I waited for her: one always waited for her: and eventually I forgot
that I expected her. It took a great deal to erase Molly Underhill
from a nervous woman’s consciousness. In this case, the great deal was
the voice of the streets, which might be bellowing a threat to the
creature leaning from a balcony thirty storeys above the sidewalk. The
creature chid herself: “What business of yours is the growth of New
York? You’re a small-sized widow-woman who had deliberately come back:
now put up with it.” I had informed Florence Quincy’s guests that I
had come back to discover what my friends were doing, who they were
doing up brown, and what they would do to me. That they were briskly
up to something I did not doubt; New York lends a spurious energy to
those who stay long enough and not too long. We had rushed in from all
sections of the country, to conquer the metropolis if it did not kill
us first. It was growing faster than were we.
Gazing at a sky-line still largely composed of the bare steel ribs
of buildings that tomorrow would be completed, this newest New York
seemed, suddenly and devastatingly, an entity too powerful to cope
with. My head swam from the immensity of this conception of a city.
Here were buildings striving titanically to reach the skies, and a
people battling to preserve an individuality already dwarfed by their
own vast feats of masonry; and this mass of the structures erected
by themselves was so mighty, this monster born of their ambition was
so ruthless in its demands that they keep up with it, that these
constructive pigmies would be terrified if the hurry of their existence
did not sweep them irresistibly on. Seen from the height where I clung
bewildered, they crawled like insects through the streets. The confused
roar of their activities, and of the machinery set in motion by their
intelligence, came up to me in a paean of praise of themselves. But
these people who, thus defeated by their fate, rushed madly along the
sidewalks, these poor things who, believing they held their heads
proudly, lived their apology to the buildings that they themselves
achieved, these victims maddened by their selected careers: even
these beings might occasionally pause and listen to a silence. For at
intervals there fell upon the dreadful bellow of the traffic a hush so
profound that it was as if the hand of God had lifted in warning.
No need for me to remind myself that I was being melodramatic. I was
frightened. Noise, to me, has always seemed a personal threat. My
nerves rasped by the roar, my thoughts confused by the silences falling
with the change of traffic lights, I would not have been surprised
if on the now flaming sky the finger of doom had written. Against
which of us would the finger trace its denunciation? I qualified my
self-arraignment: I was becoming absurd. We could only be hurt by
people and, mainly, by ourselves.
For a moment of glory, the city was bathed in a sanguine light. The
sunset withdrew through the cross streets and left behind chasms
spangled with lamps. But on the tops of the buildings, lingeringly,
the ruddy light still frolicked; it might be the soul of New York
playing with destruction, bantering ruin. This optimism sparkled on
the towers, and glinted down towards the pavements and never reached
the ground, and in the end, possibly, forgot that underneath the city
there lay the earth itself. The land, foundation for this jubilance
over the possibilities of man, might not exist. It was never seen.
Before leaving for my temporary residence in France, I had said to Eva
Litchfield that they were covering up the earth, and how, I asked,
without the feel of the land under his feet could the New Yorker of
the future write? She had replied, characteristically, that one could
write with passion of England, for instance, if one came from Oshkosh
where they make the trunks with the red bands around their middles.
Intermittently, Eva liked New York. She had concluded her correction
of my notion with the statement: “I’m frightened by nothing in the way
of a town, a place. I’m only afraid of the things that men do to our
spirits.” I decided to say to her, when I should see her: “It would be
the right thing to hang one’s spirit so high that it can’t be reached:
New York has the idea.” I would tell her about the soul of New York
playing fitfully on the tops of the new tall buildings; and she would,
of course, laugh at me as a dabbler in spiritualism. And Winnie Conant,
with her aggravating tendency to manage the affairs of those few whom
she liked--while she liked them: she would squawk with mirth and tell
me to banish fear and adjust myself to grandeur. Winnie would say that
some cities have souls, but that New York has strength for the struggle
against the gods; her breath is vigour, her noise vitality, her every
aspect that of superhuman effort; she is a lusty flout to the world,
and often she taunts her own: who cares? Not those who are worthy of
New York--would declare Winnie, who came here from Maine.
I must have stayed out on the balcony for a long time--I had watched
the sky darken and the lights of late workers prick in until each
office building was a paper cut-out--and my excitement might have been
the effect of the cold that had penetrated my heavy coat. The jingling
of the telephone broke a spell.
“Mrs. Underhill calling for Mrs. Avery, and she says will you please
hurry as it’s very late?” came parrot-like from the hotel desk.
“I must say,” remarked Molly as I stepped into her taxi, “that if
I’d realized you had located in such an inaccessible place I’d never
have come by for you. Do you realize that I’ve wandered for hours?”
But the meter did not bear her out. “Now--” she leaned back, and put
her feet up on the folding seat, and lit a cigarette--“now we’ll talk
over Eva Litchfield’s affairs.” She paid no attention to my possibly
antagonistic reaction; the talk was the thing. And with Molly talk
was a matter of personalities. She prated on aesthetics and told the
baldest facts. The grunt that she now gave might have come from the
lurching of the taxi, but I wondered if she did not derive a porcine
joy from rooting and snuffling into private lives.
She had an uncanny way of reading minds which were being withheld from
her. She said that she had a cold in her head. “Have you forgotten that
no one can avoid colds in the head, in New York in the winter? It’s a
feature of the brilliancy of the season.” Her nose was red.
The clangour of the traffic and the clack of her voice served to bring
home to me that in counting on preserving my acquired attitude of
detachment I had reckoned without the tentacles which now tightened
around me. During our progression through the streets, our hitching
starts and violent halts, our series of back-breaking jolts--the
experience, I was to rediscover, of getting anywhere in town--and
during the resulting nervous exasperation over what no one can remedy
since they have built this city, I might have been shaking, stretching,
straining to encompass the changes into which by easy stages my friends
had slipped without shock.
She screamed persistent confidences above the din. Some of what
she told me reached my ears and some escaped me, and it was only
significant because it impressed me with the fact that I was again a
member in good standing of a racket. I was not interested in what she
told, for, in spite of her proposed plan of revelation in which she was
to concentrate on Eva Litchfield, she told shattering details of the
love life of persons with whom I had the barest acquaintance. And I had
been away for so long that even the activities of my old friends had
faded into the background of the trivial.
But she finally got around to it: she always did. She asked if I had
seen Eva during the past summer, which she had spent in Europe.
I had not seen Eva since I had gone abroad. But it is not unethical
to lie to another woman. I said--unnecessarily, for Eva was always
shiningly beautiful: “She made a great sensation.”
Molly’s eyes shifted, on this. “Then you must have seen that something
was wrong? And what sort of sensation do you mean?”
I said cheerfully: “Oh, in the way of her appearance, and also in the
way of her books, which you must acknowledge one wouldn’t expect from
so lovely a woman. London takes the position that they are fine enough
to have been written by an ugly woman.”
Eva’s beauty was a slap in Molly’s face, her genius an affront to the
lesser gift. She preserved a dashed silence. In the obscurity of the
taxi I felt that she waited to spring. “It’s a fortunate thing that
you and I didn’t start life as beauties,” she eventually assured me.
“I’ve always thought, Dinah, that you don’t fit together. Have you ever
noticed that your face isn’t the type that should go with your body--if
nature happened to be squeamish, which she isn’t?” She then discounted
my amusement. “No use in saying what you were thinking of saying. I
know I’m a wreck. It’s only Eva who can work like a slave, and live on
a tension, and come out of it looking like an angel.”
Eva had, always, looked like an angel. Gossip, sticking to her like
pitch, had not spoiled the loveliness of her face. The one woman among
us whose love affairs were front page news, shrinking from it, hating
it, and always adding to it, there was about Eva a helplessness that
made me rush to her defense. I said, now, staring Molly in the eye:
“You’ve been insinuating, and have told nothing--which, after all, I
remember to be characteristic of you. Come out with it.”
“My dear!” she protested. “I’m as crazy over her as you are. How can
you think I was going to tell something against her?”
“Oh, I’m not going to tell her what you say.”
“My love, what a spitfire you’ve become,” she said sweetly. She
insisted that she knew nothing definite, that Eva was in no trouble,
that, in short, the real trouble had fallen upon her friends; they
found it difficult to keep the peace with her new husband, who was
an unacceptable nuisance. “It’s a pity,” she commented, “that men no
longer beat their wives; so much the most potent means of displaying
connubial disapproval--and so much pleasanter for the casual guest, who
doesn’t often find himself present during the performance.”
We had reached our destination, and stood with basement steps
backing us and an iron grille forbiddingly confronting us; and in
the flickering light from the lantern that threw over the speakeasy
entrance the disguise of the picturesque, Molly’s long eyes shone
like a wolf’s. The usual reserved orb peered at us through the locked
grating; the customary smile greeted us upon our eventual admission;
we scuttled the length of the narrow hallway to the rear of the house,
squeezing past a fat policeman who lounged inside the barroom door and
feelingly averted his gaze. The bar was crowded with our friends, our
enemies, and those who had not yet made up their minds about us. They
suspended the interchange of their code words, their juggling with
words, and Molly seemed gratified at their silence and flattered by the
affronted stares directed at her by those whose books she had recently
reviewed. A book must be more or less open to ridicule in order to be
reviewed by Molly Underhill. I thought: “How strange it is, that I
didn’t notice silence, abroad.” But a different language is a barrier
and at the same time a protection: if one speaks it, one is still
guarded, by its ultimate strangeness, from too close an encroachment.
As never in New York, one’s thoughts remain inviolably one’s own.
A fat Italian stood before us, beaming professionally. “Mrs. Avery!
And Miss Underhill! But how sad it is to see you here without Miss
Litchfield!”
“What did I tell you?” demanded Molly’s lifted eyebrows.
Whatever she intended telling me--and I doubted her ability, if not her
willingness, to tell me anything definite about Eva Litchfield--was
broken into by the approach of Winnie Conant and her husband, Addis
Wickersham. Winnie gushed “Again we meet!” but plainly made mental
reservations as to the benefit to New York of my return. In her torrent
of words she contrived to nicely mingle sly digs at Eva with encomiums
on the proprietor of the speakeasy. “What with living expenses being
beyond reason, where would we be without him to cash our checks which
we’ve no means of knowing to be good, to give us credit when checks are
out of the question----” Having done her duty to the amenities, she
fixed me with her glitter. “As I tried to tell you this afternoon--only
Florence talks so much----” She went on to inform me that Nicholas Van
Suydam was patently destined to ruin Eva’s career. “Such a shame, for a
brilliant novelist, as Eva is now acknowledged to be----”
I received, squarely between the eyes, Molly’s glance. She enquired,
but not as if she solely wished to give Eva her dues: “Does anyone deny
that she’s outstripped all of you?”
Here, then, were two women who had it in for Eva. Winnie purred that it
was not as if Eva had been starved for love; and laughed riotously, and
administered a visual dig to her own husband. What can be expected of
the husband of a jealous wife, besides a certain hint of duplicity? In
the case of Addis Wickersham, this tinge of deceit was so blended with
the suggestion thrown out by his sonorous voice, which rolled like an
organ and, like an organ, seemed always to be accompanying the praise
of God, that the impression left upon the listener was that of a man
who was all but grandly noble. He might have been a great biographer;
but he talked it out, he talked himself out, he talked not only his own
ideas but the world itself into a frazzle from which nothing could be
salvaged. His one passion was talk--his talk. He gave the impression of
listening to his words with rapture; and his joy in the achievements
of his larynx was so intense that in its glow his approbation of the
content of his remarks dropped out of sight. He intoned. For minutes
after he had lapsed into mute satisfaction the room would vibrate with
the sound waves he had released. He said: “I was deeply gratified to
see that Eva’s last book received from London the enthusiastic praise
that we in New York had already given it.” He considered himself the
discoverer of Eva Litchfield and dragged in New York from the kindness
of his heart. Winnie was at once torn between her intense admiration of
the show he made and her desire to shout at him “How dare you praise a
beautiful woman?”
But there was present at the bar another discoverer of Eva Litchfield.
Spencer Mapes rested his saturnine dark face on his extraordinarily
long and thin hand and laughed at Addis. Molly wanted to know for
what date the next discovery of genius in New York was scheduled: and
yawned, and laughed at both of them. Leaning on the rail of the bar,
she was so slender that her backward droop was almost a contortion.
A stranger slid along to stand beside her, holding on to the rail and
facing her with a childlike eager appraisal. “My dear lady,” remarked
this gentleman, “I never saw you before, and I haven’t the least idea
who you are, but I feel sure you’re famous. I came down here because
I was told that I’d see all the famous people. Damn it!” shouted the
stranger, no longer able to restrain his disappointment, “I insist that
you’re famous! And if you ain’t, then show me one of ’em? I came down
here to look at celebrated persons. Show me the celebrated persons,
will you, my good creature?” I judged that he had decided that none of
us came up to his dream.
In the twitch of Molly’s sharp elbow there was a mental jog to my ribs.
“Do--please--ask that question of the barkeep?” she modestly suggested
to the strange gentleman. She had a trick of waiting, hanging on a
man’s lips until he said something personal to her. Her long eyes
languished, now, at the stranger. Triumph lit her face, and I saw that
again she had misunderstood a man. She had a passion for translating
all masculine glances into the caresses of love.
Winnie whispered to me: “Notice a change in her?”
“What’s it from?” I asked.
“Ah that’s what we don’t know,” said Winnie. “She’s trying her best to
make us believe that she is involved in some affair. And of course her
telling it makes it sound as if it were not true, and we know her so
well that we are sure she’d tell it if it were true.”
“She looks wretchedly,” I said in the same low voice.
“You’ll find we all do,” said Winnie briefly.