Gita, attended by Polly and Elsie until the last minute that she be
given no time to change her mind, stood before the psyche mirror and
smiled at her reflection. She had no intention of changing her mind, for
she knew that such an opportunity to outshine all other women and etch
an indelible picture into the minds of all beholders, was granted to few
girls even on their wedding-day.
The mass of delicate lace billowed widely about her slender figure, and
the long veil (exhumed from the chest later and almost as transparent as
tulle) hung from a high coronet of orange-blossoms “built” by Polly and
dipped in weak coffee. She had removed her wig, and her hair, wiry and
vibrant, and of an intense dusky blackness, had been drawn forward to
soften the uncompromising stiffness of the head-dress. She wore her rope
of pearls, and, about the base of her throat, a string of larger pearls,
a present from Eustace. They had belonged to his mother.
Her eyes blazed with excitement, and her mouth, which had begun to take
an upward curve at the corners, was very full and very red. Polly took
out her lip-stick with a sigh.
“You are the loveliest thing on earth, Gita,” announced Elsie, with the
enthusiasm of both artist and friend. “If ever you are in the mood to
hate life just remember tonight.”
“Night of your life,” agreed Polly. “Don’t make any mistake about it.
Spin out the descent of that stair as long as you can. Such a chance
doesn’t come twice in a lifetime. Come along.”
Pelham and John Trowbridge, a friend of Polly’s and of corresponding
height, armed with large silver candelabra, stood near the head of the
stair. (They had flatly refused to put on livery.) Polly posed Gita
between them and regarded the tableau critically.
“Hold those candelabra a bit higher,” she commanded. “And don’t wabble.
Nor, what is equally important, spill grease on that lace. Now, rest
your arms until the band strikes up. I must go ahead and drive them to
this end of the hall. Elsie, better light these candles first.”
The guests were dancing, but the arrival of Mrs. Pelham, Mr. Donald, and
the clergyman in his robes of office, had advised them of some startling
change in the program, and they were not surprised when the music
stopped abruptly and Polly, her hand admonishing, appeared on the stair.
“Come down to this end all of you—over there; and afterward move into
the middle of the room.” A moment later a mass of white wigs looked like
a sudden descent of snowballs above a variegated flower-bed, ruffled by
a faint but agitating breeze. On the broad landing Elsie applied a
lighted taper to eight long candles set in high brackets.
Dr. Lancaster took his position solemnly in front of the chimneypiece
that had looked down on so many Carteret brides. Mrs. Pleyden, who had
no intention of striking too incongruous a note, wore a gown of
rose-pink velvet with panniers made from a point-lace shawl, and had
powdered her hair. She looked haughty and disapproving, however, and so
did Mr. Donald, who was to give, thankfully, the bride away. Both were
astonished that Polly and Eustace Bylant, the quintessence of modernism,
should lend themselves to anything so theatrical. Of course, anything
might be expected of Gita, and, no doubt, she had been encouraged by
Mrs. Brewster, who was by way of being a “bohemian.”
Eustace, wigless and very pale, took his position at the foot of the
stair, the bridesmaids behind him. Topper and the other servants, who
had been put into dominos, stood in the background.
The slow opening strains of the Lohengrin wedding-march stole down from
the gallery and there was a faint rustle from above. The hush became
breathless. A moment later three figures appeared and stood on the high
landing beneath the soft glow of the candles, into whose aspiring flames
they seemed for a moment to merge as if to soar upward themselves.
Pelham and Trowbridge, holding the candelabra aloft with rigid arms,
looked like graven images. Gita, a white wraith, her arms hanging at her
sides, her eyes fixed on space, but dazzling with their own light,
stepped slowly down the wide stair, her attendants beside her. All three
were consumed with fear of taking a false step and stumbling headlong,
but preserved their outward composure.
A deep sigh rose from the audience, and one or two of the men whose
secret life was ruled by a passionate devotion to beauty, winked away
tears. Even the scornful muscles of Mrs. Pleyden’s face relaxed, and she
reflected that she would have a tale to tell on many morrows.
The music rose and swelled through the old hall. The torches seemed to
flame higher, and the dark faces of Carterets stood out as saliently as
the living members of the drama enacting below. The stately trio reached
the foot of the stair and Eustace took Gita’s hand and led her forward,
unmindful of Mr. Donald’s crooked arm and heightened color. The
bridesmaids spread out their trains and stepped daintily behind. The
candelabra were lowered with a sigh of relief and Pelham advanced to his
position as best man. The ceremony began.
Once Eustace felt Gita’s hand twitch as if she would snatch it away, but
he held it firmly. Dr. Lancaster had a deep solemn voice and it boomed
out much as it had done at the funeral ceremonies eight months before.
Gita shivered, but she uttered her vows firmly, and held out a rigid
finger for the ring. Then she sank to her knees on the cushion
thoughtfully provided by Topper, and set her teeth as the solemn
blessing rolled over her head. A moment later she was on her feet again
listening to a loud excited buzz of congratulations. She submitted to
being kissed by Mrs. Pleyden and the girls, then broke away and ran
toward the dining-room.
“If you are not all famished I am,” she cried in a high and not
unhysterical voice. “And you must lose no time drinking our health.”
PART II
CHAPTER I
“Nothing and Nobody, By Elizabeth Pelham” was published in the spring,
and as critics and columnists pronounced it another notable contribution
to undiluted Americanism and as her publisher’s enthusiasm expressed
itself in picturesque advertising it had a fair success. The sale barely
reached seven thousand copies, but the event established her in
sophisticate society and the Lucy Stone League invited her to sit at the
Speakers’ Table at their annual dinner.
“But privately I don’t think much of it,” she said to Gita. “They are
all very kind and overlook defects because it is modern and sincere and
rather disagreeable. But I know I’ll do better and better, and I never
was so happy in my life.”
“Eustace thinks it a remarkable first novel, and I know it by heart.
Seems all right to me.”
Elsie shook her head solemnly. “It has holes in it. But it is seeing
your stuff in print that educates, not critics.”
They were in Gita’s sitting-room in the West Twelfth Street house, the
windows open to the warm breezes of spring.
“How is Eustace’s book getting on?” asked Elsie, who was still able to
interest herself in the work of other authors. “It should be nearly
finished.”
“Haven’t seen him for two weeks. He has his meals sent upstairs. Says he
always becomes the complete hermit toward the end. I suppose he doesn’t
even shave.”
Gita was smoking placidly and Elsie looked at her speculatively.
“Your experiment has been a success,” she observed. “I wondered if it
would——”
“Of course it has been a success. We’ve even had our little tiffs.
Sometimes, particularly at the table, I feel almost domestic. But when
we have an evening at home he comes downstairs to call and we have one
of our old wonderful talks. The more I see of all these clever men the
more I admire Eustace, for he has a mental grace that seems to be a sort
of left-over and successfully eluded by the rest of them. I’ve missed
him terribly these last weeks.”
“Too bad more husbands don’t take a leaf out of his book! In some ways
your marriage is an ideal one.”
“All ways.”
“Well, of course all women wouldn’t think so.”
“More fools they.”
“Gita——” Elsie hesitated. She seldom pressed too close to this still
incalculable friend, but no artistic faculty would continue to function
without curiosity. Moreover, she was still more interested personally in
Gita than in anyone she had ever known, save, possibly, Eustace Bylant.
“Well?” Gita, who had returned at two in the morning from a party at
Potts Dawes’s, was sunken deep in her chair, enjoying the sensation of
complete repose. She had lost some of her color, but her pink negligée
shed a soft glow over her face that would have softened it as well had
it not been for her hair, which, springing away from her face and very
thick at the back, gave her, Elsie thought, the appearance of an eagle
about to lift its wings and take flight. And her eyes, in spite of her
mild dissipations, never looked heavy, although less fierce than
formerly.
Gita had ceased to fear men and found many of Eustace’s friends as
likable and amusing as she had anticipated. Whether a bride was
sacrosanct even in a circle whose bugle-cry was scorn of tradition, or
they cared for no reckoning with Bylant, or thought her too difficult
game for a busy age, was a matter of indifference to her. They admired
her extravagantly, but they let her alone. Once Peter Whiffle kissed her
instep, but she had turned her eyes away from so much worse that she was
inclined to be lenient and merely brushed him off as she would a
mosquito. They discussed esoteric literature at odds with the censor for
the rest of the evening.
“Gita——”
“Well—once more. You look as if you had something on your mind. Better
get it off.”
“I can’t help wondering—I witnessed a good many changes before you
married . . . but this winter in New York has changed you still
more——”
“Developed, dear Elsie. You’re careless in the use of words, for a
stylist. We don’t change, you know.”
“Not literally perhaps—unless, to be sure, the endocrines go wrong. But
it looks a good deal like it sometimes! Perhaps ‘thawed’ would be a
better word still. I shouldn’t be at all surprised to see you dancing
next winter.”
“I don’t think so. There are some things I dislike as much as ever. Men
are all very well as long as you don’t get too close to them. Then they
smell of gin. And—well, I shouldn’t like it, that’s all. Some of those
men are all right but it takes just one cocktail to turn two or three I
could mention into silly beasts. If I danced with one I couldn’t refuse
any of them and then anything might happen. So far, I’m safe from all
but stuttering compliments on my eyelashes or my ears.”
Elsie laughed. “You’re safe enough. And probably right. There isn’t one
of them, I fancy, who wouldn’t like to take you away from Eustace, but
they’re afraid of you both. . . . But you _have_ thawed, and you’ve
become a good deal of a woman of the world; you’ve cast out a good many
inhibitions and prejudices. You’ve got _used_ to things. You even took
Marian Starr Darsett for a drive the other day, and it is the particular
pride of our sophisticates that she has had more lovers than any woman
in the world for her age. You find her charming and you’ve grown as
indifferent as the rest of us to conduct as long as the personality
pleases you and jiggledy morals don’t interfere with table manners.”
“That’s all true. I look upon life as a pageant and am grateful for its
variety and not out to reform it. Miss Darsett is a beauty and a genius
and a charming creature; and her private life—personal rather; nothing
very private about it—is her affair, not mine.”
“But don’t you see what a stride you’ve taken? Any hint of sex, even
under the ægis of holy matrimony, utterly disgusted you. If Polly and I
had been even the usual susceptible females, let alone Marian Darsetts,
you’d have swept us out with a broom.”
“True enough. But that was owing to a neurosis, and you and Polly and
Eustace, my grandmother and the life she made possible, did the
sweeping. I am able to adjust myself, take life as I find it, that’s
all.”
“Well, it’s a good deal! I’m wondering if you won’t go further and fall
in love with Eustace.”
Gita stared at her. “With Eustace? What an idea! Why don’t you ask me if
I don’t think of spoiling the very most ideal—and
satisfactory—relationship that ever existed between a man and woman?”
“Well—that’s a matter of opinion.”
“Only one opinion under this roof.”
“Then you’ve changed—developed if you prefer it—less than I thought.”
“Odd if I should change in that respect.”
“Some women, you know, even women that have been inhibited for one
reason or another. . . . You might fall in love with someone else.
You’ve met a good many attractive men these last months.”
“None half as attractive as Eustace. He always both rests and stimulates
me and his manners are flawless. More than can be said for most.”
“And do you mean to live like this for the rest of your life?”
“Of course. Why not? Life is perfect. When I look back on those long
twenty-two years before I landed in Carteret Manor I can hardly realize
my good luck.”
“Oh, I admit that. And you were doubly fortunate to have the mental
equipment to make the most of it. But you’re missing something, you
know.”
“I’m not.” Gita set her mouth obstinately. “Don’t talk that old tosh.”
“Call it what you like, but no woman escapes it. Even Polly is more than
half in love with my brother.”
“Is she?” Gita opened her eyes. “She’s never said a word to me about
it.”
“Bad sign, as you see her nearly every day. He’s been there to dine
several times and I know they take walks together in the Park. I fancy
the pursuit is on her side, but when a woman makes up her mind to marry
a man she generally does.”
“Funny if Polly went back on that old hard-and-fast program of hers. And
I don’t quite see her as the wife of a struggling young surgeon.”
“Nor I. But love has been known to do queer things to people. And Polly
has the tenacity of the devil.”
“I always said she was far too good for her crowd, and I’ve seen signs
more than once she was sick of it. But—well, _but_!”
“Exactly. She’ll blind herself and perhaps him for a time, but they’re
not suited at all.”
“Have you given him a talking-to?”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“I haven’t seen him since the night of the Christmas party. Then he
looked like a beau cavalier and was certainly devoted to Polly.” She
almost blushed as she remembered his explosive declaration to herself.
“I rather thought you’d made an impression on him,” said Elsie. “And
that wouldn’t have done either. I suppose I don’t want him to marry at
all. He’s the sort of man who is better off alone. Perhaps I’m all
wrong. I’d be a fool if I thought I knew my own brother . . . I wish
you’d ask them to dine and then tell me what you think of it.”
“I’ve asked him several times but he always gave some excuse. When
Eustace has finished his book we’re going to have a celebration and I’ll
tell Polly to bring him.”
“Well—if I were a different person, and you were a different person,
I’d ask you to use your own wiles and break it up. But as it is——”
“I should think not!” Gita sprang to her feet. “Let’s go for a walk.”
CHAPTER II
Eustace, unshorn and unshaven, banged out the last word of his novel,
tore the page from the typewriter and flung it to the floor. Then he hit
his machine a blow with his fist, rattled the case over it, and swinging
about in his chair, scowled at the scattered manuscript. He gave full
rein to his temperament when writing a book in the seclusion of his
chambers and bore little resemblance to the Eustace Bylant known to his
world.
He had begun his novel in Atlantic City, but interruptions had been
frequent and interests conflicting; he had confined himself to a rough
draft, working only at night and not vitally interested. But he had
plunged into it as a beneficent refuge the day after he found himself
shut up in this narrow house with Gita; and as art had been his
queen-mistress for so many years, she showed but a few days of coyness
before remounting her throne. His theme had not only absorbed but
exhausted him. A cold shower and he was ready to meet Gita at the table
or sit with her in that austere living-room of hers during the evening
with nerves that longed only for rest. They rarely met before dinner,
for he rose at nine and worked until four, and on what he called his
off-days he went to a gymnasium, played golf, or took a long walk in the
country. This last week the pace had been terrific and he had barely
left his rooms.
He hardly knew whether he loved his book or hated it. He always finished
a novel with regret, and this assuredly had been a friend in need! But
his nerves were jumping and his violated ego clamored for utterance.
He gathered up the sheets resentfully. Why hadn’t he spun it out? Made
it a third longer? Even now he might pad it, dazzling both critics and
public with pyrotechnical brilliancy. But he shrugged impatiently. He
was an artist and incapable of crime. Perhaps he was more artist than
man. He wished to God he were.
He took a hot bath and cold shower, and not daring to trust his unsteady
hands, slipped out of the house and went to his barber. An hour later he
was sauntering up Fifth Avenue to one of his clubs, cool, aloof,
immaculately groomed, the frenetic artist submerged in the man of the
world. This club, of which he was a member almost by inheritance, always
called him at the end of an intellectual orgy. The reaction from the
long strain was apt to be sharp and violent and it was some time before
he cared even to lunch at The Sign of the Indian Chief, where the
sophisticates foregathered and had created something resembling a salon.
A woman novelist once told him that as soon as she finished a book she
hastily adjusted her feminine wings and flew to the shops. His reaction
was not dissimilar and he moved automatically toward men who hardly knew
him as a novelist and were quietly amused by the word temperament.
At half-past seven he met Gita in the Brittany drawing-room and
gallantly raised her hand to his lips.
“I feel as if I had just risen from the dead,” he said, smiling, “and
had ascended not to earth but to a vision of paradise.”
“Nice to hear your pretty compliments again, dear Eustace, and nicer
still to have you back. But you look rather fagged—must have been
working frightfully hard.”
“Pegging away like an old cart-horse, but the job’s finished, thank
heaven. A week or two of polishing and then nothing more arduous than
proofs to correct.”
“I’d love to help you with them.”
“Well, you shall. We’ll be over at the manor then and I’ll really see
something of you once more. Have we anything on tonight?”
“Music at the Pleydens’. I hope you’re not too tired to go? I dared not
accept for dinner but promised Mrs. Pleyden I’d bring you later if it
were humanly possible.”
His sigh of relief was inaudible. He meant to woo her and win her but he
was very tired and a part of his brain still reverberated to the echoes
of his creative energies. “Nothing would give me more pleasure than an
evening of music except to dine alone with you and enjoy a good dinner
once more. By the time a tray reaches the third floor things are
lukewarm and tasteless. Shall we go in?”
The long narrow dining-room was at the front of the house, rather
somber, with its tapestries and Jacobean furniture, but lit with long
red candles as slender as reeds. Topper had been left in charge of the
manor and they were served by a trim maid. Gita, at the head of the
table in a shining yellow gown with a jeweled sunflower (Bylant’s
wedding-gift) at her breast, was a grateful and refreshing figure after
his incarceration, and he felt as he would toward any beautiful woman
who had never stirred his pulses; although they talked of intimate
things. Gita purred like a contented house-cat restored to the warmth of
the hearthstone, her eyes dwelling affectionately on the bland and
hungry gentleman opposite.
“You’ve no idea how I’ve missed you!” she exclaimed as their eyes met
and smiled. “But of course you forgot my existence.”
“Ah—well, I must be rude and confess that I did. But I am sure you
understand.”
“Of course I do. And I never resented it even when I wanted to talk to
you more than anything else in the world.”
“I once told you that you would make a model wife—and, I remember, you
retorted that you hated the word, and substituted partner.”
“Oh, I’m used to hearing myself called your wife and don’t mind a bit.
Words only mean what you put into them, anyhow. To most foreigners, for
instance, all our words mean nothing.”
“Quite true. What have you been doing with yourself?”
“Lunching with Polly at some restaurant in Park Avenue or with Elsie at
The Sign of the Indian Chief, or with both of them here; going to the
opera, matinées, concerts, parties, dinners, walking, shopping—getting
summer things—enjoying myself every minute.”
“Not a bit tired of this gay life?”
“Rather not. But I’ll be glad to get back to the manor.”
“I suppose you intend to have house-parties?”
“I should think so! Dozens have promised to come.”
“Wouldn’t you like to be quiet for a while?”
Gita shook her head. “No, and you wouldn’t, either. You never look as
much at home as at a party.”
“But it would be a delightful change to have you to myself for a
bit—say a month.”
“’Fraid we’d get talked out and bore each other, but a week between each
party would strike a happy medium. I never intend to give you a chance
to tire of me.” And she gave him a dazzling smile.
He made the proper gallant retort, and asked, “What time do we show up
at the Pleydens’?”
“Ten-thirty. You’ve just time for a cigar in my ark. I simply long to
see you in your chair again. It’s over a fortnight since you paid me a
call.”
CHAPTER III
The Pleydens lived in a double apartment on Park Avenue and until lately
the large drawing-room had resounded with jazz at least once a week.
During the winter Mrs. Pleyden gave two musical evenings, a large dinner
once a fortnight, followed by bridge, and numerous luncheons. She had no
intention of retiring to a backwater, and Polly, to do her justice,
never demanded the ignominy and even asked a few of her friends to the
concerts.
Tonight, although it was late in the season, a large company was
assembled, and several of the women wore tiaras—less ponderous than
Gita’s heirloom, however—supported their chins with high diamond
collars, and clung to the elaborate coiffure of the past; but others,
like Mrs. Pleyden—still in her forties despite two married
daughters—covered their ears, indulged in a permanent wave, or arranged
their hair in the manner best suited to their individual style.
Mrs. Pleyden wore a jeweled band above her eyebrows, and her gown of
eucalyptus-green satin embroidered with silver finished eight inches
above the instep and was as modish as Polly’s. A short string of pearls
clasped the base of her throat, and at the end of a long chain of
platinum and small diamonds she carried a lorgnette. Her eyes were still
clear and bright but growing defective in vision, and although
lorgnettes were no longer employed to annihilate they were useful for
casual print.
Her concerts were always events, for she had the fine taste in music of
educated New Yorkers, and a liberal understanding with stars of the
opera and concert stage. The musicians performed on a raised dais at the
end of the long room, and the guests sat as comfortably as might be on
rows of gilt chairs. The decorations were yellow chrysanthemums, and a
soft golden light was becoming to complexions both sacred and profane.
Mr. Pleyden was not present. He was the able and industrious president
of a railroad system and spent his evenings in his library reading
detective stories.
But Mrs. Pleyden looked less placid than usual as she stood by the door
receiving late guests while a coloratura warbled. Her eyes wandered to
Polly, who sat in a niche by the chimneypiece with Dr. Pelham. Her
brilliant restless daughter merely blew rings in her face when,
forgetting diplomacy, she remonstrated or probed lightly; and refused to
discuss the subject. Mrs. Pleyden was not as worldly as the mothers of
her own youth but she drew the line at obscure surgeons whose parents
she had never met. That he was the highly esteemed associate of Dr.
Gaunt, whose mother wore a tiara in the front row, and whose wife was
her intimate friend, in no way tempered the misfortune that threatened
the house of Pleyden. He might be a famous surgeon himself twenty years
hence but at present he was a nobody; and although girls sometimes
married young men obliged to toil and economize, and were content to
live in unfashionable neighborhoods, saved from complete ignominy by one
servant, it was always with a husband of their own class, and their
position was still as assured as that of their friends with spectacular
American incomes. But Mrs. Pleyden had seen enough of Geoffrey Pelham to
comprehend that if Polly married him she would drop out. It was only too
plain that society bored him, and if her dainty and fastidious daughter
accomplished what looked to be a fell purpose her flat in the Bronx
would be as disconcerting to her old friends as that dreadful house on
States Avenue, Atlantic City. Her father would be willing to give her a
large allowance, but Pelham was not the man to live on his wife, and she
knew that he contributed to the support of his mother and sister. The
future looked dark and dubious. She had seen Polly interested before but
never serious.
And then she noticed that Pelham, whose ear was bent to Polly’s
irreverent whisperings, was looking at Gita Bylant. Staring at her. His
eyes looked bedazzled. She was convinced that he had not yet asked Polly
to marry him, and although he was obviously attracted by her, he had
never, to Mrs. Pleyden’s experienced eye, given the impression of a man
desperately in love. She had concluded that the pursuit was Polly’s, but
it was a conclusion that had given her little solace. Polly was born to
have her way.
But at this moment her heart gave a throb of mingled hope and
resentment. Although she disapproved of Gita more than ever, since that
refractory charge preferred the society of what her own set persisted in
calling bohemians, to the exalted circles into which, true to her
promise, she had launched her, the creature might have her uses; and if
she chose to exert her wiles on Geoffrey Pelham, so much the better.
Eustace was able to take care of himself.
But Gita, after a smile and nod to both Polly and Dr. Pelham, had
devoted herself raptly to the music.
The musical program lasted but an hour and a half. As the company moved
toward the dining-room Gita found herself beside Geoffrey Pelham, who
had surrendered Polly to Park Leonard, a new and increasingly determined
admirer. Gita noted under her eyelashes that he more nearly filled
Polly’s old ideal than any of her numerous court, certainly far more
than Geoffrey Pelham. He was a partner in his father’s eminent law firm,
and in spite of a personal fortune, was ambitious, active and diligent,
going rarely into society and never to jazz parties. He had met Polly at
a dinner to which he had been enticed by his sister, and his attentions,
at first sporadic, had of late grown assiduous. He had dark hair and
gray eyes, clean features almost sharp, and a square chin. His devotion
to the law in no way interfered with his grooming, and as he took quiet
possession of Polly it would have been difficult to find a couple so at
one in breeding and so complementary in looks.
Polly found him useful as a red rag, and nodded indifferently to Pelham
as she gave Leonard permission to sit beside her at supper. That Gita’s
black eyes had played havoc in Geoffrey’s unsusceptible heart had never
entered her mind.
CHAPTER IV
Gita had learned the lesson familiar to all American women, that
conversational initiative was one to be cheerfully assumed, more
particularly with men as silent as Geoffrey Pelham. She began by
reproaching him for his neglect.
“I’ve been working very hard,” he replied, avoiding her eyes.
“But Eustace! He’s devoted to you and has felt hurt. You might have made
an exception in his favor. Do you really go nowhere?”
“I won’t say that. I couldn’t very well, as I’m here tonight! Dr. Gaunt
insists that society is the best relaxation for a busy man, although I
don’t agree with him, but I do go out now and then. It just happened I
could not accept any of your invitations.”
“Well! You’ll come to our party a week from Thursday. Eustace has
finished his novel and we’re going to have a blow-out. Don’t try to
think up an excuse. We’ll expect you.”
“I was only trying to say I’d be delighted.”
They found a table for two in a corner, and although surrounded by high
chatter their tête-à-tête was unlikely to be interrupted.
Gita was still uninitiated in coquetry but her eyes as she turned them
on Pelham were not devoid of challenge, although she was, at the moment,
consumed by nothing more dangerous than curiosity.
“I hear you are devoted to Polly,” she remarked.
He flushed but answered coolly: “Devoted is hardly the word. I have a
great admiration for Miss Pleyden and she has shown me much hospitality.
I—I’ve never found time to be interested in anyone.”
“Polly has more in her than you suspect. She is not only a dear but she
really has a mind if she would cultivate it.”
“I more than suspect it. As I told you before I find her admirable.”
“I was delighted when I heard of the friendship. I’ve always feared
she’d marry some duffer and come to her senses too late.”
“I should say she was less likely to make a mistake than most girls, and
Leonard, for instance, is a fine fellow.”
Gita glanced across the room at Polly, whose flower-like orbs were
lifted sweetly to the compelling gaze of the distinguished young lawyer.
“He’d do very well,” she said musingly. “Polly always said she’d never
marry until she met a man of that sort.” She shot a glance at Pelham,
who was calmly consuming a plover.
“I’m sure she couldn’t do better.”
“But——” If Polly were as serious as Elsie suspected was it not her
loyal duty to aid her in what might be the supreme crisis of her youth?
No doubt Pelham was in love with her without realizing it, so scant was
his experience with women.
“Well?” Pelham looked up, and in his own eyes there was something of
challenge.
“I mean—well—you see—I hardly know how to say it, but I believe Polly
is really interested in you.”
“I have amused her because I am a rank outsider, something entirely
different from what she has been accustomed to.” And he helped himself
to chicken salad.
Gita was torn between what might be a betrayal of Polly and the desire
to come to her assistance. She had heard that men sometimes needed but a
seed deftly planted to be flattered into complete surrender. And Pelham
was not the type to feel only the joy of the hunter. Affection for Polly
conquered.
“I believe she is really in love with you,” she said.
He turned pale but looked at her steadily. “If I thought that were true
I should refuse to discuss the subject at all. But it is not. . . . Am I
to understand that you have turned matchmaker?”
“Not I. But I’d like to see Polly happy.”
“Do you mean that you want me to marry her?” His voice had a harsh
directness, quite unlike the mellow subtle tones of Eustace Bylant.
To her surprise Gita felt her face flush, and she dropped her eyes.
“Yes—I think I do.” But she frowned, not at him but herself.
“I never saw but one woman I wanted to marry and as—that is forever
denied me I shall never marry at all. I’m not the sort of man, I hope,
to make love to the wife of my friend, but—I’d be grateful if you would
take no further interest in my casual friendships with other women.” He
was very white but his voice was hard and deliberate and his eyes angry.
He lifted his fork and his sensitive fingers were steady.
Gita turned cold and the blood left her face and seemed to settle about
her heart, whose thumping stirred the sunflower on her breast. She was
astounded and horrified—and not at Geoffrey Pelham! And then she felt a
sensation of sheer terror. What had happened to her? Of love in the
sexual sense she was incapable and she assuredly felt for this man none
of the calm active affection she so liberally bestowed on Eustace and
her two other friends. She was barely conscious of liking him, although
he had haunted her thoughts occasionally and had given her an odd
sensation the night of the Christmas party. She had heard a great deal
of the magnetic vibrations between men and women, inspired by nothing
more elevated than the automatic response of the opposite poles of sex,
but she was far removed from that category. She had lived in an
atmosphere of sex since she came to New York and its vibrations had
glanced off her as harmlessly as lightning from basalt. If she no longer
regarded the subject with profound distaste she was totally
uninterested. Eustace had taught her that men could be clean and decent
and wholly admirable, and as a rule she chose to see only the fine side
of the others and viewed their moral divagations with indifference.
She dropped her handkerchief on the side farthest from Pelham and bent
down until the blood returned to her head, then switched on her
analytical faculty. She had been startled—who would not be? Geoffrey
Pelham!—and horrified that she was the innocent cause of desolation in
two hearts capable of the highest happiness. Polly was doomed to bitter
disappointment, and this honorable and remarkable man would go through
life a dreary bachelor for her sake. (She was unable to visualize Polly
as an old maid.) She felt Jezebelian. And loyalty flooded her for
Eustace. For the moment she was almost angry at the man whose life she
had unwittingly ruined, and craned her neck until her eyes found her
husband, seated at a distant table, laughing and talking with every
appearance of enjoyment. She caught his eye and they exchanged a glance
of gay understanding which suffused her with a virtuous glow and enabled
her to turn to Geoffrey, now at work on a peach. She said calmly:
“That was an awkward silence but you frightened me out of my wits. Will
you peel me a peach? It’s a pleasure to watch you. And when I eat a
hothouse peach in winter I feel as if I had dissolved a pearl in
champagne—although Cleopatra’s wines must have been stronger than
bootleggers’.”
CHAPTER V
It was Mrs. Pleyden’s habit to move to Atlantic City in April and she
began her usual preparations on the day after the party in spite of
remonstrances from Polly.
“I’m sick to death of Atlantic City and besides I hear they’re having a
rainy spring. I’ve a lot of things on here and simply can’t go.”
She was lying on a sofa in her mother’s bedroom and wore a pale green
negligée in delicate harmony with the pink of her cheeks, unimpaired by
a cacophonous winter. As usual she was smoking.
Mrs. Pleyden, who was packing her jewels for the safe-deposit vault in
her bank, looked up critically.
“I wish you would not smoke so much, if only for the sake of your
complexion. The house in Chelsea is ready and the servants go tomorrow.
I am surprised you made any engagements.”
“I don’t think I’ll go,” announced Polly. “I can stay here with father.
He told me yesterday he’d be delighted to have me, and if he can make
himself comfortable with two servants and a caretaker I can.”
Mrs. Pleyden bent over the large box with an anxious line between her
brows. It was seldom she came to an issue with her daughter.
“But—my dear—you would have a dull time. All the girls will have left
shortly, either for Europe or the country—I dislike Europe since the
war but if you’d like to go——”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Even before your friends left you couldn’t have parties. I don’t mean
only in my absence but in that of the servants.”
“I’m sick of parties. I only want to be quiet for a while. Nothing very
quiet about Atlantic City.”
“I am afraid, my dear, you have another reason. You want to be able to
continue to see Dr. Pelham.”
“Well—what if I do? He’s the only man that interests me—makes me feel
as if I had brains instead of jazz in my skull.”
“He’s an intellectual man, of course, and if he ever talks at all, no
doubt what he says is illuminating. But aren’t you rather young for
intellectual friendships? Better enjoy yourself while you _are_ young
and leave those until later. Besides, how about Park Leonard? I should
think he was quite as clever as Dr. Pelham and a good deal more
versatile. Certainly more your own sort.”
“I like him well enough but I happen to like Geoffrey Pelham better. He
interests me and Park does not. Those things are not to be explained.
Matter of spark, perhaps.”
“Isn’t it merely because he is rather difficult? You are used to having
men fall in love with you, pursue you as Leonard does.”
“Maybe. What does it matter?”
Mrs. Pleyden abandoned diplomacy. It had come to what Polly herself
would call a show-down.
“Do you intend to marry him?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Have you thought what it means?”
“Financially? A flat in Harlem or the Bronx or commuting to some—at
present—unknown suburb? Yes, I’ve thought of it—considerably. But if
Nell Croydon and Hallie Le Kay can stand it I guess I can. Besides, I
always like anything for a change! And in a few years he’ll have a large
income. Dr. Gaunt told me the other day that his personal practice was
increasing rapidly, and of course he has his associate fees.”
“Very well. If you are able to see yourself living—with resignation—in
an uptown flat or suburban cottage, changing an incompetent servant at
least once a month and making over your clothes, cut off from everything
to which you have been accustomed, and with a man who hardly opens his
mouth, I have nothing to say. But are you sure he is in love with you?”
“No, I am not, and that is what makes it exciting. I rather like doing
all the work for a change. Waking him up. And don’t you imagine he never
talks. He’s bored stiff at dinners, and that he comes at all means a
good deal; but when we take walks together he opens up, and sometimes is
almost boyish.”
“Ah. You are sure you can make him love you?”
“I am,” said Polly serenely. “Just you wait.”
“And”—Mrs. Pleyden took another plunge—“has it never occurred to you
that he might love someone else?”
Polly sat up straight, dropping her cigarette. “What on earth put such
an idea into your head?”
“Please pick up that cigarette before it burns a hole in the rug. I mean
he is in love with Gita Carteret.”
Polly rose slowly to her feet, her eyes staring. “Mother! What are you
saying?”
“I know what I am talking about. I saw him looking at her last night
when he was pretending to listen to you. No man looks at a woman like
that unless he loves her. And I watched them afterward in the
dining-room. He said something that made her turn as white as a sheet
and she didn’t speak for at least five minutes. It seems he’s not only
in love with her but is not above making love to the wife of his best
friend.”
“I don’t believe it! You imagined it—every bit of it! In the first
place he wouldn’t do such a thing and in the second he wouldn’t dare.
You don’t know Gita as I do. She’d have thrown a plate at him.”
“It is fortunate that her evident complaisance—reciprocation, shall I
say?—averted a scandal. For unless all signs fail she’s in love with
him.”
“You’re crazy. You hate Gita and you don’t like Geoffrey. You’ve let
your imagination run away with you. That’s all.”
“Have I ever struck you as an imaginative woman? I doubt if there’s a
more practical woman in New York. And I don’t hate Gita, although I
disapprove of her, and was only too thankful when poor dear Eustace took
her off my hands. A pleasant prospect for him!”
“You needn’t worry. Neither would do anything dishonorable even if there
were anything in it, and there’s not. If you didn’t imagine it all you
were mistaken.”
“Has he never talked to you about her?”
Polly raked her memory. “Yes—I suppose he has. It’s quite the thing to
discuss Gita.”
“Hasn’t he talked of her a good deal? May not that be one secret of your
attraction for him?”
“You are not very complimentary!”
“I don’t mean, my dear, that you couldn’t charm anyone you thought worth
while, whether you let him talk to you about some other girl or not. I
am merely trying to open your eyes.”
“Well, I’ll not believe it,” said Polly stubbornly. She was walking up
and down the room, her eyes puzzled and angry. “But I’ll sound out Gita
this very day. And warn her off the grass if I find she’s been flirting
with him. She’s come out of her ‘fort’ to such an amazing extent this
winter and has got so accustomed to men raving over her that no doubt
she’s as keen as the next girl to stir a man up——”
“Do you believe that Gita is incapable of falling in love?”
“Yes, I do. When I first met her I got the impression she was just the
sort to burn herself up over some man, but I know better now. No one
could call her sub-normal, but she’s what is known as asexual. Shell’s
all right but emotional content gone fluey. Do you know that she doesn’t
live with Eustace? That they had an understanding to that effect?”
Mrs. Pleyden blushed slightly. “I inferred as much, but it cannot last.”
“Not with anyone but Gita. Perhaps not forever even with her. Time works
wonders even to one’s inside. But no one but Eustace will turn the
trick. He’s the man for her in every way and she really adores him in
her own queer fashion. She’ll never give ten cents for Geoffrey Pelham
nor anyone else.”
“I’m not so sure. She is Gerald Carteret’s daughter, and the living
image of him. Nor were the Carteret women, although their virtue was
proverbial, ever known as what you call asexual. The men were lawless,
and Gita strikes me as more like them than like the women of her family.
And although she started out in life by hating men you can see for
yourself how she’s changed. Nothing she did would surprise me. You know
how high-handed she is. What she wants she will have——”
“No more high-handed than I am. You forget this is the age of
high-handedness. What we want we’ll damn well get. And the devil take
the hindmost. Well, I’m off to dress.”
CHAPTER VI
Gita was only half-dressed when she heard Polly’s voice downstairs. She
had not slept until long after daylight. To her intense annoyance and
perplexity her mind iterated and reiterated the scene between herself
and Geoffrey Pelham. As a rule she fell asleep the moment she turned off
the light, no matter how exciting the preceding hours may have been, and
she looked upon Pelham almost with awe that he could disturb the habit
of a lifetime. Even the ugly worries and agitations of the past had
never interfered with sound healthy nights.
The moment she was encompassed by darkness she had been back in the
Pleyden dining-room with Geoffrey Pelham’s voice in her ears, her eyes
on his white strained face until she dropped them in consternation. She
supposed that another woman, recalling a declaration from a man as
attractive as that would have thrilled at the haunting memory; but her
body was quiescent, it was only her brain that blazed like a
bonfire. . . . She was not even sure he had captured her imagination, he
had merely “started something.” . . .
No doubt her vanity. . . . But she had had a good many spasms of vanity
this last year. She had been inordinately set up when she had made a
conquest of Eustace Bylant. . . . Her mirror had received a good many
confidences. Yes, she was as vain as a peacock. No need of a man more or
less to keep it awake. Certainly wouldn’t keep her awake. . . .
She recalled the night of the manor ball when she and Pelham had sat
alone in the drawing-room. He had outshone every man at the party in
looks and distinction. . . . She remembered certain odd
sensations. . . . Another Gita Carteret. That was it. No doubt if she
had sat in that room two hundred years ago with a young man as handsome
and winning as that she’d have fallen in love with him then and there.
For the first time she was conscious of regret that such an exciting
experience was denied her. It would be immeasurably interesting to love
a man like Geoffrey Pelham—especially as he looked that night. Nothing
very romantic about a man dressed like a waiter and eating chicken
salad. . . .
That, perhaps, was it. Romance. It was not the dearth of sex-fires she
was regretting—that idea was as abhorrent as ever—but the romances all
those beautiful Carteret girls had experienced before her and handed
down as her birthright. She would even have been glad if her mother—who
would have been happier dead anyhow—could have gone when she was a
child and her father had sent her to her grandmother. She would have
grown up a true Carteret girl and come into her birthright. She might or
might not have met Geoffrey Pelham but she would have had her romance
sooner or later. . . . But no, she had met a good many men now, some of
them charming and congenial enough. It would have been Geoffrey Pelham
and no other. Perhaps they were both living again after two hundred
years’ sleep and had once met and loved in that old manor. There had
been something oddly _aware_ that night—but that was nonsense. She
might be too educated to assume that anything, including reincarnation,
was fabulous, but she didn’t believe it all the same. It was merely the
law of mutual attraction at work. Men and women were falling in love
every day all over the world with no assistance from
metempsychosis. . . . And she was by no means “in love.” Silly phrase.
Moronotic. . . . What might have been and what was were two entirely
different matters. It was merely that some subtle magnetic quality in
his personality suggested romance—every girl’s birthright—or had that
night. There was nothing very romantic about a surgeon always carving up
people and getting blood all over himself . . . and they had to cut up
corpses before they could do that, and hardly ever read anything but
stiff medical journals.
. . . Still he did and that was the end of it. When that set grimness
left his face it looked sensitive and eager, almost boyish . . . and no
doubt he could be ardent enough. He was boxed up—had been—would have
to be now more than ever if he loved her as much as he thought he did.
She gave a sigh of pity. Poor devil. Why had he lit on her of all girls?
Polly was——But she turned her thoughts away from Polly.
And Eustace. If she had grown up at Carteret Manor she never would have
married Eustace; she’d have taken him on as a brother. He wouldn’t have
done for a hero of romance at all, perfectly delightful as he was in so
many ways. Odd, too. He and Geoffrey were not unlike. Both were fair,
had much the same compact tall figures, both intellectual and the
product of their times. Perhaps they both belonged to what Polly would
call her “type,” and it was just that subtle difference that made
Geoffrey romantic (in costume) and Eustace prosaic. Costume certainly
didn’t improve _him_. He’d looked simply awful as old Cornbury. . . . It
was nice to be married to dear Eustace. Not for a moment could she
regret it. What use? No romance for her. But it was exciting to imagine
what it would have been like if she had been one of those other Gita
Carterets. She couldn’t even feel sad over it—too much of a
philosopher, no doubt. She felt more like the heroine of a play—acting
someone else’s lines but feeling the real thing for the moment. . . .
No wonder she had been upset at that very real declaration in that very
prosaic dining-room. . . . Horribly upset. Thought she was going to
faint. . . . Odd, though, she hadn’t felt . . . what was it. . . .
What. . . . She yawned prodigiously and fell asleep.
CHAPTER VII
When Polly entered she was standing before the long mirror of the
dressing-table in her yellow bedroom, brushing her hair back and up. She
liked the springing effect it gave her head, as if she were about to
leap upward and fly, and she was full of vanity and had forgotten
Geoffrey Pelham.
“Hullo, Polly darling,” she exclaimed. “You look as fresh as if you’d
gone to bed at nine last night. I’m disgracefully lazy. I’ll be glad to
get back to the manor and go to bed at a decent hour once more.”
“I’m tired of late hours, myself.” Polly adjusted her flexible spine to
a comfortable chair and lit a cigarette. She wore a red gown and had
painted her lips to match.
Gita smiled sympathetically. “Your mother told me she’s going to
Atlantic City this week, but I hope you don’t mean to go before the
party. You could stay here and sleep on that day-bed.”
“No, thanks. I lay down on it once! I’m not going with mother. Dad
always keeps the apartment open and I’ll stay with him for a while.”
“Good! We leave in about ten days and it will be heavenly to have you
here. I suppose you’ll be going about the same time?”
“I may stay here all summer.”
Gita, who had looked like a boy once more in her silk union suit,
slipped a negligée of ivory-white silk and lace over her head and shook
it down. “You made me get these things,” she grumbled. “I always feel
rather a fool in them. What on earth are you staying in town all summer
for? You’ll pass out with the heat.”
“You can always be comfortable in New York in summer if you stay in the
house all day and live in north rooms. It just occurred to me I’d like a
change.”
“It will be a change, all right.” Gita stretched herself on the despised
day-bed and stuffed a cushion under her head. “Won’t you be bored to
death?”
“Not while there’s a man in the offing.”
“Park Leonard?”
“No. Geoffrey Pelham.”
Gita, prepared, did not change countenance. “Interesting man, rather,
but it seemed to me last night that Mr. Leonard exactly fitted into that
old program of yours.”
“Forget what it was. Might have filled the bill once but Geoffrey Pelham
is unique in my experience, and that suits me better.”
The girls’ eyes did not clash but met calmly.
“Well, you always get what you want, Polly dear,” said Gita, and felt an
inclination to strangle her.
Polly blew a ring. “Mother said you flirted desperately with Geoffrey
last night.”
“I!” Gita’s spine rose as if propelled by a spring. “I never flirted in
my life and you know it.”
“I told her she was crazy, but she will have it that you have lost your
heart at last.”
Gita gasped. “Lost my heart? I feel as if I were turning pea-green. It’s
enough to make a dog sick.”
“So it is. You may be sure she didn’t convince me. If you ever did
anything so commonplace we’d all be horribly disappointed. Now, you’re
the one and only Gita. . . . But—do you know?—I think you’ve rather
grown to like admiration, and are not above encouraging it.”
Gita shrugged and settled back to her pillow. “I’m vain enough. I even
put cold cream on my face at night before I wash it. But I don’t flirt
and I don’t encourage them. Just let them yap to their hearts’ content.”
“But do tell me that you think Geoffrey interesting,” cried Polly, still
angling. “I’d be frightfully disappointed if you didn’t.”
“Yes—I’d call him interesting. He doesn’t say much, but he has a
quality—magnetism, I suppose. And then he’s rather unsusceptible and
that’s always intriguing. Glad he’s fallen in love with you if you want
him.” Her conscience suddenly pricked. “By the way, he spoke of you with
the greatest enthusiasm last night.”
“Did he?” Polly seldom blushed but she did now and her eyes sparkled.
“What did he say?”
“Oh, a lot of things. Different. More admirable than all other girls
rolled into one. Almost warmed up.” Gita had a very vague remembrance of
what Geoffrey had said about Polly.
“Well, he ought to know something about me. We’ve seen enough of each
other.”
“Are you really in love with him?” Gita infused her tones with warm
interest.
“I have a queer feeling I am. I don’t like it very much. He’s not at all
the sort of man I expected to marry, and it will be horrid to be
poor—although I bluffed it out to mother just now. But—well—those
things happen.”
“Don’t they! But I don’t quite get it. You don’t seem to fit the picture
somehow. Sure you’re not deluding yourself? Novelty does wonders.”
“Don’t think I am. Got a queer feeling I never had before. Thrills and
all that. Turn hot and cold. Lose my breath. Stay awake nights thinking
about it. Dr. Pelham—at a time when I was still calling him that—told
me that love in our sex was an over-secretion of hormones in
interstitial cells adjacent to the Graafian follicles; stimulation
induced by powerful photographic image of someone of the opposite sex on
the mental lens, which responds to certain old memories in the
subconscious. Makes me fearfully set up to be anything as scientific as
that, but I fancy I’d feel about the same anyway. Only hope the sub
won’t find it’s mistaken and go into retreat when I’m living in Harlem
and marketing on Sixth Avenue of a morning.”
“And you really don’t think it will?”
“No, I don’t!” Polly suddenly became serious. “Oh, yes, I really don’t.
It would be wonderful to make a man like that happy. Grow with him.
Really amount to something. I shouldn’t mind being poor for a few
years.”
Gita was appalled (albeit conscious of conflicting emotions underneath).
She knew how little likely was Polly to realize her potentialities if
she depended upon Geoffrey Pelham. For the moment she hated herself and
him. What blind idiots men were.
To give herself time to think she went into her “ark” to get a
cigarette. She cared little for smoking but a cigarette had its uses.
. . . If she really had any influence over him couldn’t she manage to
steer him to Polly? He knew that his love for herself was hopeless and
any man who made the mistake of falling in love with the wrong woman
must come to his senses in time. Men were always falling in love with
the wrong woman, getting over it, married, became fatuous fathers, and
increased complacently in girth. Love was nothing but a superstition
anyway. . . . Geoffrey was no fool to moon over one woman all his life.
Besides, there was always the rebound if a sufficiently charming woman
who wanted him was on the alert. . . . She wished she’d had more
experience. Pretty delicate. She’d have to watch her chance; and also
watch out.
She returned to the day-bed, and exclaimed with enthusiasm: “It would be
perfectly splendid, Polly. You’d bring each other out. I’ve always
believed that all you needed was to fall in love with a really fine man
and I was always afraid you wouldn’t.”
Her eyes glowed with affection and Polly responded with a quick smile,
wholly reassured. She’d been a brute to doubt Gita, and as a matter of
fact she hadn’t. Her mother had stirred her up, thrown a wrench into her
well-oiled mental machinery. That was all. Dear Gita.
Her face fell a little. “I’ll confide to you I don’t think he cares for
me yet. I’m merely educating him up to it. That is the reason I’m
staying on in town. Hope he’ll realize in time that I’m all in all.” Her
tones were flippant again. “It takes an earthquake to wake some men up.”
“Why don’t you break your leg and then he’d not only set it but call
daily and feel so sympathetic he’d find out right off he loved you? Pity
for a beautiful frail helpless creature, bravely suffering, would turn
the trick with any man not a stone, and you look lovely in bed.”
“That sounds almost romantic from you! No. It wouldn’t work. Mother
would call in Dr. Gaunt and not let Geoffrey through the front door. But
time is all I need and I mean to take it.”
“Atlantic City won’t be the same without you. I shall miss you
terribly.” The words were automatic. Her mind was racing.
Polly rose and snapped her vanity-box. “If I pull it off sooner than I
expect, I’ll leave town in a hurry. I long for salt water and long rides
and a game of tennis. I suppose Geoffrey takes a vacation like other men
and he could spend it in Atlantic City, to say nothing of weekends.
You’re the best pal in the world and you’ve bucked me up. Had a séance
with mother and was feeling down and out. When is the party?”
“Week from tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here with bells on. Don’t come down. You look tired, and if you
find that ancient relic comfortable——Bye-bye.” And she ran down the
stair.
CHAPTER VIII
For some time after Polly’s departure Gita lay still, with her brows
drawn together. Her usually clear brain felt chaotic. A dog in the
manger? Nice rôle for her. She couldn’t have—didn’t want—Geoffrey
Pelham. Why had she alternated sympathy and noble resolutions with a
desire to tear Polly’s eyes out?
And she was really devoted to Polly—hadn’t even ceased to love her when
she’d felt like flinging the truth in her face. . . . Vanity? No . . .
something else. . . . Her brain began to flash once more. Geoffrey
Pelham loved her and that in a way made him hers. Her sense of
possession was outraged. It was as if Polly had made off with her best
seventeenth-century sunflower chest. . . .
Well, not exactly, perhaps. If she hadn’t inherited the essential
endowment of her lady ancestresses she’d found room somewhere for a few
female characteristics. Must have been lurking even when she thought
she’d turned herself into a boy. She had a moment of poignant regret for
the complete loss of that old manufactured—and protective—self. Pity
they hadn’t let her alone. This mess wouldn’t have come about.
She shook her head. No intention of fooling herself. Life had been too
pleasant and full of surprises since Elsie took her in hand. After all,
what she had wanted was drama, and she seemed in a fair way to get
it—although one act was over. But it was something to have been kept
awake by a man and to have inspired a hopeless passion. Also quite a new
sensation to want to strangle one of her three best friends.
She sprang to her feet. “Damn fools, all of us. And I’m no better than
the rest.”
She tore off her negligée and hurried into a tweed suit and thick shoes.
Problems always sent her on a long walk.
CHAPTER IX
When she returned she found Eustace smoking in what she called her ark.
He rose with a curtsey as yet unsubmerged by domesticity and shook hands
with her.
“Your cheeks are as red as pippins,” he said. “Been having a tramp?”
“Up to Harlem and back. Polly is going to marry Dr. Pelham and may have
to live there. Thought I’d see what it looks like.”
She flung her hat on the floor, ruffled her hair, and threw herself into
an easy chair. Eustace was staring.
“Polly and Geoff——I don’t grasp it. You must be mistaken.”
“You mustn’t breathe it. But legally we are one, and there’s no harm in
telling you. I think it’s serious with both.” She had no intention of
betraying Polly further, but the desire to talk of the momentous
possibility was irresistible and Eustace was safe.
“‘Legally we are one.’” He repeated the words automatically; then
recovered himself and drew on his pipe. “I never heard of a more
brilliant example of mismating. Last about a year, I should think.”
“You don’t know Polly. She can be anything she likes. And love does
wonders.”
“Oh!” He almost dropped his pipe. “That’s an odd statement to come from
you. What do you know about it?”
“My mind works. And I’ve seen a good deal of life, first and last.”
“Possibly. But the word ‘love’ sounds queer on your lips. And I don’t
believe it’s anything but a word to you. I doubt if you have any
conception of the meaning of it.”
He watched her intently. Most of her old inhibitions and prejudices had
dissolved. She was more adaptable, more tolerant, more responsive, more
what she might have been had destiny been kinder. But how deeply had the
new life changed her? She was remarkably like the old Gita still.
She looked at him with a brilliant smile. “Some stylists say you should
never use a long word when a short one will serve, nor a derivative if
you can find a Saxon. Don’t agree with them, as I’ve always thought
Swinburne’s ‘Chastelard’ as cold and dry as a bone. But hack words are
convenient, that’s all, though one may be bored to death with them. I
wonder the word ‘love’ has any meaning left in it. You’re so clever, I
should think you’d invent a new vocabulary.”
“I write to be read. . . . I remember you once said that love was merely
preference raised to a higher degree than like. But as your experience
has grown perhaps you are willing to admit there are different degrees
in the temperature of love itself?”
“Looks like it.” Gita drew her black brows together. “I merely accept
the fact because I have to.”
Bylant had laid down his pipe and was twisting his short pointed beard.
He eyed her speculatively, but not coldly. She looked warm and rosy and
alluring in the deep chair, with her tumbled hair and bright eyes, and
he would have given his new novel to kiss her; he half believed the time
of his probation was shrinking. He had intended to wait for the woods
and summer, but there was no harm in putting out an antenna or two.
“Don’t you ever feel you’re missing something?” he asked.
“I? What? Oh, you mean because I can’t make a fool of myself like other
women. No, I don’t.” But she blushed unaccountably.
Eustace interpreted the blush as an uneasy response to a fact long
ignored. “Gita!” he exclaimed, suddenly illuminated by a brilliant idea.
“Let’s play a game. We can’t discuss intellectual subjects forever. We’d
dry up. It’s time to strike a lighter note. Suppose we pretend we are
not married and I’ve come wooing. And you are rather interested, but
uncertain; willing to lead me on; curious to see if I could make an
impression on your hard little heart. Pretty certain you’ll throw me
over, but curious enough to give me a chance.”
Gita stared at him with mouth open. “What a perfectly ridiculous idea!”
“Not at all. Scientific matrimony. A science more married people would
do well to study, and the keynote is variety. Besides, I’ve been working
so long I feel in the mood for play.”
Gita dug the toe of her boot into the rug. “I don’t think I could play
up. You see, I know I couldn’t fall in love with you.”
Bylant turned cold, but he answered steadily: “It would be a part of
your end of the game to make yourself think you might. You have
imagination, if you would consent to use it. You’re not nearly so
matter-of-fact as you like to think.”
“I’m no actress, anyhow.”
“Every woman is an actress. As safe to bet on as that no woman knows the
sort of man she’ll fall in love with. Look at Polly. Love, for that
matter, is often due to the planting of a suggestion on one side or the
other.”
“Polly says Dr. Pelham told her that love is——Oh, lord! Can I remember
all that? Matter of over-secretion of hormones in cells next door to
some kind of follicles.”
Eustace burst into a roar of laughter. “Sounds like old Geoff. Is that
the sort of diet he feeds Polly on? She must be in love with him if she
can stand it!”
“Polly’s up on endocrines. Every once in a while she and Elsie get going
on the subject, but I always shut them up. Never did like the idea of
knowing too much about my inwards. Don’t know which side my liver is on
and always dodged physiology at school. Suppose it’s because I never was
ill in my life. Besides, as far as I can make out, they wouldn’t take
much interest in endocrines if one set didn’t happen to be stocked up
with sex and made the others dance to its tune more or less. That’s
enough for me. By the way, what do you think Elsie told me the other
day—said she thought the time had come when I could stand it——” She
paused abruptly and jerked her shoulders, her brows an unbroken and
twisted line.
“I’d be interested to know.” His eyes narrowed to conceal a smile.
“I hate to repeat it and she made me so furious I could have thrown
something at her. Said the reason I never could look like a boy was
because I had no male cells in some place or other—that if I had, with
the morbid psychology induced by my early experience and hatred of your
sex, nothing could have ‘saved’ me. I wonder if people were always
sex-mad!”
“Probably. Today they are more verbally interested because for the first
time they know something of cause instead of merely taking effect for
granted, and romanticizing it. But Elsie was quite right. You have an
uncommonly balanced endocrine constitution and you may be thankful——”
“I prefer not to think about it.”
“Don’t. Forget it by all means.”
“I shall, now that I’ve unloaded it on you. . . . I should think that
knowing too much would be the death of romance.”
“Quite. And far better for the race. But you’re the last person I should
expect to set up a wail over the death of romance.”
“Not I. Jolly good thing it’s out of date. Merely made an observation.
You’ve taught me to look all round a subject.”
“And you’re the aptest of pupils. But I’m tired of playing
schoolmaster—for the present—and I should think that in time it would
corrode the vanity of a beautiful and highly intelligent woman to sit
constantly at the feet of a man. Do let us play for a while.”
Gita looked hard at him, but he returned her stare unflinchingly.
“You said yourself that love was a matter of suggestion, and you might
come to fancy you were really in love with me,” she remarked. “That
would be simply horrid and spoil everything.”
“My imagination never runs away with me even when I am writing fiction.
And I assure you I shall never be in doubt of my true sentiments for a
moment.”
Gita smiled. “You do play rather well. I’ve often watched you at
parties.”
“Whole-heartedly.”
He looked prosaic enough with that beard and those rather plump cheeks.
And if she could simulate interest in him it would help her to be noble
with Polly. If Geoffrey Pelham looked on, so much the better. Another
act in her play—more unreal than the stage itself!
“All right.” She caught her hat by the crown and stood up. “What’s the
first move? How do I do it?”
“Leave it to me. Just be the flying princess for a time.”
She grinned widely. “Good title for a musical comedy. And I’ll like that
rôle well enough.”
CHAPTER X
Eight or ten of the guests were up in Bylant’s rooms playing poker and
refreshing themselves at will. Extravagantly as they admired Gita they
were a little in awe of her in her own house, and when under her eye
assuaged their thirst discreetly. Bylant had a wide bed and a divan, if
they were forced to remain for the night, and he could sneak them
downstairs in the morning before his wife was awake.
Gita had given several parties during the winter but refused to ask more
than forty at a time. She disliked crowded rooms, where the selfish
appropriated the chairs and sofas permanently, while the others were
forced to stand about or wander. A few always retired to her ark, those
who liked to hear themselves talk and two or three who had formed the
habit of listening. A mutually interested couple generally migrated to
the ecclesiastical chest in the hall. In the large drawing-room and
connecting dining-room the rest of the guests sat comfortably, drank the
cocktails and whisky and soda passed by the host and gave a divided
attention to the spontaneous performances of the livelier members of the
company. There was a good deal of music tonight, a diseuse was
convulsing and brief, there were impromptu little plays and much
staccato talk. One distinguished exponent of bald realism untempered by
art, too swiftly susceptible to synthetic gin, stole upstairs early in
the evening and appropriated the divan for the night. A dark young
actress, famous as a stage adventuress, who barely tolerated any man but
her husband and drank nothing stronger than root-beer, curled up in an
easy chair and went to sleep; her invariable habit. Polly had steered
Dr. Pelham into a corner behind the piano and kept him there, and Elsie,
who was helping Gita play hostess, watched her brother out of a corner
of her eye. Many celebrities were present: Gora Dwight, a novelist both
popular and important; Lee Clavering, whose play had been a Broadway
sensation since September; Marian Starr Darsett; De Witt Turner and his
wife, Suzan Forbes; Potts Dawes; Max Durand; Fellowes Merton; Helen Vane
Baker, of two worlds, and Peter Whiffle.
While a young musical-comedy actress was giving the convolutions of a
skirt-dance, spontaneously invented, Gita found an empty chair behind a
door and indulged in a yawn. She suddenly felt bored with New York and
parties. And clever people could be as monotonous in time as the more
stereotyped society to which Mrs. Pleyden had introduced her. What did
it all amount to? They went on like this winter after winter and not one
of them looked blasé, not even Marian Starr Darsett, who was reputed to
be entering upon her hundred-and-ninth love-affair. But they all had
some gift, or used their brains otherwise to a definite purpose. Hers
was like a whirlpool, careering round and round in circles and to no
purpose whatever. The simile stopped at the vortex; she never got as far
as that!
Next winter? And next? And next? The prospect was appalling. . . .
However, after six months in the country—reactions were
automatic. . . . She had arranged for several house-parties—and felt
disposed to withdraw the invitations. But that would leave her alone
with Eustace. He bored her less than anyone, but if he kept up that
ridiculous game she’d explode before they’d been isolated in the manor a
week. His “wooing,” tentative so far as became the first stage, had
shown him to be possessed of more charm than she had suspected, but she
preferred him without it. How could they ever get back to their old
relationship when the game was given up as a bad job? She hated
make-believe anyway. She was made for realities. . . . Realities? What
were they? In this sort of life, anyhow? Perhaps, after all, she’d have
been better satisfied with life if she had been forced to take a job in
San Francisco.
Although she had had spasms of restlessness and dissatisfaction of late,
not to mention certain abrupt flights of imagination, she had felt
nothing of the sort when she had stood before her mirror a few hours
earlier and put the finishing touches to her toilette. Her gown was
white and silver and vastly becoming. She wore all her pearls, and had
applied a light touch of powder. But as she sat there behind the door,
almost concealed from her guests, she lost all interest in her beauty.
Polly was far prettier than she and always looked her most dazzling in
red. Tonight she wore a quaint flaming head-dress and little gold curls
escaped everywhere. She hadn’t left Pelham’s side for a moment since
they entered at nine o’clock, and it was now a quarter to twelve. And he
looked anything but bored.
“Why are you hiding, Miss Carteret?” De Witt Turner was looming over
her, his great bulk encased in loose tweed. If he possessed evening
clothes he never wore them. “Your party is a stunning success as usual.
I hope we haven’t tired you out.”
“Not a bit of it. Do sit down.”
The only unoccupied chair was one of the small upright contributions
from Brittany, and Turner disposed himself carefully; then finding it
more secure than most ancient furniture, hunched down and lit a
cigarette. “Do you know what I’ve been wondering?” he continued. “If by
any chance you brought over those ancestral costumes of yours? We might
all dress up again and improvise a sort of Colonial farce. I rather
yearn for my flounces.”
Gita smiled up at him without effort; he was one of her favorites. “Too
bad. They’re down at the manor.” And then she surprised herself by
announcing: “I’ve locked them in their chests for good and all. They’ll
never be worn again in my time. You see . . . it would be a pity to
cheapen the first impression. Don’t you think so?”
“Artistically you’re right, no doubt. But it seems rather a pity—sort
of waste. Perhaps that’s rather hypocritical of me. We all enjoyed
looking like bloods for once, to say nothing of imagining ourselves
handsome. The men, I mean. I think I prefer women in their modern frocks
and short hair. But Dr. Pelham, for instance, will never look like that
again unless you relent.”
To Gita’s annoyance she felt herself blushing, a new and ridiculous
habit of hers. There had been a time when she prided herself upon a fine
static red and laughed at girls whose color changed with every passing
emotion. “I’m sure he doesn’t want to,” she replied tartly. “Surgeons
are scientists, you know, and scientists have no use for anything so
frivolous as fancy dress. About the most matter-of-fact men in the
world, I should think.”
“Um. Science requires imagination of a certain sort and surgery is
nervous work. The most temperamental man I know is a surgeon.” His
glance traveled to the corner behind the piano. “Scientists have even
been known to fall in love. I should say Pelham had some use for Miss
Pleyden. What do you think?”
“Isn’t Polly lovely!”
“She is, indeed. No wonder he’s bowled over.” But like Mrs. Pleyden, he
had seen certain straying glances from Pelham’s unambiguous eyes. He had
also noted the blush. Gita was a puzzle to him and he sometimes
suspected she was still a puzzle to his friend, known as her husband. As
a novelist he would have liked to solve it. His fiction, although it
dealt with the prosaic realities of life, and he handled sex without
tongs, was pervaded by a haunting almost poignant beauty, which drove
from his inner being not from his theme. He was in no danger of falling
in love with Gita, being quite satisfied with “Miss Forbes,” and, like
musicians, preferring to find beauty on the abstract plane; but he never
saw this particular beauty with her lofty “springing” little head, her
black flashing eyes that seemed to carry back no farther than her mind,
her curious aura of virginity, her contradictory magnetic personality
and undeviating aloofness, and a certain checked sweetness with it all,
without the sensation that some musical instrument within him was
vibrating to new harmonies, and he longed to grasp and immortalize them.
In other words he would have liked to make her the heroine of a novel.
But the music was too elusive. He only faintly guessed what she
suggested. She looked one thing and was so indisputably something else.
Once he had tried to pump Elizabeth Pelham, but that loyal friend had
laughed at his assumption of mystery. Gita was just Gita. One answer to
the riddle, no doubt, was that the girl didn’t know herself. Something
had arrested her development, and the man she had married that night
when she came down the stairs and made himself nearly bawl outright with
her astounding beauty, had as yet taught her nothing. He had met her
several times before the wedding and many times since, and although she
no longer treated every man as a possible enemy, she had changed not at
all in essentials.
But was she on the verge of a change of some sort? He noted that she
looked tired and rather melancholy for the first time since he had known
her . . . less assured. An ardent feminist, he believed in women taking
precisely the same liberties with orthodoxies as men had done since the
beginning of time; and if this entrancing creature had found she was
mistaken and contemplated throwing over poor old Eustace, why not? Men
were pretty philosophical these days—taking a leaf out of the age-old
Book of Woman—and although it would come hard on Bylant, no doubt, if
he found she preferred another man, he’d renounce her without
whimpering. . . . But . . . would she? . . . did she? . . . or, why not?
He felt there was a key to the riddle somewhere and wished he knew her
history. But he knew nothing beyond the bare facts that she had been
born and brought up in Europe, had lived for a time in California, and
arrived in New Jersey shortly before her grandmother’s death.
“What are you thinking of?” asked Gita, smiling. “You haven’t said a
word for five minutes.”
“You. I was wondering how long we’d have you with us.”
“What an idea. You’ll probably sit with me in this room at precisely the
same hour next year.”
“The slight bitterness of your accent confirms my misgivings. I doubt if
you’ll be in this house.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, frowning.
“Well, that you’ve been fumbling, so far—not even experimenting, like
most women.”
“I don’t like either word.”
“Neither really should apply to you. You’re extremely clear-sighted
about most things, but there’s a catch somewhere. I can’t get it. I’d
like to, and I too am fumbling, just now. At all events that is the way
you impress me, and I’ve a hazy idea that you’ll come out of the fog
before long.”
“Come out of the fog?” Gita stared at him under lowered brows and then
jerked her head. “I forgot you were a maker of phrases.”
“Only when I’m sweating at the typewriter. I assure you that was
spontaneous—and seems to fit you.”
“‘Out of the fog.’” Her voice sounded dazed. “Do you mean I don’t know
where I am?”
“Something like that. You’re a riddle to yourself, as you are to other
people.”
“That is not true! I know myself perfectly.”
“Then you dwell in another dimension from the rest of us.”
Gita colored angrily. “By that, I suppose, you mean I am even more
conceited than the rest of you. Quite a feat!”
He laughed good-naturedly. “Quite, indeed. And you’re not. But you’re
very honest. Do you really believe you’ve explored yourself
thoroughly—made a complete chart of all the subterranean streams, and
peaks—sort of magnet for fogs? Now, do you?”
Gita moved uneasily. “Yes, I do. I’ve had a very wide and varied
experience of life that you know nothing about. No one has ever had an
opportunity to gauge herself more exhaustively than I.”
“Ah! I’m not surprised to hear you say that. . . . You suggest a play in
four acts with a prologue and epilogue. . . . But I can’t make even a
guess. Have you ever been in love?” he asked bluntly.
Gita drew herself up haughtily. “That question was in excessively bad
taste.”
“We’ve abandoned taste with other old clichés.” But he took the edge
from this announcement of an unassailable fact with a disarming smile.
“And if you haven’t, you will, you know. You’re not in the least in love
with Eustace, and you’ve got it coming—when the fog lifts.”
He was angling, and had hoped for a minnow, but was by no means prepared
for a whale. Gita turned white, then almost purple; her eyes shot red
sparks and her mouth drew back until it made an ugly grimace. For a
moment he thought she was going to strike him. A curious devastating
force seemed to emanate from her and he turned hot all over, as if his
skin had been seared. He was almost terrified but had the presence of
mind to move forward; if his face were slapped his ignominy would not be
too public at least.
The expression lasted but an instant and her face settled into a mask of
fear; he had the impression that she was no longer aware of his
presence. “If I thought that,” she articulated, “I’d go out and kill
myself. It is the most hideous fate that can befall a woman, the most
loathsome and degrading. But—thank God!—I’m not capable of it.”
There was another lightning change and he was staring, almost
open-mouthed, at the Miss Carteret to whom he was so agreeably
accustomed. “You psychological novelists,” she said complainingly, “with
your everlasting probing, get on my nerves. And your assumption that you
can make a fashion of bad taste even more. The radical is not in the
saddle yet, and even when he is, there will be groups in which manners
and codes will survive and become the standard once more when the same
old wheel has finished the same old revolution. Look at France.”
He smiled amusedly. “Perhaps. But freedom of speech and of thought seems
to me of more consequence than taste. . . . But I wouldn’t offend you
for the world,” he added hastily. “Nor, for a jugful, have you other
than you are.”
“Thanks.” She rose, and smiled as he rose also. “Odd, you never forget
your own manners. What a lot of self-posers we are! I see that supper is
being brought in and I’m sure you want yours.”
“Whew!” Turner almost whistled as he stood where she had left him.
“Whew!” And he wondered if he had had a glimmer. . . .
CHAPTER XI
“I’m going down to the manor tomorrow,” announced Gita as she and
Eustace lingered for a moment in the drawing-room after the last guest
had departed.
“Tomorrow? But we were not to go until Tuesday.”
“You needn’t go. In fact I’d like to be alone for a while. Tired out.
Don’t want to open my mouth for a week.”
“Oh! As you please, of course. I’ll be detained until Tuesday. You do
look tired,” he added solicitously. “But I shall miss you abominably.
Couldn’t you shut yourself up here and rest?”
“I want my old manor more than anything in the world!” she said
passionately. “And I must be alone.”
He stifled both astonishment and curiosity. “Then you shall have it, or
anything else you want. Sit down for a moment and have a cigarette.” And
Gita, who had no desire for the solitude of her bed, obeyed him.
“I shall have to sleep on that davenport,” he said humorously. “Three of
my friends are dead to the world upstairs.”
“Beasts.”
“’Fraid it’s bootlegger gin.” And then he slipped on the harness of his
new rôle. “I saw you hidden in a corner with De Witt Turner for at least
a quarter of an hour,” he said with a nice assumption of jealousy.
“Women fall for him very hard, you know.”
“Do they? They must be fools. I hate him.”
Bylant raised his brows in genuine surprise. “Hate old Witt? He’s about
the least hatable man in New York, I should think.”
“Well, I can’t endure him and I’m not going to ask him to one of the
house-parties.”
“Did he make love to you?”
“I should think not. He wouldn’t dare. He merely says anything that
comes into his head, and he’s a boor.”
“Oh, no, not that. He’s a gentleman, with deliberately applied
excrescences. He dresses like a farmer to reconcile his income with his
moral approval of socialism, and if he berates old codes and standards
to which he was born, that is but one phase of this attempt to
coördinate a new and militant fact with the ancient instinct of
self-preservation. The new man is having as hard a time of it as the new
woman had a quarter of a century ago—trying to be something he isn’t.
At least men of Witt’s breeding. They’ve got to shake down, that’s all.
You’re too clear-visioned to take this particular phase of social
evolution for anything but what it’s worth. . . . Perhaps,” hopefully,
“he merely bored you.”
“That’s it, probably.” But she knew it was not. She hated Turner because
he had for some inexplicable reason infuriated her with the mere use of
a word of four letters which for months she had bandied about with the
rest. She had behaved exactly as she would have done a year ago, while
she was still inside her “fort,” as Elsie had so aptly expressed it. No
doubt that ridiculous suggestion of drifting in a fog had a good deal to
do with it. But she knew she had betrayed something, she hardly knew
what, to the enterprising eye of that novelist, and she wished never to
see him again.
“Let us forget him,” said Eustace softly. “May I tell you that I never
saw you look as lovely as you do tonight?”
“Your compliments sound exactly the same as they did before you set
about trying to be something _you’re_ not!” Gita, glad of the diversion,
laughed merrily.
“And you promised to play up! Let us imagine we are guests who have
lingered down here for a few last words while our hosts have gone
decorously to bed——”
“Instead of three drunks.”
“They are not worth remembering. I have persuaded you to linger on for a
little talk.”
“Well, here I am.” Gita stifled a yawn. “Rather sleepy, but I’ll do my
best. Anyhow, I never like you so much as when I’ve been with a lot of
tiresome people.” And she hoped her smile was bewitching.
His own was spontaneous. “Don’t you think you could like me a little?”
he murmured.
“Like you a lot——Oh, no, I mean—what the devil do girls say? I
suppose I ought to know as I’ve read that question five hundred times in
novels. Wish I could remember the answers.”
“Say what you think you would say if you really were a girl rather
interested and I were trying to make you more so.”
Gita raked her mind. This little comedy with Eustace often amused her.
“I—think—I’m rather beginning to,” she faltered, and batted her
eyelashes as she had seen Eva Le Gallienne do on the stage a few nights
since.
Eustace drew up his chair and bent over her. He had begun to turn off
the lights before they fell into conversation and in the soft dimness he
looked rather handsome to Gita’s critical eye. Distinguished he always
looked. Perhaps she had been wrong—hadn’t known her personal
predilections so well, after all . . . if it were in her to “love” any
man it should be this one, who combined so much, and whom, her sharp
eyes had long since informed her, other women found so attractive. She
smiled indulgently and repressed a desire to say: “Go ahead.” She would
play up.
Bylant himself was a little at a loss. He had never set out deliberately
to “woo” a woman, and although he had more than once fallen into step
without visible effort, he had, on the whole, accepted casually and
briefly what was offered him. He felt resentfully that he would know how
to handle the situation in a novel, and wondered why pen-experience
should avail him so little when it came to his own vital concerns.
Possibly because he was so confoundedly in earnest, and detachment
annihilated.
“Beginning?” He laid his hand on hers.
Gita patted it amiably. “Nice hands. Strong, but well-shaped. Not too
artistic to be manly. And always warm, and not too soft—or white.
That’s your golf and tennis——”
“Oh, Gita!” he said despairingly. “Lovers—would-be lovers—don’t. . . .
You should either draw your hand away shyly or turn it over and give
mine a slight pressure.”
“All right. Let’s begin over. I think I’ll do the last. You often make
me feel you’re here to hang on to——”
“You’re not worried about anything?” In the dim light he had caught a
fleeting expression of fear in her eyes—or fancied it?
“What have I to worry me? But that’s the kind of question a husband or
accepted lover would ask. You’ve whirled too far ahead on your
merry-go-round. Get back to the starting-point.”
“I never seem to get beyond it. Will you give me a kiss?”
“I’ve often kissed you.”
“I don’t mean a peck. And you’re out of your rôle. It’s what any man
would ask a girl, you know, who had let herself be persuaded to stay on
with him downstairs at two in the morning. She’d think him a chump if he
didn’t.”
“But that’s going rather fast—for some girls. Others kiss any man any
old time. I’m the great exception or you wouldn’t think I’m the one and
only. And I don’t think I care for that part of the program.”
“It’s bound to come sooner or later.”
“Not at all. You talked a lot about wooing but there was no
understanding you were to win—not by a long sight——”
“Please stay in your rôle. I am begging for a kiss.”
Gita looked at him reflectively. There wasn’t so much to kiss between
that mustache and beard. She didn’t altogether like his mouth but she
was used to it. And if it was the thing to do—she moved her head
forward; and then she encountered a disturbing gleam in his half-closed
eyes, and drew back; restraining an impulse to hiss and flee. She had
seen that gleam in men’s eyes before. Carnalites. Eustace!
At the same moment she became conscious of a resource that was offering
its timely aid. “Not yet,” she murmured with soft coquetry. “It’s too
soon. Talk to me for a little while first. Talk to me about yourself,”
she added with inspiration. “Tell me when you first began to find me
attractive. After—later——”
She leaned her elbow on the arm of the chair and covered her eyes with
her hand. Eustace, drawing a long breath, but admiring this astonishing
adaptability to a rôle so foreign to her, leaned back in his chair and
began to talk on a low and vibrating note; expressing his hopes and
fears, his longings and doubts, with considerable art; for, he told
himself, he said not a word too much nor too little. At the end of ten
minutes he asked her a question. There was no answer. He bent over her.
She was fast asleep.
He refrained from shaking her roughly, but shake her he did.
She sprang to her feet and yawned in his face. “Oh, Eustace, how rude of
me! But your voice was so soothing and I was nearly dead with sleep.
Hated to be so impolite as to tell you—we’ll have to continue on page
181 from page 2. Good night, dear Eustace, and forgive me.”
And she slipped by him like a trout under water and up the stair.
CHAPTER XII
Gita arrived at the manor in time for dinner and spent the greater part
of the night wandering about the house, which she had ordered to be lit
from drawing-room to attic. She was so glad to be there—and alone—that
she felt no inclination to sleep, and even the haunting terrors of the
past week were banished for the moment.
She had a quite personal species of humor that she could invoke at will,
and a large surface-tract in her mind upon which she had lived
abundantly during the past year. But, always ruthlessly honest with
herself, she had begun to suspect, even before that remarkably odd
outbreak under the goading of De Witt Turner, that something had been
going on underneath that broad and fertile surface which it was time for
her to tweak to the light and examine. She had turned from it in terror,
almost in horror, and had permitted herself a respite until she was
alone at her manor.
But on this night of her return she felt only happiness and content.
This was hers, her own domain, memoried, beautiful, and intensely
personal; so personal that she had at times the impression she had lived
in this house consecutively for two hundred and sixty-three years. It
seemed to return her passionate devotion, to enfold her, to promise her
peace, possibly happiness. She exulted in every stone of it, and drew
her hand lovingly across the old pieces of furniture, less sensible of
their value than of their intimate association with the past.
She could remain here for the rest of her life if she chose, denying
even Eustace hospitality, and she had a sense of freedom, of buoyancy,
vastly different from the superficial enjoyments of the past winter in
New York. They had been novel and entrancing, but both novelty and charm
had worn thin; and they had served their purpose. No woman is complete
until she has had her experience of the lighter pleasures of life;
barely conscious of the depths underneath until frivolities turn into
débris and balance is established.
She had long suspected that she knew a good deal more than she admitted
to herself, both apart from her personal ego and inextricably entangled
with it, and it was time to find out what it was. She was uneasy,
frightened, but determined.
Well, in a day or two she would take the lid off, but tonight she would
play with the idea that she had lived her life at the manor and that no
serious problems had ever knocked at her consciousness for solution.
A storm raged during the night and showed no sign of abatement next
morning. She put on a raincoat and stout boots and went over to the
deserted Boardwalk. The chain of shops looked like an abandoned village.
But the waves thundered in almost to the high promenade, and she took a
fierce pleasure in battling with the wind, clinging only occasionally to
the rail. She felt as if she were charging an elemental enemy and chose
to take it as a portent, that although she might for a moment be forced
to clutch at something stronger than herself, she could neither be blown
over nor forced to retreat.
That night she slept twelve hours, and when the broad sunlight awakened
her, her brain was as clear as the sky and she knew that her respite was
over; or would be when the day itself was over. She had decided that the
night, when she would be free of interruption from even her docile
servants, was the time to “have it out.”
Topper had received instructions to admit no one and to bring her no
telephone messages. Eustace had promised not to return to the manor
before Friday, nor attempt to communicate with her. Her isolation was
complete.
After breakfast she took a long walk on the hard roads, and spent the
afternoon answering an accumulation of letters from her California
friends. Ann Melrose had spent the winter in New York and written home
reports both astonishing and amusing; the result had been a revival of
correspondence with the girl they had “given up as a bad job.”
But the hands of the clock, made for the first American Carteret, in
Connecticut—a province that would seem to have been so completely
occupied during the seventeenth century building historic furniture for
twentieth-century collectors the wonder is it found time for the making
of Puritanical history—moved relentlessly on, and at nine o’clock the
house was as silent as the vault in the churchyard.
Early in the day she had brought down from the attic the gown of gold
tissue she had worn the night of the party, and she went up to her
bedroom and put it on. The wigs had been returned, but she powdered her
hair and even put a patch on her cheek. She had a whimsical idea that in
capturing the outward semblance of the old Gita Carterets she would
banish the last of those inhibitions which had made her so different not
only from them but from all other girls, and, with her saner knowledge
of life, help her to that exact understanding of herself she had fancied
she possessed in the past.
She locked the doors of the drawing-room, lit several candles, and
established herself in one of the few comfortable chairs a century,
singularly indifferent to comfort, had produced.
“Now!” she said aloud, “off with the lid.” And she routed a last moment
of shrinking.
Nature had endowed her superlatively, and a neurosis, inevitable in a
sensitive aspiring fastidious girl, had given her a rabid hatred of a
sex designed, among other purposes, to complete her own. Her abhorrence
of sex in all its manifestations had been, in a measure, a subtle
protest against thwarted romance: an invention of the Teutonic-Nordics,
to be sure, but none the less potent when rubbed in by the centuries.
Nor had modernism killed it. Realists were not so much realists from
reaction or conviction as from resentment at their own inability to
realize it. They were in the same class with radicals who hated a
society in which they were incapacitated by natural equipment to achieve
success.
Life, literature, nor history would be sufferable without the glamour of
romance, however personally immiscible. The invention and constant use
of the word “love” was proof of that. Mere decency ordained that a
certain enchantment be shed over a function as native as hunger, where
personal selection, imposed by civilization, was concerned.
Well, she accepted the fact. Also the fact that what her three friends
called a sound endocrine constitution had saved her from becoming one of
those semi-outlaws so freely discussed in her new circle. That was a
phase she had no desire to dwell on, but she faced it squarely. Such
women, she had been told, had sometimes the most idealized
relationships, a mental and spiritual harmony seldom found with men;
being rarely fools. Through this ominous lack of balance in the ductless
glands and an arbitrary gift from Nature of cells which had no
legitimate place in their anatomy, they were not only enabled but
compelled to love their own sex; and as faithfully, protectively, and
self-sacrificingly, as those that were fitted with normal response to
man. Often more so. They were by no means mere sensualists. Nature here
was as inexorable as elsewhere and she had not waited upon the decadence
of civilizations to develop the type. It had existed since the dawn of
history. No doubt since the dawn of time.
What Nature’s purpose was no man could guess. But that she had a
purpose, methodical creature that she was, no intelligent man could
doubt.
But she had passed over one Gita Carteret, even refusing to unbalance
those cells, with everything working in her favor. The result was that
Gita Carteret had been isolated high and dry. A rock in mid-ocean. A
capacity for agreeable friendships, but about as emotional as an
unhatched egg.
Well, that was that. She’d never think of it again if she could avoid
it. But insularity had its compensations!
She felt as if something resistant in her brain were straining and
creaking as she swung it ruthlessly to that strange moment when De Witt
Turner’s words—uttered more or less at random—had turned her mind into
a cauldron. But that frenzied moment had not only been a revelation but
a deliverance. She had experienced a sensation of exhaustion when it was
over, during which she felt that something had exploded, then taken
wing. That such an access of hatred for a side of life still unexplored
would never come again. She had been delivered—and for what?
Not for Eustace Bylant. Her recoil from that gleam in his eyes when he
bent forward to kiss her was conclusive. No need to be asexual to be
revolted at the thought of kissing a man she did not love and never
could love. Even his light and frequent touch, of which she had barely
been conscious as long as the lid was down, would be unendurable
hereafter.
He “loved” her, of course. Always had. She had kept the lid down with a
vengeance! She must have known from the first that he was in love with
her in the orthodox male fashion—known it down in that, automatically
recording invisible register; but that censored mind of hers had turned
its back blithely; kept its conscious part suspended in that rarefied
ether she had chosen as her habitat, peopled with queer eidola of her
human acquaintance.
Too bad! It would have been the ideal solution to love Eustace, who had
so much to offer, with whom she could live her life in a companionship
found by few women with the men of their choice. But she did not. She
almost hated him. He must never return here. She’d write and tell him so
at once. If he hadn’t loved her she’d be willing to go on. But she had
had one of her illuminating flashes. She knew he had reached the limit
of his endurance.
But she had no intention of making him ridiculous. She had liked him too
well for that, owed him too much. They could give out they were starting
for Europe or South America—which he often talked of visiting—and he
could travel while she lived in secrecy at the manor. The manor was her
best friend. A friend, it seemed to her, and not only last night, that
had schooled and soothed and strengthened her for centuries. A part of
her. Even the blood that had come down to her had stained its boards.
There had been a duel out there in the hall. And, in another century, an
unbridled Carteret, who loved the wife of his guest, had been stabbed in
his bedroom—the one her imperturbable grandmother had chosen for her
own. . . .
Poor Eustace! What irony! Years of seeking for the one woman who
exteriorized his secret fixation, to find her only to learn that the
shell had deluded him, that there was nothing within it for him. Worse.
To train her, to wear down her defenses, to deliver her from her
accumulated obliquities, for another man. What was the matter with life?
Controlled it would seem, not by a Beneficent Power, but by what Poe had
called the Imp of the Perverse. . . .
The only thing she hated to give up was Bladina’s pearls!
And the Brittany set. But no doubt she could buy that from
Eustace. . . .
She told herself harshly that she was twisting and turning from that
final probing, and after a moment of real terror, in which she felt an
impulse to flee from the room, tearing off that whispering old gown as
she ran, she set her teeth and went to the brink and peered down once
more.
She was in love with Geoffrey Pelham. She said the words aloud to steady
her nerves with their finality. Then shrugged her shoulders and settled
back in her chair, although she kicked a stool across the room.
Well, what did it mean? What was she to do about it? He had been
obsessing her conscious mind since the night at the Pleydens’, possibly
her unconscious since they had sat together in this room. Now that she
had hauled him out into the light he would probably obsess every waking
moment and haunt her dreams.
She felt that no caged eagle could be more resentful than she at this
moment. Her pride had been as abnormal as her existence. Her ego could
hardly have been more extended if she had been a heroin addict. That old
dream of herself, solitary on a solitary peak had been more than an
escape-fulfillment; it had been a reveling of the ego in its complete
independence. And there was no independence in the surrender of one’s
ego to another, even in this latter-day pretense of fifty-fifty. Women
were exactly the same fundamentally as they had always been. Their
instinct was surrender—blind instinct of the race to survive.
But she hadn’t got as far as that yet! If loathing had been exorcised in
that final explosion under that detestable novelist’s goading, and she
had been ejected out of the fog into a dazzle of light—mercifully
blinded for the moment to the fact of Geoffrey Pelham—she was conscious
of no sexual discomfort. She had never discussed that subject with
anyone, but modernists in fiction were remarkably frank, and while they
deadened the imagination of the reader, they left little to be learned
by mere experience. She knew all about it!
But although her blood traveled its accustomed gait, she knew that
Geoffrey Pelham’s image was sunken deep in that unpicturesque pump of
hers called heart, and probably forever. She was not the woman to be
able to love twice. She recalled the definition of love he had given to
Polly, and concluded it was more likely to be correct than anything
heretofore advanced. Science was explaining one mystery after another,
psychical as well as physical, and she for one liked to know what was
the matter with her.
She analyzed her sensations toward this man who had torn her old
theories about herself up by the roots. Eustace had once told her that
analysis was fatal to love, but that was an old delusion that surprised
her in a man uncommonly clear and precise of vision. She felt exactly
the same whether she analyzed or not.
Polly had said she felt thrills, turned hot and cold, lost her breath.
Well, so far, she had felt none of that. But there was a piercing
sweetness, moments of intolerable aspiration, of a desire to wing upward
with him to unimaginable heights, dwelling in spiritual contact with him
forever. Another trick of elemental sex, no doubt, preliminary to the
desire for surrender. . . .
Hacking her way through what was left of the fog she arrived at the
conclusion that if she were still insensible to passion it was because,
after her long lethargy, mortared with violent repulsion, she was
dependent for that upon his physical contact.
But here she would have kicked another stool across the room had there
been one within reach.
This piercing sweetness was all right, this divine consciousness that
uplifted and exalted her—but did she want anything more? She doubted
it. One indelible lesson life had taught her: that realities were
disillusionizing and commonplace. Often hard and ugly. Moreover——Yes,
moreover! One inhibition appeared to be still firmly planted.
She knew she could marry Geoffrey if she chose. Eustace would never
stand in her way. He would be bitterly disappointed, wretched,
mortified, angry, but he was not the man to hold a woman to a hollow
alliance. When he realized that she was inexorable he would wrap himself
up in a mantle of philosophy and retire from the field.
And if she did not marry Geoffrey Pelham, Polly would. She’d make
herself as intimate and necessary as his coat and button herself round
him in some moment of hopeless depression. After that, of course, he
would love her. No man could help it.
She emitted a low growl. Then beat her hands on the arms of her chair.
What did it matter? Why deprive the poor man of what consolation he
could get? He had given her something Polly could never take from her
(what Polly would be forced to content herself with was what she herself
rejected) and she could continue to love him and fulfill her soul more
completely than if she entered into prosaic—and hateful—matrimony with
him. No pleasures, when all was said and done, could equal those of the
imagination. She had always despised stories with happy endings. And
shrunk from ultimates. After flowers weeds. No soil left for imagination
or the psyche. Happy marriages? Oh, yes, plenty of them. She had even
seen several in advanced sophisticate circles, although they were always
informing you they gave each other complete liberty, and would not shed
a tear over a passing infatuation. Or else worrying if it could last,
and exactly how they would act if it didn’t. Commit suicide or look
round for someone else? But with all their febrile self-consciousness
they were happy enough. And outside of that limited circle, where people
did not bother about being modern and took life as it came, no doubt
there were thousands of happy marriages.
But life had not educated her for happiness of that sort, however she
may have scrambled to the top of her old pit. She could love, but not in
duality. She had found something very wonderful and precious and
inspiring, but there was only one way to keep it.
To be jealous of Polly was monstrous, unworthy of her. She was, of
course, but she’d dig it out by the roots.
And what was she to do with her life? She must make something of it. She
wanted no more of society of any sort. She took no interest—beyond that
of any intelligent person—in politics, and she certainly would
associate herself with nothing that led to being constantly surrounded
by masses of women. She had no artistic gift; active work in the cause
of charity would merely bore her. . . . It might be amusing to adopt a
dozen children. . . . Well, that decision could wait. She had enough on
her hands for the present——
CHAPTER XIII
Her excogitations came to a sudden end. The bright color left her
cheeks, and she stood up, rigid, her head bent forward. The heavy doors
were closed but her ears were very keen. She had heard a light footfall
on the stair. Stealthy?
She had a high courage and had seldom felt fear; physical fear, at
least. But the servants never returned to this part of the house at
night and were in bed and asleep shortly after nine o’clock. And the
house was set far back from the road. And it must be nearly midnight.
For a moment she lost her breath and shivered. Then she jerked her head
angrily and shook her nerves into order. Her jewels had been sent to the
bank and the pearls were in the safe. That hiding-place behind the panel
in her grandmother’s room was known only to herself, Topper, Elsie,
Polly, and Eustace.
She blew out the candles, removed her slippers, and stole to the door
leading into the hall. It opened without a sound and she hid behind it
and peered out through the crack. The hall was dimly lighted. She saw no
one, but again she heard that light footfall. It stopped as if in doubt,
and she held her breath. Then it moved toward the library. She heard a
door open, close.
She tiptoed across the hall and up the stairs. Her bedroom door was
open. She had closed it to shut in the warmth of the fire. She lit the
gas and glanced about swiftly. Nothing, apparently, had been disturbed.
Elsie, who was timid, had made her buy a pistol and keep it in the
drawer of the table by her bed. She took it out, examined it to make
sure it was still loaded, then crept down the stairs and listened at the
door of the library. Soft light steps were pacing up and down. What on
earth could the man want? There was no safe in the library. . . . The
silver? She stole over to the dining-room. The silver was locked every
night in safes concealed behind false doors in the lower part of two
immense sideboards. She closed the door and lit the gas. There was no
evidence that the room had been visited since Topper had put it in order
for the night.
She returned to the library door. The man was still pacing. He must be
after the furniture and was awaiting the signal of a confederate. She
had found little time for detective stories but she had read a few. And
the furniture in the manor house was worth a small fortune.
She flung open the door and raised the pistol. “Stick up your hands!”
she commanded, recalling the formula.
The room was in complete darkness but she saw a detached shadow move
suddenly forward.
“Don’t advance another step,” she cried, and hoped he would be too
startled to perceive that her arm wabbled; she must be outlined against
the faint light of the hall. “One step more and I’ll fire.”
The man made a sudden bolt to the right and then a rush at her. She
fired, and thought the house was crashing about her ears. But the man
came on, and she darted to the other side of the room, realizing her
mistake at once; she should have retreated to the hall.
The man’s ears were as keen as hers and it was evident he had been
neither hit nor deafened. He came straight for her, and she could only
hope he would trip over some piece of furniture. She was safe from that
danger for she had arranged the furniture herself.
She dodged behind the center table and fired again, hoping that if she
could not hit that agile shadow the servants would be roused by the
noise. But they slept in a wing and were cut off from the main house by
massive doors. This time she hardly noticed the sound, she heard nothing
but the man’s heavy breathing.
The shadow was on the opposite side of the table. She was about to fire,
confident that this time he could not escape her, when he disappeared. A
second later a hand caught her ankle and she was tripped and thrown
flat. She had the presence of mind to give a violent lurch and roll
behind a chair. But she had no time to rise, for the man had emerged
from under the table and was feeling about the floor. She still clutched
her pistol.
She heard him rise to his feet and move about uncertainly. She held her
breath, no longer terrified. She was too angry. The back of the chair
was very high. She dared not raise her head. If he would only come round
the corner. She felt a cold desire to kill, and would not fire again
until he was so close it would be impossible to miss him. But he was
standing still, his breath coming in short gasps. Then his breathing
stopped altogether, while her own released breath sounded like a wind in
her ears. An instant later he had flung the chair aside and was upon
her.
She managed to struggle to her feet but he had his arm about her and was
groping for the pistol. His hot breath was on her face and she exerted
herself frantically. She kicked him, and regretted her slippers. She
tried to bite him and was tempted to drop the pistol and use her free
hand to scratch his eyes out. But the pistol was her only hope, and even
in that iron embrace she managed to duck and writhe and fling herself
back. She was as strong as he was! Not for nothing was she an
out-of-doors’ girl.
She held her right hand rigidly behind her, twisting him about as well
as herself as he tried to reach her hand. They revolved in absurd
gyrations, breathless, speechless. Suddenly his hand grasped her right
shoulder and tried to wrench it. She bent down her head and bit him. He
gave a hard gasp, then jerked her still more firmly to him, put his hand
over her face, forcing back her head, and rained kisses on her neck and
throat.
For a moment she had an illusion of paralysis. Not for an instant had
she imagined the man was after anything but loot. He had come for her!
Or was this revenge? Or a desperate attempt to shock her into
submission? What difference? She knew that her skin was soft and sweet
and the man virile. And she was almost at his mercy.
She was possessed by such a fury of rage as she had never believed even
she could experience. Her exhibition to De Witt Turner had been but a
pale umbra of what she felt at this moment when her sacred virginity was
threatened.
The man was panting. He took his hand from her face and she felt his
lips approaching her own. She butted him in the chest with her head,
gave a violent wrench that half freed her, swung round her pistol and
fired. The man dropped without a groan.