Marjorie stood up and said. “Now, let’s spread the tablecloth, shall we? Sue, dear, push those folds down to Mrs. Morgan, so it will be straight. I do hope that everyone will like what we’ve brought.”
“Quite adequate, I am sure,” said Mrs. Morgan in a stilted voice as she pushed a fold in Father McNulty’s direction. He was talking to Mrs. Kitchener and finding her a most agreeable and sympathetic lady. Mrs. Morgan was most upset. What had come over Robert? Why was he staring at that frightful young woman like that? Everyone in town knew what she was and spoke about it as a “scandal.” She, Jane Morgan, had heard quite sufficient, thank you! The girl had been bad, bad from the very beginning. There had been that schoolmaster when she had been only sixteen, in Miss Chiltenham’s School, right here in Hambledon. (Jane had heard that story but yesterday.) The schoolmaster had left under hushed and furtive circumstances, but the girl had remained serenely at school! Money! It always came down to that. The Heger money; it would buy anything, even immunity against the town’s indignation and shame. How brazen she was! To be cohabiting with her dead mother’s husband, in her mother’s own home on that island, flagrantly, without regard for decent Christian public opinion! Shameless, shameless. And here was Marjorie Ferrier, of the Farmington’s of the Main Line in Philadelphia,
the
Farmingtons, the mother of a murderer who had escaped judgment only because he was rich and powerful, and the mother of another son who lived with his dead wife’s daughter, flaunting his sin, his adultery, in the Face of High Heaven! “We don’t understand Marjorie,” some of Jane’s new friends had said with sadness. “Such
a
fine family. But we have heard—mind, it is only gossip, you know—that she actually drove poor gentle, sweet, kind Adrian to his death with her coldness and hardheartedness. Everyone knew that only Harald mattered to her. Well, it was very dreadful, of course, but then blue blood did run out and become depraved and vicious. The Ferriers were the best example of that. Yes, and that’s why Marjorie cannot only tolerate that Heger hussy but invite her to her house! Perhaps”—soft laughter—“she hopes to persuade her son Harald —that silly painter—to marry the girl and get her money, too, or something, or at least to stop the scandal.”
Marjorie and Mrs. Kitchener and Maude were spreading the picnic dinner on the table and laying out the silver and napkins and glasses. “Cold lemonade,” said Marjorie, “and an old-fashioned strawberry shrub—dear Maude does like that —and, on ice, beer for the gentlemen.”
“Robert does not drink,” said Jane Morgan. She gave Marjorie a reproving and significant glance. Marjorie smiled. “Perhaps he will make an exception today,” she said in her quiet and lovely voice. Jane gave Robert a quelling look, but he was still staring at that hideous trollop. What was wrong with him? Could it be that he was horrified by her, having confronted Evil for the first time and finding it hypnotizing? Poor innocent boy. She must speak of it delicately tonight. “I like beer,” said Robert, but did not look away from Jenny, who again seemed as far away from this place as the edge of the ivory moon which was peering like a ghost from the sunlit sky.
Can it be that it was only a year ago that Mavis had been here with the family? thought Marjorie. Only a year ago, on such a hot and brilliant and noisy day? She and Jon, with all the other dignitaries of the town, had then sat for the speeches on those broad, chair-filled steps of the City Hall. How beautiful she had looked that day, all gilt and rose and white lace and white parasol and white lace gloves and white silk slippers, laughing as usual, tapping men’s arms coquettishly, and laughing, laughing, laughing, and Jon beside her, constrained and dark and silent and brooding. Everyone seemed turned, on those stairs, toward Mavis, like sunflowers to the sun, eager for the gift of her beauty and her laughter and her hoarse jokes and her affectionate taps and recognition, delighting in her coaxings and cajolings, her joyful teasings, fawning at the very shimmering sight of her, a gold and white rose of a girl, her snowy tulle hat laden with pink flowers and ribbons. Near her, her fatuous uncle had grown crimson with pleasure and love as he watched her, and even Flora, that sallow stick of a woman, had looked maudlin. But, then, so had everyone else—except Jonathan Ferrier. Now all that beauty and lust and life and verve and laughter were closed forever in the black earth, and no one would hear that boisterous laughter again or feel the patting of her hand.
Marjorie sighed. She could not feel sorry that Mavis was dead, she who had been such a plague to the Ferriers and such a calamity. But it was sad when the young died, however wicked they were, and heartless and grasping and lying. Hambledon was less bright since Mavis’ death, even though it had been a false and brassy brightness.
Jonathan was looking at Jenny’s hand lying near him on the table. She had made no effort to help his mother, and he was contemptuous and angry, for he could not know that Jenny was shy to the point of agony. But he looked at her hand, long, slender, tinted by the sun to a golden color. And then he wanted to press his own hand hard on hers, to press it so strongly that his flesh, and hers, became one flesh, moving together, inseparable. Such a stricken hunger for this consummation sprang up in him that he again stiffened with real physical pain, and stunning disgust at himself, and new hatred for the girl. So, she could entice him, too, could she? Compared with her, Mavis had been an innocent schoolgirl, an amateur. Was she laughing at him secretly, knowing that wild impulse in him? He looked at her white profile, so stern and remote, and he thought he saw a satisfied glint in the corner of her eye. She was not yet twenty-one, but she was already lewd and lascivious and without shame, already practiced. He looked at that quiet hand and did not see its vulnerability, its helplessness.
Why doesn’t Dr. Morgan look at me? Maude Kitchener was thinking. Why does he stare at Jenny Heger that way? She isn’t even pretty, quite plain, to be sure. So big, so pale, and so cold. She, Maude, had not believed a single word said about Jenny since she had been almost a child, nor had Sue Kitchener, for there was really nothing wrong to believe. Jenny had always been a retiring girl, turning miserably red if someone spoke to her unexpectedly, and her clothing awful and thick and unstylish, but a wonderful scholar, winning all the prizes at school. Maude, of the gentle heart, had tried to be a friend to that reserved and silent girl, and Jenny had been diffidently grateful at first but then had seemed to find all social intercourse painful in the extreme, and so had frightened off Maude and some of the other girls who might have been her friends. Poor Jenny. But why was that wonderful young Dr. Morgan staring at her so and ignoring herself?
Robert was thinking quite mawkishly, “Why, she is alabaster and fire!” He was taken by the thought, repeated it to himself with intense pleasure and sentimentality. Alabaster and fire. That described Jenny, his Jenny, his beautiful alien Jenny, like a classic statue in the midst of all this hot and blazing hubbub, concerned with things not of this world. She finally felt his staring and looked up at him and saw his kind blue eyes, and she blushed, tried to smile and could make only a grimace.
Mrs. Kitchener thought: How lovely it is when dear friends get together like this! Everyone is so happy and at ease, even that poor young Jenny. Sue was so gleeful at this thought that she smiled at her husband, beside her, and pressed his warm plump hand, and was pressed affectionately in return. Lovely, lovely world, sweet world, thought Sue.
How sorrowful it is that men cannot gather together, even on so innocent an occasion as this, without undercurrents of darkness, malice, hatred and bitter hearing and misunderstanding, thought the young priest, whose wise eyes had seen everything.
“We might as well have our dinner now,” said Marjorie, “before all those awful speeches begin.”
The German Brass Band sprang violently into “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!” For the mayor, Emil Schuman, was greeting fresh arrivals on the steps, ladies with big hats and parasols. There was Louis Hedler and Humphrey Bedloe and other members of the staff of the two hospitals, and several clergymen, and Colonel Jeremiah Hadley, late of the Grand Army of the Republic, sixty and gray but tall and stately in his Union blue and medals. He bowed to the ladies, and was seated next to the Senator and his sister, and then folded his military arms and looked at the veterans across the square from him. His severe face changed and he dropped his head for a moment.
“I’ve heard,” said Jane Morgan, giving Marjorie her usual cold and knowing look, “that there is a much more refined gathering today in the park near the river, without all this noise and these howling children and the more vulgar classes.”
“Yes,” said Marjorie, laying the warm rolls on a silver dish. “But this is the traditional place and the traditional celebration. We in Hambledon have been meeting here for this picnic every year, from far back before the Civil War, ever since Hambledon was a village and not a town. You will notice that Senator Campion is here, and the mayor, and other important people of Hambledon, though I did hear a rumor they are joining the others near the river after the speeches.”
“And no wonder,” said Jane Morgan. “Such a fearful noise! And that horrible band! Why can’t it be quiet even for a minute?” The band was once again begging the noisy mob if “there are any more home like you?” and in falsetto the flutes were replying that indeed “there are quite a few, kind sir!” Firecrackers affirmed this in violent chorus.
Last year I was sitting on those stairs with Mavis, Jonathan was thinking. I was one of the town’s honored “dignitaries.” Today I am the pariah, the outcast, the nobody, the despised and the rejected. A man may be innocent until he is proved guilty, but no one seems to have taken that seriously at any time. Mavis. He glanced at the City Hall steps and could see Mavis there among all that colorful gathering, shining and sparkling and laughing, nodding gaily to admirers, unfolding her white lace fan, laughing naughtily behind it while her small blue eyes twinkled and flirted. She had ignored him, as she always ignored him, but when her glance did touch him, it became full of ridicule and contempt and genuine dislike. It never failed to chill him, that glance, however much he detested her and knew her for what she was. It did not abash or cow or sadden him. It was just that he remembered his wasted years with Mavis, and his appalling former infatuation for her, his dismal love and passion, his hopes, his longings.
Today, he did not feel his old hatred for his dead wife. He felt only miserable regret that he had endured those years in proud silence. Pride. Was it pride to keep silent and to do nothing? If he had done—something—Mavis might be alive, not in his house but somewhere else, and he would not be here now, still suspected of an enormous crime. He might even have divorced her. He had thought of that very often during the years with Mavis—but on what grounds? Or, had he been afraid of scandal? I was a coward, he thought. What was it that damned priest said to me one day? “Jon, you are a brave man, but you are not a courageous one. I remember an old poem—can’t think of the author: ‘Courage is the price that life demands for granting peace. The soul that knows it not knows no release—from little things.’ “
Perhaps he was right, thought Jonathan with anger. I probably never did have much courage, and that’s a hell of a thing to recognize when you are thirty-five and your life is more than half over! I’ve backed away from things all my life, such as conspiring with my father that he was an intellectual man, and conspiring with him that my mother was brutal and insensitive—and all the other things that no man of courage would have endured for a second.
The roaring of the crowd, the bursting explosions, the band—all the screaming and singing and laughing—disappeared from his consciousness, and he was again in the courtroom, before the judge and the jury, listening to the prosecuting attorney, seeing the dull averted faces, the harsh and cunning faces, against a background of grimy snow hissing against the dirty windows. He had not been afraid of any of them and had even smiled grimly at the prosecuting attorney’s denunciation of him as a “ruthless, cruel, bloody-handed murderer of his young and beautiful wife and his unborn child. A calculating, callous murderer! Gentlemen, shall this man go free, and live, with that blameless blood on his hands? Dare you to dismiss him to laugh at you and our Great, Noble, Free American Justice?”
No, he had not been afraid.
I
should have been afraid, he thought now. I should have been scared out of my wits. Had I lacked fear because I heartily believed that innocence would never suffer unjust punishment? I’ve called others naive. I was the naive one. This is a disastrous world. I always knew it was, even when I was a child, yet I did not believe it until now.
He looked at his mother, so smiling, so calm and attentive to her guests, so proud and graceful, and he saw her sick paleness, the shadows under her eyes, the lines of patient pain about her patrician mouth. He was ashamed. He had no words to say to her to ask her forgiveness. He had never listened to her, rejecting her even before she spoke, yet she had always been right. Had her very rightness antagonized him, her very serene acceptance of the enigma of living—which he had found it impossible to accept, though he was not blind and not stupid?
I am my father’s son also, he thought with scorn. I had to have my shiny little playthings too, my sweet little delusions. I am pretty much of a mess.
The band crashed into “Hail, Columbia, Happy Land!” and the crowd rose in a mass of hot color and cheered and sang lustily and waved small flags and saluted and lit fresh firecrackers, and the sun beat down and all the air was heavy with the smell of food and beer and dust and crushed grass and gunpowder.