PART FIVE

[Illustration]

I

Several days ago, I was taken by surprise at receiving a visit from Nicholas Van Suydam. It has been almost a year since Eva Litchfield’s death; and during this time we had known scarcely more of his movements than that he was abroad. That he had recently come back I also knew, because by chance I had witnessed his return.

I had gone down to the docks to meet a friend who was arriving from Europe. It was a dingy day, and the smell of the ocean suggested but too forcibly man’s enslavement to machinery; for on its breath which could not rise through the fog it bore the horrid taint of oil. There was tumultuous noise--of winches, of the heterogeneous bulky things that are dropped into the holds of ships, of cart horses stamping their large hoofs and trucks unnecessarily back-firing. But on the cobbled expanse whose sweep connects the piers with the asphalt of the streets the maroon brougham waited, and enthroned upon the box was one of the two composed persons in New York. The irreproachable Higginson flicked from the ear of the off bay one of the few remaining horse-flies in town, but this necessary flourish of his whip did not cause a ripple of the puce livery. The bays were older; it was with more difficulty that he got an occasional curvet from them; but the brougham had been repainted and on Higginson’s top hat was a new cockade. For the little house in West Eleventh Street was empty; a renting agent’s sign creaked dismally above its white stoop.

I was early, and the waiting-room as disheartening a sight as ever, so that I hastened out on the stripped length of the pier. Walking slowly ahead of me was Mrs. Van Suydam. To all appearance, she wore the same garments which had decently restricted her form three years ago; the same bonnet-like hat protected the head it scorned to adorn, and drawn tightly across her nose was a wisp of veil which might have been cut from the same piece. But she, like her horses, was older; she went directly to the barrier and clutched it with trembling hands. There was no way of avoiding her eye, which finally rested upon me. She inclined her head slightly. The ship was not yet in sight; we would have some time together. I went up to her. After the most perfunctory hand shake, she said, her words dropping like plummets: “I am meeting my son.” I realized that she said this because, at sight of me, she had asked herself: “Why shouldn’t I feel free to mention my son?”

With equally savage intent, I threw at the silence which otherwise might envelop us the statement that I had heard he had been abroad since his wife’s death. She nodded soberly. She told me that she had refused to accompany him on his now accomplished pilgrimage. She had wished him, alone and free from feminine espionage, to plunge into the mild dissipations suitable to a young gentleman of modest means. That he had done nothing of the sort, but had immediately plunged into an orgy more to his liking--had, in fact, submerged himself in the joy occasioned by his renewed fond acquaintance with the architectural masterpieces of Europe--she had gathered from his letters. “Not that his letters are frivolous, Mrs. Avery,” she explained punctiliously; they had had to do with the surface of his life, she went into it. I gathered, then, from what she merely hinted at, that behind his letters was of course what he had not told her; and that the untold had intimately to do with Eva’s last days neither his mother nor I for a moment doubted.

“Mrs. Avery, you were unhappily present at the only two portentous interviews that ever took place between my daughter-in-law and myself. The stand I took I am satisfied was for my son’s best interests.” Sharply she inspected my face. Something that she denied by her manner had shaken her. She did not know how much of what she had said to Eva had been repeated to her son. She had no way of knowing what her son would think--what he did in fact think of things he might only guess. It was with apprehension, therefore, that she had come to meet him today. Herself incapable of suffering deeply except through her son, she feared what she might be about to experience through a possible devastation of his spirit.

She said to me that life had resolved itself into a pattern and she could almost see where the pattern ran out. She had used to regret that she was so much older than her son, while now she had reached the point where it seemed a fortunate thing, for of the two of them she at least saw that few things happening in life were irremediable. Things came about, and they all fitted into the design, and the repeat of the pattern was the next generation, so that there might be said to be a pattern for each family. And what she did not put into words I read in her bleak eyes. One brought a son into a world that one was powerless to order for his security; one stood aside while life buffeted him; and the most that one got out of it was the realization that life is a ball tossed from hand to hand, and that hands sometimes slip but the ball is not always lost. Her lashes were pushed up by her veil in a look of astonishment.

I asked if I might not find her a seat. She refused with determination; and I realized that she feared she might not be able to go on with the day if for a moment she slid into dependency. She stood rigidly upright, holding to the barrier with her gloved hands. Only with the backing of her spirit could she get through something lying dead ahead.

We stood side by side, divided by our memories. The sparks struck from the pavement by the hoofs of her bays, on her coming drive home with her son restored to her single-minded purpose, would be the sparks of the triumph that had lain in wait in her decorous breast so tightly buttoned into its absurd costume. This single-minded purpose might have directly derived from her old house, from its portraits, its family silver, its furniture that had never been neglected. I fancied that I heard the flap of the page which she, with determination, turned. Nicholas, the harvest of his soul’s wild oats garnered, would return; and, preparing for his return, his mother pieced together in her mind the things that had taken place: things she had seen, things she had been told and things she had through her motherhood divined--the mistakes of others and her own aloof waiting. But even now, before his landing, a faint uneasiness had evidently dropped down into her complacent knowledge that once more she was to have him safely under her wing. The tautness of her spare body showed at once that she suspected, and denied the suspicion, that they could never return to their old-time serenity. The most they could hope for was to shut, with the door of their house, the door through which they had ventured forth to play their part in the present life of New York. And New York as we knew it, by invading her home, must have begun to seem dreadful to her. I wondered if, with even her conviction of right, she could bear to look at her son on the drive downtown: for they would eventually reach the intersection of Eleventh Street and Fifth Avenue. Would she know, without glancing at him, that he had turned his head, with the fixity of a purpose to last him through life, that he might look east? I might have been invisibly in the brougham with them: for distinctly I saw the policeman hold up his gloved hand. Almost rising, triumphantly, on the box-seat, Higginson would give the impression that it required strength to hold in his horses. And, refusing to recognize the traffic lights, Mrs. Van Suydam would lift the speaking-trumpet to her controlled lips and direct: “Drive on!”

She must have been very sure of the nature of my preoccupation; she said: “It’s dreadful--and good--to be so old that one knows when things are impossible.” The sun had broken through the fog, but she looked as if she felt that the shadows of the pier were shadows waiting to engulf her and her son. She stood shivering. And yet, with Higginson, she obeyed her own command: “Drive on!” She turned her head, with that creaking turn of the aged, and looked me full in the eye. “Mrs. Avery, you know so much about the intimate personal affairs of my son and his late wife--” and her old distaste was on her face, and in her sharpened voice--“that I must ask you: have you the slightest idea what took place between them at the last?”

I replied, truthfully and with some wonder, that I did not. I explained that I had been out of town when Eva returned from Hollywood, and that before she set out for New York she had written me but one letter. I said nothing of the contents of the letter. Looking squarely at her in my determination that she should give me an answer, I asked: “Mrs. Van Suydam, how did Eva really die?”

She had turned more fully towards me, and as I spoke I saw her hand thrust behind to again grasp the rail of the barrier. A tremor started at her head and ran down through her body. She said simply that Eva had died of pneumonia, brought on, she believed, by exposure on the train from California to the East. But we had arrived at a state of tension wherein I almost heard her call out to her God: “I’ve never known all!” From the fact that again her dreadful, steady trembling took possession of her I felt sure that part of what had happened had taken place before her eyes, and that she had been daunted by it. In those quiet hours of the night when old people sleep lightly, she would forever after awaken to the same horror that had fallen upon her then. She glared at me, but it was an appeal. She gave the impression of wildly desiring to clutch some human being and hold on, and of a complete aversion to physically touching me because I had received her intimate revelations. But she said, directly to whatever I might oppose: “It was undoubtedly pneumonia. It could have been nothing else. The doctor diagnosed it as pneumonia. The way she breathed----”

“I meant,” I said softly, “her other death.”

She looked away. I saw that she took a long breath. When she again turned her eyes were under control. She said at once, then: “I beg you to believe me when I say that I know no more than you. What I may surmise, and what you may suspect, are probably different. But I shouldn’t be doing my duty to my son if I let you go away without plain speaking on my part. My son has told me nothing. So far as I know, he never had an approach to a quarrel with Eva.”

“Her friends,” I said slowly, “have wondered. You can’t be surprised at that.”

Her dry cheeks flushed an angry red. With her deep resentment of a mother, she almost hurled her words in my face: “How despicably cruel!” Through her frail body there now surged such energy in defense of her son that she might have been rushing at me with upraised fist. “How calculatingly cruel you can be, Mrs. Avery!” She closed her eyes: it might have been to recover her self-control, and it might have been that she refused to longer see me. “You force me to tell you something that I had never thought to let pass my lips.” And her eternal hatred of me because I forced her to tell it stared through her blazing eyes.

She had gone to the little house in Eleventh Street, running through the night because death had arrived before her. She had understood, from the message, that her son had hesitated to throw upon his mother’s age the burden of those details immediately following death, and that she had only been notified when she could enter on a scene of that dignity arranged by man to cover the careless arrangement of nature. Transfixed in the door of Eva’s room, she witnessed the scene on which she had sealed her lips and to which she had vainly tried to shut the eyes of her memory. And again, saying this, she darted at me her look of a terrible resentment. Not daring to withdraw lest her son realize that by the accident of her haste he had been overheard in his last appeal to his wife, Mrs. Van Suydam had then experienced the complete agony. For, before her shrinking eyes, her son came across the floor and took the dead girl in his desperate arms.

Mrs. Van Suydam said to me: “I am telling you this to show you that my son loved his wife. You can never after this suspect him of an indifference that might have caused her to wish to die.”

Her soul had called for help to bear it. She listened, because she could not move, as Nicholas accused some Great Juggler of having shuffled the cards. He had said: “Eva, you’ve always been so cold. I’ve never believed that you’d yielded yourself to me body and soul. Won’t you soften just once, and leave me that to remember?”

I had hurt her, deliberately, through the one profound instinct of a woman’s life, her child. An appalling disintegration began, running through her, turning her blood to water, I thought as I watched the resentment drain from her cheeks. She seemed to be shaking to pieces. She said under her breath--and I knew she did not speak to me: “Why is everything good dying before my eyes?” She held tightly to the rail while she gathered her forces.

I faltered: “I’m very sorry I asked.”

She lifted her eyes. Her lashes pulled against the mesh of her veil and again lent her her look of astonishment. She said distantly: “My son loved Eva, and his life is probably spoiled. He has ideas in his head which only time can eradicate. I am convinced that he never said a cross word to her. But, as you know, I myself had several conversations with my daughter-in-law which in the light of her death I regret. You will be doing me a favour if you tell your friends that I--and not my son--undoubtedly upset her. And, Mrs. Avery, you will kindly refrain from repeating to my son, if you should see him, what his wife said in your presence about his work.” With superb dismissal of me from her life, she put up her _lorgnette_ and inspected me. Her eyes swept over me, remotely speculative. With the slightest of nods, she turned away.

The ship had docked. She clung to the barrier with both hands. Her white kid gloves, pinching her hands, must have supplied the physical pain she now welcomed. For she lifted to the deck, where she would see her son, a face from which she had erased all that would distress him.

[Illustration]

II

Nicholas Van Suydam stood at my door, unannounced. He had not telephoned to ask if he might come, and this he at once explained by the flat statement that he had realized I would not wish to see him. With between us the memory of our last meeting, we stood mutually embarrassed. I wondered how he was going to set about saying what he must have determined to say when he took the step of coming to see me.

He set about it with commendable speed. “My mother appears to think that you consider me guilty of something dastardly. I’m not sure that, in her heart, she doesn’t agree with you.”

I watched him narrowly, perplexed as to how much she had repeated of our talk on the docks: had she, for instance, told him that she had witnessed the scene which had so shaken her at the time and which had shaken me when she repeated it to me? Cautiously I suggested that these things were no business of mine.

He looked me in the eye. “Eva told me she had written you that she had made up her mind to leave me.”

I sighed: “It was unnecessary to inform you that I knew--as things turned out.”

He said harshly: “I came here to tell you that she was about to leave me.” It was now his turn to sigh deeply; but his indrawn breath was expelled as if it were his curse on his fate. “The suddenness of it,” he resumed, “would have shocked any man, even one who understood Eva.”

I asked if he had ever felt that he understood Eva.

“I understood her.” Without glancing at him, I knew that he watched me. “She killed something in me. It’s resurrected every now and then; but it’s a ghost. Oh--I understood her!”

I stood in the window looking out at scudding clouds, which raced by in thin streamers of grey. Eva might have been drifting past, looking in on us, listening for what we might say. My eyes at once blinded by tears, I stammered: “Don’t! Don’t! I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Why did you come here?” And I said to myself “I feel that there’s a dreadful mistake, somewhere.”

For he was insisting: “You knew, didn’t you, that Spencer Mapes followed her to Hollywood? You knew it all along, didn’t you?” He gave a short laugh. “It’s so plain. And I shouldn’t have been surprised.”

I came back from the window. “I knew that he was out there, and that it hadn’t necessarily to do with Eva. Why shouldn’t he go out there? What are you driving at?”

But if in fact he was driving at anything beyond his hurt bewilderment he did not at once acknowledge it. I thought that actually he had come to tell me about their rupture, and that face to face with me he slid against his will into his old-time habit of thinking aloud on Eva’s tremendous spell upon him. There was nothing to do but let him talk. Whatever question might be in his mind about Spencer Mapes must wait. “Perhaps I’d better take it up with the statement that until the night of her return I didn’t know that she was thinking of leaving me. She had said nothing of the sort in her letters. I was so bucked at her getting back. I had been lonelier than I had realized. She didn’t look well; said she’d caught cold on the train, and the change from the warm climate of the Coast was already making it worse. It was horrible weather--one of those persistent rains when April is cold. The trees were in bud, but they were lashing, I remember, beating against the windowpanes. Strange--how one remembers things like that. I don’t believe I can ever again bear to hear branches scraping against windowpanes. Her cheeks were bright red; and yet she looked exhausted. I suggested telephoning for a doctor, but she said ‘Don’t be absurd. I want to talk to you.’ She came and patted my cheek. You know how she used to say--in the most impersonal way--‘Darling old Nick’?” His pause was lengthy. When he did go on with it, I had the feeling of listening to thoughts instead of to words. “I never, in the course of our married life, had the conviction of having touched her in the flesh. It used to make me shy with her. And that last night she had a more than ever silvery laugh. I felt as if all my life I must stand a way off from her, looking at her with my arms hanging. It was the swift precision of her reply to what I asked her: ‘Of course I love you.’” He sat tapping a cigarette on the back of his hand. His eyes were fixed on the cigarette, as if it were an important thing. When he again looked at me, he said: “I find this very difficult.”

Panic seized me. “Don’t tell me--please don’t tell me----” I doubted that I could bear it. The wind was moaning, going around and around my tower room. I felt as if Eva were more intently looking in, as if she were reproaching me with “How can you listen to things against me?” I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a shriek. But his voice droned on, and beat my nerves into a dulled peace.

“I was so glad the surface of her writing-table had been polished for her home-coming; because she leaned against it: her hands rested on it. She was leaning back against the desk, but her shoulders were thrust forward; she gave me the impression of being prepared for me to charge at her and therefore in need of solidarity behind her. That room of hers had a glow, hadn’t it? The glow shone on her, and her hair----” He paused. “She was an unapproachable saint. But a man can’t derive solace from the evidence of his eyes.” His pause, this time, was longer. “By the way, I noticed that her eyes were extraordinarily brilliant. She never removed them from my face; they were so still that they were like the eyes of a vision.” He had wondered, he said, if she wished for ardour, or if she fearfully anticipated it. She had seemed suspended between two menaces.

“She wanted help!” I cried to him. “Can’t you see that she wanted help?”

I saw, now, that there were new lines on his face. His mouth was more like his mother’s. He would be a grim man, soon. He asked me if I had ever noticed how easily she waved aside the point of view of another? Not a motion of her hands, and yet she would have definitely waved away what she did not wish to consider. She had said: “I’ve always been honest with you.” There was something ominous in this: he had not, at the moment, wanted her to be honest. An idea that had always been at the back of his head sprang to the front of his consciousness: she had never wanted to be a wife, had, when one came down to it, resented being a wife. When she shook her head, over his questions, he felt her shaking off all consideration of her life with him.

I asked why he insisted on telling me this, and he said simply: “She told you.”

“Not after she had seen you. She might never have told me these details of the break with you.”

But he said: “Oh, yes, she would.” He was increasingly agitated, and through his emotion became reluctant to go fully into what nevertheless he doggedly told me. I reflected that if I refused to hear him out he would tell his mother. He had arrived at the stage where he was impelled to tell some mute and horrified woman. He became self-hypnotized, almost acting the ensuing scene between himself and his wife.

It had been a strange and cruel feature of it that her tea roses were more humanly pitying than she; for they had given out to him a breath of home. “And don’t you think, Dinah, that sometimes a merciful lie is the act of a compassionate God?” He did not say what he had wished her to lie about. Each minute had been as long as a man’s life. There had been a drag in time itself that dulled the nerves. For she was so clear and direct, when she made her wishes plain, that she might not have realized it was her husband to whom she made such a proposal. He had asked what she wished him to do, and she had said “Nothing. What on earth should I wish you to do?” However, it had seemed not to impress him, that she thus sacrificed his future freedom while claiming her own: there was something more dreadful on his mind. Telling me of it--and not telling me the black thing in his mind--he paced the length of my room, his head bent and his gaze on the floor. He could not, for a while, rouse himself from a creeping paralysis of the senses. He must have so paced when he cautioned himself to have patience with her. He had said to her--speaking with great self-control, he assured me: “I acknowledge I don’t see what you mean. You’re usually inconsistent; but this time you’ve gone beyond the reasoning faculties of a mere man.” He said that he listened to his own voice, and that it had not revealed his rising fury. And then he was aware that his voice had flattened, and that he was assuring her that she should have her divorce. “Only make it as quiet as possible, on account of my mother.”

She had stared at him, he reported; he had noticed that her eyes had blared wide open. “Can’t you understand,” she had demanded impatiently, “that I don’t want a divorce? That I don’t need a divorce? Why should I want a divorce, when God knows I’ve had enough of marriage?” She had immediately changed to softness, and had added: “I think we could be friends. We’d be so much better friends if we were separated.”

He said he had then roared at her: “God, Eva!” And she had advanced, tentatively, as if not sure whether she wished it: “We could have Christmas together; and we might write to each other.” As he told me this, his voice followed his wrath to a higher pitch. “I said to her: ‘It’s Mapes, I daresay.’ I had just heard, incidentally, that he was out there. And she laughed--laughed heartily, as if I were trying to be amusing. It got me. I’ll admit that at once I knew how I had always feared Mapes. I think I struck my fist on her writing-table, and shouted ‘Christ!’ My voice was so loud that it made me jump. When I cleared my throat--because suddenly it had closed up--the rasp of it seemed, in my ears, to beat against the mountain of her meaning, and fall, and come back at me to hurt my head. ‘There’s nothing left,’ I said to her. I spoke in a new queer soft voice: maybe she didn’t hear. And then--I remember, now--I kept on saying: ‘Now then, let’s get this straight. I’m rather at sea. Let’s be sensible.’” He stared at me with almost ludicrous surprise. “For was it sensible, for her to keep on with ‘Do be nice about it, Nick?’”

“I’m trying to make out why you couldn’t understand,” I said.

“What did she want?” he shouted. “What under heaven did she want?” To this he eventually added: “She didn’t want me. I couldn’t fool myself that she wanted me; in fact, she said plainly that what she wanted with me was a safe harbour, to which she could set sail when in distress. That’s not the right thing for a woman to say to her husband. It came down to this, that she meant to stay away from me except when she should need me to pull her out of trouble. She didn’t need me around every day.”

I said: “She didn’t need a man around every day.”

He dwelt on this in bewilderment. “She made it plain that she didn’t need me around at all! How did I fail to make myself indispensable to her?” And, in contradiction to his previous assertion, the quaver of his voice proved that he still loved her.

I was kind when I replied to this; but I had decided that we had for a long enough time beaten around the bush. “The truth about Eva was that she couldn’t, constitutionally, combine work and marriage. And she cared more for work.”

We were at cross purposes: he almost screamed: “But Spencer Mapes!”

“So this,” I said slowly, “is what you’ve been believing all this time?”

At this he halted, in his restless prowling of the room, and stood in front of me. In his blazing eyes I read all that he had believed during the brief interlude of his marriage. “What, then, did she write you?”

“Just what I’ve said: that at last she saw clearly--that at last she had made up her mind to walk alone.” I added, letting him have it: “That lets both you and Spencer Mapes out.”

He dropped into a chair. He looked beaten. He stared straight before him, and his hands hung flatly, bonelessly, over the arms of the chair. I noticed that he was older than I had thought.

I wailed: “Oh, Nicholas, surely you remember that she was a singularly cool and aloof woman? Surely, with that in mind, you should have understood?”

He was not listening, except to whatever might be echoing in his memory. He had wished to be reassured; and he was now sure; and over his spirit, like a smothering pall, had dropped the dreadful sense of futility. And he said, finally, the most irrelevant thing. “I’m glad your windows are above the trees. Trees are sometimes curious about what’s going on in a room, and malevolent.”

The treacherous female instinct for taking care of the male when he is in trouble overcame me, and I hurried to the kitchenette to mix him a drink. But, to a greater extent than he seemed, he must have been aware of his surroundings, for he said at once: “No whiskey! After I’ve told you what now I must tell you, you will see that--that just this minute I can’t stand the thought of whiskey.” Of what it had it in its power to remind him, beyond what he had already told, I could not imagine; and because I did not wish to hear it, and because my pity for him had been short-lived, I said, outrageously, that he could then have gin. This was wasted on him, I am glad to say; without further preamble he swept into it.

Eva’s study had suffocated him, that night, and he had gone across to the window and opened it to the fresh air. And the rain had driven in on him, while the branches of the trees in the back garden had whipped at him. He told me that he was thinking how no man would ever possess her. Eva was a being of another plane, and he was looking in at nightmare. He heard her say that she was cold, and replied: “What’s needed in here is something natural. Air is the only natural thing left to you and me.” He stood in the open window for a long time, and it did him good, easing the tension of his nervous rage.

She muttered something about being chilled because it had been so very warm in Los Angeles. And, his brain again inflamed by this mention of the geographical location of Hollywood, he came back to the spiritual significance of it and slipped the control for which he had fought. “I’ve always known that Mapes would break us up.” These bitter words he said so quietly that she settled down in her armchair with a sigh of relief. She leaned back and closed her eyes. During the interval of his trip downstairs for drinks, he brooded over that peaceful closing of her eyes: so she trusted him! She wished to have him--the trustworthy man--always in her background.

He had so far gone back in his mind that his voice, as he recounted the following incidents of the night, was brutal.

He went upstairs with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He almost took me step by step up the stairway, he so carefully told his tale.

She said: “It’s very late, Nick. Don’t you think we might finish this at another time?”

He said: “We’ll finish it tonight.” He handed her a drink. She had fallen back in the chair. Even when he stood over her with the glass she did not look up from what seemed a pose of drooped eyelids. He had thought her shamming--that is, he acknowledged, if he actually thought about it. “Take a drink,” he said stridently. “We’ll drink over this thing. I used to discourage your drinking. This shows! Take a drink!”

Her teeth, he remembered now, chattered as she said she did not want the drink.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, with pleasure in his brutality. “Are you afraid of me?”

She said: “It’s just that I’m so cold.”

“Take the drink; drinks warm one.” He had forgotten the open window. He looked at her curiously. What was it she feared he would do to her? She stared at him, fascinated as a bird in front of a snake. He lifted his glass and glared at her over its rim. “Here’s to the cleaning of the stables!”

She cried eagerly: “Oh, Nick--you do understand? That’s the way I feel about it.”

He told me that, for the second time in the course of the night, he roared: “God--Eva!”

She sighed: “You’re hard. You’re like a rock, and I dash my life out at your feet.”

He growled: “Don’t be literary. I’m fed up with that tripe.” He sat slumped in his chair. “I hope to God,” he said impressively, “that I’ll never again run afoul of a literary person!”

He lifted heavy eyes to me. “You see? I was hard as a rock, as she said. But I beg you to bear in mind that I believed Mapes to be responsible. I said to her: ‘You need a heavy-fisted beast. You’d eat the artist who got you--eat him raw. You need to be knocked down. I wonder if Mapes knows how to knock anyone down?’ Oh--I sneered! She was breathing in an odd way--shallow, you know. But I was tremendously wrought up; I didn’t think, at the time, that this might not be fear of my anger. And she shrugged, and said ‘What’s the use?’ I kept pounding on her. I said: ‘I suspect you’ll say next that with your genius--the claims of your genius, the right of your genius to devour every other right in the world----’ And she said--she was all but supplicating, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live: that she supplicated me and I turned a deaf ear----”

There is a ghastly feature of tragedy: at one point or another the listener laughs out loud--laughs with frenzy, with tears streaming down the face, choking, gasping, beyond control in this confusion of the physical with the emotional. I laughed because Eva would have been disgusted with him for his phraseology.

He turned very pale. “What can you see to laugh at?”

I said: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I went on hurriedly: “You would never understand why I laughed.”

He muttered: “You must have caught that from Eva.” But he went on. I got the impression of a long and dreadful struggle on Eva’s part to find relief--relief which, at first mental, finally turned physical. She would attempt to speak, and he would talk her down. He would say, his hand upraised against an interruption: “I know you’re good at words. But they won’t help you now; you’ve got beyond words.” His hard eyes rested accusingly on her. But what they saw was not Eva but life in its futility, and what he felt was that life had no meaning, or, if it had, it had long since escaped man’s understanding. He felt all at once tired and old. Profound gloom enveloped him, touching his soul with its chilly fingers. He began walking heavily up and down Eva’s study; he did not know what to say next. He seemed, to himself, to have put into words all of the festering thoughts that he now realized had lurked within his mind for some time. And still he did not actually see Eva, there before him: she was a symbol of the irony of life. But he must have hovered over her as she shrank back in her armchair, for she screamed. He said: “Oh, I’m not going to strike you. The time for that has passed.”

He went downstairs. The rooms which were so pretty in the day, and so softly alluring by lamplight, were inexpressibly sad in the cold and struggling dawn which down the side streets fought for the right to birth. The various pieces of furniture were as if shrouded in mourning habiliments. The curtains at the tall windows, hanging in straight folds to the floor, waved fitfully; and he was at first too startled to realize that this was caused by the gusts of damp air coming down the stair-well from the window that he had opened on the storey above. He went, aimlessly, into the dining-room; it had the dreariness of a banqueting hall in which no one had ever made merry over food and wine, in which no flowers had ever graced the bare mahogany boards, in which no voices had ever been raised in gay badinage. He shivered. This was what he had left to him of his home.

He went back upstairs. The halls seemed to echo to his footsteps as if never had happy people run through the little house; the stairs creaked under his tread, which had grown sluggish with age in the lapse of the last hour. As he climbed the stairway he looked back at the front door. A door had closed in his face. But it was the door to a man’s life, and it had closed him in, on the wrong side for youth and happiness and on the side with creeping disillusion--the death of dreams.

Nicholas had told me this in jerky sentences. But he was more than ever dogged in his determination to go on with it. He might have been putting on a hair shirt. “I think I was what you might call out of my head,” he concluded his estimate of his experience. “I’ve only the vaguest recollections of it. I was profoundly shocked, you see.” Careful, as always, to be accurate, he added: “I remember my feeling, and not the links in what I did. And, looking back on it, I lose the intensity of the feeling because no longer have I the intensity of the conviction that then animated me. I actually believed, you know, that----” He was silent for some time. “I can just recall going back into her study to tell her to go to bed. Her head had dropped on the arm of her chair, limp and with her hair hanging forlornly over the chintz. I remember how bright the colours of the chintz were; I daresay it was by comparison with her white face. She must have been very ill even then. I thought: ‘She’s trying to put it over on me.’ I went across the room and shook her arm. ‘Come, Eva. This argument is over. Closed.’ She didn’t reply. She had fainted. I stood there looking down at her. In her bids for publicity she had usually made a better show than this, I said to myself. I saw that the whiskey was still in the glass by her side, and forced enough down her throat to revive her.”

He had made nothing of what she murmured when she came out of her fit of unconsciousness. She said: “Nick--help me! I feel so strangely----” As he resumed his pacing of the room, he had, he told me, glanced indifferently at her. She had put her hand to her head. “Nothing hurts, especially, but--” she looked puzzled--“I seemed to slip out----”

“You would,” he told her, at once brought back to the life that she was leaving for his share--blank of all that he had hoped she would bring to him.

She pushed her hair from her face. He remembered the time when he had liked to call her hair the wings of an angel. Staring at me with his tragic eyes, he said: “I know, now, that she looked like an angel always.”

He went through to his own room. He could not breathe, and flung open the windows. It was nearly morning. The dawn was trying to get above the roofs of the city. In the cold half-light his drawing-board mocked him. Life, for him, would now go on, drably, in the half-light. Clutched by the frenzy that all night he had tried to conquer, he rushed back to Eva’s study and seized her by the arm. He dragged her into his room and up to the open window.

“What do you want?” she cried in terror.

“To show you something,” he said through his shut teeth. In these few minutes the dawn had progressed. Over the sky there was now a wash of faint apple-green. The sooty sparrows had begun to twitter. Another day stared at them.

Over the tops of the buildings across the street arose the perfect tower, New York’s latest defiant gesture to a god of vengeance. His finger swept in an arc to encompass the city. He said to her--and it was a deep cry of intolerable pain: “See that? I could have built that if I hadn’t met you!”

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.