Echoes

by Zona Gale

Echoes

by

ZONA GALE

WHEN Lisa comes to our house in her pretty frocks and bright hats, with a curl here and a bow there and a persistent and distracting dimple, I am wont to scold her like this:

“Lisa! I dare say you know nothing what ever about the first conjugation. I dare say your French is suited only to silent reading and may not be ventured upon aloud. I have no doubt that you play your little ‘pieces’ correctly enough, but have you the least idea what they are about? And as for your needlework, though you may embroider a very fair rosebud, I shall never trust you with so much as a buttonhole. What do you know of life? And mind that you come in and let me see your gown on your way to the ball to-night.”

No wonder that Pelleas, who spoils Lisa outrageously, tells me that I lack discipline and influence; and no wonder that Lisa, who adores us both and firmly believes that we know nothing whatever about the world because we are seventy years old and everything is now become quite “different”—no wonder that Lisa laughs at us and flatters us by calling us tender names, and continues to pay the same disregard both to conjugations and buttonholes. But Pelleas and I smile at each other, seeing her clear, serene eyes, and assure each other that it is just as well. When one is seventy one has collected most of one’s scoldings and most of one’s fears and has exchanged them for the mere privilege of nodding at some one one loves and assuring him that everything in the world is well. So it is; but one has to do a deal of fretting over French and buttonholes and the like before one learns even that. Yet I have a pleasant conviction that when little Lisa comes to us before a ball, and throws back her cloak for one dazzling moment, and kisses us and runs away, no one could look on without feeling infinitely reconciled to all the world.

It is because Lisa is so charming and because no one can scold her or deny her anything, that Pelleas and I, in a burst of hospitality unwonted now that we are seventy, gave her permission to invade our old house one sparkling winter afternoon and make candy in the kitchen and rabbits in the dining-room and dance in the drawing-room and do all the appallingly energetic things that youth regards as its province of entertainment. I think that Pelleas and I, under the spell of Lisa’s fresh face framed in pale velvet and furs, actually forgot that we are thought to be nervous and to prefer the quiet.

“Ah, please. Aunt Ettarre!” said Lisa, her arm about me, “nobody’s kitchen is like yours—that great place with its brick fireplace and old cavey closets and its dressers of things that shine and wink—oh, please, Aunt Ettarre! There is not another kitchen like it in New York. Ours are all tiled and new and have gas-ranges—don’t you see that candy will taste quite different in your kitchen?”

“All the worse,” proclaimed Pelleas, who always feigns a most terrible displeasure which deceives nobody, for his eyes meantime twinkle betrayingly, “all the worse. You will eat more candy than is good for you. No candy is fit for any human being to eat.”

“Nor rabbit?” asked Lisa, as if she were on the verge of being persuaded.

“Nor rabbit,” pressed Pelleas with warmth; “all that kind of thing is bad for you. You might as well learn that at once, Lisa.”

Lisa dropped her cheek upon her hand.

“Did you learn it, Uncle Pelleas?” she asked meekly.

“Long ago,” replied Pelleas convincingly.

“By eating rabbits and candy?” demanded Lisa, a dimple appearing.

“By wholesome experience,” explained Pelleas didactically.

“When you are doing things, they are very bad for you. When you have done them, they are wholesome experience,” deduced Lisa triumphantly, one arm about his neck. “You dear—you wouldn’t wish me to grow to be seventy and never be able to tell my grandnieces—suppose we come at three and stay just until five?”

“Very well,” said Pelleas; “not a moment longer.”

I have never known an argument in which Lisa was concerned to end in any other way. I think it is that she lifts her eyes so charmingly when she argues; or that she has a way of shutting her eyes when she laughs; or that she is so eager and buoyant and happy—ah, well, I don’t know why in the world it may be save merely that Lisa is Lisa.

Accordingly a few days ago they came—Lisa and six or seven others.

“Really,” said I to Pelleas while they were leaving their wrap)s, “I think they are Lisa and her friends. But I am not sure that they are not a company of stray flowers and butterflies and ribbon bows and rainbows. Pelleas—O Pelleas! Why did we ever grow old? Indeed, I don’t in the least belong to your generation, Pelleas. I belong to theirs, out there in the hall.”

“Well, so do I,” retorted Pelleas calmly. “That’s the only generation there is, really. Everybody belongs to that generation—unless it is Nichola.”

To tell the truth, though we carefully guarded it from Lisa, our old serving-woman Nichola had made us completely and peculiarly uncomfortable ever since we had announced to her that these guests were bidden to our house. In vain we pointed out that she need prepare nothing whatever for them; that all that she would be asked to do was to turn her kitchen over to their mysteries; in vain we repeated that it was for Lisa—Lisa—to whom, indeed, Nichola long ago fell victim. Nothing would pacify her. She set her kitchen in order after luncheon; and then she climbed the stairs to her room and made fast the door; and there Pelleas and I well knew she would stay, no matter what saucepan were not to be found or what catastrophe of flames and fragments might follow.

“But Lisa may do quite as she likes,” we had agreed with determination; “Lisa shall have her party here if she wishes. Is she not our grandniece? And what objection can Nichola possibly have to caramels and rabbits?” we demanded with fine inconsistency. But we well knew that Nichola refuses to take sides with any one. Like Victor Hugo when he was asked to join a triumvirate, she repels all advances, saying constantly: “It is almost impossible to amalgamate me.”

“Ah, now,” said Lisa, coming into the drawing-room with all her rainbow cloud of friends attending, “this is delightful. Here is Mrs. Jocelyn who is going to make the candy—I mean she is going to chaperon us if you really won’t sit in the kitchen and be throned on the dresser and let us pour caramels in your laps, as we should like. Mrs. Jocelyn’s caramels are better than anybody’s—unless you make them. Aunt Ettarre. And as for her lemon creams——!”

So the happy chatter ran in the interval of the presentations, though indeed most of Lisa’s bouquet of young companions we already know very well. The last one to greet us was young Eric Chartres—whom neither Pelleas nor I had seen in some years, since he had just come home from Oxford. And I could not fail to note that Lisa did not so much as look toward him, but presented him with an enchanting droop of eyelids and a glance that included every one else. And instantly I was most happily alert. For if only it should chance that Lisa and Sally Chartres’s grandson. …

“Sally Chartres’s grandson,” said I in perplexity to Pelleas when they had all gone rustling below stairs and we were left in the still drawing-room, “Sally Chartres’s grandson. Why, Pelleas—it really isn’t possible. Sally is our age, and this fine young fellow is her grandson!”

“Ah, well!” said Pelleas reasonably, “he was obliged to be somebody’s grandson. And every grandparent believes that for him to be a grandparent is most ridiculous.”

“Pelleas,” said I thoughtfully, “do you know that he looks a bit—just a very little—as you looked, at his age?”

“Does he really?” asked Pelleas, vastly pleased, and “Pooh!” he instantly added, to prove how little vanity he has.

“He does,” I insisted. “For a moment as I looked at him I could have believed——”

Pelleas turned to me with eyes that were almost startled.

“Do you know,” he confessed slowly, “more than once when I have looked at Lisa—especially Lisa in that gown with the spingley things that shine,” described Pelleas laboriously—“I could almost have thought it was you, Ettarre. Yes—really. There is something about her——”

We fell silent for a moment, looking away out the window across the white winter avenue to the winter park. Winter without, winter within. … Ah, no doubt it is a wonderful thing to have lived to a ripe old age; and yet sometimes, when a round cheek or a young poise of head or a mere smile of the morning reminds you for an instant of a youth-time that was dearer to you than your own—ah, well, at least let no one say that youth has not its compensations! And yet, to paraphrase M. de Boissy, I am not one of those who are grateful to youth for the blessings of Providence.

Presently we went back to our book. I forget what it may have been on that day; but I know that it was some delicate thing of shadows and lines faintly traced and hues that faded, for upon its tranquil background I laid a very pattern of remembered things—vistas of spring, music that once trembled, wind that once blew, moments of glad mornings when the shadows fell so—and so; faces no longer turned to me, echoes undying, “moons like these,” and yet so strangely different. I dare say that I am a most sentimental and unbalanced old woman to let a company of young people at caramel-making in my kitchen unlock so many old doors of which they had no suspicion, but I was powerless to prevent it. And when Pelleas ceased reading aloud I do not in the least know. I lodged up at last and he was sitting silent, his finger between the pages, his eyes, too, on the winter park.

“But, Pelleas!” I cried, almost crossly, and not far from tears, “we are frightfully ungrateful. Besides, you know you wouldn’t go back.”

Pelleas turned to me in his most adorable air of scorn.

“Who so much as thought of such a thing?” he inquired with dignity. “Do you fancy for one instant that I wish to be that young monkey of a Chartres down there, in love with Lisa?”

So Pelleas had noticed how matters were with them!

“Do you think he is in love with Lisa, too?” I cried eagerly.

“I don’t know anything at all about it,” replied Pelleas, who dislikes above all things to be thought looking out for romance, and whom nothing in the world interests more deeply.

“Don’t you want to read on?” I suggested; but whether he did read or not I have not the remotest notion.

The next that I recall is Lisa herself slipping into the room, looking her most gastronomic in a bewitching ruffly apron which it was a marvel to me some of the guests did not mistake for the confections. She set a plate of sweets on the table beside us, and touched my hand to her flushed face.

“Dearest,” she begged, “would you mind if we behaved still more like babies and played—guess what?—hide-and-seek all over the house down-stairs? Do you know, dear, we’ve counted; and we’ve none of us ever played hide-and-seek in our lives! What do you think of that?”

I hope that Lisa was as impressed as she appeared. As for myself I tremble to think of the accounting to be made by latter-day parents to some god of games when he learns that they have sent their children to dancing-school and paid no heed whatever to their culture in hide-and-seek.

“Fancy!” said I indignantly. “But play then, certainly. Not only down-stairs,” I added in just rage, “but all over the house, wherever you find a door open. And when you go home, tell your dear mothers that, as for me, I have no idea what this world is coming to.”

Nearly every day I am reminded of that old carpenter whom Heyse quotes as crying distractedly in his ruin: “I no longer understand this universe!”

When she had gone Pelleas and I looked at each other in some trepidation. The drawing-room, with its screens and deep windows and high-backed chairs, was a splendid place to hide, so that, manifestly, we two must not occupy it to the exclusion of the others; but if we went to our room Nichola might appear before us at any minute, when she heard the scampering feet, and demand to know what was the matter and threaten to clear the house at once. Nichola, when she is angry, has, as they said of Pitt, “the strength of thunder and the splendor of lightning,” and we are frankly afraid of her.

“Ah, Pelleas!” said I suddenly, “you know those old letters that we’ve been meaning to go up to the attic to look out? Why not go there now?”

It looked a bit like flight, I am bound to confess, for the approaching laughter was already on the lower stairs when we hurried from the drawing-room. We got to the upper floor with all speed, and the young folk did not hear us, for they were in merry talk about who should be blindman—ces pauvres enfants, who had never even played at blind man’s buff. We hastened along the corridor, past Nichola’s grim threshold, and were thankful enough to find the attic door open so that she need not hear our escape and suspect the lawlessness. (If only Nichola would confine herself to goose-pie and leave these grave matters of conduct to us! But she is full as unconformable as the vicar’s lady.) We stole up the attic stairs most guiltily, and through another open door, and so into the dim twilight of that haunted upper place.

If it were not that all attics are too hot in summer and too cold in winter to be practicable places for reading, I should, upon occasion, prefer them to all other rooms in the house. I profess that I prefer them to very many libraries. I have known houses whose libraries do not invite, but gesticulate; whose drawing-rooms are as uninhabitable as the guillotine; and whose dining-rooms have an air of awful permanence, like a ship’s dining room; yet above stairs would lie a great, splendid attic of the utmost taste and distinction—a very home of dreams. As for ours, it is so like the traditional attic of old prints that I have always a sly impulse to attempt framing it for the walls of our drawing-room. There are three deep dormer windows which to my delight, in spite of all that Nichola can do, are constantly filled with cobwebs and dust that the late afternoon sun changes to crystals and tissue. There are chests and boxes which thrill one with the certainty that they are filled with something—how shall I say?—something that does not anywhere exist. Do you not remember chests which, it seemed to you, must certainly contain vague, splendid, mysterious things—such things as sultans give as wedding gifts, such things as parcels are always suggesting without ever fulfilling the suggestion? Yet when chests like these are opened they are always found to harbor most commonplace matter—skirts, roundabouts, hats minus trimming, cotton wadding, magazines saved for forgotten reasons, jet beads that adorned forgotten gowns, printed reports of forgotten meetings called for forgotten purposes—what mockery they invariably seem! And yet I never go up to our attic without the same impulse of expectancy. I dare say, if I persist, I shall find a Spanish doubloon there some day.

Sloping roof, slanting sun, garments hanging from rafters, old sofas where, o’ daytimes, the ghosts nap—vanishing at the first footfall on the stair—disused blinds and screens, and a broken loom on which Pelleas’s mother used to weave his little smocks—among these we made our way until we came upon what we have always called the “Little Trunk,” with the accent on the “little” to distinguish it from all other little trunks possible. In this Pelleas and I have always kept the letters which we wrote to each other in the days when he expected to be sent to India, and I was evading the visits and flowers of a cavalry officer of middle age whom my father admired. Ah! those letters from Pelleas, filled to the brim with chivalrous adoration and phrases made of stars—and yet whenever I quote from one of them Pelleas always stoutly denies that he ever said any such thing. I have always been meaning to ask other wives if other husbands exhibit similar apostasy on the same subject. From his accounts one would say that Pelleas had confined his love-letters to discussions of immigration and subsidies. And it was about one exceptionally beloved phrase of his of which he profess a sweeping ignorance that I was bent upon convincing him, and so had long determined upon a visit to the Little Trunk.

We lifted the packets with loving scorn and sympathy for the two tragic young lovers who had written them. I had labeled them in this fashion: “The First Six Weeks After the Selby-Whitford Ball”—which was where Pelleas and I had met; “While I Was at the Cleatams’s House Party”—to which the cavalry officer had been bidden and Pelleas had not; and then “After the Coaching Party”—which was on a day in the Berkshires when Pelleas was on the box and I was on the box-seat and we molded this pleasant scheme of things as near to our hearts’ desire as possible—and have kept it there ever since—an easy matter when you love some one enough. Easier, at all events, than those who do not love some one enough would have one suppose.

I found the phrase. There it was in violet ink on paper grown sadly yellow; and Pelleas, his elbow on his knee and his head on his hand, sat with the slanting sun making his hair look absurdly silver and smiled a forced confession to his handiwork. Then he fingered one of the parcels of my letters done in my tip-tilted writing which looks as if it had been traced to minuet-time—as my Lord Chesterfield recommended that everything be done; and seeing him absorbed, I opened the packet of the post-coaching-party letters, which are dearer to me than all the rest.

“An interval of calm sunshine,” wrote Dr. Johnson once, “courted us out to see a cave on the shore, famous for its echo.” And, a few sentences farther on: “There is no echo, such is the fidelity of report!” The incident crystallizes an ancient sadness of mine—a regret for the paucity of regarded echoes. For myself, I am a worshiper of echoes, and I never find them all solemn and sorrowful as do so many; I love echoes of old days and memory of glamour—and so does Pelleas, though indeed he is wont to say an apologetic “Pooh!” before and after each recollection. And here was a trunk filled with sheaves of happy echoes, and I was straightway plunged in so gracious a pastime that I forgot the attic and the Little Trunk and the occasion altogether; I remembered only that long-ago russet day among the hazy hills, and the sound of the coaching-horn, and the look of Pelleas’s hands upon the long lines, and the very singing of the wind that faithfully promised how that day of gold should never end. I remembered the very bonnet I had worn—a great cave at black velvet faced with shirred silk of rose-odor and hanging somewhere in the attic at that moment among the ghostly garments that are always getting themselves saved. And at the brow of a fair, rolling road Pelleas had drawn rein and had turned to me, his dear face shining with his secret which was no secret; and presently I was looking bravely out from the cave of black velvet and answering:

“I love you, too.”

Whereat Pelleas had begged, under cover of the floating laughter of the rest of the coach:

“When then—but when, will you marry me?”

And I had responded with vague prophecies of two years, and vague fears that we were both too young.

“Too young!” Pelleas had cried so that I suspected the entire coach-load would have understood the context. “I am not too young to adore you. Marry me now—come to India with me. Think, sweetheart—Ettarre, think!”

Ah, that rocking ride down the hillside, that silver fluting of the horn, that heavenly hour of all the hours in the world!

The near rustling that made me lift my eyes at last from the letter was very faint—indeed, was hardly perceptible. It was made of light footsteps and a whisper of garments and a little rippling of escaped laughter. I looked, and near the open door at the head of the stairs, where the shadows creeping toward the dormer windows had already penetrated, I saw something which, without my knowing, made my hand grope for Pelleas’s hand.

Lisa was standing within the door, and with her was Sally Chartres’s grandson. Had I not bidden them go all over the house, wherever they might find a door open? No wonder these two had ventured to the farthest stronghold. Lisa had her little white wool skirts gathered daintily in one hand, and she was poised to step delicately among the rubbish. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair was enchantingly astray, her lips were laughing—she might have emerged from some neglected canvas stowed away in that twilight But what fairly startled me to her reality was that, from some vague hook of the rafters, Eric was bringing down a queer, old-fashioned bonnet that made them both laugh softly and immoderately, and in spite of her protest he set it upon her bright hair.

“No,” she begged, “Eric—no. Please.”

“Yes!” said Sally Chartres’s grandson. “I want to see how you would have looked—if I had loved you fifty years ago.”

And there, smiling up at him from out a great cave of black velvet faced with shirred silk of rose-color, was Lisa, wearing my old bonnet of the very day in the Berkshires when Pelleas and I had floated through the autumn atop of that fairy coach. And there stood Eric looking down at her with, as I live, a secret in his eyes which was no secret at all. Ah, and how like Pelleas he was—the lithe, erect figure, the buoyant, happy face, the fair hair upon his temples——

I protest to every one that it would have been unforgivable to make ourselves known, for the moment was to those dear young hearts one in a lifetime and so elusive that a word from us would have dispelled its wizardry. Besides, it lasted but a fragment of time. I am not sure what he said, but she listened and she understood, and though she hesitated it was a hesitation which deceived nobody; and then I dare be sworn that I heard her answer:

“I love you, too.”

There was a moment of sweet, broken talk, of her shy laughter and his eager speech; and thereafter beyond all doubting I heard Eric’s happy:

“When then—but when, Lisa, will you marry me?”

And Lisa responded with vague fragments about years to come and youth and waiting; and Sally Chartres’s grandson took her in his arms—for this was our attic and no coach-top—and no one can ever persuade me that he did not cry out to her that he was not too young to adore her beyond the whole world. “Marry me now! Come back to England with me!”—ah, my old ears may not have heard it wholly right, but it cannot have been so very different!—“Think, sweetheart—Lisa, think!”

I caught the look in both their faces; I saw the shyness and the surrender and the happiness of heaven in their eyes—and I sat holding Pelleas’s hand tightly and scarce daring to breathe. But my heart was beating amazingly, and without my knowledge I think that the yellowed paper in my fingers must have rustled, for they started and looked toward the blinding windows, shining with crystals and cobweb tissues in the late sun. Then there was a rush of feet and whisperings and laughter in the corridor below and on the attic stairs; and then they came up, three or four of the rainbow company below stairs, and in the merry clamor the two were caught away, Lisa with the great cave of a bonnet still upon her head.

“O Pelleas,” I said almost in awe, “Pelleas!”

He nodded without speaking, and my hands trembled absurdly as I showed him the very letter that I had been reading. Was it not wonderful—and before all things wonderful, that such a shining door of the past should have opened and disclosed to us a vista that stretched quite to the shining present?

“Ah, Ettarre—Ettarre!” cried Pelleas almost sharply, “her laugh, and her voice—and that way of turning her head—she is so like you. She looks so amazingly as you used to look!”

We laid the letters back in the Little Trunk at last, though indeed I have no remembrance of how long we sat there, glad and sad, talking a little and in silence. But when the sun was pouring its last glory through the dim glass we rose and made our way below. After all, we recollected guiltily, we had guests; and guests, in their way, are as pleasant as echoes.

Nichola’s door was still closed, and when we had crept past and reached the stairs we found the corridor strangely quiet. The drawing-room and the library, too, were quite deserted, and so we kept on down to the kitchen, determined to play the host and hostess for a tardy while to show our almost tender good-will.

The kitchen was lighted and there, in the wilderness of sticky pans and kettles, stood Nichola. She was alone. She did not hear us enter, and while we were hesitating whether to face her wrath or flee without information, we saw to our amazement that she was laughing. Before her was a great plate of dainties and upon it an envelope with “For Nichola” in Lisa’s round writing, and the envelope showed heavy.

Our old serving-woman looked up suddenly and saw us, but she did not cease to smile and nod.

“For the love of heaven,” she cried, “there were sweets like this at the festa in Palestrina—and the neighbors brought me home three kinds, wrapped in colored paper. And why,” she turned upon me shrilly, “why not let the dear lambs make their good things here every week, every week? Our lady knows it is better for ’em than their mating.”

Our old Nichola understands nothing of the “privilege of indifference,” but has a modern taste for the dignity of holding opinions.

“We will, we will, Nichola,” I promised earnestly. “And where are they now?” we asked her. “Where are those young people, Nichola?”

Nichola clattered the pans and hummed a cracked and broken version of no one knows what long-buried aria.

“But they went away an hour ago,” she answered, “to the park, to give the last of their nuts to the squirrels. They will come back to say good night—they will come back at any minute!” cried Nichola, who does not tolerate our presence in her kitchen.

Pelleas and I looked at each other swiftly.

“Nichola!” we said, remembering what we had just seen in the attic, “but Nichola! How long have they been gone to the park?”

“Hours,” Nichola informed us shrilly, and would say no more.

We went back to the deserted drawing-room, still unlighted save by the open fire. We stood in the dancing half-circle of the flames, and the same question was in our eyes.

“Pelleas,” said I, “Pelleas! I am not sure—are you sure? Did they really come up to the attic—Lisa and Eric? Did they really come there? Or was it just because we were thinking——”

He did not meet my eyes but stood, half-smiling, looking towairi the leaping fire.

“Lisa looks uncommonly like you,” he said absently.

“And Eric might have been you, he is so like you,” I declared again. “O Pelleas! Maybe it was not they at all! Maybe it was we ourselves!”

Pelleas looked at me swiftly; then he made a step toward me and took both my hands; then he changed his mind and looked away, and—“Pooh!” said he enigmatically. But he did not drop my hands.

I dare say that many will be found to tell us that what we suspect is manifestly impossible. Besides, we have never actually admitted that we do suspect. But we are old—and we have seen much magic.