# Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 60

IT was a fantastic journey for Hattie and The Everlasting. On passports arranged by Thérèse Callendar they were borne along a way made easy by all the power behind Thérèse Callendar's fortune, through all the hubbub and turmoil of the war. Their companions on shipboard were correspondents and doctors and nurses and soldiers and congressmen (bound for the front to garner out of the very graves material for new campaigns). The others aboard the ship must have found them a strange pair concerning whom it was possible to speculate endlessly—this handsome, grim woman and the old, old man in her charge. It is probable that no one ever learned precisely who they were or whither they were bound, for Hattie was a suspicious traveler who placed no trust in fellow voyagers. She warned them away by her looks; and Gramp, of course, had not the faintest desire to enter upon conversation. He read his books and once a day made a circuit, under the escort of Hattie, of the entire deck, his coonskin coat (from which he refused to be separated) blowing in and out against his skinny old body. He never spoke, even to Hattie, even in reply to such remarks as, "Now, Grandpa, you must not eat that," or "Now, Grandpa, you had best move your chair, there's a draft in that corner."
(All this to Gramp who had never denied himself anything and had a perfect digestion; who had never thought of drafts since he was born.)
Indeed, there was something touching in the spectacle of the middle-aged woman, tending so carefully the old, old man. It was as if she feared that he might by some ill chance be blown from the deck into the open sea or fall down a companionway and shatter forever the brittle old bones that had defied time itself. No one could have guessed that they were enemies, that despite the temporary truce they could never be anything but enemies by the very nature of things. Hattie treated him still as if he ​were some fragile piece of old glass which she must deliver safely to Lily's house in the Rue Raynouard.
It was only after she had seen him safely to bed in his cabin that she was able to give range to all her passionate energy and walk round and round the deck, her ostrich plumes blowing in the gale, her strong, buxom figure outlined against the luminous blue of the Atlantic night. At such times she was almost happy again for it seemed to her that in the winds and fogs Fergus was somewhere close at hand, just beyond reach, waiting for her.
And she was going now to take up once more the threads of life. Ellen was to be married. . . . Ellen was to be married. . . . She must have a child. . . . She must have a child. . . . These things she thought over and over again until she came at length to repeat them aloud to herself as she walked, bracing her body against the gale, through the darkness. She had joined Thérèse Callendar in this passionate desire for a grandchild, but it was not for the same reason. To Hattie a grandchild would alter everything. It would be for her like being young again, almost like bearing a child of her own.
She had never traveled before; she knew not a word of French and The Everlasting saw fit not to reveal his knowledge of the tongue; but she was undaunted. In some way, by an heroic effort touched with a profound scorn for a nation which chattered such an abominable tongue, she managed everything . . . the customs at Havre, the accommodations in hotels already crowded to the doors and, last of all, the journey from the port into the Gare du Nord. (Lily had sent a courier to meet her but the meeting never occurred.) She was indomitable and she was almost happy again in all the business of managing tickets and meals and luggage, shepherding The Everlasting and his precious books. For Hattie believed that nothing was impossible. . . .
From the corridor of the crowded train, where she stood protecting Gramp and jostling her fellow passengers, Hattie saw ​them standing on the platform of the smoking cave called the Gare du Nord. . . . Ellen and Lily and a dark man in a blue uniform; and as the train jolted to a halt, her own car (for she thought of it thus) stopped almost abreast of them so that she was able to see that they talked earnestly with grave faces and an air of preoccupation. Wedged between a poilu slung round with a dozen musettes and wine bottles, and a trim English colonel with white mustaches and a red face, she was held immovable, unable to signal to them though she pounded upon the glass and shouted to them through windows open by some miracle against the stifling September heat. To Hattie, nothing existed in all that echoing cavern save those three figures, standing together amid mountains of luggage.
In the resounding shed steam hissed and engines squealed in ridiculous Gallic fashion; soldiers shouted to one another and a cocotte just beneath her window cried ribald jests to a lover somewhere in the same car who joined in the shouts of laughter. They looked up and down the platform—those three. It seemed that years passed before Lily, turning languidly in the heat, caught a glimpse of Hattie's red and agitated face and Gramp's sharp nose and inscrutable eyes.
They moved toward her; the English colonel whose toes had been trampled gave way in indignation and Hattie, bearing an immense amount of luggage and followed indifferently by Gramp, descended to the platform.
Ellen kissed her and then Lily, and at last she heard Ellen saying, "This is Richard, Ma. He is on leave."
Above all the flurry and the conversation, she and Callendar regarded each other searchingly, the one with a piercing gaze of appraisal, the other with an air almost of astonishment. He had not, perhaps, pictured her as such a handsome woman, nor one, despite the grimness on which one could not put one's finger, of such immense gusto. She accounted for Ellen's strength and vitality, but there was clearly nothing subtle in her and nothing cold: the answer to all that lay elsewhere—perhaps in the ancient ​man who peered at them all like a spiteful mouse through his dim spectacles.
As for Hattie, her eyes asked only one thing, "Was he—this man—good enough for Ellen?" His foreign blood showed itself more plainly than she had expected. It troubled her that her daughter should be marrying a man of foreign blood; for, vaguely, all foreigners were associated in her mind with those dark, sullen, violent men who worked in the black Mills surrounding Shane's Castle.
There flashed between the two—Callendar and Hattie—no spark either of understanding or enmity. Rather it seemed that the opinions of both were colored by surprise and a touch of suspicion. In Hattie's eyes there was a fire of pride and possession, the look of one who would fight for her children, passionately; and in the gray eyes of Callendar there was only the opaque, inscrutable expression which only Ellen, of them all, had ever seen dissolve or change.
But they were grave, all of them, in a fashion that presently entered Hattie's spirit and made her feel that their welcome was lacking in enthusiasm. Perhaps (she thought) it was the war; they were so close to it and Ellen, like herself, must be thinking always of Fergus. Perhaps they did not really want her there . . . any of them. Yet they had written her with so much eagerness. It was a doubt that filled her with a sharp terror of growing old and useless and dependent.
Lily (whom she had not seen in years, Lily who was now Madame de Cyon) seemed scarcely changed at all. She could not be (Hattie, watching her, hastily calculated the years) she could not be a day less than forty-five; yet there she was, a woman who had sinned, looking young, almost fresh, scarcely a day older than Ellen who was twelve years younger . . . more plump than Ellen and, strangely enough, more soft. Still, Hattie reflected, with a grim satisfaction, she had painted her face, and her hair, it was certain, had been "touched up."
Perhaps in Paris all life was different; perhaps such a life ​as Lily's made not too great a difference. Looking at her cousin, so beautiful, so charming and so unnaturally young, all the deep rooted respectability of Hattie's nature rose and bristled. And as she stood on the steps of the Gare du Nord waiting for Callendar to fetch the gray blue Government motor to drive them to the Rue Raynouard, it swept over her that it was a strange and ridiculous turn of affairs which had brought her of all people "into the wickedest city in the world," to live in the house of Lily whom she had always distrusted. She had not thought of it until this moment when she stood looking out across the Place Roubaix.
The motor came abreast of them with Callendar—a stranger, a foreigner—at the wheel, driving with a cool recklessness. It was all weird and unreal, so preposterous that Hattie grew suddenly frightened. She was aware briefly of a terror at the spectacle of this new, strange city where every one spoke an ungodly language. A little while before she would not even have thought of such things. It occurred to her that she must be growing old.
"I never felt younger in my life," she repeated aloud to Lily who stood waiting for her to enter the motor.
All this time The Everlasting had said nothing. Watching the others he had kept his own silence, but he had not overlooked the Paris that lay all about him, so changed now, so different, from the Paris of his youth. He heard none of their talk, made almost laboriously against the inexplicable depression, as they drove through the Rue Lafayette. How could it have interested him who was concerned with another world . . . ? A world of gaslight and crinoline, imperials and the waltzes of Strauss and Waldteufel? To him, who had no future, this new Paris must have been less than nothing . . . this new Paris in which Lily with all her money out of the black mills in the Middle West had a house and lived as if she had been born a Parisian; this new Paris in which his own granddaughter played a brilliant part. It was a Paris. . . . How could one describe it?
​Yet, as he rode over the sweltering asphalt, his eyes, his ears, his nose drank in the sights and sounds and smells . . . the sudden cry of "L'Intran! . . . L'Intran!" and "Le Petit Parisien!" the withered dying chestnut trees of the Boulevard Haussmann (he could remember when it was new), the little tables . . . Because youth was after an insidious fashion returning to him, Gramp, the bitter, the aloof, grew sentimental. It had been here, in this Paris, that he had climbed to the pinnacle of all his life, the summit from which all else had been a gentle decline. He had not died like Fergus. He had gone on and on until at last life itself had lost all its savor. . . .
They had turned now round Arc de Triomphe, and Ellen, sitting quietly by the side of Callendar, frowned. She had been silent throughout the drive, thinking, thinking, thinking bitterly with a savage secrecy because she dared not betray herself even by the flicker of an eyelid. She sat there silently, pondering how she might break the news which she herself and no other must in the end relate. It seemed to her that the whole affair was too cruel, too horrible. It was not possible that she should be forced twice to do the same terrible thing.
The sound of her mother's voice, cheerful and rich, as she talked to Lily came to her over her shoulder. . . . "And the man wouldn't open the window so in the end I opened it myself and then he began to chatter and yell at me in some ridiculous language . . . French perhaps."
"How was he dressed?" asked Lily, and Hattie described his uniform.
"Oh," replied Lily in mirth. "He was Portuguese. . . . You must never mind the Portuguese."
"Well, I don't know whether Portuguese smell worse than other nationalities but the air in that train was enough to suffocate a strong man."
. . . And now they were coming nearer and nearer to the Trocadéro. They were quite near now. Ellen turned away her eyes. They had passed the house in the Avenue Kléber. She ​caught a swift glimpse of the doorway which she had not seen since the bright morning she closed the door on the frivolous little room of Madame Nozières. Ah, she knew how it looked! She knew each tiny thing about it, and the gray courtyard with the summer furniture heaped into one corner. It was cruel, incredible . . . what she had to do.
Before they drew up to the door of the house in the Rue Raynouard, Hattie too had grown silent under the gray depression which claimed all the little party.
They had tea on the white terrace where they found the black dog and poor tottering old Criquette and were joined by Jean and Monsieur de Cyon, and Rebecca, whose sulkiness did nothing to raise the spirits of the party. It was, Lily remarked, as she sat behind a table laden with silver and flowers sent up from Germigny and the most delicate sandwiches of pâté and cheese and jam, like a great family reunion. The big house was full now; Lily was married, even with distinction. There were no more secrets. In some ways life had grown simple, yet in others its complexity had been increased, again and again.
Ellen, sitting there in her own pool of tragic silence, watched them all with the old knowledge that their lives were all in some way entangled and bound up together . . . all that absurd and ill assorted group, Monsieur de Cyon, gentle and white haired, Hattie, Rebecca, Jean, Lily, Callendar and herself; and even Gramp who had disappeared already into the solitude of the room which Lily had given him. Here they all were, most of them—even de Cyon, himself, a foreigner—living on the wealth poured out by the black mills of a town in the Midlands of America. And she it was who had brought them together.
Watching her mother, it occurred to her that the indomitable Hattie was no longer young. She would ask presently to be shown the room where Fergus had died, and Ellen, still lying, would show it to her, and her mother would weep and be satis​fied in a pitiful fashion with the deception. It was better sometimes to lie, better to deceive.
But the other thing . . . She rose presently and walked away down into the garden where she was joined after a little time by Jean on his crutches and Hansi, panting and restless at being kept in the summer heat of the city. And when she had gone Rebecca drifted away with an air of resentful martyrdom. She would have been nasty to Hattie, if she had dared, just as she had been nasty to Callendar who was only amused by her and took pains to show her in a thousand small ways that Ellen belonged to him now, and that she, Rebecca, no longer counted. But Rebecca could wait; there was the same blood in both and Rebecca understood how his game was played. She could wait, she thought bitterly, as she went up to her own room. The game was not yet over and she had not yielded the victory. She knew, perhaps better than any of the others, even Ellen, what to expect of Callendar. There was no part of him which remained a mystery to her, for she knew the men of her own family . . . the Uncle Ottos and Maximilians and Gustaves, all with a touch of the Levant. But Ellen would never believe her; she would believe only that Rebecca was jealous of him (which was true) and that what she said was uttered only out of spite. She would not believe that he was really cruel and domineering and thought of women as creatures who belonged in a harem. . . . Sabine could have helped her, but Sabine whom she had never met had been turned away from the door.
No, she had not yet lost the battle. She must save Ellen as much because she herself needed her as on Ellen's own account. She climbed the long stairs and left Lily and de Cyon, Hattie and Callendar together on the terrace, talking under the guidance of Callendar, who led them gracefully here and there, finding, it seemed, a strange satisfaction in ignoring the terrible knowledge which he shared only with Lily and Ellen. Lily, watching him, must have thought him inhumanly cold. Perhaps it occurred to ​her again, in the depths of her wisdom and experience, that this marriage of Ellen could end in only one way.
Meanwhile under the old plane trees Ellen, who had been walking up and down in silence with Jean and the dogs, took the departure of Monsieur de Cyon for the white pavilion (which Lily had had fitted up for him as a sort of study) as a signal to return. On the terrace she said to Callendar, "I shan't come down until dinner. If you want to see your mother before she sails, you had best go now. I'll be free later," and so dismissed him.
Then, turning to her mother, she said, "Come Ma, we'll go up and get you settled in your room," and led her away leaving the garden to Lily and Jean and fat old Criquette.
Hattie, who had noticed nothing either in the streets or in the house itself (for, as Ellen knew, she did not see its beauty but saw it only as the house which it might be said belonged to Ellen), noticed as she walked through the big drawing-room that it resembled Shane's Castle in its warm, soft beauty. The portrait of old John Shane with a white setter at his feet, and the glowing Venice of Mr. Turner which had once hung in the house among the Mills now found places against the satinwood paneling. She fancied too that she recognized the Aubusson carpet, connected dimly in her memory with the picture of old Julia, hawk-like and bitter, tracing the outlines of the extravagant flowers with her stick of ebony and silver.
"It's like the castle," she murmured to Ellen, who hurried on up the stairs without heeding her.
They turned off along the gallery and, as they passed one of the doors, the squeaking of Gramp's rocking chair (unpacked and long since placed in readiness by Lily) came to them through the paneling. Time went on. People were born and people died, but The Everlasting and his rocking chair remained the same.
"He's better now than he used to be," observed Hattie. She ​did not mention him by name, for Ellen knew well enough whom she meant; together they had passed his door, together they had heard the same rhythmical squeaking a thousand times. In a sense the sound of the decrepit rocker bound them to each other in a way that nothing else could have done. It was the one thing that remained constant, unchanged, out of all the past.
Hattie's room—the room to which she had come to spend the rest of her life—was large and airy with two tall windows which opened on the garden where Lily had taken Ellen's place and was now walking up and down, up and down, with her tall red-haired son. He was a man now and it made Hattie tremble to think how little difference his improper existence had made. There in the garden, under the old trees, it seemed of no importance that he had never had, in the proper sense, a father. He belonged there, with Lily. There was a rightness about the whole thing which Hattie sensed from afar off but was unable to explain . . . a vague feeling that Lily's life had been, despite everything, a life complete and in the proper key, like a beautiful painting superbly drawn and executed with all the boldness of a sure hand. Lily perhaps had led the life for which she was born. Hattie saw that she was telling the boy something which had led her to weep, for she lifted her handkerchief to her eyes and the boy halted to face her with his brow crinkled into little furrows. He was so like Fergus. . . .
And in the next instant she knew what it was that Lily had said. Ellen put her arms about her mother and murmured in a low voice, "I have some bad news, Ma."
And Hattie, looking at her in a queer stony fashion, replied, "I know what it is. Robert too is dead."
It was true. Little by little, while her mother sat listening in the same stony silence, Ellen told the whole story. It was Callendar who had brought the news. He had come from the front on leave this very morning. There—somewhere in the Argonne—he had come across Robert's regiment and there they ​had become acquainted. And then on the night before Callendar left, he had been sent for by one of the Americans. He had gone to a dressing station, but Robert was dead when he arrived. He had been wounded while saving one of his own men caught among the barbed wire between the German lines and his own. The man had been saved; he would live. It was he who had told Callendar the whole story, he who in a sort of delirium had described the whole affair with a fantastic poetry . . . the fog that had settled over the lines, the swift, brilliant flare of the Veery lights, the faint, malicious, pop! pop! of the gas shells as they buried their noses so neatly in the earth. It was in this wild, unearthly setting that Robert had given up his life. Robert (thought Hattie) who had said, "There's nothing romantic about war. . . . The side which is the most efficient . . . There won't be any nonsense. . . . I'll look out for myself."
When Ellen had finished they were both silent for a time and at last, Hattie, still dry eyed, said in a firm voice, "It is a judgment . . . I love my children too well . . . better than my own God and now they have been taken from me."
(If only it had been Robert. . . . And now it was Robert too.)
She lay down on the great bed, a strange, incongruous figure—this grim, primitive, black-clad woman—in the midst of all the luxury that Lily had provided. And presently she said, "I'd like to be alone for a time, Ellen. I'll call you . . . later on."
So Ellen left her mother in solitude, but as the door closed behind her she knew that it was herself upon whom the remnants of her family—Hattie and The Everlasting—now depended. It was she who, after all these years in which she had neglected and forgotten them, had become the rock, the foundation. And she knew too that there could no longer be any doubt about marrying Callendar. She would have to marry now . . . Now that Robert, too, was gone there were new reasons. There remained only one thing that she could do for her mother. It might as well be Callendar as any other man.