II

As I turned the corner into Park Avenue Gertrude Cuyler caught up with

me. She was accompanied by the gay Anthony Bloodgood. He had been

the man, I saw now, over whose shoulder she had peeped at me in the

restaurant a moment since.

“Mrs. Avery,” Gertrude almost gasped, as if she had been running, “you

don’t object if we walk along with you? I tried to leave at the same

time so that I might have a chance to talk with you,” she explained

with her determined honesty. She dropped into step as well as she could

with the difference in our heights. In walking she came down heavily,

leaning forward as though on the alert to control her feet, and when

she stopped it was with almost a dislocation of her body: decidedly, a

girl who would be at her best when middle age justified slow dignity.

I glanced up at Anthony Bloodgood and met his embarrassed eyes. He was

twisting the ends of his moustache. Gertrude, too, was confused; that

she was about to lose her way on a path that she nevertheless chose

to follow was revealed by a heavy flush which added nothing to her

somewhat robust good looks. I realized that they were bent on talking

about Eva’s marriage, and that Anthony at least would never acknowledge

that this was by design. He strolled along with his easy grace, in the

fashion of young men who from the nursery have been fed and clothed,

exercised and mildly entertained, by rule; only his uneasy eyes gave

him away. Walking, therefore, between two painfully self-conscious

persons, I tried to be jaunty about it, a difficult part to play

towards flanking superiority in height.

In the tiny triangle exposed between the edges of a fur coat and a

bright scarf, Gertrude’s throat showed convulsed: like an adolescent,

she tried to swallow her agitation. She said, pitching herself into

speech and being, as always, devastating: “I don’t want you to think we

eavesdropped.”

“Eavesdropped?”

“You both spoke loudly,” she explained.

Of course we had; all of us did, becoming more animated as we agreed or

disagreed more definitely. I smiled; had she been imaginative, always

we must have reminded her of a mob scene on the stage; we must have

seemed without direction, to be getting nowhere and, in truth, to be

indifferent where we might eventually bring up.

“I know most of you. And naturally I knew what you were talking

about,” said Gertrude. And vaguely she fell upon another point. “I

don’t know how any of you talk at home.” Her voice was uneasy, and a

little shocked. We must have given her an impression of strain, of

frustration, of dissatisfaction because of constant striving, of a

profound unhappiness because within us she detected no repose--with

her, the basis of all happiness. The thing before her must have seemed

to be energy engendered by the activity itself, and she would have been

very nearly right.

Her nearness to hitting it made my smile sarcastic. “I’m so sorry that

I must leave you here. I have some shopping to do.”

She was surprised. She opened her eyes widely. “But I thought we would

have a talk, because I heard you say to Mr. Glidden that you were going

to walk across to Sutton Place.”

This made me laugh, and I said more amiably: “The truth is, I don’t

wish to discuss Eva Litchfield, who is a friend of mine.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked away. “Oh, I know that. I

know that, Mrs. Avery. But then, you see, Nick is a friend of ours.”

I started to say “Then that should enable you to guess at the character

of loyalty,” when, glancing at her, I saw that her blush had faded

until her little freckles stood out, seeming to spring from her skin.

The girl’s heart lay exposed before my eyes, which I considerately

turned away. She said, speaking brightly: “Eva Litchfield is very

beautiful.” Her lively tone was a weapon in her defense against me.

I wanted to pat her shoulder, and remembered that her shoulder was

on a level with the crown of my head and that compassion on tiptoes

sports the blemish of inelegance. However, the suspicion that Gertrude

Cuyler was pathetic had crept upon me, unawares, and it did no good to

remember that Charles Glidden had said to me that I must look out for I

was only moved by pathos, which is a weakness of the nerves and slides

into bathos.

I bent upon her a strictly impersonal look and told her that beauty was

not all of Eva Litchfield. “Besides, what is there about your friend,

and my friend, that you should properly talk over with me?”

At this, she gasped that Mrs. Van Suydam was dreadfully worried.

“How do you know?” I demanded.

She said, on an even more dying note: “Eva is so attractive to men!”

During this interchange, Anthony Bloodgood had said not a word. He had

marched purposefully along, and if he had glanced above my head at

Gertrude I was not aware of it. He now, however, gave me the impression

of mutely taking part in the conversation; for I was sure that he did

not subscribe to Gertrude’s statement of Eva’s attraction. What was

there of finer perception about Nicholas Van Suydam, that he could

appreciate Eva Litchfield? Anthony walked with a stubborn set to his

broad shoulders and a forward thrust to his powerful neck; and I

wondered for how long Eva could stand opposed to this phalanx of the

Van Suydams and their kin.

I advanced that I should like to know if Miss Cuyler knew what she was

talking about; for how conceivably could she be sure that Mrs. Van

Suydam was worried?

“Miss Ingoldsby is my aunt,” she said as if this explained the

knottiest problems.

“I still don’t see----” I said. “I’m not, after all, a New Yorker.”

“My aunts are very intimate friends of Mrs. Van Suydam’s; they went to

boarding school together, years and years ago,” she expounded as to an

idiot. “She talks freely to my aunts. Who else is there for her to talk

to about Eva?”

There are times when one is abstractly afraid. I wondered if I were

really afraid of New York? I lapsed into thought so uncharted--so,

really, a maze of instinct--that it came as a shock to be again

accosted by her. I had been calling upon that abstraction usually

neglected, God. And what she at this moment said was, whether purposely

or not, a challenge. “She is obliged to talk about Eva, you see,

because everybody talks about Eva.” Eva might have considered this the

accolade: but I had been coming to the conclusion that she was badly in

need of the help over which Charles Glidden had made merry. “Can’t you

do something about it? Can’t you talk to her about it? Can’t you tell

her that she will ruin Nick’s work?” Gertrude questioned in a thickened

voice.

“Ruin his work?” I was deliberately stupid: if one were quick with her,

she became confused in her mental processes.

“She will drive him crazy!” she gasped out of some deep resentment.

“You haven’t the least idea of how she acts at home.”

I interrupted with the reminder that I had been given to understand

that his people neither approved nor grasped his architectural

ambition. I looked her in the eye, and she flinched, but not, I saw,

for herself. “Oh, I--I----” She took a fresh start: “It amuses him to

do it.”

Anthony Bloodgood now obtruded his view. “You see, Mrs. Avery, Nick

is his mother’s only child; he’ll have enough money. And Mrs. Van

Suydam--she’s old-fashioned, I’ve heard my father call her--she wanted

him to do as the old codgers had always done--settle down to manage

the estate, and all that. And I must say,” he concluded wisely, “that

it’s a policy that’s worked to advantage in lots of cases, here in New

York.” Having so done his duty by his absent friend, he twirled his

little moustache and took a long breath.

Here was the crux of the matter, I decided: it was a question of the

island of Manhattan. Eva--and the rest of us--were trying to take root

on the rock of Manhattan, and we could take root nowhere because in

leaving the land on which we ourselves had been born we had cut our tap

roots. Was Mrs. Van Suydam the hierophant who would initiate Eva, or

was she forever against her son’s wife?

“How does it feel to be a New Yorker?” I asked flippantly.

They bent upon me looks of alarm. I laughed. It was coming clearly

into my head what the trouble was. The gigantic growth of New York

was accepted by these condemnatory young people--and by their sisters

and their cousins and perhaps their aunts--as natural, but it drove

us beyond our nervous strength. If we stayed here we would die of

attrition while Nicholas Van Suydam and his kin waxed fat. The soul’s

food grows only on the land of one’s birth. “Did you ever read

Genesis?” I asked Gertrude Cuyler.

“Why--no, Mrs. Avery,” she stammered. “Or--I probably read it when I

was a little girl.”

“You might ask Mrs. Van Suydam if she agrees with the Bible that

authors should stay at home. She will, of course--in this case.”

The Cuyler girl asked timidly if the Bible really said such a thing.

She was losing the thread of what she had set out to say to me. I could

see her fighting to hold on. “All of you make such jokes,” she advanced.

“One must joke,” I threw out carelessly. Especially, I added in my

mind, when one is beginning to understand. I cautioned myself: “Old

girl, you’ve got to understand. You’ve got to understand the two sides;

for don’t you always drag in that there are two sides? There’s the

side of Eva, and there’s the side of the Van Suydams: there’s the side

of us, and there’s the side of New York. You might start--by way of a

drastic change!--by understanding yourself. Why--for instance--are you

about to be detestable to this good-natured young woman? Is it because

you’re envious of her security? She gets that security from having

always kept in touch with her home. You could have stayed at home; Eva

could have stayed at home: your precious crowd could have stayed at

home. Why didn’t you?” There we were: we were transplanted and sickly,

and I was turning to bite the hand that fed me.

We paused at a street crossing, and the lights changed, and I felt

Anthony Bloodgood’s hand at my elbow symbolically guiding me for the

passage of the--Red Sea, I decided in despair: it had become vitally

necessary that I laugh. Anthony looked down--very far down--to my face,

and enquired solicitously: “Did I rush you too fast?”

“Yes!” I said. But it was the life that I had selected, and not Anthony

Bloodgood, which was rushing me too fast. The Lord God expelled Adam

and Eve from the garden of Eden, back to the land from whence they

had come. If one read the Bible when one was upset, it applied to the

most modern of problems. An author takes colour from the land of his

birth, but mainly, it seemed to me today, he derives from the land of

his people the calm strength through which he is enabled to go on. I

glanced at these two satisfied persons who, because they believed that

nothing in the world was so good as New York, had never considered

moving away.

Encouraged by my attention, Gertrude hurried on: “Eva has a way of

saying to Nick ‘When I work, I work’.”

I objected: “Why would she find it necessary to say that to him?

Doesn’t he grasp it that there’s such a thing as the privacy of work?”

I could not be homesick: it was inconceivable that I be homesick.

This was more fundamental than the rather slippery emotion called

homesickness. We were here; and we were unaware of what worked against

us. We believed nervousness was the excitement of inspiration when it

was the excitation of sick nerves. We were defeating our own ends. With

more tranquillity, with a greater simplicity, we might stay in the

garden of Eden of peace. But in pushing myself into the problems of

Eva Litchfield I was being forced to face my own. I knew that nostalgia

was growing on us, destroying our correct self-appraisal, and that it

would finally envelop our minds in a foreboding gloom that we would

call our genius. I said to myself: “Laugh at it, you fool!” I laughed,

at myself and every friend I had in the world.

Uneasy over my silences, racked by my laughter, Gertrude spoke with a

catch in her breath: “Tony and I dropped in: we used to drop in on Nick

when he lived at home. Eva didn’t come out of her study, just shrieked

through the closed door that she’d go crazy if Nick interrupted

her. We heard it so plainly, you see, because she lifted her voice

and--and--yelled. I tried to look as if nothing was happening, and

Tony, too, tried to pass it off for Nick’s sake. And then Nick opened

her door and walked in. I whispered to Tony that we had better

leave----”

“Was she working?” I cut across her flow of narrative: she told things

as a child does, starting each sentence with a small intake of the

breath.

She said that Eva had been writing, she imagined. “And I said to Tony

that we had better go----”

Anthony shrugged. “I told you there would be no squabble. Nick’s loony

over her. If I had a wife who didn’t so much as turn her head to speak

to me when I went to her room, I’d give her a dose of her own medicine.”

“I should like to know what he did?” I murmured. “That’s the point you

were thinking of making, wasn’t it? What did he do?”

“He went over and kissed the nape of her neck,” said Anthony with deep

disgust.

“She is pretty,” Gertrude conceded.

Agreeing that this was the solution, he wagged his handsome head. “She

knows it. She’s wise. Those tea roses she has around her study are

becoming to her. But she is a strange woman: she gets the roses because

they are so becoming to her, and then she doesn’t play up to them; she

picks up papers from her desk and frowns and pretends she doesn’t hear

a word you say.”

“She probably doesn’t,” I reassured him. “Look here, you two: you will

have to make up your minds to it. Your friend has married a creature

of mist and cobwebs, an--” I hesitated before their blankness--“an

enchantress who throws spells and doesn’t take part in what her spells

bring about.”

Gertrude was practical about it. “Then why did she marry him?”

“I wasn’t here,” I said drily; “but presumably she was in love with

him.”

I knew that this time they did look at each other over my head. I heard

them breathe their doubt. Anthony brought up a feature that he assured

me would drive any man mad: she was not consistent. He had been in

Nicholas’ own workroom, he told me, sitting idly by while another man

discussed points of architecture with their host. Anthony acknowledged

to having been bored, and floundering out of his depth which, he said,

was not in the line of architecture; but men respected each other’s

work, and he had of course kept quiet until they settled whatever had

come up. But Eva had opened the door and had stood there until they

were forced to look up from the plans spread out before them. Was that

nice of her, he asked me: was that as she would be done by?

I remarked that she might have wanted to see him about something that

could not wait. I added the nugget, for Gertrude to seize, that Eva had

much ado to keep out of the way of men’s admiration; she had had, I

explained, to fight for the time in which to work.

“Now, Mrs. Avery--” Anthony began to explain--“I didn’t mean-- Of

course she had something to see him about. She told Nick that the

Wickershams had telephoned for them to come around after dinner and

talk.”

I looked sharply at him. But his face was blank. Tugging at his little

moustache, he gazed down on me with honest good nature. “Oh, well! What

then?”

He resumed: “Nick said ‘Why?’ I wish you could have seen how surprised

she was! ‘To talk, of course,’ she said. And he said ‘What’s the use

of that?’ And that was when I fancied that Gertie was right and that

they were about to blow up. The funny thing is, that you can understand

every word she says when she’s rattling like machine gun fire. She

began to say, over and over like a mechanical doll, ‘Why? Why? Why?’

She told him flatly that she was a public character and owed a duty

to society--to show up, I took it she meant. And she called poor old

Nick’s attention to the fact that it didn’t matter whether or not he

showed up in public, because no one knew who put up a building.”

“Where was the other man while this went on?” I wanted to know. The

other man had taken a hasty departure. Then, I remarked, they should

have followed his excellent example.

He stopped pulling his moustache. He explained lamely that he had

feared such a course would dignify the scene into a serious affair. “A

sort of reflection on Eva,” he concluded.

“Oh, nonsense!” I cried. “What is the matter with you people? Is he to

be allowed to say what he pleases and she to be muzzled?”

The rock of Manhattan reared itself between us. “You don’t understand,

then,” he said. He left it at that.

Gertrude took it up where he left it. “She is so fond of parties,” she

criticized.

I said: “Now, look here--be reasonable. Be fair--if you can, to Eva.

Aren’t you fond of parties?”

Gertrude reverted to her mother’s time. “She’s married!” She was

stolidly virtuous over it, but she came back to what personally she

turned the flat of her hand against. “And Nick is bored to death at

those literary teas.”