| CHAPTER VIII. CONCERNING A RECEPTION
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It was three years later. Nothing had changed very much though one important
event had taken place. Jane's mother, Mrs. Atkinson, had died. For a year or
so, naturally, life had been more quiet at the big house in Albert Avenue, Stockton.
The consequence of this had been that Jane had taken to reading again and that
her social life had developed along new lines. She had formed friendships or
rather, friendships previously formed had been drawn closer. Her more intimate
circle consisted of two men and one woman. The woman was Ann Aikins, her college
chum, wife of Dr. Aikins who held the important position of medical superintendent
at the mental hospital. The men were Stephen Carter and "young" Dr. Henderson.
Such social activities as great receptions had been resumed only recently; though the Forrests had for some time been going out again.
It was the end of October, a frosty evening. The whole house was brilliantly lighted. In the dining room, three maids in white aprons and white caps on their heads were busy, assisted by Mlle. Lefèvre, the rather homely French governess. The child, Norah, had been put to bed rather early in order that the governess might be free.
Jane, looking superb in a black evening gown, no longer embarrassed by it décolletage, was going through the four rooms which had been prepared for the function in order to see that everything was as she wished it to be. The bell rang; and there was a commotion in the dining room. One of the maids hurried to the door.
The guest was Stephen Carter. To Jane, he was still as astonishing and, in a way, captivating as he had been to her five years ago; but she could not have said in just what his attraction for her consisted. He treated her as if she were a mere child; but then, that was one of his poses with all younger people. He himself was fully fifty by now.
"Well, well," he said as he entered from the cloak room, in an evening suit which somehow looked crushed and neglected on his huge body. "And how's the little girl to-night? It's cold outside. Some
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fool or other has had the impertinence of prophesying snow before the end of the month. It gives one rheumatic twinges merely to think of it. It's all nonsense anyway. Nobody knows any more about it than anyone else. Why talk about it and make people shiver? The husband at home?" All this was said in his uniform rumble of speech, without punctuation marks.
Jane smiled. "Not yet," she said. "He went out after dressing. He'll be here directly, though, I suppose."
"I wanted to see him for a moment. I want to sell that old boat of mine and get a more up-to-date outfit; he was trying to find me a buyer. But I've had an offer from another quarter."
Jane raised a reproachful finger. "You want to make a convenience of my house for the transaction of business!" she said with a smile.
The bell rang again.
"No," Stephen Carter said. "I won't if I mustn't. All Jim needs to do is wink at me. You tip him off."
Jane laughed; three ladies were following one of the maids upstairs to get rid of their wraps.
"I'll do nothing of the kind," she said. "I don't approve of this new venture of Jim's into the automobile business." For Jim had recently opened a show-room on Dukes Avenue, saying that, if ever "the real-estate game" was played out, the automobile business would be something to fall back on. It might be well to have "two irons in the fire."
"Don't you?" Stephen Carter asked. "There's a future in it."
The Moffat ladies came down from upstairs; the two daughters were distinctly "modern"; they were trying to coax their father into permitting them to learn a trade or to enter a business school.
Jane went to meet them. "Mr. Carter tells me it is cold outside," she said. "Come to the fire." For in the huge fire-place large sticks of oak-wood were burning with a cheerful blaze.
They sat down on the chesterfield facing the fire; and Stephen
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Carter joined them in order to tease them with their emancipated tendencies. Everybody liked him, just as everybody detested his younger brother Leslie.
Jane was kept busy receiving. The room began to fill; there were now two maids at the door, receiving the wraps of all the older ladies, while the men were shown into the cloak room, and the young girls ran upstairs.
Suddenly, right after a crowd of others, Jim entered briskly and caught his wife's eye, stopping at the door to the cloak room, he was no longer so slender as he had been five or six years ago when Jane had first met him; all his development had been in width; he was still well-built; but his was a frame which now called for the epithet "powerful".
Jane went over to where he stood without taking off his coat.
"Carter here?" he asked. "Uncle Carter?"
Jane nodded distantly.
"Good," he said. "There's a fellow from Winnipeg after him for his car." And he turned to divest himself of his coat.
The door went again. This time it was old Mrs. Henderson, the mother of the surgeon. Jane, catching sight of her as she was greeting a number of young men who had arrived together, left them and went to meet her at the door, for she was almost an invalid. Jane took her arm. It was a great compliment to the house that the old lady came to attend this reception. Jane half suspected that it was her son's doing. She led her to a seat near the fire, one of the maid's pushing an arm-chair into position for her. It was thus that she happened to over-hear an exchange of question and answer between Stephen Carter and Jim.
Stephen had risen. "Say Forrest, the lady of the house doesn't approve of talking business after hours. If it's all right, just wink." He was looking at Jane who could not help smiling.
But Jim did not merely wink. He spoke tersely, and with no subdued voice. "You bet. The deal's closed. I've found a fish."
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That was all. Jane thought it was enough. She resented vulgarity at any time. She resented the transaction of business at her house. The two things combined were next to unbearable. She wondered whether Mrs. Henderson had heard.
As she returned to her place near the door, the old doctor was just coming from the cloak room. He was a very small man, white-haired, and white-moustached, but of almost martial bearing; he liked to be addressed as colonel; for he had served with distinction during the Saskatchewan rebellion. He was forever stroking the bristling moustache which divided his ruddy and laughing face smartly. He also liked to allude to the wound which he had received while fighting traitors.
Jim joined his wife. The doctor bowed, clicking his heels together.
"Well," he said almost boisterously, "here's young folks, eh?" And with a heartiness which he considered the privilege of his age he took Jane's hand with his right while with his left he gripped Jim's. "Ah!" he added, "your legs don't bother you yet when foul weather's coming. But that old hole of mine..." And, nodding and laughing, he went on to the hearth.
The Aikins came next. Dr. Aikins, tall distinguished-looking, reserved, made his bow. Mrs. Aikins, also tall and exceedingly good-looking, in a florid, massive way, always reminded Jane of her own mother though there was no actual resemblance between them. The two young women kissed.
Behind them, young Dr. Henderson entered unobtrusively; he was small, very elegantly dressed, and self-effacing in his manner; his face always bore an expression of subdued, dreamy melancholy, even when he smiled. He nodded to Jim and shook hands with Jane. He liked to come to the house but would have preferred to find no company there; yet he came anyway; and Jane knew that there was a certain amount of talk about his assiduity. Whenever he found a crowd at her house, he always slipped away, after awhile, into Jane's library
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where he engaged in discussions, mostly of a literary cast, with one or two others who were attracted by him. The majority thought him dull even though his reputation as a surgeon was beginning to be Dominion-wide.
Still others came. It almost seemed as if the professions arrived in streaks; for now one lawyer followed the other. Then the arrivals ceased, and Jane moved away from the door; Jim went on his private or, as Jane, with a feeling of irritation, surmised, on his business errands.
Jane went from group to group. She prided herself on marshalling her guests in a way which induced and enabled them to provide their own entertainment.
Then she looked into the "music room". There, Mrs. Aikins was sitting at the grand piano, playing in the way of a virtuoso, without in the least having to withdraw from the conversation. Old Dr. Henderson and Stephen Carter were with her. It was one of their pastimes at such social functions to pay court to this magnificent blonde, in an old-fashioned way, with the gallantry of an age gone-by. Just now they were imploring her to sing. She, without taking her bejewelled hands off the keys but laughingly looking up at them, shook her head, displaying her full, soft throat and jingling the pearl pendants in her ears which set off the proud, high colouring of her face.
As Jane looked in, Dr. Henderson bowed and called to her, laughing as always, "Come in, Mrs. Forrest. We two old courtiers need two queens, and we have only one. There will be blood-shed before long."
Jane laughed happily and nodded to Ann Aikins who thoroughly enjoyed herself. "I can't," she answered. "Duty calls."
She turned to the library but found it empty. She reversed her course and, stopping here and there and going on again, she reached, within half an hour or so, the dining room where there seemed to be only men. Jim was with them, pouring liqueurs. Young Dr. Henderson was just tossing off a glass which he put down when he saw her, as if
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embarrassed. She wondered for a moment. But others claimed her.
Then, the hours speeding, it was time to see to the refreshments.
Jane returned to the dining room where the table was already covered with cups and saucers. In the corner, around a dumb-waiter, a small group of men were still sitting and drinking, though perhaps the drinks were just a link in a fragmentary conversation. She took note of the fact that neither Jim nor young Dr. Henderson were among them. It struck her as strange that these two who were so unlike each other should be associated by her in even an observation of a mere fact. A dim suspicion awoke in the background of her mind; but she had no time just now to follow it up. She went on into the kitchen to see that everything was ready. It was.
For the next half hour she was busy pouring tea, assisted by her maids and Ann Aikins who came over to her side. As they worked, remarks were exchanged between the two friends from time to time.
"You look gorgeous to-night, Ann," Jane said.
Ann flashed a smile at her. "My dear Jane, I wish I had your complexion. I'm all right by lamp light, of course. But in daytime and in the open air! The least little wind makes me look like a lobster. That's where you brunettes have it all over us blondes."
"You've the colour of perfect health."
"I could wish for a touch of consumption, then."
"My dear..."
"Oh, if you knew! You never look flushed! Just imagine me as the hostess of an affair like this! I'd get all excited. You're cool as a cucumber. One might think that you like it. Of course, I like it myself when I'm a guest as to-night. But at my own place! God forbid. Tell the truth, now; at bottom you do like it, don't you, dear?"
Jane laughed. "Well, of course. Why should I do it?"
Ann laughed in turn. "I've often wondered. To listen to most women, they hate it and do it nevertheless. It must be the few who are like you who keep society going."
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Jane shrugged her shoulders. And, with a sudden change in her tone, she said, "What else is there?"
Ann looked up. The words seemed pregnant, not only with meaning, but with a confidence subtly conveyed and all the more revealing as it was given at the present moment when the lightest of all light talk seemed appropriate. "You don't mean to say..." She caught a tremour in Jane's eyes as she gazed at her briefly but with a searching scrutiny. "Well, you astonish me, dear. I'd never have thought it. But men are all alike, I suppose. I have a specimen myself." She had lowered her voice to a mere whisper without extinguishing the fixed smile on her face.
"You?" Jane seemed speechless.
Ann laughed, flashing splendid teeth.
To see them, one would have thought them engaged in the exchange of almost girlish secrets.
Then, within half an hour, the first of the guests took their leave. Around the fire-place a circle of intimates gathered; another knot formed as before in the dining room; and at the foot of the stairway there was a third group, assembled about the younger Miss Moffat, Selina, who sat throning on the sixth or seventh step. She was lively and good-looking, in contrast to her older sister Mary who had a moustache which grew from moles on her lip and prominent teeth which slanted outward; no wonder that the younger girl was also good-natured while her sister was cynical and bitter: emancipation was to her no more than a game to bait her admirers with; to Mary, it was a fight for something to live for. Yet even Mary held on to young Mr. Craig, the youngest lawyer of the city in whom she claimed almost proprietary rights while he made secretly eyes at Selina who laughed at him but kept him "on her string".
Jane watched all these things; and her observations gave her pleasure, the same sort of pleasure which she had once more begun to find in books. When she was critically inclined, she reflected somewhat
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bitterly that it was the only sort of pleasure allowed to her hence-forth. Her own, personal life had proved an insipid draught to eager lips. Yet, had she a right to complain? The draught might have been bitter instead of insipid; but it was disappointing not to find it sweet.
The centre of the intimates about the fire-place, sitting in the middle of the great chesterfield, was as usual "uncle" Carter engaged in his favourite pastime -"dispensing oracles" as the young scalawags called it who envied him his enormous, though entirely Platonic success with the younger women; perhaps this success was so great because he never aimed at making it anything else. The youngest girls frankly said that they adored him, in spite of his fifty years.
"Ah," he was saying to Ann Aikins as Jane approached from behind, speaking in his usual, rapid, and unemphatic way, "we all like to be interesting, my dear. First we fight for the best-looking and most successful young man; and when we've hooked him, we try to make out that, after all, he isn't what he was cracked up to be. Excuse the slang; it hits the nail on the head. You may say what you like, nothing is quite so welcome to us as the generally accepted opinion that we droop under a secret sorrow. If we don't have one, the next best thing is to invent one." Stephen Carter had many privileges in this superficially brilliant but essentially hollow society. He could say almost anything without offending. He provided the thrills. He even made capital out of his ugliness.
Everybody laughed. Jane, whose eye was on Ann, thought that her laugh was not entirely natural. Yet she smiled at her friend whose beauty, with its high colouring, had always seemed especially captivating to her.
She smiled at everybody except at Stephen Carter himself behind whom she stood. These people she could leave to themselves. A thought of young Dr. Henderson flashed through her mind; for she had not seen him for some time. She went into the drawing room, thinking he might
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be in the library where he often retired by himself. In fact, he was there; but he was not alone. Jim was with him. The drawing room was empty; so, preparatory to joining the two, she went over to the piano to close it. A peculiar feeling of incongruity impelled her to interfere between these two men, her husband and that friend who had begun to go wherever he expected to meet her: the two had nothing whatever in common; and Jim had often enough said openly that Dr. Henderson bored and even antagonised him. Once he had almost complained of his assiduity in his house. Jane liked him without making the exact shade of her interest in him clear to herself; she would have found it hard to explain; for to the common eye he was indeed somewhat dull. He had no small-talk and no repartee. All the stranger, though, that Jim should have singled him out for a tête-à-tête.
She was on the point of entering the library when Mrs. Moffat appeared from the hall and detained her. Mrs. Moffat was middle-aged, a colourless person with a strangely negative presence. She owed her position of importance in Stockton society entirely to her husband's prominence in its business life. She was serving on a committee of Anglican women appointed to make the arrangements for a bazaar.
"My dear Mrs. Forrest," she said effusively, "let me congratulate you. You are a wonder at this sort of thing. Everybody is having such a good time. My girls adore you and your little affairs. I couldn't keep them away if I tried to."
Jane smiled acknowledgments. "You exaggerate, Mrs. Moffat." By a gesture she invited her guest to be seated in one of the low chairs covered with striped repp and sat down herself.
"Yes," Mrs. Moffat went on, "what I was going to say, my dear..." And she launched into the business of the bazaar for which she had undertaken to enlist Jane's cooperation.
At the very moment of Mrs. Moffat's entrance Jane had overheard a few words of the conversation in the adjoining room; and they had disquieted her. She was fretting to get away from this woman who
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seemed to have been drained of all vitality and originality, without having been filled by the sweetness of mellow wisdom, because throughout her life she had been under the necessity of making friends with everybody in order to support her husband. But she could not affront her. So, while she listened patiently to her explanations, she kept an ear open for the words that drifted across through the open door.
For awhile Jim spoke vividly, punctuating his sentences with the emphasis of the confident salesman. Repeatedly Dr. Henderson tried to protest in his mild, patient way; but Jim swept on. At last he seemed to have finished; for Dr. Henderson took the word. Apparently the position of the two, in the other room, was such that the latter's speech was not obstructed by walls or furniture; for, in spite of the fact that he did not raise his voice, Jane understood every word.
"My dear fellow, I don't deny in the least the utility of a car. I know it would make me independent of trains and livery teams, for unfortunately I cannot refuse to go into distant towns and into the country. If I had my wish, I'd operate nowhere except in my own clinic. I also share your belief in the future of the automobile. But I am not mechanically inclined; personally I dislike that way of travelling; I am slow to make up my mind; and I simply refuse to be stampeded into this thing to which I shall probably have to come one day of my own accord."
In her impatience to terminate the interview with Mrs. Moffat Jane agreed to everything her interlocutor proposed; she promised help beyond her inclination and breathed more freely when Mrs. Moffat rose. But again, she could not offend her by not going with her into the hall. As she did so, she saw that the company was breaking up. Dr. Henderson himself, followed by an eager and almost subservient Jim, was issuing from the library; his grey, somewhat weary countenance lighting up at her sight.
For fifteen minutes or so she stood in the centre of the room to
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receive the compliments of her departing guests. At the door, the maids were helping the ladies into their wraps. Stephen Carter came up to her.
"Well," he said in a tone as if he were good-naturedly scolding a child, "the bird's had another one of her feasts of vanity. She has done well. The world is singing her praises. But as usual she has sadly neglected Uncle Carter."
Jane laughed.
Five minutes later she and Jim were alone.
Jim, as always after a successful social affair, felt elated and inclined to linger in talk. He did not notice Jane's sombre anger.
Then, when he did notice it, he asked with a laugh, "What's eating you?"
She shrugged her shoulders and, head raised high, passed him to give a few last instructions to the servants. When she returned, she stopped in the door of the dining room and, her temper getting the better of her, she spoke to him where she stood in front of the fire-place, a cigarette hanging from his lips.
"I must say, it is a great scheme to invite guests for an evening's entertainment and then to corner them in order to do business."
It was not so much what she said as the tone in which it was said, pregnant with contempt, which nettled Jim out of his complacency. Later, when he thought of it, he came to consider this evening as marking the nadir of their relationship. He took the cigarette from between his lips, flung it into the fire, turning his back to her, and said, "Is it?"
"Yes," Jane went on with a vibrant voice. "It resembles baiting a trap."
"Nice figure of speech to use."
"Never mind the figure of speech. I am concerned with your action. That action is vulgar. It is unpardonable; I will not tolerate it in my house."
"Your house? Seems to me it's mine as well as yours. To say the
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least."
"A gentleman preserves at least the fiction that his house is first of all the house of his wife."
Jim laughed. "I lay no claim to being a gentleman. I am a salesman. It's nonsense to talk of gentlemen in this country. At any rate, we Forrests do not come from remittance stock."
"Your brother's a gentleman, in the new-world sense."
"Is he? I have heard that at one time he was not uninterested in you. I might just as well tell you that I'm aware of the fact that there are others."
"And you don't disdain to utilise the interest they take in your wife to further your business interests."
"I don't," Jim said so coolly that it took her breath away. With a sudden motion he went on. "Let's have this out. We've been married for five years now; and it seems you don't see things in the right perspective yet. Sit down. Sit down." And he dropped into the chesterfield.
"I prefer to stand," Jane said.
He waved an indulgent arm , folded knee over knee, and clasped his hands about the upper one. "I'm a business man," he said; "first, last, and all the time. I mean one day to die a millionaire. From the gait at which you are going it seems to me you should be the last one to despise money. I can assure you I don't. I am quite willing to spend, though; so long as spending can be considered as an investment. These little social affairs of yours don't mean anything to me but opportunities. They must pay. I am glad to say, they are paying. You might just as well understand that I am I. They gave me a nickname at school. I wonder whether you know it?" He looked up, laughing complacently. And, as she did not move, he went on, "They called me 'I Myself'. It won't help you any to oppose me or to make scenes about it. I'll go a little further in frankness in order to make my position quite clear. These social affairs, considered as business opportunities,
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are exactly what I married for. You don't think me fool enough to marry for sentimentalities, do you? To tie to myself an unprofitable bill of expense?"
Jane stood in marble pallour. An icy hand seemed to grip her heart. For a moment she sought for a thunderbolt in her quiver to annihilate this man who had once had the power to make her weak. She found none. A feeling of desperate impotence, yes, of sudden disaster, seized her. The occasion of this quarrel was forgotten; a more important point was at issue. The present could not be justified; but so far it had admitted of explanation since it had had a root in the past. Then, as if annihilated herself, she said almost as a supplicant, "I thought, Jim, you had married me because you were in love."
He did not answer at once but looked at her. Various thoughts flashed through his mind. 'He had her where he wanted her.' She was thoroughly humiliated. Was it wise not to conciliate her? But a cynical memory emerged. At college he had had a chum, strangely gifted in a purely intellectual way; otherwise a slave to depravity. This young man had once quoted to him from a book written by a man whom he had called a great philosopher. "When you go to a woman, take your whip along." Jane had been defiant; by being brutal he had reduced her to compliance. So it was right that women respond to brutality. With a pleasurable complacency - for at bottom he wanted to conciliate her because he admired her - he tried to feel that this was a mere game to him. He yielded to the temptation to try the maxim out still further. "To judge by your actions of six years ago," he said slowly, "it was rather you who were in love with me."
Jane had stood slightly bent forward, her eyes fastened on his. She straightened as if the lash of a whip had hit her in her face. A cry of distress came from her lips. Then she turned and fled upstairs, without another word.
Jim looked after her, shaken in his assurance. He rose quickly, went through the dining room into the kitchen, saw that the maids
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had gone upstairs, returned into the hall, extinguished the downstairs lights by using the master switch, and slowly followed his wife. He had gone too far; he must reconcile her; perhaps he would have to retract.
But the door of her bed-room was locked; she did not answer his knock. Nor
did she, next morning, appear at the breakfast table.
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