The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 59
DAY in and day out Lily's life followed its easy, happy course, Always there were diversions, always gaiety, always people. Yet there were times now—indeed they seemed to have begun upon her return from America following her mother's death—when a cloud of sadness descended upon her, times when she would withdraw suddenly to her own room as if some tiny thing, a word, a gesture, an intonation, had set fire to a train of secret memories. Frequently she kept her room for the rest of the day, seeing no one, lunching and dining alone on a gilt table placed before her chaise longue by the window.
These sudden fits of melancholy disturbed Ellen who remarked on them gravely to old Madame Gigon.
"She was never like that before. I can't see what it is that disturbs her."
Madame Gigon saw no cause for alarm. "It's true," she said. "She was never like that before. But it may be that she grows tired. You see she is growing older, my dear Mees Ellen. All of us, as we grow older, like moments of solitude and quiet. It gives one time to reflect on life. You don't understand that yet. You're too young. But some day you will understand. As you get older you begin to wonder what it's all about . . . (pourquoi le combat)."
"Perhaps," replied Ellen with a vigorous shrug. "I'm sure it can't be her mother. It might, of course, be Irene."
And they fell to discussing for the hundredth time the case of Irene, whom Madame Gigon had not seen since she was a little girlk. They talked of her strange behavior, Madame Gigon wagging her old head, staring before her with sightless eyes.
"It is tragic . . . a life like that," she would say. "A life wasted. You know she was a pretty little girl. . . . She could have married."
They spoke of her as if she were dead. It was true that to them . . . to Ellen, to Madame Gigon, she was forever lost. Perhaps they were right, with that instinctive knowledge which underlies the consciousness of women chattering together over the strangeness of human behavior. Perhaps Irene was dead. . . . Perhaps she had been dead since a certain night when the last traces of her faith in humanity were throttled. It was true that she had left the world and turned her faith toward God alone, as if she were already dead and in purgatory.
"She was always queer," Ellen would say.
And then Madame Gigon, as if she were conscious of toying with thoughts of blasphemy, would say piously:
"But she is a good woman, who has given her life to good work and prayer."
But she spoke as if trying to convince herself, as if she did not quite believe what she said.
And Lily, all the while, kept her secret. Undoubtedly she was no longer in her first youth. This may have depressed her, for she was a woman to whom beauty and youth were the beginning and the end. Yet the fits of melancholy had something to do with a more definite and tangible thing. They were associated in some way with a little enameled box in which she kept a growing bundle of clippings from the American newspapers which Ellen brought into the house at Numero Dix.
In the solitude of her room, she opened the box and reread them many times, over and over again until the edges became frayed and the print blurred from much fingering. They had to do with the career of a certain labor leader, a man named Krylenko who seemed a strange person to excite the interest of a woman like Madame Shane. The clippings marked the progress of the man. Whenever there was a strike, Krylenko appeared to take a hand in it. Slowly, clipping by clipping, the battle he fought was being won. The unions penetrated now this steel town, now that one. There were battles, brutalities, deaths, fires in his trail, but the trail led steadily upward toward a goal. He was winning slowly. That he was strong there could be no doubt. He was so strong that great newspapers printed editorials against him and his cause. They called him an "anarchist," "an alien disturber," "a peril to the great American nation" and, most frequently of all, "a menace to prosperity and the inalienable rights of property."
Lily kept the enameled box locked in a drawer of her writing desk. No one had ever seen it. No one would see it until she died. It had been there for seven years.
It was on the morning after one of these attacks of melancholy, a few days after Jean's visit, that the Town suddenly intruded once more upon the house in the Rue Raynouard.
Lily sat on the sunlit terrace of the garden before a late breakfast of chocolate and buttered rolls, opposite Ellen whose habit it was to arise early and pursue some form of violent exercise while her cousin still slept. This morning she had been riding in the Bois de Bologne. As a little girl she learned to ride under the instruction of her grandfather, old Jacob Barr, and she rode well and easily with the air and the skill of one who has grown up with horses. The languid Schneidermann accompanied her on these early morning jaunts. She owned her horse because in the long run it was more economical and, as she said, "No pennies slip through my fingers."
She wore a tight black riding habit with a white's tock and a low derby hat. The riding crop lay across her strong, slim knees as she smoked and watched Lily devour too many rolls and a too large bowl of rich chocolate.
Between them on the table lay the morning's letters. In Ellen's little heap there were three or four notes from struggling music students, begging help or advice from her, one from a manager proposing an interview with regard to an American tour, a bill from Durand the publisher. Lily's pile was altogether different. It consisted almost entirely of bills, from Coty, from Worth, from Henri the florist, from Augustin the hairdresser, from Lanvin . . . from . . . on and on endlessly and at the bottom a letter from the lawyers who succeeded on the death of William Baines, "the old fogy," to the management of Lily's holdings in the Town.
The last letter she read through twice with so deep an interest that the chocolate grew cold and she was forced to send for a hot cup and more hot rolls. When she had finished she leaned back in the wicker chair, buried beneath the silk, the lace ruffles and the pale tiny bows of her peignoir.
"D'you know, Ellen," she remarked, "I am growing too rich. I've no idea what to do with all my money."
Ellen put down her letter abruptly and knocked the ash from her cigarette.
"There are plenty of places for it." She slapped the envelope against her slim thigh. "I've had two letters this morning asking me for money . . . from two music students. Heaven knows I've got nothing to spare. All that's left over I send to Ma. What is it now? A gold mine or an oil well?"
"Neither," said Lily. "It's just the Town making me richer and richer. It's from Folsom and Jones . . . I guess they're since your time. They're lawyers and they handle Irene's and my estate. They want me to sell the rest of the property we own."
Ellen pursed her lips reflectively. "How much are they offered?"
"Something over five hundred thousand. They say they can get six in a pinch."
She whistled softly. "Take it . . . take it. Those old shacks can't be worth that."
"It isn't the shacks," said Lily. "It's the land itself they want. The shacks aren't even worth repair. Why, they were built, most of them, while father was still living. The lawyers hint that the Town is ashamed of them, that they are a disgrace to the Town."
"I suppose it has changed," remarked Ellen.
"The population has doubled," said her cousin. "There aren't enough houses for the people. Why, last summer people who came to work at the Mills had to live in tents for atime. Even the people on Park avenue let out rooms. The Chamber of Commerce asked them to. They appealed to their pride not to stop the tremendous growth. There's been a tremendous . . ."
Ellen interrupted her. "I know . . . I know. . . . 'Watch us grow. The biggest city in the state in ten years. Well, it's money in your pocket. You've no kick coming.'"
The chocolate and rolls arrived and Lily began once more to eat.
"I don't see how you can eat all that and keep your figure," observed Ellen.
"Massage," said Lily. "Massage . . . and luckily the time is coming when I can eat all I want and be as fat as I like. In another fifteen years I'll be an old woman and it won't matter what I do." The faint bitterness again drifted through the speech, evasive and imperceptible.
"What does Irene say to your selling?" inquired Ellen.
"The lawyers say she wants to sell. You know I haven't had a line from her in years. She's in France now, you know."
"In France!" said Ellen, her eyebrows rising in surprise.
"Yes, at Lisieux."
"I should think you'd go and see her."
"She wouldn't see me if I went. What good would it do?"