Melissa

  “What is wrong with my sister?” she asked, and her voice was clear and sharp in the summer warmth.

  Arabella, who had become ugly with hate and fear, tried to smile.

  “I do not know, my dear,” she replied, sadly. “But do I need to tell you that she is no queerer than when she lived with you in your old home?”

  Phoebe did not answer. She glanced at the open door through which Melissa had disappeared. She had an impulse to go in search of her sister. But she immediately shrank from the idea. The whole day was already spoiled. Melissa’s vapors were enough to make anyone distraught. And she, Phoebe, was feeling somewhat strange and indisposed herself these last few days. There was no use in aggravating her condition. She caught her breath, and all at once her eyes began to shine musingly. She forgot Melissa.

  CHAPTER 43

  Whenever Ravel Littlefield met Melissa, it was with uneasiness and misgivings. He, unlike Melissa, was not in the least ingenuous. He had known that open meetings, within sight of the whole countryside, could lead to but one resµlt—scandal and gossip. In order to protect Melissa, he had hinted that a little discretion might be in order, but Melissa had only stared at him blankly, not understanding in the least.

  “Why should we not walk together, and talk, when we wish?” she had demanded. Her tired eyes had been clear and puzzled, and somewhat annoyed. But Ravel, after his first impatience, understood that no explanations would do more than baffle Melissa, and his reluctant tenderness for her grew steadily. She was so incredibly honest.

  Hers, he saw, was not a deliberate and righteous honesty, sternly and dutifully chosen out of a conviction that it was correct, high-minded, or likely to serve as an “example.” Such honesty, he reflected, was hypocritical. Rather, hers was an honesty which could be nothing else but itself, which could not conceive of anything else, and thus it had majesty and grandeur. He could see very well why such integrity would inspire the ridicule of fools, the superior smiles of the pseudo-sophisticates, the exchange-of-glances between those who mistook truth for naïveté. It had power—the power of complete innocence.

  So great was that power, that Ravel tried to convince himself that Melissa’s innocence made her invulnerable even to slander and lies and scandal, that when he walked with her a kind of invisibility attached itself to them. He really knew better than this, but Melissa had hypnotized him against his own good judgment and knowledge of the world. Moreover, unconsciously, he knew that scandal might in the end be his best ally in his determination to have Melissa, not for a few days or months, but for always. If matters reached a state where she would be compelled to leave her husband it would be only what Ravel, himself, now wanted.

  It had, at first, alarmed and frightened him when he discovered that he loved Melissa, not lightly, not with mere physical fascination, not even with much passion. He loved her with a love he had not believed possible; he had not believed it existed, or could exist, between men and women. This love made him feel at once humble and strong, cleansed and invincible, tender and protective. He soon saw that it also made the thought of life without Melissa completely intolerable, and that was why he was so disturbed.

  A wise man, he knew, cared about many things, but cared for nothing very much. Emotions, uncontrolled, were the enemies of a serene and happy and enjoyable existence. It was agreeable to love, but it was wiser not to love too much or too well. A man had his life to plan, whether that life was of work or of pleasure, and emotional storms could well wreck the nicety of accomplishment and joy. To permit love to make everything else quite without significance was the mark of a fool.

  He could not understand why he loved Melissa with such violent force and exclusiveness. He had thought her beautiful and desirable. But the world is full of beautiful and desirable women. She had excited him, but he had often been excited before. She had no charm or fascination of manner, no gaiety (and gaiety was his first demand in a woman), no little arts and graces and coquetries. In short, she was, in many ways, a neutral creature, almost sexless. Beyond the mere modelling of her face, her coloring, and her figure, she had few feminine lovelinesses. She knew nothing of reality and, while this might be charming in a child, it could be wearisome in a woman. Even in love, there must be a realistic contact between men and women, a mutual exchange of impressions. Her range of conversation was very limited. Let talk stray beyond the world of books, poetry, literature and the exact meaning of language, and Melissa became blank and contaught her to assume an expression of polite attention. But fused, though Ravel observed that someone had recently there were times when she forgot to be polite, and presented a stony exterior very disconcerting to a gentleman (even if he was a poet) who had other interests besides the ones Melissa considered ought to occupy, exclusively, the minds of adult human beings.

  She was not interested in the turbulent post-war world, the terrors of the Southern Reconstruction, wars, personalities and people. When Ravel tried to discuss them, she would listen with impatience for him to have done. She thought it all very trivial, and Ravel, who prided himself on his conversation, would be quite infuriated. She was actually unsure who had succeeded Lincoln. Ravel had no liking for a blue-stocking, and he preferred stupidity in a really beautiful woman, yet he found himself disappointed and frustrated in Melissa, because she actually knew nothing at all. He knew her intellect; he wished she might exercise it on something else besides the monotonous subjects she appeared to believe were the only ones worthy of discussion. Sometimes he laughed at himself. Here was a desirable woman, and for the first time in his life he wished such a woman would talk to him like a man and like a friend! As an intelligent man, he delighted in paradoxes so long as they did not touch him personally.

  He found himself hating Charles Upjohn. Charles Upjohn was always present when Ravel was with Melissa.

  At first, he encouraged Melissa to talk about her father, for he saw that was the one vulnerable spot through which he could reach her chambered nautilus of a heart. He had only to mention a man who was dead (and yet who seemed, in the presence of Melissa, forbodingly alive) and Melissa would become eloquent, awkwardly passionate, and fanatical. Her pale, rather deep-set eyes would sparkle, take on a swift blueness; her colorless skin would flush delicately; her rough gestures would assume the compelling drama of a really aroused and ardent spirit. In short, her static rigidity would be broken up, like strong waters breaking through a crust of dull ice. In the beginning, Ravel was fascinated by this phenomenon, and out of curiosity he would speak almost exclusively of Charles Upjohn. He gathered, from the rush of Melissa’s words, that Charles was the noblest scholar of them all, a man of complete perfections, kind, exquisite, delightful in conversation, excellent in learning, a creation in which God Himself would take the most awed and respectful pleasure. No one could surpass him in the choice of the felicitous phrase, the poetry of his language, the beauty of his paragraphs, the irrefutable soundness of his ideas, his logic and his knowledge.

  So great was Melissa’s eloquence upon the subject that Ravel, who again knew better, began to feel himself subtly hypnotized into believing what she told him. He even wished, in the beginning, that he might have known such a wonder and sat at his feet. But natural human jealousy and skepticism made him question Melissa closely upon matters other than Charles’ prodigious learning and genius. In her innocence, Melissa revealed more than she ever consciously suspected or knew. Finally, a really accurate picture of Charles began to develop in Ravel’s mind, and he was disgusted, and alarmed for Melissa.

  Not only was Charles a constant intruder when they were together, but he was an intruder both evil and petty, wanton and deformed, sinister and mean, jealous and exigent. He was a man of power, but it was a power of extreme and twisted littleness. He had superimposed himself on Melissa’s imagination, had seduced her reason, had made grotesque her vision, knew, because he was a frustrated man ruled by hatred, could destroy. And he had done all this, Ravel intuitively had imprisoned her in a tower whi
ch only a major convulsion Nothing else but hatred could have impelled any man to take over the sovereignty of any other soul, and to cripple it so terribly. Ravel suspected also that the hatred which had destroyed Charles Upjohn was a hatred for the world which had denied him eminence and fame. But the world was invulnerable. Charles had fallen back on the only domain he had, his family, and he had poured out on that family the full if impotent measure of his will-to-power, his lust for destruction.

  It was apparent that the others had finally escaped. Melissa alone had not. Why? She was a woman of character and inherent strength. Only love could make a victim of such a woman. She had loved her father without reservation and with awful completeness, and so had delivered herself up to him.

  If Ravel had heard, somewhere, of two people like himself and Melissa, if he had heard of a man who seriously felt himself beginning to grapple with a dead man for a woman’s soul, he would have laughed with amusement. He would have said such a man had, to be very charitable, no sense of humor. Yet he was not laughing now.

  He sent to New York for copies of Charles’ writings. He read them closely, for it was necessary to understand a thing in order to hate it constructively. He was, himself, no mean scholar, and there were times when he admired, involuntarily, this minute and precise scholarship. And then he saw its essential pedantry, its narrowness and conceit, its enormous egotism and dogmatic self-love. Ravel had always detested the pedant. Charles was its archetype. He was the pedant enamored of the word, the gelid and quivering snail in its drab shell. And, like all pedants, he was potentially dangerous.

  That such a man might take possession of one like Melissa was understandable. But complete understanding only increased the horror of the thing. Sometimes Ravel felt paralyzed. There was nothing he could do, that was immediately evident. Unlike Geoffrey, it never occurred to him that only Melissa could save Melissa, and that if Melissa were left alone, in silence and in contemplation, she must inevitably be awakened by the rising clamor of heretofore self-suppressed knowledge. The healing of any madness, Geoffrey knew, came from self-realization, from meditation and reflection. The human mind, if only it had quiet, tended to health. Let the trampling be ended, and the grass of fruitful thoughts would struggle to life again and cover all scars with greenness.

  Ravel had become a man whom he had always found even more absurd than the man abjectly in love: a man who believed that the woman he desired was married to an obdurate and stupid husband from whom her lover must rescue her at all costs. Incredibly, for Ravel, he saw himself as Melissa’s deliverer. He had forgotten everything he had ever known. There was nothing for him in the world now but Melissa and the poem he was writing, and this was coming more and more to be a heroic saga of her own bewitched and sleeping self.

  It was to be the one poem he ever wrote that was to bring him fame. But he never thought of fame now. He thought only of Melissa.

  They met very frequently at the Dunham house. The old friendship between Arabella and Ravel had become stronger, and both knew why. During Geoffrey’s absence, Ravel dined at least twice a week with the two lonely women in the great house, and summer afternoons often found him on the terrace with them, drinking tea. But he met Melissa alone, in a spot which had become their favorite haunt, usually at sundown.

  This spot was in a sharp bend of the river, where a grove of willows leaned over the water and trailed their green fingers in their own reflections. Two or three flat, sun-warmed stones were conveniently grouped together in a place where drooping boughs laced themselves into a canopy against the hot sky. This left Ravel and Melissa hidden from anyone who strolled nearby on the banks above, while leaving a clear and open view of the river before them and the distant banks beyond and of occasional small craft bobbing on the brilliant water. Only the sounds of wind and river and birds moved about them, and these enhanced their privacy and isolation. If the spot had a tendency to be somewhat dank, and if insects showed a predilection for their company, neither knew nor cared.

  Ravel was not entirely sure why Melissa met him here and why she was always waiting for him. He was not even sure that she did wait for him. She had found this place herself, and when he came he would usually discover her reading or making notes, utterly absorbed in what she was doing. When she heard his step, she would glance up vaguely, smile only a little, and wait for him to sit down beside her. There were times when she actually seemed slightly annoyed at his interruption of her work and thoughts. He had only one consolation. She no longer was shy with him, or awkward and painfully embarrassed. She accepted him. His intuition, almost feminine, assured him that in this he had made an enormous gain.

  At first, she had merely tolerated him. But now he had become that best and dearly beloved friend, an ear. If Ravel had had any iota of his old sense of humor left, he would have found his new rôle ridiculous, he who had charmed all women with his conversation, his bons mots, his flattery, his eloquence. But an ear for Melissa he had become. He had known this must be his rôle, and though he had entered it reluctantly and artfully in the beginning, he played it now with passionate interest and fascination. He might be bored with Melissa’s incessant talk of books and her father, but he was delighted with her ingenuousness, her lofty and bizarre comments upon a world about which she knew nothing, and by her opinions, which were invariably fanatical, fantastic and arrogant.

  Moreover, he found that her very presence excited him, brought streams of thought to his own mind as he listened to her firm remarks and opinions. He could not understand this; certainly he never engaged in spirited controversy with Melissa, for he knew it would be useless. Nor did she permit him to tell her anything of the world he knew, for to her that world did not exist, or, if existing, it was not important. But he had only to sit beside her and watch the movement of her faintly colored and strongly carved lips, to catch a beam of light which made her eyes suddenly and vividly blue, to see her breast rise on a sudden vehemence, or her large white hands lift in a quick and heroic gesture, and a pattern of beautiful words would form in his thoughts.

  He had forgotten his old tricks of presenting his profile for her admiration, for he saw that she did not notice it. He never flattered her; he flattered her father. He never struck an attitude, for that would only confuse her. His approach to her was as an audience only. His hope was that he would become indispensable to her in that rôle, and all the signs were encouraging. Now she would greet him with every indication of pleasure, in her reserved fashion. The fact that she still did not see him as a man and a potential lover sometimes disturbed and infuriated him. However, he was certain that he had only to wait. He had some hope: once or twice when he had made some particularly acute remark she had turned her head and had listened to him as if strangely entranced, and she had not quoted her father in reply.

  She did not speak of Geoffrey and, as a man experienced in the ways of women, Ravel could not but think that she had some guilty thoughts on the subject of her husband. The young man did not know that she came to him in her hunger and loneliness, and that she found comfort in him for her misery and pain.

  Still, she remained an enigma to him, not because she concealed anything but because she had nothing to conceal. Such a human being was mysterious, and new to Ravel’s experience.

  He found her waiting for him tonight. She did not hear him at first. She sat on the stone, under a canopy of willows, and her brown linen frock was the color of fallen leaves. She was staring at the river, upon which lay a wide flood of sunset light. There was a loneliness about that empty light on the waters; there was a desolation about the woman on the stone, her arms folded on her knees, her face in shadow. Ravel stood a moment and watched her. He no longer marvelled at the fierce surge of emotion he always felt when he saw her, it had become too familiar.

  It was late July, but the sunset on the river, the silence of the spot, the attitude of Melissa on the stone, suggested the coming of mournful autumn. A wind lifted a fold of her brown frock, blew it against her
ankles. She did not stir. A lock of her hair fluttered against her cheeks. She did not put it back. Now the shadow moved, and he saw the white angles of her face, the drawn and frozen suffering of her mouth.

  He had never seen her like this even when she did not suspect he was close by. When alone, Melissa was usually very still, sunken in her own thoughts. But there was about her this evening less stillness than the quietude of despair. This made him exclaim, as if in protest and alarm: “Melissa!”

  She turned her head slowly, and saw him. She watched him come to her. Then she said: “I was thinking of my mother. I haven’t thought of my mother for a long time.”

  Though he was accustomed to her simplicities and unpredictability, he felt that odd disorientation which she frequently inspired in him. He sat down beside her, and tried to smile. He flicked a bit of mold from his impeccable pantaloons, and ruefully gave a moment’s attention to the mud on his polished boots. He then turned his attention to Melissa.

  “Your mother? She has not been dead for very long, has she? I suppose you miss her very much, poor child.” He did not recall that he had ever heard Melissa mention her mother before, and he became curious. Arabella had once told him of the hostility between mother and daughter, and the cause of it. So Ravel studied Melissa, and added: “But why think of sad things, if it can be avoided?”

  “Oh, I am not sad,” replied Melissa, sighing. “At least, I do not think so. It is just that I feel very strange, thinking of Mama tonight, Ravel.”

  She had only recently, and unconsciously, begun to call him by his first name, and it never failed to excite him. He drew a little closer to her. Matters had not progressed to the point where he had ever taken her hand or indulged in any other intimacies. Yet her look and her air of desolation just now made him take her hand; the gesture was not premeditated, nor did he watch for her reaction. It was an impulsive gesture, and a kind one, and she appeared grateful for the touch of comfort. At least, she did not pull her hand away from him. As for Ravel, when he held it and felt its coldness and lassitude, he forgot for a moment everything else, and could only feel that ancient wonder of the lover, and his tender delight.