The party, like most of those that Mrs. Cumnor gathered about her, was not composed of exceptional beings. The people of the old vanished New York set were not exceptionaclass="underline" they were mostly cut on the same convenient and unobtrusive pattern; but they were often exceedingly “nice.” And this obsolete quality marked every look and gesture of the lady I was scrutinizing.
While these reflections were passing through my mind I was aware that Merrick’s eyes rested still on her. I took a cross-section of his look and found in it neither surprise nor absorption, but only a certain sober pleasure just about at the emotional level of the rest of the room.
If he continued to look at her, his expression seemed to say, it was only because, all things considered, there were fewer reasons for looking at anybody else.
This made me wonder what were the reasons for looking at her; and as a first step toward enlightenment I said:—“I’m sure I’ve seen the lady over there in gray—”
Merrick detached his eyes and turned them on me with a wondering look.
“Seen her? You know her.” He waited. ”Don’t you know her? It’s Mrs. Reardon.”
I wondered that he should wonder, for I could not remember, in the Cumnor group or elsewhere, having known any one of the name he mentioned.
“But perhaps,” he continued, “you hadn’t heard of her marriage? You knew her as Mrs. Trant.”
I gave him back his stare. “Not Mrs. Philip Trant?”
“Yes; Mrs. Philip Trant.”
“Not Paulina?”
“Yes—Paulina,” he said, with a just perceptible delay before the name.
In my surprise I continued to stare at him. He averted his eyes from mine after a moment, and I saw that they had strayed back to her. “You find her so changed?” he asked.
Something in his voice acted as a warning signal, and I tried to reduce my astonishment to less unbecoming proportions. “I don’t find that she looks much older.”
“No. Only different?” he suggested, as if there were nothing new to him in my perplexity.
“Yes—awfully different.”
“I suppose we’re all awfully different. To you, I mean—coming from so far?”
“I recognized all the rest of you,” I said, hesitating. “And she used to be the one who stood out most.”
There was a flash, a wave, a stir of something deep down in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. ”That’s the difference.”
“I see it is. She—she looks worn down. Soft but blurred, like the figures in that tapestry behind her.”
He glanced at her again, as if to test the exactness of my analogy.
“Life wears everybody down,” he said.
“Yes—except those it makes more distinct. They’re the rare ones, of course; but she was rare.”
He stood up suddenly, looking old and tired. “I believe I’ll be off. I wish you’d come down to my place for Sunday…. No, don’t shake hands—I want to slide away unawares.”
He had backed away to the threshold and was turning the noiseless doorknob. Even Mrs. Cumnor’s doorknobs had tact and didn’t tell.
“Of course I’ll come,” I promised warmly. In the last ten minutes he had begun to interest me again.
“All right Good-bye.” Half through the door he paused to add:—”She remembers you. You ought to speak to her.”
“I’m going to. But tell me a little more.” I thought I saw a shade of constraint on his face, and did not add, as I had meant to: “Tell me—because she interests me—what wore her down?” Instead, I asked: “How soon after Trant’s death did she remarry?”
He seemed to make an effort of memory. “It was seven years ago, I think.”
“And is Reardon here to-night?”
“Yes; over there, talking to Mrs. Cumnor.”
I looked across the broken groupings and saw a large glossy man with straw-coloured hair and a red face, whose shirt and shoes and complexion seemed all to have received a coat of the same expensive varnish.
As I looked there was a drop in the talk about us, and I heard Mr. Reardon pronounce in a big booming voice: “What I say is: what’s the good of disturbing things? Thank the Lord, I’m content with what I’ve got!”
“Is that her husband? What’s he like?”
“Oh, the best fellow in the world,” said Merrick, going.
II
Merrick had a little place at Riverdale, where he went occasionally to be near the Iron Works, and where he hid his week-ends when the world was too much with him.
Here, on the following Saturday afternoon I found him awaiting me in a pleasant setting of books and prints and faded parental furniture.
We dined late, and smoked and talked afterward in his book-walled study till the terrier on the hearth-rug stood up and yawned for bed. When we took the hint and moved toward the staircase I felt, not that I had found the old Merrick again, but that I was on his track, had come across traces of his passage here and there in the thick jungle that had grown up between us. But I had a feeling that when I finally came on the man himself he might be dead….
As we started upstairs he turned back with one of his abrupt shy movements, and walked into the study.
“Wait a bit!” he called to me.
I waited, and he came out in a moment carrying a limp folio.
“It’s typewritten. Will you take a look at it? I’ve been trying to get to work again,” he explained, thrusting the manuscript into my hand.
“What? Poetry, I hope?” I exclaimed.
He shook his head with a gleam of derision. “No—just general considerations. The fruit of fifty years of inexperience.”
He showed me to my room and said good-night.
*****
The following afternoon we took a long walk inland, across the hills, and I said to Merrick what I could of his book. Unluckily there wasn’t much to say. The essays were judicious, polished and cultivated; but they lacked the freshness and audacity of his youthful work. I tried to conceal my opinion behind the usual generalisations, but he broke through these feints with a quick thrust to the heart of my meaning.
“It’s worn down—blurred? Like the figures in the Cumnors’ tapestry?”
I hesitated. “It’s a little too damned resigned,” I said.
“Ah,” he exclaimed, “so am I. Resigned.” He switched the bare brambles by the roadside. “A man can’t serve two masters.”
“You mean business and literature?”
“No; I mean theory and instinct. The gray tree and the green. You’ve got to choose which fruit you’ll try; and you don’t know till afterward which of the two has the dead core.”
“How can anybody be sure that only one of them has?”
“I’m sure,” said Merrick sharply.
We turned back to the subject of his essays, and I was astonished at the detachment with which he criticised and demolished them. Little by little, as we talked, his old perspective, his old standards came back to him; but with the difference that they no longer seemed like functions of his mind but merely like attitudes assumed or dropped at will. He could still, with an effort, put himself at the angle from which he had formerly seen things; but it was with the effort of a man climbing mountains after a sedentary life in the plain.
I tried to cut the talk short, but he kept coming back to it with nervous insistence, forcing me into the last retrenchments of hypocrisy, and anticipating the verdict I held back. I perceived that a great deal—immensely more than I could see a reason for—had hung for him on my opinion of his book.
Then, as suddenly, his insistence dropped and, as if ashamed of having forced, himself so long on my attention, he began to talk rapidly and uninterestingly of other things.
We were alone again that evening, and after dinner, wishing to efface the impression of the afternoon, and above all to show that I wanted him to talk about himself, I reverted to his work. “You must need an outlet of that sort. When a man’s once had it in him, as you have—and when other things begin to dwindle—”