What Will People Say? A Novel 67 – Hughes · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 67Chapter 67
18
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 67
Chapter 67
HughesEnglish
In the famous Enslee dining-room, where brilliant companies had gathered for a generation, giving and taking distinctions, and where Persis in her brief reign had mustered cohorts of pleasure that outgleamed them all, only two chairs were drawn up to the table; and that was contracted to its smallest circle. All the other chairs were aligned along the white marble walls with a solemn look as of envious, uninvited ghosts sitting with hands on knees and brooding. The walls were broken with dark columns like giant servants, and between them hung tapestries as big as sails. The tapestries told in a woven serial the story of "Tristram and La Beale Isoud."
Only three servants waited now: Roake and Chedsey--in the somber Enslee livery, whispering together as they straightened a rose stem or balanced a group of silver--and Crofts, eternally bent in an attitude of deference, standing near the door--the great golden portal ripped from the Spanish castle of one of the senior Mrs. Enslee's ancestors.
For all their listening the servants had been unable to learn the details of the immediate wrangle, though they knew that war was in the air.
Crofts had kept them at their tasks and at a distance, and Crofts either had not heard or would not have told if one of them had presumed to ask him.
He had lived through so many family tragedies that he rather celebrated in his heart a day of good spirits than remarked a period of stress. And of all times, he felt, a good servant shows his quality best when the atmosphere is sultry with quarrel and a precarious truce is declared in the dining-room. To Crofts that was a temple for peace and perfect ceremony. There flourished the genius for self-effacement and the invisible, inaudible provision of whatever might be needed, that made service a high art, a priesthood.
Crofts, in his plain black, slightly obsolete evening dress, looking rather like a poor relation than a servant, had been in his day an aristocrat among servants. To-night he was old and alarmed. He had seen, when he announced the dinner, that he broke in upon some unusually desperate conflict, and his old heart fluttered with terror. He had heard so much gossip at the servants' table, such ribald comment and interchange of eavesdroppings, that he wondered what new stain threatened the old glory of Enslee.
He loved the new Mrs. Enslee. All the servants did--as much as they disliked Mr. Enslee. But they all felt that she was as dangerous in the house as a panther would have been in a wicker cage. And they all gossiped with other people's servants. And one of the maids, on her evenings off, was meeting a very attentive gentleman with brindle hair and half an eyebrow. She didn't know his business, but he was generous; he took her to tango-places, and he loved to hear her talk about her employers.
Suddenly Crofts lifted his head and threw Roake and Chedsey a glance of warning; they came to attention, each behind a chair, watching with narrow eyes where Persis slowly descended, as into a gorgeous dungeon, the three velveted steps leading down through the red-velvet-curtained golden portal.
First they saw Persis' slipper, a golden slipper on a slim, gold-silk stocking. Next the gleaming shaft of her white-satin skirt, with its wrinkles flashing and folding round her knees; and then a rose-colored mist with glints of gold spangles; a few flowers fastened at her waist; the double loop of a long rope of pearls; then her wide, white bosom, with half the breasts revealed in the deep V between. And next her shoulders; her long throat, passionate and bare save for one coil of pearl-rope; and then her high-held, resolute chin; her grim, red lips; her tense nostrils; her downcast eyelids; her brows; and, finally, the crown of diamonds sparkling in her hair.
Her velvet-muffled footsteps grew faintly audible as her heels advanced with a soft tick-tock across the black-and-white chessboard of the marble floor. There was such a hush in the room that even her soft, short train made a whispering sound as it followed reluctantly after her.
Then Enslee's glistening black shoes appeared on the steps; his short legs; the black-rimmed bay of white waistcoat and shirt, and tie, and the high, choking collar, where his fat little head rested like a ball on a gate-post.
In the rich gloaming of the big room the table waited, a little altar alight and very beautiful with its lace and glass and silver and its candles gleaming upon strewn roses.
Overhead the massive chandeliers hung dark from an ornate ceiling powdered with dull Roman gold. It was illuminated now only by the fretful glow of the fire slumbering beneath the carved mantel ravished from a bishop's palace in Spain.
In such a scene the audience of three servants awaited the performance of the polite comedy by the farceur and farceuse, who would pretend to leave their personal tragedies in the wings. The actors made their entrance with a processional formality, faced each other, and were about to be seated in the chairs the men had drawn back a little.
But the dignity vanished when the male buffoon, glancing at the array before him, broke out with a sharp whine:
"Where's my cocktail?"
There was such a twang of temper in his voice that Crofts heard at once, and made a quick effort at placation.
"Very sorry, sir, but, the other servants being away, I was not able to learn just how you had it mixed, sir."
"Just my luck!" Enslee snarled. "When I need a bracer most I can't have one." He shook his head so impatiently that Persis foresaw calamity and hastened to intervene.
"Let me make it for you, dear."
Enslee threw her an ugly glance, and wanted to refuse, but could find no reason to give except the truth: that he hated to accept any more of her ministrations. And truth was the one thing that must be kept from these menials at all cost. So he said:
"Mighty nice of you."
Persis went to the vast sideboard, and, while Crofts fussed about her, handing her the shaker, the ice, and bottle after bottle, she prepared the cup as if it were a mystic philter of love. She poured each ingredient into one of the glasses, and held it up to the light to make sure of the measure; then she emptied its contents into the shaker and filled it again from another bottle; and so when the square, squat flagon of gin, the longnecks of Italian and of French vermouth, and the flask of bitters, had contributed each its quota, she pondered aloud:
"That's all, isn't it?"
Willie, who had strolled to the sideboard in a kind of loathing fascination, spoke up:
"Here, barkeeper, you're forgetting the absinthe."
"Oh yes," she said, recalling his particular among the numberless formulas--"six drops of absinthe and twelve drops of lemon."
Crofts passed her the absinthe, and, finding a lemon, sliced it across and handed it to her on a plate. She held it over the shaker and, squeezing, counted the drops.
"Nine, ten, eleven, twelve--oh, there went the thirteenth! That's a bad omen." She was so overwrought that a little genuine fear troubled her. Enslee felt it, too, but would frighten the bogie with indifference:
"Hang the omen, so long as the cocktail's not bad."
Persis nodded with a difficult smile, and, setting the top on the shaker, said:
"Now, Crofts."
The old man was so slow and so feeble with his agitation that she snatched the shaker from his hand and shook it herself, the ice clacking merrily. Then she lifted off the top and poured the cold amber through the strainer into the two glasses and dried her chilled hands on a napkin.
Willie was too eager for the stimulus to go back to the table and take the cocktail there. He lifted his glass.
"We'll take it standing at the bar." And he reached for an imaginary foot-rail, as he had seen the vaudeville comedians do. Persis laughed, and he laughed, but sorrily. Still another idea occurred to him in his determination to enact domestic bliss.
"And now what's the toast? To the absent one?"
The ghastly patness of this unnerved him, but Persis came to the rescue with, "Toasts are out of date." And Willie, setting the glass to his lips, guzzled it in that chewing way they had never been able to correct in him since his infancy. Persis stood a moment with a far-off look of fierce regret in her eyes, then drained her glass swiftly and dabbed her rouged lips with her handkerchief.
Crofts held out a little tray, and Willie set his glass down so hard that the stem cracked. He gave Crofts the blame in a sullen look, then went back to the table and sat in the chair that Roake pushed under him.
He was up again instantly with another complaint. Willie was by nature one of the tribe of waiter-worriers. In his present tension he was doubly irascible.
"Where the devil is my cushion?" he barked. "You know I can't carve without my cushion."
The cushion was whisked under him instantly.
He stabbed at his canape of caviar with his fork as if he hated it, ate but a morsel of it, and turned aside in his chair. Persis, watching him with anxious eyes, gave Crofts a command in a glance, and the plates were removed and replaced with oysters, the men bringing everything to the table, but Crofts alone serving their Majesties.
Crofts was senile and slow, and unusually aspen with anxiety and the rebukes he had had. His deliberation was maddening to Enslee. The old-fashioned deference of Crofts' manner was only further irritation.
Persis' own heart was wretched enough with its load of shame; she was hard put to it to sit and smile at the husband who had caught her in the arms of her paramour and heard him casting her off. But she had that social understanding of the actor's creed that the show must go on to the last curtain, no matter what had preceded it, or what might happen between the acts, or what might follow. She was certain of only one thing, that she and Willie must sit out this dinner somehow.
The entr'actes in the solemn mummery were the spaces between the courses while the servants left the room for a few moments to bring on the next thing.
When the caviar had been nibbled and rejected, the oysters set down and refused without being tasted, the two men went into the pantry for the soup-tureen and the hot plates. The swinging door oscillated with little puffs of air like sneers, and a breath ran around the tapestries hung on the walls. Ripples went through them in shudders, and, as the wrinkles traveled, averted faces seemed to turn and glance quickly at the Enslees, then turn away again.
With all the surreptition possible Crofts and his lieutenants brought in the silver urn and the ladle and the plates, and set them down on the serving-table behind the screen of Spanish leather with its glowing landscape and its gilded sky.
But Enslee's raw nerves shrieked at the soft thud of plate on tray, the infinitesimal click of ladle on tureen, the very endeavor not to make a sound. He fidgeted, bit his knuckles, wrung his hands out like damp cloths, played a tattoo on the arm of his chair, and passed his hand wildly across his eyes. At length he whirled, and shouted:
"In God's name, less noise! Less noise!"
Crofts turned to bow and made a trifle more noise. And when he took the plate from Roake's tray and set it before Enslee his hand trembled perilously. It was Enslee's favorite soup, a luscious puree Mongole. He lifted one spoonful now to his lips and put it away with disgust. His ignominy was so vile that it sickened his stomach. He had been told that his wife was unfaithful to him; he had found it true; he had wrought himself to a frenzy of revenge upon the destroyer of his home; but the lover, instead of leaping from the window like the typical man of guilt, had taken the husband's weapon from him, denounced the wife, and left the wrecked home in triumph.
Enslee had endured all these disgraces; why should he add one more? Why should he play a part before his own menials? Why should he care what they thought? None the less, as mutinous soldiers keep the line automatically, so a lifetime of paying devotion to the ordinances of etiquette held him to the mark now.
Seeing that Persis had not even made a pretense of lifting her spoon to her lips, he nodded to Crofts, "Take it away."
The failure of a dinner was a catastrophe to Crofts, and he forgot his wonted reticence enough to ask:
"Isn't it good, sir? Sha'n't I tell the chef to--"
His solicitude brought him only a reproof:
"Crofts, if you speak again I'll have the other servants serve the dinner. Take it away, I said."
Hurt and frightened, Crofts hurried the soup and its apparatus off. As he slipped out with his aides the swinging door went "Phew!" and the tapestried figures glanced and whispered together.
As soon as he was alone with his wife, Enslee's voice rose querulously:
"If Dobbs ever leaves us in the lurch again I'll fire him for keeps. This old fool gets on my nerves. Everything is going wrong here. The whole house is falling to rack and ruin. Ought at least to have decent servants--if I can't have a decent wife!"
Persis smiled patiently at this, but as with lips bruised from a blow.
"I trust, Willie, that you won't forget yourself. All these doors have ears, you know."
"You bet they have!" he snapped. "And eyes, too. Are you crazy enough to think that lowering our voices will conceal the truth from any one? Don't you realize that those hounds out there know everything that goes on in this house? Don't you understand that your good name and my honor were gossiped away down-stairs long before my dishonor became public property?"
Persis felt a panic in her own heart at his manner. Still she tried suasion. "I implore you to postpone this. At any moment Crofts will be back."
"Crofts, eh?" Willie shouted. "Crofts! Crofts will be back! Why, do you imagine for a moment that even that deaf old relic is ignorant of this intrigue you have carried on? Don't you know that every servant of ours that has left the house for weeks has carried through the area-gate a bundle of news and innuendo and suspicion and keyhole information, to be scattered broadcast in every servants' hall in town?"
And then he heard Crofts at the door, and in spite of him habit throttled him; he pulled down the comic mask he had pushed back from his dour face. He ransacked his brain for something humorous to serve as a libretto, and he was reminded of a story he had laughed at heartily before he learned that his own household was a theme for laughter.
He began to giggle uncannily, gruesomely. Persis looked at him, wondering if he had gone mad and begun to gibber. But while Crofts and the others served deviled crabs in their grotesque shells he began to explain his elation, overacting sadly:
"I heard the best story to-day about Mrs. Tom Corliss."
Forgetfully Persis, from her own glass house, protested: "Oh, don't tell me anything about that woman!"
Enslee sneered. "Oh, you're always so easily shocked--such a prude, so conventional!"
Persis understood and blanched. "Go on, I'll stand it."
Enslee began to snicker again, taking some support in his shame from another man's disgrace.
"Well, you know old plutocrat Crane?"
"Not old Deacon Crane," Persis gasped, "that passes the plate at church?"
Willie nodded.
"What can he have to do with any story about Mrs. Tom?"
Enslee he-he'd. "That's the fun of it. Mrs. Tom, it seems--one day when Tom was off to the races--entertained the dear Deacon at a little dinner--served a deux. The Deacon used to give her tips on the market and back them himself for her, and she--well, he was talking about the present-day craze for dancing with bare feet, et cetera; and she vowed that she wasn't ashamed of her feet either; and so she made the Deacon play Mendelssohn's Spring Song on the pianola, and--"
He looked up to find that Chedsey, while pretending to be very busy at the sideboard, wore a smile that extended almost into the ear he perked round for the gossip. Willie choked on his own laughter, and roared:
"Chedsey, leave the room, and don't come back!"
Chedsey slunk away, and Roake became a statue of gravity. Crofts had not heard at all. Willie finished his story without mirth.
"Anyway, Tom Corliss came in unexpectedly just then, and--well, when the Deacon finally got home his wife met him in the hall; he told her he had been sandbagged by a footpad; and she believed him!"
Willie found Tom Corliss' shame so piquant that he began to relish his food. Crofts, a little encouraged, nodded to Roake and led him out for the next dish.
Persis took small comfort from other people's sordid scandals. They seemed to have no relation to the pure and high tragedy that had ended the romance of her own love. Seeing that they were alone again, she expressed her dislike before she realized its inconsistency.
"And where did you pick up all this garbage?"
Enslee was outraged at this ingratitude for his hard work. "Oh, it shocks you, eh? So beautiful a veneer of refinement and so thin!"
"Where did you hear it?" Persis persisted, lighting herself a cigarette to give her restless hands employment; and Willie answered:
"Mrs. Corliss' second man told it to Mrs. Neff's kitchen maid, and she to Mrs. Neff's maid, and she to Mrs. Neff; and Mrs. Neff to Jimmie Chives, and he to me--at the Club."
"At the Club?"
"Where I heard of your behavior."
"You heard of me at the Club?" Persis gasped.
"Yes, that crowning disgrace was reserved for me. Big Bob Fielding took me to one side and said: 'Willie, everybody in town knows something that you ought to be the first to know--and seem to be the last. I hate to tell you, but somebody ought to,' he said. And I said 'What's all that?' And he said: 'Your wife and Captain Forbes are a damned sight better friends,' he said, 'than the law allows,' he said."
The room swam, and Persis clung to her chair to keep from toppling out of it.
"So that's what he said. And what did you say?"
"I didn't believe him--then. I was too big a fool to believe him; but he opened my eyes, and I came home to see what was going on. And I saw!"
Persis was on fire with a woman's anxiety to know if any champion had defended her name. She demanded again:
"What did you say to Bob Fielding?"
And Enslee answered with a helpless, mincing burlesque of dignity:
"I told him he was a cad, and I didn't want him ever to speak to me again."
"And you didn't strike him?"
Enslee cast up his eyes at the thought of attacking the famous center-rush; then he lowered his eyes before her blazing contempt. She demanded again, incredulously: "You didn't strike him?"
Enslee dropped his face into his two palms and wept, the tears leaking through his fingers. Persis felt outlawed even from chivalry. She gagged at the thought: "Agh! The humiliation!"
Enslee lifted his head again, his wet eyes flashing. "Humiliation?" he screeched, in a frenzy of self-pity. "Do you talk of humiliation? What about me? My father and mother brought me into the world with a small frame and a poor constitution. They left me money as a compensation. And what did my money do for me? It bought me a woman--who despised me--who dishonored me before the world. And I'm too weak to take revenge. I'm helpless in my disgrace, helpless!"
He sobbed like a lonely girl, his eyes hid in the crook of his left arm, his elbow on the table, his little hand clenching and unclenching. His tears brought tears to Persis. It was the first time she had ever felt sorry for Willie; had ever realized that a weak man does not select his weaknesses, though he must endure their consequences. She had often justified herself by the plea that she had not chosen her own soul, but must get along with it. That defense was her husband's, too.
The swinging door thudded softly, and Willie raised himself in his chair, but he could not quell the buffets of his sobs, and he dared not put his handkerchief to his eyes. And so Crofts, bending close to remove the crab-shells, noted the grief-crumpled face and the drench of tears; his mind went back to the time when Willie Enslee was a child and wept in a high chair in his nursery. Before he could suppress it the old man had let slip the query:
"Why, Master Willie, you're not crying?"
Willie, with splendid presence of mind, answered:
"Nonsense, you old fool, it's that deviled crab. There was so much cayenne pepper in it, it w-went to my eyes."
Crofts was desolated.
"Oh, I am sorry, sir. The chef shall hear of it, sir. And the roast now--shall I carve it, or will you?"
Willie looked drearily across at Persis. "Do you want any roast?"
She frowned with aversion. "I couldn't touch it."
And Willie shook his head to Crofts. "We'll skip the roast. What follows that? Be quick about it!"
Crofts lowered his voice, as if a game-warden might be listening, for it was after the season had closed. "There is a pheasant, sir--sent down from your own run, sir. It is braised, financiere. I'm sure you'll like it. You may have to wait a little, seeing as you didn't eat the roast; but it's worth waiting for, sir."
The old man was pleading both for the honor of his menu and for the welfare of his master. Willie nodded curtly, and the roast, that had ridden in so royally on its silver palanquin with its retinue of cutlery and its hot plates, was removed in disgrace.
Once more husband and wife were abandoned to themselves. But now Persis looked with new eyes at the heap of misery collapsed in the opposite chair. All these years Willie had tried to win her love with gifts, with splendors, with caresses, prayers, compliments, and with weak experiments in tyranny. And he had failed dismally. Finally his failure and his shame had crushed him into abjection.
And now her heart went out to him with a melting tenderness. But now she was unworthy to approach him. Now it was she that must plead:
"I'm awfully sorry for you, Willie. You haven't had a fair deal. I never realized what a rotter I've been till now. But if you'll let me, I'll try again; I'll try hard, really, honestly, Willie. The only man I ever seemed to care for has taken himself out of my life. He hates me as you hate me. I haven't much of anything to live for now except to try to square things with you. I'll do better by you. I'll be on the level with you after this. Honestly I will. We'll find happiness yet."
"Happiness!"
Even at this belated hour the world's ambition was so dear to him that he was wrung with longing.
"It might have been possible if I hadn't found you out. I was a fool to trust you so blindly, but I was a happy fool. I didn't know how happy I was till I learned how unhappy I can be. Oh, Persis, how could you--how could you? You seemed so clean and so cold and so proud, and you've let that man make as big a fool of you as you've made of me."
She took her lashings meekly, hoping thereby to achieve some atonement. "I know, I know," she confessed. "But we can keep other people from knowing. We don't have to tell all the world, do we?"
Again the vision of stalking gossip enraged him. "The world--ha! It always knows everything before the husband suspects anything. I've said that about so many other fools I've known. Now it's my turn. Here we sit at dinner in this ruined home as if everything were all right. Think of it! After what I saw and heard I'm sitting here trying to persuade a pack of flunkeys that you have been a good wife to me!"
"It's hideous, I know, Willie. I'll go away to-morrow. You can divorce me if you want to. I won't resist. It will be horrible to drag your name through the yellow papers. But I won't resist--unless you think you might let our life run along as before until gossip has starved to death? We'll be no worse than the rest, Willie. Every family has its skeleton in the closet. The worst gossips have the worst skeletons. Let's fight it out together, Willie, won't you? Please!"
She stretched one importunate hand across the table to him, but he stared at her with glazed eyes. "And go on like this the rest of our lives? Sitting at table like this every day, facing each other and knowing what we know? Knowing what other people know of us? Keep up the ghastly pretense till we grow old?"
She drew back her rejected hand with a sigh, but pleaded on: "It's not very pretty, that's true; but let's be good sports and play the game. We tried marriage without love, for you knew I didn't really love you, Willie. You knew it and complained of it. But you married me. I tried to do what was right. I ran away from him in France, and I tried to love you and unlove him. But you can't turn your heart like a wheel, you know. We've married and failed. But nearly everybody else has failed one way or another, Willie. Nobody gets what he wants out of life. Let's play the game through. You said to me once--do you remember?--you said, 'Gad, Persis, but you're a good loser.' And I've lost a little, too, Willie. I've had a pretty hard day of it, too. Let's be good losers, Willie; let's try it again, won't you? Won't you, please?"
She sat with hands clasped, and thrust them out to him and prayed to him as if he were an ugly little idol. But contrition did not seem to render her more attractive in his eyes. It hardened his heart against her.
"When I look at you I can only think what you've been to that man; where you've gone, what you've done. You sit there half naked now, ready to go to the opera, to expose your body before the mob--my body--my wife's body. You show it in public--and you dance it in public with anybody--with him! The first time you saw him you were dressed like that, and you danced with him that loathsome tango. You taught him how. And he has taught you how to be his wife--not mine.
"You've set everybody laughing at me. They're all saying I was a blind, infatuated fool before. Now you want them to fasten that filthy word 'complacent' on me. You want me to overlook what you have done and what you've brought me to. I'm just to say: 'Well, Persis, you've had your lover and your fling, and you're tired of each other, so come home and welcome, and don't worry over what's past. It's a mere trifle not worth discussing. What's the Seventh Commandment between friends?"
She was trying to silence him, but he had not heeded the return of Crofts till the pheasant was placed before him in all its garnishment, and the plates and the carving-fork and the small game-knife. He was ashamed, not of what he had said of her, but of his own excitement.
"Is the knife sharp?" he asked, for lack of other topic.
"Oh yes, sir," said Crofts. "I steeled it myself."
Willie began anew, groping in his tormented brain for something to dispel the silence. The result was a dazed query:
"By the way, my dear, what's the opera to-night?"
"Carmen," she said.
He brightened. "Oh, of course. That's the opera where the fellow kills the girl who betrays him, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"With a knife like this, eh?" And with a fierce absent-mindedness he made a quick slash in the air. The knife was small and curved a little, and it fitted his hand like a dagger. He chuckled enviously. "Ah, he was the wise boy, that Don Jose. He knew how to treat faithless women. He knew how to talk to 'em. A knife in the back--that's all they can understand."
Crofts was too anxiously trying to avoid spilling a drop of the wine he was pouring to heed the warning gestures of Persis. She felt that the breaking-point of Willie's self-control had been reached. She must dismiss the audience. She spoke hastily:
"Willie, my dear--my dear! Won't you send for some champagne--or sherry. I hate this red wine, and, besides, we've skipped the roast."
"Oh yes," Willie agreed, with abrupt calm. "Crofts, down in the--er--wine-cellar in the farthest end--you'll find laid away by itself one bottle of--er--L'Ame de Rheims--one bottle, the last of its ancient and--er--honorable name. Bring that here."
As Crofts stumbled out on his long journey, Willie commented, ominously:
"It's a good time to say good-by to that vintage!"
His roving eyes discovered Roake standing aloof. Willie snapped his fingers and yelped at him:
"Get out! And stay out!"
Roake withdrew in haste, and Enslee muttered:
"I'm sick of seeing so many people standing around, staring, smirking, listening, thinking about me. I wish I were on a desert island."
He sat forward to the pheasant, set the fork into it, and paused with the knife motionless. Suddenly there were beads of sweat on his forehead, and he was panting hard; then he groaned:
"My God, he took my revolver away from me!"
His eyelids seemed to squeeze his eyes in anguish. When he opened them they were bloodshot and so fierce that they seemed to be crossed. He laughed.
"I was too weak to kill your soldier. But I think I'm just about strong enough to pay you up. Carmen got her reward with a knife, and you're no better than she was."
He looked at the knife; it was beautifully sharp, and it inspired a desire to use it. As a man seeing a gun wants to fire it at something, he felt the call to employ this implement. He pushed back his chair, rose, and groped his way round the table toward her, all crouched and prowling.
