What Will People Say? A Novel 51 – Hughes · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 51Chapter 51
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Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 51
Chapter 51
HughesEnglish
As Forbes had once surveyed the tide of Fifth Avenue from the upper deck of a motor-bus, so now, from a sky-scraping ship he watched the thronged traffic along the spacious avenue of the Hudson River and the broad plaza of the bay.
Among the tugs, noisy and rowdy as newsboys, the waddling ferry-boats, the barges loaded with refuse or freight-trains, the passenger-boats and excursion-boats, and the merchantmen from many ports, a few yachts picked their way superciliously, their bowsprits like upturned noses, their trim white flanks like skirts drawn aside.
Among these yachts, though Forbes was unaware of it, was the Isolde, known to those who know such things as a ridiculously luxurious craft, a floating residence. Persis had christened the yacht at Willie's request, and he had accepted the name as a good omen, since he said: "I always have a perfect sleep when Isolde is under way."
Persis, herself now an Isolde wedded to one man and loving another, passed the famous sky-line which seemed to continue another Palisades, only fantastically carved and honeycombed with windows. When these cliffs of human fashioning were pulled backward, there was a space of dancing water, and then Governor's Island, with its moldy old mouse-trap of a fort.
Never dreaming that Forbes was on the liner that had gone down the bay a few moments before, Persis fastened her binocular on the island and tried to pick him out from among the men whom distance rendered lilliputian. She selected some vague promenader and sent him her blessings. If he ever received them he never knew whence they came.
Forbes was groping toward her in thought like a wireless telegrapher trying to reach another and unable to come to accord. Forbes was entering upon the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, and Persis was embarking on another sea equally new to her, for marriage is a kind of ocean to a woman. Maidens struggle toward it and consecrate themselves to it from far inland; they come forth upon the roaring wonder of its cathedral music; the surf flings white flowers at their feet. They venture farther and encounter the first shocks of the breakers, and thereafter the sea lies vast and monotonous with happiness or grief and their interchange. But the prosperity of the voyage is less from without than from within the boat. Persis was not lucky in the captain she had shipped with.
To-day's Persis on the boat was altogether another woman from yesterday's Persis. The toil and fever of preparation, the bacchantic orgies of purchase, the dressing up, the celebration of the festival--these were the joys of the wedding to her, and she had drained them to the full. They left her exhausted and sated. The anticipation was over, the realization begun.
In some wiser communities the bride and groom separate for a day or two after the ceremony. But Persis had no such breathing-space. Persis was delivered to Willie Enslee in a state of fagged-out nerves, muscles, and brain. To him, however, the weeks of preparation had been a mere annoyance, a postponement, a prelude too long, too ornate. And when at last the prize was his he found the fact almost intolerably beautiful. He possessed Persis Enslee! She had no longer even a name of her own. Miss Cabot had been merged into the Enslee Estates.
One does not expect to-day the childlike innocence that was revealed or pretended by the brides of other years. Nowadays even their mothers "tell them things." And Willie knew that Persis was neither ignorant nor ingenuous. Her gossip, the scandal she knew, the books and plays she discussed, her sophisticated attitude toward people and life had long ago proved that, whatever she might be, she was not without knowledge. She knew as much as Mildred Tait, and her talk was nearly as free, but always from the cynical, the flippant, or the shocked point of view.
Willie did not expect to initiate an ignoramus into any unheard-of mysteries. He expected at most a certain modest reluctance and confusion. He was dumfounded to be met with icy horror and shuddering recoil. After the first repulse the terror with which she cringed away from his caresses enhanced her the more.
He imputed it to a native purity. He believed--and it was true--that she had come through all the years and temptations and the dangerous environments with her body and her soul somehow protected to this great event. It was a kind of purity. But not what he thought it.
Persis' creed--if she had thought much about it--would have been the creed of many a woman: that love sanctifies all that it inspires; and that unchastity is what Rahel Varnhagen defined it--intercourse without love, whether legalized or not.
If Persis had married the man she loved, the man whose touch was like a flame, she would still have been terrified; but love would have hallowed the conquest, changed fright into ecstasy, and glorified surrender.
Willie's touch had always chilled her clammily. What she saw in his eyes now offended her utterly, filled her with loathing and with panic as before a violation. But after this first rebellion she regained control of her fears and reasoned coldly with herself. When she had said "Yes" to Willie's courtship, and when she had made her affirmations in the church, she had given him her I. O. U. She was not one to repudiate a gambling loss. She forbore resistance, but she could not mimic rapture. Yet rapture was part of the bargain. Soul and flesh could not pay the obligation her mind had so lightly incurred.
And now it was Enslee that recoiled, strangely smitten with an awe, a reverence for her and her integrity. "You are a saint," he murmured, "an angel, and I am a brute. You are too good, too wonderful!"
Persis was startled at being treated with reverence. It was perhaps the first time she had ever been held sacred. She accepted this tribute in lieu of the others, and they left the hotel as they had entered it, still bachelor and maid, though they wore the same name.
But she was alone upon the ocean now, and she feared her husband more than before. She found him somewhat ridiculous in his uniform, with his yachting-cap a trifle top-heavy for his slim skull. Yet he was the owner; his flag and his club pennant were fluttering aloft. And Persis felt sure that he had repented of his mercy and was ashamed of his asceticism.
He ogled her as he paced the unstable deck, and found her more beautiful than ever, clad in a trim white suit and curled up in her chair like a purring kitten, the sun sifting over her through the awning like a golden powder. And he knew that she was his. He paused at her side and mellowed her cheek, pinched the lobe of her ear, and pursed his lips to kiss her red lips. She winced, then frowned, and shook her head.
"Why not?" he demanded.
"The crew is watching," she explained. And he retorted:
"They expect us to be a little silly, don't they? They'll think it stranger if we aren't than if we are, won't they? Even those Scandinavian sailors are human."
And so--for the sake of the Scandinavians--she accepted his caresses.
It was such a sarcastic parody of her own code that she laughed aloud. She was good sport enough to laugh at herself when the joke was on her.
But it was bitter laughter; and it ended on the margin of hysteria. She conquered that--for the sake of the Scandinavians. But she felt altogether forlorn, miserably cheap, fooled.
That bitterness of hers embittered Enslee. He felt that he was being made ridiculous in the sight of man and God and himself. He remembered proverbs about mastership, about women's love of brutality, their fondness for being overpowered.
He grew fiercely petulant, sardonic, ugly. He whined and swore and muttered. And, finally, to that mood she yielded, feeling herself degraded beneath her own contempt.
And now Persis was married and not married. Strange fires were kindled and left to smolder sullenly. Unsuspected desires were stirred to mutiny and not quelled. Latent ferocities of passion were wakened to terrify and torment her. And only now she understood who and what it was she had married. Only now she realized what it meant to marry without love and to marry for keeps. The vision of her future was unspeakably hideous. Her life was already a failure, her career a disaster.
Persis had always loved crowds and the excitement they make. It was only with Forbes that she had found contentment in dual solitude, in hours of quiet converse, or in mute communion. Next best to being with him was being alone, for then she had thoughts of him for company.
Now Forbes was banished from her existence by her own decree. Willie was to be her life-fellow for all her days and nights, while her youth perished loveless.
And now once more she pined for crowds. Solitude with Willie was an alkaline Death Valley without oasis. She grew frantic to be rid of him, or, at least, to mitigate him with other companionships. And he who had been restlessly unhappy without her found that he could not be happy with her, because of the one mad regret that he could not make her love him as he loved her.
Mismated and incompatible in every degree, they glared at each other like sick wretches in the same hospital ward. The next evening as they sat at table in the dining-saloon it came over her that for the rest of her days she must see that unbeautiful face opposite her. She felt an impulse to scream, to run to the railing and leap overboard, to thwart that life-sentence in any possible way. But she kept her frenzy hidden in her breast and said, with all the inconsequence she could assume:
"To-morrow they'll be playing the first international polo game."
Even Willie heard the shiver of longing in the tone. It meant that the honeymoon was already boring her. His heart broke, but all he said was:
"Er--yes--I believe it is to-morrow. Like to go?"
"Oh no," she murmured. "I was just thinking what a splendid sight it will be. Everybody will be there, I suppose."
"Er--yes--I suppose so."
She lighted her third cigarette since the soup, and, rising from the table, drifted to the piano clamped to the walls of the drawing-room. Her mind was far off, and her fingers, left to themselves, stumbled through a disjointed chaos of melodies from nocturnes to tangos and back.
Willie stood it as long as he could, then his torment broke out in a cry more tragic than its words:
"For God's sake play something or quit."
She quit.
She walked to a porthole and stared out at the dark waves shuffling past like stampeding cattle.
He apologized at once. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I apologize."
"Oh, that's all right," she sighed, with doleful graciousness. But when he knelt by her and put his arm around her she slipped from his clasp and went out on the deck. He followed her. But neither of them spoke.
The moon on the sea spread a pathway of dancing white tiles. She wanted to run away, to step forth on that fantastic pavement and follow it out of the world.
To Forbes, on a distant ship in midocean the same moon was spreading the same path straight to him. He stared into its shifting glamour till his eyes were bewitched. He could see Persis walking on the water in the boudoir cap and the shimmering thing she wore that morning.
They were thinking of each other, longing for each other, and the space between them was widening every moment.
It came over Persis with maddening vividness that she had made a ruin of her happiness. All the wealth was nothing but mockery. Even the hats and the multitudes of dresses were wasted splendor, weapons of conquest to be left in an armory.
The night grew more and more wonderful. The moon was like a white face flung back with unappeased desire. The wind across the waves tugged amorously at her hair and whimpered and caressed her. And she was with Willie Enslee, the unlovable, the hideously uninteresting, the intolerable. She was handcuffed to Willie Enslee for life.
The ache of longing that thrilled the night world thrilled Enslee's heart, too; and he crept close to her, his adoration, his wife, the only soul on earth he deeply loved. He set his cheek against hers and clenched her in his arms fiercely. And immediately he encountered that hopeless antipathy, though all she said was a faintly petulant "Don't, please!"
It struck him in the face like a little fist. He moved aloof from her in abject humiliation and thought hard, took out a cigarette, tapped it on the back of his hand, puffed restlessly, threw the cigarette over the rail, and a moment later took out another. There was no need for words. The air throbbed with Persis' detestation of the voyage. The sailing-master passed. Willie called to him:
"Svendsen!"
"Yes, sir!"
"Put about and make for home."
"I beg pardon, sir."
"You heard!"
"Aye, aye, sir."
The commands were given in the distance, a bell rang remotely in the engine-room, and the stars wheeled across the sky as the yacht came round.
The phosphorescent sea revealed the wake they had plowed in a long straight furrow of white fire, and now there was a sharp curve in the line. And shortly they were paralleling its dimming radiance.
They were bound for home. The mere thought of the word brought a tragic chuckle from Enslee's heart. Home was a word he could not hope to use. Home was a thing he must do without.
