The sable cloud

Chapter I

Grandma Liveright died the year Louisa Liveright Lea was born. But before she died, standing like a seeress by the side of the cradle, she uttered a sort of incantation over the deaf, dumb, blind, little sleeping red imp.

She said: “ You have a grave responsibility in her upbringing. Civilization is the care of women. The change I have seen come to birth you will see the growth of, but she will see fulfilled. She comes of those whose destiny is high. Much of the future lies hidden like a plaything in her tiny clenched hand. See you teach her it is not a plaything.

“ For all this talk of democracy, the world is a snob. It has always looked up and it always will. Men are what their heroes make them. They will worship the golden calf for a while, but they soon grow drunk on its futile sacrifices. Then they lay hands on it, and its clay feet crumble and they know there is nothing to worship. They break it up then and fight for the gold. They call it radical¬ ism, or socialism, or—they will have some other name for it by the time the child grows up. Any¬ way, teach her the light comes from above and she has responsibilities.

“ Don’t make the mistake of educating her. Cultivation is what the world needs. It will be a bad time when ladies are turned out wholesale, machine-made bluestockings. A gentlewoman is made by hand.”

Aunt Anna Carroll did not agree with Grandma Liveright. She said her Frederica should go to college. It was all very fine, she said, to talk of light from above, but if Society wished to retain its leadership, obviously it must lead. Louisa’s father begged his sister to remember that there is a dif¬ ference between leading and allowing yourself to be pushed. Sometimes leading consists of planting your feet and standing firm by your convictions. Aunt Carroll answered that planting your feet and standing firm was generally called balking. Aoiyway, Frederica had to live in her generation and she was going to make it as easy for her as she knew how. She was to have the higher education. He could do as he liked about Louisa.

He liked to follow Grandma Liveright’s system, perhaps because it was hers, more likely because it was the reverse of Aunt Carroll’s. He always liked the reverse of things his sister liked—especially since she married Caleb Carroll, of Saco, Ill., and disgraced the family. Anyhow, whatever the reason was that decided him, he sent Louisa as the first step in her cultivation to one of Mr. Violette’s “ Select Classes for the Cultivation of Gentle¬ women.” It was he who sent her. Her mother was not consulted. She did not have to be. She was the finished product of Grandma Liveright’s system, a shadow woman who slipped will-less and wordless in the wake of her husband. The only person she spoke to on the subject was Aunt Carroll. When she heard Frederica was to go to college, she said: “ The idea, Anna! The very idea! ”

Mr. Violette’s theory for the cultivation of gen¬ tlewomen was that, their brains being delicate mechanisms, easily overstrained, mental effort in them must be conserved; what his pupils learned, they must learn by absorption, not by study; that a lady’s schoolroom should as far as practical re¬ produce the conditions of the drawing-room and, as a corollary to this, that any Social Function was sufficient excuse for her absence; if, on a certain day, she went to a lunch party, she need not come to school.

Louisa’s class met at Mrs. de la Pin’s house in Twelfth Street, only a couple of blocks from the Leas’ house on University Place, and so it happened that the beginnings of her friendship with Noel de la Pin went back to the dim season of half-remem¬ bered babyhood.

The two children used to play in the afternoons in the eastern, aristocratic half of Washington

Square. The elders loved to watch them roll their hoops up and down the paths there. The sight of them stirred old memories of beautiful Leas and de la Pins of the past. They liked to speculate on the result of grafting the fairness and soft gentle minds of the Liverights (Grandma Liveright was a Dortic, but her daughter was pure Liveright) on the darkness and slow, sure wills of the Leas (stubbornness is an ugly word). They tilted Louisa’s chin and asked her who she looked like, and she answered without hesitation: “ Great- Grandpa Dortic, the general, except Grandma Lea’s eyes. They were gray and so are mine.” This was before she could pronounce the words properly. She left out all the R’s and lisped the S’s. She was, they said, a very promising child.

She had the opportunity to be promising in many directions. Her small feet were carefully placed on a whole row of ladders, although she was not expected to climb very high on any one of them— just high enough to talk intelligently. She was taught, in German, to play chess, she was taught to draw hands and feet from angular casts, to dance to castanets and to sing little songs to her own ac¬ companiment,—“Katy did! Khty did! Tell me, tell me is it true-ue? ”

Mr. Yiolette died after Louisa and Noel de la Pin had been with him a year or two and they were transferred to Miss Letitia Cotenet’s u School for the Education of Young Ladies.” It was supposed to be just as select as Mr. Violette’s classes bad been and it showed how able a prophet Grandma Liveright was that Louisa found herself mates there with Leida Louise Sullivan, whose fa¬ ther was a retail grocer on a huge scale, and with Lois Livingstone Morres, who spelt Livingstone with an extra letter and Morres with an “E.” Louisa was perfectly aware of their plebeian de¬ scent. Genealogy was one of the most important of her studies. She knew the family history of all her school-fellows, the major sins of their grand¬ fathers and the peccadilloes of their grandmothers. She rather despised the lot of them, and the two climbers she resented.

Outside school she had by now graduated from castanets and plaster casts. She was studying French literature, expurgated, with a French marquis of illustrious name, who was chosen be¬ cause of his perfect manners and unattractive physiognomy, German literature with a Junker who, as a result of dueling, had a cheek with a hole in it and a hand with a finger and a half missing. An end of bone stuck out of the half finger, and, not having the manners of the marquis, he was con¬ tinually picking at it, which gave Louisa the night¬ mare and rendered her mind utterly impervious to “ Der Jungfrau von Orleans/’

Twice a week the famous dramatic coach, Miss Florette, came and taught her how to walk and stand and sit and speak and laugh, and tTvo other days Mr. Broun, whom she could hear put his method in practice on the stage of the Metropoli¬ tan, came and taught her to sing arias in a voice like a reed-bird. She rode horseback every day in the park when it didn’t rain, and when it did, she rode in the musical drill in the rink.

Her hours of idleness she spent browsing in her father’s library. But the pursuit of cultivation left her few idle hours in winter.

Summer was the idle time. Summer was the time for friends. In winter there were only ac¬ quaintances,—except Noel,—and she came in sum¬ mer as well as winter. Summer was the free time, the time when you lived, and all the teachers stopped molding and pressing and pulling you into an ideal, and you were the person nature meant you to be. Summer was the time when you rode your pony across the fields and over the fences and ditches, when you scrambled him up steep moun¬ tain paths and splashed him down the beds of rocky brooks. Summer was the time when you laughed because the sun shone and danced to the sound of the rain; when you played hide and seek in the fog and shivered at the shadows of the moon. Sun and moon and fog and rain didn’t exist in winter, at least not for you. You were shut away from them behind walls. Summer was the time when there were no walls.

Summer was the time when you drove fast horses and felt like Ben Hur, when you explored the i woods and sailed the sea and dreamed long dreams, when you leapt into the water and saw the rain¬ bow as you shook the drops from your eyes, when you ran and jumped and shouted without stopping to think what muscles you used and whether you were pitching your voice high or low. In summer when you got tired you curled up in a hammock and read and read and read. And your thoughts grew strong and active and insistent so you couldn’t keep them cooped up in your head. You had to pour them out to somebody and that was the reason that summer was the time for friends.

First, of course, there was Noel de la Pin, calm, unemotional, satisfied to take things as they came, who never felt a sickening sensation of falling in the middle when things went wrong, nor a burning light behind her eyes when things were splendid, whose knees never trembled with excitement, who lived on an even plane and never touched the heights nor the depths, nor even envied you your mountain tops and valleys, rather pitied you for them, though you knew, with all their discomforts, they were the best things in life; who had bound¬ less patience and understanding when your soul broke loose in a fit of talking, who never laughed when she shouldn’t, and never repeated what she should keep secret. It was a friend like her whom Polonius had in mind when he told Laertes to “ Grapple him to thy soul with hoops of steel.” Noel’s nose tilted at the tip, and her red brown eyes turned slowly when you spoke to her, and rested on you solemnly and contemplatively. It was a blessing she came in summer.

There was Zaidee Brown, with bright eyes like a little wild creature. She had no mind at all, but an imagination worth a dozen minds. The elders said her talk was lies, but the elders were stupid. Her talk was fiction and as much fun as Schehera¬ zade. She was utterly fearless, wouldn’t be dared and couldn’t be stumped. Her will was like a piece of India rubber. The elders could bend, bend, bend it, but they couldn’t break it, and the minute they took the pressure off it snapped back where it came from. How her little eyes, rather like an elephant’s in her fat face, sparkled and snapped as she ate forbidden fruit in the greenhouse! It was lucky Zaidee came in summer.

There was Bobby White, who, the elders said, was handsome, w t 1io tagged after Noel and was linked with her in your mind so you couldn’t think of him without thinking of her.

There was Tim Tuttle w T ho had freckles and no sense of humor, who was stupid and rather to be despised because he liked to play with girls,—just girls,—any girls.

There was Johnny Rocoft who had freckles and a sense of humor, whose laughter was contagious, who didn’t like to play with girls except a chosen few, who lived next door—you climbed the stile by

the beach to get there, who- His father and mother were “ Aunt ” and a Uncle ” by affection, not relationship.

Later there was Winton Finley. But he was older and only pretended to be as young as you, and he liked better to have you pretend you were as old as he. He was an important person with the elders. He was in politics and you heard them say he “ was going a long way.” But they never explained where to. Mamma and Papa said it showed you were clever that he liked to ride and walk with you. But you would rather have had someone who did not have to pretend to you.

Freddie Carroll, Aunt Anna’s daughter, did not come till much later, when she came East to col¬ lege and made her holiday headquarters at the Leas’. That was the year Louisa “ came out.”

CHAPTER n

They all “ came out ” the same year, Louisa and Noel and Zaidee and Leida Louise Sullivan and Lois Morres. They were addle-pated about it for months beforehand. They talked, breathed, dreamed nothing but balls, parties, clothes and partners. They went around with eyes that shone and lips that never uncurled, gladness personified, denizens of the golden age astray in a world of gilt. The sight of them lightened elders’ burdens and made stiff lips smile. They danced in the sun with the inconsequence of butterflies, and like but¬ terflies made the sunlight more joyous. They had their usefulness.

The first dance of the season, the first real “ out ” dance, was Noel de la Pin’s on the twenty-third of November. The date is not without significance. It was at the house in Twelfth Street, in the ball¬ room where Mr. Violette’s class used to meet, with the conservatory opening off it where his pupils used to play during recess.

Frederica Carroll came down from college for the occasion, and she was amazing. Usually she looked like—well, she looked like Saco, Ill. But when she appeared in the ball dress which Mrs.

Lea had chosen for her, she looked like Paris. She was nothing short of amazing. She was enchant¬ ing. She was a dream. Her short little golden curls were so tight and glossy and metallic you al¬ most expected to hear them tinkle when she walked. Her cheeks were pink with excitement and her neck as white as the gardenia that nestled in the tulle beside it. Her lips were red and parted. Her little teeth were pearls. Her blue eyes shone. She could not keep still. She was excited. She was a little overexcited. She made Louisa feel sedate and stately.

Stateliness was Louisa’s role. Not that she was tall, but she moved very calmly and quietly, and her gray eyes were steady. Her skirts were longer than the other girls’ and her long brown hair had only a natural wave.

The girls appraised each other mercilessly.

Leida Louise’s hair was so tightly curled it looked for all the world like the frowzy shock of a Bedouin Arab.

It was wonderful what art had accomplished with funny fat Zaidee.

Lois looked as though she had just stepped out of the fashion plate of a rather advanced shop.

But it was Noel herself, as she stood before a bank of flowers, receiving her guests, who made a picture that was never to fade out of Louisa’s mem¬ ory. She was like Tennyson’s Lynette with her little nose “ tip-tilted like the petal of a flower ”

and her sweet smile, trembling and shy, coming and going on her lips. Her silver gown was the cloak of perpetual youth. The vision of her was to shine, unchanged, like a star in Louisa's mind to the end of her life, as proof that this unbelievable time when joy and life were all one thing was real and not a dream; that they had actually stood to¬ gether, she and her friends, in a shadowless land, and danced in the golden age.

Bobby White kept hovering around Noel till she could leave her guests and dance with him.

Louisa was dancing with Tim Tuttle when they went past her, with a glory on their faces as though they were walking into the sunlight.

u Noel looks like a fairy princess, doesn't she? " said Louisa.

“ She looks very well. But I don't see why fairy and I don’t see why princess." Tim was in a per¬ petually bad humor lately because it had dawned upon him that he was stupid. He couldn’t dance. He stepped on his partner's toes and everybody else's within reach.

“ Oh, Tim, you’re so funny! ” exclaimed Louisa. And fortunately Winton Finley cut in before she had to explain why.

It was delightful to dance with Mr. Finley after dancing with Tim. It was like floating down a broad river, a river of music, easy and rhythmic, with sudden little whirlpools of swinging motion that made you laugh. It was after one of these that he stopped by the door of the conservatory and suggested going in. Louisa was breathless. She nodded with parted, laughing lips. It was fun to be “ out.”

u Now,” said Finley, putting two chairs opposite each other, “ apologize.”

“What for, in the world?” asked Louisa, still laughing as she sat down.

“ Have you a clear conscience? ”

“ Absolutely.”

“ What! A hardened sinner already? ”

“ What are you talking about? ”

“ My flowers.”

“Didn’t I thank you for them? Oh dear! But they are lovely.”

“ Don’t thank me. You did not like them. You gave them to Miss Carroll.”

“ Did Freddie tell you? ”

“ Do you think I wouldn’t recognize a flower that I chose for you, Louisa? ”

His tone more than his words made the blood rise hot behind her eyes. No one had ever spoken to her like that before, and she did not know quite how to meet it. It made her angry.

“ I never said you could call me Louisa,” she said. “And I never wear gardenias. The smell of them makes me sneeze.”

“ Your apology is accepted.”

“I didn’t apologize. They were mine to do as I liked with. I had more than I could use and

Freddie had none because she is a stranger. It just happened that those went best with her dress.”

She looked up as she spoke, very earnest in her explanation, and the smile with which he met her eyes changed her anger to embarrassment. She felt the red flooding all over her face, and looked away.

He said nothing, but she knew he was still look¬ ing at her and smiling, and suddenly she became ashamed of her anger. She had been ungracious about his flowers, and he had a right to feel hurt. Ungraciousness loomed big in Louisa’s scale of sins.

“ I would like gardenias, you know,” she said, “ if they didn’t make me sneeze so.”

He laughed then as though he had been wanting to laugh right along. “ Hereafter there shall be only orchids and violets,” he said. He leaned for¬ ward and laid his hand on her wrist, and she was too surprised to move.

“ I couldn’t tell you before, Louisa. You were too young and your father made me promise not to. But to-night you are not a child any more, and I can tell you. I love you! ”

“ Good lands! ”

She had played with the fun of Finley’s atten¬ tions (all the girls were green with envy of her for having a “ grown-up beau ”), but she had never carried them out in her mind to their logical conelusion, at least not to a real present conclusion— there was a misty distance over all her conclusions. She had dreamed of life, and dreamed of love, as far-off beautiful things, but she had never given them actuality by so much as a stolen kiss. Com¬ ing upon them suddenly face to face she was be¬ wildered and frightened.

“ Good lands! You! ” she repeated, and her tone was not flattering.

“ I, Louisa? Why not I? ”

“ You—why—I—I’m too young for you,” she ended desperately.

“ That’s a polite way of telling me I’m too old.”

She shook her head emphatically. “ No. I don’t think you are old.”

“ I’m thirty-five.”

“ That’s not much.” She might have cheered a nonagenarian in the same tone.

He laughed at it. “ I’m not senile yet, Louisa. And what difference does age make, if you love me? ”

“ If you love me ”! It was like a book to sit here and hear him say such things. It made her want to laugh, so she sat very still and silent, try¬ ing not to.

He leaned closer. “Louisa, you must answer me, you know. What difference does age make if you love me? Your father says it doesn’t make any.”

“ Papa? But I don’t think I do love you.”

He drew away sharply. Evidently he had not expected that answer.

“ I really don’t think I do,” she repeated. “ I— I never thought of it.”

“You never thought of it, Louisa? Then what have you been thinking of all this time? I thought of it three years ago when you were only a child, with hardly a hint of the woman about you. Like young Diana, you seemed to me. I wanted you to stay just as you were, and when you went abroad last year I was so afraid you would be changed that I could hardly bear to come and see you when you got back. But you didn’t change. You came back the same beautiful, crystalline, other-worldly being. And then I knew. And you had not even thought of it! ”

“ No, really, I hadn’t.”

He looked at her in silence for a long minute, and she kept herself from wriggling under his gaze only with difficulty. At last he pushed back his chair.

“After all, you wouldn’t be you if you had thought of it. Think of it now, Louisa. I will ask you again—in a month.”

She jumped up. “ No, please! ”

“ Yes.”

“ No, please! ”

“ Say ‘ no ’ then, if you want to. Don’t say it now.”

“ I will say ‘ no’!” She knew it suddenly. She knew it beyond doubt, quick with panic. “ Don’t ask me again! ” she exclaimed, running out of the conservatory. She met Johnny Rocoft at the door, and began to dance with him without waiting for him to ask her.

It was a frolic to dance with Johnny, like blow¬ ing about helter-skelter in the wind. The hour was getting late and the room was emptying. The sleepy elders smiled as the couple whirled by them. Louisa laughed as the scene in the conservatory dropped back into unreality, a play she had seen, exciting, perhaps, but one which she had hardly even acted in.

“ Hasn’t it been great, Johnny? ” .she asked.

“ Fine. But I spent half an hour looking for you. What in the world did you and that old fossil find to talk about in the conservatory? ”

She felt a quick temptation to tell him. How he would laugh. Winton Finley proposing to her! That was a joke to share with Johnny. A joke shared with J ohnny was always a better joke. She really did wish she could tell him.

“ He said he wanted to cool off. He said he was thirty-five years old.”

“ Gosh. When a man gets as old as that, you can’t tell how old he is, can you? ” Johnny was twenty-two.

“No, you can’t. I suppose-” words died

away into thoughts—was thirty-five really so very

old? Was Winton Finley- Was Johnny-

Thoughts died away into dreams. One did not have to think to dance with Johnny. Just let yourself go and sway like a branch in the wind, and dream —dream—dream.

Johnny stopped dancing abruptly and shattered her dreams. She woke from them with a start, and flushed to realize she had been dreaming it was Johnny who had proposed to her in the conserva¬ tory. The music had changed. They were playing “ Home, Sweet Home ” and they two were the only couple left on the floor.

“ It’s time you went home to bed,” remarked Johnny brutally. “ You’ve been dancing in your sleep for ten minutes. I’d have stopped, only I hated to wake you.”

“ I wasn’t! ” exclaimed Louisa indignantly. " I couldn’t! ”

“ Yes you were. I don’t know anybody else who could. But I swear you were.”

They had come up to Mrs. de la Pin who was standing in the doorway saying good-bye to her guests.

“ I sent Noel up-stairs a little while ago,” she said. “ She looked tired—quite tired out.” A shade passed across her face, but it was hidden be¬ hind her smile so Louisa did not see it.

Noel had only gone half-way up-stairs. She and Bobby White were on the landing leaning over the banister watching the crowd below. She threw her arm around Louisa’s neck.

“ Hasn’t it been great? ” sbe asked.

“ It’s been splendid. I wonder whether you have been able to enjoy it as much as the rest of us? ”

“ More, I think. I’m so happy, and I’m so tired. I’m simply tired out with happiness. Isn’t that a nice way to feel? ” She leaned close and whispered in Louisa’s ear:“ I’m going to marry Bobby.”

But she didn’t. In a week Noel was dead.

Thus did God and man initiate Louisa into life.

Chapter III

“ Extra ! Extra! All about Gr-ri—All ab-

Extra! ”

Louisa raised her eyes from the book she was reading aloud and met Mamma’s eyes raised from her tapestry.

“ Is it worth while getting it, dear, do you think? ” asked Mamma, in a voice which indicated that she didn’t.

Yet she might have. The cry had a singularly live sound ringing up and down the sleepy length of University Place, as though there must be some¬ thing of real importance to justify it. Newsboys seldom came there, except Yids at the noon hour when the street was packed with factory hands. Even the Yids did not often come down to the lower end where the sun slanted through from Washington Square along the front of the University, and the old houses dozed in a hazy dream of vanished dig¬ nity with “ room to let ” signs in their parlor win¬ dows. Down there only a blue-blinded, yellow-cur¬ tained outpost of Greenwich Village looked recep¬ tive of anything so modern as an Extra. The big Lea house with its polished door-knob looked quite aloof from it; seemed, indeed, with the shades drawn down half-way on the windows, and two lay¬ ers of heavy curtains hanging straight below that, to have closed its eyes on the twentieth century and its doings, to be blind to the manifestations of change all around it, to the impertinent little whip¬ per-snapper from Greenwich Village opposite, to the encroaching slums behind, and the sweatshops in the block above. It seemed to recognize only Washington Square for a neighbor and to be com¬ pletely absorbed in the contemplation of its own mid-Victorian dignity.

It was a gray stone house of a vaguely ecclesias¬ tic style, with carved finials over the doors and windows. It stood back from the street a little way, protected from it by a tall iron fence whose points and pinnacles were apt, on windy days, to fly speared newspapers like disreputable flags. In¬ side the fence there was a narrow grass plot where a magnolia tree grew and crocuses “ bloomed in the spring—tra-la,” like the Mikado’s flowers. The place had an imposing appearance and strangers stopped to stare at it. It seemed, standing there in the blowing dust and papers, like a silent, sor¬ rowful protest against Democracy, a sort of monu¬ ment to show how comfortable Aristocracy can be —for aristocrats.

And it was comfortable. The entrance hall, paved in diagonals of black and white marble, was open all the way to the roof where there was a skylight of yellow glass that filled the whole house with, a mellow glow, like sunlight. On the right of the hall were two big drawing-rooms and back of them the dining-room with a glass morning room behind it where in sunnier days palms used to grow and begonias, but now nothing flourished but a tin ivy.

On the left of the hall was the library. It was as long as the two drawing-rooms and the dining-room put together and it was two stories high, with a gallery running round it, and a peaked ceiling where cross beams went crisscross like big dusty cobwebs, almost out of sight in the duskiness. The room was lighted by a big window front and back, up above the gallery. The front window was of stained glass so people in the street couldn’t see in. It was almost unbelievably ugly in itself, but it woke dim glowing patches of color on the backs of the books along the wall and set little fairies of variegated light dancing up among the roof beams and down on the polished floor boards when the sun shone through in the afternoon.

The library fireplace was the heart of the house. Here, over the mantel in the midst of carved curly leaves, was a shield with two little red lions on a gold ground and two little gold lions on a red ground, and under it the motto “ Sto solus ” which, being translated, means “ I stand alone ” or “ by my owm strength.” Freddie Carroll said it meant “ I lean on my own dinner.” But Freddie was an iconoclast.

Above the shield was, a helmet facing sideways with the visor open, which as everybody knows means “ gentility.” A helmet facing forward with the visor closed means royalty, facing sideways with the visor closed means nobility, facing for¬ ward with the visor open means knighthood, and sideways with the visor open, means gentility. And royalty, nobility and knighthood being all capable of achievement, while gentility is the gift of God, the possessors of the latter helmet consider it by far the most desirable—though, as Mrs. Lea used to say, wishing to be broad-minded, if you happened to have one of the others, you could probably find a reason for preferring that. All this, of course, is English heraldry, which America, having none of her own, borrowed along with the language and some prejudices and other things, making such ad¬ justments in each as suited her need. The Leas, however, be it emphatically stated, did not borrow their heraldry. They inherited it along with the language and made as far as circumstances per¬ mitted no change in either. They always pro¬ nounced “vase” as though it were spelt with a double “A.” Over the helmet was the crest, a leopard standing upright between two palm fronds. The leopard illustrated the motto. The meaning of the palm fronds was a little obscure.