When they came out on the verandah, Joel’s mother, Howard Martin, and Joel’s cousin, Ruth, had just driven up before the entrance and were getting out. They had been to the swimming pool — a small but delightful one a half-mile away in a green hollow, tree-embowered — and all three were in bathing costume. Howard Martin trod gingerly across the drive and on to the warm brick flooring of the porch, on white, wincing, well-kept feet; Mrs. Pierce and the girl wore light bathing-robes and walked firmly, with assurance. Mrs. Pierce’s figure was as slender and as well-conditioned as the girl’s — her ankles and her legs were wonderfully graceful, strong and slender — but in comparison to her niece’s black and white voluptuousness — her dark and sullen, almost brooding, face and her swelling creamy thighs, her lavish belly and her melon-heavy breasts — the figure of Mrs. Pierce was lacking in seduction: it had the strength and slenderness of youth without youth’s warmth and freshness; it had, like everything about her, a chilled and glacial perfection that spoke of stern regimen, grim watchfulness, and unflagging effort — “keeping fit.”
As the two young men came up, Mrs. Pierce turned gracefully, her hand upon the screen-door, and with a smile awaited them. Her teeth were so solid, white, and perfect in their alignment that it was difficult to see where they joined together, and they sometimes suggested twin rows of solid gleaming ivory more than individual teeth: this circumstance also contributed to the glacial, detached and almost inhuman quality of her smile. She greeted her son’s friend with a kindly but detached “Good morning,” and without altering the rigid brilliance of her smile a jot, turned to her son and said:
“I thought you were coming to the pool. What happened to you and Ros’?”
These words were spoken quietly and matter-of-factly: nevertheless, the suggestion of strong displeasure and annoyance was somehow unmistakable.
Joel answered quickly, whispering a swift concerned explanation, his thin figure slightly bent forward, his gaunt face lifted, eagerly, radiantly concerned, in that attitude of devoted and solicitous respect that characterized his relations with every woman, but that was extremely marked when he spoke or listened to his mother:
“I know, Mums,” he whispered swiftly, apologetically — “I’m TERRIBLY sorry — but he promised to read his play to us and that took all morning. . . . MUMS!” he went on in his astounded and enthusiastic whisper, “it’s SIMPLY magnificent — I wish you could have been there to hear it.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Pierce quietly, and turning, for a moment she regarded her son’s friend with that glacially brilliant smile of her thin and faintly carmined lips that never changed or altered in expression by an atom. “Oh,” she said, “I should like to — perhaps you will read it to me some time.”
“SIMPLY superb,” Joel whispered, “it really is.”
“And now you boys had better get ready for lunch,” she said in a more warm and friendly tone. “You know how Granny hates it if people get there late.”
With these words she went into the house and mounted the stairs. The young men followed her: at the foot of the stairs Joel turned and said to his visitor:
“Look — I’d hurry as much as I could! . . . We’ve only twenty minutes: you’ve just got time to bathe and dress.”
Bathe and dress! The youth looked at his young host with a bewildered, uncomprehending face, and with a sinking feeling in his heart. What did they expect him to do — what, according to the formula of these strange rare people, was one supposed to do when one was invited out to lunch? He had bathed that morning when he got up, it seemed to him that he must still be very clean, and as for dressing, he had just one suit of clothes in all the world, and that was the suit he was wearing at that moment. And just one day before, when he had left New York to come to this magical, unbelievably glorious place, he had thought, in his miserable na?ve ignorance, that this one suit of clothes, three shirts, three pairs of socks, and a change of underwear were abundantly sufficient to all the demands that fashion and a week-end visit could possibly make on him. At that moment, as he stared at his friend with a gaping mouth, unable to reply, the terrific impact of this new world which had stunned him the night before with its magnificence and beauty exploded in his brain in a flare of stars and rockets. And for a moment now he felt a lost, sickening desperate terror, and curiously, a feeling of blind resentment against his friend. For a moment he felt tricked and deceived — deceived by Joel’s modesty, his exquisite humility, by the frayed and shabby clothes he had worn in Cambridge and New York, by the over-refinement of his breeding, which had caused him to conceal utterly his true state of life, never to suggest by a word or reference the kind of life that he came from, the wealth, the luxury, the magnificence of the world in which he had been born and lived.
“D-d-dress! . . . But . . . how — ” his face reddened, he craned his neck doggedly, and suddenly blurted out:
“Dress? In what? This is the only suit I’ve got!”
“But of COURSE!” Joel whispered, arching his eyebrows in astounded surprise. “What’s wrong with that? . . . You can wear a dark coat anywhere — all that I meant was that you could wear white flannels with it.”
“Flannels!” the other said, “I have no flannels, Joel. . . . This suit is all I’ve got to wear; if I can’t wear this, I can’t go.”
“But of course you can wear it!” Joel cried, concealing any surprise he may have felt with the instant impatient agreement of his tone. “It’s PERFECTLY all right — only,” his eyes were thoughtful for a moment, he considered swiftly —“Look here!” he said abruptly, “would you like to wear a pair of mine? I’m not as tall as you are, but perhaps you can make them fit. . . . And if you can’t,” he said quickly, “it’s PERFECTLY all right — it doesn’t matter in the slightest — it’s only,” and his eyes for an instant had a faintly perturbed expression, “— it’s only that Grandfather belongs to the old school — oh, he’s SWELL, SIMPLY magnificent; you’ll like him the moment you see him — the only reason I dress when going there is that he’s got old-fashioned standards — and he’s so GRAND— I do everything I can to please him — But come on!” he whispered quickly, “I’ll give you a pair of mine, and you can wear them if they fit — and if they don’t — it doesn’t matter in the slightest.”
They went upstairs then to Joel’s room; he gave his friend a pair of striped flannel trousers, and the other departed dutifully to bathe, put on a clean shirt and collar and the flannel trousers — which proved, indeed, a very tight precarious fit, but which were made to do — and thus correctly garmented, he joined the family and the other guests, and they drove away to Mr. Joel’s house.
The great rambling old house which had been so lovely in the moon-enchantment of the night before was no less beautiful by day. It sat there in the hollow of the hill, embowered in rich green and shaded by the leafy spread of its great maples, with the homely, pure, and casual loveliness that the old houses of New England have.
Old Mr. Joel himself was just as grand and imposing a personality as Joel had indicated. He was, indeed, in Joel’s word, “stupendous”; a figure of leonine magnificence and gallant gentility, who might have stepped forth from a page of Thackeray. He was already past his seventieth year, but his body was still strongly, vigorously set: he was somewhat above the middle height, but his neck and shoulders had a kind of massive strength that suggested he had been a powerfully built man in his prime. His white mane of hair was soft as silk and gave his wide brow and ruddy, pleated old man’s face a kind of noble lion-like fierceness, and this impression was enhanced by his grizzled moustache and his old, rather growling voice, which had in it nothing surly or ill-tempered, but rather a kind of old and noble masculinity, an aristocratic kind of growl that seemed perfectly adjusted to a kind of Pendennis-like language, a “Dammit-all,-sir,-it’s-not-the-fellow’s-drinking-that-I-mind,-it’s-only-that-he’s-proved-himself-incapable-of-holding-his-liquor-like-a-gentleman” kind of voice.
The inference was warranted: even as they stood there in a spacious, airy big room, the guests standing and talking in groups, drinking small glasses of a fine dry sherry, the youth could hear Joel’s eager whispering voice engaged in earnest, but respectful, debate, with his leonine grand-sire, and Mr. Joel’s nobly growled out answers. The conversation was about books — about the artist’s right to use the materials of his own experience and conversation — and it hinged particularly upon a certain book in which the writer had apparently made use of personal letters and private documents that people he knew, a woman chiefly, had written him.
“No, sir,” Mr. Joel growled, “I do not care what the circumstances may be or what the nature of the work. If I had a friend, sir, who would deliberately make public letters which a woman had written him, why, sir, I should drop him from my acquaintance — I should be forced to conclude, sir,”— here the old growling voice fell to an ominous whisper of irrevocable judgment, and he looked out at his grandson with a fierce glint of his old eyes under bushy brows —“I should be forced to conclude, sir, that he was nothing but a cad,” old Mr. Joel whispered, and with a suddenly fierce glint of his old eyes, a sudden movement of his leonine head, he growled out in a low and savage tone: “And I should tell him so, sir. I should be compelled to tell him that he was nothing but a cad!”
“Yes, grandfather,” Joel whispered eagerly, his thin figure bent forward in an attitude of devoted and attentive reverence —“But after ALL, some pretty great people have done it — Rousseau did it, and The Confessions are pretty great, you know — You’ve got to admit that. — And Byron did it in his poems — at least, everyone knew whom he was talking about, and then there was De Musset and George Sand.”
“It makes no difference, sir,” growled Mr. Joel implacably, “it makes no difference who they were or how great they may be considered in the realm of art, or how great the work they did may be-if I knew a man who did a thing like that, I should be forced to consider him a low cad — no matter how great a poet or a writer, or how great his work might be-I should consider him a cad — and”— his old growling voice fell to a whisper of boding and implacable judgment —“I should tell him so, sir. I should let him know that I considered him a cad.”
Such was Joel’s grandsire, Mr. Joel, and surely he was a specimen of which any group or class could well be proud: of all that Hudson River aristocracy he was justly venerated and esteemed as one of its noblest and proudest adornments. He had lived a long, honourable, and successful life; and now in his old age he had retired to the bosom of his paternal earth to spend his last years in dignity and simple ease and in calm but fruitful reflection on his rich experience. He was writing a book, and in advance it could be solemnly averred that he would make no use in it of any letters that a woman ever wrote to him.
What man, therefore, could speak with greater weight about the duties, codes and principles of man? What man was better qualified to know the rules of honour and the standards of a gentleman — and to assert a truth that might have gone unnoticed by a person of a baser spirit and a lower quality — that Rousseau was a scoundrel and De Musset and Lord Byron a couple of low cads —“because, sir, they made public letters that a woman wrote them.”
It was indeed delightful to find such Thackerayan gallantry, such Olympian scorn for knavish genius and for the lives of mighty poets dead and gone who illuminated mankind with their radiance but had their own light put out — must dwell for evermore “a couple of low cads,” in outer darkness, never again to be received, acknowledged, given gracious pardon by the chivalric flower of the Hudson River rich. How wretched that stern judgment must have made Rousseau! What bitter news for Byron! What misery for De Musset!
But now a woman servant entered and announced that lunch was served. The chattering groups of people turned and formed instinctively, and by a kind of native respect, into files of deferential waiting, until Mr. Joel had passed. He led the way, a grand and leonine old man, superbly garmented in a coat of soft, rich blue, wide loose white flannels, wound at the waist by a great sash of yellow silk — an adornment that seemed in no way inappropriate but superbly fitting the noble dignity of the old man.
At the door he paused and stood aside, with a grizzled majesty of courtesy, for his wife and the other ladies of the group to pass. Then he entered the dining-room, followed by his grandson and the other young men. The dining-room was another light, spacious, and graciously beautiful room in the old New England style: through the open windows one saw the deep green and gold of trees and flowers in the embowered magic of the setting, and the fragrance of sweet drowsy air breathed on the curtains and flowed through the room.
The snowy table had a great bowl of fresh-cut wood flowers in the centre: the food was also native, plain old American, and superbly cooked: there was a thick pea-soup, fried chicken, plump and tender, done superbly to a juicy, delicately encrusted brown: there were candied sweet potatoes, string beans, cooked the Southern way with the succulent sweet seasoning of pork, stewed golden corn, and creamy mashed potatoes, a deep smooth gravy, rich and brown and thick, sliced tomatoes and sliced cucumbers, no alcoholic beverages, but iced tea, cold and tall and fragrant in high tinkling glasses rimed with ice, flaky biscuits, smoking hot, and for dessert, fresh apple-pie, hot and crusty, hued with cinnamon and flanked by thick fresh squares of pungent yellow cheese.
It was, in short, a plain but wholesome and most appetizing meal, completely American in its flavour and abundance, and superbly cooked, most fitting to this house; the simple green and natural, casual beauty of the place, the life, the people, the homely gracious hospitality of democracy.
It is true, the meal was also rather Southern in its cooking and its quality — a fact that was not surprising, however, when one remembered that Mr. Joel’s present wife had been a famous Southern belle from the blue-grass region of Kentucky.
One not only remembered this fact, it was difficult for one not to remember it; Mrs. Joel herself made her romantic origins evident. Although she was a woman in her early sixties with white hair, she was still remarkably preserved, and her manners, graces, dimpled smiles, her roguish glances and her languishing soft drawl were still the familiar stock-intrade of the Dixieland coquette.
She was certainly what is called “a fine figure of a woman”; her figure was tall, spacious, amply proportioned, her face, although beginning to show the signs of age — a slightly wrinkled plumpness like the skin of a full but slightly withered apple — was still almost as soft and white and tender as a child’s: she had almost all her natural teeth and they were white and pearly, her hands were white and plump and fine, her voice had the refined and throaty burble that is familiar in the majestic American female of the upper crust, and she dimpled beautifully when she smiled.
It was rather uncomfortably evident at once that there was a strong, if suppressed, hostility between Mrs. Joel and her step-daughter, Joel’s mother.
The struggle between the two was for the possession of something that neither of them any longer had — youth. Both were obviously enamoured of youth — of the freshness of youth, the warmth, the charm, the grace, the vitality of youth. Both hated the idea of growing old: both bitterly and desperately refused to admit the possibility of growing old. Mrs. Joel was able to cast over her soul a spell of hypnotic deception, and by absurdly flaunting around the graces, airs and manners of a coquette, to convince herself that she was young and beautiful, able to enslave every man she met under the domination of her captivating charm.
And Mrs. Pierce felt bitterly that the older woman had had her day, that she should be willing to admit her years, gracefully submit, and take a back seat. This ugly rivalry was now apparent in almost everything they said, and gave everyone at the table a feeling of tension, embarrassment and discomfort. Thus, Mrs. Joel, speaking to her step-daughter, and including the whole company, in a reference to Mrs. Pierce’s strenuous pursuit of youth, her grim devotion to youth’s figure and its vigorous gymnastics, now remarked in a tone of sugared venom, a malicious gaiety of fine surprise:
“But really, I do, I think it’s the most astonishing thing to see a woman of your age take part in all these sports and games that only the YOUNG people of my generation played. . . . After all, if you were twenty — the age of Joel or this young man — I could understand it better — but at YOUR age, my dear,”— she drew a fine breath of astonishment, “— really, I marvel that you don’t collapse.”
“Do you?” said Mrs. Pierce, smiling her glacial and inflexible smile, and in a tone of cold, impassive irony —“I confess, Mother, I see nothing at all to marvel at. . . . Please set your mind at rest — I assure you I’m not in the slightest danger of collapse. . . . I can do everything,” she went on grandly, “that I could do at twenty — and I can do it better now, with less fatigue and greater skill. . . . I can hold my own with any of these young people around here, no matter what it is — whether swimming, golfing, playing tennis, or going for a walk. So you can save your sympathy, Mother,” she concluded with a laugh which seemed casual and friendly enough, but which showed plainly the hard inflexibility of her antagonism, “— when I need your condolences I’ll let you know.”
“But, my DEAR,” said Mrs. Joel with sweet gushing malice —“I think it’s ma-a-rvellous! I only wonder how you do it at your age! . . . Why, no girl of my time............