A Prologue To Love (25 page)

He put his hands, dainty as a woman’s, on the tablecloth and sent his slow glance about the table.

John Ames stared down at his plate. He looked alarmingly ill.

Franz Sleber continued. “The bourgeoisie is not the enemy of Marx’s proletariat. It is our enemy. Cicero’s ‘new men’ are rising again all over the world, which was once comfortably divided between the aristocratic wealthy and the laborers and the serfs, as it should be.”

“It is a confused picture,” said Hen Ernst doubtfully.

Franz Sleber smiled. “All that concerns man is inevitably confused, for man is intricate. But one thing can be said simply: Greed and envy and the desire for power motivate all men to a larger or lesser degree. And, as the power of the State was challenged by the new middle class in France, so now this class is challenging — us. It is challenging our wars for profits, our absolute liberties, our power. The middle class suspects power of all kind.”

“And so,” said Montague Brookingham, “the middle class must be destroyed before it grows too strong. You have seen them in England, with their ugly brown town houses and their fat vulgarity and their bee-like industry. And their uncompromising support of religion and what they call their virtues.”

Herr Ernst said in his gentle and hesitating voice: “I understand the middle-class threat to us. It was the American bourgeoisie who challenged the aristocratic wealth of England. It was not the little accounts keeper or the worker in the mill or the man who tended sheep and cattle in America who made America free. It was the owner of shops, the owner of mills, the comfortable farmer, the proprietor of newspapers and businesses, who challenged England in the name of liberty, which the masses neither understand nor want.”

John Ames was silent. His face was still shadowed by his hand. Caroline watched him anxiously. But she was also thinking, and a powerful repudiation of what she had heard was resolutely becoming stronger in her mind. She would never have anything to do with these suave and amiable and ruthless people who wanted money, not merely to protect themselves, as she and her father did, but as a thing in itself, as a personal power!

“You’ll be taking a tiger by the ears,” said John. “Again, as for myself, no.”

He looked suddenly at his daughter. “Well, Caroline,” he said, “what do you think of all this?”

Caroline shrank when everyone looked at her. She faltered, “I think you are right, Papa. I’ve been reading about revolutionaries since the last discussion we — you — had here. I think they’re wicked men. I think they’re insane too. If they ever have control of governments they’ll make slaves of everybody, without exception. They did that in France in 1795.”

They all smiled, including John. “Gentlemen and ladies,” he said, “you have heard the voice of innocence, and there are times when I think innocence is very perceptive.”

When Caroline was alone with her father she said impulsively, “Papa, let us leave Switzerland at once.”

They were sitting by the expiring fire, and the ice-laden air from the mountains seeped into the room. Caroline had wrapped a blanket around her father’s knees as he sat on the hearth. He was a man who went to bed early. Tonight he sat in silence long after the clocks of Geneva rang midnight over the city. He had not even noticed when Caroline had covered him.

“They don’t understand,” he said, as if speaking to himself. “There’s something horrible loose in the world now, and they’re only too eager to help feed it. Well, I’ll probably not be here to see it.”

Caroline was frightened again. “Papal You’ll live a long time.”

“They’re in such a hurry,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “They won’t succeed soon. It will be a long time, if ever. I don’t want to see it.”

“They’re only a few people,” said Caroline, attempting to soothe him.

“Immense wealth is not ‘only a few people’,” said John with irritation. “They’ll have their ‘holy wars’, which will be wars for profit, as usual. They will feel satisfied.”

He turned his haggard face to his daughter, and his eyes were looking at far places. “Think of it — madness in control of the world. Who will challenge madness?”

Caroline did not answer. The room was becoming very cold. John rubbed his lips with his hand. “If my mother were alive she would have the answer, which is no answer at all. She would say that God will challenge madness.”

Caroline wanted to tell her father about Tom Sheldon, but he stood up then, feebly, the blanket falling from his knees. He stared down at the huddle of cloth at his feet as if it were a profound puzzle and he was wondering what it was. Then he raised his eyes to Caroline.

“What is it, Papa?” Caroline exclaimed.

He put his hand on the mantelpiece. “That food,” he muttered. “I think I’ll go to bed. It’s late.”

He walked toward his bedroom slowly and carefully, like a drunken man, and Caroline helplessly watched him go. When he reached the door she called out to him, “Papa. Good night, Papa.”

He turned and looked at her bemusedly. With an effort he finally said, “Good night, my dear. Good night.” He entered his room and closed the door heavily after him.

Caroline stood and looked at his door for several moments, full of lassitude and sick anxiety. She did not want to go to bed. She pushed aside the draperies at the windows and looked out at the shadow of mountains under a polar moon and the flat, faintly luminous plain of the lake. The bridge to her right flickered with yellow lights, which reflected themselves like amber blurs in the water. The city rang with the iron tongues of bells proclaiming the hour of one in the morning. If only we could leave now! thought Caroline under the pressure of some vague but insistent premonition. The palms of her hands began to sweat under her growing fear. The cold air struck her face like a wall of ice. She thought of Lyme, and a powerful yearning for Tom Sheldon made her throat and chest ache. She would write him tomorrow and tell him that she would be in Lyme in July! She would tell him that she loved him. For a moment she cringed at the thought of expressing her emotions on paper. No, she would not tell him that she loved him and that she would marry him. She would merely write an impersonal letter, and she would send him the little painting of the Bay of Naples. He would understand. “Dear Tom,” she said aloud, and was startled at the sound of her own voice in the silence. After a little she smiled joyously.

Homesick, warm with longing for Beth and Tom Sheldon, she went to bed, noting as usual that the tepid bed warmers had hardly softened the stiff cold white sheets. Remembering Beth, she brought herself to pray awkwardly and to repeat the Lord’s Prayer. When she arrived at ‘And deliver us from evil’, her thoughts quickened. She shivered under the blankets and the eider down and thought of her father’s guests. But there were others! Yes, there were others like Beth and Tom and old black Jim who had been a slave. There had been a kind and weary teacher or two at Miss Stockington’s. If she knew such people, then there must be many in the world, after all. She opened her eyes, startled, in the darkness and thought of this deeply, and a free and joyous sense of release came to her and washed away her chronic fear.

She fell asleep, feeling deliverance, not only from the evil which was her father’s associates and friends, but from the iron prison of herself and her terrors. It was some time before she began to dream. She was on the blanched and broken plain of the painting that had been described to her, and she could smell its barrenness, which was the very odor of sorrow and loneliness. There was no end to the plain; it heaved and rose and fell to every horizon under a sky like stone. And there was the tower on the treeless pointed hill, black and gray and crumbling, with the ruined battlements and the empty door. It plunged high into the air, throwing a black shadow before it. Caroline, in her dream, was afraid. She looked about the plain, on which nothing moved, but she felt menace behind every boulder, every dip and fall. She ran to the tower, stumbling, falling, her legs as heavy as the trunks of trees. There was shelter in the tower; she would hide in its broken recesses and no one could find and hurt her. She had almost reached the door when she saw the tall figure of Tom Sheldon standing before it, his arms outstretched to bar her way. “No!” he cried. “No, Carrie!”

“I must! I’m afraid!” she cried back to him. But he left the door, smiling, and took her hand and pointed, and she glanced fearfully over her shoulder. The plain was full of warm trees and light and flowers, and it was not barren at all.

But from within the tower came a terrible groaning as of a man in agony. “Who?” asked Caroline, clinging to Tom. “No one can hurt you now,” he said, and tried to draw her away. But the groaning became louder, more helpless, more beseeching. “It’s my father!” she screamed. Tom instantly drew her hand, but she held back. “Don’t go in there, Carrie,” he pleaded.

She was more frightened than ever before in her life. She snatched her hand from Tom and ran to the door. The groaning was all about her. She awoke, gasping, and sat up. She had not dreamed the groaning at all. It came from her father’s room.

She jumped from the bed, and immediately the bitterly cold air pierced through her cheap flannel nightgown. She struck a match and lit the gas lamps on the wall, calling out desperately, “Yes, Papa, I’m coming!” She snatched up her worn old brown dressing gown with the patches on the elbows and flung it over her shoulders and ran into her father’s room. The yellowish glare from her own lights fell on his bed. He lay on his pillows, and his face was livid, his eyes closed, and he was groaning deeply. She went to him, trembling, then lighted the wall light. John Ames was unconscious; streams of sweat ran from his forehead like tears; he was gasping for breath. And then Caroline, who had never seen death, knew that he was dying.

She had faced a few crises in her life, but not one as awful as this, so what she did next was born of panic, inexperience, and inability to think. She had only to pull a bell rope for help. This did not occur to her in her blind frenzy. She ran back into her room and pulled a pair of boots over her bare feet, and her gasping was as loud as her father’s. “Yes, yes, yes!” she cried, “Just wait, Papa.” She flung open the sitting-room door and rushed out into the wide carpeted hall, in which only a single light burned. She fled down the wide marble stairs. The clocks of Geneva struck three. Caroline reached the dim lobby, where a clerk slept behind the counter. She did not see him or think of him. She had remembered seeing a doctor’s home down the street from the hotel; she would bring him to her father. She dodged around the brown marble columns of the lobby, her boots clattering on the white marble floors. The bronze doors were bolted; her wet hands tore at the bolts with a savagery and strength born of her despair and urgency. She pulled the doors apart and rushed into the silent dark street full of moonlight and shadows.

She found the doctor’s house in a minute or two and leaped up the brown stone steps and pulled wildly on the rope again and again, frantic with her need. The windows in the tall gray house remained black for endless moments, then finally an upper one flickered. She continued to pull on the rope, and the house echoed with the clangor. The door opened and the sleepy bearded doctor in his dressing gown stood on the threshold, shaking his head.

“Come! Quick!” she clamored in French, and then as he began to stare at her she repeated her agonized plea in German. The doctor continued to stare. He saw a tall and frenzied girl on the steps, with dark and disheveled braids on her shoulders, an obviously poor girl in miserable night clothes. Her aspect was so strange and her cries so piercing, he moved back a step. She caught his arm and repeated her pleas in both languages.

“But where?” he asked, noting more closely the poverty and coarseness of her clothing and the wildness of her eyes. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“My father!” she moaned. “In the Grande Hotel, there!” And she pointed with one hand as she continued to clutch the doctor with the other. The doctor’s arm stiffened. Geneva was a lawful city, well policed, orderly. But still, there were criminals here also, and the ugly poor. He looked down the street at the Grande Hotel with its dim lower lights. Was this wretched girl a servant there? But, if so, why had she not summoned help in the hotel, who would then have sent for him or the house physician? He looked again at the lumbering unbuttoned boots, at the blowing flannel nightgown, at the patched robe. This was no guest of the hotel! He struck down her hand, moved back, and tried to close the door. She, this animal, was either a drunken prostitute or mad.

“Go away!” he shouted. “I’ll summon the police!”

Caroline flung herself against the door and held it open with the strength of extremity. The hall light shone on the doctor’s face. He had the eyes of old Mr. Fern in Boston, and for a moment she was sick. But her necessity overcame her fear. She began to cry out incoherently: “Please, please! My father! Mr. John Ames. We’re Americans. Guests in the Grande Hotel. My father is dying! Come, come, in the Name of God!”

Her French was excellent, and this alone made the doctor pause. He glared at her. “There is a physician in the hotel,” he said. “Call him if you speak the truth.”

She clung to him. “Come, come!” she prayed, not hearing his words. “My father!”

“Can you pay?” he demanded accusingly. The girl would break his arm, curse her. “My fee. Can you pay — you?”

For a single moment Caroline was dumb at this universal and terrible question. She blinked her starting eyes. Then she panted, “Yes, yes! We’re rich Americans. Americans! Come, for God’s sake!” A ball of nausea rose in her throat, but she still held the doctor’s arm with a powerful grip.

“You can pay in Swiss francs?” he demanded. Rich Americans.
Nom de Dieu
! What rascality was this?

“Yes! Please!” Caroline began to sob dryly.

The doctor cursed under his breath, but he reached for his ready bag on the table. He went with Caroline down the steps, then became angrily aware of his night clothing. He pulled his arm from hers. “Wait, I must dress,” he said roughly. “Give me your name again. I will come in a few minutes.”

“It will be too late!” Caroline almost shrieked. “My father is dying!” She understood, even in her red panic, that if she left him now he would not come at all. He wanted to be rid of her, this man with old Fern’s eyes and Fern’s accusing voice.

“Mad, mad,” he muttered to himself, but went with her. She dragged on his arm, trying to hurry him. He glanced fearfully into shadows, expecting a crouching form to leap out and strangle him. He thought of his unprotected home and his wife and children. The street echoed with the girl’s footsteps; his own feet wore only slippers, and he felt the cold air on his ankles and cursed her. Now the hotel seemed a place of refuge to him, and he hurried also.

The clerk had been awakened by Caroline’s opening of the doors and the sound of her running. The owner, Herr Schloesser, had been summoned, and he was gravely regarding the unbolted doors when Caroline and the doctor burst through them. He stared and started. “Fr
ä
ulein Ames!” he exclaimed. “What is wrong? Fr
ä
ulein!” He recognized the doctor, who was an old friend. “
Herr Doktor
,” he said. “What is this?”

The doctor flung off Caroline’s hand, and she immediately seized him again. “You know this — this — creature, Adolf?” he said.

“But certainly! She is Fr
ä
ulein Ames, one of our cherished and frequent guests,” said Herr Schloesser helplessly. “Fr
ä
ulein, what is it?”

The doctor relaxed. He turned benevolently to Caroline. “My dear child,” he said, “let us be calm.” He patted the stiff fingers on his sleeve and turned with an air of worried importance to his friend.

“The lady says that her father is dying,” he said. “Will you lead me, Adolf, and obtain some assistance for this poor, frantic lady?”

“Herr Ames? He is ill?” The hotelkeeper was alarmed. “Why did she not summon help here?”

“That I do not know. She apparently lost her wits,” said the doctor with more and more benevolence toward Caroline. “Dear lady,” he said, “calm yourself. I will go to your father at once.”