For a while Lilla remained in the house on Long Island.
She sat in the pergola holding on her lap a closed book, between the
pages of which she kept Lawrence's cablegrams and letters from London.
Toward sunset she rose and went down across the meadow to the brook,
where some willows leaned over the water. As the twilight gathered, a
smell of wood smoke made her think of camp fires; and casting a look
around her at the suave landscape she tried to picture the jungle.
Then, when she recalled their brief hours together, a filmy curtain
appeared to ascend before her eyes; and that relationship, which
because of her profound, psychic agitation had been almost dreamlike
while in progress, assumed a perfect clarity, a new value. And now,
with the dissipation of that haze cast over all her senses by his
nearness, she perceived him, himself, far more distinctly than when he
had been with her. "Ah, what was I thinking of to let him go!" She
felt that another woman, not cursed with her ineptitude in that crisis,
would have held him back.
"But you were cruel enough not to give up going of your own accord,"
she sighed in the twilight. And, turning wearily back toward the
house, she reflected that if she had been fatally weak he had been
fatally strong, and that, after all, those two antithetical defects
were strangely similar.
When she was most gloomy, Fanny Brassfield came to visit her for a few
days.
That vigorous blonde woman, ruddy from golf and thin from horseback
riding, with calm nerves and an endless fund of gossip, brought a vital
thrill into the Long Island house. Yet to Lilla this very vigor was
oppressive instead of tonic; and resentment came over her as she
scrutinized her friend's satirical face, which seemed to typify all the
women who progressed successfully through life, as if their natures,
victoriously adamantine, had bestowed upon them this brilliant hardness
of complexion, this sophisticated, frosty, conquering glance. Lucky
women, who were so emphatically of the same essence as the phenomena
round them, who accepted life with the simplicity of natural creatures,
who never saw, beneath the pageantry of these appearances, a peeping
horror that cast one down from joy to despair! Even death seemed
natural to them, apparently, so long as they themselves escaped its
touch.
"One must resign oneself to all these things," said Fanny, in her
clear, loud voice. "One must learn to rise above them. These periods
of mourning are really a mistake. All this sitting still, dressed in
black! One takes medicine when one's ill. A dose of pleasure ought to
be the prescription when one's sad."
She added that physical exercise was also very important.
In a striped woolen sports suit, a felt hat turned over one ear and a
walking stick in her hand, Fanny Brassfield presented herself at
Lilla's bedside while the garden was still full of mist. She
prescribed, on this occasion, a walk before breakfast.
They trudged through bypaths where the bushes were gemmed with dew.
From a wooded hilltop they saw, gliding along the highway, the cars of
men who were bound for their safe occupations in the city.
Lilla regained the house exhausted, pale from fatigue, while Fanny
Brassfield seemed bursting with energy.
In the evening time began to hang rather heavily for Fanny. She
persuaded Lilla to play the piano for her. Then she glanced over the
books in which the paragraphs were shortest, ran through a few
magazines, kicked off her slippers, put her feet on a stool, lighted a
cigarette, and fell back upon gossip. Madame Zanidov was now visiting
in Maine. Cornelius Rysbroek had gone to Mexico.
"Mexico! Aren't things rather unsettled there?"
"Perhaps he's gone where things are unsettled because everything is too
much settled here," replied Fanny, with her satirical smile.
"But Cornie!"
"Oh," said Fanny, luxuriously stretching herself like a cat that needs
exercise, "if one of these timid souls is hit hard enough, there's no
telling what he'll do."