Mary had been staring into space, as if entranced, forgetting her brothers. She said suddenly, “Do you know what? I’m going to marry Tony.”
Fielding howled with laughter, but Miles did not even smile. His blue eyes narrowed thoughtfully on his sister. He said seriously, “No, my dear. He won’t marry anybody, I think. Least of all, you. You might try for DeWitt, though; he’s sweet on you, and someday, perhaps five or six years from now, it can be a match.” He became more serious than ever, and studied his sister as though she had appeared to him in a new and important light. “DeWitt. What if he’ll always walk on crutches or be in a wheel chair, or at best, use canes? He’s a deWitt.”
Mary was angered, and her eyes flashed. “I think DeWitt Marshall is detestable. Oh, we all had fun together when we were kids, but now I can’t stand him. I’m going to have Tony. It’s true he isn’t very bright about a lot of things, but just look at him! He makes my mouth water. The girls at school rave madly about him. And he’ll have your precious railroad one of these days, too.”
“No, he won’t,” said Miles softly. He ran his hand over his silken auburn ringlets. “DeWitt might. Don’t glare at me; I know what I know. Get after old DeWitt. You will, if you have any sense.”
Mary, in outrage, flounced to her feet, and the rosy skirts swirled about her in the perfect circle of a dancer’s costume. “Don’t tell me what to do, Miles Peale! I know you’re soft on that horrible Dolores, but she won’t look at you, not for a second! Besides, there’s that English nobleman, or something, and you can be sure that Aunt Cornelia is getting up a sweat working on it. And did you ever hear of Aunt Cornelia not getting what she wanted?” She laughed at Miles, who made no reply but pointedly took up one of his books.
“Ever hear of Miles not getting what he wanted, either?” asked Fielding, coming to his brother’s aid. “And you’re wrong, Mary. Who would want old Dolores? Looks like wax, with all that light hair. The family’s got millions, but even the hungry boys let her be a wallflower at dances.”
Miles never lost his temper visibly. So he smiled with superior kindness at his brother. “Yes,” he said. “Who would want Dolores? And again, do I have to throw you kids out?”
When they had finally left him, he closed his book over his finger and gazed at the fire, and those who knew him would have been astonished to see the intensity of his expression and his monumental concentration. He finally got up, lifted a book from its narrow shelf on the wall, and from behind it withdrew a letter he had received that morning. No one had ever violated his privacy, but he distrusted all human beings. He reread the letter, which was from Jon deWitt. It was a very thick and rambling letter, written in cramped handwriting, and here and there it was incoherent. It was full of lyrical and frantic devotion to this seventeen-year-old youth, and Miles smiled in an ugly fashion as he read on. “… dreadful time at Cannes, which I loathe—miss you, dear boy. … You are such a child, but so beautiful. Even when you laugh at me, I forgive you because of your face and intellect. … You don’t understand these things—the purity, the loftiness, the classic. … But you’ve given me some hope … do not despise me—the pain, the longing. … There is no one like you. I am losing interest in my French friends—they pretend to a subtlety they do not have … just want my money. I am ten years older than you, but I know you would understand if you would allow me to explain. …”
Disgusting obscenity, thought Miles. He tapped the papers against his teeth. Then he continued to read: “Lonely—lonely—lonely. … I remember that discussion I had with you last summer. Let me talk with you again, I have so many new books on the subject.—When one looks at Allan Marshall, and my grandfather, for that matter, one is filled with hatred for them. Cruel, greedy oppressors of better men. Monopolists of the worst kind, but they always manage to evade the antitrust actions against them. What do they know of the suffering of the exploited, the people? Do they ever hear the clatter of the tumbrils at any time? But they’ll hear them, one of these days! Did you read the last translated pamphlets I sent you, which were smuggled out of Russia? The hour is coming! In this respect you are so perspicacious, so perceptive. You, like me, know that the day of the robber barons is finished, that the Day of the Proletariat is approaching with thunder. …”
I wonder, thought Miles, sitting down near the fire again, if there is anything to my suspicion that unspeakable people like Jon deWitt are just naturally, and inevitably, drawn to ideas like the “Day of the Proletariat”? Their perversions? Their dementia? Do they hate successful men, and so try, this way, to destroy them? Is that their revenge?
Miles had met some of Jon’s New York “friends.” He remembered the zealot’s glare in their eyes, their shrill denunciatory voices, their clenched fists, their piercing and insistent arguments, their womanish malignance and airs, their passion for “oppressed groups and the Masses.” Degeneracy—and perhaps the light of burning cities tomorrow. The fragile but spiteful banshees of doom. Miles wrinkled his nose as if offended by a foul smell. One or two of the “friends” were men distinguished for literature, for obscure, beautifully written, frail poems or novels. Their work had the scent of putridity about it, for all the exquisite phrases and the general excellence. Moreover, they wrote almost exclusively of men—masculine, dominant, warlike men, and they wrote voluptuously.
Miles rolled the letter tightly together, and pushed it between the coals of the fire. He watched it burn, and his smile was cryptic. Jon deWitt. Rufus deWitt’s son. He could be useful, very useful. Miles began to think of the letter he would write to him. A cautious letter, harmless and unintelligible to others, significant to Jon.
39
As the family sat at breakfast on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, Tony Marshall felt that he had at least one reason for humble gratitude to God: his father was looking strong again, the life had returned to his eyes, his air of concentrated potency, which over the years had appeared to deteriorate slowly but steadily, had returned in its full power. Still very thin, and with gray hair, he was, for the first time in a long while, giving the impression that he was in absolute control, thought Tony, the feeling that he was “present.”
Because he had such sensitivity of feeling, Tony knew that the seemingly trivial have a stupendous place in the lives of men. Allan, in his youth, might have had a contempt for his parents; nevertheless, his acceptance by his father in these later years had comforted him. He was needed by his father, that old man, so serene, so belligerent, so affectionately blustering and kind and simple. Tim’s wife was dead, but he hardly grieved. “Sure, my lad, herself is just dustin’ up the new house and settlin’ the furniture for me,” he had told Tony. “It’s lookin’ out the window for me she is, right at this minute.” His filmed eyes had smiled at the young man. “And it’s not surprised, I’d be, if some of the blessed angels didn’t drop in for a cup of tea sometimes, and one of her tarts.”
This highly unorthodox view of the hereafter had not disturbed Michael. He had said softly, “And when you get there, Dad, don’t forget to keep a chair brushed off for me.” This was before he had left for India. He, as if he knew Allan’s need, wrote constantly.
Tony pitied Estelle and her two sons, Jon and Norman, but in spite of the imperative Command he could not love them, and this sometimes worried him. Estelle, in her early sixties, looked much younger to the casual glance, though the thin skin of her sweet face was cobwebbed with time. She never appeared, even during slight illnesses, without the bloom of expertly applied rouge and powder, and her luminous brown eyes were still distended with a synthetic enthusiasm. She had no need, even at her age, to resort to the dye pot, as did Cornelia. Estelle’s soft curls were still brown, if thinned, and she wore them like a crown on her head. She had kept her youthful figure, her artificial eagerness of expression, and her saccharine quality. But malevolence had pinched and sunken the corners of her mouth, had driven pits around her nostrils, had shriveled the area about her eyes.
He also dislike
d, in spite of earnest effort, her two sons, who resembled her so closely. Norman was his mother’s courtier, a young, brown-haired, brown-eyed man who gave the impression of having no “body.” At twenty-five, he was a perpetual youth, and always would be. Adolescence was part of his spirit; it was his livery. Sometimes he was even guilty of clapping his hands in delight over some trifle. Yet, though he was interested in no woman but his mother, he did not give off that certain effluvium of disease and ominous distortion which hovered about his older brother.
Even when he had been much younger, and much more innocent of life, Tony had recognized that Jon deWitt was unhealthy in both personality and soul. At fourteen, Tony, who had always called Jon by his Christian name, simply, was instinctively impelled to call him “Uncle Jon.” (What had occurred to cause this change was almost blotted from his memory, but he retained the impression that it had threatened him and that he had fled from it in horror and loathing.) At any rate, the firmly enunciated title had changed Jon’s former interest in his nephew to cold and spiteful dislike.
There were times when Tony, though only eighteen, had a mature man’s perceptiveness; and it came to him at irregular but fully enlightened intervals that if there was some awful fate which had deformed Jon, and had kept Norman in infancy, that fate was their mother.
Tony did not know that Rufus, over the years, had come to recognize his sons for what they were, and now shuddered at one and regarded the other with the unthinking aversion one extends to the unknown. His last will left them some amounts in cash, but no stock or bonds in the railroad. Their mother had increased her own original wealth in the stock market.
Rufus, though he had lost much flesh lately, still retained his hearty appetite and joviality. He had insisted on joining the family at breakfast, for the company of his daughter and his grandchildren, Tony and Dolores, had become a necessity to him. Allan, since his revival of mind and health, sometimes became tedious to the old man; he wanted to “talk business” all the time, as Rufus complained to Cornelia. “I never thought the day would come when I wouldn’t be predominantly interested in our company, above anything else,” he would admit. “Would you mind telling Allan, in a very subtle way, of course, that I’m ‘not what I was,’ or something?” Cornelia, therefore, would tactfully move the conversation from a business discussion when her father and husband were together. “For God’s sake,” she would say, “there’s something else in the world besides locomotives and stocks and bonds and directors and patents and rights of way, especially at breakfast and dinner.”
The morning was disquietingly showing every indication of making life miserable for human beings. Snow had fallen heavily all night; it lay in grayish and mounting heaps on the mountains and in the valleys. It seemed to be determined to do much more. Vision through the windows was limited to curtains of whiteness, torn apart by a thunderous gale. “Roads will be blocked,” said Cornelia. “I do hope that Mother and Ruth won’t have too much difficulty; they won’t if they use a sleigh. I must call them. Remind me, somebody. The Peales, unfortunately, will get here. Patrick becomes more intolerable all the time. Why isn’t it permissible, on regulated occasions, for a woman to poison her husband?” Rufus laughed heartily. But Allan, who had been about to ask Rufus his opinion of a newly invented automatic switch, did not smile. His face darkened and he put down his fork. Cornelia watched him intently from under her tawny lashes, and for an instant she was completely ugly. But she went on: “Mother didn’t want to come, considering poor Uncle Jim’s recent death. I became quite the wounded daughter; she knows all about me, of course, and she laughed a little. She understood, though, that we really wanted her.”
Estelle glanced up. “Do we?” she asked sweetly. “Frankly, as you know, I never cared much for Lydia. She is completely neglecting herself; she looks like an old woman.”
“None of us are young,” said Rufus. He regarded his wife with a hard gleam in his eyes.
Cornelia said, “Thank you, Papa. I do feel decrepit. Honestly, these large gatherings-of-the-clan on holidays bore me. But it’s my turn. Thank God we go back to New York next week, after Tony returns to Harvard, and DeWitt to Groton.” She complained, “I never thought the Peales would make me want to leave home, but they do.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Miles. And Mary,” said deWitt in his unaccented voice. His face, so sharp and dark, flushed a little. His mother, beside him, patted the small hand on the table, and he shrank away, rebukingly. “Never mind; we all know you like Mary,” she said. “And why not? Such a darling girl. Miles? A terrible rascal, of course.”
Estelle furtively patted her curls. “I must say that Lydia seems to take Jim’s death very calmly, and they always appeared to be so devoted.”
“There’s more to grief than emotionalism,” said Cornelia, accepting another large slice of ham from the platter the butler was offering her. “Or don’t you know, Estelle?”
“Now, now,” murmured Rufus with enjoyment.
“I, for one, will be happy to get back to my apartment in New York,” said Jon, in his feminine voice, precise and lyrical. “Dull, here in the country. I think I’ll make it a little earlier than usual. Papa, it won’t be necessary to order out our private car for me.”
Rufus held a piece of toast in his hand. “I won’t,” he replied. “What’s wrong with our Pullmans, anyway?” He put down the toast as if he had suddenly sickened of it, and he turned to his left, where Dolores sat. Immediately he was warmed. “Why do you have to go back to that school in Switzerland, my love?”
“I don’t,” she answered with a tender smile. “I’d much rather stay here with you, Grandpa.”
“Now don’t encourage her, Papa,” said Cornelia with boisterous vigor. “You know she has to finish. And we’ll be on the Riviera again, before you know it.”
Rufus smiled ruddily but did not answer. His daughter fixed all her attention on him, and her heart, usually so invulnerable, contracted. Allan turned to her, caught her eye, and smiled with affection. She responded to it, but under her thick and robust application of bright rouge her skin paled.
What complacent, wicked, or dull fools they are! thought Jon deWitt with such violent revulsion and hatred that his vision became distorted for a moment, and all objects and the people about the breakfast table drew together in tall and jagged lines before him, colored only in white and black. He was familiar with this phenomenon, and with its accompanying sensation of extreme nausea, intolerable head pain and plunging heart. There had been times when the stalklike and glittering lines had fused as one, glimmered like lightning, and had then disappeared in a total darkness which had lasted for several terrifying moments. He was afraid it was going to happen again, and he forced himself to breathe slowly and steadily, to swallow methodically, as he had been taught.
There sat his father, that oppressor of the workers, that battener on the lives of humble men! No doubt he still fancied himself as a Jove, thought Jon, a benevolent Jove, with all his condescending charities, his chairmanships of “welfare” organizations. Too late, too late! Jon went on in himself with raging satisfaction. Too late for anything, you damned, twinkling, chuckling liar, who have made my mother’s life a hell since the day you married her. And that daughter of yours, that loud-voiced brazen bitch with her gusto and her shouts of laughter and her way with men! Pollution, corruption! Allan Marshall! Thief, conniver, plotting Irish rascal. Low-bred scoundrel. I thought you would die the last time you were ill; if I believed in any God I would pray that you would die.
Jon picked up his glass with trembling fingers and drank. The ominous flicker of darkness was touching the corner of his right eyelid. He made himself look desperately at his mother as a distracted peasant kneels before a wayside shrine. Her dear, sweet, shining face. Her young and eager eyes. The adorable curls, the dimpled chin. He had been choosing her clothes for many years now; his gaze lingered on her blue morning robe with its froth of white lace about her neck and flowing from the wide cuf
fs. He sighed. He looked at his brother and was stabbed with jealousy. Norman was leaning against Estelle’s arm and smiling up at her like a dependent child. Jon smiled victoriously to himself. He knew what he knew about Norman; he had taught him. Norman’s emotions might be those of an adolescent, but there was a mind behind the prattling, the clapping of hands, the apparently senseless laughter. A voracious and calculating mind, capable of absorbing the new and flowering philosophy of the common man. The family would have to reckon with both of Estelle’s sons.
He studied the rest of the family. DeWitt. Cold, clicking away in the depths of him, ignoring that repulsive crippling as if it were an irrelevance. One could hear him ticking, tabulatking, adding up, endlessly, sleeplessly. But the mind of a man could defeat a machine, however intricate. Besides, the ugly, black-faced little monster was only sixteen.
Jon came now to Tony, and for a few seconds he was completely blinded with hatred, and with something like terror. Had he ever told anyone, his mother, his father, his grandfather? It must be so, otherwise he, Jon deWitt, would not be so avoided and treated with such open aversion.
At last, Jon came to Dolores, so like her brother. Positively repellent, thought Jon, despising her. All that pale light hair curling about her Renaissance face, those empty eyes, that delicately swelling figure. In some way she appeared to him even more of a threat than Tony. He glanced at her breast, and shuddered, and at her white throat, and shuddered again. With what grossnesses of body the animal could be seduced! Her rose-colored lips, smiling so gently at Rufus, nauseated Jon.
Rufus was speaking in that rich voice of his: “We always believe that our lives and our thoughts are marvelously unique, our calamities beyond the understanding of others, our hopes higher and nobler, our despairs deeper, our aims purer, our comprehensions more refined, and that the things which happen to us, whether for good or for bad, have never happened before to anyone else. Do you remember, Allan, what the Pharisee said: ‘I thank Thee, Lord, I am not as other men are’?” He laughed. “I’ve never done a thing which hasn’t been done before thousands of years ago in exactly the same way by millions of others.”