“My lamb,” interrupted Florence, “wouldn’t it be honest if we
acknowledged that these days we get together solely to talk about her?
And wouldn’t it be more open and above board if you acknowledged that
you eat it up? For my part, I’m frank in my avidity. And I want to
say, just here, that I know what Eva herself wants; above and beyond
being talked about whenever men--and women--are gathered together in
her name, she wants the greatest joy ever experienced by a human being,
only, in order that she be not shocked, it must be the joy of creatures
without bodies.”
Mapes stood at the window tapping on the panes his own reply to the
beckon of the bare branches that mournfully swung in the wind from the
river. He said, speaking over his shoulder as if he concealed his face:
“She can’t help it. She’s powerless to change her nature--as are we
all. Women with thin treble voices have no power of emotion.”
Pomeroy revelled in arguments about the nature of women. “What, then,
keeps them going?”
“Their excited nerves.” Thus charitably excusing all possible
charges against Eva’s treatment of her husband, Mapes at the same
time suggested that this treatment was of a refined cruelty. With
anticipatory relish, he glanced keenly from one to another of us,
gathering up obscure reactions he might have brought about. I knew that
he studied us, measuring our relatively tense muscles as indications of
how we had drifted since his suggestion which might embrace so many.
I noticed that the cocktail shaker made a swift round of the room. I
said that I was tired. “It’s all too much. I can sort out some points,
but not so many. Everyone of you has a different impression of everyone
of--of--suppose we call them Eva and her opponents? And what you’ve
been half-way telling is as jumbled as that statement of mine, and my
mind is as jumbled as my statement, and--there you are!”
“Pray for strength,” Pomeroy advised me. “For this is nothing to how
you’ll feel when Eva gets at you with her own inner secret side of it.”
They shouted at me that they had been right in assuming that Eva
would have no objection to being dissected by us. And, advancing her
apology for Eva more tentatively than was her habit, Florence took it
up. “Sit down, Dinah,” she begged. “I’m not going to abuse Eva. And,
incidentally, I don’t acknowledge the justice of your attitude of
holier than thou. You can’t deny several points. You can’t deny that
you never get on your ear until after you’ve heard all we have to tell
you: and you can’t deny that Eva herself in her distastes is almost
inhumane. She’s harsh in her condemnations of what life has brought
out in others. And I think that part of the trouble now is that she’s
afraid of the effects of life on herself if she lets go and turns
human.” Leaning over in her favourite position, her elbows on her
knees and her chin cupped in her hands, she stared into the fire with
her sullen resentment against something that only she knew. The long,
racy lines of her figure were so much lovelier than her face that
at the moment Florence presented her greatest contradiction. “She’s
harried--like a poor wild thing--and I, for one, am sorry for her. But
to hell with it! Why should I worry myself?” When Florence cursed it
was in a curiously deadened voice that carried her ultimate conviction.
She continued to worry herself, of course. “Spence says--but I have my
reason for stating that he doesn’t think it--that her fastidiousness
is lack of feeling. It’s all in her head, he holds. And because she
happens to have a thinnish voice he puts that, too, down to a thinness
of temperament. And I don’t believe a word of it. To docket a woman
isn’t so easy as all that.” She paused to smile at Mapes. “Don’t be
ashamed of being in love with Eva, Spence. You’re a bloodless radish,
and for you to so plunge into the maelstrom of human failings is a
comfort to your friends. Wasn’t radish,” she mused, “what Eva’s husband
called all you men? She told us about it--remember?”
Mapes was disdainful. “Of course he selected the wrong simile. He meant
to say turnip. And if you want to recall what Eva told us, how about
that bit to the effect that he said he’d see everything once, and her
counter remark that her friends were never guilty of triteness? I seem
to recall her repeating a quite long and fiery speech she made to him,
in which she said that of course he was splendid in his own line but
that we weren’t tolerant of platitudes. Which all of you might bear in
mind, as it would be sad to fall below Eva’s praise.”
Florence’s mouth seemed to tear her face when she laughed, as
she did now, with complete abandonment. “Add to that the one
excruciating comment on us that Van Suydam has been known to make. He
said--according to Eva--‘Then it’s a labour union, and I’m a scab and
liable to get hurt?’ Eva said she didn’t speak to him for the rest of
the way to wherever they were going. Eva, poor devil, doesn’t think it
amusing that she tells us these things.” One would have taken her for a
different woman from the brooding replica of the antique who so short a
while ago had sat looking at who knows what in the fire.