Edith Wharton - SSC 10 (21 page)

 
          
“Mrs.
Clingsland? A wrong you did to Mrs. Clingsland?”

 
          
Hitherto
she had lent an inattentive ear to her grandmother’s ramblings; the talk of old
people seemed to be a language hardly worth learning. But it was not always so
with Mrs. Attlee’s. Her activities among the rich had ceased before the first
symptoms of the financial depression; but her tenacious memory was stored with
pictures of the luxurious days of which her granddaughter’s generation, even in
a wider world, knew only by hearsay. Mrs. Attlee had a gift for evoking in a
few words scenes of half-understood opulence and leisure, like a guide leading
a stranger through the gallery of a palace in the twilight, and now and then
lifting a lamp to a shimmering Rembrandt or a jewelled Rubens; and it was
particularly when she mentioned Mrs. Clingsland that Moyra caught these
dazzling glimpses. Mrs. Clingsland had always been something more than a name
to the Attlee family. They knew (though they did not know why) that it was
through her help that Grandmother Attiee had been able, years ago, to buy the
little house at Montclair, with a patch of garden behind it, where, all through
the depression, she had held out, thanks to fortunate investments made on the
advice of Mrs. Clingsland’s great friend, the banker.

 
          
“She
had so many friends, and they were all high-up people, you understand. Many’s
the time she’d say to me: ‘Cora’ (think of the loveliness of her calling me
Cora), ‘Cora, I’m going to buy some Golden Flyer shares on Mr. Stoner’s advice;
Mr. Stoner of the National Union Bank, you know. He’s getting me in on the
ground floor, as they say, and if you want to step in with me, why come along.
There’s nothing too good for you, in my opinion,’ she used to say. And, as it
turned out, those shares have kept their head above water all through the bad
years, and now I think they’ll see me through, and be there when I’m gone, to
help out you children.”

 
          
Today
Moyra Attlee heard the revered name with a new interest. The phrase: “The wrong
I did to Mrs. Clingsland,” had struck through her listlessness, rousing her to
sudden curiosity. What could her grandmother mean by saying she had done a
wrong to the benefactress whose bounties she was never tired of recording?
Moyra believed her grandmother to be a very good woman—certainly she had been
wonderfully generous in all her dealings with her children and grandchildren;
and it seemed incredible that, if there had been one grave lapse in her life,
it should have taken the form of an injury to Mrs. Clingsland. True, whatever
the lapse was, she seemed to have made peace with herself about it; yet it was
clear that its being unconfessed lurked disquietingly in the back of her mind.

 
          
“How
can you say you ever did harm to a friend like Mrs. Clingsland, Gran?”

 
          
Mrs.
Attlee’s eyes grew sharp behind her spectacles, and she fixed them half
distrustfully on the girl’s face. But in a moment she seemed to recover
herself. “Not harm, I don’t say; I’ll never think I harmed her. Bless you, it
wasn’t to harm her I’d ever have lifted a finger. All I wanted was to help. But
when you try to help too many people at once, the devil sometimes takes note of
it. You see,
there’s quotas
nowadays for everything,
doing good included, my darling.”

 
          
Moyra
made an impatient movement. She did not care to hear her grandmother
philosophize. “Well—but you said you did a wrong to Mrs. Clingsland.”

 
          
Mrs.
Attlee’s sharp eyes seemed to draw back behind a mist of age. She sat silent,
her hands lying heavily over one another in their tragic uselessness.

 
          
“What
would
you
have done, I wonder,” she
began suddenly, “if you’d ha’ come in on her that morning, and seen her laying
in her lovely great bed, with the lace a yard deep on the sheets, and her face
buried in the pillows, so I knew she was crying? Would you have opened your bag
same as usual, and got out your cocoanut cream and talcum powder, and the nail
polishers, and all the rest of it, and waited there like a statue till she
turned over to you; or’d you have gone up to her, and turned her softly round,
like you would a baby, and said to her: ‘Now, my dear, I guess you can tell
Cora Attlee what’s the trouble’? Well, that’s what I did, anyhow; and there she
was, with her face streaming with tears, and looking like a martyred saint on
an altar, and when I said to her: ‘Come, now, you tell me, and it’ll help you,’
she just sobbed out: ‘Nothing can ever help me, now I’ve lost it’.”

 
          
“‘Lost
what?’ I said, thinking first of her boy, the Lord help me, though I’d heard
him whistling on the stairs as I went up; but she said: ‘My beauty, Cora—I saw
it suddenly slipping out of the door from me this morning’… Well, at that I had
to laugh, and half angrily too. ‘Your beauty,’ I said to her, ‘and
is
that all? And me that thought it was your husband, or
your son—or your fortune even. If it’s only your beauty, can’t I give it back
to you with these hands of mine? But what are you saying to me about beauty,
with that seraph’s face looking up at me this minute?’ I said to her, for she
angered me as if she’d been blaspheming.”

 
          
“Well,
was it true?” Moyra broke in, impatient and yet curious.

 
          
“True that she’d lost her beauty?”
Mrs. Attlee paused to
consider. “Do you know how it is, sometimes when you’re doing a bit of fine
darning, sitting by the window in the afternoon; and one minute it’s full
daylight, and your needle seems to find the way of itself; and the next minute
you say: ‘Is it my eyes?’ because the work seems blurred; and presently you see
it’s the daylight going, stealing away, soft-like, from your corner, though
there’s plenty left overhead. Well—it was that way with her…”

 
          
But
Moyra had never done fine darning, or strained her eyes in fading light, and
she intervened again, more impatiently: “Well, what did she do?”

 
          
Mrs.
Attlee once more reflected. “Why, she made me tell her every morning that it
wasn’t true; and every morning she believed me a little less. And she asked
everybody in the house, beginning with her husband, poor man—him so bewildered
when you asked him anything outside of his business, or his club or his horses,
and never noticing any difference in her looks since the day he’d led her home
as his bride, twenty years before, maybe…

 
          
“But
there—nothing he could have said, if he’d had the wit to say it, would have
made any difference. From the day she saw the first little line around her eyes
she thought of herself as an old woman, and the thought never left her for more
than a few minutes at a time. Oh, when she was dressed up, and laughing, and
receiving company; then I don’t say the faith in her beauty wouldn’t come back
to her, and go to her head like champagne; but it wore off quicker than
champagne, and I’ve seen her run upstairs with the foot of a girl, and then,
before she’d tossed off her finery, sit down in a heap in front of one of her
big looking-glasses—it was looking-glasses everywhere in her room—and stare and
stare till the tears ran down over her powder.”

 
          
“Oh,
well, I suppose it’s always hateful growing old,” said Moyra, her indifference
returning.

 
          
Mrs.
Attlee smiled retrospectively.
“How can I say that, when my
own old age has been made so peaceful by all her goodness to me?”

 
          
Moyra
stood up with a shrug. “And yet you tell me you acted wrong to her. How am I to
know what you mean?”

 
          
Her
grandmother made no answer. She closed her eyes, and leaned her head against
the little cushion behind her neck. Her lips seemed to murmur, but no words
came. Moyra reflected that she was probably falling asleep, and that when she
woke she would not remember what she had been about to reveal.

 
          
“It’s
not much fun sitting here all this time, if you can’t even keep awake long
enough to tell me what you mean about Mrs. Clingsland,” she grumbled.

 
          
Mrs.
Attiee roused herself with a start.

 
          
  

 
          
Well
(she began) you know what happened in the war—I mean, the way all the fine
ladies, and the poor shabby ones too, took to running to the mediums and the
clairvoyants,
or whatever the stylish
folk call ’em. The women had to have news of their men; and they were made to
pay high enough for it… Oh, the stories I used to hear—and the price paid
wasn’t only money, either! There was a fair lot of swindlers and blackmailers
in the business, there was. I’d sooner have trusted a gypsy at a fair… But the
women just
had
to go to them.

 
          
Well,
my dear, I’d always had a way of seeing things; from the cradle, even. I don’t
mean reading the tea-leaves, or dealing the cards; that’s for the kitchen. No,
no; I mean, feeling there’s things about you, behind you, whispering over your
shoulder… Once my mother, on the
Connemara
hills, saw the leprechauns at dusk; and she said they smelt fine and high, too…
Well, when I used to go from one grand house to another, to give my massage and
face-treatment, I got more and more sorry for those poor wretches that the
sooth-saying swindlers were dragging the money out of for a pack of lies; and
one day I couldn’t stand it any longer, and though I knew the Church was
against it, when I saw one lady nearly crazy, because for months she’d had no
news of her boy at the front, I said to her: “If you’ll come over to my place
tomorrow, I might have a word for you.” And the wonder of it was that I
had!
For that night I dreamt a message
came saying there was good news for her, and the next day, sure enough, she had
a cable, telling her her son had escaped from a German camp…

 
          
After
that the ladies came in flocks—in flocks fairly… You’re too young to remember,
child; but your mother could tell you. Only she wouldn’t, because after a bit
the priest got wind of it, and then it had to stop … so she won’t even talk of
it any more. But I always said: How could I help it?
For I
did
see things, and hear things, at that
time…
And of course the ladies were supposed to come just for the
face-treatment … and was I to blame if I kept hearing those messages for them,
poor souls, or seeing things they wanted me to see?

 
          
It’s
no matter now, for I made it all straight with Father Divott years ago; and now
nobody comes after me any more, as you can see for yourself. And all I ask is
to be left alone in my chair…

 
          
But
with Mrs. Clingsland—well, that was different. To begin with, she was the
patient I liked best. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for you, if ever for a
minute you could get her to stop thinking of herself … and that’s saying a good
deal, for a rich lady. Money’s
an armour
, you see; and
there’s few cracks in it. But Mrs. Clingsland was a loving nature, if only
anybody’d shown her how to love… Oh, dear, and wouldn’t she have been surprised
if you’d told her that! Her that thought she was living up to her chin in love
and love-making. But as soon as the lines began to come about her eyes, she
didn’t believe in it any more. And she had to be always hunting for new people
to tell her she was as beautiful as ever; because she wore the others out,
forever asking them: “Don’t you think I’m beginning to go off a little?”—till
finally fewer and fewer came to the house, and as far as a poor masseuse like
me can judge, I didn’t much fancy the looks of those that did; and I saw Mr.
Clingsland didn’t either.

 
          
But
there
was the children
, you’ll say. I know, I know!
And she did love her children in a way; only it wasn’t their way. The girl, who
was a good bit the eldest, took after her father: a plain face and plain words.
Dogs and horses and athletics.
With her mother she was
cold and scared; so her mother was cold and scared with her. The boy was
delicate when he was little, so she could curl him up, and put him into black
velvet pants, like that boy in the book—little Lord Something. But when his
long legs grew out of the pants, and they sent him to school, she said he
wasn’t her own little coodly baby any more; and it riles a growing boy to hear
himself talked about like that.

 
          
She
had good friends left, of course; mostly elderly ladies they were, of her own
age (for she
was
elderly now; the
change had come), who used to drop in often for a gossip; but, bless your
heart, they weren’t much help, for what she wanted, and couldn’t do without,
was the gaze of men struck dumb by her beauty. And that was what she couldn’t
get any longer, except she paid for it. And even so—!