There was no going back now, and Lilah went forward swiftly,
forgetting, in the excitement of the wedding, her hours of doubt.
She clung to the memory of that moment in the fog; it was at once a
disguise and a justification. To Junius Peabody she had said simply: “I
promise you; it will be all right.”
She was married one morning, out-of-doors, before an altar made of
syringa bloom. For this occasion, Robert’s Aunt Whiteside came from
some Virginia spa, caparisoned, as Junius Peabody put it, like a
Christmas tree. She found Lilah a “useless ornament.” And said so in an
astonishing bass voice.
There was nothing fashionable about this wedding. A few friendly,
rather shy and inarticulate people, appeared for the ceremony, were
introduced, and disappeared immediately.
Lilah kissed Junius, noticed again the odor of Cologne, and was hurried
away toward the traditional honeymoon in Robert’s motor ... Portland
... Bath ... Bar Harbor.... It would soon be over and she could be
herself....
Six months later she was established in Thirty-eighth Street.
A small army of decorators occupied the doorstep and besieged Lilah
by letter and telephone. And Mrs. Junius Peabody’s Victorianism was
pulled up, literally, by the roots. Gilt-framed mirrors went headlong
down the “stoop” into moving vans. Chinese porcelains and top-heavy
vases disappeared into barrels. Mantels were ripped out, parquet floors
became, in some instances, black and white tiles, in others smooth
painted surfaces. Tabourettes, gilded what-nots, ponderous buffets
vanished on the backs of moving men, and the discreet marbles and
pedestaled bronzes were banished to heaven knows what storage vault.
“No one would _buy_ these things,” Lilah explained. “You couldn’t
_give_ them away! The Ladies’ Home Journal has changed all that. I’m
not sure whether what they’ve got is any better, but at least it’s no
worse.”
“I liked it,” Robert said. “It was cozy.”
Lilah sniffed.
During the reconstruction they lived on the top floor, in rooms
occupied in Mrs. Junius Peabody’s era by servants. Lilah had painted
the furniture herself and had hung at the windows curtains of glazed
chintz--parrots, cabbage roses and gay Kundry-blooms. Robert slept in a
cottage bed beneath a quilted spread and shaved peering into a crackled
mirror. He was vaguely uncomfortable and dubious. Beneath him, the
familiar house of his childhood was disintegrating, falling to pieces.
One by one the precious familiarities disappeared. But if it pleased
Lilah, why, for God’s sake, on with the game!
What it all meant was beyond Robert’s comprehension. His mother had
been content to spend half a lifetime with walnut and plush.... And why
all the fuss about the front door, the brownstone steps?
“But they’re _hideous_,” Lilah cried. “_No one_ has them! Every house
on the block, except ours, has an English front.”
Robert shrugged his shoulders, and a month later the stone façade
became a brick façade; the steps gave way to a white doorway with a
fan grill, and window boxes planted with evergreens added that touch
of a Mayfair dwelling. It was all very discreet, and, to Robert, very
startling. He could not believe his eyes. He wrote to his grandfather
that Thirty-eighth Street was “jolly giddy.”
Lilah was supremely happy. She wore chintz aprons and bound her hair
in silk, as if she were gardening. Her eyes had a critical, appraising
look. Robert never saw her unless he pursued her to the top of a
step-ladder or forced his way through the ranks of decorators. These
people frightened him; they had such an air--as if they thought and
spoke in symbols. It was a secret order to which, apparently, Lilah had
been initiated, for she tossed off the phraseology with a reckless, and
sometimes condescending, carelessness.
“Isn’t it too delicious? This needle-point? Miss de Blauvelt wants
brocade, but I insisted....”
“It’s rather--pale,” Robert said lamely.
“Nonsense. It’s exquisite.... The panels are to be painted all the way
to the ceiling. Ships and cliffs and trees and great folds of silk,
like Claude Lorraine, with steps, you know”--she made a gesture--“and
funny clouds.”
She pulled him by the hand. “Come into the dining-room--I want you to
see something. It’s here! The Venetian glass.... Look! Look!”
Robert said guardedly: “Purple glass? What for?”
“For use, silly.”
“And what are these--vegetables?”
“For the console--they’re merely decorative.”
“But I don’t like them!”
“Never mind. You will, when everything is finished! An Aubusson rug.
Gray walls. A great mirror, cut in squares, here. An enameled table
with strips of old lace or brocade. Your grandfather’s Boucher here. A
screen, there. And crystal--”
“Lilah! Lilah!”
Robert picked his way through plaster, lathes, packing-cases and
excelsior whenever he left the house to go to the dubious comfort of
his Club. He wanted the country, his dogs, his old green sweater. But
if Lilah was happy....
And Lilah happy was less difficult than Lilah unhappy. At the Point,
during the summer, there had been days when she was too restive to
be quite comfortable. He was to blame for something; eventually he
discovered that he was to blame for liking the out-of-doors. The
implication was vague. Whenever Robert let himself go, Lilah would
say: “Beautiful? Yes?” As if there were some reason for resentment.
When Robert discovered that she wanted New York, and Thirty-eighth
Street, he capitulated at once. But he had faced mysterious rebuffs,
inexplicable moods, hurts that were more damnable for being beyond
analysis. He had wondered. He had questioned himself. He had, more
than once, blamed himself. For what? Why, for failing her somehow!
He hated to see that look of resentful discontent. He was ashamed of
being happy! And this was a new sensation. He had always been happy.
But he encountered the feminine rebellion against a mood which does
not exactly match her own; and at last depressed by the atmosphere of
blame, he gave way to temper, flung himself down and hid his head in
his arms. Then, Lilah had been repentant; he felt her hand on his hair.
“Robert, what’s the matter?” He had not answered. And Lilah had kissed
the back of his neck and had called him “cross old Bobsie.”
With New York an accomplished fact, and the woods, the rocks, exchanged
for a sultry October in town, she was gracious, delightful.
Robert promised himself that he would never again deprive Lilah of
anything. She was worthy of the most unselfish behavior.... He adored
her.... He would do anything to hear her call him “cross old Bobsie.”
He made the mistake of becoming his most cheerful, his most optimistic
self.
* * * * *
The panels were to be done by an American artist, a man famous for the
facility of his execution; he painted like a fury. One day you had the
cartoons, in red chalk--a swirl of draperies, figures of long-limbed,
rather sheep-like women and top-heavy columns in the Tiepolo manner.
The next, a finished canvas.
Robert began to stumble over this Elmer Shawhan in his comings and
goings. He had none of the trappings Robert expected of painters, but
worked in a disreputable coat, collarless. He was small and agile,
Irish, with the head of a vaudeville actor and the feet of a Brazilian
dancer.
Lilah found him violent and amusing.
“I despise women,” he told her, “but I can’t keep away from ’em. It’s
their drawing--ankles and knees and long arms and necks. They’re so
damned graceful.”
He was sitting on a scaffold ten feet above her head, dangling a pair
of patent pumps and ankles encased in sheer silk socks. Lilah’s walls
were already transformed. Shawhan painted the panels in his studio and
mounted them himself.
Lilah could not rest until she found out whether he considered her
pretty. He made her feel dumpy and too blonde, because the women he
painted were like fresh strawberries mounted on long silk legs. No
woman had legs like that....
“I know,” he said. “I paint legs plus the universal male exaggeration
of their importance. That’s why my stuff sells. I got seventy-five
thousand dollars for covering a millionaire’s home with silk stockings
and frillies. He thinks he likes it because it’s art.”
“Isn’t it?” Lilah demanded.
“My stuff? Of course not. Mister Tiepolo of New York! No, I’m clever. I
have a certain facility, that’s all. I learned to draw when I was a cub
reporter on a southern daily--I had to make quick sketches of murders,
suicides, hangings and celebrities; President Cleveland in the morning
and Lulu the opium-queen in the afternoon. I _had_ to draw! Then I came
to New York and drew New York. Slums and ‘L’ stations and bums in the
park and snow and fire-engines and horse ’buses. In those days New York
was a _place_. Twenty years ago....”
“I was seven,” Lilah interrupted.
“Well, I wasn’t! I was twenty-three. And what I had you’ll never have.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t exist any more. You’ll never see Ethel Barrymore in
‘Captain Jinks’ with those eyes of hers and that bass voice and that
Barrymore bend. Davis was on the crest of the wave and Gibson was
immortalizing the shirtwaist. It meant something in those days to be
tailored in England and to wear the kind of shoes I wear--look at
’em--no tips--soft as a glove! Davis and I wore wing collars when
it was considered degenerate, and we carried canes in the face of
public ridicule and private envy. Stanford White was building glorious
houses. Most of us were in love with Minnie Ashley. Talk about the age
of innocence! Clyde Fitch, Maxine Elliot, Elsie de Wolfe and Clara
Bloodgood.... I could name a dozen. We were the American aristocracy of
wit. What we said and did was shocking and unique. It was worth while
being clever because almost no one was. To live in Gramercy Park, to
eat at the old Café Martin and _not_ to wear pads in your shoulders--”
He went back to his canvas with a sort of violence.
“I object to to-day because every one is superficially clever! And
there are ten geniuses to one, twenty years ago, men who can write
colossal novels about the war; men you’ve never heard of, like Dos
Passos, producing a sort of heroic poem, every verse beginning and
ending with Goddam! Gorgeous! And chaps like Manship and Simonson. And
Bellows. And God knows who--there are thousands of ’em.”
“Well?” Lilah said, being very Russian with her cigarette.
Shawhan came down the ladder. He had a most engaging and roguish smile.
With the neck of his shirt turned in, he was more Byronesque than
vaudevillian; he would have been romantic if he had not looked out at
you through eyes so initiated and so skeptical.
“And there you are! Genius is a drug on the market.”
“Then you’re asking too much for these panels,” Lilah said sweetly.
“I’m a specialist,” was his shrewd reply, “not a genius. I have cashed
in on my facility. You’re paying, not for my work, but for my name.
When people come into this room, they will know who decorated your
walls and your stock will jump!”
“How did you manage it?” Lilah asked.
He smiled. “The New York way. A very exotic house and studio. Two
marriages with famous and temperamental women both of whom divorced
me, quite amicably. A dash of scandal. Parties every one wanted to get
to because they were both beautiful and risquè and the guests were
limited.... Thirty, no less, no more! An impassioned, and anonymous,
press agent. Kissing the finger-tips of such women as you. Getting the
reputation of being a misogynist. _And legs!_”
Lilah laughed. “And now?”
“You pay for it.”
“And you?”
“It doesn’t leave much to believe in, does it? That’s why I sneeze when
people drag in art. Art! Oh, my God. The whole thing is an elaborate
hoax. You want these walls--these lovely empty spaces--filled with
something gracious, pretty, to harmonize with your furniture and your
lamp-shades.”
“Oh, no--” Lilah interrupted.
“Oh, yes! I beg pardon. Yes! Your husband wouldn’t live with a wall by
Michelangelo--big, fat torsos and bumpy females and snakes. And how
would you look, in that gown, against a Gaugin jungle? Be honest.”
“Well--”
“You go to Miss de Blauvelt. She wants to sell you some Louis Quatre
chairs and one of those French sofas, an escritoire and a five hundred
dollar footstool. So she looks through her mental card-index and says:
‘French. Shawhan.’ Then she phones me. I get the specifications and the
limitations and the architects’ blue-prints. I go to the Palais Royal
and make sketches on the back of the menu-card. Mrs. Robert Peabody’s
Louis Quatre drawing-room for November twenty-eighth. Lots of pink. A
swing, with four Watteau ladies and satin garters, a poodle on a yellow
cushion, some fuzzy trees, a cupid on a pedestal and five hundred yards
of Alice Blue silk looped back with Fragonard tassels. One Tiepolo
column, one Boucher bosom and a knot of flowers.”
“You’re disgusting,” Lilah said.
“This is the Twentieth Century,” he reminded her, “and you are living
in New York.”
He backed away from his work, twisting the ladder aside. “What do you
think of it?”
“I like it. I believe you do. Isn’t your contempt a part of your
business manner?”
“Don’t you see--all this is very sad?” he remarked. “What I’ve told
you--what I am and what you are, and our buying and selling this way--”
He broke off. “Yes, I like it,” he admitted.
He stood, his hands on his hips, his head tilted, staring at the
exquisite thing he had somehow summoned out of his staleness and
disillusionment. Into his expression something mocking appeared to
contradict his absorption.
“Some day,” he said, “I shall decorate a pork-packer’s ballroom. Two
hundred thousand down and no interference! I shall paint what I like--a
series of cartoons--sky-scrapers, flappers, head-waiters, taxicabs,
chorus girls, Jews and fashionable women, cabarets, streets, theaters
and--the whole mess! Wouldn’t it be gorgeous? A parade, all the way
around the ballroom, where my pork-packer had expected nymphs in
panniers?”
Lilah tossed her cigarette away and yawned. “I see. You’re an artist,
after all. And a humbug.”
He laughed, and their eyes met with appreciation.
“Perhaps,” Lilah suggested, “you’ll put me into that cartoon.”
His glance deepened; his expression changed; as if he sensed the trap
laid down by her, he said dryly: “Perhaps.”
* * * * *
Lilah told Robert that Elmer Shawhan was an egoist.
“Probably,” Robert said. “He looks it.”
“Why? Because he is spectacular?”
Robert sensed opposition. “Why, yes. His hair--”
“Externals!” Lilah cried.
“That’s one of your phrases, Lilah. Don’t trip me unfairly. Hair _is_
an external, but the way a man cuts it is indicative of something
internal. I suspect your artist of being what you call him, an egoist,
because he has patiently cultivated a pompadour. Now, whiskers--”
Lilah put her fingers in her ears.
As the house began to take form and to emerge from the chaos of
reconstruction into a very harmonious and comfortable air of
permanence, Lilah discovered that she was being too extravagant. The
bills for all this mannered luxury began to appear, statements that had
a matter-of-fact coldness, a finality. She must face, placate Robert,
make him see, as always, in smaller things, her rightness.
Miss de Blauvelt had an exaggerated and flattering conception of
the wealth of her clients. She was accustomed to magnificence and
munificence. She spent other people’s money, Lilah discovered, with the
largest possible gesture, and then added her own fee, a compensation
out of all proportion to her services; she was “cheeky” in a way too
subtle for rebuff.
With a graceful sweep of her hands, she would say: “I can do a
delightful boudoir for ten thousand. Not perfect, of course--for
_that_--but modern and witty, a perverse little room. Leave it to me.
You don’t mind?”
The names of social celebrities flowed in and out of the stream of
her talk like minnows. She knew every one. Lilah gathered that at her
own house at Dinard she gathered together the froth of fashionable
and artistic Europe--skimmed off the cream for her own amusement.
With this woman, business seemed to be an excuse for indulging in
extravagances. The account, rendered before the workmen were out of the
house, staggered Lilah. She had, she realized, spent a fortune. Her
heart contracted and the blood rushed to her face, receding to leave
her trembling, frightened, sick. She had no idea how she was going to
face Robert with this fact--it was done; there was no going back. She
should have consulted him. The whole thing suggested a sort of vulgar
eagerness on her part, a head-long impatience. And she had made it
only too evident that Robert bored her. She must go back, patiently,
and try to understand herself and him, prepare him, somehow, for this
preposterous bill headed simply De Blauvelt, Interiors, Paris, New York.
Miss de Blauvelt appeared on the following day to make what proved to
be a final inspection of her handiwork. Lilah, caught unawares, felt
at a disadvantage in the presence of this compact little cosmopolitan.
There was something decidedly challenging in the frivolity of her
beautiful feet and ankles and the whiteness of her hair. She was an
old woman sustained by the success and color of her life. Everything
had been done that could be done by science and art to preserve, make
permanent, her famous slimness, her provocative and ugly features, her
_chic_. The result was not quite human; there were no wrinkles, no
visible signs of age; in the transparent mask of her face, only her
eyes seemed to be alive, black, intelligent and cruel. She never smiled
and Lilah decided that she couldn’t; plastic surgery had deprived her
of animation. She wore a tube-like dress, short in the fashion of the
moment, a turban of dyed metallic cloth and the curious square-toed,
clumsy, strapped slippers affected by the Parisian _mondaine_.
“Well? You like it?” she demanded.
“Very much.”
“You had better let me do your country place before I go back to
France.”
Lilah said decidedly: “Thanks. No.”
“Why not?”
“Your bill was exorbitant.”
Miss de Blauvelt’s eyes came around with a pounce. “Nonsense. I was
more than charitable! If you expected department store economies--”
She broke off. “Surely, you understood--”
“Oh, yes,” Lilah said hurriedly. “But I shan’t undertake another--not
now.”
“You must come to Dinard,” Miss de Blauvelt said in an even voice; “I
live there with two amusing and talented women, a sculptress and a
pianiste. It’s very simple and very beautiful.”
She made an expressive gesture. “This is my last house in America. You
may tell every one so. It will give your interior a peculiar luster and
perhaps reconcile you to the expense.”
And with a nod, she walked quickly out, and across the pavement to her
motor.
* * * * *
Lilah spent the rest of the afternoon at her desk adding up a list of
bills, De Blauvelt, Shawhan, plumbers, painters, masons, upholsterers,
warehouses, rugs, electricians, florists, contractors....
She was interrupted by a servant, a new acquisition like everything
else, who said: “Miss Fuller” in a dubious voice as if he were weary
of ushering in tradespeople and nobodies.
Lilah turned with relief. She hated details. She almost ran forward to
meet Grace Fuller, who came into the room unruffled and casual, as she
had entered the flat in Ninth Street.
Lilah forgot the bills in the excitement of displaying her possessions.
And as Grace Fuller followed her from room to room she felt her
enthusiasm mounting. For the first time her dreams seemed to be
concrete, her security certain. Her feet slipped along the rugs with a
luxurious appreciation of their softness. Grace Fuller followed, saying
very little. But then she never did have any enthusiasm. She might be
regretting--poor soul! This warmth and glow, after the room in Ninth
Street, the gas-log, the oak table, the green lamp and her father’s
chair, worn hollow.
“It’s quite like you,” Grace Fuller said. “Purry. I feel stroked
myself. Tea? By all means. I’m dog-tired.... New York all summer--heat
that withered the geraniums on the fire escape! I had to open the
dumb-waiter door for ventilation....”
She lighted a cigarette. “How’s Robert?”
“Awfully well.”
Lilah busied herself with cups and saucers. She did not care to discuss
Robert. But Grace Fuller said: “He hates New York at this time of year.”
“He has his club.”
“Has he?”
“Are you being disagreeable?”
“I don’t think so. I want you to be happy, and it seems to me that you
are doing figure eights around the danger sign.... In November, the
Maine natives go down East for deer. Robert always hunts with his gang
of Perkins and Littlefields and Brewsters. Hasn’t he told you?”
“We have been married less than six months. He wouldn’t leave me,”
Lilah said concisely.
“He would, if you gave him the least little push! He wanted a moose
this year.”
Abruptly, she changed the subject. She told Lilah that she was very
nearly worn out. It seemed to be her fortune to get nothing but
“hopeless cases,” invalids engaged in the long-drawn-out process of
dying by inches. She had had to witness so much poor, human suffering,
to face the mute or the querulous questions of people who “had to
know.” “The ones who suffer most are the ones who want to stay. They
seem to love life. They’re so futile, so pathetic! I’ve listened for
hours to women who could remember every detail of their girlhood--how
pretty they were, and the number of tucks on their graduation dress,
and all about their wedding day: what he said and the cinders on the
honeymoon journey, and how he took the littlest, weeniest bite out of
the lobe of her ear.... They want it all back again! I’m dog-tired,
trying to get it for them. When they die, they give me just the funny,
accusing look that boy in France gave me.”
“Poor Grace.”
“I’d like to nurse an alcoholic case or a pretty actress with the
mumps. Something to amuse me. I don’t understand death. I wish I did.
To put us here, to inform us that our stay is limited, to offer no
proof of immortality--it’s damnable! Animals don’t know, do they?
They’re afraid of being hurt, but do they know, when they’re old enough
to know anything, that some day, no matter how brave and quick they
are, they’ve got to give it all up?”
Lilah twisted her shoulders. “For heaven’s sake, Grace, be cheerful.”
“I can’t. I live in an atmosphere of dread and tip-toeing. Doctors
tip-toeing in and out. Relatives tip-toeing in and out. And the
poor creature on the bed yearning for life! I’m no good any more. A
rebellious nurse had better stop nursing. I’m going to stop, and come
back again when I have found something to offer them.”
Lilah had been turning a new idea over in her mind. Sparring for time,
she said: “You can’t justify death, Grace.”
“I might. I sometimes think it is more justifiable than life.”
“Don’t be bitter.”
“I’m not.” Grace Fuller put her tea-cup down. Her expression was
excited, she flushed and clasped her hands together as she always did
when she felt anything deeply. “It seems such a waste of power. Youth,
with all that energy. A wave of youth rising up in every generation and
spending itself against the facts of life. Why must it be? I remember,
when I was a child, how wonderful it all seemed, fields and clouds,
and wind. Even the seasons were exciting; when the first snow came, I
was in ecstasy, watching the landscape change. Something was always
waiting for me. I never knew, or cared to know what--but if I were to
open my eyes wide or stretch out my hand, there it would be--shining
and glorious, mine!”
She relaxed and sank back, the old cynical look reappearing, as if she
had lost hope again.
“I’m a fool. It happens to everybody.”
Lilah turned quickly and asked: “Would you have been happier with
Robert?”
That slow flush remounted. “No.”
“Then I want you to do something for me. I’m swamped with details,
correspondence, bills, people I don’t want to see and people I must
see. I need some one to help me. Some one, like you, who has a good
telephone voice and decent manners. Will you try it? Please don’t say
no! I hate talking business, but I assure you you won’t lose anything.
You can rent the flat in Ninth Street and come here. Now that the
second floor is finished, you can have our quarters on the third. The
servants are on the fourth.”
Seeing Robert in the doorway, Lilah called to him: “Hello! Just in time
for tea! Grace is going to be my secretary. Isn’t it wonderful?”
Robert took Grace Fuller’s hand and bent down a little to smile at her.
“I’m glad,” he said.
“Then I’ll come,” Grace Fuller answered.
Robert sat down beside Lilah on the narrow French sofa that bulked so
conspicuously as an item in the De Blauvelt account. He seemed heavier
than usual, very pink from his walk across town in a sharp November
wind. His eyes had that untroubled expression which particularly
irritated Lilah because it was an indication of profound inner content.
She did not want him to be contented, to take for granted her love, as
if a gift so inestimable could be accepted easily. Something warned her
to keep her temper; if Grace Fuller were watching for a rift in the
lute she would be disappointed.
She may have made a mistake in asking this waspish woman to live under
the same roof. Strangely enough, the prospect excited her. Without
Grace Fuller, there would be no rebound to life. She could fling her
challenge: “See what I am, what I have become,” at this surface, and
catch, in the deepening irony of the other, her own particular shimmer
and brilliance. Lacking Junius Peabody, who was desirable because he
enjoyed watching Lilah wrestle with destiny, Grace Fuller would be the
necessary audience. To know that she had loved Robert would make Robert
more endurable. Grace would pore over his stamp-albums and condone his
canine complex and perhaps read aloud to him the terrible books he
preferred, murder mysteries and western melodramas: “Nothing like a
crackerjack mystery, Lilah! Now this chap, Jenkins, was locked up in a
house on the Hudson and there was a sort of secret passage leading down
to the river--”
Lilah came back with a start to the unfamiliar outlines of her
drawing-room. Robert was being very genial and talkative. His enameled
boots caught the fire-light. Lilah’s eyes rested on his hands; she
noticed for the first time the breadth and strength of his fingers,
the blond hair on the backs of his hands. Whenever she came in contact
with the physical, she felt revulsion. She would have preferred a
disembodied Robert, or no Robert at all. She turned her eyes away with
a little shiver of apprehension....
When Grace Fuller had gone, Lilah sat for a long time in silence.
Robert lighted a cigarette mounted in a long tortoise-shell holder
with a gold mouth-piece. One hand rested over hers. She wondered what
he was thinking, whether he liked the room, the house, this brand-new
air of expensive perfection. The sound of his breathing, heavy and
regular, was audible above the muffled rumble of traffic in the street.
A servant removed the tea things and drew the shades, kindling lights
here and there on tables and against the paneled walls.
“Do you like it?” she said at last.
Robert moved. His answer came with the usual slow marshaling of facts
and words: “Shall I tell you the truth? I prefer the old house at the
Point.” His hand tightened over hers; she tried to draw her fingers
away, but he held them within his. “I’ve hurt you! But you don’t want
me to be a lap-dog, do you? Must I bark every time you say: ‘Speak,
Fido’?”
“Why didn’t you tell me so in the beginning? did you let me spend all
this money?”
“Because I love you,” he said simply.
“Do you?”
“Very much.”
Lilah hurried to the issue. “I’ve spent thousands and thousands. For
something you hate--”
“I know very little about such matters,” he said. “I left it to you
to re-furnish the house. I expected a certain expense. Ten or twenty
thousand--”
“I’ve spent forty thousand,” Lilah said, trying to keep her voice
steady.
There was a short silence. Robert’s grasp relaxed and she drew her hand
away. Presently he said: “That is a great deal of money, my dear.”
With a flash of temper she answered sharply: “Why didn’t you stop me,
then? Instead of letting me go blindly on, believing that I had your
consent? Was it a trick to trip me up?”
“Lilah!”
“Both you and your grandfather think I married you because I was hard
up and frightened! You’ve made me feel your suspicion. Suppose I had
really loved you--and I tried to make you see that I did--wouldn’t your
doubting me make me self-conscious?”
“Now you’re being nasty.”
She closed her eyes. Shivers of feeling ran through her like currents
of poison. “Nasty! What a primitive word! I’m being frank, if that’s
what you mean.”
“I thought you _did_ love me,” Robert said. “I’m probably
old-fashioned, but I admit that I had an entirely different idea of
love. I’ve read a lot of trash and believed a lot of sentimental
idiocy, perhaps....”
“What, exactly, did you expect?”
He turned. “Lilah! We mustn’t talk like this!”
She insisted: “What did you expect that I haven’t given you?”
He made a gesture of surrender. “If I told you, you’d laugh at me.”
“Do I laugh at you? How unfair you are! You are trying to make me out a
cheat.”
“No. I love you. Only don’t you see--I wanted, and still want,
companionship. You rather took this house out of my hands, didn’t you?
As far as I’m concerned, it might be a hotel. Even if I have rotten
taste, I like a little of it around--in my own room, for instance. Why
not? Am I irrational?” He unclasped his hands and clasped them again
with a slow pressure that whitened his knuckles. “I wanted to plan
things--go over things with you. I didn’t want this woman to buy my
bed--it’s none of her business! I’ve always dreamed of building a home
with the woman I loved and married.... I suppose you’re laughing at me.”
Lilah said nothing. She could not trust her voice.
She felt that her power over him had been shattered. None of the old
tricks would do. She must find new magic, and quickly, if she wanted
him.
“I’m not laughing at you,” she said at last. “If I’ve done wrong, I’ll
do the only thing I can do, under the circumstances; I’ll go.”
“You mean, leave me? Lilah, you’re joking! We’re a grown man and woman
trying to understand each other. I don’t care a damn about that forty
thousand. It’s you I’ve got to get at--and I can’t buy your heart. I’m
not rich enough....”
“That was a very pretty speech, Robert.”
“I didn’t mean it to be. I’m in deadly earnest. I’m not contented with
myself as I am. No one is, perhaps. But my case is extreme. I’m pretty
much of a waster. I waste myself on harmless amusements, but I waste
myself. I thought--I just imagined--it was a damn foolish notion--but I
wanted you to stir me up, get me started at something, make me want to
serve, somewhere, somehow. And when you married me, you dropped me out
entirely--” he spread his hands, “for this.”
He turned to her, his face white and strained. “There shouldn’t be much
of a toss-up between a house and a human being.”
She did not answer, but sat with her body drawn away, her shoulders
hunched, her breath quick and shallow. Her expression was guarded
but she permitted herself a half-smile that was both patient and
contemptuous.
“You’re so damned feminine,” he said. “My mother was like that. She’d
bang doors and sulk. And my father would rap and beg her to come out,
and she wouldn’t. Not for hours, while the rest of us went around with
lead in our hearts, feeling ashamed! When she did open the door, she’d
sort of smile. She was my mother, but I hated her when she did that....”
“What do you want me to say?” Lilah demanded.
“Something honest,” was his surprising answer.
She stood up suddenly. “I won’t stand this any longer. I won’t!”
She did not cry easily, but now she burst suddenly into a storm of
tears. The flood gates of fear and questioning broke; she was swept
away. Through it all, she was aware of the room, of her own attitude
and of Robert, frightened, aghast, repentant, trying to tear her hands
away from her face.
“Don’t cry. Lilah, don’t cry.”
She collapsed against him and he drew her down on his knees. His
unsteady hands caressed her hair. She felt his lips on her neck. She
drew in her breath sharply and the tears stopped; with shut eyes she
remained against his shoulder, motionless. The storm of feeling had
passed, leaving again that curious unreality. Robert was not a part of
experience; he was in her life for some purpose, to carry her forward a
little way. Without discontent there could be no advance. From him, she
would go on, perhaps to love.... But he already felt what she could not
feel, and this involved her because she had given herself. She shivered
and a deep sigh cut through her immobility. His arms tightened. He kept
on whispering, with his lips against her ear, but she heard nothing.
She became conscious again of the large expanse of Aubusson and of
pools of light in which hot-house flowers seemed made of wax, and of
sleek surfaces, smooth contours. Her own slippers, the chiffon across
her knees, were a part of the vision.
Robert was saying: “We mustn’t quarrel. It’s childish. I’ll do any
earthly thing for you.”
With a quick, almost feline motion, she turned in his arms. “Here
goes,” she said to herself.
And very deliberately, purposefully, she kissed him.
V
With that perilous moment bridged, Robert given again his unquestioning
security in her, Lilah began her search for experience, for
satisfaction, for a vague, undetermined happiness. She had for so many
years peered over the wall at the social garden-party, at women in
light dresses and men in polished hats, marionettes, voiceless, yet
animated, infinitely removed--she had imagined so much, given these
people a wholly romantic and unnatural luster--Now she found herself
about to drop into the garden, among them, and her eagerness took
Robert’s breath away. He told himself that he must be patient; when the
novelty had worn off, when Lilah had rubbed elbows with a world already
familiar to him, she, too, would discard it. In the meantime, he tried
to content himself with her rare impulses of affection, hasty caresses,
light kisses that stung his flesh and penetrated to his heart like
thin, precise knife-thrusts. For the most part she met him with banter
and postponement, as if she were skimming over the dark depths of life,
a vivid and elusive skater on silver skates....
He found himself, suddenly, a slave to hope. Some day she would skim
back to him, into the circle made by his love, his arms, and remain
there, safe. But she must first dart here and there, fearless and
foolish, enjoying herself. It became his dubious pleasure to watch,
ready to pull her out if the ice should crack.
Robert was not exactly a fool, although he took no pains to appear
otherwise. What he had seen of the world had landed him back at the
Point again, where, he argued, all the facts of life and death, of love
and hate, were uncomplicated and recognizable. He could not see, he
told Lilah, why experience should acquire anything by multiplication.
You were born, you loved, hated and died. You could do all these
things, and get out of it what there was in it, as well in one place as
in another; nothing was gained by chasing down the horizon--once you
got there, it was the same, love and life, hate and death. He preferred
a limited existence to the accumulated sensations offered by such
cities as New York and Paris. Crowds gave him a mental indigestion.
Ideas, unless they were based on truths, caused him to suffer an
intellectual heart-burn. He was not swift enough to chase the casual
and elusive theories of most modernists, who were content with the
haphazard because no one could pause long enough to argue or to prove.
But he was willing, after that sharp quarrel with Lilah, to experiment.
He made a hurried trip to Maine and shamefacedly kissed his spaniels,
turning back to New York with an assumed eagerness that deceived even
himself. In the train, he left the sleeper for the smoking-car and
sat up all night trying, as he put it, to reduce Lilah to a common
denominator. The secret of her fascination lay in her swift and
inexplicable changes of mood; he waited for favors with a feverish
sort of excitement. It was probably unhealthy, bad for him to be so
buffeted about by feeling, alternately exalted to heaven and left flat,
with a sense of humiliation and shame.
Another type of man might spare himself indignity by letting her see
a certain brutality. But Robert was not so gifted. He could only be
himself.
For her he had abandoned his “drinkin’” and had tried desperately to
part his hair on the side. The green sweater had gone down before her
contempt. In a hundred little ways he tried to re-make, improve, the
outward man; he knew when he bored her, although he was never certain
why he bored her. His enthusiasms were as authentic as hers. But
Lilah was Lilah, and for such a woman he, any man, would attempt the
impossible.
He had wanted a strong, sweet, fearless love, ecstasy and pride and
recognition.
What he had was different, but he could not be sure that he had not
wanted too much. Perhaps all women were like Lilah, and tormented you,
where they should offer their breasts for you to put your head against
and rest, and rest, from life.
* * * * *
When Grace Fuller moved in, Robert felt more comfortable. She was a
familiar, understanding sort of woman.
He wondered whether Lilah were justified in calling Grace a deliberate
celibate. He began to study her face, to question his knowledge of
her. She had never enjoyed kissing him, but had always pushed him
away, with an expression almost of fear in her eyes. He couldn’t say
that he had enjoyed it, either; it was too much like forcing her to
his will.... There were times, at night, when Lilah was strange and
emotional, when she pressed against him and ran her fingers up and down
the back of his neck with the caress he liked, and kissed him, quick,
almost furtive kisses; when she relaxed in his arms, suddenly, as if
she were about to surrender, and then was tense again, pushing him
away, turning her face aside....
He couldn’t understand.
Grace left him alone, left his senses alone. She was a good companion
in spite of her sharp tongue. He supposed that all nurses had that same
air of watching out for you, mothering you, seeing that things were
comfortable and orderly. There was no trace in her manner or her look,
of remembering; she let him off, magnificently. He would say that for
her; she was a sport! They began again, as people who have only just
met. And all those meaningless kisses and casual, artificial embraces
were forgotten in their common passion for Lilah.
Lilah became a bond between them. When Robert came in and Lilah was not
at home, he sought Grace and questioned her.
Lilah was fascinating, reckless, just a little terrible and they never
tired of discussing her. She had done this, or that. This one and
that one had telephoned. She had bought a new dress or a new book.
Everything she did startled them, because, once certain of Robert,
Lilah had become more startling, more reckless and more insatiable than
ever.
It was as if she had come into full possession of life without
questioning her right to it. She was not, as far as Robert could see,
happy, but she was, on the other hand, arrogant with fulfillment.
Because she herself had succeeded, she could not help having contempt
for people who had failed.
This amused Robert, but it was also cause for a certain amount of
chagrin, since he saw that his position had been the lever she needed
to lift her out of obscurity. She could never have done it alone.
But because he loved her, he did for her everything she seemed to
require. Before long, she knew every one of importance in Robert’s
world. It was a world limited by necessity to a few hundred souls.
Lilah called them Murray Hill blackbirds. They were, in fact, the old
guard, a thinned-out company of so-called Knickerbockers, New Yorkers
long enough to cherish their few square blocks of sacred soil with a
tenacity that was almost aristocratic.
They gave Lilah critical inspection; her house was less important and
could, in its severe restraint and exact emphasis, be taken for granted.
Flushed, beautiful, excited, Lilah received them. The sleek Aubusson
became the arena of her first social struggle. These people were
fashionable but not modish. For them, sensing their prejudices, Lilah
wore black and was over-careful of her accent. Her Russian atmosphere
was discarded for the occasion, and Robert and Grace were amazed,
embarrassed, by a totally different Lilah, a châtelaine, wistful,
eager and disarming.
Robert was rather proud of the gathering; people like this made him
feel safer about the future; they cemented the cracks in society. He
adored dowdy wealth because it was an indication of permanence, a stand
against the upstart, ’Change. There was something plucky about foulard,
sensible shoes and elaborate whiskers in the Jazz age. While these
people lived, the last cable held. Their names were less impressive now
that their city had become unaware of them. But Lilah seemed to enjoy
juggling these rather musty titles. Robert didn’t know it, but she was,
consciously, laying a foundation down. She would stand, eventually, not
upon the quicksand of new, untried, if glamorous names, but upon the
veritable, bed-rock Manhattanese.
Afterwards, to Grace and Robert, she was explicit: “What fearful bores!
All of them, except Mrs. Humphrey-hyphen-whatever-her-name-is.... The
red-headed one.”
“She goes everywhere,” Robert explained, “and is invited nowhere. She
_was_ glorious, thirty years ago.”
“She is now.”
“She’s a bad egg,” Robert said.
“What do you mean, exactly?”
“Oh, she left her husband, and lived with a chap--some one--I’ve
forgotten.... She’s quite purple.”
Lilah laughed. “I’d die if I had to know these people.... I liked your
purple one. She was human. The rest ... _blackbirds_!”
She was being Russian again.... While the new servant, placated by the
announcement of so many celebrated blackbirds, removed the tea tables
and gathered up cups and saucers, Lilah disposed of Robert’s friends
with a tirade of pointed witticisms. She could afford to laugh at them
because now, she knew, she could subjugate them. All she had to do was
to snub the purple lady, entertain discreetly, grow old, and die. In
ten years she would look just like the rest of them--ground-grippers
and a pince-nez, a maribou boa, a bit of real lace, amethysts and
rheumatism in her finger-joints.... She preferred more difficult
attainment....
Suddenly she went to the piano and, still smoking, played a rakish
accompaniment to a French song.
“_Je sais que c’est une folie!_”
Robert and Grace Fuller turned about in their chairs and listened. She
seemed to be unaware of them. With her head thrown back, the cigarette
aslant, she sang in a light, high voice, a little song about madness
and youth and _la tendresse_ and, meltingly, _l’amour_.
* * * * *
From this little occasion, Lilah stepped off into New York. There were,
she discovered, no barriers raised against a pretty, witty and wealthy
woman. She had all the ingredients to make a very potent brew.
In the beginning, Robert was always at her elbow, puzzled, but
stimulated in exact proportion to her own pleasure. New York was not
“dry” and before long Robert was drinking again with that boastful
abandonment characteristic of prohibition. Everywhere there was gin,
and according to the social scale, it was either genuine, or frankly
synthetic. Lilah drank for the first time in her life, steadily,
carelessly. She explained to Robert that there was no other way to
“fizz” at dinner or to hold off fatigue. And, happening to discover a
substantial supply of good wines and whisky in the cellar of the Murray
Hill house, she wrote to Junius Peabody and obtained his somewhat
satirical permission to uncork all but the rarest vintages. Those,
he explained, belonged to his “heirs” and were to be handed down as
historical evidence. Lilah must consider, take pity on the parched
palates of her sons....
Lilah tossed the letter into the fire. She did not intend that there
should be sons. She was infected by the casuistry of the age, a
total lack of interest in the coming generation. Behind men’s lives
there was no longer any sustaining idealism, any heroic faith in an
unbroken purpose. The war had severed a link in the chain of passions,
spiritual, national and racial. The day, the needs and fulfillments of
the day, sufficed.
Robert could find nothing to refute her claim that the war had made
morality ridiculous and had stripped adolescent humanity of its
illusions. Everywhere, in both men and women, he encountered the
cynicism that goes, usually, with embittered old age, with failure and
disappointment. People were reckless because the moral skids were off;
there was a gay determination, everywhere evident, to meet disaster
as gayly as possible. But this was not heroic; it was cowardly, and
Robert found himself despising the times he lived in.
As usual, he was not expressive. Something about his physical pinkness
and blondness, his air of being extremely well-fed and well-brushed,
held him back from complaining. Lilah might be right. Certainly, there
was no evidence of spirituality, of change.
* * * * *
New York was dancing-mad, in a mood essentially unlike the madness
of Nineteen-Fourteen, when blind satiety had twirled on the lid of a
seething volcano. This madness was sophisticated and purposeful. The
Argentine tango had given way to the primitive rhythms of Africa and
Maylasia, a brutal tom-toming, savagery stalking progress through a
maze of the senses. There were very few private dances. Robert could
remember the day of the cotillion leader, Ward McAllister’s reign. Now,
society patronized the commercial dance-halls or the exclusive “clubs”
given over to all-night dancing, in defiance of a closing law which
arbitrarily separated jazzing couples at one in the morning. There were
few formal occasions; hostesses relied upon haphazard dinner-parties, a
box at the theater or the opera, and the confused, prismatic, exciting
contact afterwards.
Lilah danced beautifully, without a trace of vulgarity, but Robert
objected to the frank enticement of her gowns that displayed her flesh
to the casual observer. She answered that he belonged in the Dark Ages;
no one paid any attention to backs and arms; the sight was too usual.
Fashion had freed women because women had first freed themselves.
They were too frankly undressed to be alluring, and men ought to be
grateful; nudity rid them of obscene imaginings.
Robert was not certain that women’s clothes were a symbol of masculine
indifference. Lilah might be right; she was infinitely more clever than
he, and besides she said things with a conviction, a finality, that
floored him. It is hard to contradict a woman you love. He had his
reservations.
They rarely dined at home. As the winter progressed, their program
of pleasure became more complicated. The details were left to Grace
Fuller, who sat at a desk the better part of every day, answering
the telephone and attending to Lilah’s correspondence. An avalanche
of people had swept Robert’s handful of Murray Hill blackbirds out
of the picture. It had been but a step from these conservatives to
their children, the reckless generation that had outlived but had not
out-thought the war; and from them to the professionals, a little world
of hard, bright, amazingly talented modernists, racially nondescript,
intellectually polyglot, artistically indeterminate.
Robert encountered too many enthusiasms to have much faith in a
standard of taste. A sort of united press-agentry conspired to prove
that there was an American art. Painstakingly, Robert sought what Lilah
declared already existed, and he failed to find it. He found, instead,
a horde of facile, astonishing copyists. The extremists irritated him
because they struck him as being too lazy to study. Further than that,
he refused to express himself.
For several months he followed wherever Lilah led. Then it became
an easy matter to excuse himself. He did not dance, and the rôle of
caryatid to the striped awning at the Palais Royal was proving irksome.
Conversation, he insisted, had been annihilated by those jungle noises
produced by the saxophone, the oboe, the violin, the piano and the
bass-drum. He was not capable of feeling the necessary emotion; he
preferred staying at home to holding a half-dozen strange and hectic
women in his arms.
“By all means, stay,” Lilah said agreeably. She kissed him on the top
of his head and went out, wrapped in a voluminous coat of gold cloth,
from which her face emerged, powdered, delicately rouged, like the face
of a bisque figurine.
Her mistiness had taken on a certain sharp and defined quality; she
was more accentuated, less shadowy. The petulant droop of her lips
was pronounced; her eyes were larger and more brilliant--they sought
admiration frankly, if disdainfully, and gave nothing in return.
Robert went to his easy chair with a sense of having been left flat. He
expected at least a show of protest, of regret.
Grace Fuller was at work, in the library; he heard the click of her
typewriter. He might go to her. Damn it, why not? She might be able to
tell him what Lilah had meant when she said, “By all means, stay.”
He climbed the stairs slowly, puffing his cigar. He was, he realized,
very tired. Pleasure exhausted him because he didn’t believe in it. To
Lilah, it had all the luster of a Cause.
Grace Fuller glanced up.
“Not going?”
“Not going.”
“Why?”
Robert said lightly: “I’m fagged. Old age, I suppose.”
She pushed the machine away and sat staring at him with an expression
which made him vaguely uncomfortable.
“What did Lilah say?”
Robert laughed: “She invited me by all means to suit myself.”
“You made a mistake. Why didn’t you tell her how tired you are and make
her stay at home?”
“I can’t _make_ Lilah do anything.”
“I wouldn’t admit it, if I were you.”
“Why not? She is undisciplined, but I would be the last one to try to
curb her.”
“It’s too late, Robert. Lilah has taken the bit. She’s running away
from you.”
With a pang of irritable fear, Robert said sharply: “Nonsense.”
Grace Fuller jerked the typewriter forward again and struck at the keys
with her long, cool fingers. Her mouth had hardened; her eyes were
obstinate. “Very well,” she said.
“See here, Grace. Don’t exaggerate! Lilah’s excited. She has never
seen life. She isn’t stale. And you and I are.... She’ll get over it.
There’s good in her.”
“It isn’t ‘bad’ to love life,” Grace answered. “I am only suggesting
that it is bad for you.”
“I can stand it.”
Grace Fuller gathered together her day’s work with deliberate gestures,
sheaves of gray note-paper heavily embossed with the Thirty-eighth
Street address in the English fashion, square envelopes, checks and
receipted bills. Then she rose and stood for a moment looking down at
Robert.
“I’m really very happy, Grace,” he said, on his guard against something
in her expression.
“I’m awfully glad,” she said finally, “to hear that.”
She turned to leave the room, but Robert spoke quickly: “Don’t go. I
want to talk to you....” He hesitated, and then said awkwardly, “about
yourself.”
“Myself?” Grace Fuller hesitated, flushing. “Please don’t.”
But she came back, and sank with a deep sigh, a sudden, almost pathetic
relaxation, into a chair before the fire. Robert had never seen her
looking so positively ugly; the guards were down; her distinction
had given way to the essential woman, a creature defeated by her own
disbelief. It was shocking, and to Robert, humiliating. He turned his
eyes away.
“Don’t talk about me,” Grace said. “I prefer to be left in my own
Nirvana of self-forgetfulness. I have conquered ambition and regret,
and you’re sorry for me! You ought to congratulate me....”
She caught her breath sharply. “How well that sounded! I almost
convinced myself....” She smiled crookedly at him, with a funny little
grimace. “You can’t get Nirvana without surrendering. I suppose there’s
some primal bug of hope in my system; I still cherish the unattainable.
I wish I had had the courage to fling myself away, as nuns do. What
peace! To believe ... I can’t.... Here I am, talking about myself....”
“There ought to be some way,” Robert said, “to live in the world
and like it. I used to. At one time I had things reduced to pretty
simple terms. Lilah has shaken me out of my security. She is like a
humming-bird, or something swift and alive. You’re right--she has left
me behind! My own world is stale, and hers is beyond my comprehension.
Those darts and flights and quick stabs at things.... When a man gets
to be my age, he wants to stand on a sort of hill and look off at his
future. I’m too old to be puffing up the nether side. Frankly, I don’t
know where Lilah is leading me, or whether, if I ever over-take her,
I shall see anything beyond. Have I said too much? This isn’t in the
nature of a confession. I’m not disgruntled. Only I thought that you
might....”
Grace interrupted: “I can’t analyze her. She dazzles me. For all I
know she is shallow water, but I am more inclined to think that she
is beyond our depth, yours and mine. We’re making rather fools of
ourselves trying to reach her and drag her up to our level into the
common light of day. I adore her. She is the only human being I’ve ever
known I could believe in, because she is absolutely honest.”
“Then why--” Robert began.
“Because you’ll never understand her! Dear old Robert. You’re a
brownstone-front and Lilah is an English basement. You’ve inherited all
the prejudices and social quaverings of the ’Eighties. Lilah is--I wish
there were a superlative for the word modern; would it be futurist? She
has bolted into a new generation, with all its recklessness and daring
and passion for facts. She likes things as they are, raw and naked. And
that makes her saner than you and me, and safer.”
“I’m not sure that you’re right,” Robert said after a moment. “I think
Lilah dodges reality. And what I’m afraid of is that the facts will
spring out from ambush and hurt her terribly. I don’t want her hurt!
There’s something ... at times ... like a willful child....” His
expression changed. He became unaware of Grace Fuller’s watchfulness.
“I have failed to show her anything.”
* * * * *
When Lilah came in at two o’clock, she found them still together, in
the library filmed with the smoke of cigars and cigarettes and before a
fire that had burned out.
She crossed the room swiftly, letting her gold cloak slip away from
her as the petals of a flower fold back from a slender stamen. She
was dressed in pollen yellow with amber ornaments; barbaric ear-rings
brushed her shoulders. She wore no rings, not liking them; her wedding
ring had been discarded an hour after her wedding.
“Hello! Still awake? I thought you were sleepy, Robert! Who has a
cigarette? I came back before I wanted to because I had twinges of
conscience. I thought afterwards, that you might be ill. It was foolish
of me. I made apologies to the Sinclairs and painted a terrible
picture--Robert with a fever. They wanted me to go on to the Club,
so I went. Reluctantly! Now don’t you both feel silly? I danced with
Heifetz. He has eyes like agates set in satin cushions. He dances
divinely, but I was afraid he might scratch one of his famous hands
on this girdle of mine--the beads are so sharp. He thought me quite
Austrian, not French. He is coming here with that American violinist
who made such a hit in Rome and has married a pretty American girl
when he had a choice of titles and millions. It was really awfully
amusing. Poiret was there, looking us over. He is rather like a
Bedouin--Barker’s Constantine Madras. He thinks American women
potential; but they lack something the French have. Now you know, both
of you, that we don’t know how to wear hats; if we’re picturesque,
we’re not _chic_, and if we’re _chic_, we’re not picturesque. I’m
sick and tired of hearing about Cécile Sorel. Poiret raved, too, and
there was a little Roumanian attaché from Washington who declared
that she is the most beautiful woman in the world. I can’t see it.
She has a wonderful neck, but that mouth! And there’s nothing subtle
about flamingo-pink ostrich feathers in a Roman helmet made out of
rhinestones. Bordoni is lovelier; she has the most provocative feet
in the world. Heifetz likes olive women with eyebrows ... at least,
I think so--he danced with one and his expression was like the last
movement of Debussy’s _L’Après-Midi d’un Faune_.... Another cigarette,
Robert. Aren’t you two being rather glum? What have you been talking
about? Me, of course! I suppose you dished me up from soup to nuts.
Is there anything left of me? Do you like me? I’m a trusting soul, to
leave you together! Not a servant in sight and you two marooned in the
library, picking my mortal bones....”
She perched on the arm of Robert’s chair and the cloak fell to the
floor. She was as alive, as vivacious, as if the night were only begun.
She had an imperishable luster, a surface brilliance that was beginning
to harden, like the skin of a pearl....
* * * * *
Lilah dreaded the approach of Spring. Summer meant the Point, where she
had no one to stand between Robert and herself except Junius. There
had been no appreciable abatement of the New York season; very few
people had gone South, since all eyes were turning again toward Europe.
Lilah suggested Paris to Robert, but he was, for once, determined. He
expected her to go with him, in June, to Maine.
Lilah had been launched with a certain momentum; now she could not
stop. She ran from one important pleasure to another. Her time was
taken up by the meaningless activities of the young married set, the
débutantes of an immediate yesterday who were now tasting freedom and
a characteristic dissipation; marriage seemed to be not a bondage but
an excuse for license; the manners, and the casual morality of these
matrons were the result, they said, of the War. Most of them had
married in a hurry, but there were no signs of leisurely repentance;
rather, divorce was spoken of across the dinner-table and accomplished
after breakfast. Speech was reckless, profane and satirical; there was
nothing left to be shocked at because everything had been said. Love
was always possible, but never probable unless tinged, at least, with
the illicit. Concessions were made to any one who had “a line,” and
lapses from social grace were condoned and even glorified.
There was, Lilah discovered, a code, astonishing to the older
generation. But this had always been so. The difference lay, not in the
code itself, but in the mental condition that had produced it. This
generation had been hurled against the bayonets, into the mud-pits and
stench holes, the heroisms and pitiless defeats of war. Brought up to
believe in progress, in their own infallibility and triumph, they had,
in adolescence, been stripped of their most inestimable faith. It was
natural that they should scorn both their teachers and the untruth
they had been fed, as with a spoon. They made their own deductions;
impatient, ironic, and without sentiment, they raced forward.
The men were more balanced than the women; a preponderance of
serious-minded men were intent on finding out something, no matter
what. Lilah listened to much bitter speculation. While they speculated,
they either drank or danced or, without emotion, experimented in the
flesh.
Lilah met some strange fish. There were times when her over-stimulated
mind refused to accept impressions and she saw faces swimming,
floating, snatched away, reappearing, like the fantastic denizens of
an aquarium. The city required that a woman should appear impervious
to fatigue; Lilah fell into the luxurious habit of having her tired
face “patted” into lines of animation at so much an hour. Tilted back
in a combination barber-chair and operating table, she gave herself
up to the fingers of a beauty specialist. Lilah submitted to hours
of manipulation; her face was smothered in clay masks, packed in
ice, slapped, pinched, and stroked. These were her only moments of
relaxation. At the mercy of the expert, her body rested, her mind swam
in and out of the mazes. At her side, upon a highly antiseptic glass
table, bottles and jars contained the supposedly mysterious ingredients
of youth; Lilah believed in their advertised potency. Lulled by the
touch of soothing fingers and the odor of creams, lotions, tonics,
herbs, sachets, rouges and powders, Lilah spent hours in these brocaded
salons. Other hours, fixed appointments rigorously kept, were spent at
the hairdressers’, where, before a triple mirror, beneath a cluster
of lights, her vanity was fed by a mannered Frenchman who wielded the
Marcel irons with a sort of tenderness. Her hands, surrendered to
a pale girl in black, became smooth and pointed, tinted, polished.
She enjoyed the odor of this establishment--a combination of violet
brilliantine, singed hair and a Gallic thrift.
Early in February her life took a strange turn. She went around a
corner into a new street.
* * * * *
She had been invited, significantly, without Robert. May Sinclair
thought Robert a wet-blanket and had said: “Come alone. It’s going to
be a bit wild. Robert wouldn’t understand. Give him his slippers and
leave him at home.”
The Sinclairs lived in a Park Avenue apartment, fifteen stories above
ground. A columbarium maze of small rooms had been transformed, by a
judicious knocking out of walls, into a stately salon. Upon this lofty
shelf Mrs. Sinclair lived and entertained, in the fashion of modern New
York, any one who amused her.
Lilah found the company already there. A man sat at the piano,
improvising. She recognized Montague Wilder and his inevitable tumbler
of whisky. He couldn’t play, he said, unless he was thoroughly drunk.
Then he played divinely. He looked up as Lilah came in and, not
pausing, called: “Lilah! Lovely Lilah! Dance for us! This is a waltz on
a poem by von Hofmanstahl. Listen! Isn’t it lovely? Dance. Something
Viennese! Cupids and garlands, hoops and little waists....”
Lilah lifted her arms. Suddenly she felt very gay and triumphant. She
was conscious of people sitting in the shadowy corners of the room,
watching her. She began to waltz. The little square of cloth that did
for a train got between her feet and she caught it up, exposing her
ankles to the frank admiration of her audience. No one said anything.
This was the lazy after-dinner hour before vivacity had worked its way
to the surface. Later, every one would talk at once.
Lilah said breathlessly: “Mrs. Vernon Castle!” And waltzed into the
arms of Chivers Chew, who was the only man in the room on his feet.
They whirled for a minute (Chew danced abominably) and then Lilah sat
down beside Wilder. “That was wonderful, Montague. But play something
serious. Chopin.”
“For God’s sake, Montague, cut it out,” Chew complained. “I’m blue
enough.”
“Use your mind,” some one advised. “You can do anything with your mind.”
Montague Wilder improvised on the theme “Kalua.” Glittering scales
ornamented the melody; he took it by the hand and led it into the
Debussy half-tones, so that the South Sea ragtime tune became a wistful
French song, a thing of strangeness and nuance. His left hand reached
for the whisky glass without seeming to know what his right hand did,
but there was no break in the invention of technical feats. Through
this dissonance and unexpected harmony the familiar melody seemed
classical, important. “You’re wickedly clever,” Lilah said.
“Wait until I’ve had a quart,” he answered. “I’ll play the D-flat waltz
in thirds. Rosenthal could do it, but no one else ever has.”
“Who’s here?” Lilah asked.
“Oh, the Heywoods. Pound, the shipbuilder. He’s middle-class English.
‘The wife’ is with him and she’s worse. Carey; the Hawaiian Carey. Miss
Wagner--pronounced with a wag. Putnam Flagg and a girl from San Diego
who writes. May has never drawn such a hand--aces and eights! Why are
_we_ here?”
“Who is Putnam Flagg?” Lilah interrupted.
“I don’t know.”
“What is May going to do with us?”
“The opera. Then back here. And then talk, until morning.”
“Talk?”
May Sinclair unfolded and rose from a long sofa upholstered in taupe
velvet. “Come on! ‘Butterfly’!”
“‘Butterfly’! Good God,” Wilder groaned.
“Let’s stay here and play, you and I,” Lilah whispered.
“No, you don’t!” May Sinclair’s clear, high voice came between them.
“Drink that whisky, Montague, and bring Lilah! Farrar’s singing.”
“Worse and worse,” Montague Wilder said. But he rose, and Lilah found
her wrap.
In the elevator she brushed shoulders with a tall man who stared at
her down his nose. May Sinclair never introduced any one. This, Lilah
supposed, was Putnam Flagg. Afterwards, long afterwards, it used to
amuse her to think of their meeting in a stuffy little elevator that
slid down fifteen stories while they stared at each other.
He had a curious, rather flat nose, eyes like an animal and the
beautifully modeled full mouth of a satyr.
They did not speak, but Lilah thought: “I hope May will let him come
with me.”
The Sinclair motor waited at the curb, and Lilah hung back, pretending
to adjust the collar of her wrap. She heard Mrs. Sinclair call:
“Lilah! Lilah!” With a flurry, the writer from San Diego and the
elder Carey embarked, the Englishman and his wife followed and the
attendant, closing the door of the limousine, signaled for Lilah’s
little brougham.... She was to have the tall man and Montague Wilder to
herself.
She beckoned to them; the car slipped into the stream of downtown
traffic upon the heels of May Sinclair’s crowded chariot, and again she
became conscious of the pressure of her shoulder against his.
“I am Mrs. Peabody,” she explained.
“Major Flagg,” he answered briefly.
They did not speak again until a skillful and precarious landing had
been made before the Opera. It was Montague Wilder’s monologue. He
complained on the way across town that opera in New York was debased,
a commercial side-show. There were no voices worth mentioning. No one
below the peanut heaven knew anything about music; tradition was lost
on the balance of the house, and therefore the singers played fast and
loose with the scores. He had heard a distinguished prima donna cheat
three times in one evening, substituting a b flat for a high c to the
rage and mortification of Moranzoni; but the audience was unaware, so
why bother to sing? Galli flatted to her heart’s content. Now that
Caruso was gone, there was no one. No one, that is, save Diaz, who was
permitted to sing once or twice a season--it was worth going a thousand
miles to hear him do the prologue of the “Coq d’Or” and the rag-picker
in “Louise.”
But who could sing “Depuis le Jour” since Mary had gone to Chicago?
Jeritza would snuff out like a rocket, in two years, or less. She was
too damned Teutonic....
In the lobby, May Sinclair gathered her aces and eights and led them
around the red velvet corridors to her box. She was a tall, blonde,
long-waisted woman who had reduced from two hundred to one hundred and
thirty-five pounds in less than a year and had had a sort of personal
renaissance, a rebirth. From a fat placidity, a dowdy gentleness, she
had entered upon a willowy emotionalism; she was enormously interested
in what she had, for years, surrendered because of her sense of the
fitness of things. She was experimenting; it was no longer ridiculous
to experiment. She was forty but she was not fat.
Butterfly’s relatives were retreating before a matter-of-fact
Pinkerton, sung by Martinelli. Farrar, in a nasturtium-red kimono with
a metallic obi, her blue-black hair a pinwheel of lacquered ornaments,
crouched before an artificial cherry tree in the fullness of unnatural
blossoming. Lilah saw the stage, a pool of light, and the two small
gesticulating figures, across the shoulders of Mrs. Sinclair and the
writer from San Diego. That music, melting, propitiating, assailed her,
like a personal appeal. _Bimba, dagli occhi pieni di malia--_
If Martinelli would only cut his hair....
The house was not crowded, but, as always, the boxes made a show--poor
relatives of the holders, or relatives of the poor relatives, or music
teachers, or God knows who.... Lilah had not heard “Butterfly” often
enough to be bored. But Montague Wilder had curled up in the ante-room
and had gone sound asleep.
Suddenly Lilah’s eyes turned to Major Flagg. She had wanted him to be
watching her, and he was. Their eyes held. It was a game. His eyes
were unwavering and yet something kept flickering in them; it was as
if a shutter opened and closed. Whenever she was about to leap into
his eyes, he shut her out. More than anything she had ever wanted, she
wanted to get by that barrier, whatever it was, into his eyes. Once
inside, she could conquer him, but never so long as he kept her out.
She had not spoken to him except to say that she was Mrs. Peabody and
to receive his polite but noncommittal answer.
He was winning the game....
Lilah shrugged her shoulders and turned back to the stage, where
Pinkerton, feeling carefully behind him for the steps, drew Butterfly
into the _dolce dimora_. Farrar, abandoned, Carmen in a kimono, swayed
forward, lost in ecstasy; her feet, in gold lacquer sandals, mounted
the steps, slowly, slowly, as her head tilted back to that kiss on the
threshold....
“Oh, God,” Montague Wilder said, sitting up, disheveled and sleepy.
“Puccini! Lilah--let’s go back and drink more of May’s Scotch.”
She shook her head.
It was no use pretending they had not looked at each other like that.
In the corridor, pacing up and down with Mrs. Sinclair, who couldn’t
find any one to smile at because it was a parade of “loans,” Lilah
heard in snatches that Putnam Flagg was “queer,” that he had “ideas.”
He had been gassed and had a bad heart. It made Mrs. Sinclair jumpy
because at any moment he might faint.
“Talk to him, Lilah, I can’t.” Mrs. Sinclair caught sight of old
“Rosie” Jackson and shed Lilah.
Lilah found herself at Flagg’s side. He was too tall. She felt little
and silly. But more than that she was excited, a dangerous, unfamiliar
excitement. She could not explain it, then, or later. He spoke of the
opera. He liked it. He liked Farrar. “Because she is alive. A woman
like that....”
“Well?”
“Magnificent! Not quite feminine.”
“Do you know her?”
“No. I shouldn’t want to.”
“Why?”
“I hate finding sawdust in dolls.”
“Perhaps you wouldn’t.”
“I might.” He smiled down at her. “And then I’d have one less
enthusiasm. I can’t do with too few! It’s lonely enough as it is. Rows
of ’em, prone, with the sawdust spilling out of their heads! Leave me
Farrar, please.”
After a moment he said: “This is the first opera I’ve heard in five
years. I’ve been in New Mexico for two years. Before that, in France, I
didn’t care to go. I hope Mrs. Sinclair won’t leave early. I want to be
in at the death.”
“Montague Wilder would consider you very unsophisticated. He laughs at
Puccini, or, as you know, he goes to sleep.”
Flagg seemed for a moment to consider. “I don’t dare to laugh at
things,” he said presently. “It’s dangerous. You begin by laughing at
your pet little detestations and you wind up by losing your big faiths.
It doesn’t pay to be too fastidious.”
“Doesn’t it?” Lilah said lightly.
He shut her out again. As if embarrassed by having made a confidence,
he turned his head away. People were staring at them and Lilah wondered
whether she had been recognized. Her photograph, taken by a flattering
man of title against a background of Florentine brocade, had been
published broadcast in those magazines whose business it is to foster
the idea that an American society really exists. Lilah had discovered
that it is not altogether easy to get yourself advertised, even though
you happened to be Mrs. Robert Peabody. But she had taken this hurdle,
as she took all of them, with alacrity, and it was therefore not
improbable that this strolling crowd stared at her for the reason that
the American crowd loves its celebrity as the Englishman loves his
duke. Ordinarily, she would have been content to enjoy the flattery
implied by this attention alone, but to-night her pleasure was doubled
because she particularly wanted this man to be aware of her. He could
scarcely be unaware that she was attracting attention.
At the box door, Mrs. Sinclair waited with the air of being about to
sweep them into a net. “We’re going on to the Rendezvous after the
second act. Montague’s fearfully bored and Carey has a Gilda Gray
complex. I hope you won’t mind, you two.”
Flagg made a polite if not enthusiastic gesture and Lilah, catching his
eyes deliberately, permitted her own to say: “I’m sorry, for your sake.”
As they entered the box, he remarked simply: “I have a rotten heart and
can’t dance.... Who is Gilda Gray?”
“She is a lovely, initiated, transplanted savage,” Lilah explained,
“who dances the hula-hula on Forty-fourth Street.”
Again their eyes held. The lights dimmed; with a sigh, a rustle, the
great audience faced again the glowing proscenium. Lilah had a curious
sensation of being isolated, alone, in a crowded emptiness, with this
man. Life, for the moment, was immeasurably suspended. There was a
dignity, a beauty about the impending, the imminent disaster. She would
love this man. She could not help herself. She paused, amazed, before
the strangeness and the splendor of that recognition. The moment
prolonged itself, until, in the fixed and intense meeting of their
eyes there was mutual declaration. It seemed that they must sit thus,
strangers, in a shadowy balcony above a pool of music, forever....