Edith Wharton - SSC 09 (3 page)

 
          
And
then, one day, about eight months after her departure, there was a telegram.
“Found my boy.
Unspeakably happy.
Long to see you.” It
was signed Catherine Glenn, and dated from a mountain-cure in
Switzerland
.

 
          
  

 
          
That
summer, when the time came for my vacation, it was raining in
Paris
even harder than it had rained all the
preceding winter, and I decided to make a dash for the sun.

 
          
I
had read in the papers that the French Riviera was suffering from a six months’
drought; and though I didn’t half believe it, I took the next train for the
south. I got out at Les Calanques, a small bathing-place between
Marseilles
and
Toulon
, where there was a fairish hotel, and
pine-woods to walk in, and there, that very day, I saw seated on the beach the
majestic figure of Mrs. Stephen Glenn. The first thing that struck me was that
she had at last discarded her weeds. She wore a thin white dress, and a
wide-brimmed hat of russet straw shaded the fine oval of her face. She saw me
at once, and springing up advanced across the beach with a light step. The sun,
striking on her hat brim, cast a warm shadow on her face; and in that
semi-shade it glowed with recovered youth. “Dear Mr. Norcutt! How wonderful! Is
it really you? I’ve been meaning to write for weeks; but I think happiness has
made me lazy—and my days are so full,” she declared with a joyous smile.

 
          
I
looked at her with increased admiration. At the Consulate, I remembered, I had
said to myself that grief was what Nature had meant her features to express;
but that was only because I had never seen her happy. No; even when her husband
and her son Philip were alive, and the circle of her well-being seemed
unbroken, I had never seen her look as she looked now. And I understood that,
during all those years, the unsatisfied longing for her eldest child, the shame
at her own cowardice in disowning and deserting him, and perhaps her secret
contempt for her husband for having abetted (or more probably exacted) that
desertion, must have been eating into her soul, deeper, far deeper, than
satisfied affections could reach. Now everything in her was satisfied; I could
see it…. “How happy you look!” I exclaimed.

 
          
“But
of course.” She took it as simply as she had my former remark on her heightened
beauty; and I perceived that what had illumined her face when we met on the
steamer was not sorrow but the dawn of hope. Even then she had felt certain
that she was going to find her boy; now she had found him and was transfigured.
I sat down beside her on the sands. “And now tell me how the incredible thing
happened.”

 
          
She
shook her head. “Not incredible—inevitable. When one has lived for more than
half a life with one object in view it’s bound to become a reality. I
had
to find Stevie; and I found him.”
She smiled with the inward brooding smile of a Madonna—an image of the eternal
mother who, when she speaks of her children in old age, still feels them at the
breast.

 
          
Of
details, as I made out, there were few; or perhaps she was too confused with
happiness to give them. She had hunted up and down Italy for her Mr. and Mrs.
Brown, and then suddenly, at Alassio, just as she was beginning to give up
hope, and had decided (in a less sanguine mood) to start for Spain, the miracle
had happened. Falling into talk, on her last evening, with a lady in the hotel
lounge, she had alluded vaguely—she couldn’t say why—to the object of her
quest; and the lady, snatching the miniature from her, and bursting into tears,
had identified the portrait as her adopted child’s, and herself as the
long-sought Mrs. Brown. Papers had been produced, dates compared, all to Mrs.
Glenn’s complete satisfaction. There could be no doubt that she had found her
Stevie (thank heaven, they had kept the name!); and the only shadow on her joy
was the discovery that he was lying ill, menaced with tuberculosis, at some
Swiss mountain-cure. Or rather, that was part of another sadness; of the
unfortunate fact that his adopted parents had lost nearly all their money just
as he was leaving school, and hadn’t been able to do much for him in the way of
medical attention or mountain air—the very things he needed as he was growing
up. Instead, since he had a passion for painting, they had allowed him to live
in Paris, rather miserably, in the Latin Quarter, and work all day in one of
those big schools—
Julian’s,
wasn’t it? The very worst
thing for a boy whose lungs were slightly affected; and this last year he had
had to give up, and spend several months in a cheap hole in Switzerland. Mrs.
Glenn joined him there at once—ah, that meeting!—and as soon as she had seen
him, and talked with the doctors, she became convinced that all that was needed
to ensure his recovery was comfort, care and freedom from anxiety. His lungs,
the doctors assured her, were all right again; and he had such a passion for
the sea that after a few weeks in a good hotel at Montana he had persuaded Mrs.
Glenn to come with him to the Mediterranean. But she was firmly resolved on
carrying him back to Switzerland for another winter, no matter how much he
objected; and Mr. and Mrs. Brown agreed that she was absolutely right—

 
          
“Ah;
there’s still a Mr. Brown?”

 
          
“Oh,
yes.” She smiled at me absently, her whole mind on Stevie. “You’ll see them
both—they’re here with us. I invited them for a few weeks, poor souls. I can’t
altogether separate them from Stevie—not yet.” (It was clear that eventually
she hoped to.)

 
          
No,
I assented; I supposed she couldn’t; and just then she exclaimed: “Ah, there’s
my boy!” and I saw a tall stooping young man approaching us with the listless
step of convalescence. As he came nearer I felt that I was going to like him a
good deal better than I had expected—though I don’t know why I had doubted his
likeableness before knowing him. At any rate, I was taken at once by the look
of his dark-lashed eyes, deep-set in a long thin face which I suspected of
being too pale under the carefully-acquired sunburn. The eyes were friendly,
humorous,
ironical
; I liked a little less the rather
hard lines of the mouth, until his smile relaxed them into boyishness. His
body, lank and loose-jointed, was too thin for his suit of light striped
flannel, and the untidy dark hair tumbling over his forehead adhered to his
temples as if they were perpetually damp. Yes, he looked ill, this young Glenn.

 
          
I
remembered wondering, when Mrs. Glenn told me her story, why it had not
occurred to her that her oldest son had probably joined the American forces and
might have remained on the field with his junior. Apparently this tragic
possibility had never troubled her. She seemed to have forgotten that there had
ever been a war, and that a son of her own, with thousands of young Americans
of his generation, had lost his life in it. And now it looked as though she had
been gifted with a kind of prescience. The war did not last long enough for
America to be called on to give her weaklings, as Europe
had,
and it was clear that Stephen Glenn, with his narrow shoulders and hectic
cheek-bones, could never have been wanted for active service. I suspected him
of having been ill for longer than his mother knew.

 
          
Mrs.
Glenn shone on him as he dropped down beside us. “This is an old friend,
Stephen; a very dear friend of your father’s.” She added, extravagantly, that
but for me she and her son might never have found each other. I protested: “How
absurd,” and young Glenn, stretching out his long limbs against the sand-back,
and crossing his arms behind his head, turned on me a glance of rather weary
good-humour. “Better give me a longer trial, my dear, before you thank him.”

 
          
Mrs.
Glenn laughed contentedly, and continued, her eyes on her son: “I was telling
him that Mr. and Mrs. Brown are with us.”

 
          
“Ah,
yes—” said Stephen indifferently. I was inclined to like him a little less for
his undisguised indifference. Ought he to have allowed his poor and unlucky
foster-parents to be so soon superseded by this beautiful and opulent new
mother? But, after all, I mused, I had not yet seen the Browns; and though I
had begun to suspect, from Catherine’s tone as well as from Stephen’s, that
they both felt the presence of that couple to be vaguely oppressive, I decided
that I must wait before drawing any conclusions. And then suddenly Mrs. Glenn
said, in a tone of what I can only describe as icy cordiality: “Ah, here they come
now. They must have hurried back on purpose—”

 
          
  

 
          
Mr.
and Mrs. Brown advanced across the beach. Mrs. Brown led the way; she walked
with a light springing step, and if I had been struck by Mrs. Glenn’s recovered
youthfulness, her co-mother, at a little distance, seemed to me positively
girlish. She was smaller and much slighter than Mrs. Glenn, and looked so much
younger that I had a moment’s doubt as to the possibility of her having,
twenty-seven years earlier, been of legal age to adopt a baby. Certainly she
and Mr. Brown must have had exceptional reasons for concluding so early that
Heaven was not likely to bless their union. I had to admit, when Mrs. Brown
came up, that I had overrated her juvenility. Slim, active and girlish she
remained; but the freshness of her face was largely due to artifice, and the
golden glints in her chestnut hair were a thought too golden. Still, she was a
very pretty woman, with the alert cosmopolitan air of one who had acquired her
elegance in places where the very best counterfeits are found. It will be seen
that my first impression was none too favourable; but for all I knew of Mrs.
Brown it might turn out that she had made the best of meagre opportunities. She
met my name with a conquering smile, said: “Ah, yes—dear Mr. Norcutt. Mrs.
Glenn has told us all we owe you”—and at the “we” I detected a faint shadow on
Mrs. Glenn’s brow. Was it only maternal jealousy that provoked it? I suspected
an even deeper antagonism. The women were so different, so diametrically
opposed to each other in appearance, dress, manner, and all the inherited
standards, that if they had met as strangers it would have been hard for them
to find a common ground of understanding; and the fact of that ground being
furnished by Stephen hardly seemed to ease the situation.

 
          
“Well,
what’s the matter with taking some notice of little me?” piped a small dry man
dressed in too-smart flannels, and wearing a too-white Panama which he removed
with an elaborate flourish.

 
          
“Oh, of course!
My husband—Mr. Norcutt.”
Mrs. Brown laid a jewelled hand on Stephen’s recumbent shoulder. “Steve, you
rude boy, you ought to have introduced your dad.” As she pressed his shoulder I
noticed that her long oval nails were freshly lacquered with the last new shade
of coral, and that the forefinger was darkly yellowed with nicotine. This
familiar colour-scheme struck me at the moment as peculiarly distasteful.

 
          
Stephen
vouchsafed no answer, and Mr. Brown remarked to me sardonically. “You know you
won’t lose your money or your morals in this secluded spot.”

 
          
Mrs.
Brown flashed a quick glance at him. “Don’t be so silly! It’s much better for
Steve to be in a quiet place where he can just sleep and eat and bask. His
mother and I are going to be firm with him about that—aren’t we, dearest?” She
transferred her lacquered talons to Mrs. Glenn’s shoulder, and the latter, with
a just perceptible shrinking, replied gaily: “As long as we can hold out
against him!”

 
          
“Oh,
this is the very place I was pining for,” said Stephen placidly. (“Gosh—
pining!”
Mr. Brown interpolated.)
Stephen tilted his hat forward over his sunburnt nose with the drawn nostrils,
crossed his arms under his thin neck, and closed his eyes. Mrs. Brown bent over
Mrs. Glenn with one of her quick gestures. “Darling—before we go in to lunch
do
let me fluff you out a little: so.” With a flashing hand
she loosened the soft white waves under Mrs. Glenn’s spreading hat brim.
“There—that’s better; isn’t it, Mr. Norcutt?”

 
          
Mrs.
Glenn’s face was a curious sight. The smile she had forced gave place to a
marble rigidity; the old statuesqueness which had melted to flesh and blood
stiffened her features again. “Thank you … I’m afraid I never think …”