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Book 1Eleven
One Sunday afternoon near the end of February Lucy was sitting in her room looking out at the back of the next building, which came close to her window,--a blank wall of bricks painted grey. Sunday was the only day in which she had much time for reflection. She gave lessons all day on Saturday, but on Sunday she was free.
This morning she was wondering how a month, nearly two months, indeed, could have slipped by so quickly. A strange kind of life she had been leading. For two hours, five days of the week, she was alone with Sebastian, shut away from the rest of the world. It was as if they were on the lonely spur of a mountain, enveloped by mist. They saw no one but Giuseppe, heard no one; the city below was blotted out. Then, after eleven-thirty, the city began poking in its fingers. The telephone began to buzz, and she heard him build up the rest of his day and his evening. At about twelve she got into the elevator and dropped down into Chicago again.
The weather, which everyone grumbled about, had been exactly the right weather for her. The dark, stormy mornings made the warmth and quiet toward which she hurried seem all the richer. The dirty streets, as she crossed the town through sleet and snow, were like narrow rivers, shut in by grey cliffs where the light was always changing, and she herself was a twig or a leaf swept along on the current. As soon as she reached the studio, that excitement and sense of struggle vanished; her mind was like a pair of dancing balances brought to rest. Something quieted her like a great natural force. Things took on their right relation, the trivial and disturbing shut out. Life was resolved into something simple and noble--yes, and joyous; a joyousness which seemed safe from time or change, like that in Schubert`s Die Forelle, which Sebastian often sang.
Lucy stopped looking at the streaks of rain against the grey wall, went to her shabby piano, and played that song again and again. There were other songs which she associated more closely with Sebastian himself, but this one was like the studio, like the hours they spent there together. No matter where in the world she should ever hear it, it would always drop her down again into that room with the piano between two big windows, the coal fire glowing behind her, the Lake reaching out before her, and the man walking carelessly up and down as he sang.
On this same Sunday Sebastian himself was going through a bad time. He happened to have no out-of-town engagement, so he was in Chicago, in his studio. This day, with a brutal rain beating on brutal buildings, had been one of slowly rising misery.
In the morning paper he had read a dispatch from Geneva, announcing the death of an old friend and fellow student, at a sanatorium in Savoy. He hadn`t even known that Larry MacGowan was ill; there had been a coldness between them for the last few years. But the moment his eyes fell on that black headline the feeling of estrangement vanished as if it had never been. The reality was their ardent, generous young friendship, their student days together--which were only yesterday, after all. He put down the newspaper softly, as if he were afraid of wakening someone. It was like reading his own death notice. Like it? It was just that. The obituary would serve for both--for their good days.
Nothing had ever made Sebastian admit to himself that his youth was forever and irrevocably gone. He had clung to a secret belief that he would pick it up again, somewhere. This was a time of temporary lassitude and disillusion, but his old feeling about life would come back; he would turn a corner and confront it. He would waken some morning and step out of bed the man he used to be. Now, all in a moment, it came over him that when people spoke of their dead youth they were not using a figure of speech. The thing he was looking for had gone out into the wide air, like a volatile essence, and he was staring into the empty jar. Emptiness, that was the feeling: the very objects in his studio seemed to draw farther apart, and to regard each other more coldly. MacGowan had slipped out of all this; grey skies, falling rain, chilled affections. Everything in this room, in this city and this country, had suddenly become unfamiliar and unfriendly.
The lid once off, he began remembering everything, and everything seemed to have gone wrong. Life had so turned out that now, when he was nearing fifty, he was without a country, without a home, without a family, and very nearly without friends. Surely a man couldn`t congratulate himself upon a career which had led to such results. He had missed the deepest of all companionships, a relation with the earth itself, with a countryside and a people. That relationship, he knew, cannot be gone after and found; it must be long and deliberate, unconscious. It must, indeed, be a way of living. Well, he had missed it, whatever it was, and he had begun to believe it the most satisfying tie men can have. Friendships? Larry was the man he had cared for most. Among women? There was little for sweet reflection in that chapter. He had married the woman he loved, and for years they had been happy; now they were both better off when they had the Atlantic between them. The thing which had estranged them was not at all the conventional situation supposed to arise between an artist and his wife. It was jealousy, perhaps, but not of the usual sort.
As they had no children, Sebastian had taken into their house a talented boy, almost a child when he came, who had no home and no parents; the orphan of a couple who had both sung at the Opera Comique. He was a charming boy, and devoted to Madame Sebastian. But she had taken a strong dislike to him and treated him harshly. The lad was sensitive, and so adoring of her that her severity amounted to cruelty. After a year and a half Sebastian could endure the situation no longer, and sent Marius away to a good school. But this did not mend matters; he had seen a side of his wife`s nature which he had never before suspected; it had changed his feeling for her. She sensed this, and was bitter. He missed the boy and used to go into Paris to see him; even this she resented. He came to America, to Chicago, where he was born, though he had left it at eighteen and had lived abroad most of the time since.
Sebastian had been sitting by the fire for hours. He had smoked until his throat was dry, and his thoughts had wandered over a great part of the surface of the earth. He had dragged the bottom, and brought up nothing worth remembering. His mind could not find a comfortable position to lie in. He remembered Macbeth`s, Oh, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! Wasn`t there one lovely, unspoiled memory?--In the present wasn`t there somewhere a flower or a green bough that he could hold close and breathe its freshness? His glance wandered toward the piano; perhaps there was one!
Sebastian got up and opened the windows wide, wound a scarf about his throat, and walked up and down the room while the wind blew out the tobacco smoke. He was thinking about Lucy; that perhaps he wouldn`t have got so far down this morning if she had been there for an hour. It was dangerous to go for sympathy to a young girl who was in love with one, but Lucy was different. As he paced back and forth he told himself that hers was quite another kind of feeling than the one he had encountered under so many disguises. It seemed complete in itself, not putting out tentacles all the while. He had sometimes thought of her as rather boyish, because she was so square. It was more like a chivalrous loyalty than a young passion. He didn`t believe she would ever be guilty of those uncatalogued, faint treacheries which vanity makes young people commit. He didn`t believe she would ever use his name for her own advantage--not even in a harmless way, to make herself interesting to a crowd of students, for instance. That was a good deal to say for a young thing with her living to make, struggling to get a foothold in a slippery world. He hadn`t met with just that kind of delicacy before, in man or woman. When she gave him a quick shy look and the gold sparks flashed in her eyes, he read devotion there, and the fire of imagination; but no invitation, no appeal. In her companionship there was never the shadow of a claim. On the contrary, there was a spirit which disdained advantage.
He suddenly noticed that the place had grown very cold. His watch said five o`clock; he must have been on his feet for nearly an hour. The air of the room had freshened, and something within him had freshened. The contraction in his chest, the bitter taste in his mouth were gone. He shut the windows and went into his bedroom to change his clothes. In a quarter of an hour he came out in a dinner jacket and put on his overcoat. Downstairs he hailed the first cab he saw and gave the driver Lucy`s number.
When he got out before the bakery he told the cabman to wait. First he glanced into the restaurant, thinking she might already have come down for her supper. Then he went up the two flights of stairs. He would not have known at which door to knock, but behind one of them he heard a piano with a bad tone; Die Forelle. He smiled, and when she had finished he knocked gently.
"Who is it?"
"It`s Sebastian, Miss Gayheart. May I see you for a moment?"
Lucy glanced despairingly about the room; but it was dark, he couldn`t see anything. She pulled her dressing-gown tight and opened the door a little way.
"I shouldn`t bother you on Sunday, should I? But won`t you come out to dinner with me tonight, if you`ve no other engagement? I`ve had a melancholy day, and I dread dining alone."
"Why, certainly, Mr. Sebastian. I`ll have to dress, but it won`t take long."
"Don`t hurry, take all the time you want. It`s still very early. I`ll wait for you downstairs in the cab. And I`ll go into the bakery and buy a bun, so the good woman can see that you are driving off with a staid, respectable person."
Lucy shut the door and lit the gas. She had only the same old evening dress, the black net she had worn to all his concerts. However, she told herself, if it was well-dressed women he wished to dine with, there were plenty he could ask. He must know she hadn`t any clothes, and if he didn`t mind, she didn`t.--But she would have given a great deal to have a new dress to put on for him.
When they went into the hotel dining-room she was glad to find that it was nearly empty; he wouldn`t have to conduct a shabby girl through a roomful of smart people. While they were waiting for the soup he smiled for the first time.
"I`m afraid I startled you, turning up uninvited like that. I`ve been sticking in the studio all day. Did you happen to notice in the morning paper that Larry MacGowan died yesterday in a sanatorium in Savoy? We were the closest of friends, long ago. We were students together."
The day of Madame de Vignon`s funeral flashed up in Lucy`s mind. She could only murmur that she was sorry he had had bad news.
"And I am sorry in the wrong way. I am sorry for myself. Years ago if I had seen that thing in brutal type, I would have lain down and cried like a boy. Things happen to our friendships; that`s the worst about living. Young people can`t know what it means."
The waiter came with the soup and wine. When he was gone, Sebastian began to talk again.
"We had drifted apart, and for no good reason. Five years ago he came to visit me in France. My wife and I had been having our little place at Chantilly done over, and we were very pleased with it. I had looked forward to Larry`s visit, but it didn`t turn out well. He didn`t like our house or our servants or our friends, or anything else. He showed it plainly, and I was disappointed and piqued. Our parting was cold. I think he must have been breaking up even then. He was difficult about everything, and he made criticisms that hurt one`s feelings."
"Did you never see him afterwards?"
"Never. Other troubles came along, soon enough. We exchanged a few letters, the kind which mean nothing. The dispatch said he died in a sanatorium in the mountains above Sallanches. He and I took a walking trip through that very country one summer when we were in our early twenties. He must have recalled those days, when he was ill up there. We used to lie down on the hillsides and look up at those mountains, with our knapsacks under our heads, for hours together. We always got up very early and went out on our balconies before sunrise, while the light was changing on the peaks, and called good-morning to each other. I can`t help wondering why he didn`t wish to see me again. Why didn`t he send for me last summer, I wonder?"
Sebastian drank a good deal of wine, and he told Lucy more about his own life than he had ever done before: how he had met Larry MacGowan on the steamer when he first left Chicago and was on his way abroad to study. He soon found that MacGowan also was going over to study, and under the same master. When they landed at Cherbourg they were already friends. They took a studio together in Paris and lived at the same pension.
Sebastian lingered a long while over his dinner. The dining-room was almost empty when they at last left it and took a cab for Lucy`s part of the town. He slipped his arm through hers and pressed her hand gratefully. "You were kind to give me this evening, Lucy. I wanted to talk to someone; and I wanted it to be you. No one else."
She turned to him quickly and caught his sleeve. "Oh, Mr. Sebastian, I wish you didn`t ever have to be sad! I am happy whenever I think about you, and so are lots of people. You have everything other people are struggling for. You don`t value it enough, truly you don`t!" She stopped because she knew she was talking foolishly.
Sebastian was listening not to what she said, but to the rush of feeling in her warm young voice. There is no way to define that ring of truth in a voice, he was thinking, and no mistaking it. He took the hand on his sleeve and held it between both his own. "Do I seem sad to you, Lucy? Everyone has disappointments. I`m sometimes lonely over here. Not in the mornings, when we are working together; then I feel quite like myself. That reminds me: tomorrow morning I must spend with my agent. Perhaps you can come in at five o`clock and have tea with me? I should like that."
The cab turned the corner, and the greenish-white lights in the bakery windows came into view. Sebastian took her to the foot of the stairway. "Remember," he said, "tomorrow is a holiday for you, and you are to sleep late and dream of something very nice. Perhaps you will dream that we are both twenty, and are taking a walking trip in the French Alps. And I shall call to you at daybreak from my balcony!"
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