewood, where Cicily was to join them in
October and 'see all the family,' she had cheerily written, before carrying her children off to begin life in Pekin. Cicily had thought the impeccable Molly, who had been, after all, nine years with the twins, was quite capable of taking the children from Paris to Gull Rocks. Muriel had agreed with her, while regretting that she and Ed Brown were to summer in England. But Jane had been outraged at the suggestion. 'She just thinks of the physical care,' she had said to Stephen. 'She doesn't consider what it will do to those babies to sec her marry again.* And she had offered to make the monstrous pilgrimage alone.
Stephen, of course, had scouted that suggestion. 'I guess it's a leading from the Lord
,' he had said heavily. 'I guess we both belong there.'
But this pleasant June morning, as Jane stood looking out over the feathery green tree-tops of Central Park, she had a guilty feeling that she was going to enjoy the pilgrimage, in spite of its monstrosity. Enjoy it more than Stephen would, at any rate. No woman was quite proof against the excitement of a trip to Paris. Jane had not seen Paris for twenty-three years. She had not seen New York for five. Every mother wanted to be with her daughter on her wedding day — on all her wedding days, thought Jane, with a little rueful smile. And — she would see Andre again.
She would certainly see Andre — unless by ill luck he were out of Paris. Flora ^vould arrange it. Andre himself would arrange it. She and Andre would meet — it would be almost like meeting on the other side of the Jordan — after thirty-four years of separation. They would meet and talk about life and she would feel again that old sense of intimacy, of
identity, almost, with the boy that After all, there had
never been any one quite like Andr6. They had seen life eye to eye. They had experienced together that first tremulous
intimacy of passion. Not with Stephen, not with Jimmy, had she ever felt just that unity of interest and emotion. With Stephen there had been questioning — did she love him, should she marry him? With Jimmy there had been conflict — she should not love him, she should not marry him. With Andre it had all been as simple as the Garden of Eden. First love, Jane supposed, was always like that.
'Well, I've got to go,' said Stephen. He was lunching on Wall Street with Bill Belmont.
'Take a taxi, dear,' said Jane. 'It's very warm. Don't experiment with the subway.'
'Don't worry,' said Stephen. 'My subway days are over, rhey were over when I turned sixty. Take a taxi, yourself.*
'I will,' said Jane. She was lunching with Agnes. It was funny how young she felt, just because she was going to see Agnes again. She glanced in the mirror before leaving the room. A sedate, grey-haired, much more than middle-aged lady glanced back at her. A lady discreetly attired in a black-and-white foulard dress and sensible kid walking-shoes and a black straw hat, perched just a little too high for fashion on a head with too much hair! But Jane only laughed. She laughed out loud alone in her hotel bedroom. Agnes would look like that, too. But it was only a joke. She and Agnes would know that the sedate, grey-haired, much more than middle-aged ladies were incredible changeUngs. When she and Agnes were together they were sitting on a Bryn Mawr window-seat. When she and Agnes were together they defied time and eternity. They laughed at the joke.
Years of Grace Page 48
