The Eagles Gather Page 5

  “No, our realistic monkey has no illusions. But, he also has no morality. He has never heard of his duty to his fellows; he has never heard of altruism, of justice, of peace, of love, or self-sacrifice. He has never heard of—of—God. If he has heard, he has not understood.” (And how like him are the Bouchards; she thought again, drearily.)

  “Celeste, whenever you are faced with the sight of monkey-realism, and are frightened and confused by it, you must just ask yourself one simple question: Is this monkey-realism more valuable than the ‘foolishness’ of a Jesus? Does it make existence more profound, more beautiful, more endurable? Does it give you dignity, or does it degrade you?” And on another occasion, she said:

  “You will hear, child, that ‘truth’ or ‘realism’ are preferable, even if ugly and vicious and treacherous, to ‘silly illusions.’ And then you must ask yourself: What is truth, and what is illusion? No one will be able to answer this to your satisfaction, though some will tell you that morality is not an objective fact in the Universe, which is entirely amoral and without subjective values. Perhaps this is true, but in the mechanical and lifeless Universe there is also no ‘truth’ and no ‘realism,’ either. They, too, are illusions.

  “Your choice, then, perhaps, lies between two ‘illusions’: the life-giving and the life-destroying, the man-ennobling, and the man-degrading. The illusion which has given us Jesus and Phidias and Galileo and Beethoven and Shakespeare, or the illusion which has given us Napoleon and Nero, Genghis Khan and the Borgias, wars and death.

  “You must weigh the value, to yourself, of these two illusions, and you must take your choice. Every man must take his choice. And what he chooses means peace or misery for all those who come near him. What he chooses preserves him or kills him, makes life bearable or intolerable.

  “Perhaps in the light of all eternity nothing is valuable. But we do not live in the light of eternity. We live in the light of our own small lives, for just a few moments. We must live for just those few moments. Shall we degrade them and ourselves, or shall we ennoble them, and also ourselves?”

  And on another occasion, with what bitterness! she said: “When some one begs you to be ‘realistic’ he is preparing to exploit you, degrade you or destroy you.”

  Once Celeste, in tears, declared that Christopher had laughed at her for some innocence, and had called her a little fool.

  Adelaide looked at her deeply and sadly for some moments, and then asked: “You love Christopher, don’t you, my darling? And he loves you, too, very much. He loves your innocence, which he laughs at. Become like—like him, or some of the—others, and he will detest you, as he detests himself and the others. When he asks you to be ‘sensible’ he is asking you to accommodate him for a little while, but if you continued to be ‘sensible’ he would grow to hate you.”

  She thought to herself: He tells me he despises me. He jeers at me. He hates me. But he does not really despise me. If I could stand in his way, and prevent him from corrupting Celeste into something which he would hate in the end, he would love me as he did when he was a child.

  It was Christopher’s blindness which caused her such sorrow. She hated this blindness, and not Christopher. Sometimes she forgot her sorrow in anger.

  What her mother said to her strengthened and reassured little Celeste. She went to her mother for sympathy and understanding, but she was also shy with her, and constantly growing more shy. Her loyalties were divided. She loved Adelaide. But she loved Christopher more. When Adelaide mentioned her youngest son with a bitterness she could not keep entirely from her voice, Celeste was painfully affronted, and her manner became distrait and uneasy. When Christopher sneered lightly about his mother to his sister, Celeste was uneasy, also, but not so uneasy as when Adelaide spoke of Christopher. At times she tried to act as peacemaker, and was bewildered when she could make no peace. She never fully realized that she was, herself, the territory coveted by both, that she herself, was the battlefield on which they everlastingly came to grips with each other.

  Christopher constantly put his mother in the wrong. Unfortunately, little Celeste could uneasily observe that Adelaide, when confronted with the steel smoothness of Christopher’s will, became disordered and querulous, pettish and unreasonable. As time went on, the poor woman, feeling that she would grant no victory, even the smallest and most insignificant, quarreled with her son over the most foolish matters. On occasions, so harassed, so terrified was she, that she descended to whining and thin accusations and hysteria. She would attack Christopher, then turn incoherently upon her daughter. Christopher, seeing the effect on the girl, encouraged these occasions. He knew she was too young to understand what caused them. To a tormented animal, the buzz of a fly is sufficient to throw him into a frenzy. Celeste saw the frenzies; she did not see the torment.

  But Christopher was satisfied. He provoked Adelaide’s nervous and hysterical outbursts, and so shamed her in her daughter’s shrinking eyes. Adelaide, poor woman, saw this, and once she cried out to Celeste in her pain:

  “He is trying to make you hate me!”

  “But Mama,” replied Celeste, “why do you get so angry over such little things?”

  Christopher was careful to instil in Celeste’s mind that she had a duty to her mother. When she asked him about the possibility of buying something without significance, or if she could go to a certain place, he would often say: “Ask your mother. It is her place to decide, not mine.”

  So Celeste, in defending Christopher one day, cried out protestingly: “He does not hate you at all, Mama! How can you be so unjust to poor Christopher?”

  Adelaide saw what was happening, and tried desperately to control herself. But her terror and suffering often got the better of her efforts, and so she played, with her eyes wide open, into Christopher’s hands.

  When Celeste was confused, she still came, at twenty, to her mother. But she came less and less. For poor Adelaide’s nerves and despair were completely wrecking her. She could not keep the bitter strain from her voice; she could not keep the jerk of impatience from her hands and her eyes.

  And now, when Adelaide battled for Celeste’s soul, Celeste began to see only a nervous and querulous woman, fighting over the most trivial things, gesturing wildly over absurdities, thin-voiced and unreasonable, spiritually disheveled and haggard of face. Almost a shrew.

  But still Adelaide fought The very look of distaste in Celeste’s eyes was sufficient to show her how unremittingly, how desperately, she must fight. But how terrible, how heart-breaking, it was to fight to save some one who did not know she was threatened.

  Adelaide had never liked the Bouchards. She was what Ernest Barbour had called “a great lady.” She had been reared in the traditions of gentlefolk. Many of her mother’s relatives had lived in the New England States, where restraint was not thought bloodlessness, and where good manners and civilization were not considered decadent. She had been taught a respect for property, and a belief that it was an evidence of competence. She had been taught to respect money, not for itself, but as an indication of the value of time and the obligations of responsibility. But worldly goods, she had been told, are no indication of the intrinsic man. Florid “show” revealed the plebeian, the kind of individual who was potentially dangerous. Envy, greed, avarice, meanness and cruelty were not sins, but evidences of a low-bred person, whom nice people avoided and despised, and did not mention.

  She was really too kind to say outright that she disliked, and feared, the Bouchards because they had no “character.” She had admired Ernest Barbour, for she had discovered that her husband’s uncle had the Englishman’s reverence for tradition, discipline, pride and self-reliance. Once she told Mrs. Emile, in a moment of indignation, that whatever Ernest had been otherwise, he had been a Man. Why, exclaimed Mrs. Emile in angry amusement, he had not been even a gentleman! That, replied Adelaide, after a moment’s thoughtful contemplation of Mrs. Emile’s flushed handsome face, was a matter of opinion. He had had character. Perhaps it
was true that he had been a scoundrel. But he had been undeviating; he had had taste, as shown by his love for the old Sessions house. He had hated flamboyance, had despised suppleness and hypocrisy. He had gotten his own way, but had taken no delight in the misery he had caused, nor had he been amused by it. If he had lied, it had not been for the love of lying.

  Not one of the Bouchards, she would think sadly, had much character, except, perhaps, Peter Bouchard, son of the sincere Honore, who one never saw nowadays, since his discharge from the Army. No, not one of them had much, in spite of their ladies, heiresses to great fortunes, and their French pretensions, which they laughingly half-believed, due to the assiduousness of their American wives. They affected not to think constantly of money, and the value of the things they bought, but Adelaide knew this was only affectation. Even their elaborate educations had merely taught them the outward gestures of gentility. But gentility was not in their fibre; true aristocracy was not in their hearts.

  She was mortally afraid of them. They were ruthless, but it was a Jesuitical ruthlessness, winding, lying, plotting and sinister. She knew they laughed at her, and it took all her fortitude, all the knowledge of her own superiority, to keep herself from being utterly routed by them. She knew they considered her a fool, because she would seem bewildered before contempt, expediency, avarice and selfishness. When Jules had been alive, they had not dared to make fun of her to her face, and openly, if affectionately, deride her. But now they made no pretense at any consideration. From derision, they passed to indifference, and finally ignored her. They knew she was afraid of them, and when they encountered her, there was a cavalier flavor in their speech and manner. Once she had innocently believed it was because they resented her superiority, but finally she had to admit that they truly believed her inferior to them. She could not be angry or indignant. She could only be sad.

  Sometimes, with a trembling, of the heart, she thought she detected dim evidences of character in her oldest son, Armand. Detecting these, she would lean spiritually towards him, yearning, soundlessly crying to him to let them have their way. Then she would feel uncertainty in him, depression, confusion; she would cry out to him again and again, trying to catch his eye in desperate encouragement. And then he would sigh, retreat, soften, mass-down, flow away under her hopeless gaze. Finally she came to the conclusion that inherent probity that had no courage was more despicable than no probity at all.

  Christopher terrified her more than all the rest of the Bouchards together, for she had no defense against him.

  But Emile, her second son, filled her with disgust.

  CHAPTER VII

  Christopher, when Celeste was fourteen, decided that it would be an excellent thing for the girl to go away to school. Postwar Europe in 1921 and 1922 was still in a state of flux. He wanted to send her to school in France, where he had an idea young girls were protected and disciplined and unspoiled. His own experiences in France, especially in Paris, had not made him believe that there was no fastidious morality in that country. He, with his brother, Emile, and his various cousins, had discreetly attended the Peace Conferences, but all without notoriety or publicity. Emile, and their cousin, Jean, and two or three of the others, had had quite a gay time in France. They had sought out Montmartre, fondly remembered from their student days. They had gone to Germany, to Berlin, and then to Vienna and London, and then back to France. There was nothing they had overlooked. Nevertheless, Christopher (“the Rabelaisian Trappist,” as Jean cleverly called him) did not believe with the others that women were exclusively rumps, and had a rump-psychology, which precluded them from sexual morality. He had met a number of sincere and decent women (all frumps and homosexuals, said Emile), who were human beings as well as females. Their only trouble, he could see, was that they had a tendency to lean heavily on the human-being side, and too little on the female side. They had not been artful; they had not flirted nor coquetted; in short, they had lacked what Jean called “pretty rump-attitudes.”

  Christopher had admired them. He hoped Celeste would grow to be like them, though perhaps with a little more femaleness and loveliness. The only drawback was that he was afraid that the sight of the huge devastated areas might frighten and depress the girl. A convent in Paris, convenient to cathedrals and museums and galleries and concerts, seemed the best choice. But even here there were marks of steel-jacketed death, and for some not too strange reason, he did not wish Celeste to see them. He played with the convent idea, however, for some time. He liked to imagine Celeste demurely sitting in her little cloistered room, all white muslin and bare white walls and floors, and walking in sunny old gardens near a green-mossed fountain, and laughing with innocent young girls like herself. The more he thought of the idea, the more he liked it. Black-robed nuns were good companions for female youth. He could vividly imagine the tiny chapel where Celeste would pray and meditate. He could see the sunlight splashing through stained glass upon her little ivory-colored face with its deeply dimpled chin.

  He detested the young American girls of the post-war era, with their bare legs and lipstick, their hip-flasks and nonchalant and indecent inanity, their “clear-eyed” imbecility, and their knowledge of contraceptives. He found them convenient and entertaining. The only difference he found, he said, between them and professional prostitutes, was that one paid the prostitutes on a C.O.D. basis. Emile and the others laughed approvingly at this witticism. In manner and speech Christopher might be a Trappist, but they guessed rightly that his vices, if austere, had a sort of cold viciousness about them, and no joyousness.

  He vigilantly scrutinized all Celeste’s young friends. He did not believe, with his grand-uncle, Ernest Barbour, that a rascal is preferable to a “good” fool. He preferred the fools for Celeste. They kept their skirts down and carried handbags as receptacles for handkerchiefs and combs and perfume, and not for artifices. He was not interested in Celeste being entertained; he was interested only in her virginity and her ignorance of dirtiness. There was much talk these days, among young girls, of sexual knowledge that “made one free and unafraid and uninhabited.” (There was much talk of Freud, whom he called a procurer.) Christopher preferred that Celeste should not acquire such freedom and fearlessness. He did not wish her to associate with those who would “enlighten” her in the name of understanding He wanted her as inhibited as possible, believing that erotic experience was not the most vital necessity for a girl in her teens. He found the new and constant chatter of sex among the “uninhibited” young women of his acquaintance boring when it was not disgusting.

  One night, in such company, he said in his quiet but penetrating voice, which was so oddly without inflection: “And now, let’s talk about constipation. That’s just as important a subject, and very closely related, I believe.”

  Celeste, at fourteen, had not yet discovered sex. Christopher carefully supervised her reading, and bought her the old classics by the case, after having satisfied himself that they were well expurgated. He liked her to read the great romances; he liked to know that her mind was filling with visions of tenderness and devotion, however much he smiled at them himself, and thought them precious. He encouraged her to tell him about them, and thought there was nothing more beautiful than the sight of her pretty face with the palings and flushings of emotion on it.

  Once Adelaide, in one of her struggles with him, had cried out: “You will destroy her innocence!” He had replied, with cold contempt, that he had no greater wish than to preserve it. Then Adelaide had looked at him strangely and had said: “You and I are talking about different things, Christopher.”

  He had contemptuously affected to be puzzled, but he knew what she meant. But she did not know that he, too, desired both innocences to be kept intact. His whole struggle with his mother for possession of Celeste was for the possession of her love. Adelaide would gladly have surrendered Celeste’s love to Christopher, all of it, if it would have kept her spiritual innocence from being violated. But this was the one thing he did not unders
tand.

  He discussed, finally, the convent idea with Adelaide. He was not prepared for her sudden delight, and it disconcerted him, until he realized that Adelaide’s delight was caused by the thought that Celeste would thus be separated from her brother. “You are a selfish woman,” he said to Adelaide, and had immediately abandoned all thought of the French convent. Moreover, when he thought of the separation, which he had overlooked in his satisfaction, something moved painfully in him.

  He would not let her go away to school. He engaged the best procurable tutor for her in her own home. He had picked the schools in Windsor which she had attended, and had carefully seen to it that they were exclusively girls’ schools. At sixteen, she had never danced with a boy, had never talked for more than ten minutes with a youth, and had never thought of sex.

  She had never had more than a dollar in her purse at any one time. Adelaide, with Christopher’s approval, chose all her clothes. He would not let her cut her hair. It was very dark and curly and glossy, and did not grow very long. It lay on her immature shoulders in round glistening masses. She was very tiny, and looked, at sixteen, not much more than twelve. Her small face was pointed, and smoothly ivory-colored. She had a tiny full red mouth, almost always smiling, and dark blue, shyly merry eyes. Her white hands and feet were doll-like. Her breasts were just beginning to bud. She laughed and danced and chattered like a child.

  Sometimes in the midst of her laughter she would stop abruptly, her mouth still open, her eyes still shining. But a dim and rigid shadow would pass across her face, and she would lift her head as though listening to something that both bemused, interested and frightened her. Christopher would feel something like cold anger and impotence at these times, and he would speak to her sharply. He knew she was listening to something beyond him, some strong secret urging in her expanding life, something which he realized would take her from him for all time. He knew the inevitability of the taking, but he was determined to postpone it as long as possible, and then, when the postponement had ended, to choose, himself, the man who would take her.