Ceremony of the Innocent (21 page)

“Quite regularly, Jeremy, and May knows that only too well. Are you implying, May, that I am a dissolute and wicked woman?”

May’s gray and tortured face flushed with a sickly crimson. “Oh, no!” she cried. “I know you are a good and Christian lady. I know only too well! You must excuse me.”

Mrs. Eccles became all graciousness and leaned back enough to touch Jeremy’s shoulder with her own. “Well, then,” she said. “You and Ellen do as you please, but Jeremy and I are going to enjoy our dinner.” She now decided that neither Ellen nor May had been tippling in her wine cellar, though she had been suspicious at the disappearance two weeks ago of a half bottle of her cheaper wines, though all her wines were cheap. It was probably the handyman; she thought darkly. I will discharge him at once when I return.

Having won this small and pathetic victory, Mrs. Eccles sat back in her velvet crimson chair and looked at Ellen almost with pride. Ellen merely seemed sad and uncomfortable. But Jeremy gave her a cheerful smile, and as cheerfulness was not one of his more prominent virtues, this was quite a victory for him, too.

Daughter of John Sheldon Widdimer, indeed, thought Mrs. Eccles, tossing her head. I don’t believe a word of it, though obviously Jeremy does.

The train was passing rapidly through the autumn landscape, and Ellen, looking through the window, was suddenly absorbed in the wild burning of color everywhere, in the trees, on the scarlet-laden grass, on the rising plum-tinted hills in the distance. The western sky was a deep pellucid green, remote and awesome, over the far mountains, which had turned to bronze iridescence in the sunlight. She was conscious only of beauty, except for the insistent awareness of Jeremy’s presence, and that awareness only enhanced the tranquillity and grandeur of what she was seeing. In his turn Jeremy was watching her profile and again he marveled at such immaculate perfection, and felt the charm and the magnetism of it.

Two waiters in long white aprons to their ankles came in with a number of tables, all steaming, and Mrs. Eccles, sparkling and avid, leaned forward to look at them, and at the glistening white linen and silver and flowers in a silver vase, and the silver ice-filled tubs of wine.

“Oh, lobster! Don’t you adore it?” she asked in the groaning voice of ecstasy. “I haven’t tasted it since I was last in New York a year ago.” She inspected the pheasant under glass and groaned again, and Jeremy said to himself that she sounded as if in the midst of an orgasm, which, come to it, he thought, is probably happening to her, but in her stomach this time. May looked at the lobsters, red and glossy with butter, and at the huge claws, and she was nauseated and put her hands to her middle and turned her face aside. Then when she saw the pheasant under glass she rose abruptly and said to Ellen in a weak voice, “Please—take me to the lavatory.” So Ellen led her into the corridor, her face pink with embarrassment, and to the lavatory, where May promptly vomited, while Ellen held her head and was almost ill with sympathy and self-reproach. When May had finished she sat down in a state of collapse on the toilet seat, her face coldly sweating, her damp hair falling down her scorched neck, her whole body trembling.

“To think they eat that,” she moaned. “I can’t go back there, Ellen, while they are eating such stuff. I just can’t. And the smell!”

“The lobster just smells like fish, Auntie,” said Ellen, ‘and the pheasant is just another fowl like chicken. Please, Auntie. I know how you feel, but this is the way rich people eat, and there is nothing disgusting about it.”

May seized Ellen’s wrist frenziedly in her twisted and swollen fingers. “Ellen! Let’s get off the train at the next stop. Let’s tell Mrs. Eccles we are going home—”

Ellen spoke quietly. “Home? To where, Auntie? We never had a home. Mrs. Eccles will be only too glad to have us back—at a lower wage. I don’t like her, I never did, and please don’t look at me like that. She has taken our labor for a pittance over four years, and we owe her nothing. Besides, I will never leave Jeremy. I’d die if I did; I almost died a few times, thinking of him, over those long years. I am going to be his wife.”

“We are not his kind, Ellen,” said May, beginning to weep. When Ellen offered her her own handkerchief, while May fumbled for hers, May pushed Ellen’s hand away almost savagely and glared up at her through trickling eyes. “No, we are not his kind. What will you do among his friends, Ellen? They’ll laugh at you, a servant girl, putting on airs. They’ll know you are only a servant no matter how grand he dresses you, in silks and satins and laces and furs and ribbons. You’ll look like a lady clown in such clothes, Ellen. Look in that mirror; sec yourself as you really are, only a servant girl, trying to rise out of the station to which God has called you. Pride cometh before a fall, the Good Book says, and it’s true, it’s true. I thought you had better sense, Ellen.”

Ellen pushed up her large and lustrous pompadour, looked briefly in the mirror, and she wondered, as she had wondered many times, what Jeremy saw in her and why he wanted her. Then she said, “Jeremy is going to hire a tutor for me, Aunt May, to eliminate the gaps in my education, or, I should say, to give me the education I never had. He wants me to be at ease with his friends.” Her beautiful voice faltered. She smoothed down the gray flannel skirt, of cheap wool, which May had made for her, and she eyed the little pearl buttons on her cotton blouse to see if any of them had opened indecently over her full high breast. Then she studied the rainbow glitter of the large diamond ring Jeremy had brought for her from New York, and it seemed to her that the rainbows in it danced for her alone, with gaiety and promise. May, sobbing, saw the girl’s sudden bemusement, and she said, “Look at that ring! Do you think it’s right for you to have such a costly bauble, Ellen? I just can’t believe you’ll have anything but misery if you marry him. If he marries you.”

“He will,” said Ellen, and her voice was rich with passion and love.

“If only it had been Mr. Francis,” said May, desolated. “Though he has better sense, Mr. Francis.”

Ellen thought of Francis Porter with affection. Yes, he had been kind and good, and he had done his best for two homeless servants, and Ellen was grateful. But at the absurd thought of marrying him she could not help laughing. She took her aunt’s arm. “You are all right now, Auntie. Let’s go back; it’s very impolite to stay away this long, and Mrs. Eccles will be only too happy at our—our—discomfiture. She would just love it if we turned tail and ran, and came slinking back to her.”

“How can you talk that way about such a lovely lady, who has been like a mother to you! A mother! God will punish you, Ellen, for such ugly words.”

Ellen took her aunt’s arm with loving firmness and raised her from the seat. “Aunt May, you don’t need to look at that food. You can eat your own sandwiches, which you brought, and have some hot tea.” She was wildly impatient to be back in the stateroom with Jeremy; it was as if she had been away for hours; he might have disappeared.

“You can’t eat that horrible stuff either, Ellen. It will poison you; you’re not used to it. Poison you.”

“If it doesn’t poison Mrs. Eccles it won’t poison me,” said Ellen with an ambiguous smile. May tottered with the swaying of the train and her real illness and distress, but Ellen guided her strongly into the corridor and into the stateroom. Jeremy rose, looked sharply at May and then at Ellen, who smiled into his eyes. The stateroom was filled with delicious odors and Ellen discovered she was very hungry.

While Jeremy still stood, Ellen put her aunt into her chair, and Mrs. Eccles watched with complacent malice and smugness, her mouth dripping with melted butter. Then Ellen calmly picked up her aunt’s bag and opened it on the neatly arranged cold beef sandwiches and pound cake. She glanced at Jeremy over her shoulder and she could not read his expression, for he was trying to control both his vexation and his pity. Had he been alone with May and Ellen he would have brought himself to the limit of his capacity for solicitude, but Mrs. Eccles was there, gloating, laughing inwardly at Ellen. Smirks meant nothing to Jeremy, for himself, and he had seen them thousands of times on the faces of the meager men like Francis Porter, the greedy, cruel, bloodless men who called themselves the intelligentsia. But smirks for Ellen were another matter. He wanted to hit Mrs. Eccles.

He rang for tea for May, then took Ellen a little unceremoniously by her arm and led her to a seat at the table, and when she would have drawn back, to stay with her aunt, he gave her his first formidable look of command and masculine force, and she sat down. She knew now that she could never successfully oppose him, but—it was strange to her—this only increased his fascination for her, and she gave him a submissive uplifted glance and he saw the deep blue shining of her eyes and was touched.

Ellen ignored Mrs. Eccles and tried the lobster and the fowl and discovered they were delectable. She ate with her natural delicacy of gesture and plainly showed her enjoyment; her eyes kept returning to Jeremy and he smiled at her with compassion and amusement and approval, and she felt the now familiar warmth flowing over her, which made her breasts tingle and her breath momentarily short.

May, sniffing occasionally into her handkerchief, nibbled at the sandwiches she had made, and drank the hot tea with lemon, and pretended, in her wretchedness, to gaze through the window occasionally. But she was again desolated; Ellen had become someone she did not know, through pride and vanity, both heinous crimes against God. She had always been very lonely, in her deprived life, but never this lonely before. She longed for her bare chilly room and the rough blankets and the hot bricks Ellen would bring her, wrapped in flannel, for the pain in her ankles and knees. She longed to be “home.” She was like a half-starved bird driven from its wintry nest and terrified at its eviction.

Ellen, whose back was to her aunt, drank some of the wine and it gave her a delightful sense of elation and excitement, and her cheeks turned a deeper apricot and so did her lips. Forgetting both the other women in the coach, she talked with her naive confidence to Jeremy, and it seemed to him that the stateroom was filled with melodious music, so full of cadences was her voice. He had never seen her so beautiful, so animated, and he thought of his wedding night and his dark face colored and became hot.

When Mrs. Eccles suggested, after the meal, that May go with her “for a little walk, for our circulation, dear,” May got painfully and meekly to her feet and went with the woman she still feared and who she still felt was her mistress. They went to the lavatory, where May became abject and tearful and clutched Mrs. Eccles’ arm. ‘Take us home, please, Mrs. Eccles, please. We want to go home.”

Mrs. Eccles, who had been examining her own sleek brown pompadour with pleasure, stopped her patting and looked over her shoulder at May, and her expression became alert. “Do you mean that, May? With Ellen, too? Ellen wants to go back to Wheatfield?”

May stammered, “Ellen will do whatever I say, Mrs. Eccles. I think.”

“You’ve talked to her about it?” Mrs. Eccles gleefully considered Jeremy’s face at this announcement. She had nothing against Jeremy; she had become very attached to him these past two days, and admired him greatly, especially his money and his manner. But she was by nature full of intrigue, and loved mischief for its own sake, and this had induced her to send Francis a telegram with the incredible news. Moreover, she deplored Jeremy’s “infatuation” for a servant girl, a girl hardly higher in station than a trollop, a streetwalker. Then, the magnificent engagement ring had inspired her with umbrage and envy.

“Yes,” said May in a doleful voice, “I talked to Ellen about it, right here, ma’am.”

“And what did she say?” said Mrs. Eccles eagerly.

May hesitated, and dropped her head. “She didn’t say much, ma’am. But she didn’t say no, either.”

Mrs. Eccles regarded her shrewdly. “Well, I reckon that means no, May. I know Ellen. A deceitful puss, with a close mouth, and bold, and disobedient and willful. She will have her way! We can only pray for her, I suppose, and she will very probably need our prayers.”

May still clutched her arm, and her suffering wet eyes, with their red rims, were desperate. “Mrs. Eccles, after the—wedding—if it happens, and I pray it won’t, take me back to Wheatfield with you. I’ve worked for you a long time—”

Mrs. Eccles disengaged her arm. (Take you back, indeed, you hapless cripple! A whining invalid in my house, useless, a drag on my affairs. You must think me mad, or something, throwing away money on you.) She gave May a sweet, affectionate smile. “Now, now, May, you must be sensible, even if Ellen is such a determined and ignorant and uppish little hussy, and doomed to misery, I can tell you that, after he’s tired of her. Ellen—and Jeremy Porter! It’s ridiculous. It’s insane. I agree with you. But you must stay with Ellen. It’s your duty, and we must do our duty no matter our tears and our sighs, isn’t that so?”

May had been too wretched to hear the epithets Mrs. Eccles had called Ellen; she only received the import of her words, that she must stay with Ellen, and she laboriously got to her feet, stroked her white hair with both her moist palms, and went back to the stateroom with Mrs. Eccles, walking so feebly that Mrs. Eccles freshly despised her and thanked Heaven she was rid of this creature.

Mrs. Eccles, who often cried copiously when her minister pleaded for the Missions, and had waved her scented handkerchief and had been conscious of the tender smiles of her friends about her, had no pity for May Watson. Mrs. Eccles could weep over the minister’s eloquent stories, and especially when he spoke of the dolorous state of Chinese women, who hobbled about on bound feet. But she had no compassion for a woman who had become disabled in her arduous service. The Chinese women, and the inhabitants of “godless jungles,” were very far away. May was near, and “a burden,” and that was a different matter. Mrs. Eccles was a very pragmatic woman.

C H A P T E R   10

MAY HAD BEEN BENUMBED at the clamor and roaring of Fifth Avenue, in New York, on this dusky autumnal night spitting with rain. But Ellen leaned forward, entranced, dazed, at the sight of all this traffic and the crowds, and she would wipe off the steaming carriage windows and feel an almost unbearable excitement and ebullience. Why, she thought, I’ve been here before, I know it so well! I know it’s silly, but it seems so familiar to me, all these burnished victorias and glossy landaus and the glassy carriages with the charming flowers painted on their sides, and the white and black and sorrel and dappled horses prancing on the glistening wet cobbles and their silver harnesses singing like bells, and the coachmen, and all these yellow mist-wreathed gas lamps dancing like veiled butterflies, and the shopwindows lit up like Christmas and full of beautiful jewels and dresses and objects of art, and the pounding streetcars and the endless throngs with their wet gleaming umbrellas and the gentlemen with canes, and the ladies in furs, on the walks, and the laughter and the voices and the grinding of wheels and all the side streets choked with impatient vehicles and the piercing steeples and huge buildings running with bright rain which shines like falling gems in the lamplight, and the noise which is really like fast and galloping music full of importance and gaiety, and the theaters with their brilliant white lights and the arcades, and the sense of thundering activity—I know it all, all.