He said smoothly that of course it was not.
“She’s so sweet!” I regretted.
“She’s so weak,” he countered. “For all her talk, she lets him bully
her. You should have seen him dragging her--all protests, half-way in
hysterics--from a dinner given for her, because his mother was giving
a reception for her later on and Van Suydam thought it discourteous
for them to be absent when the first guests arrived. I mean--it was
discourteous: but she’s Eva Litchfield, and some leeway must be allowed
her.” He regretted that she did not choose her actions with the
taste she displayed in her choice of words. If she behaved with the
exquisiteness of her characters, she and her husband would make out.
“He is as punctilious as she should be, and doesn’t see that she would
truckle at once to a man who hit her a good smacking blow between the
eyes. Women like it. Why do you laugh?”
I laughed because once upon a time Eva had said the same thing. She
said that the smaller in size the woman the more she speculated about
force, the more finical her tastes the stronger her curiosity about
brutality. Men, she said, went at it by contraries: they were apt to
fight a large woman who dreamed of a knight. I said to him: “Go on? You
were saying that he dragged her off by force?”
“In the line of polished pushing. I rather suspect that he gave away
his underlying motive in what he said to her as he held her wrap.
She had been protesting that what she needed was contact with other
writers, and he said: ‘I’m jealous of everything. I’m jealous of the
sky that looks down on you. I’m jealous of the air that blows on your
cheek.’ I had hopes of him; it occurred to me that, with this line, he
might come far enough to really appreciate Eva’s own unerring selection
of the right word--unless she’s telling her troubles with him: then,
you would be surprised to find out how disgustingly sentimental she is.
She told me of some love passages between them. She will of course tell
you. But she may tell you other passages, and this was so amusing. She
said she went to his study to see if he was angry--she had probably
been outrageous to the poor devil--and she said he was put out because
she then jumped up from his ardent caresses to answer the telephone.
She was genuinely astonished at his irritation. Women act like
gadflies: they never let a man alone when he is irritated. She appears
to have come back at it, standing and simply smiling. He tried to hold
out--must have had some lurking idea of teaching her a lesson; but she
assures me that at the touch of her he always loses his head. And when
he gasped--silly of him, where it’s a question of Eva--that she must
love him always, she merely said that his workroom was so untidy. She
told me this because she was scoring a point against him: he had drawn
a mark on her brow with a stick of charcoal and said that she could
never get away from his brand--that she belonged to him. Being Eva,
she took this badly; she said, ‘You can’t shackle my mind! You can’t
put your mark on my brain!’ It appears that as they were hotly arguing
this, the telephone rang again, and she rushed away to answer it.”
I wailed: “If he doesn’t understand Eva better than to even play at
branding her----!”
He said: “I have no use for women in fact, although theoretically I
admire the pretty dears. Eva didn’t see, as you don’t see, how amusing
it is that for the second time she outraged him by rushing to answer
the telephone.”
Side by side on the divan encircling the room, we dropped into bodily
comfort; and bodily comfort makes a man talk. At last I protested:
everyone, I said, brought it around to Eva’s mother-in-law; was
she necessarily so a part of the situation? To be sure, I mused,
her immobility would have a disastrous effect on Eva’s nerves. He
contradicted me: “Mrs. Van Suydam’s composure is the sum of her sense
of what is due her position multiplied by her inflexible will. You’ll
find that Eva appreciates her; I’ve always felt that her admiration for
the mother had much to do with her falling in love with the son. She
met Mrs. Van Suydam at the critical moment. She met her the day the
chap asked her to marry him.”
Often his omniscience irritated me. “How can you know?”
“We all know,” he crowed over me. “It happened the day that you, in a
spirit of mistaken decency, left a tea at the Savoy Plaza. Never, my
dear Dinah, leave a splendid scene because of a feeling for what is
right.”
“She seemed a tragic sight,” I put in as my excuse.
“Eva?” He was amused.
I shook my head. “The old lady. She was having a terrible time
controlling herself, you know.”
“That’s what made it such a magnificent scene. Those old girls were
taught self-control at the proper boarding schools. And when she
sees fit she can defend herself. The old lady needs no help from the
itinerant author. Oh, I’ve been hanging around her whenever I found an
opportunity!” His laugh, seldom heard, was always startling; it was
a high, whinnying laugh. “I assure you that she doesn’t feel a whit
humbled in presence of our various names and fames. Her pleasure in
identifying those of us whose photographs she’s seen appended to book
reviews is almost sadistic. She’s long since recovered the balance
that you feared to see her throw overboard. She seems to think that
our pictures hadn’t prepared her for the truth. Once upon a time, when
I was hanging on her words, she said loftily: ‘And who, pray, is that
strange woman with a face like a mask?’ She graciously assisted me in
identifying the lady with ‘Ah I don’t wonder you are at a loss! They
all wear masks, these celebrities.’ The term she so derisively threw
at us seemed to taste bad; only her famous self-control prevented
her making a face. She was, at the time, attentively regarding a
pale poet who looked, if the truth must be told, half drowned, and
at Molly Underhill who has, as we know, an eye that is lewd in its
open questing. She said ‘Humph! Indeed! All diseased, I fear. It is
a disease, this writing of books.’ You’ll notice that she seldom
abbreviates her words. There’s nothing slovenly about her.”
The woman with a face like a mask must have been Florence Quincy, I
said. Interested in oddities in others, she was herself strange in
appearance.
He recovered from the devastation of a fit of laughter and went on with
his dissection of Mrs. Van Suydam. “She said to me ‘And which of these
ladies and gentlemen are my son’s especial friends?’ This being soon
after the marriage I was at a loss: for who among us knew much about
him? Who among us, even now, knows much about him? We really agree
with Mrs. Van Suydam, who didn’t then, and doesn’t now, recognize a
possible bridge between her family and the artists who make the toys
with which Van Suydams amuse themselves when so minded. You realize
that she must have had some definite plans for her son--that she must
have followed the best lines of the dowager tradition and picked out
a wife for him? She wanted Gertrude Cuyler, who’s wholesomely without
talents, to marry Nicholas. The Cuyler girl was the woman whose
eventual stepping into her shoes she could have borne with equanimity.
But I hear that his objection to Gertrude was that she insisted too
strenuously on the fact of her never feeling ill; while, he is reported
to have said, he didn’t admire sickly women, there was a happy mean
between bouncing health and a lady’s delicately tenacious hold on life.”
Gertrude Cuyler had never interested us. She laughed too much; and when
she laughed her mouth, stretching widely, still failed to suggest true
mirth. About this girl who had sighed, at the tea two years ago, there
was no hint of mirth, although her frequent laughter showed her to be
conscience-stricken by its absence. She was a tall girl with russet
hair and the pale skin of the red-headed woman; and over her face there
was the warmth of sunshine, and when one looked closely the sunshine
was an overlay of small golden freckles. As Glidden had remarked, she
was wholesome.
“I mentioned her,” whispered Glidden, “because she happens to be
sitting a few tables away.”
Over the shoulder of the man with her, she eyed me. Before the day
was over, I was to feel sorry for Gertrude Cuyler. But at the time I
glowered because she was only a few tables away.
“Women are so amazing. They know when they’re being talked about--with
the exception of Eva,” he amended it. “Eva is sublimely oblivious--most
of the time. It’s so lovely to watch a person who is sublimely
oblivious.”
Plaintively I begged that he make one plain statement of fact: how did
Mrs. Van Suydam feel about her son having married Eva Litchfield?
“You’re so literal!” he lamented. “I’m sure that if Eva hadn’t been
the subject of open gossip she would have seemed ordinary to Mrs.
Van Suydam; she would have been no more than a very pretty woman
whom her son had ‘picked up’ and fallen in love with--foolishly but
understandably. But Eva had been ‘talked about’; she was a woman who
could, therefore, smear an impious finger over the fair name of the Van
Suydams, and the old lady got the wind up. I think she came uptown to
that tea, where she knew her son would be and where she suspected Eva
would be, in order to bear him off in triumph. It didn’t occur to her
that she could fail.”
Here was the clear impression. Mrs. Van Suydam had set out to play her
first, and last, card. She would pluck the young man from his circling
flight in ether only slightly above, and in sight of, his home; she
would bear him off on the rush of her victory. The drive back down
Fifth Avenue would be her triumphal progress with the son of her house
safe at her side. But as she sat on the sofa at the tea-party could she
banish all doubts? Underneath the noise of high chatter there must
have flowed for her, rapidly, darkly, the stream of impending defeat. I
asked--but already I knew the answer: “She took her son home?”
Charles Glidden smiled. “Didn’t you get the idea? He refused to go with
her. He stayed behind to ask Eva Litchfield to marry him. That’s the
point, don’t you see?”
[Illustration]