Mrs. Bridge regretted having told her about a rather unfortunate slip of the tongue which occurred at the start of the benediction on Palm Sunday. Dr. Foster had said, “With eyes bowed and heads closed …”
True, this was unfortunate, but, as she promptly added in defense of the minister, “It could happen to anyone.”
Grace probably didn’t hear; she was laughing hysterically. “I knew I should have gone last Sunday,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes, “Oh, I’m so sorry I missed that!”
Then there had been that awful day when the elevator plunged into the bargain basement. It was a dark, rainy afternoon and Mrs. Bridge had gone downtown and was browsing through the basement of one of the department stores in search of something humorous to give as a booby prize at a forthcoming card party. She was examining some celluloid toys when all at once there was a noise like a shot and a shrill singing whine and a rumble, and before she could understand what it was all about the elevator crashed not ten steps from where she stood. Later it turned out that the elevator had not fallen as far as everyone thought; in fact it had only dropped about six or eight feet. Even so, it made a great noise and most of the passengers dropped their parcels and one or two fell down. Mrs. Bridge had not yet recovered from her surprise and was only looking rather blankly at the people in the elevator, who themselves were stunned into momentary silence and were looking blindly out of the cage, when someone began to scream for help. It was someone in the rear of the elevator, and presently this person fought his way through the other passengers and got to the front where he grabbed the cage and began shaking it.
“Why, Dr. Foster!” said Mrs. Bridge, and then there was so much confusion and so many people rushing around that she lost track of him.
He was not badly injured, as she had supposed he was; he had a sprained ankle. He went about on a cane for quite a while afterward longer, in fact, than she had ever seen anyone employ a cane for a sprained ankle and for several weeks more he hobbled and alluded dryly to his accident. Mrs. Bridge was a little disappointed in him without knowing just why. However there was certainly nothing funny about the accident, and she was quite put out with Grace for laughing when she heard of it.
Her entire attitude toward religion was flippant, and Mrs. Bridge did not think it was in very good taste. After one of the Auxiliary meetings she chanced to be nearby when Grace got on the subject of religion and said there was a rumor that after Christ was sentenced to death He turned to one of the soldiers and said, “When am I going to learn to keep my big mouth shut?”
Mrs. Bridge smiled courteously, as she never failed to do when someone told a joke, and though she did not believe God was planning to strike Grace dead, still she could not see there was anything to be gained by asking for trouble.
Frequently she attempted to interest her in religion, or at least in the habit of attending church, but the attempts were unsuccessful. It was a rare Sunday when she encountered Grace among the crowd on the church steps after services.
In the center of the church lawn stood a green wooden cupboard with a glass front. Each Thursday morning the janitor came out with a manila envelope full of white celluloid letters about two inches tall, and with these he composed the title of Dr. Foster’s forthcoming sermon. Mrs. Bridge was pleased to see the Barrons Cadillac parked in the lot one Sunday morning when the sermon was entitled: Should We Go to Church?
Naturally no one believed Dr. Foster would decide in favor of the negative, yet Mrs. Bridge could not help being irked when Grace whispered that she could hardly wait to find out. In a few minutes Dr. Foster appeared and ascended to the pulpit. He was growing more stout and more dignified every year. Solemnly he gazed down upon the congregation. At such times Mrs. Bridge thought he looked every inch the Man of God. She remembered seeing him one day on the Plaza; he had been studying himself in the mirror of a cigarette machine and she thought she had never seen him look more impressive. It was only at cocktail parties that he seemed unable to avoid little belches, after which he would stare with severity at the sandwich or cocktail in his hand.
“Should we go to church?” asked Dr. Foster of his audience. He allowed a few seconds for everyone to ponder. ”Should we go to church?” he repeated. He cleared his throat, placed his hands on the sides of the lectern, and began.
The sub-title of the sermon was “Unexplored Warehouses of the Cliff Dwellers.” The parable had to do with the fact that in plentiful years the Mesa Verde Indians stored part of their harvest in cliff houses and in time of famine they ate what they had saved.
A few minutes after noon Dr. Foster was winding it up. “We, of this more enlightened age, can surely benefit from the wisdom of those ancient savages. They learned to store their surplus against the time of dire necessity, and so it is when we go to church. …”
A few minutes later he descended and strode magnificently through the swinging doors. The last they saw of him was the tail of his black and royal purple cassock. To Mrs. Bridge he had seemed unusually eloquent and moving, and it was very strange, she thought, that throughout the sermon Grace was inattentive and listless. Afterward, on the steps, they talked for a little while.
“Grace,” Mrs. Bridge said impulsively, and took her by the hand, “is something troubling you?”
“No,” she whispered, with her eyes tightly shut. “No, no, no!”
“There is!” cried Mrs. Bridge. “I know there is!” But at this point they were interrupted by the arrival of the men and whatever might have been revealed was lost.
101. ‘Quo Vadis, Madame?
That evening, while preparing for bed, Mrs. Bridge suddenly paused with the fingertips of one hand just touching her cheek. She was seated before her dressing table in her robe and slippers and had begun spreading cold cream on her face. The touch of the cream, the unexpectedness of it for she had been thinking deeply about how to occupy tomorrow the swift cool touch demoralized her so completely that she al-most screamed.
She continued spreading the cream over her features, steadily observing herself in the mirror, and wondered who she was, and how she happened to be at the dressing table, and who the man was who sat on the edge of the bed taking off his shoes. She considered her fingers, which dipped into the jar of their own accord. Rapidly, soundlessly, she was disappearing into white, sweetly scented anonymity. Gratified by this she smiled, and perceived a few seconds later that beneath the mask she was not smiling. All the same, being committed, there was nothing to do but proceed.
102. Joseph Conrad
She was wakened by the chimes of the grandfather clock in the hall. It was three or four in the morning. Her husband was sleeping easily, but gravely, as though exhausted. She awoke simultaneously with the knowledge of one morning many years before when she had been dusting the bookcase and came across an old, old red-gold volume. Taking it down she found on the flyleaf in dry, spidery script the name of Shannon Bridge, who was the uncle of her husband an unambitious, taciturn man who had married a night-club entertainer and later died of a heart attack in Mexico, and upon whose death they had inherited a few books and charts. She had no idea what the charts were about, for she had not unrolled them, only stored them in the attic, and then one day, absently, since they were useless, she had discarded them; and as for the books, no one had read them, so far as she knew, though later she found Douglas examining them, and now at four in the morning she was lying completely awake, thinking of the time she had taken a book down from a shelf and had begun turning the brittle, yellowed pages. She stood beside the bookcase for quite a while, growing absorbed in what she read, and wandered, still reading, into the living room, where she did not look up from the book until someone called her, because she had come upon a passage which had been underlined, no doubt by Shannon Bridge, which observed that some people go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain; and this passage she had read once again, and brooded over it, and turned back to it again, and was thinking deeply when she was interrupted.