The Pelican
by Edith Wharton
She was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity, humanized by a dimple that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said possessing the outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the real thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic problem.
I don’t think nature had meant her to be “intellectual;” but what can a poor thing do, whose husband has died of drink when her baby is hardly six months old, and who finds her coral necklace and her grandfather’s edition of the British Dramatists inadequate to the demands of the creditors?
Her mother, the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt, had written a poem in blank verse on “The Fall of Man;” one of her aunts was dean of a girls’ college; another had translated Euripides–with such a family, the poor child’s fate was sealed in advance. The only way of paying her husband’s debts and keeping the baby clothed was to be intellectual; and, after some hesitation as to the form her mental activity was to take, it was unanimously decided that she was to give lectures.
They began by being drawing-room lectures. The first time I saw her she was standing by the piano, against a flippant background of Dresden china and photographs, telling a roomful of women preoccupied with their spring bonnets all she thought she knew about Greek art. The ladies assembled to hear her had given me to understand that she was “doing it for the baby,” and this fact, together with the shortness of her upper lip and the bewildering co-operation of her dimple, disposed me to listen leniently to her dissertation. Happily, at that time Greek art was still, if I may use the phrase, easily handled: it was as simple as walking down a museum- gallery lined with pleasant familiar Venuses and Apollos. All the later complications–the archaic and archaistic conundrums; the influences of Assyria and Asia Minor; the conflicting attributions and the wrangles of the erudite–still slumbered in the bosom of the future “scientific critic.” Greek art in those days began with Phidias and ended with the Apollo Belvedere; and a child could travel from one to the other without danger of losing his way.
Mrs. Amyot had two fatal gifts: a capacious but inaccurate memory, and an extraordinary fluency of speech. There was nothing she did not remember– wrongly; but her halting facts were swathed in so many layers of rhetoric that their infirmities were imperceptible to her friendly critics. Besides, she had been taught Greek by the aunt who had translated Euripides; and the mere sound of the [Greek: ais] and [Greek: ois] that she now and then not unskilfully let slip (correcting herself, of course, with a start, and indulgently mistranslating the phrase), struck awe to the hearts of ladies whose only “accomplishment” was French–if you didn’t speak too quickly.
I had then but a momentary glimpse of Mrs. Amyot, but a few months later I came upon her again in the New England university town where the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt lived on the summit of a local Parnassus, with lesser muses and college professors respectfully grouped on the lower ledges of the sacred declivity. Mrs. Amyot, who, after her husband’s death, had returned to the maternal roof (even during her father’s lifetime the roof had been distinctively maternal), Mrs. Amyot, thanks to her upper lip, her dimple and her Greek, was already esconced in a snug hollow of the Parnassian slope.
After the lecture was over it happened that I walked home with Mrs. Amyot. From the incensed glances of two or three learned gentlemen who were hovering on the door-step when we emerged, I inferred that Mrs. Amyot, at that period, did not often walk home alone; but I doubt whether any of my discomfited rivals, whatever his claims to favor, was ever treated to so ravishing a mixture of shyness and self-abandonment, of sham erudition and real teeth and hair, as it was my privilege to enjoy. Even at the opening of her public career Mrs. Amyot had a tender eye for strangers, as possible links with successive centres of culture to which in due course the torch of Greek art might be handed on.
She began by telling me that she had never been so frightened in her life. She knew, of course, how dreadfully learned I was, and when, just as she was going to begin, her hostess had whispered to her that I was in the room, she had felt ready to sink through the floor. Then (with a flying dimple) she had remembered Emerson’s line–wasn’t it Emerson’s?–that beauty is its own excuse for seeing, and that had made her feel a little more confident, since she was sure that no one saw beauty more vividly than she–as a child she used to sit for hours gazing at an Etruscan vase on the bookcase in the library, while her sisters played with their dolls–and if seeing beauty was the only excuse one needed for talking about it, why, she was sure I would make allowances and not be too critical and sarcastic, especially if, as she thought probable, I had heard of her having lost her poor husband, and how she had to do it for the baby.
Being abundantly assured of my sympathy on these points, she went on to say that she had always wanted so much to consult me about her lectures. Of course, one subject wasn’t enough (this view of the limitations of Greek art as a “subject” gave me a startling idea of the rate at which a successful lecturer might exhaust the universe); she must find others; she had not ventured on any as yet, but she had thought of Tennyson–didn’t I love Tennyson? She worshipped him so that she was sure she could help others to understand him; or what did I think of a “course” on Raphael or Michelangelo–or on the heroines of Shakespeare? There were some fine steel-engravings of Raphael’s Madonnas and of the Sistine ceiling in her mother’s library, and she had seen Miss Cushman in several Shakespearian roles, so that on these subjects also she felt qualified to speak with authority.
When we reached her mother’s door she begged me to come in and talk the matter over; she wanted me to see the baby–she felt as though I should understand her better if I saw the baby–and the dimple flashed through a tear.
The fear of encountering the author of “The Fall of Man,” combined with the opportune recollection of a dinner engagement, made me evade this appeal with the promise of returning on the morrow. On the morrow, I left too early to redeem my promise; and for several years afterwards I saw no more of Mrs. Amyot.
My calling at that time took me at irregular intervals from one to another of our larger cities, and as Mrs. Amyot was also peripatetic it was inevitable that sooner or later we should cross each other’s path. It was therefore without surprise that, one snowy afternoon in Boston, I learned from the lady with whom I chanced to be lunching that, as soon as the meal was over, I was to be taken to hear Mrs. Amyot lecture.
“On Greek art?” I suggested.
“Oh, you’ve heard her then? No, this is one of the series called ‘Homes and Haunts of the Poets.’ Last week we had Wordsworth and the Lake Poets, to-day we are to have Goethe and Weimar. She is a wonderful creature–all the women of her family are geniuses. You know, of course, that her mother was Irene Astarte Pratt, who wrote a poem on ‘The Fall of Man’; N.P. Willis called her the female Milton of America. One of Mrs. Amyot’s aunts has translated Eurip–”
“And is she as pretty as ever?” I irrelevantly interposed.
My hostess looked shocked. “She is excessively modest and retiring. She says it is actual suffering for her to speak in public. You know she only does it for the baby.”
Punctually at the hour appointed, we took our seats in a lecture-hall full of strenuous females in ulsters. Mrs. Amyot was evidently a favorite with these austere sisters, for every corner was crowded, and as we entered a pale usher with an educated mispronunciation was setting forth to several dejected applicants the impossibility of supplying them with seats.
Our own were happily so near the front that when the curtains at the back of the platform parted, and Mrs. Amyot appeared, I was at once able to establish a comparison between the lady placidly dimpling to the applause of her public and the shrinking drawing-room orator of my earlier recollections.
Mrs. Amyot was as pretty as ever, and there was the same curious discrepancy between the freshness of her aspect and the stateness of her theme, but something was gone of the blushing unsteadiness with which she had fired her first random shots at Greek art. It was not that the shots were less uncertain, but that she now had an air of assuming that, for her purpose, the bull’s-eye was everywhere, so that there was no need to be flustered in taking aim. This assurance had so facilitated the flow of her eloquence that she seemed to be performing a trick analogous to that of the conjuror who pulls hundreds of yards of white paper out of his mouth. From a large assortment of stock adjectives she chose, with unerring deftness and rapidity, the one that taste and discrimination would most surely have rejected, fitting out her subject with a whole wardrobe of slop-shop epithets irrelevant in cut and size. To the invaluable knack of not disturbing the association of ideas in her audience, she added the gift of what may be called a confidential manner–so that her fluent generalizations about Goethe and his place in literature (the lecture was, of course, manufactured out of Lewes’s book) had the flavor of personal experience, of views sympathetically exchanged with her audience on the best way of knitting children’s socks, or of putting up preserves for the winter. It was, I am sure, to this personal accent–the moral equivalent of her dimple–that Mrs. Amyot owed her prodigious, her irrational success. It was her art of transposing second-hand ideas into first-hand emotions that so endeared her to her feminine listeners.
To any one not in search of “documents” Mrs. Amyot’s success was hardly of a kind to make her more interesting, and my curiosity flagged with the growing conviction that the “suffering” entailed on her by public speaking was at most a retrospective pang. I was sure that she had reached the point of measuring and enjoying her effects, of deliberately manipulating her public; and there must indeed have been a certain exhilaration in attaining results so considerable by means involving so little conscious effort. Mrs. Amyot’s art was simply an extension of coquetry: she flirted with her audience.
In this mood of enlightened skepticism I responded but languidly to my hostess’s suggestion that I should go with her that evening to see Mrs. Amyot. The aunt who had translated Euripides was at home on Saturday evenings, and one met “thoughtful” people there, my hostess explained: it was one of the intellectual centres of Boston. My mood remained distinctly resentful of any connection between Mrs. Amyot and intellectuality, and I declined to go; but the next day I met Mrs. Amyot in the street.
She stopped me reproachfully. She had heard I was in Boston; why had I not come last night? She had been told that I was at her lecture, and it had frightened her–yes, really, almost as much as years ago in Hillbridge. She never could get over that stupid shyness, and the whole business was as distasteful to her as ever; but what could she do? There was the baby– he was a big boy now, and boys were so expensive! But did I really think she had improved the least little bit? And why wouldn’t I come home with her now, and see the boy, and tell her frankly what I had thought of the lecture? She had plenty of flattery–people were so kind, and every one knew that she did it for the baby–but what she felt the need of was criticism, severe, discriminating criticism like mine–oh, she knew that I was dreadfully discriminating!
I went home with her and saw the boy. In the early heat of her Tennyson- worship Mrs. Amyot had christened him Lancelot, and he looked it. Perhaps, however, it was his black velvet dress and the exasperating length of his yellow curls, together with the fact of his having been taught to recite Browning to visitors, that raised to fever-heat the itching of my palms in his Infant-Samuel-like presence. I have since had reason to think that he would have preferred to be called Billy, and to hunt cats with the other boys in the block: his curls and his poetry were simply another outlet for Mrs. Amyot’s irrepressible coquetry.
But if Lancelot was not genuine, his mother’s love for him was. It justified everything–the lectures were for the baby, after all. I had not been ten minutes in the room before I was pledged to help Mrs. Amyot carry out her triumphant fraud. If she wanted to lecture on Plato she should–Plato must take his chance like the rest of us! There was no use, of course, in being “discriminating.” I preserved sufficient reason to avoid that pitfall, but I suggested “subjects” and made lists of books for her with a fatuity that became more obvious as time attenuated the remembrance of her smile; I even remember thinking that some men might have cut the knot by marrying her, but I handed over Plato as a hostage and escaped by the afternoon train.
The next time I saw her was in New York, when she had become so fashionable that it was a part of the whole duty of woman to be seen at her lectures. The lady who suggested that of course I ought to go and hear Mrs. Amyot, was not very clear about anything except that she was perfectly lovely, and had had a horrid husband, and was doing it to support her boy. The subject of the discourse (I think it was on Ruskin) was clearly of minor importance, not only to my friend, but to the throng of well-dressed and absent-minded ladies who rustled in late, dropped their muffs and pocket-books, and undisguisedly lost themselves in the study of each other’s apparel. They received Mrs. Amyot with warmth, but she evidently represented a social obligation like going to church, rather than any more personal interest; in fact, I suspect that every one of the ladies would have remained away, had they been sure that none of the others were coming.
Whether Mrs. Amyot was disheartened by the lack of sympathy between herself and her hearers, or whether the sport of arousing it had become a task, she certainly imparted her platitudes with less convincing warmth than of old. Her voice had the same confidential inflections, but it was like a voice reproduced by a gramophone: the real woman seemed far away. She had grown stouter without losing her dewy freshness, and her smart gown might have been taken to show either the potentialities of a settled income, or a politic concession to the taste of her hearers. As I listened I reproached myself for ever having suspected her of self-deception in saying that she took no pleasure in her work. I was sure now that she did it only for Lancelot, and judging from the size of her audience and the price of the tickets I concluded that Lancelot must be receiving a liberal education.
I was living in New York that winter, and in the rotation of dinners I found myself one evening at Mrs. Amyot’s side. The dimple came out at my greeting as punctually as a cuckoo in a Swiss clock, and I detected the same automatic quality in the tone in which she made her usual pretty demand for advice. She was like a musical-box charged with popular airs. They succeeded one another with breathless rapidity, but there was a moment after each when the cylinders scraped and whizzed.
Mrs. Amyot, as I found when I called on her, was living in a sunny flat, with a sitting-room full of flowers and a tea-table that had the air of expecting visitors. She owned that she had been ridiculously successful. It was delightful, of course, on Lancelot’s account. Lancelot had been sent to the best school in the country, and if things went well and people didn’t tire of his silly mother he was to go to Harvard afterwards. During the next two or three years Mrs. Amyot kept her flat in New York, and radiated art and literature upon the suburbs. I saw her now and then, always stouter, better dressed, more successful and more automatic: she had become a lecturing-machine.
I went abroad for a year or two and when I came back she had disappeared. I asked several people about her, but life had closed over her. She had been last heard of as lecturing–still lecturing–but no one seemed to know when or where.
It was in Boston that I found her at last, forlornly swaying to the oscillations of an overhead strap in a crowded trolley-car. Her face had so changed that I lost myself in a startled reckoning of the time that had elapsed since our parting. She spoke to me shyly, as though aware of my hurried calculation, and conscious that in five years she ought not to have altered so much as to upset my notion of time. Then she seemed to set it down to her dress, for she nervously gathered her cloak over a gown that asked only to be concealed, and shrank into a seat behind the line of prehensile bipeds blocking the aisle of the car.
It was perhaps because she so obviously avoided me that I felt for the first time that I might be of use to her; and when she left the car I made no excuse for following her.
She said nothing of needing advice and did not ask me to walk home with her, concealing, as we talked, her transparent preoccupations under the guise of a sudden interest in all I had been doing since she had last seen me. Of what concerned her, I learned only that Lancelot was well and that for the present she was not lecturing–she was tired and her doctor had ordered her to rest. On the doorstep of a shabby house she paused and held out her hand. She had been so glad to see me and perhaps if I were in Boston again–the tired dimple, as it were, bowed me out and closed the door on the conclusion of the phrase.
Two or three weeks later, at my club in New York, I found a letter from her. In it she owned that she was troubled, that of late she had been unsuccessful, and that, if I chanced to be coming back to Boston, and could spare her a little of that invaluable advice which–. A few days later the advice was at her disposal. She told me frankly what had happened. Her public had grown tired of her. She had seen it coming on for some time, and was shrewd enough in detecting the causes. She had more rivals than formerly–younger women, she admitted, with a smile that could still afford to be generous–and then her audiences had grown more critical and consequently more exacting. Lecturing–as she understood it– used to be simple enough. You chose your topic–Raphael, Shakespeare, Gothic Architecture, or some such big familiar “subject”–and read up about it for a week or so at the Athenaeum or the Astor Library, and then told your audience what you had read. Now, it appeared, that simple process was no longer adequate. People had tired of familiar “subjects”; it was the fashion to be interested in things that one hadn’t always known about–natural selection, animal magnetism, sociology and comparative folk-lore; while, in literature, the demand had become equally difficult to meet, since Matthew Arnold had introduced the habit of studying the “influence” of one author on another. She had tried lecturing on influences, and had done very well as long as the public was satisfied with the tracing of such obvious influences as that of Turner on Ruskin, of Schiller on Goethe, of Shakespeare on English literature; but such investigations had soon lost all charm for her too-sophisticated audiences, who now demanded either that the influence or the influenced should be quite unknown, or that there should be no perceptible connection between the two. The zest of the performance lay in the measure of ingenuity with which the lecturer established a relation between two people who had probably never heard of each other, much less read each other’s works. A pretty Miss Williams with red hair had, for instance, been lecturing with great success on the influence of the Rosicrucians upon the poetry of Keats, while somebody else had given a “course” on the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas upon Professor Huxley.
Mrs. Amyot, warmed by my participation in her distress, went on to say that the growing demand for evolution was what most troubled her. Her grandfather had been a pillar of the Presbyterian ministry, and the idea of her lecturing on Darwin or Herbert Spencer was deeply shocking to her mother and aunts. In one sense the family had staked its literary as well as its spiritual hopes on the literal inspiration of Genesis: what became of “The Fall of Man” in the light of modern exegesis?
The upshot of it was that she had ceased to lecture because she could no longer sell tickets enough to pay for the hire of a lecture-hall; and as for the managers, they wouldn’t look at her. She had tried her luck all through the Eastern States and as far south as Washington; but it was of no use, and unless she could get hold of some new subjects–or, better still, of some new audiences–she must simply go out of the business. That would mean the failure of all she had worked for, since Lancelot would have to leave Harvard. She paused, and wept some of the unbecoming tears that spring from real grief. Lancelot, it appeared, was to be a genius. He had passed his opening examinations brilliantly; he had “literary gifts”; he had written beautiful poetry, much of which his mother had copied out, in reverentially slanting characters, in a velvet-bound volume which she drew from a locked drawer.
Lancelot’s verse struck me as nothing more alarming than growing-pains; but it was not to learn this that she had summoned me. What she wanted was to be assured that he was worth working for, an assurance which I managed to convey by the simple stratagem of remarking that the poems reminded me of Swinburne–and so they did, as well as of Browning, Tennyson, Rossetti, and all the other poets who supply young authors with original inspirations.
This point being established, it remained to be decided by what means his mother was, in the French phrase, to pay herself the luxury of a poet. It was clear that this indulgence could be bought only with counterfeit coin, and that the one way of helping Mrs. Amyot was to become a party to the circulation of such currency. My fetish of intellectual integrity went down like a ninepin before the appeal of a woman no longer young and distinctly foolish, but full of those dear contradictions and irrelevancies that will always make flesh and blood prevail against a syllogism. When I took leave of Mrs. Amyot I had promised her a dozen letters to Western universities and had half pledged myself to sketch out a lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion.
In the West she achieved a success which for a year or more embittered my perusal of the morning papers. The fascination that lures the murderer back to the scene of his crime drew my eye to every paragraph celebrating Mrs. Amyot’s last brilliant lecture on the influence of something upon somebody; and her own letters–she overwhelmed me with them–spared me no detail of the entertainment given in her honor by the Palimpsest Club of Omaha or of her reception at the University of Leadville. The college professors were especially kind: she assured me that she had never before met with such discriminating sympathy. I winced at the adjective, which cast a sudden light on the vast machinery of fraud that I had set in motion. All over my native land, men of hitherto unblemished integrity were conniving with me in urging their friends to go and hear Mrs. Amyot lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion! My only hope was that, somewhere among the number of my accomplices, Mrs. Amyot might find one who would marry her in the defense of his convictions.
None, apparently, resorted to such heroic measures; for about two years later I was startled by the announcement that Mrs. Amyot was lecturing in Trenton, New Jersey, on modern theosophy in the light of the Vedas. The following week she was at Newark, discussing Schopenhauer in the light of recent psychology. The week after that I was on the deck of an ocean steamer, reconsidering my share in Mrs. Amyot’s triumphs with the impartiality with which one views an episode that is being left behind at the rate of twenty knots an hour. After all, I had been helping a mother to educate her son.
The next ten years of my life were spent in Europe, and when I came home the recollection of Mrs. Amyot had become as inoffensive as one of those pathetic ghosts who are said to strive in vain to make themselves visible to the living. I did not even notice the fact that I no longer heard her spoken of; she had dropped like a dead leaf from the bough of memory.
A year or two after my return I was condemned to one of the worst punishments a worker can undergo–an enforced holiday. The doctors who pronounced the inhuman sentence decreed that it should be worked out in the South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my thermometer and my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another. In the vast and melancholy sea of my disoccupation I clutched like a drowning man at any human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory interest in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my fellow-sufferers; but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I clung with undiscriminating enthusiasm.
In no other way can I explain, as I look back on it, the importance I attached to the leisurely confidences of a new arrival with a brown beard who, tilted back at my side on a hotel veranda hung with roses, imparted to me one afternoon the simple annals of his past. There was nothing in the tale to kindle the most inflammable imagination, and though the man had a pleasant frank face and a voice differing agreeably from the shrill inflections of our fellow-lodgers, it is probable that under different conditions his discursive history of successful business ventures in a Western city would have affected me somewhat in the manner of a lullaby.
Even at the tune I was not sure I liked his agreeable voice: it had a self-importance out of keeping with the humdrum nature of his story, as though a breeze engaged in shaking out a table-cloth should have fancied itself inflating a banner. But this criticism may have been a mere mark of my own fastidiousness, for the man seemed a simple fellow, satisfied with his middling fortunes, and already (he was not much past thirty) deep-sunk in conjugal content.
He had just started on an anecdote connected with the cutting of his eldest boy’s teeth, when a lady I knew, returning from her late drive, paused before us for a moment in the twilight, with the smile which is the feminine equivalent of beads to savages.
“Won’t you take a ticket?” she said sweetly.
Of course I would take a ticket–but for what? I ventured to inquire.
“Oh, that’s so good of you–for the lecture this evening. You needn’t go, you know; we’re none of us going; most of us have been through it already at Aiken and at Saint Augustine and at Palm Beach. I’ve given away my tickets to some new people who’ve just come from the North, and some of us are going to send our maids, just to fill up the room.”
“And may I ask to whom you are going to pay this delicate attention?”
“Oh, I thought you knew–to poor Mrs. Amyot. She’s been lecturing all over the South this winter; she’s simply haunted me ever since I left New York–and we had six weeks of her at Bar Harbor last summer! One has to take tickets, you know, because she’s a widow and does it for her son–to pay for his education. She’s so plucky and nice about it, and talks about him in such a touching unaffected way, that everybody is sorry for her, and we all simply ruin ourselves in tickets. I do hope that boy’s nearly educated!”
“Mrs. Amyot? Mrs. Amyot?” I repeated. “Is she still educating her son?”
“Oh, do you know about her? Has she been at it long? There’s some comfort in that, for I suppose when the boy’s provided for the poor thing will be able to take a rest–and give us one!”
She laughed and held out her hand.
“Here’s your ticket. Did you say tickets–two? Oh, thanks. Of course you needn’t go.”
“But I mean to go. Mrs. Amyot is an old friend of mine.”
“Do you really? That’s awfully good of you. Perhaps I’ll go too if I can persuade Charlie and the others to come. And I wonder”–in a well-directed aside–”if your friend–?”
I telegraphed her under cover of the dusk that my friend was of too recent standing to be drawn into her charitable toils, and she masked her mistake under a rattle of friendly adjurations not to be late, and to be sure to keep a seat for her, as she had quite made up her mind to go even if Charlie and the others wouldn’t.
The flutter of her skirts subsided in the distance, and my neighbor, who had half turned away to light a cigar, made no effort to reopen the conversation. At length, fearing he might have overheard the allusion to himself, I ventured to ask if he were going to the lecture that evening.
“Much obliged–I have a ticket,” he said abruptly.
This struck me as in such bad taste that I made no answer; and it was he who spoke next.
“Did I understand you to say that you were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot’s?”
“I think I may claim to be, if it is the same Mrs. Amyot I had the pleasure of knowing many years ago. My Mrs. Amyot used to lecture too–”
“To pay for her son’s education?”
“I believe so.”
“Well–see you later.”
He got up and walked into the house.
In the hotel drawing-room that evening there was but a meagre sprinkling of guests, among whom I saw my brown-bearded friend sitting alone on a sofa, with his head against the wall. It could not have been curiosity to see Mrs. Amyot that had impelled him to attend the performance, for it would have been impossible for him, without changing his place, to command the improvised platform at the end of the room. When I looked at him he seemed lost in contemplation of the chandelier.
The lady from whom I had bought my tickets fluttered in late, unattended by Charlie and the others, and assuring me that she would scream if we had the lecture on Ibsen–she had heard it three times already that winter. A glance at the programme reassured her: it informed us (in the lecturer’s own slanting hand) that Mrs. Amyot was to lecture on the Cosmogony.
After a long pause, during which the small audience coughed and moved its chairs and showed signs of regretting that it had come, the door opened, and Mrs. Amyot stepped upon the platform. Ah, poor lady!
Some one said “Hush!”, the coughing and chair-shifting subsided, and she began.
It was like looking at one’s self early in the morning in a cracked mirror. I had no idea I had grown so old. As for Lancelot, he must have a beard. A beard? The word struck me, and without knowing why I glanced across the room at my bearded friend on the sofa. Oddly enough he was looking at me, with a half-defiant, half-sullen expression; and as our glances crossed, and his fell, the conviction came to me that he was Lancelot.
I don’t remember a word of the lecture; and yet there were enough of them to have filled a good-sized dictionary. The stream of Mrs. Amyot’s eloquence had become a flood: one had the despairing sense that she had sprung a leak, and that until the plumber came there was nothing to be done about it.
The plumber came at length, in the shape of a clock striking ten; my companion, with a sigh of relief, drifted away in search of Charlie and the others; the audience scattered with the precipitation of people who had discharged a duty; and, without surprise, I found the brown-bearded stranger at my elbow.
We stood alone in the bare-floored room, under the flaring chandelier.
“I think you told me this afternoon that you were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot’s?” he began awkwardly.
I assented.
“Will you come in and see her?”
“Now? I shall be very glad to, if–”
“She’s ready; she’s expecting you,” he interposed.
He offered no further explanation, and I followed him in silence. He led me down the long corridor, and pushed open the door of a sitting-room.
“Mother,” he said, closing the door after we had entered, “here’s the gentleman who says he used to know you.”
Mrs. Amyot, who sat in an easy-chair stirring a cup of bouillon, looked up with a start. She had evidently not seen me in the audience, and her son’s description had failed to convey my identity. I saw a frightened look in her eyes; then, like a frost flower on a window-pane, the dimple expanded on her wrinkled cheek, and she held out her hand.
“I’m so glad,” she said, “so glad!”
She turned to her son, who stood watching us. “You must have told Lancelot all about me–you’ve known me so long!”
“I haven’t had time to talk to your son–since I knew he was your son,” I explained.
Her brow cleared. “Then you haven’t had time to say anything very dreadful?” she said with a laugh.
“It is he who has been saying dreadful things,” I returned, trying to fall in with her tone.
I saw my mistake. “What things?” she faltered.
“Making me feel how old I am by telling me about his children.”
“My grandchildren!” she exclaimed with a blush.
“Well, if you choose to put it so.”
She laughed again, vaguely, and was silent. I hesitated a moment and then put out my hand.
“I see you are tired. I shouldn’t have ventured to come in at this hour if your son–”
The son stepped between us. “Yes, I asked him to come,” he said to his mother, in his clear self-assertive voice. “I haven’t told him anything yet; but you’ve got to–now. That’s what I brought him for.”
His mother straightened herself, but I saw her eye waver.
“Lancelot–” she began.
“Mr. Amyot,” I said, turning to the young man, “if your mother will let me come back to-morrow, I shall be very glad–”
He struck his hand hard against the table on which he was leaning.
“No, sir! It won’t take long, but it’s got to be said now.”
He moved nearer to his mother, and I saw his lip twitch under his beard. After all, he was younger and less sure of himself than I had fancied.
“See here, mother,” he went on, “there’s something here that’s got to be cleared up, and as you say this gentleman is an old friend of yours it had better be cleared up in his presence. Maybe he can help explain it–and if he can’t, it’s got to be explained to him.”
Mrs. Amyot’s lips moved, but she made no sound. She glanced at me helplessly and sat down. My early inclination to thrash Lancelot was beginning to reassert itself. I took up my hat and moved toward the door.
“Mrs. Amyot is under no obligation to explain anything whatever to me,” I said curtly.
“Well! She’s under an obligation to me, then–to explain something in your presence.” He turned to her again. “Do you know what the people in this hotel are saying? Do you know what he thinks–what they all think? That you’re doing this lecturing to support me–to pay for my education! They say you go round telling them so. That’s what they buy the tickets for– they do it out of charity. Ask him if it isn’t what they say–ask him if they weren’t joking about it on the piazza before dinner. The others think I’m a little boy, but he’s known you for years, and he must have known how old I was. He must have known it wasn’t to pay for my education!”
He stood before her with his hands clenched, the veins beating in his temples. She had grown very pale, and her cheeks looked hollow. When she spoke her voice had an odd click in it.
“If–if these ladies and gentlemen have been coming to my lectures out of charity, I see nothing to be ashamed of in that–” she faltered.
“If they’ve been coming out of charity to me,” he retorted, “don’t you see you’ve been making me a party to a fraud? Isn’t there any shame in that?” His forehead reddened. “Mother! Can’t you see the shame of letting people think I was a d–beat, who sponged on you for my keep? Let alone making us both the laughing-stock of every place you go to!”
“I never did that, Lancelot!”
“Did what?”
“Made you a laughing-stock–”
He stepped close to her and caught her wrist.
“Will you look me in the face and swear you never told people you were doing this lecturing business to support me?”
There was a long silence. He dropped her wrist and she lifted a limp handkerchief to her frightened eyes. “I did do it–to support you–to educate you”–she sobbed.
“We’re not talking about what you did when I was a boy. Everybody who knows me knows I’ve been a grateful son. Have I ever taken a penny from you since I left college ten years ago?”
“I never said you had! How can you accuse your mother of such wickedness, Lancelot?”
“Have you never told anybody in this hotel–or anywhere else in the last ten years–that you were lecturing to support me? Answer me that!”
“How can you,” she wept, “before a stranger?”
“Haven’t you said such things about me to strangers?” he retorted.
“Lancelot!”
“Well–answer me, then. Say you haven’t, mother!” His voice broke unexpectedly and he took her hand with a gentler touch. “I’ll believe anything you tell me,” he said almost humbly.
She mistook his tone and raised her head with a rash clutch at dignity.
“I think you’d better ask this gentleman to excuse you first.”
“No, by God, I won’t!” he cried. “This gentleman says he knows all about you and I mean him to know all about me too. I don’t mean that he or anybody else under this roof shall go on thinking for another twenty-four hours that a cent of their money has ever gone into my pockets since I was old enough to shift for myself. And he sha’n’t leave this room till you’ve made that clear to him.”
He stepped back as he spoke and put his shoulders against the door.
“My dear young gentleman,” I said politely, “I shall leave this room exactly when I see fit to do so–and that is now. I have already told you that Mrs. Amyot owes me no explanation of her conduct.”
“But I owe you an explanation of mine–you and every one who has bought a single one of her lecture tickets. Do you suppose a man who’s been through what I went through while that woman was talking to you in the porch before dinner is going to hold his tongue, and not attempt to justify himself? No decent man is going to sit down under that sort of thing. It’s enough to ruin his character. If you’re my mother’s friend, you owe it to me to hear what I’ve got to say.”
He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.
“Good God, mother!” he burst out suddenly, “what did you do it for? Haven’t you had everything you wanted ever since I was able to pay for it? Haven’t I paid you back every cent you spent on me when I was in college? Have I ever gone back on you since I was big enough to work?” He turned to me with a laugh. “I thought she did it to amuse herself–and because there was such a demand for her lectures. Such a demand! That’s what she always told me. When we asked her to come out and spend this winter with us in Minneapolis, she wrote back that she couldn’t because she had engagements all through the south, and her manager wouldn’t let her off. That’s the reason why I came all the way on here to see her. We thought she was the most popular lecturer in the United States, my wife and I did! We were awfully proud of it too, I can tell you.” He dropped into a chair, still laughing.
“How can you, Lancelot, how can you!” His mother, forgetful of my presence, was clinging to him with tentative caresses. “When you didn’t need the money any longer I spent it all on the children–you know I did.”
“Yes, on lace christening dresses and life-size rocking-horses with real manes! The kind of thing children can’t do without.”
“Oh, Lancelot, Lancelot–I loved them so! How can you believe such falsehoods about me?”
“What falsehoods about you?”
“That I ever told anybody such dreadful things?”
He put her back gently, keeping his eyes on hers. “Did you never tell anybody in this house that you were lecturing to support your son?”
Her hands dropped from his shoulders and she flashed round on me in sudden anger.
“I know what I think of people who call themselves friends and who come between a mother and her son!”
“Oh, mother, mother!” he groaned.
I went up to him and laid my hand on his shoulder.
“My dear man,” I said, “don’t you see the uselessness of prolonging this?”
“Yes, I do,” he answered abruptly; and before I could forestall his movement he rose and walked out of the room.
There was a long silence, measured by the lessening reverberations of his footsteps down the wooden floor of the corridor.
When they ceased I approached Mrs. Amyot, who had sunk into her chair. I held out my hand and she took it without a trace of resentment on her ravaged face.
“I sent his wife a seal-skin jacket at Christmas!” she said, with the tears running down her cheeks.
The Pelican was featured as The Short Story of the Day on Wed, Aug 11, 2021