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Madame de Treymes
by
There was apparently nothing embarrassing to her in his silence: it was a part of her long European discipline that she had learned to manage pauses with ease. In her Frisbee days she might have packed this one with a random fluency; now she was content to let it widen slowly before them like the spacious prospect opening at their feet. The complicated beauty of this prospect, as they moved toward it between the symmetrically clipped limes of the lateral terrace, touched him anew through her nearness, as with the hint of some vast impersonal power, controlling and regulating her life in ways he could not guess, putting between himself and her the whole width of the civilization into which her marriage had absorbed her. And there was such fear in the thought–he read such derision of what he had to offer in the splendour of the great avenues tapering upward to the sunset glories of the Arch–that all he had meant to say when he finally spoke compressed itself at last into an abrupt unmitigated: “Well?”
She answered at once–as though she had only awaited the call of the national interrogation–“I don’t know when I have been so happy.”
“So happy?” The suddenness of his joy flushed up through his fair skin.
“As I was just now–taking tea with your mother and sisters.”
Durham’s “Oh!” of surprise betrayed also a note of disillusionment, which she met only by the reconciling murmur: “Shall we sit down?”
He found two of the springy yellow chairs indigenous to the spot, and placed them under the tree near which they had paused, saying reluctantly, as he did so: “Of course it was an immense pleasure to them to see you again.”
“Oh, not in the same way. I mean–” she paused, sinking into the chair, and betraying, for the first time, a momentary inability to deal becomingly with the situation. “I mean,” she resumed smiling, “that it was not an event for them, as it was for me.”
“An event?” he caught her up again, eagerly; for what, in the language of any civilization, could that word mean but just the one thing he most wished it to?
“To be with dear, good, sweet, simple, real Americans again!” she burst out, heaping up her epithets with reckless prodigality.
Durham’s smile once more faded to impersonality, as he rejoined, just a shade on the defensive: “If it’s merely our Americanism you enjoyed–I’ve no doubt we can give you all you want in that line.”
“Yes, it’s just that! But if you knew what the word means to me! It means–it means–” she paused as if to assure herself that they were sufficiently isolated from the desultory groups beneath the other trees–“it means that I’m safe with them: as safe as in a bank!”
Durham felt a sudden warmth behind his eyes and in his throat. “I think I do know–“
“No, you don’t, really; you can’t know how dear and strange and familiar it all sounded: the old New York names that kept coming up in your mother’s talk, and her charming quaint ideas about Europe–their all regarding it as a great big innocent pleasure ground and shop for Americans; and your mother’s missing the home-made bread and preferring the American asparagus–I’m so tired of Americans who despise even their own asparagus! And then your married sister’s spending her summers at–where is it?–the Kittawittany House on Lake Pohunk–“
A vision of earnest women in Shetland shawls, with spectacles and thin knobs of hair, eating blueberry pie at unwholesome hours in a shingled dining-room on a bare New England hill-top, rose pallidly between Durham and the verdant brightness of the Champs Elysees, and he protested with a slight smile: “Oh, but my married sister is the black sheep of the family–the rest of us never sank as low as that.”
“Low? I think it’s beautiful–fresh and innocent and simple. I remember going to such a place once. They have early dinner–rather late–and go off in buckboards over terrible roads, and bring back golden rod and autumn leaves, and read nature books aloud on the piazza; and there is always one shy young man in flannels–only one–who has come to see the prettiest girl (though how he can choose among so many!) and who takes her off in a buggy for hours and hours–” She paused and summed up with a long sigh: “It is fifteen years since I was in America.”