Lilah was afraid to tell Grace Fuller that she had promised to marry
Robert Peabody. Her conscience, an inconsistent element in her nature,
disturbed her to the extent of making her irritable. She went to her
room without saying good night.
She was trembling with excitement and could not sleep. Instead, wrapped
in a kimono, she paced the floor, seeing her white face at intervals in
the oval mirror of her dressing-table.
What would her life be with Robert Peabody? Not what she had dreamed,
certainly. She would have the scope money affords. But not the pride of
love; she would always be a little ashamed of Robert. She did not know
why, exactly. To justify her acceptance of him, she assured herself
that she could change him, pour him out of his mold into hers. Yet she
shivered with apprehension. He might guess her lack of feeling and
grow cold himself. Men wanted love, the gestures and jealousies, the
unconsidered, delicious abandonments, passion. She could never give him
this. And she would miss the wild sweetness, the danger, the pain of
love that is mutual, acknowledged. But she wanted ease....
She paused to stare at herself. Perhaps she was wrong. There might
not be love of that sort. Perhaps she was giving Robert all that he,
or any man, expected--her prettiness, her charm, her youth. He must
be forty. He had had experience--but, good heavens, she couldn’t be
jealous! Only he mustn’t go on; if she married him, he must be loyal....
Pacing the room again, she pictured herself in possession, at last,
of security. It was humiliating to battle with poverty when you had
no wits with which to pull yourself out; if she had been one of those
clever girls who stalk success, on the stage, in studios, newspaper
offices, shops.... She hadn’t their courage or their audacity; she
despised struggle.
Persistently, the idea returned, that she was cheating. She recalled,
with a shudder, an instinctive recoil, his attitude as he bent over her
hands--it had been both supplicating and possessive.
What she was doing was immoral, wrong. She had been brought up to
believe that such a step leads to good, old-fashioned perdition,
hell, damnation and brim-stone. Experience had taught her that in all
probability she would suffer, but that if she were clever she could
balance the advantage against the price; wealth against Robert, love
against comfort; she threw her charm in, to square the account. She
could be generous on that score. She would dress remarkably well; she
would create an interesting atmosphere, and if Robert did not know
the most entertaining personalities in New York, she would get them
together; before long, she would be a famous hostess. In just that,
her ability to attract people, lay her genius. She could, given the
means, make living an art, create, out of places and people, something
unique and memorable, as Lorenzo of the Medici had made his pages, his
poets, his ladies and his gardens into an immortal legend. Why not?
American literature had recently exploited the soda-water clerk and the
corner groceryman, the farmer, the traveling salesman, the immigrant
and the crook. No one was interested in the spiritual reactions of
that almost extinct dodo, the gentleman. Nothing was art that did not
deal with a profane ape groping for the stars and missing them! The
more interesting and complex society was overlooked in this effort to
capture the soul of what Lilah called the proletariat; it proved, this
soul, as elusive as a flea. One was left with the conviction that the
country was populated by illiterate sensualists--a vast, imponderable
mediocrity. There was no one else. The fine flower had withered in the
clutches of this overwhelming parasite. An inchoate fumbling at the
foundations ... a wail of protest ... ignorance and braggadocio....
Or else, they advertised the flapper, the country-club habitué, the
pathological spinster and the cad. Society was constantly being
reminded that it was rotten. Novelists were what David Brenner had
called himself, alley-cats pawing over garbage. Apparently, the brave
and the witty, the poetic, the exquisite were, for artistic purposes,
fresh sardines. The cry was for Truth, and the whole pack ignored any
truth that was not putrefied, or, at least, stale....
Lilah thought: “I can do something to change this.”
The idea trailed off into a vision, a spectacle, a kind of
entertainment in which she played the leading rôle. She saw the house
she would have in New York. Herself, in gray brocade trimmed at the
neck and hem with fur, her feet in brocaded slippers, advancing across
an immense, glowing room, her hand outstretched....
* * * * *
She did not want to hurt Grace Fuller. At breakfast she shivered with
dread. It would be like putting poison in a cat’s milk. She expected to
see Grace Fuller actually foam and shriek and stiffen and then stretch
out dead on the kitchen floor, her bang in curl and the pallor of her
cheeks brushed faintly with expensive rouge.
Lilah was very tender. She made pop-overs and cooked the hominy in a
double boiler. She hovered over Grace Fuller, who ate with precision,
as if she were afraid of exuberance, as if, Lilah thought, she were
guarding herself against some strain of hysteria.
Lilah said suddenly: “Robert asked me to marry him last night. I said
I would. I know you’ll think I’m a liar. I didn’t really want him
yesterday morning! When he kissed me--I did.”
Miss Fuller went on buttering a slice of toast. She did it thoroughly.
Then she said in an absolutely unchanged voice: “What are you going to
do for a trousseau?”
Lilah flushed crimson. To cover her relief, she opened the oven door.
She had expected something more--more feminine. She said: “I thought
you cared.”
“I do.... I learned certain things in France. One of them was not to
care too much.”
“I didn’t know you went to France, Grace.”
“Three years.... And things like this happened.... At Soissons there
was a French boy, about twenty-two years old. He looked nineteen. They
brought him in with a wound in his abdomen--he told me, that first day,
that he had looked down at himself and had seen his own intestine. He
was going to die. They all said so. We were being shelled, and every
night we had to carry the wounded into the cellar. He couldn’t be
moved. And while all the rest of them cried out and groaned or made a
joke of it, he said nothing. The wards were dark. They let me have a
baby flash which I held under my apron, and I used to run back to him.
Sometimes the racket was fearful--that long howl and screech of shells
passing over. Sometimes it was quiet as the tomb. I was never sure
whether that boy was alive until I saw his eyes, blue, steady, patient,
asking me to pull him through.... Well, I did! He was my case. He got
well. The day came when he was out in the garden in a chair, and then
he was in uniform again, going home....”
Grace Fuller shrugged her shoulders. “I cared. Terribly. It was my own
little victory. He was a brave boy. I used to gloat over the fact that
I had cheated death.... Then, one night, a year later, they brought him
in again. I was standing in the hall when the ambulances came. There
had been a drive and we had our hands full. Suddenly I saw him. His
stretcher was sopping with blood. He had gone back as an observer and
his plane had been shot down ... he was riddled. But he knew me. And
again he asked me to see him through. _I couldn’t!_ He died there, in
the hall ... my victory! And I had to see those patient eyes fill up
with distrust, with protest, with a sort of mocking challenge, as he
felt himself slipping out of my arms into that red tide....”
She rose, folding her napkin into a neat square.
“Since then, I haven’t let myself care.”
“How did you stand it?”
“What?”
“The war.”
“I didn’t stand it. I changed my nature.”
Lilah said: “I wanted to do something--help.... But the women over
here acted so badly I was ashamed.... They seemed to enjoy, some of
them, all the risk and death. You’d see them rushing down the library
steps, their faces red, clutching at men, trying to drag them into it:
‘You’re going to fight, aren’t you? Why aren’t _you_ in khaki?’ And
then the Liberty drives ... a sort of circus parade of ambulances,
stretchers, posters smeared with blood, pictures of atrocities--that
terrible one by George Bellows, of a massacre at Dinard.... People
were excited. They took a sort of morbid pleasure. I wanted to stay
out of it and hold on to sanity, if I could. It never ‘got’ me. And
when the wounded began to arrive, it was worse. One of the doctors at
Greenhut’s told me that they had to force the women out. They weren’t
all of them sympathetic; they wanted to look at the wounded. The way
a crowd rushes to an accident.... Morbid. Even the women who danced
with the soldiers and sailors and knitted in the theaters struck me as
ridiculous.... I hated it.”
“It was better in France.”
A silence fell and Lilah’s cheeks burned again. She rolled the sleeves
of her dress above her elbows and began to clear the table. Miss Fuller
stood, rigid and uncompromising. Presently, in her usual precise voice,
she said: “If you are going to marry Robert, you’ll have to have some
clothes. Have you any money?”
“No.”
“How much would you need to see you through? I have saved a little.
I’ll let you have it.”
“I can’t allow you to do that.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve hurt you----”
“No, you haven’t.” Unexpectedly, she put her arms around Lilah. “I want
you to be happy. I admire you enormously.”
Lilah hugged her. “Darling Grace! After all, it’s better that I should
have him. You’ve got strength, and I haven’t. Left alone, I’d sink.”
“Oh, I’ll swim,” Grace Fuller admitted. “Women like me always do! We
give the impression of strength because we have our imaginations under
control. I’m as helpless as you are, but I won’t admit it. The men of
my family were all farmers. From them, perhaps, I got my tolerance. I
can’t blame you. I wish I could! I can’t blame Robert. I have none
of the usual feminine eagerness to blame men for everything that goes
wrong. You probably think I have no standards. I haven’t. I understand
too well.”
She went into the other room and came back wearing her hat, with a
rather dog-eared fur neck-piece clasped under her chin; in high, tight
collars she had the swan-like look of Consuela. Lilah was deeply sorry
for her. For the moment she felt herself inferior.
“I can let you have five hundred dollars, Lilah. Don’t tell Robert.”
The telephone rang. They looked at each other with a glance stripped
naked of pretense.
“Go. It’s Robert.”
“No! No!”
“Hurry! Please.”
Lilah went. She put the receiver to her ear with a certain dread, a
reluctance.
And she heard Robert’s voice, vibrant, saying: “Lilah? Sweetheart! I
want you to meet me for lunch. We’ll buy that ring. What d’you say?” He
broke off. “Is Grace there?”
“No,” Lilah said distinctly.
She turned her head and saw the door closing.
“No,” she repeated. “I’m alone.”
* * * * *
Lilah was married a month later, in Junius Peabody’s house at the Point.
She had had an overwhelming four weeks. Grace Fuller’s five hundred
dollars had no more than cleared the first hurdle. When Robert Peabody
asked her whether she wanted pearls or a bandeau of diamonds, she had
replied: “I prefer the money. I don’t care for jewels, and there are
all sorts of things I want, and need; foolish things I can’t afford.”
He had given her a check for five thousand dollars.
With this sum deposited and in possession of a book of blanks smartly
bound in leather, Lilah reversed her mask of poverty. She wore,
instead, her most devastating sophistication, a fetching air of
patronage and sweetness. Her first pilgrimage was to the gray stone
house in the Fifties occupied by the esthetic and sharp couturière who
had refused her a chance to work. She sent word to him that she was
interested, this time, in a “wardrobe.” She was wearing a slim and
expensive frock of red crêpe and a Paisley turban. She was positively
beautiful; her slimness, her arched feet in delicate shoes, her gloves,
were dominating.
The dressmaker (his name was Maurice) pretended not to recognize her.
With a bow, he led her to his show rooms and, summoning a saleswoman,
entered, in French, into a passionate discussion of Lilah’s height, her
coloring, her possibilities. One of the deep-skinned models trailed
upon the scene in a sheath of gold cloth, dragging behind her a tail of
emerald green chiffon. She met Lilah’s stare with an expression totally
blank, as if she were walking in her sleep. Maurice sent for materials,
yards and yards of brocade, metallic cloth, crêpe de Chine; jade,
orange, violet and dull red mingled on the floor, the backs of chairs,
across lacquered screens and tables. This profligate heap of stuffs
went to Lilah’s head, but she preserved her air of polite indifference,
sitting with crossed knees, her feet, in the elaborate, strapped shoes,
displayed.... The model, she decided, had ugly ankles.
* * * * *
At lunch that day she told Robert of her purchases.
He shook his head. “Where shall you wear them? Peabody’s Point is a
wilderness--the three houses, my own, my father’s and my grandfather’s,
a deep forest of maples, pines and birch, and the sea! We seldom see
any one, but when we do, they come on horse-back or by motor. It is
astonishing when the women wear evening clothes. On great occasions, a
house warming or a birthday or a dance--once, or twice, a year--there
is some show of ceremony.... You will find us very rural.”
Lilah stifled her disappointment. “Shan’t we live in town in the
winter?”
“If you like. We have a house in Thirty-eighth Street. It is closed
now.”
“Take me there!”
The rooms were dark, and when, admitted by a caretaker, Lilah and
Robert explored the first two floors, they found the furniture
swaddled in linen, the chandeliers wearing net veils, like Bluebeard’s
brides, and the rugs rolled back. The house was an exact example of
the New York residence of the early Eighties. The marble mantels were
surmounted by elaborate, wooden fret-work, an intricacy of shelves
and pilasters, screens and grills, roosting place for those useless,
ugly and enormously expensive vases of the period. Mirrors divided the
windows and curtains of dark red velvet were looped up, held clear of
the floor by chenille ropes. There was a multiplicity of cushions,
tables, tabourettes; paintings, in deep frames, by Rosa Bonheur, Henner
and Corot, and one luminous and arresting Inness, a landscape with elms
and a river, sunlight and haze, russet, gold, and blue. Lilah seized
upon this as a reason for enthusiasm.
“My grandfather understands pictures,” Robert explained. “Even the
modern fellows! I don’t. No one has ever taken the trouble to explain
what they’re all about.”
“Don’t you like this?”
“Oh, yes. But Inness wasn’t a modern exactly.”
Suddenly he put his arm through Lilah’s and said: “You’re so clever. If
I didn’t know what a darling you are, I’d be afraid of you. I want you
to teach me all these things--what I should like, and why. I don’t want
you to be ashamed of me.”
Lilah, with a pretty bend of her head, put her face against his
shoulder. She was feeling mellow, generous. This house, a valuable
property in Murray Hill, was soon to be hers. Going from room to room,
she mentally refurnished it.
“I don’t like the house,” she said frankly. “It’s hideous--all this
Victorian velvet and ebony. Horrible!”
“Lilah!”
His expression warned her. “You sweet old stupid! Of course it’s
horrible.”
He stammered: “It’s a sort of--of monument to my grandmother.”
“A mausoleum,” she corrected. “We’ll change it.”
* * * * *
Miss Fuller would not go to the Point for the wedding. She had, she
insisted, an important case out of town. And, with her neat traveling
bag and the fur neck-piece, she started off the day before Lilah left
town. She had agreed to keep the apartment and to pay the astonished
agent on the first of every month.
Lilah went alone. Robert had engaged a compartment for her; she found
flowers, candy, books there; _Lilah Norris_, written on Robert’s
cards, thrust hastily into envelopes stamped with the names of shops
internationally famous. The porter, judging from his eagerness, had
been tipped. When he closed her into this walnut and green plush cell,
he reminded her that he would call her at five. She would be “put off”
at Peabody’s Point at five forty-five....
The train moved out of the city, boring its way through the tunnel into
a twilight studded with red and green, white and topaz-yellow flashes.
A glimpse of the river. Tall stacks. Then darkness, broken by suburban
stations, where, for an instant, people and motors were glimpsed in a
strange immobility, as if painted on the car windows.
Lilah undressed. She enjoyed the unaccustomed luxury of her traveling
things, so unlike the pack she had slung across her shoulder in
Switzerland. Her night-gown was sheer batiste, scalloped, threaded with
white ribbon. She braided her hair, switched off the light and lay on
her side, staring out of the window. The silence was clamorous, yet she
could hear the beating of her own heart. She pressed her hands there,
frightened.
She was going to marriage, in which, supposedly, she would never again
be alone, like this.... Never again alone.... She ran her hands over
her body, jealous of herself. Life, the crude fact, was unimaginable;
she was aloof; somehow, she would gain time, hold herself for herself a
little longer.... Outside a late moon had pierced the usual smokiness
of a city sky. Trees brushed by. The odor of the flowers sent by Robert
was sickish in the close room.... Lilah felt suddenly the weight of
his affection, his conquest. She burned with anger, with a sort of
resentment. How could he think, expect.... She thought of running away,
giving him the slip.... They would find the compartment, the roses, his
fatuous cards, but no Lilah. No woman. She pressed her face into the
pillow and cried. She was infinitely sorry for herself, desolate. If
only she were simple! If only she could love, accept, like other women!
* * * * *
In the morning she was happier, sustained by excitement.
While she dressed, she glanced out of the window at a northern
landscape of carelessly cleared fields now white with daisies, patches
of pine and maple, and, beyond, a range of hills, sharply outlined
against a clear, white sky. Puffs of air came through the screen
infinitely fresh and cool; country air. Lilah took deep breaths.
At the station, where the train stopped only long enough to let down
a grinning porter and a step, Robert was waiting. He lifted her down,
kissed her. She was instantly conscious of a difference in him; his
coat was rough and cold; his face was red, sun-burned. And his hair,
always so smooth and well-brushed, had blown askew, over his forehead.
It got in his eyes and he smoothed it back with an impatience, a
carelessness, new to her.
“Grandfather is waiting. The early morning air isn’t awfully good for
him. He sent apologies.”
He hurried her into an open motor and the robe was adjusted about her
knees. Robert drove. And again she noticed that he was in some sense
more free. His hands on the wheel were casual but in control; with a
quick turn of his head he scanned the road and turned north with a
burst of speed startling in a man usually so hesitant and cautious.
“Five miles,” he shouted. “We live at the end of nowhere. Our property
already--all these fields. Wait until you see the woods!”
The woods were somber in the morning light, green as trees are in
stage-settings, immensely tall and close and straight, upon a carpet of
moss and fern, wintergreen and arbutus. The road at intervals crossed a
bridle-path, now and then emerging into cleared spaces where a tangle
of clover, buttercups and daisies grew lush, knee-deep.
Robert brought the car to a standstill and turned to Lilah. His face
was older in an unexpected seriousness. “This is all yours, Lilah. I
am yours. Does it mean anything to you that I love you so? Your coming
here has made me terribly happy--a queer sort of happiness, for I
can’t sleep or eat. I ache for you. I want you to kiss me of your own
accord....”
“Haven’t I, ever?”
“No.”
She lifted her face, but at the first light contact of her lips, he
could not have told whether she loved him or not. He gave to the
embrace all the feeling he craved from her. She was overwhelmed,
relieved. Nothing was required of her; she need not show herself, give
herself up. Not yet.... She smiled, with closed eyes....
Suddenly he let her go. Almost violently he relaxed his hold, so that
she fell back and away from him.
“If you don’t love me, Lilah,” he said, in a dry voice, “say so.”
Lilah protested: “I do! What on earth makes you ask?”
Robert Peabody did not answer, but sat bent forward over the wheel,
as if, at a signal from her, he would start the car and drive back to
the station. His expression was terrible; somehow, she knew that he
had sensed her relief in the moment just passed. She had hurt him. It
wasn’t going to be altogether easy.
In a silence made poignant by a stir of branches and the early morning
clamor of birds, she fought for the right words, the gesture that would
reassure him. Her hand touched his sleeve, crept down to his hand
clenched on the wheel. “It is all new,” she began, “strange.... It
isn’t love so much that I feel, but recognition ... of you, and this
place ... mine ... you might be a little patient....”
He bent swiftly and kissed her fingers. The car sprang forward into the
forest again.
* * * * *
She did not glimpse the sea until they were fairly out of the wood and
making a wide turn in a sort of park, where moss and fern gave way
to an incredibly deep sward, smooth, emerald-green. She saw a house,
another, and a sparkle of water beyond. At once she could smell the
sea, kelp, sweet and sickish, salty. Robert had not spoken, but now he
turned and said: “Here we are! Lilah! Home!”
He swept into a gravel driveway and under a porte-cochère.... She
was getting out, rather faint, frightened now that she had committed
herself.... A servant spoke to her and Robert said: “Miss Norris,
Maisie.”
“How do you do, Miss Norris? I’m sure we’re all very glad.”
The hall, within, was dark--too much wood-work, and a huge, stone
mantel, top-heavy. Lilah put her hand up to her hat, and, turning
instinctively in search of a mirror, found herself confronting an old
man.
“My grandfather,” Robert said. “This is Lilah.”
Junius Peabody was tall and very handsome, at eighty-four. He offered
his hand, and Lilah, giving her own into that dry, rather bony clasp,
met his eyes. They were black, deep-set, with something ironic,
quizzical, in their depths, like a spark of light at the bottom of a
well. He wore a heavy mustache, perhaps to hide the leanness of his
cheeks. He had what Robert had missed, a flame of some sort, a feeling
for things, for life, for women, for beauty.
“Lilah? May I?”
She felt his lips on her cheek, and noticed a faint odor of Cologne.
“You must be tired. Will you breakfast with us? Or, perhaps, later--”
“Breakfast, by all means,” Lilah said. “I’m not tired. I’m very excited
and happy.”
She was, inexplicably, exhilarated again. The old man’s look had been
appraising, and satisfied. He found her delightful. She knew this,
and because she was certain that he was not easily pleased, she could
afford to be flattered. He moved at her side through the house, across
a large, cluttered room to a veranda, where Venetian shades were
half-drawn against the brilliance of the sea in full sunlight; a table
had been set for breakfast. Geraniums in boxes hedged the veranda on
three sides. Beyond, a narrow garden separated the house from a pebbly
beach and rocks covered with brown kelp.
“Low tide,” Junius Peabody remarked.
It was not the house she had pictured. There were no Italian gardens.
But there was something substantial and vigorously assertive in the
ugly width and spread of the wings, the turrets and verandas and
useless, expensive ornamentation. In the Eighties this would have been
a “place.” Meadows of wet kelp mingled with the fragrant spiciness of
geraniums. A man servant in an apron, very old, with a crumpled mouth
in a pink face, brought coffee. And Robert said: “Miss Norris, Edwin.”
Lilah put just the right shade of interest into the pronouncement
of the word “Edwin” with a rising inflection. She loved Edwin. She
loved Junius. She loved Robert. She was conscious of being more
charming, more herself, than she had ever been in a life given over to
being, always, some one unlike the real Lilah. The real Lilah was a
delightful, amusing, affecting little person.
Once over that moment of appraisal, Junius Peabody made it plain that
he approved of her.
And after breakfast, brushing his mustache with a large cambric
handkerchief, he walked with her into what he called the “greenery,”
a park-like place at the back of the house away from the sea where a
gardener worked among formal beds of Spring flowers. “No, Robert, you
stay back--I want Lilah to myself.”
Robert disappeared and Lilah threw a kiss, very prettily, at his back.
“Robert would like to show you the kennels, but that can wait.”
Lilah said impulsively: “It was good of you to let me come here to be
married. I am very alone.... The few relatives I have are in the West,
and I don’t like any of them. They will not approve of my marrying so
soon. But my father wouldn’t care, so why should I?”
They crossed the greenery and, without comment, Junius Peabody pointed
out another house. “My son’s. He died ten years ago. We have closed
the place. Robert didn’t like it. I’ll show you his house, later.
Although I dare say you will want to change it, it is modern enough.
This, you see, is what I call the East Aurora period; it was built in
nineteen-four, when America was beginning to absorb the Morris a b c’s.
Inside it is worse.... Hand-tooled by Fra Bunco....” He broke off.
“What perfume is that? Sandalwood? Delicious. My dear, we are delighted
to welcome you.” And before she could thank him, he began again: “I am
really astonished. I didn’t expect you to be--what you are. You are
very clever; I can see that. Robert won’t understand you, but that
won’t matter if you see to it that he isn’t humiliated. A woman must
never be conspicuously superior to her husband. I dare say you know
just what you are doing.”
With a flash of anger, she said: “I am very fond of him!”
“I’m glad of that.”
They came into a small grove of pines, young trees near the sea, and
on the shore, built upon the dunes, she saw another, smaller house,
gray-shingled with gray blinds and stone chimneys. This, she realized,
was to be her home. At first glance, it seemed a desolate place;
there was no garden, only the white sand blown into little hills, and
glistening, thick blades of dune grass and, beyond, the sea. Always
keen to beauty, she resented the uncompromising grayness of the house.
“The blinds should be blue,” she said quickly, “and there should be
yellow and blue awnings and a brick terrace at the back with hydrangeas
in pots. Why not a wall on this side and turf and some poplars?”
Junius Peabody laughed. “You must ask Robert. He will do anything you
suggest. He is very much in love with you.... I think you two will
make a go of it if you won’t be impatient. Robert will be stubborn if
you criticize him. He isn’t as simple or as pliable as he seems, on
the surface, to be. His father, not I, was responsible for his career.
My son had no more sense of the beautiful than his house indicates;
he lived only to serve my creation, Peabody and Sons. He never loved
or needed to love. He quite literally worked himself to death and
collapsed in harness. But he wanted Robert to do the same thing, and,
to prepare him, sent him to a boys’ school at Territet and then to
Columbia! And then, by way of hardening him, a trip around the world!
For one year before his father died, Robert sat in an office in the
Peabody Building in Boston, staring out of the window.... It might have
been, in the end, a tragedy.”
He took her arm. “Let’s go back. Robert will want you, and I don’t like
the sun.”
* * * * *
That night she talked to him again. A mist had come up, opaque,
chilly, and at intervals a buoy beyond the reef tolled like a ship’s
bell. A fire was lighted in the drawing-room, and Lilah, in a gown of
disturbing simplicity, very short, faced Junius Peabody. He had the
outlines she most admired, a distinguished thinness; his wrists and
ankles were characteristic, slender. His elegance was stressed; he had
not Robert’s unawareness; the details of Junius Peabody’s dress were,
to the least fold of a tie, considered, epicurean. And this ceremony
somehow detracted from his age, gave him an appearance not in the least
jaunty, but vivacious. When Lilah dressed for dinner, she chose her
gown for him, not for Robert; she had found, in Junius, an audience
appreciative of those things Robert overlooked. She thought: “While
he’s alive, I shall be happy here. I like him because he won’t give
in to being old. He never apologizes.” She had, she knew, brought him
something he longed for and was too proud to seek, youth and the little
drama of furbelows and perfumes, ribbons and silk stockings. She was
pert enough to amuse him. He would have despised a sentimental woman.
Robert left them again. One of his favorite dogs had developed a
distemper and he went away, wrapped in a great coat, to spend a
watchful night beside a box full of straw where the silver gray bitch
lay on her side, panting. Robert’s face was puckered with regret and
humiliation. “I know you’ll think I’m a fool! But that dog’s damned
sick, Lilah.”
When he had gone, Junius Peabody said: “In my day, Edwin would have sat
up with the dog. Love isn’t what it used to be.”
“I don’t mind,” Lilah said. “Grace Fuller warned me.”
“She did, did she?” The old man jerked in his chair. “Unpleasant
female. I never liked her. She made me feel that my illusions were
hocus-pocus, rubbish. As if she had spotted all my weaknesses and could
put her finger on them, the way those osteopath chaps pick out sore
spots on your spine. Here, vanity. There, arrogance. And down the line.”
He chose a cigar from a silver box at his elbow.
“I don’t want the truth. At my age, it’s dangerous. I am like a twist
of paper that has gone up in flames; the shape remains, but at a touch
will crumble away.... Excuse me, my dear. I do not often mention my
age. After all, I may live twenty years, and I must not shrink from the
dust too soon.”
He reflected, with a curious gratification, that he was at last
very safe from life, because he no longer cared what happened to
him--nothing _could_ happen. He was free from his old restless
curiosity, his desire to be always in contact with experience.
“You, my dear, are still seeking the unattainable. Immeasurably
superior--old age! You want big happenings; I am content with little
happenings. Thank God, I’m not a dyspeptic ... men who understand food
never are. I’ve never bolted, like these modern business men. To
be appreciated, done justice, breakfast must be given half an hour,
luncheon an hour, dinner two hours. There’s something vulgar in this
dishing up and gobbling down.... Robert says you’re a good cook.”
“I am,” Lilah admitted.
“You must make something for me. Even a potato--boiled with
art--Consider the slow, the exquisite processes of its growth! The
earth must be turned, the seed planted. Then the feathery stalks, the
white blossoms, the root upturned, the gathering.... Some conception of
the potato must be in the seed, an immortal thought contained within
the physical means of realization. Very comforting, that idea! It gives
one at least the security of divine attention. Could there have been,
before I was at all, a picture of me, dry as dust, tall and gaunt, with
this mustache? Perhaps! The finished product must be contained in the
germ, irrevocable, bound to materialize.”
“Fatalist!” Lilah cried.
“Otherwise, wouldn’t an onion grow into an oak tree, a toad into
an eagle, a mushroom into a man? The intention must be there along
with the cell structure! Stay as you are, my dear--you are a lovely
celestial mistake, an orchid grown into a woman!”
He was very particular about his cigar--a mild panetela with an easy
pull. He sliced off the tip with a pen-knife, squeezed slowly between
thumb and forefinger, held the cigar against the light, took it between
his lips, sucked, closed his eyes, and, opening them suddenly, applied
the match.
“Havana,” he said. “I smoked my first cigar in Hergesheimerland.... But
I mustn’t go back! Old men are always doing that, perhaps because youth
takes on a patina with years.”
“Were you happy?” Lilah asked.
“Never! Avid. Insatiable. Restless. Always goaded by desire--but not
happy. Now, at eighty-four, I know how to live. I know that familiarity
is more precious than novelty, and that relaxation is sweeter than
distraction.”
Lilah shook her head. “I don’t believe you. You are as eager as I am,
perhaps more so.”
“The world of men is behind--the world of spirit opens up. You don’t
believe that, either. Wait until you are alone with yourself--if you
out-live your family, as I have. My wife, Minnie, my two brothers, my
son. Robert doesn’t count. He is a remote descendant.”
“You won’t die,” Lilah said.
“I may,” he admitted, with a smile faintly ironic. “Although I have
always believed that I neither would nor could! The earth is too sweet
and I have loved ... everything. Other men don’t. They die complaining
of a lack, where I have found a surfeit of beauty. For twenty years
I’ve been burying people who didn’t love enough, little disappointed
people, jealous, enraged, all of them! Because youth had gone! Youth!”
He stood up. And with that quick, faintly unsteady gait, he went to the
mantel, staring up at the portrait of a young man in a black coat, a
white waist-coat and tie who sat, stiff and somehow violent, in a red
velvet chair. The thick, black brows almost met above the bridge of the
nose; the lips were full, both sensual and ironic; the eyes small and
dark. A dark skin stained with red--
“They used to say I was ‘foreign’ looking. And I was proud of it. My
wife rather disapproved.”
He sat down again, stroking his chin. “Poor Minnie! Poor girl! To be
foreign wasn’t quite respectable in the ’Sixties. But there you have
me--young! And miserable.”
“Why miserable?”
“What do you know about love?” he demanded suddenly. “Pretty minx,
sitting there with your cigarette, talking to me when you should be out
in the fog with your lover. You modern women are as cold as ice. You’re
not normal. Nothing about you is rational except your love of finery.
I have a streak of it in myself. I can remember my wife’s night gowns
where I have forgotten her opinions. You haven’t changed in _that_. So
many scents and sachets, little scissors, sticks, powders, essences,
curls, bandoline and brilliantine, creams and rouges. Precious things
put away in drawers, wrapped in tissue-paper, hidden in boxes! Rites of
beauty! For men? For love? Instinct? Nothing else is left--”
He broke off. Lilah watched the fire-light strike flashes in the
buckles of her slippers. What an amusing old sensualist! What was he
trying to prove? That he hadn’t loved his wife or that she didn’t love
Robert?
“I won’t argue,” she said. “Women _are_ different. Why not? They are no
longer deceived about love....”
“Ah.” He stared at her down his nose.
“There isn’t time for loving nowadays.” Lilah insisted. “Not your sort.”
“My sort?”
“I realize--”
“What you youngsters _don’t_ realize,” he interrupted, with a touch of
anger, “is that the old are unchanged, within. The casing is rusty, but
the springs and wheels are as good as ever. What makes us different is
our nearness to death. We don’t change, otherwise.”
He rose again and beckoned to her. “Come into the library; I want to
show you something.”
As she followed him, he said: “This isn’t my taste. My wife controlled
the furnishing of our houses--a Victorian feminine prerogative.”
“I know. I have seen the house in Murray Hill.”
“I never live there. It is cruelly innocent.”
“May I change it?”
“Of course.”
“Then you aren’t sentimental.”
He stroked his chin, again Lilah saw that look of rather Hogarthian
humor.
“My wife was a dear little soul. She loved me; she disapproved of me;
she died for me, not guessing, thank God, that she had never entered
my imagination.... This tobacco jar was my grand-uncle Stephen’s. He
brought it from England, a hundred years ago.”
He paused in the hall. “A few of these things are mine. If I could
count on twenty years, I’d build the sort of house I like. These
Chippendale chairs--gratifying, aren’t they? That ship’s model over the
door--a full-rigged whaler! And this jade; milky, like moonlight....
The Chinese are real craftsmen. ‘White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
ringed with blue lines--’ Eh? Why not? Better than hymns and prayers
and incantations. Now you know how spiritual I am! If love of this sort
of thing is pagan, then I am pagan, and proud of it. I would rather
carve a piece of jade into such loveliness than save a soul....”
He opened a door and Lilah preceded him into a room smaller than the
others. A coal-fire had burned low in a shallow grate. There were
several lamps, easy chairs and many shelves of books.
Lilah put her pointed slipper on the fender and glanced up at him.
“Your room?”
He said: “It’s quiet, and everything is mine. That picture up there is
by Kent.”
“I don’t like it. It’s too frosty.”
“How about this Shinn?”
“Naughty!” Lilah exclaimed, rather shocked by the naked little woman in
a garden hat who was reading a French novel. “Do you like it?”
“Very much.”
Suddenly he tossed the unfinished cigar into the grate. “Sit down. I
want to tell you something. Something very personal. About myself.
I’ve never told any one. It needn’t embarrass you. But it might help
you.”
He went to a writing desk that was closed, and, producing a key from
his watch-chain, he unlocked the top and opened it. It seemed to Lilah
that he was a bit unsteady. Perhaps so much talk wasn’t good for
him. He turned, holding a small package of letters, the envelopes,
inscribed to Junius Peabody in a big, square hand, bearing the stamp
of Italy like a seal. “I can recapture,” he said, “the old magic, just
by touching these letters.... They are letters from a woman.... They
have nothing to do with my wife, or my son, or Robert. But they have
everything to do with people like ourselves.”
He sat down in the chair facing hers; sank back, still holding the
slender packet of letters. He seemed, in an odd way, to be conjuring
up some memory, summoning back a great happening that had grown dim in
outline. For a moment, she thought he had ceased to breathe. Then, in a
rather broken voice, he began to tell her what he saw:
* * * * *
He was in Venice, Venice still under the shadow of the Austrian eagle,
yet, as always, incomparable; a city of bizarre façades reflected in
salty lagoons; nothing classical--he despised neo-classicism--but
cupids, garlands, fore-shortened goddesses, golden! He had sensed the
Venice of Longhi, thank God! Of Titian. Of Veronese. These catapulting
Venuses and rampant Mars, these lions and gilt domes and love-songs!
Nothing mattered save his own recognition of beauty. And for a while
it bowled him over.
A woman was part of it, touched by the same unreality, removed from all
experience.
He had left Minnie, his wife, that summer, in this very house, while he
went off to Europe chasing rainbows.
The quest had been much deeper than that, only he had been afraid to
acknowledge it. Rainbows were no part of his need; he was in pursuit
of the intangible justification, something Minnie could not give him.
Minnie was life. He wanted, as he supposed all such men sooner or later
want, the illusion of life.
In Venice, he had met the woman. No need to tell Lilah her name; that
would be beyond the point. She had put him right again, reaching
delicately, expertly, into his spirit, setting his psychic house in
order.
How? He didn’t know. She was a woman of women, sane, fearless,
magnificent.
A week only. Out of a lifetime, he reflected, this seemed meager
compensation. Yet he supposed that few men had had as much. A week in
Longhi’s Venice with a woman in whom purity wore a lace mask; a woman
strangely aloof, strangely seductive, possessed of a miraculous and
unbroken mystery. She had loved him and had told him nothing of herself.
He remembered her, wearing white; he could not recall the style, but
people stared at her. She was a tawny woman, dark-skinned, tall, with
topaz eyes, and she moved with a sort of slow grace--every pose an
immortal loveliness. A foreigner. That something “foreign” in him had
leaped to the encounter. So, at least, he justified his passion. They
seldom spoke. It had been, nevertheless, communion. Everything about
her delighted him--her jewels, her parasols, her perfumes. She was
distinguished.
Yet she could play her part in their brief personal drama like an
artist, delighting in him, in their climaxes, their interludes,
their sure approach to the inevitable finale, savoring each detail.
What a woman! He had had no twinge of conscience; almost, he had
forgotten Minnie. He had had his week. No vulgarity. No reproaches. No
questioning. Beauty.
Well....
She had gone.
These three letters, written from Belaggio. Then, no more, as it should
have been!
“There must be some reason, my dear, for these glimpses. A divine
tantalization, perhaps. Souls led to heaven as a donkey follows a
carrot to the crest of a hill.... Some day you will love this way.
Wouldn’t it be wiser to wait? You are very like me.”
Lilah stood up with a quick, almost violent gesture of rebellion. “No!
How can you?”
A door opened out from the library to the veranda. Lilah threw it back
and ran outside.
The veranda was wet, and a heavy mist poured in from the sea. Lilah
crossed the garden and hurried toward the kennels along a narrow gravel
path. The mist stung her bare arms, drenched her hair, soaked through
the thin soles of her slippers.
Some one loomed out of the shadows and she recognized Robert, still in
his great-coat, bare-headed.
He cried: “Lilah!” And, startled, blocked the path.
Lilah caught his arm. “Robert. Kiss me again. Again. Make me kiss
you.... I want to! I want to! Your grandfather’s wrong. I’ll love you.
Kiss me.”
They clung together. Her emotion, her fear, became desire. She could
not see Robert’s face; his restless hands slipped down her arms to her
waist, back again to her shoulders. She cried, pressing herself against
him: “Robert!”
“Poor little girl. Poor little Lilah. It’s all right....”
Her lips against his, her arms pinioned, she thought: “I love him. That
detestable old man.... This is love--_this_.”
Aloud, she asked again: “Do you love me?”
For answer, he lifted her clear of the ground and held her, so that she
could hear his heart and her own, beating together.