Any Shape or Form

TWO A Token-1

TWO

A TokenRedfield was looking anxious. “The children are behaving pretty well,” he said. “Pretty well. But poor dear Aunt Josie—they hardly know how to take her. You’ll help, Gamadge? You’ll do your best? You won’t mind humoring her? She’ll ask you to call her Vega, you know; that’s her astrological name.” He smiled. “You won’t mind a flight to the stars? Into the Inane? I refer, of course, to the immensities of space.” His eyes glinted. “Just to keep her happy, you know. She’s such a decent old thing.”

Gamadge said gravely that she had done well to choose as a patron a star of the first magnitude.

“Well, she sticks to the name; but I’m afraid that apart from sticking to the name she’s rather deserted astrology. I’m afraid it’s a sun cult now.”

“A what?”

“A sun cult.”

“I don’t know about sun cults,” protested Gamadge. “I couldn’t talk intelligently about sun cults.”

“Gamadge, my boy, you won’t be called upon to talk intelligently about a damned thing. I can’t keep up myself. But after all, it’s all in the System, isn’t it? Just humor her, old man.”

“Count on me.” Gamadge followed him into the living room.

It was a delightful room, long, high and bright, with double windows to the east and west. The front and back parlors of the old Redfield place had been thrown into one, and gaily papered and upholstered with Chinese birds and flowers. The best of the original mantelpieces had been set into the middle of the south wall, and a fire burned on the hearth.

There were six persons in the room, two on the west window seat and four around the fire; Gamadge, pausing in the doorway while Redfield snatched drink and food for him from Alice’s tray, glanced at them all. The two at the window were his cousin Abigail and Mrs. Walter Drummond; the group that surrounded the hearth consisted of two young people on a settee, Walter Drummond in front of the fire on their left, and opposite them a figure that looked as though it might be dressed up for a fantastic part in a charade. Blanche Drummond, who if she were listening to Abby could certainly not have been attending to her, turned her head on its long and beautiful neck, smiled at Gamadge, and extended a hand in a long, creamy glove.

“Well, Henry,” she said.

“Well, Blanche.” He advanced to take the hand. “You’re looking splendid. But have you ever looked less than splendid?”

She was thirty-five years old and didn’t look it; tall, white-skinned, with bronze-golden hair and eyes the color, and with the brilliance, of the stone called cat’s eye. In her woolen suit that had been dyed to simulate the tint of a dead leaf, with the bronze feather of her little hat drooping almost to one of her large gold-and-pearl earrings, she was a lady from the cover of an art-and-fashion magazine; she had such a lady’s calm, resigned, distant look.

Blanche Drummond hardly every smiled, yet never looked serious; she looked blank. But was there a troubled expression in her face today, and had she aged a little? Gamadge thought so, and Abby’s restraint when speaking of her had half prepared him for something of the kind.

Before she had replied to his compliment Johnny Redfield bustled up and dragged him away. “You mustn’t talk to people you know yet, Gamadge; you must come and meet my aunt. Here’s your cocktail and here’s your sandwich.” His voice dropped. “I suggest that you swallow the cocktail now; then I’ll bring you another.”

Gamadge, swallowing his cocktail, glanced again at the group in front of the fire. The two young Malcolms, side by side on their settee, had turned to look at him; and whether it was the identical quick motion of their dark heads, or the quizzical expression in their dark eyes, he couldn’t for the life of him help thinking of two very intelligent monkeys. But they were both handsome, and certainly not ill-proportioned. The next moment they were simply an attractive young man and woman in tweeds, with clear olive complexions, low and broad foreheads, short, straight noses, and well-shaped chins. They had brown hands, with strong fingers. The young man, when he rose, showed himself to be medium tall, with wide shoulders. The girl seemed more delicately made.

Next to her, and leaning forward in his chair as if he had been listening or talking to her, sat Walter Drummond; tall, big and sandy, with a small sandy moustache, and wearing rough country tweeds. On the little table between them Walter’s cigarette burned itself away in its glass dish. He looked up over his shoulder at Gamadge, and rose; but his blue eyes hardly seemed to recognize his old acquaintance.

Alone at the other end of the hearth sat the odd figure of the sun worshiper; a woman who would have looked shrewd, even rather hard and sharp, if it had not been for a grotesque costume and a wild and wandering eye. Gamadge had to remind himself that “big” business men consulted palmists, clairvoyants, and astrologers, in order to reconcile that Roman nose, thin mouth, and firm jaw, with the wreath of yellow artificial flowers on Vega’s graying hair; with the yellow robe that hardly reached her bare ankles and was tied about her waist with a white cord obviously torn from a dressing gown; with the toeless and heelless beach sandals, yellow and blue, that could scarcely be said to cover her bare feet. There were rings on her fingers, and the left breast of the robe was decorated with a large diamond cluster, old-fashioned in design.

“Vega,” said Johnny Redfield, “let me present Henry Gamadge. Abigail Ryder’s cousin, you know.”

Vega’s smile was benevolent, and she held out her hand graciously, even mincingly. The refined gesture went oddly with the stare of the pale eyes and the slightly mad effect of the fillet and the robe. But they, of course, might be ritual—appropriate to somebody’s idea of a cult of the sun.

Redfield said: “Gamadge is here by the happiest chance, Aunt. In these difficult times he doesn’t look in on us often.”

“I’m delighted to meet Miss Ryder’s nephew,” said Vega. “Or cousin—cousin, of course. Have you met my stepchildren?”

Gamadge said he hadn’t as yet had the pleasure. “Cora, this is Mr. Gamadge, Mr. Gamadge, David Malcolm.”

Gamadge exchanged bows with the young Malcolms, and shook hands with Drummond. Chairs were pulled up; Gamadge found himself between the sun worshiper and Redfield. The twins sat quietly, shoulder to shoulder, gazing at Vega with a kind of innocent wonder; but Gamadge had seldom seen two people who looked more alert and wary.

“Did you know that it’s our first meeting, Mr. Gamadge?” asked Vega, swinging a sandaled foot. “Our very first! These dear children have been living abroad, you know, or did live abroad until the war drove them home three years ago. And I have been living very quietly in Pasadena; more and more I hate to leave my peaceful, sun-drenched home! And when the rains do come, I go to the desert. But it couldn’t go on forever, you know—our not coming together. Now it’s all going to be different. We shall meet often. If I’m able I shall come East every summer.”

“Able?” protested Redfield. “Of course you’ll be able.”

“I mean if I’m still on earth in this shape,” said Vega, smiling brightly at him. “In this vesture of decay, you know.”

Cora Malcolm was leaning forward, her hands clasped around her crossed knee, her eyes fixed on the speaker. Her brother’s hand was along the back of the settee. He tapped her shoulder lightly, as he said in the low, unaccented monotone that both the twins affected: “I don’t quite follow the trend of the idea, Mrs. Malcolm.”

“Vega, my dearest boy. Call me Vega.”

“I must remember. What I mean is, we should expect to find the old symbols—of fertility, of revival—in any cult of the sun. What dies in the autumn comes up in the spring. But slowly, if surely! Gradually and chemically.”

“Or botanically,” said Cora.

“Or botanically. But you almost seem to imply, Mrs. Malcolm—excuse me, I can’t get used to it yet—that in your case you expect the translation to be immediate, quasi-miraculous. The quite different symbolism of the butterfly and the cocoon.”

“I do mean that,” said Vega, complacently. Though Redfield moved in his chair, and even Walter Drummond shuffled his feet, she had not seemed to notice that she was being made fun of. “I do mean it,” she repeated. “But you mustn’t inquire too closely into the mysteries, dear boy. You wouldn’t understand.”

Redfield said gaily: “Dearest Aunt, I preferred the stars! The stars were confusing enough, but at least seemed to be definite about what was going to happen to us.”

“I really prefer Calvin to the stars,” said David Malcolm, his dark eyes turning to Redfield. “I’d rather be predestined by Calvin than by the stars.”

“But the stars,” said Cora, “let us alone after we die. Don’t they?”

Vega wore an expression vague but tolerant. Gamadge wondered why she put up with the twins, why they risked losing the increase in their allowance by their recklessness. Or had they gauged, as they thought, her silliness, and decided that open mockery would be safe? Looking again at that cold, canny face, he was more than ever certain that its owner was credulous—even perhaps a little crazy—on one subject and one alone. Like those big business men.

And he reflected that there might be something to account for her patience with the twins, something more rational than a bewitched preoccupation with the mysteries of a sun cult. Vega might be suffering from a guilty conscience where the young Malcolms were concerned. She really might have influenced her husband against them when he made his will. She might have read something in the stars—or the sun—which told her to make amends. In that case she wouldn’t allow her stepchildren’s rudeness to dissuade her from giving them money.

He remarked, in the tone of one who brings matters to a plane where everybody must feel at home: “I never did think that Casca was entirely right when he snubbed Brutus about the stars.”

“And who, pray,” asked Vega, smilingly, “was Casca?”

“Pay no attention to him,” said Redfield, “or to David either. They’re both showing off. Why not? David is a prodigy who hasn’t had a chance to express himself creatively yet; and as for Gamadge, what can you expect of an intelligence so perverse that its owner can only refer to his son and heir as a sky-blue bassinet?”

David Malcolm, with a faint indication of distaste for this domestic reminder, said that it surely couldn’t be showing off on Mr. Gamadge’s part to allude to anything so obvious as Julius Caesar.

“I owe you one,” said Gamadge, smiling at him.

“But Casca isn’t obvious to me,” declared Vega.

“Just a friend of dear Brutus’,” Malcolm told her, “informing him that man is master of his fate.”

“I hate to seem pedantic,” said Gamadge, “but I must point out that Casca qualified his statement. He only said that men are at some time masters of their fate.”

David Malcolm grinned. “Now we’re even,” he said.

“Er—not quite.”

Vega looked bewildered.

Miss Ryder and Mrs. Drummond approached the circle, chairs were rearranged. Abigail addressed Redfield accusingly:

“Johnny, you’ve lost a tree out of your boundary hedge.”

“Don’t remind me, Abby! It went in February. Some blight.”

“Did you know,” she continued, and the oblique approach to her subject amused Gamadge very much, “that people can see right across the lawn and right into your rose garden?”

“Can they? I didn’t realize that the gap was in a straight line from the archway. And why should I mind their seeing in?”

“No reason why, if you don’t mind giving them a shock.”

“Shock?”

“Johnny, what is that horrid wooden image you’ve put up there?”

“Oh!” Redfield glanced at Vega, who looked complacent. “You had a glimpse of our little monster, had you?”