PART FOUR

[Illustration]

I

There was about the whole thing a sense of swift disaster. Ruin of all things, temporal and spiritual, seemed close on our heels. And yet, nothing had actually happened to us. But the air was charged with vengeance. One found oneself believing implicitly in the Old Testament, and in a God who was mighty in wrath. In words, on white paper, I am failing to convey the full weight of this threat as we received it at the time. Things are never so bad, once they are translated into words; for words fail of true imputation. If I had seen on the sky, as upon my return to New York I had almost expected to see, a finger tracing a curse, I would not have been shakier than I was when, in the chilly afternoon sunshine, I came from the little house in Eleventh Street with Eva. This disappointing sunshine glinted across the stoop and neglected the north windows and warmed nothing.

We were going out for a walk. Eva’s face, above her furs, flower-like in its delicacy of feature and colouring, was so much more heartening than the things of which I had been thinking that I smiled at her. “You are nice, Eva,” I said; “you’re nice!”

She turned upon me eyes that failed to see beyond her own concerns. “When you come down here and bother me with doleful prognostications about things that don’t affect you and me, Dinah, you get me out of sorts. Don’t be ‘sensible’, will you? You’ll spoil your work if you develop executive ability. Nick’s that way.” She gave me her little impish grin; her half-smile with its implications was for other moods. “Spencer Mapes says that Nick has sense while I have sensibility.”

Blaming her for her failure to throw herself into my mood, I now failed to follow her lead to lightness. “I knew, all along, that the outrageous summer before last was an omen. Eva, the brassy sky was a warning!”

She displayed sincere astonishment. “Of what?”

I had, in reply to this, only the small rejoinder: “The stock market crash.”

She remarked, practically, that as neither of us had had money in it we need not think about it. “If you had the things to worry you that I have,” she went on, “then I would sympathize, my dear. But as it is--I have Nick’s work to worry me, if you want to know.” She complained that he had got little work of late, and she put it down to what she said she had all along suspected: the quality of his work had fallen off. “It’s not surprising,” she stated. “Look around you at these abortions of his trade.” She waved disdainfully at the modernity of lower Fifth Avenue. “How can anyone call these horrid things the result of talent?” She was, I had noticed, unimpressed by modern architecture; while it appalled me, it left her unshaken. She said, now, that she felt a desire to go to her mother-in-law’s house in Washington Square and rest her eyes. “I love it, there. One knows, when in that rarefied atmosphere of dried rose leaves, that nothing happens which can shake the world, Dinah. It might do you good to go. You let your nerves play you tricks.”

And yet at this time New York was a city struggling with alarms. Even the staccato of steel construction was, or seemed to be, muted. It was a mild winter, enervating the optimism of those accustomed to bitter cold; and, with surprising ease, the citizens had dropped into one of the most pronounced cases of mass pessimism seen by a world that has seen a great many things. It would not have surprised the New Yorkers if their amazing new buildings had tumbled down. Under the influence of adversity, they had even begun to speculate on how much weight the rock of Manhattan could hold up without splitting, a contingency over which no thought had been wasted in the days of their prosperity. “Have you sensibility?” I wondered aloud.

“Not that sort,” she replied promptly and cheerfully. “But I want to tell you that I have looked forward more than you may surmise: what do you think I did with the money the last book brought me? I didn’t spend it; I went back to first principles, and while I didn’t hide it in my stocking I did the modern equivalent: I put it in a bank! Oh, I’m safe! I’m safe!” she crowed. Her cheeks flushed; she looked more nearly herself than for some time past.

We discovered Mrs. Van Suydam to be entertaining her own friends at tea. The Misses Ingoldsby and Mr. Tappen Tillinghast at once ceased what they had been saying to look at us with varying degrees of guilt. With the same expression of stopping in the middle of something detrimental, the dark old portraits on the white walls might have this minute clapped their lips together; the red draperies over the windows might have been drawn in front of a whisper. Formal old chairs stiffened their backs at our entrance, nice old tables forbade us to enjoy their grace. The ginger jars on the high mantel closed in against us their dried rose leaves. I had been in this drawing-room many times, and had always found it to be a gracious room.

“You were talking about me,” Eva asserted gaily. “No matter where I go, I find that people have been talking about me. However, we all talk about each other.” But the look that she now bent upon her mother-in-law was serious, and revealed in its small way that she was, then, uneasy. “We don’t object to being discussed; it’s part of the business, really. Only, here in this house, it’s different.”

Miss Augusta Ingoldsby could always be depended on. She said judicially: “My dear girl, whenever we speak of you it is in your best interests, let me assure you.”

Eva took this with her lightness which she wore like a mantle. “Of course! I told you that I didn’t object. I came over, to tell the truth, to discuss myself.”

Miss Augusta moved her chair closer and leaned forward, efficient and reliable. “You can tell us anything.”

Mrs. Van Suydam sat more rigidly erect. “Augusta!”

I heard the aside of the younger Miss Ingoldsby: “Gussie always did talk too much, Tilly, as I am forever telling her.”

Mr. Tillinghast cleared his lean throat.

Miss Augusta rolled a vigorous eye around the circle of her cronies. She settled firmly in her chair, her feet together in the correct dancing attitude of her youth; she could have instantly risen without undue effort, and she could then have charged forward, or retreated, in full command of her body. “I am very fond of young people,” she began her lecture, “and I don’t at all mind giving much of my time to the solution of their problems.” She was so intently marshalling her as yet unspoken sentences, and the others were so keenly waiting for a chance to stop her off, that it was easy to speak in an aside to Eva. I touched her arm. Remembering what she had told me of a previous tea-party in this room, meeting her eye which gleamed with her own memory of that conversation and this present substantiation of it, I argued with her: “I see no reason for staying. Do come away? Why should you subject yourself to unpleasantness?”

Eva said: “Nonsense! Nick’s mother is never unpleasant. We are staying, old girl, and you might as well resign yourself to it.”

I urged my point, however. “Did you ever talk to her--really talk to her?” It seemed to me that the face Mrs. Van Suydam at this moment turned towards Eva was as closed as the room. This elderly and colourless face was not forbidding so much as it was casually but totally withdrawn from recognition of anything between herself and her son’s wife. I recalled her manner towards her daughter-in-law at the Glidden party a year ago. In deciding for herself a matter that she held to be solely her own affair Eva had brought down on her head an avalanche that as yet she did not even instinctively feel. Mrs. Van Suydam enquired: “You wished to speak to me, you say?” Her courtesy was so complete as to be in itself a barrier.

Eva said: “Very much. I knew, as I came in sight of the house, that I must talk to you.” Her smile was a lovely thing. And I noticed again how easily she believed in the devotion of others.

With dexterity compounded of equal parts of will and of a surety that she could do as she pleased with circumstances, Mrs. Van Suydam got rid of her friends. It might have been that Eva’s refusal to carry on the Van Suydam family was the first irretrievable reverse she had ever encountered. I cannot recall with what polite inanities I made my attempt to escape in the large wake of Miss Augusta; I do remember that Eva pushed me into the embrasure of a window and said that she would not keep me waiting long. There was nothing for it; and I had cause to castigate myself because of a suspicion that I was delighted to have had it taken out of my hands. I said to myself: “Face facts! We are, none of us, any good. What is friendship, when one writes novels?” I therefore attempted to discipline myself by not listening. I stood behind the long red draperies, looking out at the Square with eyes that saw nothing; and I think they must have forgotten my presence, for all at once I realized that Eva was nervously shedding tears. “Tell me how to bear life?” she implored the older woman, and wept more convulsively when Mrs. Van Suydam did not at once reply.

Mrs. Van Suydam’s eventual “The only way to bear life is to do your duty” was dry as dust.

I put my fingers in my ears. But this makes the ears ring; it is uncomfortable. When I again listened, Eva was saying that she loved Nicholas.

Her mother-in-law qualified this assertion. “Not so much as you love yourself.”

From her voice I almost witnessed Eva’s defiant stare. “You mean that it would be my duty to love him more than I love myself? It’s possibly a splendid thing to love from a sense of duty; but is it a compliment?”

Mrs. Van Suydam’s “The sense of duty to the man one loves comes out of the fact of the love--if it’s love” was flat with her final decision on the matter.

This started Eva off on her sometimes wild laughter. “The old fallacies! How can you say a thing like that?” Capitulating as swiftly as she had flouted, she turned back to “How do you know I don’t love him more than I do myself?” I felt reasonably sure that this was a question which she asked herself also. But at this moment she exclaimed: “Let us be frank with each other? I am not afraid of words.” Without peeping around the curtains, I knew that her head was held proudly, as she more than ever defied criticism for which she had asked.

Not until she again raised her voice did I overhear. “I had the right of decision.”

Mrs. Van Suydam judged that “In the eyes of God, you had nothing of the kind.”

But Eva stated that she had not been speaking of God. “It’s a thing that everyone does,” she extenuated.

Mrs. Van Suydam said: “Listen to me very carefully, if you please--you said, I believe, that you are not afraid of words? It comes down to what a man is, and what a woman is. The child is the ultimate answer. As you have settled this question to suit your convenience, my son----”

Eva cried in a sudden high excitement: “So you--and Nick--are trying with all your might to push me down to a question of that sort? I see what----”

Mrs. Van Suydam continued as if she had not been interrupted. “From now on, you will find that my son feels for you the variety of love that a man thinks he feels for his mistress.” The wealth of disdain which she contrived to inject into this sentence was in its way a masterpiece.

“I see what the question is: it’s whether I shall be harnessed! It’s whether I will submit to being harnessed! It’s whether I will meekly agree to demand no more chances than women had in the Middle Ages. I--to be no better than they!” The push of her clipped words made it a sheer impossibility to interrupt; I fancied that the elderly lady must be sitting aghast. “What do you think my friends would say, if you did this to me? What do you think would be the eventual verdict of the world, if Eva Litchfield were fetching and carrying and bearing children for the Van Suydams?” She laughed shortly.

Mrs. Van Suydam then laughed also, shortly, almost viciously, with hatred. “It’s the choice that has always existed, you young fool: the choice between the women men marry and the women they make their mistresses.”

I was enthralled by this contrast between the exaggerations of the generations at war; and it occurred to me--and so amused me that I caught myself just before I chuckled--that Eva’s child, if she had had it, would have been hard put to it to discover a real right course which should also be diametrically opposed to his mother and at the same time his grandmother. The poor generations, on their hunt for novelty!

I heard Eva’s rapid, light footsteps. In her stride up and down the room--up and down, caged--she was almost running, with frenzy. She flung at the elderly lady: “By your creed, the woman with brains is to give up, if she’s so unfortunate as to fall in love?”

Mrs. Van Suydam’s words fell like drops of ice-water. “Those brains are designed to feed the brain of the unborn child.”

“My God!” Eva whispered. And then again she gasped the two words. I could not tell whether she laughed, or whether what she considered the enormity of this had literally taken her breath away. Mrs. Van Suydam sat in an assured silence. In order not to break this silence by my own convulsive merriment, I turned and pressed my face to the window pane. I looked down on teaming life. The inevitable hurdy-gurdy of all home crises in New York ground out, gaily and inconsequentially, an Italian love song. The call of the bird to its mate, the man to his sweetheart: the duet to the child--the little bird. It was the Trinity that, behind me in the drawing-room, Mrs. Van Suydam tried to force on Eva. And I wondered, not for the first time, if these poor creatures who infested the Square, involved in a struggle to make both ends meet, knew profounder things than Eva.

But Eva’s immense distaste was in her voice when she said: “I am tired of being told.” She paused. “What chance would gifted women have, if the world ran as you want it to run?”

Mrs. Van Suydam stated calmly: “It does run that way.”

“I think,” Eva began again, “that when a woman has a gift----”

“All women,” pronounced Mrs. Van Suydam, “have the gift of which I speak.”

Eva demanded triumphantly: “You quote the Bible, and God’s will: how do you get around what Christ said about the talents?”

Mrs. Van Suydam said blandly: “Christ spoke of men.”

As Eva went into a scream of laughter, I made the best of awkwardness by issuing from my lair behind the curtains. Eva’s eyes were filled with tears of mirth. She laughed until the tears dried and her eyes were left still sparkling but rueful. “I’m sorry.” She waited, uncertain what to do next. “You will never forgive me for laughing.”

I felt miserably apologetic for my presence. Mrs. Van Suydam gazed into the fire, her eyebrows slightly raised. Eva stood tapping her foot on the floor, her eyes fixed on this cool face turned towards the fire. And then she glanced swiftly at me, said “There’s--literally--nothing to be done!”, shrugged, and asked if she might use the telephone.

I began a lame explanation. “I’m very sorry that I was, in a way, forced to overhear what you said. But Eva must have forgotten that she asked me to wait over by the window.”

She said politely: “I did not forget that you were there, Mrs. Avery. I had, however, no objection to your hearing what I said to my son’s wife. She badly needs discipline.” She left it in doubt whether she considered that the fact of a third person hearing what she had said to Eva would act as a disciplinary measure. It was with difficulty that I pinned her down to my contention that I had been an innocent victim of what was none of my concern. She was then very gracious. “I pray you won’t disturb yourself over it, Mrs. Avery; for I once more assure you that I hadn’t the slightest objection to anyone hearing what I had to say.”

There was no use in further apologies. I felt like making a face at her when she turned her head to stare in surprise at the re-entrance of the elder Miss Ingoldsby. It was evident from Miss Augusta’s immediate bright inspection of the room that she had been drawn back by her curiosity. She murmured something indefinite about having forgotten to give Mrs. Van Suydam a piece of news, looked over her shoulder and by the power of her eye drew her niece, Gertrude Cuyler, across the threshold, and then asked: “What is Eva doing?”

Mrs. Van Suydam’s failure to reply might have been a rebuke to her friend for prying, and it might have been that she at once drew Gertrude’s face down and kissed her. At this moment Eva returned from telephoning. Halfway around in her chair, and with one stout ankle and gay shoe exposed by her effort to balance and yet lose nothing, Miss Augusta hailed her: “Well, there you are! I was afraid you had gone home.”

Her eyes fixed on Gertrude Cuyler, Eva advanced, her head up; on the surface of her beauty arrogance shone like armour. She said “How do you do?” to Gertrude, said the same to Miss Ingoldsby, and turned sweetly to her mother-in-law. “You will permit me to intrude a little longer? A gentleman is calling for me.” During the silence which upon her pronouncement fell heavily she smiled. She dominated the room, fading Gertrude’s more florid good looks and nearly succeeding in beating into words the inaudible opposition of Mrs. Van Suydam. The maid, going along the hall to answer the summons of the doorbell, walked too deliberately for my nerves. In the hush of the drawing-room, we heard the colloquy. To the query of a man’s voice the maid dropped into a mumble.

“Miss Eva Litchfield,” the man’s voice expounded. “I’m sure she’s here. Suppose you go and find out?”

The maid said more confidently: “There ain’t anybody by that name lives here.”

We in the drawing-room heard the sound of a man’s soft laughter. “I forgot: I’m asking for Mrs. Nicholas Van Suydam.”

Framed by the white woodwork of the door, Spencer Mapes was chastely Continental in his graceful pause. He might have been calling primarily on Mrs. Van Suydam as he bent over her hand; he might have adored Gertrude Cuyler as he let his eyes dwell on her in greeting; his ardour all but embraced the elder Miss Ingoldsby; and then he said, his voice caressing the words: “Oh, Eva!” He smiled charmingly. “I was having a lonely tea at the Brevoort, and it occurred to me--for no reason in the world except that of inspiration--to drop in here on the chance of finding Eva.” In his elaborate carelessness he contrived to be awkward; and instantly Eva’s act of telephoning him took on significance. He averted his eyes from her and fixed them on Mrs. Van Suydam as he continued with an explanation that had not been sought. He said that he was writing a critical article on Eva’s work, and had come to the pass where he was obliged to consult her on what she wished said. With all his acumen he threw upon Eva the burden of association.

Gertrude Cuyler sat with a troubled face. Motionless, Mrs. Van Suydam waited for something: there was something in the wind. Spencer Mapes shed his warmth in my direction; I knew that he was meaning me to understand that he was saying “Our own dear Dinah!” I went across the room and began the process of taking my leave of my involuntary hostess.

But one could always count on the elder Miss Ingoldsby; Miss Augusta at once rushed into speech. “My dear Mrs. Avery, don’t go yet? I came back in order to tell Lavinia a piece of news--not that I fear it will affect her, for she is sound as the rock of Gibraltar. But, after all---- I daresay you don’t, being an artist, keep up with the daily news? Artists always have their heads in the clouds, don’t they say? I have heard that expression used in relation to them, at any rate. But aren’t you, my dear Mrs. Avery, worried?”

This being startling, I paused in my determined progress towards the door to ask what she meant.

“I allude,” she said as if she recited, “to the financial news of the day.”

“I don’t,” I told her, “keep up with it.”

With a visible slight annoyance, Mrs. Van Suydam enquired what she had to tell. “For of course you’ll tell it.”

“I heard, today, from well authenticated sources which I’m not at liberty to quote, that several New York banks are on the verge of their Waterloo,” said Miss Augusta with satisfaction in having put it so neatly.

Eva cried “Which banks?” and began to tremble.

Miss Augusta’s gratification at this sensation was evident. “I don’t know, my dear girl. But do find out from Nicholas if it’s true--I certainly was told it on good authority--ahem!--Tony Bloodgood, to be exact, mentioned it to Gertrude--that he has lost money?”

Eva gasped: “Spence, I must go home. I must go home at once.”

I hastened to her. One never knew; and I was uneasy at the expression on the elder Mrs. Van Suydam’s face. Also, the interest of Miss Augusta Ingoldsby was not strictly impersonal. “We’ll go together,” I said firmly.

She clutched my arm. “What shall I do?”

I said, under my breath: “Listen to reason. I told you all of this, today, and you didn’t then lose your head.”

The clutch of her fingers on my arm was painful. I cannot remember how we got out of the house. Back of my other unpleasant memories of the day is that of curious eyes following us to the door; in front of all other painful impressions is that of Spencer Mapes solicitously attending us. I muttered to him: “If you will kindly leave us, I can manage Eva.”

Eva had a devastating trick of swinging like a peculiarly rapid pendulum, so that one was left behind, gaping, as she flew through the crises of her passionate nature. She said, with no preparation for it: “Do you realize that I’ve never had a break? Is it because I’m a woman?”

Mapes said: “I thought you were upset over the panic.”

I said to him, fiercely: “Can’t you let her alone? She’d forgotten it.”

We disputed over her; and she walked between us, erect, absent-minded, steeping herself in her own thoughts, suffering through her own thoughts. And around the corner from Eleventh Street, and straight towards us, came Nicholas Van Suydam. The eager look of expectancy on his face savoured of the earlier days of their marriage. Eva whispered: “I forgot that I left word for him to join us at his mother’s.”

I found time to be irritated that she had not said, frankly, upon our starting out for a walk, that she intended going to Mrs. Van Suydam’s. Why would she try to make me believe it the impulse of the moment?

Nicholas quickened his pace, hurrying to join us. He must have looked forward to a stroll home with her; he must again have felt the need of those intimate touches of life with one’s wife when one is friends with her. And evening was even now dropping over the city, and with it the quiet. Doubtless he had welcomed the cessation of rivetting, the noise of which must of late have jabbered at him “All construction work is about over--your career is over--it may be that everything is over.” And here we came, with Eva between us; and her face was set in a tragic look of pain. He stopped short. “What has happened?” he demanded sharply.

Without hesitation I played the coward. I turned and ran. But first I laid a firm hand on Spencer Mapes’ arm and held on until we were around the next corner.

[Illustration]

II

Looking back on that dreadful winter, I seem to have run across Eva only upon occasions of disaster. I must have seen her in quieter moments, but the memory of pleasant things is overlaid with misery.

I knew, when I started for the party given by Daniel Pentreath, that the evening would be a sign-post along the way. It was not cheering, upon my somewhat late arrival, to fall immediately into Florence Quincy’s hands; her laughter was derisive, was mournful, was a brew of all the sorts of laughter within the range of man. “You, too, searching for the unattainable?”

“This is, then, one of your evenings in the grand manner,” I commented with resignation. “I asked you a simple question: what’s doing?”

“And I answered you, perhaps less simply. For none of us know what’s doing.” Her painted mouth set in a smile which was the antithesis of her laughter: when she laughed, her face gave the impression of having broken in order to allow sound to escape. “Doubtless you will get off in a corner--and sit on your silly foot--and moon about your soul; and if you had a soul would you be here? There’s the answer. It’s the answer to everything about us, to every one of us and our questions about everything.”

“And maybe I agree with you.”

I saw the shiver which ran along her fine skin, so that the heavy powder she wore cracked, and rolled into ridges. “There’s something in the air tonight--something bad!” With her vermilion lip-stick, and her dead white thick powder, she was a tragic clown.

Annoyed by the sound of a man’s groans coming from the adjacent bedroom, we moved away, although groans were not uncommon here.

Daniel Pentreath loomed over the studio, his gigantic chair, painted as starkly vermilion as Florence’s lips, a throne lifted above his mob of guests. He wore pyjamas, and his grey curls thrust themselves independently into the air; except for his unusual size, he might have been a bad boy escaped from bed. His great voice roared out from a great mouth like a cavern. Pentreath was indifferent to the fact that he had been born too late by many centuries. His behaviour was simply direct and self-indulgent. Topping his guests by his great height, he dwarfed them by his ruthless ability. “Hey!” he shot at someone, a vocal projectile. As most of his teeth were gone, he spoke in short sentences which he threw against his gums. “You gal! Keep your head still!”

“He’s making a sketch of Eva,” Florence explained. “She kept well in his sight until he did. She brought on herself whatever comes.”

For as he worked Pentreath muttered, and snorted, and called all women kittle cattle. “Heugh! Hard as nails--mean as the devil--vain as peacocks: all women! Ornamental, though--silly creatures! Strut like peacocks. Prancing--proud of their tail feathers. Ain’t natural: ought to leave tail feathers to the males, like the birds.”

Florence and I moved cautiously to a position whence we could see Eva. She sat against the vast canvas of Pentreath’s latest study of mountains: they were menacing mountains of black rock. She was very pale. Occasionally she looked helplessly around the room. “I know all about myself,” she said. “I wish you wouldn’t do me. You’re cruel.”

I thought: “Like the gods.” But if I had spoken aloud no one would have heard, for Pentreath’s bellow again shattered the room. “Pretty things--glaciers,” he remarked with a change of imagery; “cool, and quiet--full of clear colour--know where they’re goin’ and get there!”

The groans from the bedroom were more insistent, rising, I made no doubt, in order to beat out Pentreath at his own game of noise. A gorgeous youth came up to Florence, his Greek profile magnificently the only classic in the room. “Florence dear--do you mind?--I’m afraid that this time Barney will truly do something desperate.”

Florence said waspishly: “Do I have to take care of everyone who’s incapable of taking care of themselves?” She pulled aside the curtain shrouding the bedroom door, and out gushed the lamentations of Barney. Over her splendid shoulder, she grimaced for my benefit. “I take it they’ve had one of their quarrels,” she remarked; and went inside. The Greek profile rested picturesquely against the door jamb; its owner said to me that he was afraid the trouble was Barney’s disapproval of one of the boys.

Urged by a spiritual necessity for physical support, I went over to lean against another door jamb; and from the next room I heard Anthony Bloodgood making love to a New York girl whom we knew as one of those who are “sometimes going to write because they must express themselves.” Anthony’s voice was strange to me; it was as if his heart were singing because he was with her, and I recalled having heard that he had been in love with her since her school days. He said: “When we’re married, Janny, we can have these people at our home.” If she replied, I missed it; but Anthony’s sense of the magnanimity of his conduct again caused his voice to ring out boldly. “You don’t know it, Janny, but I’m not a brute. I know all about it, loveliest! I’m not going to scold you. I’ve done it myself, you see.”

“You!” The girl’s laughter was convulsive. “You! Oh---- I can’t bear it!”

Indulgently, he shared her amusement. “Carouse around a bit? You don’t think a chap can reach my age without having racketed around town; do you?”

All men spoke the same words to all girls; all men, in more or less roundabout ways, boasted of their early peccadillos. I was mildly amused. Glancing around for some answering smile--for this was the only comic relief of the evening--I met the eyes of a woman who had that instant taken up a position which enabled her to watch the pair. This woman, an interior decorator, was herself the rarest decoration of any room. She had a white face to which she added emphasis by her lack of the slightest touch of rouge. Her hair was densely black with no highlights and with not a trace of the blue sheen which is the beauty of actually black hair. Her eyes, a burning black without glitter, and exceptionally large, revealed at this moment a wild intensity. She looked like some ancient conception of a goddess who takes away, but never bestows, life. I remembered that her hand was small and like a bird’s claw, and that it was always bone-dry. This woman, then, stood looking intently at the girl Janny, and the girl left Anthony Bloodgood and went to her.

The studio was more peaceful than this, although Florence had been right about the tension in the air--tension flowing after me, catching up with me, as I found a chair in a comparatively hidden nook behind the piano. But in the midst of my burst of pure gratitude for the chair I realized that my host held nicely suspended over the crown of my head a beer bottle, or some such missile. The ludicrous feature of it--if one excepts the character of the weapon--was that he looked thoughtful. “Go on!” I instructed him. “Do it! You haven’t the idea that I care if you bash my head in, have you?”

“Heugh!” Pentreath grunted, and made off down the room. I scrambled from the chair. With elaborate carelessness I lit a cigarette; and I noticed, with impersonal interest, that my hand shook. He had, then, frightened me. I hurried to tell Florence, who had come from the bedroom, also carelessly smoking, that he had made me see that bad as existence was I liked it. “He knocked into a cocked hat all that Yoga stuff you forever tease me about. I wonder what would be happening to me now, if he’d come down with that beer bottle?” And she speculated, but indifferently, on whether I was unstrung because of the beer bottle being capable of causing pain, or because of the tottering of my belief.

Eva came up to us with a reproach. “Why didn’t one of you make me go home? I have a feeling of something menacing. I can’t understand what is going on. Tony Bloodgood is looking queer, and hunting for Nick: and where--I want to know--is Nick? Oh, Dinah--you always take up for him; but even you must acknowledge that he shouldn’t go off and leave me to face this sort of thing alone! Some people may be able to bear this sort of thing; but if you realized how things affect me----” She went on about artists being extraordinarily sensitive to impressions.

Florence asked if she did not think we had to hear a lot of that; and turned on her heel and left us. Enviously I gazed after her: I never acted on my impulses, and they died quickly. With a sigh, I suggested that we go down to the sidewalk and get some air.

On the steep and winding stairway another fugitive rushed past us and flung open the street door. We reached the sidewalk as the girl Janny was being handed into a cruising taxi by the night watchman on the block. The watchman treated us to a leer. “Lor!” he remarked affably. “I’m used ter ladies bustin’ outer that there house! I knows, when I sees ’em atearin’ for the street, I better git ’em a taxi in a jiffy.”

We stayed out long enough for a cigarette. I think that we were both reluctant to reënter the house. The watchman hung around, senilely communicative. “It pays ter be a watchman, on some blocks of this here town. You know this town well, ladies?”

The walls of the winding stairway were painted with beasts and birds unnaturally entangled amid unnatural forests. With every step that we mounted we became more apprehensive. But Eva said: “We’re being foolish; aren’t we? There’s no bogy lying in wait for us. But I’ll own up, Dinah, that there are times, of late, when I feel afraid in the dark. It must be this damnable depression you forever talk about. I feel---- Well, I don’t feel natural.”

As if in answer to her reassurance that no bogy-man was around the next turn of the stairs, there was a crack, a thud, and outcries from the studio. Past us, as we shrank back against the dreadful beasts on the wall, they dragged a youth with a bloody head. “Heugh! Got him!” And Pentreath returned to his seat on the piano bench where he played the interrupted accompaniment to the song of a large woman with a large voice. The woman’s voice easily soared above the febrile scale of comments on the recent violence. She sang a thing that sounded angelic.

The damaged youth, supported on either side by youths who winced when his blood spattered them, was being borne to the bathroom for repairs. He opened his eyes and said he did not see what had made Dan so mad at him. He called out: “Jonathan! Oh, Jonathan! Do please come and hold my hand while they wash my head?”

The boy Barney shuddered. “My goodness! How can you have the nerve to ask such a thing with a face all nasty and gory like that?”

“Jonathan?” the injured youth implored. “Do please come with me while they wash my head? Please, Jonathan?”

“No, I won’t!” said the gorgeous youth with the profile. “I’m glad of it!”

Through the now uneasy movement of his guests from room to room, Pentreath played and listened to the song; his face was fine and rapt.

Eva’s spasmodic clutch was on my arm. “Pentreath isn’t human, is he? But he’s great! Why should any of us mind what he does, or says? That is what it is to be truly great.”

Many drank at the sideboard. Addis Wickersham pushed through the throng to ask Eva if it were true that Nicholas had eloped with Gertrude Cuyler. “And here am I, on my way to console my own wife, which you will admit is a novelty.” He added that it had been reported to him that his wife was in possession of Pentreath’s mammoth bedstead, from the depths of which she declared her intention of ending it all. “A side show to the greater show of the party,” commented Wickersham. “You ladies are always upset, in this house; because Daniel steals the spotlight.” His sonorous voice flowed to the bedstead in the adjoining room. But something was missing from this splendid organ; who could be the centre of things at Pentreath’s but Pentreath himself?

It occurred to us, belatedly, that we missed Molly Underhill from amongst these excitedly moving women. And someone said: “She’s off somewhere trying to get herself ruined.”

I found myself near Nicholas; and both of us had lost Eva. He said: “Do try to find out what’s on Eva’s mind?”

I endeavoured to reply with comfortable assurance: “Oh, it’s merely the times.”

And at this moment, through a gap in the throng which had again turned delirious, we saw Eva’s little mouth going--going; and someone with a pale face came up and said that Nicholas must get Eva home before she should have a breakdown. I heard Nicholas mutter that this would be a good chance to hit Mapes with a beer bottle, and saw that the man with the pale face was he. But Mapes at once faded into the mass of people, and Eva, her cheeks wet with tears, waited for him. But I thought that she waited for anyone who would help her. People were crowding, but I got the impression that they did not attend Eva. It was a man around whom they clustered, necks stretching to see over each other’s shoulders.

His pleasant face dead white, his gentle eyes glassy, his plump form on the verge of collapse, this young man, Freye Remsen, felt no ground under his feet. He who had talked to every desperately threatening artist in New York--he who had believed these people to be the great tragic characters of the century--had now looked on the face of death by self-inflicted violence, and everything he believed had been at once reversed. He babbled: “I was going to bring Molly here tonight--and her apartment was filled with the police and they held me up and pushed me out. I was going to bring her here tonight. The place was full of policemen.”

Pentreath stepped down from his vermilion throne. He reared up like a primeval statue. He bellowed: “Well? Ain’t that what we’ll all come to? Ain’t we all mad as coots?”

[Illustration]

III

On every street corner men and women offered for sale apples which the passersby were too shocked to buy. Every living thing in the city was in a state of shock. They cried with their eyes and with their pale cheeks: “That this could have happened to New York!” If the fantastic beauty of the panorama still gave them pleasure, it was now a thwarted, masochistic pleasure. Up it went, the city, striving to pierce the sky itself; defying the gods whilst trusting to the law of gravity of the earth, inarticulately but consciously lampooning the great buried cities of the past whilst through its streets swept the old, old misery of money fear.

I went out on my balcony and looked, awe-stricken in spite of habit, into the gnashing teeth of the sky-line. But there is something unsettling in this sky-line; it cannot induce inertia. I dressed and went down into the street, wandering aimlessly and with my head filled with what I had endured the day before. The weather was abominable, with gusts of wet snow--a symbolic day, I felt in my bones. A canopy of fog dropped down on this new white city its burden of soot. And here in front of me was Nicholas Van Suydam, snow slipping down his collar. He rushed into speech. “I’m thankful I ran across you. I wanted to ask if you know what plans Eva is making?”

I scoffed: “That has a familiar ring!”

“Ah but she is making plans! I can see it. And the trouble is that she doesn’t say a word about it. She usually talks about whatever is in her head. I wondered if you mightn’t know?”

Against the insistent question in his eyes I opposed truthfully a blank ignorance; but I had at once felt the need for caution. He stood in the clinging, dirty snowflakes, forlorn, looking as if he needed to be whistled home. His dejection wrung from me the delayed information that I had not seen her for some time. I had--although this I did not say--stayed away from her.

He pointedly requested that I come down to see her. “You know how she is--excitable? She’s got herself tremendously worked-up over the panic; and she was already moping over Molly Underhill.”

I could not resist telling him that Eva had telephoned me, some time since, of having gone to his mother for comfort on the score of her responsibility for Molly’s death. She had said to Mrs. Van Suydam that upon a certain occasion she had been so cruel to Molly about her recitation that she felt this had had a large share in breaking down her desire to live. Mrs. Van Suydam, it appeared, had remarked that the opinion of one person was never so powerful as that would come to. I did not tell him that this had only too evidently clipped Eva’s spirits; but he turned on me an eye so comprehending that I became lost in a confused speculation on how deeply he might actually understand Eva. And, as I submitted to his instantly popping me in a taxi, getting in himself and giving the driver the number of the little house in Eleventh Street, I wondered feebly if my supineness arose from the snow slipping down my own back or from a guilty knowledge of my unwillingness to go at all. I felt like saying: “I have my own troubles.” No one took their troubles to Eva.

The taxi skidded, and he re-adjusted the angle of his hat. Why--I asked myself pettishly--are men fussy about their hats which look the same on any slant? His relieved face, as he contemplated me, a virtual prisoner on my way to taking over a share of his burden, produced in me a contrition in the toils of which he, and Eva, I made no doubt, would use me.

“How is work?” I asked casually.

“Stopped.” Architects, he went on with wry amusement, would soon be in the class of artists who conceived and executed those pleasures which are luxuries, such as--he paused to grin amiably at me--books. Our taxi hurled itself downtown along canons already shut in by more buildings than the frightened population needed. He laughed heartily at the corollary he now propounded: as he went down from usefulness in a man’s work, he automatically went up according to his wife’s circle. “However,” he said with a disheartened drop in his amusement, “she’s worried because she--well, then, because she’s Eva! She thinks I shan’t make enough money to keep us out of the poorhouse. I dislike to talk about such matters, Dinah; but you might put it in her head that she needn’t worry about the poorhouse. We--my mother and I--have a policy, as my father had--he learned it from his father, and so on back--to hold on to real estate. We’re strapped, but not smashed. If you could explain this to her?”

I objected that this was clearly in his own province.

He made a helpless gesture with his hands, thereby loosening his hold on his stick, which fell with a clatter and gave the excuse for bending and so hiding from me any actual realization he might have had about his wife. When he came up, a little red of face, he said indulgently that she was a child about money. “And, you see, she’s got it in her head that the falling away of my work is due to a corresponding falling to pieces of my reputation.” This he also laughed off indulgently, but not before I had seen that it had hurt him. And, still not having discussed her with any intimacy of detail, he again waved it off with a murmur that she was not adult when it came to a question of money. “She keeps saying that she is so afraid to be poor.”

“She was poor, once,” I put in, “before she came to New York.”

“Ah?” He seemed surprised. “I know nothing of that old life before she came to New York. Oh, I mean--naturally, I know the general outline. But I mean to say--you people charge on New York, and show your most sparkling side, and we take it for granted, you see, that you were always, and everywhere, brilliant and prosperous and on the crest of the wave.”

“That’s New York,” I said composedly.

“And then, too, it’s impossible to think of Eva as ever having passed around the hat, so to speak,” he went on.

I held him to the subject. “The city is in such a blue funk, just now, that it works on her; of itself, it would frighten her.”

But he was not frightened by New York. He knew that this city, of which he was an integral part because he had been born of the stock that had settled it--this city whose bold new growth had been conceived in the brains of a body of men like himself--was a cruel city and would cast him out if he lagged; but he was sure that he would not lag and that he and the city understood each other. He gave a positively affectionate glance from the window and said, under his breath, “The poor old town! The poor bastard!” I knew that he thought us the monsters who did not understand. And yet, Eva had hurt him through the medium of every brick in every great new structure.

Through the smoke of my cigarette, I studied him. By his attitude towards what Eva had done he was lying. With him, I fancied, nervousness took the form of an inability to do any creative work at all. But in what he next said he went back to our interchange of remarks on the storming of the fortress by the authors. “You people who come into New York are so marvellous! Such energy! Such apparent ignorance that you could possibly fail to conquer! It’s amazing. I’ve noticed about Eva that she can and does turn on to her work the full force of her storming rages--I don’t mean that in the least the way it sounds, however; but she does tear around the house and bemoan herself--well, then,” he pushed on, now thoroughly involved and, I saw, desperately taking the way out of telling all, “I remember once when she had asked me to read proof sheets to her, and she was cutting up over quite minor mistakes, I assure you--saying that the printers had tampered with her words, and appealing to me in the most agonized way to know if I hadn’t an ear--and the telephone rang in that awfully annoying way it has, off and on, off and on; and she simply screamed to the maid to tell Winnie Conant that she was out--to tell her she was dead--to tell her anything. And, the point is, she gets ahead with her work in, and as a direct result of, her emotional upsets. Sometimes I’m appalled by her vital energy. But when it comes to turning some of that energy into the minutiæ of living she’s horrified at the interruption. She doesn’t,” he concluded helplessly, “open her mail for weeks at a time.” He appeared to look upon this as one of the most inscrutable things about his wife.

I asked lazily: “Why should she? You’ve just said that you’re constantly surprised at the way in which her nervous force is made to serve the needs of her work. Why try to reform her? She knows what she’s about.”

He stared. “But it isn’t I who is up to reforming! She’s putting her shoulder to the wheel of changing me!”

I said to myself: “We’re getting at it!” I asked aloud: “What can you mean?”

He blurted out that she continually told him of how helpful the wives of authors frequently were; these wives, it appeared from her caustic comparisons, saw to it that during the writing of books they were relieved of all annoyances; and she had always wound up by calling on God to know what she would do if no one helped her. In his resentment at this inference, he had, I gathered from what he did not say, studied her with a new cold detachment. He had reminded her of her tantrums when she fancied him falling off in his work. He had gone on to draw her attention to the point of his being the man of the family: would it be suitable for him to be at her disposal all of the working day? He had said--he assured me that he had been dispassionate--“Do you realize that if this goes on I shall be unfit for work?” He gave me a sidelong glance, and said by way of excuse that our crowd talked to each other of all details of our lives; he could not see that he was disloyal to Eva in telling me this.

With no intention of entering into it, I said sweetly that he should be able to manage his wife as men had always managed their wives, by the power of a greater shout.

“Are you laughing at me?” he demanded. “For I assure you that it’s no laughing matter. It has--got out of my hands.” He hurried on with a rather feeble statement that it was not in any way the fault of Eva, who was a particularly guileless creature; it was the fault of certain persons who put things into her head.

“And now you want me to put something into her head?”

He hastened to deny this. He said, out of a clear sky but with immense vindictiveness, that he should have kicked Spencer Mapes out of the house long ago. “Why did I fail to kick him out? What’s lacking in me that I never act on my impulses?” He laughed, then. “I seldom act on my convictions, to tell the truth. This is because I stop long enough to think it out--I want to be fair, you know. But a man shouldn’t stop long enough to think out a crisis. Once it is thought out, a crisis becomes an emasculated psychological situation. There’s something wrong with the age,” he finished on a weak plea.

I said drily that it might be that he was deliberately trying to get himself out of touch with the age. “You’re sorry that you aren’t sorry that jealous husbands no longer flog gentlemen callers. You feel it to be the correct impulse; and you haven’t been able to stem the stream that’s swept our generation beyond it. You’ve turned the clock back--perversely--and its ticks are muffled in your re-adjusted hearing. I mean--you did, of your own accord, step out of Washington Square. Why do you try, in your mind, to step back?” But his clock ticked steadily, and he was helpless. He wondered, he said, if anyone in our crowd had the chance, or wished for the opportunity, to lead private lives. Chatter hit on every nerve in his body. The topics selected applied to him, to Eva, to the two of them in conjunction--to all life, he decided almost wildly. Life was dreadful because, when one needed all strength, all intelligence, in order to see a way through, one was weakened by the cumulative effect of idle remarks that irritated already raw nerves. I said: “You shouldn’t be the one to feel such things. This is your home town.”

He seemed numbed by statements such as this. It was necessary to explain to Nicholas, always, I said to myself with annoyance. “New York does something to us who come here from outside.”

He exclaimed with real indignation: “Eva married me. And a wife becomes what her husband is. Eva is now a New Yorker.”

I contented myself with settling back in my corner of the taxi and from my huddle remarking that at any rate most of us were bad off. “Our gills have dried, you might say.” I liked this simile more than did he; I noticed that he frowned. We went on our way in silence. The great towers leaned over us, threatening us.

He took it up again. “I fail to see what you’re driving at.”

I drawled: “Maybe I don’t see, myself. It’s the result of the weather. It’s depressing weather.”

Having let us in with his latchkey, he set me the example of tiptoeing up the stairs. He might have spared me this anticipatory alarm, for Eva was not at home. I saw that he was at once agitated. It amused me to observe that through association with us he had developed a theatrical attitude towards situations: he went straight to her writing-table, and on his now pale face there was a look of terror. Had there been a note propped against her typewriter, I was convinced that before opening it he would have thought of shooting himself. There was, of course, no note, and he glanced swiftly at me and smiled. I said, casually: “I had feared, you know, that you had got the idea that you were in love with Eva because you were dazzled by the fact of her being, as she undoubtedly is, a famous person.”

He flung me a look of derision. “Nonsense! I was dazzled by her face.” He spoke, however, with reservations: he was in no mood for tender confidences. I wanted, as on many occasions I had wanted, to suggest to him that Spencer Mapes kept his hold on Eva by telling her with his eyes, and with a carefully dropped word or two, that she was a great artist; but Nicholas, always disregarding this side of his wife, would have wanted to say in reply that Mapes was possibly thankful that he had not to chant this theme eternally, that the daily burden of Eva’s mental rapacity was not his to shoulder. I ended by reminding myself that it was an ungrateful task to maneuver between a husband and wife, and that, with every intention of keeping out of it, I now found myself much too deeply in it for my comfort and would do well to retreat. While Nicholas went downstairs to mix a cocktail, I sat relaxed and regretting that the better man failed to manage a very ordinary situation. It might, I said to myself, be an instinctive balancing of the question between this married pair; for Eva, with what she considered her stern clear judgment, did not believe in Nicholas. I had heard her tell him “I asked Spencer Mapes what he seriously thinks of your work----”

Nicholas had said: “That was nice of you. Does the gentleman know anything about architecture?”

Eva had an exasperating way of turning deaf to interruptions. “He said that, while he hadn’t heard of you until we married, he had no doubt but that, with inspiration----”

“Shall we agree,” Nicholas had said pleasantly, “that we don’t, and never can, understand each other’s aims?”

I said to myself--lying back in Eva’s armchair and hoping to make my escape before she should bring a scene in with her: “The real trouble is that neither of them has a vestige of tact. Talk of eugenics! Two tactless people shouldn’t be permitted to marry.” In this fashion I tried to be light about it. It was a difficult task: the room carried a whisper of desertion.

Mattie came in to light the lamps. The room leapt at me. The scent of narcissus, from a pot of forced growth on the windowsill, was overpoweringly sweet and heavy. It was the smell of spring, of the quickening of the earth; and it was December, and this pot of narcissus was unnatural. That Mattie in her own strangely natural way disliked the thing was evidenced by the scorn with which she sniffed the perfume that with the almost cosmic disregard of plant life fell upon her. “I’ll jes’ open this winder a little ways so’s you won’t be kilt by that stink, Miss Dinah,” she said. And into the scented comfort there poured sound. The radio is the unfailing solace of the American family. None so poor that they cannot turn it on at breakfast and turn it off only when they go to bed. The air is free; but in order to hear the variety of noise for which his soul may be said to yearn there were jobs, even in hard times, to shout “on the air.” The latest breadline of New York wound in and out the doors of the big broadcasting concerns. I cried to Mattie: “Shut the window in a hurry! I’d rather smother.”

Mattie said: “Yes’m?” She left the room with eloquent shoulders.

Nicholas came with the cocktails. “I think she will be in soon,” he ventured. It was clear that he thought nothing of the sort.

“I’ve been thinking over things,” I threw myself into what I had but now decided to avoid. “There’s reason in abundance for Eva being worried, you know. I mean, I know she was very apprehensive about the crashing of banks; and now that it’s happened----”

Busy with the cocktails, he cast at me an incredulous look. “My job is to see that she’s not worried.”

“She sees it all around her,” I explained. “Her friends are worried sick. The town is on the run.”

“New York?” He was still more openly incredulous. “But that’s only temporary, of course.”

I was in the mood for considering his civic pride revolting. “So nothing can open your eyes?”

“You think, then, that she is really worried? What,” he demanded, still skeptical, “does she see, then, that would so upset her?”

“She might have run across what I found myself in the thick of, yesterday,” I threw in the teeth of his laughter. “She didn’t, it happens, see this particular thing; but it isn’t the only shocking sight in town--your prosperous town!” I glared at him; and I saw only the surface of his lightness. “It wouldn’t hurt you, to be thrown out to hunt a job for yourself!” I said hatefully.

His mirth stopped as suddenly as if he had turned off a spigot. “Did you never hear of keeping up one’s courage by making fun?” he asked gently. “No, Dinah: I’m--I’m scared to death. And I’m frightened over something so much more vital than money, so much more necessary than a job: happiness with one’s wife.”

We exchanged a long look, at the end of which I told him, commiseratingly trying to get his mind off his anxiety, that which I had intended using as a cudgel to bruise him. “I got the chance to see it,” I flung myself into it; “and now I’d give much if I hadn’t. We crowded into a slit of a place, and peeked through a large pane of glass let into the wall.”

He asked patiently in what wall the pane of glass was. “Don’t make it sound like Alice and the looking-glass, for I don’t feel whimsical.”

I acknowledged to a corresponding lack of whimsy. “It was the trying-out of applicants for the job of radio announcer. We looked through the pane of glass as they admitted them one by one, like those hogs that go sliding down a chute at a slaughter house. Only the hogs don’t realize. And I assure you, Nicholas, that those poor wretches took every conceivable test of their courage. I don’t doubt but that they were hungry. The people on the street corners, selling apples, have made us all hunger-conscious.” I attacked my cocktail with thirst engendered by the hunger-consciousness.

“You have the rapt look of the literary sleep-walker,” he stated. He had seen the look on various faces, and I judged by his accent that he did not like it. He glanced at his watch, and frowned.

“Listen, Nicholas?” I urged. “Do listen? Behind the pane of glass we were like fish in an aquarium. You know how fish goggle out at humanity filing past their tank? We goggled.” The candidates for the one vacant job were creatures outside the world of the fish in the tank. The fish saw them, through the pane of glass, and heard not a word from them. The voices booming at intervals through the loud speaker above the control board beside us might have come from another dimension. Young men, middle-aged men, blustering men and uncertain men, strode past the pane of glass to their salvation or their doom. It had been a motley lot, I reported to Nicholas. There had been a clergyman, an old man.

He interrupted: “Are you trying to drag me in spirit to the pane of glass?”

“It wouldn’t hurt you,” I retorted. I wondered what detained Eva. Looking at the heaps of apples spotting the streets with red, he might feel that all was well and that Christmas was hot on the heels of a town gone mad with apprehension. He was uneasy, but his uneasiness was on account of Eva’s delay in getting home for the security of the night.

Again he looked at his watch. “Dinah, I must interrupt to say----”

But I rushed along. “Would you believe the cruelty of it? They gave them, as the ‘humorous test,’ that ghastly thing about the man worth while is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong! Are you listening to what I’m telling you?”

He listened. But he listened for the sound of a key in the lock.

“Clutching the mike as if it might get away before they made good, they smiled because this would prove them to be men worth while. Their smiles were awful. They stretched their lips over their teeth and didn’t dare draw them back into place. The poor clergyman tried to believe that he was exhorting a congregation. His voice smiled, his face was benevolent, his eyes beamed kindly down from an imaginary pulpit. And because he fell into his old way of drugging his congregation, no one listened to his words. But when he came towards our pane of glass to say goodbye--they were punctilious about this ceremony--he walked bravely; and he smiled. Oh, damn! Listen, Nicholas: I’ve got to have another drink!”

Nicholas said: “You don’t think they are the only men in this town who go on smiling because they don’t dare stop? She told me, a few days ago, that she must get away. She told me that she couldn’t work at home. She told me that I hadn’t the right to forbid it, because she could always make the money to go with. She was sitting just there at her writing-table, but she had whirled around so that her back was to her typewriter; she didn’t seem to know why she was there. She said that she felt me disapprovingly in the house. I asked her if she realized that I might feel her disapprovingly in the house? She said that she wanted peace; and I asked her if she didn’t grasp it that she wasn’t giving me peace?”

I found that I had crouched back in my chair--crouching away from what I had loosed in him.

“It’s difficult to talk to Eva; she isn’t logical in her talk. I had all sorts of thoughts on what I’d say in order to clear things up--arrive at a good and fair understanding with her; but, as always, I no longer knew what I had wanted to say when I entered the room. I could think of nothing but plain words, and so I said it outrageously: ‘It has seemed to me, lately, that we’re going on the rocks.’ And she didn’t answer this, naturally. She had tears in her eyes, so she couldn’t have been trying to hurt me when she said she wondered why a woman might not claim the right to peace for doing her work. She wondered why it is that only a man may say he will have it--that only a man may fight for it, kill for it. And I urged her to sit down and try to talk like a sensible woman. And she said that if ever again she had to listen to that God-awful term ‘sensible woman’ applied to her she would---- Oh, she left it up in the air what she would do!” He rapped on her writing-table with strong fingers: it sounded like the roll of a snare drum. “So you see it isn’t only her fear about money. We did have this row.”

I saw that he had marked that in her bearing which had shaken him. It was shocking for Eve, of all people, to show uncertainty of her powers; but he had seen, as I gleaned, that it was uncertainty which was now shaking the foundations on which her life had been built up. Without her pride and joy in her talent, Eva would be a broken woman. He told me that she had all at once cried, as if she had read his mind: “You can’t take it in that something dreadful is happening inside me? You can’t comprehend that an artist’s imagination is a delicate, brittle, easily injured quality?” He had been thrown, by this, back to his cool detachment; although it was not in a spirit of cool detachment that he reënacted this scene for my benefit. He was immensely stirred by the recollection of it. In his intelligence he understood only too well that this was the pose of the creative worker in all arts save architecture, but with his heart he realized that under her doubts Eva’s beauty had faded. It began to seem to him that the conceit of artists is a defence against their own fainting spirit, which otherwise might cringe before the world’s neglect. But she had at once put it on him; she had explained that she felt as if she were beating her head against something more unyielding than the proverbial stone wall when she tried to argue with him. She said it was the fixity of his smile. “You don’t know how you stare at me!” she had said in what amounted to a shriek.

“This was where I was cruel to her, Dinah--and I know it now. I suppose I knew it then, and wanted to be cruel. You see, I don’t trust the influence of that fellow Mapes. You can never put your finger on Eva’s motives; they’re damned complex for a simple man to follow.”

“She is complex,” I put in. I wondered if he were going to regret having told me this. But he had to tell someone: even men feel the necessity to talk, I reflected derisively. “Her acts are necessarily hard to understand, although I don’t doubt that they are simple, and above board, if you could get at them.”

“Then what does she think--feel--about this Mapes fellow?” he asked urgently, but looking ashamed of himself.

I explained that she respected his judgment of her work.

He resumed: “This brings us to my self-charge of cruelty. I told her that while we were on the subject I wished to state that her friends took out the greater part of their sensibility in talk; and she instantly flew at me, although behind her eyes I saw the suspicion she fought down. She said her friends have a great power of belief, a tremendous generosity; and as to critical taste--well, then, if their judgments weren’t to be accepted, where were we for a criterion? I replied to what I saw behind her eyes; I said she’d better go in search of Mapes, then--that as his praise was so whole-hearted a session with him might make her feel better. As for me, I told her, I never got the feeling of sincerity in anything he said. She positively quailed. She might have been seeing a ghost. She begged me not to say such a thing. But I had stopped thinking solely of her. I insisted that he wasn’t an honest man, that he hadn’t an honest eye, and that anyone could tell by his voice that he was sly. She reminded me that he had nothing to gain. But she was at the moment arguing with her intelligence, I knew, trying to bolster her spirit which might turn to water. I was a cheap fellow to say to her ‘I have still to discover what he stands to gain’.”

He tilted back, his hands clasped behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. Now that she was not before him, to exasperate him by her swift changes of mood, to bewilder him by her illogical veering with the wind of her fancies and the shifting winds of her friends’ fancies, he fell into a state of belated compassion. At this moment she must have seemed to him, as always she did to me, a bewildered creature who was hag-ridden, who could neither take care of herself nor bend her neck to the care of another.

It was at this moment that the telephone rang. His face turned white. With all the ringing that this particular telephone did, interrupting talks between them with its insistent summons to the outside world, he still, at this moment, feared.

I heard the reedy voice over the wire: “Miss Litchfield in?”

“She’s out,” he responded gruffly.

“Is this Miss Litchfield’s husband?” came the squeal of Eva’s agent’s secretary.

His laughter making his response almost gay, he agreed to this.

“Can you take a message for Miss Litchfield?”

He said that he could be trusted with a message.

“Will you tell Miss Litchfield, please, that it’s all right about the Hollywood contract?”

“I’ll tell her as soon as she comes in.” With great care he replaced the instrument on its stand, and again leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. He said quietly: “You heard? That’s what she means to do.”

And again we exchanged a look in which we encompassed--and judged, and pardoned, respectively--all things about Eva. The silence became hard to bear. He got up and began a restless prowling around the room. When he spoke, finally, he seemed not aware of it; he was talking to Eva. “Go to Hollywood by all means. And bear in mind that you go with my consent.” He bit down savagely on his pipe stem, and no answering glow appeared in the bowl. He took it from his mouth, looked at it with interest, and remarked: “It isn’t filled!” He was painstaking in the refilling of the pipe. He said: “Both of us need a period of rest from each other.” He might almost be hearing her voice coming back at him, for he replied: “You said you wanted peace--repose. That was what you said, wasn’t it?”

I ventured something futile. And he looked at me and said “Huh?” But he gave a short laugh. “Dinah, you and I need a drink.” He went downstairs. When he came back with the replenished shaker, he said “We’re getting nowhere.” I knew that again he spoke to Eva.

The rasp of her key in the lock brought him around to face the door.

She stood arrested, looking in at Nicholas. She seemed to have been halted in some violent rush, so that even her heavy fur coat swept back like classic drapery. I knew that she was uncertain: her eyes showed a curious light flicker. And then, as she gazed at her husband, her face became compassionate. She was oblivious of my presence.

He said harshly: “What is this thing that you’re putting over without consulting me?”

She said: “I’m sorry, Nick. But it had to be this way. I must----” She stopped; and by her refusal to say it she left him to infer what he pleased of the thing she had been about to say. The lovely look passed like a mist, dissolved in her return to her absorption in herself. I slipped past her unnoticed, and hurried downstairs where my coat had been left. I closed the front door softly; I had no wish to be recalled.

[Illustration]

IV

It was early on the following day when she telephoned to insist on seeing me at once. I demurred, and she asked simply if I were going to fail her. Her emotional crises passed like thunder-storms; they were dangerous, but left in their wake a freshened sweetness. I hoped that it was so now: she seemed calm enough, and neatly refuted my arguments against dropping my work immediately.

I advanced tentatively: “You’ve given up the idea?”

She said curtly: “I’ve decided nothing. Will you, or won’t you, come down here?”

“Soon after luncheon,” I therefore promised. “After all, I’m endeavouring to get along myself, you must remember.”

“All right.” The click of the telephone being replaced on its stand was almost simultaneous with the click of her words.

But she had spoiled my day’s work, and I made the best of it by going to my agent’s office to clear up necessary sordid details of the ways and means of living. I believe that I was not really surprised to find Eva already with him: she had dominated my thoughts for many hours. I scrutinized her with some anxiety. She was quite herself, and with the firmest of mouths; and she displayed her customary business acumen in regard to the terms of the contract. I had sometimes suspected that Eva’s sense was of a more practical calibre than her husband’s; but I knew her too well to laugh over it. I watched her, this morning--as if her mind were on a switch-board, and she pressed a button for the creative to turn off and pressed another button for the practical to turn on--drive so hard a bargain that the agent was overcome with admiration. She had said to me at once: “Dinah darling, you don’t mind if I go on talking to Edgar? Then we can go straight downtown with my conscience clear.”

Edgar, cool in the thick of his day’s hubbub, was only too evidently busy reassuring an anxiety that I failed to discover in her mien. His manner was a nice blending of his private irrepressible amusement and his tactful insistence on the helplessness of his clients. In his experience, authors were fated to suffer every kind of disillusion and mortification whilst remaining sheathed in their inability to understand how it all came about. The eye rolling at me might have winked without change. Dapper, with the comfortable effect of bodily heat of the dark man on a winter day, Edgar bustled along with what, in spite of her flat statement of the morning, proved to be his final arrangements with Eva. “I’ll draw up a water-tight contract. It will be ready for you to sign tomorrow. I trust--” as if discussing a prima donna’s husband--“I trust that Mr. Van Suydam is agreeable to your going?”

“What I do,” she said brusquely, “is my own affair. Is that all we had to talk over, Edgar?”

Edgar agreed that it was. “Didn’t you want to see me about something?” he asked me.

Eva answered for me. “She certainly doesn’t! She’s coming with me.” We left Edgar smiling like an impresario.

“Suppose we go down on the bus, and ride on top?” she suggested. “I want to take a good look at the new buildings.” And when we thus rode between them, she said “I wonder?” She continued gazing pensively from side to side of the spectacular street. “Nick’s right when he says that I can never understand what I feel until after my next reaction.”

I watched her next reaction flame in her cheeks and die down. And I discovered that as I was watching her so she was watching me. She arrested the hand that I extended towards the button which would summon the bus to stop. “We’re going all the way to Washington Square.”

I said impatiently: “I can’t waste my time this way. A bus ride is outside my schedule.”

She begged: “Dinah, you won’t fail me? You must go with me to see Nick’s mother.”

Aghast, I refused sternly. “You do as you wish to do, and then you expect your friends to get in on the inevitable scene.”

She sighed. “In a lot of ways, I don’t want to go!” And she left me uncertain as to whether this applied to the call on Mrs. Van Suydam or the Hollywood project. I sank back on the hard bus seat. I too, sighed. “You manage it, one way or another,” was my capitulation.

We got out at the terminal in the Square and walked across, past the Arch, and towards the row of fine old houses on the northern side. She walked more slowly as she approached her mother-in-law’s door. She said, almost to herself: “It always smells of the things I really and truly like--lemon verbena, and lavender, and pot-pourri jars.” As we drew nearer she walked as if her body, from the weight of her admiration, grew heavier, as if it were not yet prepared for the house. She said: “I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say to her.” But she went doggedly up the steps and rang the bell; and she remembered, she told me, that never had she been given a latchkey. A trifling thing, today it worried her.

We were ushered into the drawing-room; and instantly the servant had left she seized my arm. “Wouldn’t you think she would ask me to come to her upstairs sitting-room? But she never has.” Never before today had it appeared to her a simple and direct act of adjusting values. She began to laugh, however, and whispered to me: “Have you looked at those stodgy Van Suydam faces along the walls? If I’d become the mother of one of them, I’d have had a latchkey!”

I sat stiffly, uncomfortable in mind because I had so weakly allowed myself to be persuaded. I said: “You realize, I trust, that this is the last thing I shall do for you?”

The curious light flicker had come into her eyes, and as quickly passed, like the shadow of a cloud upon water. The tranquillity of this old house pressed in on her as if it were trying to say “Shame on you!” I saw that she was angry with herself over her vacillation; and I knew that this would goad her into saying more than she had planned. More and more I wished that I had not come. She whispered: “If I liked this sort of thing, I could stay here and be a nice lady and forget that I ever was an artist. I think I don’t know what I want.” And as she felt her resolution falter, she invoked her spirit with simplicity of belief: “Pick your hour upon the stage, Eva Litchfield, and stick to it. And don’t be a fool, before this old woman, simply because you admire her as a distinct literary find. That’s all she is, really, Dinah,” she confided in a more natural tone. “I know--none better!--that she’s stupid.”

Mrs. Van Suydam entered with a withheld question which was not her conventional query about tea. “It’s so early that I wasn’t sure tea was what you wanted.” She turned upon me a frigid face, extended to me a stiff hand. “Ah Mrs. Avery! An unexpected pleasure.”

I said: “It is so to me, also.”

There was now no politeness lost between us; and I had the less reluctance to intrude upon whatever conversation they purposed having. I took a chair removed from theirs, and resigned myself to a laceration of the sensibilities that I hoped to conceal under glacial composure.

The Van Suydams had the gift of their imposing silence. It seemed a long time before she remarked that it was a pleasant day. She dropped this into the well of silence as if Eva had been a chance acquaintance. It would not have mattered whether Eva found the day pleasant or the reverse, as it would not have altered conditions in the drawing-room if all storms had raged outside.

By contrast to the glazed surface of Mrs. Van Suydam’s fine indifference, Eva’s brusqueness amounted to bravado. “I’m going to Hollywood.”

Mrs. Van Suydam murmured: “Indeed?”

Eva must push against the erection of her mother-in-law’s impersonality; she was not to be helped: this much was certain. She said bluntly that she had arrived at a stalemate in her work.

“I don’t think I understand,” advanced the elder woman. “Naturally, I know little about it.”

Eva’s resentment flared. “You’ve never let me tell you about it.”

“I took it for granted,” rejoined Mrs. Van Suydam, “that you fancied I couldn’t understand.” She paused, and added, her face buttoned up: “I understand much.”

Thus brought to a pause, floundering helplessly in the hugger-mugger brought about by her mother-in-law’s will, Eva sat mute. Until this bulwark of Nicholas’ rights presented a weak joint, there was nothing she could do or say. And weakness of any kind, even, at the moment, the weakness of advancing age, was hard to credit to the list of Mrs. Van Suydam’s possibilities. She sat upright--she never lolled--gazing blandly at her son’s wife; and if there was anything to talk over, any loose ends left between them, it seemed a remote contingency from the standpoint of Mrs. Van Suydam’s own understanding of the situation. Eva, it was clear, felt a singular reluctance to speak. The elder woman had--although one began to wonder if even this ignorance could be accurately attributed to her--a technical ignorance of the craft of writing; but in her choice of words when engaged in an encounter she found no difficulty in making her shades of meaning plain. She put, now, only the faintest accent on her “And what does my son say to this scheme of yours?” By an inflexion she had repudiated, for all those born of the Van Suydam blood, any knowledge whatsoever of Hollywood.

Eva’s restless glance passed from object to object in the room. The stony eyes of the elderly lady remained fixed on her. What, she must have asked herself with natural irritation, would be accomplished by meeting an eye of stone? She said: “He doesn’t say.” She looked as if she might scream: I knew that she would scream, if Mrs. Van Suydam emitted her equivocal “Humph! Indeed!” To obviate this, I imagined, she rushed along with “I wished to--I thought it wise to talk it over with you.” She must have seen that Mrs. Van Suydam was making it impossible to talk over anything; but she must also, and immediately, have realized that she had come here because above all things she wished to break through the crust of this old lady’s resistance, to win from her one word of understanding, one softened glance of sympathy. Her desire was futile; and I saw that, in order to avert tears of weakness, of dashed hopes that only this minute she had possibly clearly acknowledged to herself, she began talking frantically. “You are a woman! You are a woman, too! And you’ve been married! You must have married a man like Nick! You could understand, if you would!”

“And what, pray, am I to understand? I trust that it isn’t a question of a divorce?” But in her eyes, which for a second blazed straight at her daughter-in-law, there was every question between man and woman and her revulsion to the majority of them; and by her swift advancing of her assurance that no such thing could be in the wind she proved its presence in her mind.

Eva’s repudiation of this contingency, while springing from selfishness which was on the other side of the fence from that of Mrs. Van Suydam, was of a like strength of purpose. “I assure you that there has never been a question of such a thing coming about. This is a matter of business solely.”

“Business? Well, that,” asserted Mrs. Van Suydam untruthfully, “is beyond my province. I don’t--really--grasp what you mean to infer, by mentioning business in connection with my son’s wife going to a place like Hollywood.”

“It is purely a question of money,” Eva explained earnestly. She leaned forward, eagerly searching the face of the elder woman.

“Yes?” Mrs. Van Suydam injected into the monosyllable her inbred distaste for social mention of finances. She turned to me. “Mrs. Avery, I cannot express my regret that you should have been brought--against your will, I am sure!--into a discussion of this sort.”

“If you will let me explain----” the young woman began.

Mrs. Van Suydam made a careless gesture of repudiation. “Not called for.”

Once more leaning forward eagerly, Eva said on a rush of desire to be friends: “You mean that you do understand--you do really understand?”

“My dear Eva,” Mrs. Van Suydam suddenly attacked her, “why do you always explain? Is it because you suspect that you are--usually--wrong?”

Eva was fast becoming diverted from her object in coming here. She stirred restlessly. It must have popped into her head that she might better take her leave without more fumbling. But she made a valiant attempt to have her say. “It means, simply, that I must--I intend--to tell you why I’ve made up my mind to go to Hollywood to make some money.” And her tone, and the sparkle of her eye, said “So there!” She knew that she was being held off; she must have felt sure that the older woman would not listen to what she had to say; and she came back with a counter-attack: “Why is it that you refuse to listen to me?” It seemed to have occurred to her that if she stared hard enough she could compel not only the old lady but herself to go through with it.

If Mrs. Van Suydam felt the force of Eva’s will, she gave no evidence of it. She said: “I can give you no advice about schemes for making quick money, as I believe it is called.” The faint lines of her distaste engraved themselves around her mouth. “I can give you no advice because I can conceive of no situation in which a wife should not defer to the advice of her husband; and this I imagine you haven’t done.” She smiled shrewdly. “Besides, it’s quite evident to me that you’ve already made up your mind.”

Eva brooded drearily over the fire which crackled so genially and with such a warmth of home. Something within her intelligence must have said: “There’s nothing here for you.” And something else, deeper than her intelligence, saddened her, while instinct warned her: “Get out of this, now you know that this old woman has the power to shake you. Preserve your future, at any cost.” This, I was sure, she considered her integrity of purpose. She sprang to her feet and stood firmly; and in her kindling eye I saw her thankfulness that her feet were able to uphold her so steadily. She began her charge against this old woman. “I see no difference,” she said with scorn, “between you and my friends. You hold me off, and it’s for the identical reason that they hold me off.”

Mrs. Van Suydam, who had at once revealed that she was not unprepared for this change of mood, now raised her eyebrows in delicate detached amusement. “I had never dreamed,” she murmured, “that the day would come when I should be compared to ‘artists’.”

Eva was, however, in the full fling of her resentment. “You belittle me in order to aggrandize Nick’s puny little talent! That’s what it comes down to! You know it’s true: I can see in your eyes,” she wound up on a high note of triumph that rang through the room, “that you know it’s true!”

They had now reached a point over which I had vainly speculated. Did his family appreciate Nicholas’ career as an architect? I sat more alertly in my distant chair.

For a moment Mrs. Van Suydam was speechless. Her difficulty in accepting this from Eva was plainly to be read on her face; but whatever inner unsurmountable difficulty scarred her soul I could only guess at: it might have been that of taking from Eva her own estimate of her son. She sat with her lips implacably sealed and her lids drooping over eyes that might be tell-tale, and had it not been for the spots of red on her cheekbones Eva would not have been sure that she had drawn blood; for during a period which became unbearable she said nothing. She looked straight ahead. She might have been alone in the room. When Eva, rushing to throw herself at her knees, cried: “Forgive me? Forgive me?” she still did not look at her. She might not have seen her, for all her nearness, and for all of the fact that the young woman was weeping.

Eva laid her hand over her heart. She had got slowly to her feet and stood hesitating near the old lady. “I’m truly sorry I said it,” she began again to apologize. “I wish I could make you see? I don’t think that I intend doing these things. I’m impelled by some force within me. My life seems driven on by some force within me----” Because she saw that Mrs. Van Suydam’s ears were closed against her, she ceased. I realized that she wondered what to do next. But upon Mrs. Van Suydam’s lips was now a smile of polite boredom; so she might have smiled at simple-minded strangers who had forced their uninvited way to her fireside and who had not there felt at home. Eva must have acknowledged this look while she wondered at it: for how could she have bored? She began drawing away, irresolute and looking down at the small figure in the straight-backed chair.

At last Mrs. Van Suydam spoke. Her tone was charged with excessive courtesy. “My dear Eva, I must ask you to leave me now. I am not so young as I once was, and tire easily. I must lie down before I go for my drive.” She held out her hand with a definite dismissal. And instantly I knew that when the door of the Van Suydam mansion should today close behind Eva it would close on all hope of a mutual comprehension.

Eva must have so decided herself. “That’s that,” she concluded, during the space of time that it took us to walk around the corner and along Fifth Avenue and around another corner to the little house. “I’ve done all I can. She’s impossible.” She enumerated the many lines along which Mrs. Van Suydam was impossible.

As we came in sight of the little house in Eleventh Street, she made her final effort to throw off the effects of her encounter with her mother-in-law. “I’ll go to Hollywood, for all that,” she told me, impressing upon her own spirit her invincible determination. She recalled to me a recent experience: she had told Nicholas that she had felt the rush of wings through the little house. She had said: “If I don’t listen to those wings, what’s to become of me?” Nicholas, she said, had merely raised one eyebrow.

She halted on the pavement and looked at the façade of her house. Her gaze lingered. “I shall go to Hollywood,” she bolstered her courage.