Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 362
“That settles it,” Mrs. Dodge gasped. “It ought to have been a gondola.”
“A gondola?”
“A Doge’s wife carrying on with a fool poet or something; — she always has that air to me. What a comedy!”
Mrs. Cromwell shook her head; her expression was of grief and shock. “It’s tragedy, Lydia.”
“Just as you choose to look at it. The practical point of view is that it’s going to happen to Amelia, and pretty soon, too! Some day before long that man’s going to walk in and tell her she’s got to step aside and let him marry somebody else. Doesn’t what we just saw prove it? That woman did it deliberately in our faces, and she knows we’re friends of his wife’s. She deliberately showed us she didn’t care what we saw. And as for him — —”
“He didn’t see us, I think,” Mrs. Cromwell murmured.
“See us? He wouldn’t have seen Amelia herself if she’d been with us — and she might have been! That’s why I say she ought to know.”
“Oh, I don’t think I’d like to — —”
“Somebody ought to,” Mrs. Dodge said, firmly. “Somebody ought to tell her, and right away, at that.”
“Oh, but — —”
“Oughtn’t she to be given the chance to prepare herself for what’s coming to her?” Mrs. Dodge asked, testily. “She’s made that man think he’s Napoleon, and so she’s going to get what Napoleon’s wife got. I think she ought to be warned at once, and a true friend would see to it.”
In genuine distress, Mrs. Cromwell shrank from the idea. “Oh, but I could never — —”
“Somebody’s got to,” Mrs. Dodge insisted, implacably. “If you won’t, then somebody else.”
“Oh, but you — you wouldn’t take such a responsibility, would you? You — you wouldn’t, would you, Lydia?”
The severe matron, Lydia Dodge, thus flutteringly questioned, looked more severe than ever. “I shouldn’t care to take such a burden on my shoulders,” she said. “Looking after my own burdens is quite enough for me, and it’s time I was on my way to them.” She moved in departure, but when she had gone a little way, spoke over her shoulder, “Somebody’s got to, though! Good-bye.”
Mrs. Cromwell, murmuring a response, entered her own domain and walked slowly up the wide brick path; then halted, turned irresolutely, and glanced to where her friend marched northward upon the pavement. To Mrs. Cromwell the outlines of Mrs. Dodge, thus firmly moving on, expressed something formidable and imminent. “But, Lydia — —” the hesitant lady said, impulsively, though she knew that Lydia was already too distant to hear her. Mrs. Cromwell took an uncertain step or two, as if to follow and remonstrate, but paused, turned again, and went slowly into her house.
A kind-hearted soul, and in a state of sympathetic distress for Amelia Battle, she was beset by compassion and perplexity during what remained of the afternoon; and her husband and daughters found her so preoccupied at the dinner-table that they accused her of concealing a headache. But by this time what she concealed was an acute anxiety; she feared that Lydia’s sense of duty might lead to action, and that the action might be precipitate and destructive. For Mrs. Cromwell knew well enough that Amelia’s slavery was Amelia’s paradise — the only paradise Amelia knew how to build for herself — and paradises are, of all structures, the most perilously fragile.
Mrs. Cromwell was the more fearful because, being a woman, she understood that more than a sense of duty would impel Lydia to action: Lydia herself might interpret her action as the prompting of duty, but the vital incentive was likely to be something much more human; for within the race is a profound willingness to see a proud head lowered, particularly if that head be one that has displayed its pride. Amelia had displayed hers too long and too gallingly for Lydia’s patience; — Lydia had “really meant it,” Mrs. Cromwell thought, recalling the fierceness of Mrs. Dodge’s “I’ve had all I can stand of it!” that afternoon. A sense of duty with gall behind it is indeed to be feared; and the end of Mrs. Cromwell’s anxieties was the conclusion that Amelia’s paradise of slavery was more imminently threatened by the virtuous Lydia than by that gorgeous pagan, Mrs. Sylvester.
III. PERVERSITY OF A TELEPHONE
THE TROUBLED LADY began to wish devoutly that the sight of Mrs. Sylvester caressing Mr. Battle had not shocked her into a fluttering and indecisive state of mind; — she should have discussed the event more calmly with Lydia; should have argued against anything precipitate; — and so, as soon as she could, after her preoccupied dinner, she went to the telephone and gave Mrs. Dodge’s number.
Mr. and Mrs. Dodge were dining in town, she was informed; they were going to the theatre afterward and were not expected to return until midnight. This blank wall at once increased Mrs. Cromwell’s inward disturbance, for she was a woman readily tortured by her imagination; and in her mind she began to design terrible pictures of what might now be happening in the house of the Battles. Until she went to the telephone she thought it unlikely that Lydia had acted with such promptness; but after receiving through the instrument the information that no information was to be had for the present, Mrs. Cromwell became certain that Mrs. Dodge had already destroyed Amelia’s peace of mind.
She went away from the telephone, then came back to it, and again sat before the little table that bore it; but she did not at once put its miraculous powers into operation. Instead, she sat staring at it, afraid to employ it, while her imaginings became more piteous and more horrifying. Amelia had no talk except “Mr. Battle says”; she had no thought except “Mr. Battle thinks”; she had no life at all except as part of her husband’s life; and if that were taken away from her, what was left? She had made no existence whatever of her own and for herself, and if brought to believe that she had lost him, she was annihilated.
If the great Battle merely died, Amelia could live on, as widows of the illustrious sometimes do, to be his monument continually reinscribed with mourning tributes; but if a Venetian beauty carried him off in a gondola, Amelia would be so extinct that the act of self-destruction might well be thought gratuitous; — and yet Mrs. Cromwell’s imagination pictured Amelia in the grisly details of its commission by all the usual processes. She saw Amelia drown herself variously; saw her with a razor, with a pistol, with a rope, with poison, with a hat-pin.
Naturally, it became impossible to endure such pictures, and Mrs. Cromwell tremulously picked up the telephone, paused before releasing the curved nickel prong, but did release it, and when a woman’s voice addressed her, “What number, please?” she returned the breathless inquiry: “Is that you, Amelia?” Then she apologized, pronounced a number, and was presently greeted by the response: “Mr. Roderick Battle’s residence. Who is it, please?”
“Mrs. Cromwell. May I speak to Mrs. Battle?”
“I think so, ma’am.”
In the interval of silence Mrs. Cromwell muttered, “I think so” to herself. The maid wasn’t certain; — that was bad; for it might indicate a state of prostration.
“Yes?” said the little voice in the telephone. “Is it Mrs. Cromwell?”
Mrs. Cromwell with a great effort assumed her most smiling and reassuring expression. “Amelia? Is it you, Amelia?”
“Yes.”
“I just wanted to tell you again what a lovely impression your essay made on me, dear. I’ve been thinking of it ever since, and I felt you might like to know it.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Cromwell.”
“Lydia Dodge and I kept on talking about it after you left us this afternoon,” Mrs. Cromwell continued, beaming fondly upon the air above the telephone. “We both said we thought it was the best paper ever read at the club. I — I just wondered if — if Lydia called you up to tell you so, too. Did she?”
“No. No, she didn’t call me up.”
“Oh, didn’t she? I just thought she might have because she was so enthusiastic.”
“No. She didn’t.”
Mrs. Cromwell listened intently, seeking to detect emotion that might indicate Amelia’s state of mind, but Amelia’s voice revealed nothing whatever. It was one of those voices obscured and dwindled by the telephone into dry little metallic sounds; language was communicated, but nothing more, and a telegram from her would have conveyed as much personal revelation. “No, Mrs. Dodge didn’t call me up,” she said again.
Mrs. Cromwell offered some manifestations of mirth, though she intended them to express a tender cordiality rather than amusement; and the facial sweetness with which she was favouring the air before her became less strained; a strong sense of relief was easing her. “Well, I just thought Lydia might, you know,” she said, continuing to ripple her gentle laughter into the mouthpiece. “She was so enthusiastic, I just thought — —”
“No, she didn’t call me up,” the small voice in the telephone interrupted.
“Well, I’m gl — —” But Mrs. Cromwell checked herself sharply, having begun too impulsively. “I hope I’m not keeping you from anything you were doing,” she said hastily, to change the subject.
“No, I’m all alone. Mr. Battle is spending the evening with Mrs. Sylvester.”
“What!” Mrs. Cromwell exclaimed, and her almost convivial expression disappeared instantly; her face became a sculpture of features only. “He is?”
“Yes. He’s finishing the interior of her new house. With important clients like that he always interprets them into their houses you know. He makes a study of their personalities.”
“I — see!” Mrs. Cromwell said. Then, recovering herself, she was able to nod pleasantly and beam again, though now her beaming was rigidly automatic. “Well, I mustn’t keep you. I just wanted to tell you again how immensely we all admired your beautiful essay, and I thought possibly Lydia might have called you up to say so, too, because she fairly raved over it when we were — —”
“No.” The metallic small voice said; and it informed her for the fourth time: “She didn’t call me up.” Then it added: “She came here.”
“No!” Mrs. Cromwell cried.
“Yes. She came here,” the voice in the instrument repeated.
“She did?”
“Yes. Just before dinner. She came to see me.”
“Oh, my!” Mrs. Cromwell murmured. “What did she say?”
“She was in great trouble about Mr. Dodge.”
“What?”
“She was in a tragic state,” the impersonal voice replied with perfect distinctness. “She was in a tragic state about her husband.”
“About John Dodge?” Mrs. Cromwell cried.
“Yes. She was hurried and didn’t have time to tell me any details, because they had a dinner engagement in town, and he kept telephoning her they’d be disgraced if she didn’t come home and dress; but that’s what she came to see me about. It seems he’s been misbehaving himself over some fascinating and unscrupulous woman, and Mrs. Dodge thinks he probably intends to ask for a divorce and abandon her. She was in a most upset state over it, of course.”
“Amelia!” Mrs. Cromwell shouted the name at the mouthpiece.
“Yes. Isn’t it distressing?” was the response. “Oh course, I won’t mention it to anybody but you. I supposed you knew all about it since you’re her most intimate friend.”
Mrs. Cromwell made an effort to speak coherently. “Let me try to understand you,” she said. “You say that Lydia Dodge came to you this afternoon — —”
“It was really evening,” the voice interrupted, in correction. “Almost seven. And their engagement was in town at half past. That’s why he kept calling her up so excitedly.”
“And she told you,” Mrs. Cromwell continued, “Lydia Dodge told you that her husband, John Dodge, was philandering with — —”
“There was no doubt about it whatever,” the voice interrupted. “Some friends of hers had seen an actual caress exchanged between Mr. Dodge and the other woman.”
“What!”
“Yes. That’s what she told me.”
“Wait!” Mrs. Cromwell begged. “Lydia Dodge told you that John Dodge — —”
“Yes,” the voice of Amelia Battle replied colourlessly in the telephone. “It seems too tragic, and it was such a shock to me — I never dreamed that people of forty or fifty had troubles like that — but it was what she came here to tell me. Of course, she didn’t have time to tell me much, because she was so upset and Mr. Dodge was in such a hurry for her to come home. I never dreamed there was anything but peace and happiness between them, did you?”
“No, I didn’t,” gasped Mrs. Cromwell. “But Amelia — —”
“That’s all I know about it, I’m afraid.”
“Amelia — —”
“Probably she’ll talk about it to you pretty soon,” Amelia said, at the other end of the wire. “I’m surprised she didn’t tell you before she did me; you really know her so much better than I do. I’m afraid I’ll have to go now. One of Mr. Battle’s assistants has just come in and I’m doing some work with him. It was lovely of you to call me up about the little essay, but, of course, that was all Mr. Battle. Good-night.”
Mrs. Cromwell sat staring at the empty mechanism in her hand until it rattled irritably, warning her to replace it upon its prong.
IV. A GREAT MAN’S WIFE
SHE HAD A restless night, for she repeatedly woke up with a start, her eyes opening widely in the darkness of her bedroom; and each time this happened she made the same muffled and incomplete exclamation: “Well, of all —— !” Her condition was still as exclamatory as it was anxiously expectant when, just after her nine-o’clock breakfast the next morning, she went to her Georgian drawing-room window and beheld the sterling figure of Mrs. Dodge in the act of hurrying from the sidewalk to the Georgian doorway. Mrs. Cromwell ran to admit her; brought her quickly into the drawing room. “Lydia!” she cried. “What on earth happened?” For, even if telephones had never been invented, the early caller’s expression would have made it plain that there had been a happening.
“I’d have called you up last night,” the perturbed Lydia began;— “but we didn’t get back till one o’clock, and it was too late. In all my life I never had such an experience!”
“You don’t mean at the theatre or — —”
“No!” Mrs. Dodge returned, indignantly. “I mean with that woman!”
“With Amelia?”
“With Amelia Battle.”
“But tell me,” Mrs. Cromwell implored. “My dear, I’ve been in such a state of perplexity — —”
“Perplexity!” her friend echoed scornfully, and demanded: “What sort of state do you think I’ve been in? My dear, I went to her.”
“To Amelia?”
“To Amelia Battle,” Mrs. Dodge said. “I went straight home after I left you yesterday; but I kept thinking about what we’d seen — —”
“You mean — —” Mrs. Cromwell paused, and glanced nervously through the glass of the broad-paned window beside which she and her guest had seated themselves. Her troubled eyes came to rest upon the pinkish Italian villa across the street. “You mean what we saw — over there?”
“I mean what was virtually an embrace between Roderick Brooks Battle and Mrs. Sylvester under our eyes,” Mrs. Dodge said angrily. “And she looked us square in the face just before she did it! I also mean that both of them showed by their manner that such caresses were absolutely familiar and habitual — and that was all I needed to prove that the talk about them was only too well founded. So, when I’d thought it over and over — Oh, I didn’t act in haste! — I decided it was somebody’s absolute duty to prepare Amelia for what I plainly saw was coming to her. Did you ever see anything show more proprietorship than Mrs. Sylvester’s fondling of that man’s shoulder? So, as you had declared you wouldn’t go, and although it was late, and Mr. Dodge and I had an important dinner engagement, I made up my mind it had to be done immediately and I went.”
“But what did you tell her?” Mrs. Cromwell implored.
“Never,” said Mrs. Dodge, “never in my life have I had such an experience! I tried to begin tactfully; I didn’t want to give her a shock, and so I tried to begin and lead up to it; but it was difficult to begin at all, because I’d scarcely sat down before she told me my husband had got home and had telephoned to see if I’d reached her house, and he’d left word for me to come straight back home because he was afraid we’d be late for the dinner — and all the time I was trying to talk to her, her maid kept coming in to say he was calling up again, and then I’d have to go and beseech him to let me alone for a minute — but he wouldn’t — —”
Mrs. Cromwell was unable to wait in patience through these preliminaries. “Lydia! What did you tell her?”
“I’m trying to explain it as well as I can, please,” her guest returned, irritably. “If I didn’t explain how crazily my husband kept behaving you couldn’t possibly understand. He’d got it into his head that we had to be at this dinner on time, because it was with some people who have large mining interests and — —”
“Lydia, what did you — —”
“I told you I tried to be tactful,” said Mrs. Dodge. “I tried to lead up to it, and I’ll tell you exactly what I said, though with that awful telephone interrupting every minute it was hard to say anything connectedly! First, I told her what a deep regard both of us had for her.”
“Both of you? You mean you and your husband, Lydia?”
“No, you and me. It was necessary to mention you, of course, because of what we saw yesterday.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Cromwell. “Well, go on.”
“I told her,” Mrs. Dodge continued, complying. “I said nobody could have her interests more at heart than you and I did, and that was why I had come. She thanked me, but I noticed a change in her manner right there. I thought she looked at me in a kind of bright-eyed way, as if she were on her guard and suspicious. I thought she looked like that, and now I’m sure she did. I said, ‘Amelia, I want to put a little problem to you, just to see if you think I’ve done right in coming.’ She said, ‘Yes, Mrs. Dodge,’ and asked me what the problem was.”
