There was nothing to do but for Lilah to go.
Robert came into her room again, pale, with that new look of a man who
has found himself in suffering.
“I’m going, Robert.”
Robert sat down by the bed. He avoided looking at her. It was a pain to
look at her; Lilah, with that ghost whiteness, the blue veins showing
at her temples, her hair in two childish braids over her shoulders. She
was like a little girl. At the same time, there was a mystery about
her. She had suffered so. She had had to pass, alone, through a dark,
terrible suffering where no one could follow or help her. Robert felt
ashamed, because his own suffering was so unimportant in comparison to
hers. And yet his own cried out for speech. He wanted her to know that
she had killed something in him; he would never tell her. Never.
“You can go, if you want to,” he said stiffly.
Lilah turned her head on the pillow. “You don’t want me to stay, do
you?”
“Not if you love Flagg.”
“I do.”
After a moment, Robert said, “I’ve seen Flagg. He’s staying at
Biddeford. Did you know?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose my grandfather told you.”
“Your grandfather is decent enough to pity me.”
Suddenly Robert went down on his knees and put his face on her hand.
“God knows I pity you. Stay with me, Lilah. Tell me where I’ve failed.”
“It’s no good,” she said, “to try. To stay. Don’t blame me too much. I
didn’t know what love was.”
Her hand stirred beneath his lips, and he got up again stiffly.
“You must stay until you’re well.”
“They’ll let me walk to-morrow,” she said eagerly.
“Flagg wants me to divorce you.... Well, I won’t.”
“Why?”
He had not intended to tell her. But the answer was torn out of him,
a physical wrench, as if he had pulled a leech from off his heart.
“You’ve hurt me enough between you! I’ll be damned if I’ll let you
humiliate me. A man who divorces his wife is a coward. You may do what
you like. But I won’t divorce you.”
Lilah turned on her side, away from him. She could see the sky, a deep,
warm blue, with thin clouds passing over. And a quick flight of birds.
She had intended to tell Robert that she was sorry. Now she couldn’t.
After a moment, he went out.
* * * * *
She left the Point one morning in June. Her trunks and boxes had
gone off the night before. Robert’s motor, driven by the stable man,
Edmonton, was to take her to the station. Robert had flung away up the
beach, followed by the spaniel. Junius kissed her good-by. He permitted
himself only one reproach. “I’m not sure that this is going to be any
better. You won’t like poverty. And happiness at the expense of another
is likely to go stale.”
“You had Venice,” she reminded him.
“But I came back.”
He took her hand. “Are you sure?”
“Quite.”
A wave of faintness, something almost hysterical, caused her to lean
against him. “We have to be true to ourselves. Sacrifice is out of
date.... If Robert is wise, he’ll let me go and not care.”
“Good-by, my dear.”
She kissed him quickly.
The motor turned out of the drive, sped smoothly through the forest,
now richly green, and she saw the place where she had been thrown,
where Flagg, late that night, had found her. It was like him to have
arrived sooner than he was expected. Like him, once there, to have
faced his responsibility. Through her illness, he had stayed at
Biddeford, within call. They had not let him see her, but Junius had
played the part, not unwillingly, of messenger; he enjoyed, Lilah knew,
the disloyal intrigue. Any man of spirit, Junius probably argued--any
man of his own day--would have driven to Biddeford to thrash Flagg on
general principles; but Robert had mooned about the house, had sat for
hours with his head in his hands! Junius Peabody’s sympathies were
with Lilah. Lilah, who lay rigid, her figure outlined beneath the
bed covers, her face drawn with the peculiar tension of her will to
conquer. Even death.... He had brought Flagg’s messages with a grim
tenderness and had murmured them to her often when she seemed unable
to hear. Only her lips had quivered, or there had been a faint smile.
Whenever Junius wavered, ashamed of his own part in the affair, he
reminded himself that in no other way could she be kept alive....
Lilah shuddered. The motor left the woods, turned sharply into the
paved highroad.... What did Edmonton know?
It occurred to her that Edmonton was no longer her servant. In the
performance of his duty, he was driving her, as he would have driven a
guest, to the station.
She straightened herself sharply. Her look became at once indifferent
and haughty. But something was unsteady, out of balance, threatening.
Her hold on life was precarious; she was drifting away from safety,
from her established self. The new self she would have to create
to meet the situation she found herself in was still shadowy; she
must wear a different face.... Love in exile.... The future had no
significance. Nor was there reality in the image of herself, reckless,
dedicated, indifferent, somehow romantic....
At the station, Edmonton, swinging her hand-luggage to the platform,
showed an impassive face and asked: “New York, madam?”
She thought of tipping him and changed her mind. After all, she wasn’t
a guest.... She could not resist saying, as the long train slipped down
the track toward them: “Don’t let Mr. Robert saddle the roan while I’m
away, Edmonton.”
He flushed and touched his cap. He had heard something! Servants found
out everything. “No, ma’am. Indeed, no, ma’am. I won’t. Be sure of
that.” An astonished, gratified, sly look passed across his eyes. He
handed Lilah aboard with a return of deference, an unmistakable relish.
* * * * *
Lilah met Flagg in New York. She went to a hotel, and Flagg stayed at
the borrowed flat in the ’Fifties. She had a few hundred dollars, and
she had brought every rag and stitch of clothing and all of her jewels.
It was, she argued, no affair of Flagg’s. Robert had given her these
things; they belonged to her. She owned a distinguished string of small
pearls, well-matched and unusually brilliant, and, for the more formal
occasions of the season, Junius had given her a small crown of emeralds
which had belonged to Minnie; this, with an emerald bracelet, too
heavy and ornate for wear, had about them the innocent elegance of the
’Eighties.... Lilah discovered her wedding ring among the diamonds and
square-cut sapphires she preferred. She decided to wear it....
She met Flagg in the lobby of the hotel and they talked in the
comparative isolation of a taxicab throbbing up and down Fifth Avenue
in a complicated, nervous stream of traffic.
Their first excitement gave way to a hurried planning. They must, Lilah
argued, leave New York. “I’ve made such a ‘noise’ here,” she said. “I’m
more of a personage than you realize.”
Lilah expected to follow Flagg to his middle-west university town and
to become an anonymous figure in the background of his life. But Flagg
shook his head. “We’d be better off in New York.”
Lilah suppressed a sharp anxiety. “You won’t lecture, then?”
He assured her again that he wanted only to lie on a green hill with
his head in her lap!
“I can get my hands on three hundred a month. Not much; but we needn’t
starve! If you say, we’ll go abroad. Three hundred a month isn’t to be
sneezed at in Italy.”
“But you wanted to go on with your work!”
His interest in teaching, he explained, had lessened as his knowledge
increased. He was beginning to believe that he could do little more
than “shove his pupils off the high road into the wilderness of
personal experience, speculation”; besides, he was beginning to doubt
the value of his own contribution. “When I found you there, crumpled,
covered with blood, apparently dead, I was staggered by my ignorance.
Death, for myself, has always seemed a sort of translation. But
you--flesh I love--There is no solace for what I felt! I want to spend
the rest of my days with my arms around a concrete loveliness, warmth,
life.... Lilah, I’m afraid to go on alone!”
His desire persisted. They must go abroad, at once. Every day spent
in the city, crowded, humid, was wasted. Lilah had the impression
that Flagg was hurrying to a happiness which might, with delay, be
lost. Impatient, often irritable, he was upset by small details; he
wanted Lilah, enjoyment, fulfillment, immediately. The matter of
passports proved to be embarrassing. Flagg’s honesty would permit of no
compromise and Lilah refused to allow their names to appear on the same
passenger list. They agreed, finally, to sail on different ships and to
meet in Genoa or Naples.
Flagg left Lilah at her hotel and, alone, went about the complicated
business of steamer reservations.
If only there had not been this hiatus; the outlines of the adventure
were already blurred; in his arms, secure, the past definitely
discarded, her pleasure in her own audacity would return....
She glanced out over the city. From her bedroom, twenty-two stories
above the street, she could see the rivers, metallic, laced with
bridges. She was impressed by her lack of superiority, save only the
elevation granted her by this wall of granite and steel.... Flagg was
somewhere down in that swarm of people, that tossing and scurrying of
humanity....
Here, society was out of focus. Her rightness or wrongness was lost
in a conglomerate jumble of right and wrong. She could not comprehend
adultery--a cruel word--betrayal. These things counted only as they
affected a few individuals. Her right to happiness was paramount.
That crowd down there cared nothing, knew nothing, of what she did or
was, what she felt, her success, her failure.... She was struck by the
indifference of the mob, the savage concentration of the individual.
No tragedy, not even national disaster, not even war, could touch
them all! What, then, was she, was any one afraid of? To break a
commandment, to do good, was like throwing a pebble into a pool--a
little hoop of ripples....
* * * * *
Flagg did not come back at once. He telephoned that he was standing
in line at the Customs House. “Have a photograph taken.” “Must I?”
It struck her that it was not going to be simple, this flight. They
might have gone to California, to Cuba! “But we can’t buy _lire_ in
California,” Flagg reminded her. With a hint of impatience, he rang
off. And Lilah, alone again, thought: “I’ll go to Thirty-eighth Street.
There may be an old photograph--”
She dressed with an odd sense of excitement, of daring. She remembered
the Waterford glass chandeliers; she had never seen them in place.
After all, the house was her creation; she had evoked it. Flagg could
have no possible objection to her going there. For the rendezvous
with that self she was discarding, she wore a gown Elmer Shawhan had
approved of, longer than the fashion of the moment, made of dark
blue and sulphur yellow; her stockings, sheer; her feet, in strapped
slippers, might have been bare. A small hat and a heavy veil, the
perfume she affected, gave her an exclusive, an unmistakable elegance.
The caretaker admitted her, after a delay, while the taxicab she had
hired waited at the curb. “Mrs. Peabody!”
Again that look of surprise! Lilah brushed her way in, across the hall,
upstairs. The shades were not drawn and a flood of sunlight illuminated
Elmer Shawhan’s riotous panels. Lilah thought: “I told Robert to darken
this room!” She stood on the threshold in a sort of trance of delight.
She had forgotten how lovely it was; even now, with the furniture
covered, the rugs rolled back, it was a room worthy of respect.... Her
dreams of a little renaissance had come to nothing; her next step was
even less promising. Italy, with a man she could not marry, an invalid
who had abandoned his career for her sake....
She crossed the room and became suddenly conscious of voices. Before
she could draw back, or hide, Robert and Grace Fuller came in from the
hall. Grace Fuller was in gray, her natural distinction accentuated
by a clever hat. Lilah saw Robert’s face, flushed and angry. For the
first time in her knowledge of him he was beside himself. She said
breathlessly: “I didn’t know you were in New York! I wouldn’t have come
here, naturally....”
“I intend to sell the house,” he interrupted. “I haven’t spent a happy
day here.... If there is anything you want, you are welcome to it.”
Grace Fuller looked from one to the other. In her expression, amusement
and pity conquered embarrassment. “Aren’t you two going to be sensible?”
“No!” Lilah wanted to run, to fly ignominiously from this humiliation.
She saw how the wind blew; what Robert intended to do; where he had
turned, already, for solace, “understanding.” The whole incident made
life and love seem disgusting, trivial. Flagg could do nothing to erase
the fact of her marriage to Robert. All of their best moments together
were ugly in the light of their present situation. They who had been
intimate were bitter strangers, abashed by the memory of their intimacy.
She cried desperately: “Let me go. This is abominable.”
Robert said nothing and she ran downstairs. The astonished caretaker
opened the door and shut it again, with a bang.
* * * * *
In the taxi, Lilah conquered her panic. “Drive around the park slowly.”
She needed people, movement, color, to restore her faith in herself....
No matter what the world thought, now, later she would be forgiven
if she failed magnificently. New York was charitable to picturesque
sinners. Florence, a villa, herself, wistful but triumphant.... She
wondered whether she could do without the things she had, in a year,
come to regard as necessary. On three hundred a month she would have
to wear made-over clothes; she would have to curb her extravagant
desire for amusing, expensive accessories. She was one of those women
who sense every variation in style, each new subtle trick of elegance,
the sleight-of-hand of the mode. To be inconspicuous and astonishing
had become paramount. Until she met Flagg, she had thought of little
else. Her charm and her pert wit had carried her. She had forgotten
how to think, what to think, since she had long ago discovered that a
worthless opinion spoken decisively passes for cleverness in a hurried
world.
Flagg would not like her friends, vivacious log-rollers who had
peddled their superficial accomplishments successfully and now called
themselves the Young Generation of American writers, painters, actors,
critics and editors. Lilah enjoyed their ostentatious sophistry, their
good humor and their irreverence. They stimulated her and never bored
her; like them, she was fundamentally restless, unstable, impatient.
Perhaps she was incapable of constancy.... She could never follow
Flagg’s thought, painstaking, honest, uncompromising....
The cab turned into the park. On wide, dusty greens children in bright
dresses romped with colored balloons. A procession of motors in a blue
reek of gasoline clogged the drives.
To be victorious, she must dominate Flagg. He might turn poet or
mystic, or he might be content with sunlight and _fritto misto_.
She had seen many such couples--lovers who had surrendered
respectability without a struggle, who had relinquished position, who
no longer cared what was said or thought about their affair and who
fought like cats and dogs. She must see that this didn’t happen. After
all, every love, no matter how exalted in the beginning, inevitably
resolved into a struggle against the loss of illusion. So fragile the
threads from heart to heart, so impermanent affection.... Junius had
once said to her that the only happy love relationships were illicit
because marriage harnessed the imagination. He believed in the European
marriage of convenience, a business arrangement, something outside
the emotions. If this were so, Lilah thought, she had a chance of
happiness....
The telephone bell was ringing fretfully when she opened the door of
her room at the hotel. She ran, lifted the receiver with a sudden,
passionate recklessness.
Flagg’s voice, purposefully tranquil, tightened her heart. He began to
say that there would be difficulty, when she interrupted him: “No! No!
I was wrong. Forgive me. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. The slate’s
clean. We’ll go together.”
* * * * *
Florence was all a golden yellow in August, dusted with the pollen
of hot sunlight. Flagg and Lilah climbed over the hills or drove in
a rickety cab, house-hunting. They chose, finally, a small villa,
ironically enough named “Villino Sans-Souci,” near the Ponte a Mensola.
It was dirty, but there was a grape arbor at the back, and two very old
cypresses, black, tipped with gold, traced invisible slow spirals upon
a purple sky. Vincigliata rose behind them and in the cypress groves at
sunset there was a constant call of cuckoos. “Legendary,” Flagg said.
“Mournful, and beautiful. We’ll take this. What do you say, Lilah?”
They could afford it, just. Flagg figured hurriedly on the back of an
envelope. “Rent. Cook. Food and light. Fuel. Not much left for cabs,
Lilah! Or the opera. But we have the view! Turn around, my dear, and
look--”
Through the arbor, framed in the dusty arch of grape-leaves, they could
see the Dome, those delicate stone shafts, remote, miraculous, the
Tower, the Bargello, and that great black lily, the Signoria, thrusting
through the tumbled roofs of the city.
“It hasn’t changed,” Lilah said. “What immortal loveliness!” She leaned
against Flagg and let herself sink into her appreciation of him. Robert
would have been more concerned with the plumbing than with the view.
Flagg cared for nothing so long as he could fill his senses with this
old, secretive, sardonic city, this city with bold cheek-bones, short
shining hair, the smile of Gioconda and the eyes of a hired warrior.
Flagg belonged in Florence; there was nothing modern about him; he was
like Leonardo, was perhaps, Leonardo, sent back to question, to advance
a little way, to recede again, like a comet flying down space.... She
turned her head and kissed his shoulder.
“Perhaps you won’t miss the other things--”
“What other things?”
“Your work. Those guinea pigs and test tubes, those farmer boys looking
to you for the word.”
His eyes, for the first time in many weeks, shut her out. But he smiled
and his arm tightened about her waist. “If no one ever comes here--if
we’re left alone to grow old in our arbor--will you mind, Lilah?”
“No!”
They went into the house, and Lilah, with wide gestures, refurnished
it. “We’ll have to get rid of all the furniture. All of it! And those
fearful pictures. Except that one--that’s so bad it’s--positively good!
This room needs Venetian brocade, claret-against-the-light color, with
Sixteenth Century chairs--”
“But we can’t afford such things,” Flagg interrupted.
“I’d go mad if I had to live in the same house with a gilded
waste-paper basket,” Lilah answered.
The agent, sensing criticism, rattled the keys. “The villino belongs to
a celebrated poet,” he said eagerly. He showed his teeth and repeated:
“Most celebrated!”
“It was here,” he assured them with dignity, “he wrote ‘_Belle Mani_.’
You know this book?”
They had come out into the arbor again. And, licking herself in a patch
of sunlight, a little black cat had made herself at home. “Does the cat
go with the house?” Flagg demanded.
The agent made a violent gesture. “I have him killed! At once! This
poet liked the cats--_everywhere cats_!” He made a terrible face and
waved his arms. “_Shoo!_ Get out!”
The cat rose, arched her back, yawned and with her tail in the air,
slightly crooked at the tip--a sign of pleasure--went straight to
Flagg. He picked her up. “If your poet liked cats, he has my permission
to use gilded waste-paper baskets.”
Lilah was seized with a perverse mirth.
“Spaniels and cats,” she said. But, to Flagg, she refused to explain.
Holding the little black cat in the crook of his arm, he was tickling
her under the chin where a patch of white fur was worn, daintily, like
a bib.
* * * * *
In the blazing stillness of an August mid-afternoon, their drowsy
isolation was broken into by a friend of Flagg’s who came out from
Florence on a bicycle and arrived at the gate of “Sans-Souci,” dusty,
jovial and eager, with a quizzical look for Lilah and a shout for Flagg.
Lilah had been painting kitchen chairs an artless apple green. She
looked up, saw a strange man staring at her and stood, the paintbrush
at arm’s length. This, she saw at once, was to be her first social
encounter.
She said quickly: “Mr. Flagg is asleep. I’ll call him!”
“Don’t. Please....”
She hurried indoors, angry, rather stimulated. Flagg was lying
uncomfortably on the poet’s divan. He was not asleep and his eyes
looked up at her, mischievous, black, bright, more alive than any eyes
she had ever seen.
“Some one--” she began breathlessly. “Tall, dusty man on a bicycle--”
“McNair!” Flagg shouted.
He ran outside and Lilah heard their noisy greeting. She did not quite
dare to follow, but waited for Flagg to call her. Presently he did.
“Lilah! Oh, Lilah!”
She flew to a mirror.... How pretty she was getting to be! The color
of happiness was over her, warm, golden.... What a pity that all women
couldn’t be happy; so many of them were pinched and gray, shadowy,
unrecognized, unreal. She had never existed until Flagg loved her,
until, she corrected herself, she had loved Flagg. She had had no other
consciousness, since coming to this place, but this.... She went out,
smiling.
“Lilah,” Flagg said, “this is Gil McNair. Can you manage tea?”
Lilah gave her hand, sticky with paint, into a large, warm clasp, and
it was then she caught that quizzical look. It was not a question, it
was, rather, a brief investigation. With an upward rush of spirits, the
challenge accepted, Lilah said: “Tea? Of course!” But she threw into
her glance what she would have preferred to say: “Yes! Here we are.
Quite irregular. But quite charming!”
She made tea on a spirit lamp because she had not conquered the
mysteries of an Italian stove and, so far, she had been unable to
lure a cook as far out of town as the Ponte a Mensola. It was not the
Florence of before the war; Tuscan maid-servants had become aware of
their potentiality in commerce.... The poet’s cups were eccentric;
apparently _il the_ had not been popular at the “Villino Sans-Souci.”
There wasn’t any cut sugar and Lilah had to use cream from a can.
“Aren’t there any cows in Italy?” she wondered. She could hear Flagg
laughing in the arbor, and she felt a pang of jealousy because he could
laugh at something she did not share. To love, she had discovered,
is to be jealous--jealous of everything, each unconsidered, careless
gesture not directly to do with her; when Flagg slept, she was jealous
of his dreams.
She was glad, hearing him laugh, that he had accepted their situation,
not as if he were making the best of a bad bargain, but with the
positively gorgeous indifference of a man superior to his audacities.
She had not once considered right or wrong--she had thrust aside the
shadow of presentiment, had drawn the warmth of sunlight over the dark
depths of possibility. She had rested for hours with her head against
Flagg’s breast, listening to the beating, rapid, unstable, of his
heart, his enemy, her enemy; she had lost the reality of death in the
living body....
The arbor was patterned with the cool, blue shadows of grape leaves;
the sun struck through, white, hot, and lay in flakes on the table, on
the smoothly brushed earth.
The black cat had wandered in and sat on Flagg’s knee in that peculiar,
feline trance he liked because, he said, it was so “damned superior.”
He stroked the shining black fur as he talked and Lilah, in spite of
herself, watched the caressing fingers.
McNair took the tray from Lilah. His gestures were quick, nervous.
Lilah discovered that he had done something astonishing, if not
conspicuous, in the war, what, she could not quite make out; it had to
do with “listening gear.”
“He can hear celestial ragtime,” Flagg said. “He ‘listens in’ on the
Beyond--michrophonic miracle man.”
McNair laughed. He had big, square white teeth, like tombstones, and
dusty hair worn in a bang. Lilah wanted him to notice her. She felt
that she must look very pretty in her chintz apron, the little turban
of twisted green silk, her feet in buckled slippers.
McNair accepted tea and drank it greedily, his eyes on Flagg; their
talk was experimentary, the talk of men widely different yet gifted
with an identical passion for the world, the adventure offered by life
to eager men; they liked it well enough to want, honestly, to better
it. Words, names she had never heard, at first baffled, then bored her.
She yawned, but Flagg was not stricken, as she had hoped he would be,
as Robert would have been, with an immediate concern. So she moved to
the bench beside him, slipped her arm through his and let her head fall
against his shoulder.
McNair, putting his tea-cup aside with a clatter, as if he had only
just become aware of her, said: “You’re going back in October, Flagg?”
Flagg answered: “No! I’m through. For a while.... I have what every man
secretly desires at one time or another, leisure for contemplation.
I’ve never had time to think. Since the war smashed man’s favorite
image of himself, wearing the laurels of progress, I want to sit
alone with the fragments and make of them what I can, for my own
satisfaction.”
“For your own satisfaction?” McNair repeated. “You used to believe, or
claimed you did, that man owes his wisdom to man. You once said that
you despised ascetics and hermits.” He glanced around. “Delightful!
Your arbor! But you won’t stay here!”
Lilah interrupted: “Why?”
“Ask Flagg!”
Flagg said: “I claim the right to the one certain beauty--life itself!
I’ve been through the five cycles of psychic hell. I’ve questioned
until I’m sick and tired of questioning. I’ve come to a sort of
acceptance that isn’t surrender--it’s seeing! And if I should tell you,
any one, what I see, know--I’d be damned as a dreamer or an idiot.
I see that science and religion, both, have failed. We still suffer
plague. We still arm ourselves. We still distrust our brother.... But
we go forward. Imperceptibly, forward.... Here, at peace, I want first
to think, later, if possible, to write. It depends on whether or not I
have anything to say.”
“You won’t stay,” McNair repeated. His face was flushed, and he said
good-by abruptly, almost angrily.
When he had gone, Lilah said: “Did you really mean what you said?”
“Yes.”
“What did McNair think--about--us?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, I dare say.”
Lilah insisted: “But he must have wondered--”
Flagg lifted her face and said gravely: “For God’s sake, let’s be
decent sinners! I thought we had decided to pay our debt in the coin of
the realm.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean that it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn what McNair or any
one else thinks of us! The only thing that matters is what we think
of ourselves. If you’re ashamed, you ought not to be here. If you’re
sorry, you’re only hurting me.”
She answered: “We’re happy when we’re alone. But when people come,
we begin to blame each other.” She kissed him, quick, light kisses.
Then her head sank again on his shoulder, and they sat there, clasped
together, staring through the arch of the arbor at Florence, the
towers, the brazen Arno climbing across the plain toward Pisa. It was
very still. A cart went down the road beyond the wall with a tinkle of
bells. The little black cat sat on the table, licking, her tail in a
plate of cakes.
X
The lazy enchantment of their exile lasted through the summer. In
September, Lilah complained to Flagg that all of New York seemed to
have moved to Florence. Whenever she went to town she met some one
she had known during her brief appearance as Mrs. Robert Peabody. She
encountered curiosity but, from the younger generation, at least, no
hostility; she was not certain whether this was an indication of social
emancipation or due, rather, to her own remoteness from the lives,
the activities of these people--she was, perhaps, not worth snubbing!
The older generation was unaware of her; their standards resisted,
obdurately, the pressure of modern opinion. Lilah could dismiss
them because they were “old-fashioned.” But she resented the casual
indifference of her contemporaries; it was selfish, even vulgar; she
had, it seemed, nothing material to offer them! She was bitterly aware
that most of them could have been hooked had she baited her line with
millions. Money, enough of it, meant pleasure, diversion, a sop for the
martyrdom of satiety. She could have lured the fashionable world to one
of the veritable _ville_ in the hills near Florence--jazz on a Medicean
terrace, swimming parties in a marble basin by Mino da Fiesole, a
liberal supply of sporting Italians of the upper class.... Her scandal
would be an asset under such glamorous circumstances. The “Villino
Sans-Souci” was another story.
McNair came again, bringing a young Englishman, a pianist, a pupil of
Busoni, who played on the poet’s upright. He soothed Lilah because,
without hesitation, he fell in love with her; she called him “silly
boy,” but he was, if anything, older than Lilah; he “adored” women,
professed to have been badly treated by them, to have thrown himself
away, whereas he was quite unscrupulous, lazy and irresponsible. He
played with facility and refused to practice because he seemed to have
been born with a technique. Tall, heavy, he had the typical thespian’s
skull, the profile of a Shakesperian actor.
He made love to Lilah whenever Flagg’s back was turned. He played “for”
her, he said. Lilah began to believe that she was responsible for the
seductive music he somehow got from that long-toothed piano; she saw
herself in the waltzes of Kreisler, the moon-smitten nuances of Ravel,
the songs of Rachmaninoff. And she was filled with a vague melancholy,
almost a pity for herself, inexplicable, delicious, like the
forebodings of adolescence. She would sit on the terrace with Flagg,
her hand in his, and seeing the “silly boy’s” ardent profile swaying
against the glow of the piano-lamp, she would think tenderly of Robert,
of Junius, and of herself.... She could only relent, apparently, when
she had had her own way.... She squeezed Flagg’s hand.
Lilah began to know the sort of people she would, in New York, have
ignored. A thin, hawk-nosed, Pittsburgh-born American _contessa_ who
lived nearby called repeatedly, bringing with her a shifting retinue
of cavalry officers; the _contessa_ conducted a sort of matrimonial
agency; she had, she boasted, introduced many “dear, sweet, rich
American girls” to young Italians of title. Lilah suspected that she
lived upon the precarious fruits of gratitude.
Flagg’s reputation attracted scientists from France, from Germany,
from Rome--he was at the mercy of men who coveted his knowledge. He
was always generous, but Lilah saw him in moods of savage contempt and
rebellion. “You waste yourself on these people,” she said.
“I know! I wish they’d leave me alone!” But he never seemed to be able
to resist them; she would rescue him from arguments carried on in half
a dozen languages, lead him indoors and make him lie down. He would
look up at her, his face pinched, his lips pale, and with a gesture of
hopelessness, say: “I’ll have to go back, some day, and work! I don’t
know a damn thing!” And once he added, with a querulous bitterness:
“There’s so little time.”
“But you’re going to get well.”
“Yes,” he said. “Perhaps. It’s a new idea.... If I do, it will be
because of you.” He smiled. “I’m not used to you, Lilah! I find myself
looking at you, wondering who you are and how you came to be here....
You’re not sorry, are you?”
“Not if you aren’t.”
So they reassured each other.
* * * * *
Flagg was not a man who enjoyed idleness. McNair left for Edinburgh.
Save only Don Orlando, a priest who came down from Siena occasionally
to spend an hour in the arbor, and an eccentric Florentine, a sort of
inventor-alchemist, there was no one he enjoyed. He took to wandering
away into the country, on foot. Lilah was left to her own devices.
She tried to convince herself that she was happy. This was what she
had made for herself; she could not question his love; her own was
deeper than she had thought possible--her feeling consumed her. But her
character was unchanged. She resisted, despised discipline; denial made
her intractable. She wanted pleasure, excitement, admiration. There was
danger in the heartless and unstable passion of such men as the English
pianist. She hated herself because this was so. But she told herself
that had Flagg been different, she would have been contented to sit in
the arbor at the Ponte a Mensola, secure in the possession of love.
Something instinctive in Flagg, out of reach, resisted accepted
social standards. He stood aloof from close personal bonds, even,
fundamentally, from Lilah. He was solitary, but not morose. She never
really knew his failings or his ambitions; his confidences were always
touched with self-scorn, yet he refused sympathy--it was as if he
preferred to find his own way. His feeling for her was identical; he
realized, perhaps, that sex would entangle him, hold him back from
that mysterious pursuit of his. He was not easily stirred by her mere
physical presence; she never felt that he had gone into the adventure
through a desire for gratification. And she was flattered by his most
casual caress because she realized that he was not demonstrative; his
emotions were deep, strong and, when aroused, ruthless.
But there were moments when Lilah was baffled by his reserve; she felt
inadequate. Her own human, reprehensible sufferings, longings and
jealousies fell back before his impartiality. He had believed in their
right to live together. The fact that she did not love her husband,
Flagg insisted, absolved her. But he had not stopped to consider what
the affair might mean to Lilah; it was demoralizing, she decided, to
ignore the world’s opinion. If Flagg should die, she would have no
resistance.
Thoughts like these threaded her consciousness; for the most part, she
was lulled by the fact of his presence. Whenever he touched her, she
sensed the immortality of happiness.
* * * * *
Coming out of Doney’s confectionery shop one afternoon, with a box of
French pastry, she met Mrs. Sinclair, a willowy figure in gray crêpe,
with enveloping veils, descending from an open touring-car painted
royal blue.
“My precious darling.”
She enfolded Lilah briefly.
“I heard that you’d run off with Putnam Flagg. The Wagners crossed
with you. That witty Wagner girl was too absurd--she said you’d been
flagged. Was that vulgar? How are you?”
“Awfully well,” Lilah answered. She was sorry that she had worn her
most unbecoming hat and a dress that was much too short for the mode.
“Of course you came to Florence. Extraordinary, how they all do--people
who break away--irresponsible, brave people! Sinclair and I are so
desperately conventional. We’ve been married fifteen years and neither
of us has ever cast the eye--well, not seriously! Sinclair’s in the
car. Don’t speak to him, Lilah darling--he’d be shocked. Flagg hasn’t a
cent, has he? I don’t see, frankly, why you did it, or what you gained.
You had everything on earth you could ask for, and New York at your
feet. Sympathy is with Robert, of course. He’s enormously popular, and
any number of women are applying.... You aren’t divorced?”
“No.”
Mrs. Sinclair turned with a swirl, positively oriental, of draperies.
“Are the chocolates good here? We’re on our way to Bologna--then on up,
to Paris. They say Doucet’s clothes are inimitable, and I’m in rags.”
She went into the shop and Lilah, lifting her head, crossed the
sidewalk to the royal blue car. Behind a pair of smoked goggles she
found Sinclair’s eyes staring at her with a sort of panic. “How do you
do?” He gasped, leaned forward, offered a limp hand. “How do you do?
Beastly weather, isn’t it? Where are you stopping?”
“At the Ponte a Mensola,” Lilah said sweetly.
“Well, I must say, you’re looking fit.”
“I am.”
“What’s May doing? Tell her to hurry!”
Lilah turned away. The encounter had left her trembling. She crossed
the Tornabuoni, signaled a cab and drove all the way back to the Ponte
a Mensola. Somehow this extravagance comforted her.
The ride was long and dusty. A stream of cars and trucks, carts and
trolleys, blocked the narrow road between endless villa walls. The
cabman, a disreputable Tuscan in a frock coat and a patent-leather hat,
gurgled and hiccoughed at the horse. She could imagine the progress
of the Sinclair’s motor, climbing the tortuous streets of sun-smitten
hilltowns, rushing across the Lombardian plain, climbing Alpine
passes, on again through France to Paris--in its wake a servile host
with well-silvered palms bent in an attitude of obeisance to American
millions. Lilah knew how Mrs. Sinclair would spend her time in Paris--a
round of the _couturières_, perhaps in the company of a Frenchman,
a rarefied sycophant, dancer, flatterer and debased wit who would
criticize _mannequins_ and gowns, choose May Sinclair’s wardrobe and
profit by her vanity to the extent of a cruise in the Sinclair yacht or
a trip to the South of France in the Sinclair’s private car.
Lilah’s imagination, like a shutter, opened and closed upon visions of
fashionable America, the people she had known and might eventually
have dominated, moving from Paris to London, from Biarritz to San
Moritz, from New York to Palm Beach. Their houses, jewels, clothes,
pleasures, were rare and exclusive enough to permit them any latitude
of behavior; now that she was not a part of their life, Lilah could be
contemptuous. Except for chance, she would in all probability have been
in Paris, buying the best of Doucet’s collection ... or ... no; at the
Point, waiting for her child to be born....
She put her hands up to her face.
Women like May Sinclair had escaped. Lilah suffered because she had not
been content to use the material at hand--the fabric for the fashioning
of her dreams had always been just beyond reach.
She decided to say nothing to Flagg of her encounter. She went up the
steep path from the gate to the house. Flagg was leaning on the terrace
wall. The late sun gilded him, so that he was like a figure in bronze.
Lilah called: “You old pagan! I want ten _lire_. I’ve been extravagant.”
“Ten _lire_?”
“To pay the cabman.”
“Lilah,” Flagg said seriously, “you haven’t changed.”
“But I have!”
She paid the cabman and ran back to Flagg. “But I _have_ changed! I
needed gloves and bought pastry instead for your tea--black, sticky
cakes with cherries on top. Look!”
Flagg looked. “Lilah, do you know, I think that cat’s going to have
kittens!”
They went to the arbor. Lilah admitted that Flagg’s suspicions were
justified; the little black cat _was_ going to have kittens. And Flagg
said: “Damn! I hate having dumb things suffer. We’ll have to make a bed
for her.”
He went into the house and came back with a clothesbasket and a
blanket. “But she’s not going to have them to-day!” Lilah cried. Flagg
answered seriously that it was just as well to be prepared. These
things upset him; birth was terrifying. “I hope you’ll never have a
child. I’d probably die. Go mad. Knock my brains out.”
Lilah stroked the cat. Her heart tightened. After a moment she said: “I
won’t have a child.”
“What do you mean?”
“That time when I was thrown--”
Their eyes met. Something flashed across Flagg’s eyes, a fugitive
anger. “Oh. That was it. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t.”
“You can tell me anything.”
After a pause, he added: “You weren’t quite honest, Lilah. I wouldn’t
have gone to Maine if I had known what you’ve just told me. Your
husband has every reason to believe that I’m a cad.”
“Must we talk about these things? Can’t we forget them?”
He stooped again over the basket. His expression was not guarded and
Lilah cried: “If you think I wanted to be hurt--if you think I tried
deliberately--”
Flagg turned away. “We can’t forget these things. But you’re right; we
needn’t talk about them.”
When he had gone, Lilah wept a little. The warm, sinewy body of the
stray cat comforted her; she held it close, as she would never have
held one of Robert’s spaniels, letting her tears fall on the glossy
fur like drops of quicksilver. If she sat there long enough, she knew,
Flagg would come back, repentant. And presently he came, drawn by her
silence. “I’m sorry, Lilah.”
She burst out: “You’re thinking of yourself when you ask me not to
divorce Robert! I could, easily, in Paris.” The accusation was turned
adroitly against Flagg. “Am I selfish? Isn’t it, rather, a question
of honesty? Must we go over that again?” Lilah turned her head away.
“I’m unhappy.” Flagg gazed at her with a curious detachment, as if he
were seeing her for the first time. Presently he said deliberately: “If
divorce will make you happy, by all means go to Paris. I don’t know
what the process is, how long you’d have to live there or whether, in
the end, we could afford the necessary expense. But you must, at all
costs, be happy.”
Later in the day, still smarting under the memory of Sinclair’s
dismissal, she wrote to Junius: “I am going to divorce Robert. Will you
find out from him, for my sake, whether he would be willing to come to
Paris and make the necessary arrangements?” She added, with a flourish
of defiance: “I am gloriously happy.”
With the letter safely in the post, Lilah felt a return of security.
It was only a matter of time before she could demand recognition. She
dreamed of subjugating Florence; there was opportunity for a clever,
pretty and accomplished woman to have a distinguished “drawing-room.”
She hadn’t money, but she had everything else.
With this possibility in mind she looked with new eyes at the “Villino
Sans-Souci.” The poet had furnished it with lavish bad taste. He had
had a morbid turn of mind, and perhaps to stimulate his imagination or
in the interests of publicity had slept in a bed built like a gondola,
black, funereal, uncomfortable, and had placed a wooden statue of
Aphrodite in a niche, a sort of shrine before which he had burned
tapers “to love and sorrow.” His drawing-room was a museum of amorous
mementoes, signed photographs of pretty actresses--_Á mon cher! Tua,
Maria. Sempre, Nina_--abominable porcelains, first editions, cushions
and ecclesiastical velvets. His desk, where he had probably written
“_Belle Mani_,” was the largest piece of furniture Lilah had ever seen,
an affair of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, “a battleground for
literature,” Flagg said. “The whole place is like an embalmed scandal.”
The house itself was old; it had been a _podesta’s_ and bore the patina
of several centuries. “I believe we could buy it for a song,” Lilah
said. She kissed the tips of her fingers. “And I could make it into one
of the loveliest houses in Florence.”
Her desire for beauty had never got her anywhere. Now she was restless
and dissatisfied because there were too many footstools and majolica
vases in the “Villino Sans-Souci.” A few thousand dollars--only a
few--would transform this wilderness into a setting worthy of her
ambition. She began to haunt the shops along the Borgognissanti, where,
for ridiculous prices, she was offered the treasures of palaces;
Sixteenth Century tables, dim Venetian mirrors, flamboyant chairs,
chests, silver, brocades stiff with tarnished gold threads, faded,
“like sunlight through claret.” Her desire for possession--she was a
victim of her love of these things--was a sort of drunkenness; she made
promises, broke them, had furniture sent to the “Villino Sans-Souci”
on approval and sent back again; she was at once the despair and the
victim of the antiquaries.
Flagg had no idea that she had in her possession the pearls Robert had
given her. They were hidden away in a hat-box together with the emerald
crown and bracelet.
One day she took them to a dealer whose shop was on the Ponte Vecchio,
an unpretentious, shadowy room ten feet square. Across a modern counter
upholstered in black velvet, Lilah faced a man who was positively
medieval, lean, dark and clever; he had the delicate hands of an
expert, flexible wrists and pointed, sensitive, critical fingers. The
pearls, a long string, lay coiled on a small cushion, an opalescent
serpent. Lilah had no idea how much they were worth. “I want to sell
them,” she explained. The dealer considered, his hands clasped under
his chin. His offer, in lire, astonished her, but she covered her
surprise with an emphatic shake of her head.
“Too little?” The dealer’s face became enigmatic. “I recognize
these pearls, Madame. They belong to the Peabody collection. I sold
them--this clasp--to Mr. Junius Peabody, thirty years ago. I never
forget a really important purchase; sooner or later, the most valuable
pearls in the world pass through my hands. I have, besides, a record.”
Suppressing a feeling of guilt, Lilah said: “The pearls are mine. I am
Mrs. Robert Peabody.”
“I see. Exactly.... I can sell the string, immediately, to an American
lady who is now in Rome. My offer stands.”
Realizing that this man was superior to the sort of bargaining usual on
the Rialto, Lilah accepted the offer. The pearls were whisked away by a
clerk. The dealer remarked upon the weather. And the clerk, returning,
paid into Lilah’s hands the sum of seventy-five thousand lire. She
signed her name--once, twice--the dealer bowed without a trace of
animation, and she went out again into the street, a street, a world
transformed, no longer inimical, but hers. A duck of a world!
* * * * *
A duck of a world!
With seventy-five thousand lire hidden away beneath the tissue paper in
an “Annette” hat-box, happiness flowed back over Lilah’s spirit. Her
worldly surface, that inimitable appearance of security, reappeared.
Her manner became decisive, her bearing assured. She found it possible
to smoke a cigarette with her old manner of casual indifference. She
could be Russian without an inward shiver of self-ridicule and distrust.
She postponed buying what she coveted because, in possession of
seventy-five thousand lire, she could afford to be particular. The
“Villino Sans-Souci” was inadequate. She must have one of the smaller
Medicean houses--she could imagine Mrs. Sinclair saying: “Lilah,
darling! What a delicious garden!”
With the _contessa_, in a hired carriage driven by a respectable
coachman in livery, Lilah inspected the available houses. Flagg
knew nothing of these excursions. The gates of imposing, crumbling
_ville_ were thrown open and Lilah glimpsed some of the most coveted
interiors in Italy. The demoralizing simplicity and perfection of these
rooms--spacious, exquisite in proportion, frescoed--went to her head.
She found herself living in imagination in a setting contrived by the
most cunning artists of Lorenzo’s day for a corrupt and fastidious
court. Terraces of stone worn smooth, grass-grown, crumbling; basins
reflecting the complicated foliage of live oaks; cypress alleys and
balustrades, the warm, ochre walls of Tuscan palaces, unbroken, without
ornamentation, sharp against the dazzling purple of the sky....
The _contessa_ was garrulous; her enthusiasm, her bad and fluent
Italian embarrassed Lilah. She was greedy, over-inquisitive. And with a
sort of officious generosity she wanted to establish Lilah at once in a
_villa_ at Montughi. “But, _cara mia_, it’s perfect! I don’t see what
you expect. You’d better snap it up at once or some American vulgarian
will lease it.”
It was easy to imagine herself established, with Flagg, in that
ingenuous, expensive little palace. The seventy-five thousand _lire_,
her treasure horde, were an open sesame to the most extravagant dreams.
But she did not dare to confide in Flagg; something warned her that he
would not approve, understand, forgive.
The December rains drenched Florence. Valambrosa was powdered with
snow. The Arno, amber, swollen, poured through the city, covered the
mud flats, became all at once a veritable river.
Flagg was driven indoors. He began, tentatively, to write. The
effort exhausted him. He would wrestle with his enemy, breathless,
contemptuous, until he collapsed.
And suddenly, for no reason, out of her security, the idea came and
persisted that her happiness was threatened.
Flagg was ill again.
Lilah never knew the precise moment when she was first aware that he
might not be going to live. His eyes were frightened most of the time,
although he kept on smiling at her. Noises irritated him. He wanted
silence. He would sit at his desk, writing, into the night, obstinate.
And when she spoke to him, he would shake his head and ask her to go
away. There was something he wanted to do, to finish, before he called
quits. It was absurd to say that he couldn’t work. He could.
On fine days he sat in the arbor, holding the cat and smiling a queer,
fixed smile that terrified Lilah. When it rained, he moved indoors and
sat, bent, in an attitude which was belligerent and pathetic, at his
desk--that “battle-ground of literature” inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
At night he would come into her room and lie with his face pressed
against her shoulder, like a child that is afraid of what he might see
in the dark.
When she questioned him, he was perfectly still.
And now, she knew, she loved him more than anything in the world.
* * * * *
Love, complete love, came because she knew she could not have it. Flagg
was going to die. She had let herself off from feeling, because there
was always time to give way to an emotion that would be so great that
something of herself would have to perish. Now, because there was so
little time, she surrendered to it. She could not dodge facts any more;
she must face them and make of her life what she could with what she
had. Her nature was terrible to her because she was in the grip of a
genuine passion; she wanted to make herself over in time to conquer
Flagg’s reticence, to have him for herself. She had been selfish. She
had taken whatever she wanted, without caring. But she had cared.... It
hadn’t been easy to give up everything and come to Flagg. She wasn’t
superior, as Flagg was superior, to humiliation.
But now she saw what she had come for.
She saw herself, little, defeated, having to start all over again. She
was humble, frightened. She saw that she could have nothing without
earning it. And this revelation was like an unendurable light beating
against her consciousness. There was no escape. Because the future held
no happiness, the present was terrible, since it contained the essence
of the thing she would go on wanting all the rest of her life. It was
so precious, so elusive, so beautiful, and so inevitable.
She could not bear to watch Flagg’s suffering. She sent for a physician
who came out from Florence and was alone with Flagg for two hours.
Lilah waited, her heart fluttering as if she, not Flagg, were going to
die.
When the two men finally opened the door and came out, Flagg was still
smiling, but it was not that fixed, self-conscious smile Lilah had come
to fear. He seemed relieved. The physician nodded casually to Lilah and
drove away again, in a rickety cab, toward the city. Lilah thought: “He
can’t be a great specialist and come in a _carozza_. I won’t believe
anything....”
Flagg said: “It’s all right, Lilah. I’m sorry you worried. I’ve got a
chance. Only I’ll have to stop writing.”
Lilah thought: “He’s not telling me the truth. He’s going to die and
he’s glad of it.”
After that she felt that everything was against her, even Flagg’s will
to die. If he had really loved her, he would have wanted to live.
She heard from Junius Peabody toward the end of December. The familiar,
heavily embossed stationery post-marked Peabody’s Point bore her name
and the frivolous address: “Villino Sans-Souci” in Junius’ spidery
hand. Lilah tore the envelope open with a feeling of impending crisis.
She read:
“DEAR LILAH:
“Your letter, the first from you in over six months, contained no
news of yourself. I wanted to know whether or not you had made a
success of your experiment. Society has never been charitable to
women who take happiness they are not entitled to. A few celebrated
women of genius have escaped criticism because their contribution was
superior to their ‘transgression.’ I am not preaching to you. In this
day and generation there are no fixed standards of behavior. I am
only complaining because there is something shoddy, to me, offensive,
in a woman of your quality ‘taking’ life in a rented villa--one of
that pathetic band of outlaws who play at respectability in the
smaller cities of Europe. I admit my part in the affair. But I
somehow had faith that you would send that fellow packing when you
were well enough to recognize his peculiar selfishness. I cannot
resist begging you to consider seriously returning with Robert. He
will, as you request, meet you in Paris on the first day of January.
I am enclosing the name and address of his lawyer there. I will see
that your position, in America, is secured.”
He signed himself, characteristically: “Junius.”
Lilah thought angrily: “Hypocrite! He wants me there, because I amuse
him.”
His own indiscretions had been made palatable, sugar-coated with
secrecy. She was happier than he had ever been in his selfish enjoyment
of women who had had to leave him because he was respectable. He had
spared Minnie’s Victorian sensibilities by carrying on an elaborate, an
“artistic” deception....
“I despise men,” Lilah said aloud.
Flagg glanced up. “Why?”
“Read this!”
She tossed Junius’ letter across the breakfast table.
Flagg’s expression was both contemptuous and embarrassed. When he
spoke, his voice was unsteady. “It seems that your husband is, after
all, going to let himself be divorced.”
The question of money came up immediately. Lilah couldn’t go to Paris
because there wasn’t enough money. They had spent their month’s
allowance already and the January draft, which wouldn’t come until the
tenth of the month, would have to be used to settle the December bills.
“I could wire for a few hundred. I’ve never told you. This money is
mine during my life-time. It comes from an estate held in trust for my
younger brother who’s out in India. When I die, it goes to him. I could
borrow on the future, but I don’t want to. I never have.”
“But I’ve got to go. Think, darling, what it means! Surely, you aren’t
jealous of Robert--now.”
“No.”
“I’ll have to see him. But it will be formal, embarrassing. The lawyer
will explain things. And before you know it, I’ll be free.”
Flagg turned to Junius’ letter. “I’m not sure. I hardly think it will
be as simple as that. They’ll urge you to go back. They’ll put up all
sorts of arguments. They’ll make it hard for you. I’d prefer that you
didn’t go.... Later, will be time enough.”
He got up and came around the table, touching her hair, a caress that
always stirred her to the heart, it was so unconsidered and gentle, the
caress of a friend; it made her precious to herself. But now, in her
eagerness, she drew away.
“I must go! I want to marry you! Then, you can return to America, to
the work you like. Or we can live here--properly. Be the sort of people
you despise, upright, tipping-over-backward people! But we can always
laugh at ourselves. We needn’t lose our sense of humor simply because
we happen to be respectable....”
She paused, scared by his look, aware of her failure, but sustained by
a conviction that she was misunderstood.
Flagg reminded her again that there was no money. “Only a few _lire_,
unless I cable for more.”
Lilah cried: “But I have some money! Lots of it. I meant to tell you. I
sold my pearls.” She laughed: “Like the lady in the melodrama....”
“I didn’t know you had any pearls.”
“They weren’t becoming,” she said carelessly. “I prefer jade, or
ivory--”
“Were they valuable?”
“I got seventy-five thousand _lire_.”
“Good God.”
Flagg turned abruptly and went to the window. He stood there looking
out into a downpour of rain, at Florence, sodden and drenched.
“The pearls were mine,” Lilah remarked. She felt herself growing
angry. She felt that she would lose her temper if he pressed her; say
things she would regret. The old self wasn’t conquered. She despised
criticism. She wanted to be thought right.
Flagg turned. His face was dark again, but his feeling had driven the
look of fear out of his eyes. He had forgotten himself. “You left the
Peabody’s under circumstances that required the most absolute honesty.
You should have come to me with the clothes you stood in. I forgave you
the eight trunks full of finery--after all, your husband had no use
for it, and you, apparently, did. It doesn’t matter, to you, who pays
for the things you want, or whether you are giving value received. To
me, it does matter.... What we did might have been splendid. It isn’t!
I’m as ashamed as you are. Because of these damned, petty things--this
letter, for instance! And what you’ve just told me. The stinking
ugliness of desire and compromise....”
He got control of himself with a wrenching effort. “You’d better go to
Paris. I’d rather compromise than be ashamed.”
* * * * *
Flagg went out and did not come back. She watched him hurry down the
path to the gate, bending his head against a downpour of rain. She said
bitterly: “You shouldn’t have spoken to me like that.” But he couldn’t
hear, of course--the window was closed, and the rain beat against the
ground with a harsh, rhythmic clatter, the noisy rain of southern
countries.
Flagg disappeared up the road to Vincigliata, into the forest of young
cypress trees.
Lilah thought: “I ought to feel more than I do.”
What had happened was too important for concrete, recognizable
feelings. She couldn’t grasp it all at once. She was numb with
misery. She went about the house doing unimportant things with great
seriousness, an exaggerated attention. She put a book-shelf in order
and cleaned Flagg’s study. The dust flew out of the window as she would
have liked to shake out her thoughts, scatter them, get rid of them.
At ten o’clock the casual servant who came in from a near-by farm
appeared under a _contadino’s_ green umbrella, like a big, wet
lettuce-leaf on legs.... Lilah was explicit, much more so than usual.
She set the table herself, humming, “as if nothing had happened,” she
reminded herself. She had the feeling that if she ignored what had
happened it couldn’t be serious. But everything she touched seemed to
be impermanent; knives and forks and plates had a sort of unreality.
She went upstairs, frightened by the dread that clutched at her throat.
But she must put off remembering. She would count the money--try to
understand what Flagg had meant about her selling the pearls.
She counted the bills, laid them in little piles, was relieved by their
ordinary appearance. Surely Flagg hadn’t stopped loving her because
of these little green notes.... She put them away, confident that she
could make him understand as soon as he came in.... It was absurd
for a man and woman in love with each other to quarrel over something
petty....
But she mustn’t think of that.
Flagg did not come in for lunch. The sky was leaden, yellow, and the
rain came down in solid sheets. She couldn’t bear to be alone in the
house. That wet lettuce leaf stumbled down the hill. There was no one
but Aphrodite in her niche, a painted goddess with gilded ringlets and
heavy lids, the smile of a courtesan, the little hands of a child....
No wonder the poet had turned to warfare for sensation. Things. Things.
Things. And nothing got you anywhere. First, you thought it was this
and then that. And nothing satisfied the you that was personal and
aching. Not even love. For then things like this happened....
She thought: “I’ll go out. I’ll feel better if I go out.”
She splashed down the road and stood, holding her umbrella against the
rain, waiting for a tram.
Twenty-five centesimi. Cheaper than a cab.... She sat with the dripping
umbrella pressed against her knees and stared at the people. An old
man. His trousers were baggy at the knee and the skin of his hands was
like brown corduroy. A young girl with bold, unwavering eyes stared
back at Lilah; there was an imitation diamond ring on the first finger
of one plump, red hand.
The city closed around the street; great, drenched walls thrust up,
cornices leaned over; people surged along the narrow sidewalks under
a tossing and writhing of umbrellas; priests, fascisti with curled
forelocks like young game-cocks, like frizzed savages ... girls....
Here and there a shop-window was lighted.
Lilah walked through the square and across to the Tornabuoni.
She went into a hairdresser’s establishment. A warm, sickish odor,
perfumed, assailed her. She explained to a pale woman in pearl earrings
and clinging black satin that she wanted a “wave.” Madame could be
accommodated because, on a rainy day, there were many cancelations.
Right here.... In this booth. _Subito!_
A small, blackish man removed Lilah’s hat. Her hair fell down on her
shoulders and she thought with a stab of pain, acute, physical, of
Flagg’s fingers, caressing, caressing....
The marcel irons twirled. Did Madame want pompadour or straight back?
It was becoming fashionable to clip the hair at the nape of the neck,
close, like a boy’s.... It would be very becoming to Madame.
Did this man love? Every one did, sooner or later. Why was it that the
world wasn’t smitten with madness; would she ever be sane again.... She
fingered the bottles on the dressing-table. Brilliantine. Rouge. Skin
tonic. Pomade. _Mettre cette poudre avec la houppe, s’essuyer avec un
linge...._
Sooner or later, she would have to question not only her reflection,
that face, unchanged by dread and bewilderment, but Lilah, the woman.
It wasn’t possible longer to avoid that encounter. She, herself, had
failed.... _Not yet!_
“Madame has pretty hair. In French, we say _cendrè_--the colour of
ashes.”
* * * * *
She found the English pianist in the drawing-room when she got back to
the “Villino Sans-Souci.”
“Hallo! I thought you’d give me tea. Beastly day. Where’s Flagg?”
“He’s not here,” she said coldly. Suddenly she wanted to hurt Flagg. “I
don’t know where he is.”
The Englishman’s eyes grew round. He made a sound like a whistle. “I
_see_! You’ve quarreled.”
“Yes.”
Let him know it. It didn’t matter. Flagg was trying to frighten her....
She took off her hat and sank down on the divan. “I don’t want to talk.
I want you to play for me. Something strange, ugly. I see now why
modern art is out of balance and discordant and crooked--the world is
sick at its soul. When you’re sick at your soul you don’t want beauty.
You want something clever and horrible, like the evil in yourself.”
The Englishman’s eyes, always flickering, as if there were little
flames in them, blazed up. His lips parted. He was like a smooth,
too fat faun smoking a cigarette. His eyes appraised her. And, for a
terrible reason, Lilah was glad that she was beautiful. She tipped her
head back so that he could see her throat.
This man understood women; he pitied them and desired them; but they
never loved him unless they had lost love; he had never known, never
would know, the best of love, because he expected the worst of it.
Suddenly he jumped up and went to the piano. “I’ll play you the
Saint-Sebastien; I know your real mood is religious, not evil at all! A
woman of your experience buries each amour with a _Te Deum_.”
Lilah wanted to tell him that she had had no experience, but she knew
that he wouldn’t believe her. Her life with Robert, with Flagg, had
never really changed her; she hadn’t loved Robert, and Flagg hadn’t
loved her; when people spoke of experience she supposed they meant that
dedication of self which is spontaneous, mutual, irrevocable....
“Stop! I can’t bear that sort of music.”
He spun around, seized another cigarette. “Then we’ll talk. I’ll cheer
you up. Poor, lonely, adorable Lilah.” He sat, too close, on the divan.
“What on earth possessed you to fall in love with a man whose mind is
fixed on the primeval atom?”
Lilah shrugged her shoulders. It was easy to say: “I don’t know! Why do
we?”
“You ran off, didn’t you? Cut loose? I’ve heard rumors--I beg your
pardon, but things get about a small place like this. Infernal curious,
most people. They like to eat a pretty woman up; crunch her bones.
Now, if you were ugly as mud and fat and forty, they’d call you
‘emancipated.’ Waving the banner of personal freedom and all that sort
of thing.... They’d make you out a martyr to unholy matrimony, meaning
matrimony which is no go. But since you’re young and lovely--very
lovely--they’re tearing you to bits down there.”
“Are they?”
“I’m no end sorry for you. Really.” His eyes said more. “Doing all this
for a man who doesn’t appreciate--well, you--” his eyes said. But he
was too clever, too wary, to put the thought into words.
A bitterness surged up in Lilah’s heart. Six o’clock. And Flagg hadn’t
come in. He might have taken a train to Rome. She saw him in Rome
walking up a street in the rain, wearing that fixed smile, alone. Or
Milan. Another picture. Only this time, she saw him sitting in a hotel
bed-room in his shirt-sleeves.... He might have died, up there in the
cypress grove. He might, even now, be lying on the soaked ground, his
face pressed into the sodden leaves.
She got up. “I think you’d better go,” she said. “I want to be alone.
If you don’t mind.”
The Englishman rose. She was too miserable to sense the danger. He
stayed, looking down at her. And then he caught her shoulders, pressed
her against him and kissed her. She could feel the softness of his
body. She shivered, gasped and pushed him away. She hated him.
“Abominable!” she said.
“Oh, very well.”
With a gesture of contempt, as if it really mattered very little, he
got his hat and went out, slamming the door.
* * * * *
She went upstairs, followed by the black cat and the only one of the
kittens they had saved. It, too, was black, with eyes like jewels and
an incredibly thin, flexible tail. The cats did not seem to know or to
care whether Lilah suffered, and she wanted them to know; she said:
“You little brutes! Don’t frisk! I can’t bear it!” But they frisked on
the gondola-bed, over it and under it, scratching and leaping, as if
nothing had happened.
Lilah undressed. Then, in a warm negligée, banded with fur, her hair
under a sort of gypsy cap made of purple chiffon, she went into Flagg’s
room and peered at his things, his brushes, his coats, on hangers, his
handkerchiefs, in neat piles. She touched everything, sensing his dear
person.... She would wait until eight o’clock, and then, if he hadn’t
returned, she would go out, alone, and look for him in those dark woods.
Eight o’clock came, but she didn’t dare to go out. She got into bed,
instead, and lay in the dark, listening to the rain. She was terribly
afraid. Life was inimical again, and she had lost faith in herself, in
her ability to be pert and to win success with the misty quality of her
loveliness. Accepted things, long-established ideas, convictions, had
failed. There was nothing to go on.... She began, reluctantly, almost
with terror, to look herself straight in the face. She saw an image of
herself, silly, vain, rushing in pursuit of unimportant things. Always
things! And where had they gotten her?
A motor, turning into the Vincigliata road, cast a swinging light
through the windows, across the walls, across Aphrodite, imponderable
and secretive in her niche....
Flagg!
Her heart stopped.
They might have come to tell her....
No. The downstairs door opened, closed again, and she heard his
footsteps, coming, coming....
She thought: “He’s been cruel. I ought to punish him.” But she called
him.
She saw him in the doorway and summoned her half-glimpsed self with a
passionate and peremptory cry. Flagg hesitated, a dim figure, silent,
remote. Then he moved forward and, quivering, her nerves unsteady, she
felt him leaning down over her. She could not see his face. She could
smell the cloth of his coat, wet.... And with a sudden lifting of her
arms, she dragged him down to her. He had to kneel. His face pressed
into her throat. Again she felt his hair, the shape of his head. He
was warm and alive; he was all of life. How could she have doubted,
questioned, hesitated, when this, this was the answer to everything--to
be near him.
“I thought you’d never come. I wanted to tell you that I’ll give the
money to Robert, all of it. I understand.”
Flagg said nothing. He sighed. His body relaxed. He pressed his face
closer against her. His arms went around her.... Lilah could feel the
two cats frisking over her feet, and she thought: “They know. I’m
happy. I’m happy.”
They clasped each other, for the first time, with that love which is
pity and forgiving and ecstasy.