What Will People Say? A Novel
robe of sacrifice. They whispered about her and called her "Mrs. Enslee"
with immemorial mischief; but it was still Persis Cabot that slipped
from the house and met Willie, still a bachelor. They hurried into the
limousine and sped to that clandestine meeting in the hotel suite where
they were to tarry till the morrow. And then the yacht was to take them
on a long cruise across an ocean of bliss to the unknown continent
beyond the honeymoon.
And now the crowdless silence seemed to ring in her ears. She had heard
so much noise and suffered so many stares and vibrated to so many
excitements that the abrupt hush left her dizzy as on the edge of an
unexpected abyss. It was like one of Beethoven's symphonies, where sound
is piled on sound and speed on speed till the storm sweeps toward an
intolerable climax, and just as the thunder and the lightning are to
come there is instead a complete hush; and then a little oboe voice
twanging.
She had been swept and spun in a maelstrom, an eternal crash! crash!
crash! Then suddenly she was alone in a room with this little man. She
heard the thud of the door like a coffin lid. She heard the lock click;
she saw him peering at her with a fox-like slyness. He was whipping off
his coat and waistcoat and fumbling at his scarf. And his words were in
his whining, oboe voice:
"Well, that's over. And, thank God, I can get out of this damned collar
before it chokes me!"
That was his first comment on their solitude! But it was better than the
love speeches he tried to make next.
She sank into a chair; but he was wrapping his arms about her. He was
trying to say pretty things, and making a complete fiasco. He was
kissing her with ownership, and she dared not turn her lips from his,
though all her soul was averted.
He was tugging at her hatpins and pulling her hair naggingly. She rose,
controlling her impatience, and spoke with a meekness that amazed her:
"Nichette is there. She will--help me."
He grinned peevishly.
"Nichette, eh? I thought we were to be alone--for once? Well, send her
away--as soon as you can."
He spoke already with command, and she said, with that sick meekness:
"All right, Willie."
She slunk away and was afraid to meet the eyes of Nichette. And even
Nichette wept at her ministrations. And then she sent Nichette away. At
the door Nichette paused to stare through eyes of water, then ran back
and clasped Persis and kissed her, and ran out and closed the door.
And Persis waited for her husband. Her thoughts were bitter. She was
utterly ashamed. It was not the beautiful shame of a bride whose lover
knocks at her door. She was understanding her bargain. She had kept
herself for Willie Enslee. She had fought off lovers and love and fled
from her own heart that she might be worthy of Willie Enslee and his
money! Her body was no longer a shrine. She had rented it to the highest
bidder. And the tenant had arrived.
CHAPTER LI
As Forbes had once surveyed the tide of Fifth Avenue from the upper deck
of a motor-bus, so now, from a sky-scraping ship he watched the thronged
traffic along the spacious avenue of the Hudson River and the broad
plaza of the bay.
Among the tugs, noisy and rowdy as newsboys, the waddling ferry-boats,
the barges loaded with refuse or freight-trains, the passenger-boats and
excursion-boats, and the merchantmen from many ports, a few yachts
picked their way superciliously, their bowsprits like upturned noses,
their trim white flanks like skirts drawn aside.
Among these yachts, though Forbes was unaware of it, was the _Isolde_,
known to those who know such things as a ridiculously luxurious craft, a
floating residence. Persis had christened the yacht at Willie's request,
and he had accepted the name as a good omen, since he said: "I always
have a perfect sleep when _Isolde_ is under way."
Persis, herself now an Isolde wedded to one man and loving another,
passed the famous sky-line which seemed to continue another Palisades,
only fantastically carved and honeycombed with windows. When these
cliffs of human fashioning were pulled backward, there was a space of
dancing water, and then Governor's Island, with its moldy old mouse-trap
of a fort.
Never dreaming that Forbes was on the liner that had gone down the bay a
few moments before, Persis fastened her binocular on the island and
tried to pick him out from among the men whom distance rendered
lilliputian. She selected some vague promenader and sent him her
blessings. If he ever received them he never knew whence they came.
Forbes was groping toward her in thought like a wireless telegrapher
trying to reach another and unable to come to accord. Forbes was
entering upon the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, and Persis was
embarking on another sea equally new to her, for marriage is a kind of
ocean to a woman. Maidens struggle toward it and consecrate themselves
to it from far inland; they come forth upon the roaring wonder of its
cathedral music; the surf flings white flowers at their feet. They
venture farther and encounter the first shocks of the breakers, and
thereafter the sea lies vast and monotonous with happiness or grief and
their interchange. But the prosperity of the voyage is less from without
than from within the boat. Persis was not lucky in the captain she had
shipped with.
To-day's Persis on the boat was altogether another woman from
yesterday's Persis. The toil and fever of preparation, the bacchantic
orgies of purchase, the dressing up, the celebration of the
festival--these were the joys of the wedding to her, and she had drained
them to the full. They left her exhausted and sated. The anticipation
was over, the realization begun.
In some wiser communities the bride and groom separate for a day or two
after the ceremony. But Persis had no such breathing-space. Persis was
delivered to Willie Enslee in a state of fagged-out nerves, muscles, and
brain. To him, however, the weeks of preparation had been a mere
annoyance, a postponement, a prelude too long, too ornate. And when at
last the prize was his he found the fact almost intolerably beautiful.
He possessed Persis Enslee! She had no longer even a name of her own.
Miss Cabot had been merged into the Enslee Estates.
One does not expect to-day the childlike innocence that was revealed or
pretended by the brides of other years. Nowadays even their mothers
"tell them things." And Willie knew that Persis was neither ignorant
nor ingenuous. Her gossip, the scandal she knew, the books and plays she
discussed, her sophisticated attitude toward people and life had long
ago proved that, whatever she might be, she was not without knowledge.
She knew as much as Mildred Tait, and her talk was nearly as free, but
always from the cynical, the flippant, or the shocked point of view.
Willie did not expect to initiate an ignoramus into any unheard-of
mysteries. He expected at most a certain modest reluctance and
confusion. He was dumfounded to be met with icy horror and shuddering
recoil. After the first repulse the terror with which she cringed away
from his caresses enhanced her the more.
He imputed it to a native purity. He believed--and it was true--that she
had come through all the years and temptations and the dangerous
environments with her body and her soul somehow protected to this great
event. It was a kind of purity. But not what he thought it.
Persis' creed--if she had thought much about it--would have been the
creed of many a woman: that love sanctifies all that it inspires; and
that unchastity is what Rahel Varnhagen defined it--intercourse without
love, whether legalized or not.
If Persis had married the man she loved, the man whose touch was like a
flame, she would still have been terrified; but love would have hallowed
the conquest, changed fright into ecstasy, and glorified surrender.
Willie's touch had always chilled her clammily. What she saw in his eyes
now offended her utterly, filled her with loathing and with panic as
before a violation. But after this first rebellion she regained control
of her fears and reasoned coldly with herself. When she had said "Yes"
to Willie's courtship, and when she had made her affirmations in the
church, she had given him her I. O. U. She was not one to repudiate a
gambling loss. She forbore resistance, but she could not mimic rapture.
Yet rapture was part of the bargain. Soul and flesh could not pay the
obligation her mind had so lightly incurred.
And now it was Enslee that recoiled, strangely smitten with an awe, a
reverence for her and her integrity. "You are a saint," he murmured, "an
angel, and I am a brute. You are too good, too wonderful!"
Persis was startled at being treated with reverence. It was perhaps the
first time she had ever been held sacred. She accepted this tribute in
lieu of the others, and they left the hotel as they had entered it,
still bachelor and maid, though they wore the same name.
But she was alone upon the ocean now, and she feared her husband more
than before. She found him somewhat ridiculous in his uniform, with his
yachting-cap a trifle top-heavy for his slim skull. Yet he was the
owner; his flag and his club pennant were fluttering aloft. And Persis
felt sure that he had repented of his mercy and was ashamed of his
asceticism.
He ogled her as he paced the unstable deck, and found her more beautiful
than ever, clad in a trim white suit and curled up in her chair like a
purring kitten, the sun sifting over her through the awning like a
golden powder. And he knew that she was his. He paused at her side and
mellowed her cheek, pinched the lobe of her ear, and pursed his lips to
kiss her red lips. She winced, then frowned, and shook her head.
"Why not?" he demanded.
"The crew is watching," she explained. And he retorted:
"They expect us to be a little silly, don't they? They'll think it
stranger if we aren't than if we are, won't they? Even those
Scandinavian sailors are human."
And so--for the sake of the Scandinavians--she accepted his caresses.
It was such a sarcastic parody of her own code that she laughed aloud.
She was good sport enough to laugh at herself when the joke was on her.
But it was bitter laughter; and it ended on the margin of hysteria. She
conquered that--for the sake of the Scandinavians. But she felt
altogether forlorn, miserably cheap, fooled.
That bitterness of hers embittered Enslee. He felt that he was being
made ridiculous in the sight of man and God and himself. He remembered
proverbs about mastership, about women's love of brutality, their
fondness for being overpowered.
He grew fiercely petulant, sardonic, ugly. He whined and swore and
muttered. And, finally, to that mood she yielded, feeling herself
degraded beneath her own contempt.
And now Persis was married and not married. Strange fires were kindled
and left to smolder sullenly. Unsuspected desires were stirred to mutiny
and not quelled. Latent ferocities of passion were wakened to terrify
and torment her. And only now she understood who and what it was she had
married. Only now she realized what it meant to marry without love and
to marry for keeps. The vision of her future was unspeakably hideous.
Her life was already a failure, her career a disaster.
Persis had always loved crowds and the excitement they make. It was only
with Forbes that she had found contentment in dual solitude, in hours of
quiet converse, or in mute communion. Next best to being with him was
being alone, for then she had thoughts of him for company.
Now Forbes was banished from her existence by her own decree. Willie was
to be her life-fellow for all her days and nights, while her youth
perished loveless.
And now once more she pined for crowds. Solitude with Willie was an