“Wait till you see,” she told me ominously.
I asked her if Spencer Mapes were still Eva’s encroaching background.
“Oh, encroaching!” she groaned.
As he came up to us, I endeavoured to hold my greeting to a friendly
indifference. He looked as if he were concealing some deep anxiety, and
said at once: “I am thankful you’ve at last returned, Dinah. I always
feel that you can be counted on to stand by Eva.”
My recollections of Eva Litchfield, which before I had believed to be
clear as daylight, had, through this confusion of innuendo, become a
jumble of muggy half-tones. I thought: For God’s sake, Eva, why do you
allow people to so use up your vital energy, blotting the flow of your
inspiration as such interruptions must do some time if they haven’t
done it already? From a long continued warm friendship, my attachment
to her flared at this moment into idealization. I reproached myself
that invariably I had been conscious of listening to her perplexities
with avidity. I had said to her: “It comes down to this: one isn’t
a novelist unless one has a consuming and all-embracing curiosity
about people--all people--even those of whom one is fond--every human
worm and every superhuman bore?” She had replied with her charming
seriousness: “Of course.” And all the time I was conscious that she
herself had no pure and cold-blooded curiosity about people whose
problems did not touch her; when she listened to the recitals of those
outside her life, she did it with warmth. Her good heart showed in her
tolerance of the everlasting jabber of her friends--said I to myself,
glancing forbiddingly at those whom Molly had invited to her little
dinner in my honour. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I occasionally
see when I am making a fool of myself. “Snap out of it, you hypocrite!”
I began on myself. “You have every intention of hanging around Eva, of
questioning, listening, and otherwise poking your nose--which Molly
is right in dubbing a misfit--into things that are in no way your
business, until you get at the bottom of this marriage. Don’t cavil at
the right of others to do likewise.”
Doubtless my expression as I so took myself to task led Spencer Mapes
on to say: “You must really go at once to see her. She has one of those
little red brick houses in West Eleventh Street just off Fifth Avenue:
did you know?”
I was surprised that she could afford a house. Her quality was
too fine, too attenuated, to make of her a best seller. That the
effulgently gifted Eva should live in a cramped apartment, under
the almost sordid conditions with which the rest of us struggled,
had always impressed us as an ironical twist of fate. Not that we
consciously conceded these superior points to her; we did not, except
in so far as we conceded the same to ourselves; but, looking back on
the years that we had spent in New York--washed up on this beach from
remote spots on the map of the country, brought together by our common
interest in literature and held together by our fear of taking our eyes
off each other’s development--our wish to succeed in juxtaposition with
our desire for the other fellow to fail, or at the most to keep his
distance a few paces in the rear--we all, I think, brought up points
against Eva out of our conviction of her possession of every gift in
the power of a fairy godmother to bestow. At least, so it seemed to me,
this evening, standing looking intently and deceitfully into Spencer
Mapes’ equally dissembling fixed stare. We had had a way of saying, or
suggesting: “Oh, yes, she’s perfectly beautiful, and she writes like a
seraph, but for God’s sake why does she do those things?” And Eva said
of herself that she had not, at any rate, an immoral impulse; why then,
she asked tragically, did people go out of their way to talk about her?
Her offense lay in being too pretty to allow other women to forgive her
her talents.
In the light of Spencer Mapes’ surface glassiness, I saw that the
truth was that Eva needed a protection which so far life had not
granted her. Children and animals saw this. Although she was only
intermittently fond of children, and then almost theoretically, they
invariably assumed towards her the indulgent fondness of very old and
wise persons; they might have been watching through the play hour that
this innocent should not harm herself. Her Negro maid hovered over her,
quite simply assuming, so far as she could, the part of mother.
I scowled at Spencer Mapes. “Why don’t you keep away from her? She’s
incapable of seeing through you.”
He was light in his reply. “And what do you see--you with your
singleness of purpose?”
Afterwards, I regretted having replied; for I gave her away as I saw
her. Also, his smile, which he preserved in its initial spontaneity,
made me doubt my motive: was I pleading for Eva or solely striving to
inflict a scratch on this immovable, taunting man? I told him that he
played upon her weaknesses. I reminded him that, although she did the
ugliest things, she was driven by a strong sense of harmony. Ridden
by some nervous instinct that she had no great amount of time, she
wasted much time in bewailing the world’s misunderstanding of her life:
was it good for her that he should so deliberately add to this game
of cross purposes? Having blurted out these lucidities, and thinking
along lines thus engendered, I stood looking at him in that abstraction
which throws a dulling veil over the sight but with the feeling in my
flesh that a cat gives me. I wondered how he sprung. He would never
do a thing so physically definite as to spring, I told myself. I was
certain that he had not taken the constructive step of endeavouring to
marry Eva, because, possibly, he had not been able to make up his mind
that he could not do without her. His eyes gleamed at me with enjoyment
of my suspicions. Doubtless he still devoted all his spare time to
hanging around her. I should find him, as we had always found him, at
the parties where he knew he would meet her, sitting in sight of her
and directing his remarks at, or to, her. In this fashion he played
the cat with the worried mouse, letting her out with praise, dragging
her back with judiciously placed destructive criticism. He was always
faintly derogatory.
Faint derogation was in his tone when he asked if I had ever met the
man who was now Eva’s husband; his emphasis docketed the marriage with
passing experiments. “She insists she did it for love of him,” he said
with quiet amusement; his amusement was never hearty. James Pomeroy,
who could say coarse things with impunity, once remarked that belly
laughter had never escaped Mapes’ chiselled lips. “But, as you know
and will never admit, there’s a good deal of the snob in our Eva. She
thoroughly believes, poor girl, that what she wants of life is the
social security which every now and then she so deliberately chucks
overboard.”
I said that I had not come back to play blind man’s buff. “I intend to
see her tomorrow; and I’ll find out for myself these equivocal secrets
at which all of you hint. If there’s anything I detest--” I almost
gnashed my teeth at him--“it’s to be played!”
His soft laughter, his “My dear Dinah!” brought me to the point whither
he had wished to lead me: I asked him what he was trying to do about
Eva’s marriage.
He looked, conventionally, shocked. “My dear Dinah!” he once more
breathed. He was compassionate of my imbecility when he said that for
no consideration would he throw a stumbling block in Eva’s path to
the eventual stabilization of her life; but with every word he spoke
I became more suspicious. “Try to be fair, old girl,” I admonished
myself. “Try to come to conclusions as a man would, personal likes and
dislikes aside.” Glancing along the bar, I amended this to: “Be as fair
as men tell us they are.”
I said finally that it was his choice of words. “You know, and I know,
that very deliberately you’ve confused the state of affairs, so that
when I see Eva tomorrow--and I’ve every intention of seeing her as soon
as I decently can, and shall tell her everything you’ve said----”
He asked pleasantly: “What have I said?”
This pushed me into the fury of a baffled woman. There was nothing left
except to cry that I did not believe a word of it, a blunder which
he promptly capped by remarking that he had said nothing for me to
believe or disbelieve. “You won’t be helping Eva by fighting her other
friends,” he concluded.
“Friends?” I came back at him. “Friends, Iago?”
He looked, if anything, pleasanter than ever. “Our own dear Dinah!” he
murmured.
I listened, with determination, to the hubbub of the bar. The strange
gentleman’s voice rose at measured intervals, as if he chanted. Winnie
Conant screamed at Molly Underhill: “My good woman, you may be my
hostess, but keep your hands off Mr. W. I won’t stand for personal
liberties. Liberties with my spirit will go down all right; but just
you lay off Mr. W.” Addis Wickersham cleared his throat; and even this
prosaic act was in the grand manner.
Molly shouted: “Don’t be a wattled turkey gobbler. I’m your hostess, as
you so graphically put it; and we’re going upstairs this minute and
dine; and try to be a good Arab and eat my salt without spitting in my
eye.”
Noise went up the stairs with us, entering into the dining-room and
colliding with noise already established there. I had been out of it
for so long that it occurred to me to wonder why we should assert that
we gathered together because of our interest in each other’s talk,
as seldom did we listen to what was being said. It came to our ears
in a concatenation robbed of all meaning; only when a chance remark
struck against a particular interest did one of us hear with the
intelligence. Molly’s latest pet sat beside her, gulping down whatever
she chose to say; he, of us all, was fresh enough to mourn over a lost
word. “I work,” expounded Molly, “under the driving power of the most
fundamental of all instincts. I mean--that instinct which draws men
and women together. I mean,” she went into it more fully but still
languidly, “I can’t--I simply can’t--work except under the influence
of blasted love. When the affair is going on I give myself up to the
sweep of the wings of the angels. Then, during the inevitable resulting
blight, I work.” She drooped over the very young man. “It had occurred
to me, on the spur of the moment, that the souse at the bar downstairs
might treat me to a good blight.”
“Tell us more,” Winnie urged. “How did you lose him?”
Molly seemed already to have the blight upon her. “As usual with his
sex, he wanted to see Eva Litchfield. Said he had gloated over her
picture. That latest photograph doesn’t look like her in the least.”