A Prologue To Love (63 page)

Caroline listened, and again she heard the voices in Switzerland so long ago. She shifted again on her chair and frowned. “A design,” she repeated.

Then Elizabeth said, “I overheard — someone — call Timothy pusillanimous. And accuse him of wanting power.”

The huge and terrible design was still shadowy, and it was even more shadowy to Elizabeth, who was merely reporting. It was not shadowy to Caroline. Little drops of sweat gathered on her dark forehead. Then she said, “Timothy? Pusillanimous? Wanting power? He has it, with his money.”

“Apparently that isn’t all he wants,” said Elizabeth indifferently, “though I can’t imagine what else it is.”

“I can,” said Caroline. She folded her big hands in her lap and looked down at them.

Elizabeth shrugged delicately. The furniture had not been polished in nearly a quarter of a century, but it all had a glassy surface to her vision. It hurt her eyes; she stood up suddenly and pulled the ragged draperies across the windows, and immediately the room was plunged into dusk and there was a smell of dust in the air. The girl sat down again. Caroline said, “Why did you do that?”

“The sun,” said Elizabeth irritably. She was a pale blurred image in the darkened room. Caroline averted her head and thought again.

“Their recommendation,” said Elizabeth, “is that you begin at once to invest heavily in Robson-Strong in England, Kronk in Germany, and the other munitions firms in Europe.”

“And that is all they told you?”

“Yes.” Caroline’s associates had not found Elizabeth as alert and perceptive as Caroline had led them to believe in her letters. “Sad,” they had murmured to each other later. “She has an intelligent look, but girls these days are not what their mothers were, particularly not what Caroline Ames is.”

“I have some confidential reports for you,” said Elizabeth. “They are sealed. I’ve put them on your study desk. Do you want to go up with me and look at them?”

“Not yet,” said Caroline. The dusky room was full of ghosts. Shades were always pulled down firmly on the back of the house, which faced the distant public road. But on this side the windows were never covered. Caroline glanced at her daughter, and Elizabeth was no more substantial than the other silent ghosts here. Caroline was frightened, but she said, “Perhaps, as they are confidential, I’d better look at them alone.”

“Please yourself,” said Elizabeth. Then her eyes glowed in the semidarkness. “You’ll have to do something about Timothy.”

“Why?” asked Caroline, startled.

“He hates you,” said the girl.

“That’s nothing new,” answered Caroline with a dark smile. “I’ve always known that. It doesn’t matter.”

“He’s dangerous.”

“I’ve never denied it.” Caroline paused. She sat up straighter. “What is it, Elizabeth? Was he unpleasant to you?”

“No. Not at all. He was much pleasanter than Amanda and her children. Mother, he doesn’t need you any longer. He’ll try to injure you one of these days. Perhaps soon.”

“How? I don’t speculate wildly; I am safely invested in sound stocks. There is nothing he can do against me. I have several times his money. Even more. He’s not a fool; he knows there is no way.”

“He’ll find one.” Now, for the first time, there was emotion in Elizabeth’s voice; and, hearing it, Caroline was pleased and stirred. She believed her daughter was concerned for her. She reached out and awkwardly patted Elizabeth’s stiff knee.

“Don’t worry, child,” she said. She regarded Elizabeth with diffident affection. “Have you been worried?”

“Yes,” said the girl. “Mother, I hate him.”

“So there was something,” said Caroline slowly. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“He despises you — me,” said Elizabeth, and clenched her hands on her knee.

“Probably. Should that concern you?”

“I want you to — ruin — him, Mother.”

There was silence in the room. Caroline’s thick dark brows had drawn together. She had heard the high shrillness in her daughter’s voice, the sudden gasping pause.

“I don’t do things like that,” said Caroline loudly. “What nonsense. ‘Ruin’ Timothy? Why? He’s been of much help to me. We are quite friendly. Elizabeth! You aren’t talking sanely.”

Elizabeth did not answer. “How could I do such a thing even if I wanted to?” demanded Caroline, and again she was frightened.

“You can find a way.” The girl spoke with a kind of dull and obstinate intensity. “You must.”

Caroline nodded. She repeated, “There was something.”

Again Elizabeth was silent. Caroline said, “If you won’t tell me, I’ll ask him.”

Elizabeth said, “No. I tell you, there was nothing. I only think you should do to him what I honestly believe he will try to do to you.”

“It must be very bad,” said Caroline. She had not been so alerted and uneasy in years. “If you won’t tell me, I am sure he won’t.” Then she was filled with outrage. What had Timothy done to this young girl, her daughter? If it had changed Elizabeth so drastically, then it must be very serious and unpardonable. She could not identify the sensation that rose violently in her now and made her teeth close together tightly. She thought of Timothy’s mother and exclaimed, “That woman!”

“Who?” said Elizabeth.

“His mother! That old woman!”

“What has she to do with any of it?” asked Elizabeth, and she wet her dry lips. “I haven’t seen her for years.”

“She hates all of us! I know. She exploited my father, she made my childhood wretched, she laughed at us! She is an evil person. You refuse to admit that Timothy hurt you, but if he did, be sure his mother is behind it! Yes, be sure.”

Elizabeth listened with fresh acuteness. Was it really possible that Cynthia had had something to do with this agony of hers? Elizabeth trembled, and the stunning sensation in her head began again, but fiercer now, and her body collapsed weakly in the chair. The room swam, the walls tilted, and there was a sibilant rustling in the girl’s ears.

“What is it?” cried Caroline, and she stood up quickly. “What’s wrong?”

William, thought Elizabeth, and thought and hoped she was dying. She put her hands over her ears to deafen the shrill screaming in them. She rocked her head from side to side, trying to escape the torment and the noise. Something was pressing itself against her lips. She opened her eyes and dimly saw her mother and knew that a glass of water was in her mother’s hand. She pushed it away.

“Oh,” she murmured. “I don’t want it. I just have a headache.” She pulled herself up in her chair with a terrible effort. “Mother, I know you hate Aunt Cynthia and have reasons for it, but she never hurt me. I doubt she even remembers me.”

‘If Timothy has done something,” said Caroline, “his mother is behind it.” The water sloshed over her shaking hand.

“He’s done nothing. I’ve tried to tell you. It’s you I am afraid for,” said Elizabeth. Like her grandfather, she had great powers of self-control. She brought them up now. She even smiled. She said, “Let us give a little thought to Timothy. Perhaps more than a little thought.” She laughed that queer, mirthless laughter again, the senseless and echoing laughter, which ended as suddenly as it had started.

Nothing stirred, except on the surface, in the carefree world of the summer and autumn and early winter of 1909. Nothing stirred, except on the surface, in peaceful, jocular and buoyant America of 1910. Nothing, in fact, disturbed the millions of young men in America and Europe, the millions who were to die or to be made homeless or crippled or blind or desperate in only four short years. No one knew, except a few men everywhere, that the world was not only turning on its real axis but was preparing to turn implacably on an axis designed decades ago in a German city and, in turning, was to change forever the world of men, for greed and envy, for wars and death, for unending hatred and uneasiness, for violence and murder, for shattered cities and planned slavery, for fury and terror, for madness and agony.

Here and there some newspapers in America and in Europe caught stealthy whispers and reported them, but they were so vague, so ‘alarmist’, so threatening to the nice and placid and expanding world of 1910, the brave and hopeful world of 1910, that they were laughed down.

Americans were more concerned with the danger of women’s hatpins, long and sharp, in streetcars and in crowded places, than with faint murmurs in the press of some horror gathering. Women’s skirts were scandalously revealing glimpses of ankles, and the churches were inflamed. Lillian Russell’s hinted new amorous affairs delighted an innocently lecherous America. Jack Johnson, a Negro prize fighter, had won the world championship, and Americans seethed with a passionate desire for ‘A White Hope’. ‘Suffragettes’ were guilty of ‘outrageous conduct’, according to indignant newspapers. Former President Roosevelt continued to delight his friends and enemies with his exploits. Leading journals of public opinion published solemn articles by distinguished physicians as to the effect women’s corsets were having on future generations. Cries arose from clerics, duly published in the press, against Sunday baseball, and the controversy raged from coast to coast. An evangelist, a former baseball player, Billy Sunday, was just beginning to start his national ‘revival’ meetings, and rumbles of his thunderous voice reached the farthest outposts and excited comment among a people who took their fundamentalist religion without question. Denunciations of moving pictures as ‘a prime force in the corruption of our youth’ attracted audiences who were even more attracted to moving pictures. Elderly men and women, who were authorities on the subject, wrote to their senators and their pastors demanding that an amendment to the Constitution be passed prohibiting the sale and drinking of alcohol. Stories of foreign royalty, actresses and actors, murderers and impressive thieves were printed under portentous large headlines in the papers and could be certain of discussion among all classes of society. Condemnations of the wearing by women of false hair could excite conversation in the dullest of social gatherings. Mr. Taft sat stolidly in the White House and was somewhat ignored by the press, which preferred the antics of Mr. Roosevelt and his prophecies of vague doom, followed by ululations on the future of America. Chewing gum was blamed for the malaligned teeth of children.

The most trivial story, if headlined enough, was sufficient to alarm, delight, excite, enthuse, or terrify the innocent Americans of 1910, those ebullient, uninformed, childlike, unsophisticated, and rapidly walking people. Little foreign news appeared, except for implied scandals among royalty; Europe was light-years away, and England was not liked, and this dislike was vehemently reaffirmed every Fourth of July by speakers, after long and vociferous playing of brass bands in public parks, while children ran about among their elders waving small flags. The Revolution was re-enacted over and over. When President Taft spoke of ‘dynamic humani-tarianism’ the majority of people vaguely connected this phrase with the recent visit of Booker T. Washington to the White House. Mr. Taft was accused of being pro-Negro, even by Republicans, and another controversy blew up on street corners and in the beery saloons. Aviation, of course, had no future. Airplanes were toys for those bent on suicide. But it was a mark of prestige to have an automobile, despite the fulminations of those who could not afford one.

The silly, happy, ingenuous, and eager world of America stood like an adolescent female Colossus on her continent and smiled and sang, became enraged over trifles and indignant over trivia, engrossed in petty scandals, and tossed her toys and smiled and smiled and smiled, and counted the golden coins in her pinafore pocket and jingled them joyously.

She was unaware of the convulsions beginning in the bowels of her kindergarten world, and the few who knew did not speak and did not sleep. While she sang the new ragtime, the men in New York, Washington, Paris, London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Berne quietly exchanged cryptic messages, murmured to each other in passing, and prepared death for mankind and slavery and change and ruin — for their own profit and their own power. Among them was Timothy Winslow.

Elizabeth Sheldon dressed for her twice-weekly visit to her mother’s office in Boston this blizzardly day in December 1910. All her clothing was now rigidly tailored and severe and, though expensive, gave no hint of money in a modern fashion that was all ruffles, long tight skirts, pleats and bows and ribbons. Even Caroline, amazingly, complained that Elizabeth’s clothing was mannish, and this complaint was followed by a remark that as her daughter was approaching twenty-three a marriage should be considered.

“With whom?” Elizabeth would ask contemptuously.

“You meet worthwhile men in Boston,” Caroline would then say.

“Where? In your board room?”

“You are still a member of the Assemblies,” Caroline would offer.

Elizabeth would laugh that peculiar laugh of hers. “And where should I invite a young man who was interested? Here?” She would indicate the malodorous house in its increasing decay.

Caroline ignored this. “All men are interested in money,” she said once. “You must consider heirs. I did.”

Elizabeth had become silent. Then she had looked penetratingly at her mother and understood for the first time in her life. She and her brothers had been bred solely as heirs and not for love, not out of any longing of their mother’s. She suddenly hated her mother more than ever before.

“Don’t be surprised if I never marry,” she said, and then regretted this. Caroline would not let her money come to a dead end in a spinster daughter who would have no other heirs but ‘spendthrift’ brothers and their children. So she said immediately, “Give me time. I’m not as old as you were when you married.” She smiled.

Her suit today was an old and bulky one of some dark tweed and with a mannish shirtwaist. The skirt swept her ankles in their buttoned boots. She put on a plain tweed topcoat, a felt hat, and then her gloves. She looked like a tall and rather emaciated seamstress or a schoolteacher or any other underpaid female. But she carried letters from her mother involving millions of dollars in her leather dispatch case. She looked at herself in the mirror and stared at her gaunt white image, her icy blue eyes, her pallid lips, and her straightly dressed light brown hair. The beautiful girl, charged with love and hope and innocence eighteen months ago, had existed only briefly.

Her mother was in her study. The morning newspaper was on a filthy littered table in the hall. Elizabeth picked it up and turned the pages listlessly, for she had a little time until the station hack called for her. (There were no carriages or horses in the stable now.) Then her throat burned and her heart was struck.

“Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Andrew Winslow of Boston and New York announce the marriage of their brother, William Lord Halnes, of London, Devon, Biarritz, and Nice, to Lady Rose Haven on December fifth, in London, at — ”

Elizabeth carefully refolded the newspaper. Pages 10 and 12 had somehow gotten themselves intertwined with pages 22 and 23. “Really!” said Elizabeth, aloud. “People are so careless these days.” She was extremely annoyed with the newspaper; she formulated a protest to the editor. “Dear Sir: One knows that in these days there is a very dowdy sense of responsibility . . . I discovered this morning . . .”

I discovered this morning. I discovered that I thought I had died but I was not quite dead after all. I discovered what pain is; I rediscovered what pain is. How can I live? I’ve waited. A footstep, a letter, a knock on the door? Really, I must have been mad.

Very priggishly she relaid the newspaper on the hall table and readjusted her hat. What cheap materials they made these days! This was felt, but it was weightless in her hands. Her body had a curiously flimsy sensation. She had only to lift her feet and she would float through the door. There. She had done it, without any motion at all. It was a matter of will power only. She began to laugh, and the gray snow-filled air rang with her laughter. She was so amused. People thought they needed to use muscles to open doors, to walk. It was the most foolish illusion. She bustled down the path, taking long wide steps, and floated into the hack. She was still laughing. When she could control herself she told the man, “The station, please. As usual.” He was a tired man; he wondered why Miss Sheldon laughed so heartily in the back of his vehicle and why she doubled over in her extremity of mirth. Finally he could not stand her laughter, and he huddled in his thick brown coat and was resentful. It was all right for the rich to laugh like that. What worries did they have, anyway? Here it was, close to Christmas, and all the things his wife expected of him for the children! When he was a boy a penny and a wizened orange was enough in a stocking. Now the kids wanted toys and candy and gum. It was all right for Miss Sheldon to laugh. She could go into any store and buy it out. He spat surlily. She was going to Boston to buy anything she wanted, for all her friends, and she wouldn’t turn a hair at the price.

Dear God, said Elizabeth’s spirit, and she had to press her gloved hands against her mouth to stop her laughter. Dear God. It was so very funny. She said to the driver in a suddenly serious voice, “Did you know there isn’t any God?”

Now, that was atheism. Everybody knew about that rich old mother of hers and all that money. Only the poor folks knew about God. He was filled with virtue and expanded. “Well now, miss, I don’t know about that. I never miss a Sunday at church.” The driver’s virtue increased, and he helped Elizabeth from the hack with a very superior manner. “Down you go. Watch that skirt, miss. You almost tripped on it. Two minutes to train time.”

“Oh, I could float to Boston,” said Elizabeth. “It doesn’t mean anything at all. So foolish.”

He stared at her. Miss Sheldon wasn’t given to jokes, but there she stood, smiling and laughing. There was just the mitest thing queer about her eyes, though, come to think about it. They stared and didn’t blink, and she smiled and smiled. Well, at least she was feeling friendly for a change. Perhaps she would remember him at Christmas.

Elizabeth had no memory of boarding the train or of the trip to Boston. She saw only long shadows and strange brilliant angles and jagged perspectives. Once or twice she put up her hand to feel the thick glass between herself and the world. She nodded with satisfaction. So long as the glass was there nobody could touch her or hurt her. She always kept it very clean and polished. It was her protection. She continued to press her hand against it in the train. She had not really believed in it when she saw it on her first day home after she had left England. She had originally thought it an illusion, as elongated stairways and narrowing walls were an illusion, as the screaming sounds in her ears were also an illusion. But not lately, not for more than a year. She settled contentedly in her seat, secure and protected. Everything was soundless.

She talked very calmly and clearly to the people in her mother’s office. She discussed the papers she had brought. She held her head tilted seriously as she listened and nodded and made notes. She did not laugh at the suddenly pulled-down faces, the squashed sides of heads, the grotesque hands. That would be unpardonable. When the session was over she refused lunch at the Beverley and said that she was expected home. She went out into the snowstorm and stood there in the street, with the flakes battering her face and her hot forehead. Then she said aloud, “There’s something wrong with me. It must be my eyes. Everything looks very strange.”

People walked at a peculiar angle, as if the street were the side of a hill. The buildings opposite lay down the hill; she herself stood on a ledge. She began to walk, at first slowly, then very rapidly. Then she began to run very neatly, in a ladylike fashion. Part of her mind guided her. She reached a large wide building, high and full of many windows, the hospital of the Sisters of Charity. She pushed open the heavy doors with the finger of her left hand and was pleased to see how well cumbersome matter obeyed her will.

A figure floated to meet her, all black and white and excessively tall, with a wimple and clear brown eyes. It was too familiar, honestly, for the figure to embrace and hold her, and very stupid of her to cling to the figure. However, the floor did whirl under feet. Was this a way they had to confuse patients or intruders? Elizabeth smiled slyly. “I am Miss Jones,” she said to the figure. “I think there is something wrong with my eyes. I don’t seem to see very well. Now if you please — ” She was very annoyed at this familiarity, this strong embrace. She settled her hat. “Now if you please,” she repeated severely. “I have money to pay. No doubt you have an eye doctor here.”

It was ridiculous, the way people could instantly change sex and appearance. The nun who had held her so tightly dissolved sheepishly into a man behind a desk in a large warm office. Elizabeth was surprised to find that she was sitting and not standing. The man had a kind face and a mustache. The mustache was gigantic and filled all his face. Elizabeth laughed, put her hands to her mouth, politely begged his pardon, then stared at him. He was watching her with a concerned expression. The nun who had brought her here stood quietly near the door.

“There is something wrong with your eyes, Miss — Jones?” he said. He looked at Elizabeth’s old tweeds, at her long white hands, at her pure stark face. He knew Boston ladies. They were often discreet to the point of being ludicrous. But there was something about this young lady’s eyes that disturbed him.

“Jones!” she exclaimed angrily.

“Yes. I have it here. Do you live in Boston?”

“Oh yes,” said Elizabeth. She paused. She knew these doctors; they always wanted money. “I’m very poor, really,” she said. The doctor looked at the dispatch case on the corner of his desk, and when Elizabeth saw the glance she snatched the case and held it tightly in her arms.

The doctor heard the careful intonations of her voice. Miss Stockington’s, beyond any doubt. He had two daughters there. “It’s odd, isn’t it,” said Elizabeth, “that there should be thunder at this time of the year? It hurts my ears.”

“Very odd,” the doctor agreed gravely. He looked at the silent snow flowing against his office windows. “Now, shall we look at your eyes, Miss Jones?”

He examined her eyes. She could not endure the glare of his light, but she struggled against her inclination to hide. It surprised her that he could pass through the glass. “Didn’t you feel it?” she asked him when he sat down again. “How could you pass through it?”

“What?” he asked gently.

She made a wide, vague motion in the air. “Why, the glass. In front of me.”

The nun at the door lifted her beads and held them in her hand, and the doctor stared down at his desk. He said, “I’d like a colleague to question and examine you.”

It was like a fairy tale. He no sooner had said this than another man stood beside him, conjured out of the thin air. Elizabeth laughed like a child.

The two doctors sat side by side. Elizabeth was not afraid of them, for the glass was gleaming before her. The new doctor was an older man, and he looked at Elizabeth compassionately.

“Now, Miss Jones, you must answer some questions. Have you had a nervous breakdown recently or a shock?”

“Oh no, indeed.” It was very necessary to be precise. “In fact, we have no family doctor at all. I’ve never been sick. I am very healthy.”

“I see. I must ask you some questions.”

The questions, thought Elizabeth indignantly, were very personal and embarrassing. In the midst of them she beckoned to the nun, who came to stand by her side. “Really,” she would murmur to the nun before answering the questions, and would look for feminine reassurance. The Sister smiled and sighed and nodded.