Edith Wharton - SSC 09 Read Online Free PDF

undoubtedly had one with lesser beings; his smile, his faint hoarse laugh
would have made me do his will even if his talk had not conquered me. We sat
for hours on the sands, discussing and dreaming; not always undisturbed, for
Mrs. Brown had a tiresome way of hovering and “listening in,” as she archly
called it-—(“I don’t want Stevie to depreciate his poor ex-mamma to you,” she
explained one day); and whenever Mrs. Brown (who, even at Les Calanques, had
contrived to create a social round for herself) was bathing, dancing, playing
bridge, or being waved, massaged or manicured, the other mother, assuring
herself from an upper window that the coast was clear, would descend in her
gentle majesty and turn our sand-bank into a throne by sitting on it. But now
and then Stephen and I had a half-hour to ourselves; and then I tried to lead
his talk to the past.
                 He
seemed willing enough that I should, but uninterested, and unable to recover
many details. “I never can remember things that don’t matter—and so far nothing
about me has mattered,” he said with a humorous melancholy. “I mean, not till I
struck mother Kit.”
                 He
had vague recollections of continental travels as a little boy; had afterward
been at a private school in Switzerland; had tried to pass himself off as a
Canadian volunteer in 1915, and in 1917 to enlist in the American army, but had
failed in each case—one had only to look at him to see why. The war over, he
had worked for a time at Julian’s, and then broken down; and after that it had
been a hard row to hoe till mother Kit came along. By George, but he’d never
forget what she’d done for him—never!
                 “Well,
it’s a way mothers have with their sons,” I remarked.
                 He
flushed under his bronze tanning, and said simply: “Yes—only you see I didn’t
know.”
                 His
view of the Browns, while not unkindly, was so detached that I suspected him of
regarding his own mother with the same objectivity; but when we spoke of her
there was a different note in his voice. “I didn’t know”—it was a new
experience to him to be really mothered. As a type, however, she clearly
puzzled him. He was too sensitive to class her (as the Browns obviously did) as
a simple-minded woman to whom nothing had ever happened; but he could not
conceive what sort of things could happen to a woman of her kind. I gathered
that she had explained the strange episode of his adoption by telling him that
at the time of his birth she had been “secretly married”—poor Catherine!—to his
father, but that “family circumstances” had made it needful to conceal his
existence till the marriage could be announced; by which time he had vanished
with his adopted parents. I guessed how it must have puzzled Stephen to adapt
his interpretation of this ingenuous tale to what, in the light of Mrs. Glenn’s
character, he could make out of her past. Of obvious explanations there were
plenty; but evidently none fitted into his vision of her. For a moment (I could
see) he had suspected a sentimental tie, a tender past, between Mrs. Glenn and
myself; but this his quick perceptions soon discarded, and he apparently
resigned himself to regarding her as inscrutably proud and incorrigibly
perfect. “I’d like to paint her some day—if ever I’m fit to,” he said; and I
wondered whether his scruples applied to his moral or artistic inadequacy.
                 At
the doctor’s orders he had dropped his painting altogether since his last
breakdown; but it was manifestly the one thing he cared for, and perhaps the
only reason he had for wanting to get well. “When you’ve dropped to a certain
level, it’s so damnably easy to keep on till you’re altogether down and out. So
much easier than dragging up hill again. But I do want to get well enough to
paint mother Kit. She’s a subject.”