The Mother’s Recompense quotes

For nearly twenty years now she had lived chiefly with women of her own kind, and she no longer very sincerely believed there were any others, that is to say among women properly so called.

Her female world was made up of three categories: frumps, hypocrites and the “good sort”—like herself.

After all, the last was the one she preferred to be in.

every fibre in her kept its glow. But she didn’t believe in it; she knew now that “things didn’t happen like that” for long, that reality and durability were attributes of the humdrum, the prosaic and the dreary.

And it was to escape from reality and durability that one plunged into cards, gossip, flirtation, and all the artificial excitements which society so lavishly provides for people who want to forget.

She and Chris had never repeated that week. He had never suggested doing so, and had let her hints fall unheeded, or turned them off with a laugh, whenever she tried, with shy tentative allusions, to coax him back to the idea;

for she had found out early that one could never ask him anything point-blank—it just put his back up, as he said himself.

One had to manœuvre and wait; but when didn’t a woman have to manœuvre and wait?

Ever since she had left her husband, eighteen years ago, what else had she ever done?

and when the tears reached her eyes it was over his wistful image, and not her own, that they flowed.

She had a way of getting desperately fond of people she had been kind to, and exaggeratedly touched by the least sign of their appreciation.

It was her weakness—or her strength: she wondered which?

Mrs. Minity was still persuaded that to sit in her hired victoria, behind its somnolent old pair, was one of the most rapid modes of progression devised by modern science.

She talked as if her carriage were an aeroplane, and was as particular in avoiding narrow streets, and waiting at the corner when she called for friends who lived in them, as if she had to choose a safe alighting-ground.

Mrs. Minity had come to the Riviera thirty years before, after an attack of bronchitis, and finding the climate milder and the life easier than in Brooklyn, had not gone back. Mrs.

“Go to those dreary people? Not for the world!” because they knew they had no chance of getting there.

Yes: the war had brought them peace, strange and horrible as it was to think it.

Kate’s eyes filled as she looked about the table at those haggard powdered masks which had once glittered with youth and insolence and pleasure. All they wanted now was what she herself wanted only a few short hours ago:

He met her gaze now without a shadow of constraint. “Oh, well, you know what John was—always the slave of anything he’d once said.

Once he’d found a phrase for a thing, the phrase ruled him.

He never could be got beyond that first vision of you ... you and Davies....”

The old aunts and indifferent cousins at Meridia—her remote inland town—had bowed their heads before the scandal, thanking fortune that the people they visited would probably never hear of it.

And now she came back free of everything and every one, and rather like a politician resuming office than a prodigal returning to his own.

The sense of it was so rejuvenating that she was almost sure she was looking her best (and with less help than usual from Aline) when she went down to dinner to meet the clan. Enid Drover’s appearance gave a momentary check to her illusion:

Yes, even Nollie seemed to be in a great hurry; one felt her perpetually ordering and sorting and marshalling things in her mind, and the fact, Kate presently perceived, now and then gave an odd worn look of fixity to her uncannily youthful face.

Kate wondered when there was ever time to enjoy anything, with that perpetual alarm-clock in one’s breast.

Her glance travelled on to her own daughter. Anne seemed eager too, but not at such a pace, or about such a multiplicity of unrelated things.

Lilla shrugged again. “Not your conversation particularly.

I hate talking. I only like noises that don’t mean anything.

”

She had been right in guessing that her questions as to what people thought of her past were embarrassing to Landers, but wrong in the interpretation of his embarrassment.

Like every one else about her, he was caught up in the irresistible flow of existence, which somehow reminded her less of a mighty river tending seaward than of a moving stairway revolving on itself.

“Only they all think it’s a river....” she mused.

now the noises that accompanied her falling asleep and awakening seemed to issue harmoniously out of the silence, and the late and early roar of Fifth Avenue to rock her like the great reiterations of the sea.

“This is peace ... this must be peace,” she repeated to herself, like a botanist arrested by an unknown flower, and at once guessing it to be the rare exquisite thing he has spent half his life in seeking.

Of course she would not have felt any of these things if Anne had not been the Anne she was. It was from Anne’s presence, her smile, her voice, the mystery of her eyes even, that the healing flowed.

After all, in this new existence it was Anne who mattered, not Anne’s mother; instantly, after the first plunge, Mrs. Clephane felt herself merged in the blessed anonymity of motherhood.

She had never before understood how exposed and defenceless her poor unsupported personality had been through all the lonely years.

Her eyes rested on Anne with a new tenderness; the glance crossed Nollie Tresselton’s, and the two triumphed in their shared admiration. “Oh, there’s no one like Anne,” their four eyes told each other.

Only—what was there to observe? Again the sameness of the American Face encompassed her with its innocent uniformity. How many of them it seemed to take to make up a single individuality! Most of them were like the miles and miles between two railway stations.

She saw again, with gathering wonder, that one may be young and handsome and healthy and eager, and yet unable, out of such rich elements, to evolve a personality.

Her thoughts wandered back to the shabby faces peopling her former life.

She knew every seam of their shabbiness, but now for the first time she seemed to see that they had been worn down by emotions and passions, however selfish, however sordid, and not merely by ice-water and dyspepsia.

“Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia,” she reflected, “they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.”

Landers came up as the thought flashed through her mind, and apparently caught its reflection in her smile.

“Female—” she murmured—“is that word being used again? I never thought it very nice to apply it to women, did you? I suppose I’m old-fashioned.

Nothing shocks the young people nowadays—not even the Bible.

”

“Poor Lilla! She can’t see a new room without wanting to fox-trot in it.

Life, for her, wherever she is, consists in going somewhere else in order to do exactly the same thing.

”

Then, as to friends—was it because she was too much engrossed in her daughter to make any? Or because her life had been too incommunicably different from that of her bustling middle-aged contemporaries, absorbed by local and domestic questions she had no part in?

Or had she been too suddenly changed from a self-centred woman, insatiable for personal excitements, into that new being, a mother, her centre of gravity in a life not hers?

She did not know; she felt only that she no longer had time for anything but motherhood, and must be content to bridge over, as best she could, the unoccupied intervals. And, after all, the intervals were not many.

Yes; she remembered now; it was always in emotional moments that his tact failed him, his subtlety vanished, and he seemed to be reciting speeches learned by heart out of some sentimental novel—the very kind he was so clever at ridiculing.

They continued to stand facing each other, their inspiration spent, as if waiting for the accident that had swept them together to whirl them apart again.

Suddenly she risked (since it was better to know): “So you’re living now in New York?”

Yes: it all came to the question of what he wanted; it always had. When had there ever been a question of what she wanted?

He took what he chose from life, gathered and let drop and went on: it was the artist’s way, he told her.

But what could he possibly want of her now, and why did she imagine that he wanted anything, when by his own showing he was so busy and so provided for?

but there must always have been rents and cracks in it, and now it couldn’t by any tugging be made to cover him. No; she didn’t love him any longer; she was sure of that.

Like a traveller who has just skirted an abyss, she could lean over without dizziness and measure the depth into which she had not fallen.

But if that were so, why was she so afraid of him? If it were a mere question of her own social safety, a mean dread of having her past suspected, why, she was more ashamed of that than of having loved him.

And yet she was! She supposed it was the old incalculable element in him, that profound fundamental difference in their natures which used to make their closest nearness seem more like a spell than a reality.

She understood now that if she had always been afraid of him it was just because she could never tell what she was afraid of....

If only there had been some one to whom she could confess herself, some one who would laugh away her terrors! Fred Landers? But she would frighten him more than he reassured her. And the others—the kindly approving family?

For mystery there was; she was sure of it now! People like Lilla Gates and Chris did not wander aimlessly through Central Park at the secret hour when the winter dusk begins to blur its paths.

Every moment of such purposeless lives was portioned out, packed with futilities.

Kate had seen enough of that in her enforced association with the idlers of a dozen watering-places, her dreary participation in their idling.

what if he wanted to marry Lilla? And what more probable than that he did? It was evident that living with his people and administering Mr. Maclew’s philanthropies was not a life that he would have called “fit for a dog”.

He liked money, she knew, for all his careless way; he wanted to have it, but he hated to earn it.

And if he married Lilla there would be plenty of money.

Her duty—how he used to laugh at the phrase! He told her she had run away from her real duties only for the pleasure of inventing new ones, and that to her they were none the less duties because she imagined them to be defiances.

It was one of the paradoxes that most amused him: the picture of her flying from her conscience and always meeting it again in her path, barely disguised by the audacities she had dressed it up in.

Yes; evidently he had asked himself, on the instant, what she would do about Lilla; and the mere fact made her feel, with a fierce desperation, that she must do something.

If one were poor, and lived from hand to mouth, one had to think about money—worse luck! But once relieved from the need of doing so, she had dismissed the whole matter from her thoughts.

Safely sheltered, becomingly arrayed, she cared no more than a child for the abstract power of possession.

And the possession of money, in particular, had always been so associated in her mind with moral and mental dependence that after her break with Hylton Davies poverty had seemed one of the chief attributes of freedom.

But once relieved from the need of doing so, she had dismissed the whole matter from her thoughts. Safely sheltered, becomingly arrayed, she cared no more than a child for the abstract power of possession.

And the possession of money, in particular, had always been so associated in her mind with moral and mental dependence that after her break with Hylton Davies poverty had seemed one of the chief attributes of freedom.

It was Anne’s suggestion of giving her the house which had flung a sudden revealing glare on the situation. Anne was rich, then—very rich!

Kate Clephane sat in her midnight room alone with these questions. She had forgotten to go to bed, she had forgotten to undress.

She sat there, in her travelling dress and hat, as she had stepped from the train: it was as if this house which people called her own were itself no more than the waiting-room of a railway station where she was listening for the coming of another train that was to carry her—whither?

Ah, but she had forgotten—forgotten that she had him in her power! She had said to him: “I’ve got the means to beat you in the end,” and he had bowed his head to the warning and given his word.

“But it was all so quick!

How can anybody love one day, and not the next?

”

“I do know that, in such cases, there’s never any remedy but one.

If your courage fails you, there’s your pride.

”

“My pride?

What’s pride, if one cares?

I’d do anything to get him back. I only want you to do what I ask!”

But daughters, she said to herself, don’t take a fancy to their mothers! Mothers and daughters are part of each other’s consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there.

A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.

Well—this mother must put up with what she had, and make the most of it. Yes;

The Drovers and Tresseltons were great at acting in concert, and at pretending that whatever happened was natural, usual, and not of a character to interfere with one’s lunch.

When a member of the tribe was ill, the best doctors and most expensive nurses were summoned, but the illness was spoken of as a trifling indisposition; when misfortune befell any one of them, it was not spoken of at all.

Taking Lilla for granted had brought this art to the highest point of perfection, and her capture of Horace Maclew had fully confirmed its usefulness.

Anne pressed her closer. “Can’t we agree, mother, that I must take my chance—and that, if the risks are as great as you think, you’ll be there to help me?

After all, we’ve all got to buy our own experience, haven’t we?

And perhaps the point of view about ... about early mistakes ... is more indulgent now than in your time. But I don’t want to discuss that,” the girl hurried on.

You’d say yes if you knew the difference it has made, this last year, to have you back!” She lifted her face close to Mrs. Clephane’s to add, with a half-whimsical smile: “

Mothers oughtn’t ever to leave their daughters.

”

But their relations with him, though amicable, were purely formal, and Kate concluded that his presence at one of the Drover week-ends was to be attributed to the prestige he had acquired as a certain Coadjutor or possible Bishop.

The Drover social scheme was like a game of chess in which Bishops counted considerably more than Rectors.

The Rector of St. Stephen’s struck Mrs. Clephane, who had met him only once before, as a man accustomed to good company, and eager to prove it. He had a face as extensive as Mr. Maclew’s but running to length instead of width.

How then was she to obey Dr. Arklow’s bidding and impart the secret to Anne? He had said it as positively as if he were handing down a commandment from Sinai: “The daughter must be told.”

How easy to lay down abstract rules for other people’s guidance: “The daughter” was just an imaginary person—a convenient conversational pawn.

But Kate Clephane’s daughter—her own Anne! She closed her eyes and tried to face the look in Anne’s as the truth dawned on her.

Leaning against one of the piers of the nave she evoked all those imaginary confessions, and thought how trivial, how childish they would seem, compared to what she carried in her breast....

What a help it must be to turn to somebody who could tell one firmly, positively what to do—to be able to lay down one’s moral torture like a heavy load at the end of the day!

Dr. Arklow had none of the authority which the habit of the confessional must give. He could only vaguely sympathize and deplore, and try to shuffle the horror out of sight as soon as he caught an unwilling glimpse of it.

Anne’s happiness shone through her, making her opaque and guarded features luminous and transparent; and the mother could measure, from her own experience, the amount of heat and force that fed that incandescence.

She herself had always had a terrible way of being happy—and that way was Anne’s.

She simply could not bear to picture to herself the change, in Anne’s face, from ecstasy to anguish. She had seen that change once, and the sight had burned itself into her eye-balls. To destroy Anne’s happiness seemed an act of murderous cruelty.

To destroy Anne’s happiness seemed an act of murderous cruelty. What did it matter—as the chances of life went—of what elements such happiness was made? Had she, Kate Clephane, ever shrunk from her own bliss because of the hidden risks it contained?

She had played high, staked everything—and lost.

Could she blame her daughter for choosing to take the same risks? No;

From the first, she had pitched their relation in that key; had insisted on the difference in their ages, on her own sense of the necessary transiency of the tie, on the fact that she would not have it otherwise.

Anything rather than to be the old woman clutching at an impossible prolongation of bliss—anything rather than be remembered as a burden instead of being regretted as a delight!

How often had she told him that she wanted to remain with him like the memory of a flowering branch brushed by at night? “You won’t quite know if it was lilac or laburnum, or both—you’ll only know it was something vanishing and sweet.”

“

I would sell my soul for her—why not my memories?

” she reflected.

How had she ever imagined that she could keep her place at Anne’s side—that she could either outstay Chris, or continue to live under the same roof with them? Both projects seemed to her, now, equally nebulous and impossible.

She must put the world between them—the whole width of the world was not enough.

The very grave, she thought, would be hardly black enough to blot out that scene.

Again she perceived that he was trying to remind her of a possible alternative, and again she let the allusion drop, answering merely: “

I’m used to being lonely. It’s not as bad as people think.

”

She shut her eyes for a second from the vision. Her own body still seemed so supple, free and imponderable.

If it had not been for her looking-glass she would never have known she was more than twenty.

She glanced up at the clock; a quarter to eight. Very likely Anne would not be back for another half hour. How would the evening ever drag itself to an end?

“Why should I be? I’ve had over a year.

As happiness goes, that’s a lifetime.

”

Fifth Avenue was much more brilliantly lit than on that other far-off morning.

Long streamers of radiance floated on the glittering asphalt like tropical sea-weeds on a leaden sea.

But overhead the canopy of darkness was as dense, except for the tall lights hanging it here and there with a planetary glory.

In old times one would have heard the desolate nocturnal sound of a lame hoof-beat as a market-gardener’s cart went by: they always brought out in the small hours the horses that were too bad to be seen by day. But all that was changed.

The last lame horse had probably long since gone to the knacker’s yard, and no link of sound was left between the Niagara-roar of the day and the hush before dawn.

On that other morning a hansom-cab had been waiting around the corner for young Mrs. Clephane. It had all been very well arranged—Hylton Davies had a gift for arranging. His yacht was a marvel of luxury: food, service, appointments.

and she remembered that, then, also, Fred Landers had joined her there, hurriedly summoned to reassure her loneliness.

It was curious, in what neatly recurring patterns events often worked themselves out.

The door opened and he came in. He still wore his wedding clothes, and the dark morning coat and the pearl in his tie suited him, gave him a certain air of self-confidence and importance.

With a slight break in his voice he said: “

You come with yourself.

”

Paly, and even suffer himself to be boisterously hailed by Mrs. Horace Betterly, who came clinking down the loggia steps to shout out a reminder that they counted on him for dinner that evening.

It was the fate of those who had to stuff their days full, and could no longer be particular about the quality of the stuffing.

Kate could almost see the time when Lord Charles, very lean and wizened, would be collecting china frogs for Mrs. Plush.

“

Never is a long word.

There is some one there who would be very happy if you did.”