“I am fatigued,” she complained; “you know how weary I get when you
ignore me.” He gazed down at her untouched. “I have left Lao-tze for
Greece,” he replied. She found this stupid and said so. “Has he been no
more amusing than this?” she asked Linda. “But then, you are a child,
it all intrigues you. You listen with the flattery of your blue eyes and
mouth, both open.”
“Don't be rude, Susanna,” Pleydon commanded. “You are so feminine that
you are foolish. I'm not the stupid one--look again at our 'child.' Tell
me what you see.”
“I see Siberia,” she said finally. “I see the snow that seems so pure
while it is as blank and cold as death. You are right, Dodge. I was the
dull one. This girl will be immensely loved; perhaps by you. A calamity,
I promise you. Men are pigs,” she turned again to Linda; “no--imbeciles,
for only idiots destroy the beauty that is given to them. They take your
reputation with a smile, they take your heart with iron fingers; your
beauty they waste like a drunken Russian with gold.”
“Susanna, like all spendthrifts, is amazed by poverty.”
Even in the gloom Linda could see the pallor spreading over the other's
face; she was glad that Susanna Noda spoke in Russian. However, with a
violent effort, she subdued her bitterness. “Go into your Siberia!” she
cried. “I always thought you were capable of the last folly of marriage.
If you do it will spoil everything. You are not great, you know, not
really great, not in the first rank. You've only the slightest chance of
that, too much money. You were never in the gutter as I was--”
“Chateaubriand,” he interrupted, “Dante, Velasquez.”
“No, not spiritually!” she cried again. “What do you know of the
inferno! Married, you will get fat.” Pleydon turned lightly to Linda:
“As a supreme favor do not, when I ask you, marry me.”
This, for Linda, was horribly embarrassing. However, she gravely
promised. The Russian lighted a cigarette; almost she was serene again.
Linda said, “Fatness is awful, isn't it?”
Pleydon replied, “Death should be the penalty. If women aren't lovely--”
he waved away every other consideration.
“And if men have fingers like carrots--” Susanna mimicked him. Judith,
flushed, her hair loosened, approached. “Linda,” she demanded, “do you
remember when we ordered the taxi? Was it two or three?” Markue, at her
shoulder, begged her not to consider home.
“I'm going almost immediately,” Pleydon said, “and taking your Linda.”
His height and determined manner scattered all objections.
Linda, at the entrance to the apartment, found to her great surprise--in
place of the motor she had expected--a small graceful single-horse
victoria, the driver buttoned into a sealskin rug. Deep in furs, beside
Pleydon, she was remarkably comfortable, and she was soothed by the
rhythmic beat of the hoofs, the even progress through the crystal night
of Fifth Avenue.
Her companion flooded his being with the frozen air. They had, it
seemed, lost all desire to talk. The memory of Markue's party lingered
like the last vanishing odor of his incense; there was a confused vision
of the murmurous room against the lighted exterior where the drinks
sparkled on a table. Linda made up her mind that she would not go to
another. Then she wondered if she'd see Pleydon again. The Russian
singer had been too silly for words.
It suddenly occurred to her that the man now with her had taken Susanna
Noda, and that he had left her planted. He had preferred driving her,
Linda Condon, home. He wasn't very enthusiastic about it, though; his
face was gloomy.
“The truth is,” he remarked at last, “that Susanna is right--I am not
in the first rank. But that was all nonsense about the necessity of the
gutter--sentimental lies.”
Linda was not interested in this, but it left her free to explore her
own emotions. The night had been eventful because it had shaken all the
foundation of what she intended. That single momentary delicious thrill
had been enough to threaten the entire rest. At the same time her native
contempt of the other women, of Judith with her tumbled hair, persisted.
Was there no other way to capture such happiness? Was it all hopelessly
messy with drinks and unpleasant familiarity?
What did Pleydon mean by spirit? Surely there must be more kinds of love
than one--he had intimated that. She gathered that “Homer's children,”
those airs of Gluck that she liked so well, were works of art,
sculpture, such as he did. Yet she had never thought of them as
important, important as oatmeal or delicate soap. She made up her mind
to ask him about it, when she saw that they had reached the Eighties;
she was almost home.
“I am going away to-morrow,” he told her, “for the winter, to South
America. When I come back we'll see each other. If you should change
address send me a line to the Harvard Club.” The carriage had stopped
before the great arched entrance to the apartment-house, towering in its
entire block. He got out and lifted her to the pavement as if she had
been no more than a flower in his hands. Then he walked with her into
the darkness of the garden.
The fountains were cased in boards; the hedged borders, the bushes and
grass, were dead. High above them on the dark wall a window was bright.
Linda's heart began to pound loudly, she was trembling ... from the
cold. There was a faint sound in the air--the elevated trains, or
stirring wings? It was nothing, then, to be lifted into heaven. There
was the door to the hall and elevator. She turned, to thank Dodge
Pleydon for all his goodness to her, when he lifted her--was it toward
heaven?--and kissed her mouth.
She was still in his arms, with her eyes closed. “Linda Condon?” he
said, in a tone of inquiry.
At the same breath in which she realized a kiss was of no importance a
sharp icy pain cut at her heart. It hurt her so that she gasped. Then,
and this was strange, she realized that--as a kiss--it hadn't annoyed
her. Suddenly she felt that it wasn't just that, but something far more,
a part of all her inner longing. He had put her down and was looking
away, a face in shadow with an ugly protruding lip.
She saw him that way in her dreams--in the court under the massive
somber walls, with a troubled frown over his eyes. It seemed to her
that, reaching up, she smoothed it away as they stood together in a
darkness with the fountains, the hedges, dead, the world with never a
sound sleeping in the prison of winter.