The sun shone, sparrows twittered love, and false spring tricked me
into a rebirth of my first delight in New York. If I sat long enough
on the bench in Washington Square I would catch the early crocuses
springing up. But it was December, and nothing pleasant could last.
There was dirty weather lying dead ahead.
Because the day was so fine, I had walked downtown. I was going to
call on Eva, who lived four blocks away; but it was early, and she
might still be at work. And to sit in the sun and gaze at the pleasant
pinkish bricks in the row of old Georgian houses on the northern side
of the Square was delightful. I was pleased when Mrs. Van Suydam’s
maroon brougham came in sight around the corner from Macdougal Street;
its colour toned in with the pinkish bricks and with the pale blue
sky. Every fine afternoon, at the correct hour for a lady’s airing,
Higginson donned his puce livery, mounted the box-seat of the brougham,
and drove the bays which had once been spanking from the stable which
still fulfilled its original mission on Macdougal Alley. His little
eyes looked neither to the right nor to the left; for he ignored the
life of the Alley which had once been a mews and was now an artists’
colony. With the laudable end in view of showing the inhabitants
that he flouted them, he contrived to get around the sharp turn into
Macdougal Street, and around the further curve into Washington Square,
with much stamping of hoofs. For Higginson was conservative. He was
the worst of snobs: he was a horseman. And he could remember when the
smells along Macdougal Alley had been those of horses and harness and
not, as now, the stench of gasoline and the emanations of artistic
life. He drew up, with a flourish, before the high front steps of the
Van Suydam mansion, froze into immobility, and prepared to endure with
scorn the jibes of roller-skating and ball-playing roisterers in the
Square. I was sure that he shared the opinion of his mistress on the
decline of manners and customs.
I watched Mrs. Van Suydam come down the steps and give directions over
her shoulder to the maid who saw to it that no errant gust of wind
should lift from their decent protection of elderly limbs the last
petticoats in the city. Although a small woman, she gave the impression
of solidity, of standing in the last ditch without acknowledging it to
be the last, of fighting for a lost cause and believing it to be the
only cause. Her ability lay in an inability to see that her people,
inheriting New Amsterdam, had not kept up with New York. She had
confidence in herself because if she had ever been crossed she knew how
to wait until matters adjusted themselves. All of this showed on her
face, which was never serene but which was always composed. She had
bent her will to a temporary acceptance of the repugnant. For a moment,
she stood looming out at the Square with unseeing eyes.
The carriage door slammed. The message of the slam of the door of a
horse-drawn carriage differs from that of a motorcar. She was off for
the drive which she had made an institution.
I sat, then, on my sunny bench, ruminating over Winnie Conant’s
contribution to the various tales of Eva and her husband. I could not
bring myself to look upon that scene as significant of future trouble.
Nicholas Van Suydam, with his long legs and his pipe, apostrophizing
himself and remaining unruffled in the midst of the turmoil of the
Wickersham library, verged on the charming. “My man, if ever there was
a time--” I shut my eyes and strove to recall his appearance: he had, I
remembered, the pleasantest of faces.
I had called Eva, in the morning, and had heard over the telephone her
high, sweet voice. Promptly she had rushed into “You should be the
last one to reproach me with neglect. You should know how it is when
one is torn asunder over a book. You should know that it’s actually
birth-pains, in the suffering it causes one. The period of gestation
is the same, too--a matter of the best part of a year.” And she began
laughing at her conception of the situation. “Do you know, Dinah,
you’ve brought me luck, already! Already I’ve said something very, very
good.” She did not stop to make a note of it; she never forgot a word
she said. She added, on a hasty after-thought: “Do you have to see me
today? I mean, is it of particular importance?”
I was firm about it being important. “After all,” I told her, “I’ve
heard the other side of it.”
“I don’t mind telling you,” she rejoined, “that I’m in the funniest
quandary.”
“Funny? It didn’t impress me as being in the least amusing.”
“Don’t be literal,” she said; and made the appointment.
In Eleventh Street, a few doors west of Fifth Avenue, there still
stands a row of red brick houses which is a miniature Washington Square
with smiles thrown in. For these intimate little houses smile from
their small-paned windows, and run down their tidy front steps and
through their little areas and hail their friends. The city might be
across one of the rivers; but it is around the corner, and leans over
with a leer to remind the small houses that it is only a question of
time when they will go into the hands of the wreckers. If the passerby
listens, he will hear the rat-tat-tat of riveters. If he lifts his eyes
from the always gay window-boxes, he can see, rising against the sky,
the hideous steel ribs of unborn towers. Artists passing along the
sidewalk thank providence for the small houses; architects possibly
reflect that they do things on a bigger scale, these days.
I walked past a modern apartment house, and past one or two remodelled
houses, to the little houses in their pristine style. I wondered if
Nicholas Van Suydam knew that it was in him to build the greatest of
the towers now thrusting their insolent heads skyward; and I reflected
that the towers might be in his imagination, but the old red brick of
New York had always been in his blood. Not for a moment did I doubt
which of the two had selected this house. Home means the opposite of
a man’s work, while a woman carries her home with her, even, when
necessary, into the office. I went up the high and narrow stoop, liking
the house more and more as I noticed that even the basement windows
were charmingly curtained and as I pulled the shiny brass knob of the
old-fashioned bell. I smiled at the house, and the house, I felt,
smiled back at me, personally good-natured about it. Home means a house
that smiles inside and out. Through the curtains of the drawing-room
windows I saw a chintz easy-chair, a smoking stand beside it and
flowers beyond it. To the elderly eyes of Mrs. Van Suydam, accustomed
as they were to what was undoubtedly the austerity of the Washington
Square mansion, this aspect of a cheery sudden blooming must have
seemed ominous of early departure.
A warm welcome awaited me behind the white painted door. Eva’s personal
maid, Mattie, smiled broadly. But she had time to whisper: “Miss Dinah,
please ma’am lemme speak to you jes’ a minute ’fore you goes?”
I started up the flight of stairs to the second storey. “The door
towards the back, Miss Dinah,” Mattie called after me, intelligently
staying at the foot of the stairway’s drag on the heart.
Eva had a way of enveloping a guest in a greeting the warmth of which
became at once a recitation of her own affairs. “Oh, darling--oh, I’m
so glad to see you! If you only knew how I need to talk with you!”
“H-m-m,” I remarked, if this exhalation of the breath can be called
a remark. “Over the telephone, you didn’t impress me as feeling so
strongly about seeing me.”
She paid no attention to this. “Oh--” she cried on a rising note--“if
you only knew! Everything is going to pot!” Holding me by the hand,
she dragged me into her study, dashing past the chairs, pushing me on
the day-bed and throwing herself down beside me to fix her eyes on my
face. “Everything is wrong,” she wailed. She had a long and slender and
round throat, and the hollows at the base were delicately modelled. But
her face had begun to suggest wasted years; it was the face of one to
whom already life had brought disillusion. I thought her more nervously
upset than I had ever before seen her.
The room was familiar although in a house that was new to me. It might
have been the study in any of Eva’s residences. Over the whole place,
seeming to be part of the house itself although it was really Eva’s
dressing up of her personality, there hung the scent of tea roses. I
told her how delightful I had found the window-boxes, and she gave me
an odd look and said that it had been about the window-boxes that she
and Nicholas had had one of their first disagreements. “I had forgotten
all about the house because I was on a book. And it came out that the
geraniums had collapsed in that awful pulpy mess which is one of the
horrors of autumn. And he said to me that it was strange I’d talk so
much about beauty and not hate the way the geraniums looked. I daresay
the sensible course under attack would be to imitate the wild things
in the woods: sit motionless until the attacker’s attention has been
diverted. But I reply; I always reply. He can be rather hateful, like
all equable men.”
“Aren’t you happy with him?” I asked at once.
She blared her eyes. “Happy--with Nick? Of course I am. That is--I
could be, if people let us alone.”
“You mean you see too many people? No time to be quietly happy and
contented?”
“Sentimental as ever!” she teased. “I mean, in plain words, that
everyone--Nick’s friends who aren’t mine, and my friends who aren’t
his--take a hand in the least thing we do. Of course both sides have
been at you about us?” From my smile she knew that this guess was
correct, and went on with what she would have called her own side. “Let
me tell you that they aren’t the amiable meddlers who beset all newly
wed couples. These meddlers are almost malignant--at least, his side of
the mob are malignant. But both sides give an impression of concerted
action. They give the impression--his side, I mean, of course--of
bitterly resenting any appearance on our part of getting on together.
They are the prophets howling in the wilderness that they ‘told us so.’
And, if it doesn’t come out the way they prophesied, they will make it.”
I asked what she meant by this. It appeared that she meant only her
momentary irritation at all people; and this seemed to me to be the
passing phase of the last long stretch with the book. I felt relieved,
and amused, and vastily aggravated. Today, she was pettish over
something that ordinarily she would enjoy. I advanced the contingency
that her husband might have had to face the problem of readjusting his
life and work to her presence, and at once her face became grave.
“That is one of the difficulties. He’s lost, I fear, the abstraction of
his ideas.”
My mood changed, and I laughed heartily. “How can anyone hold an
abstract idea while you are around?”
She was indignant. “I should inspire them.”
“My dear,” I told her, “you have a way of shattering people. You have a
trick of making everyone feel inferior to you.”
Because she knew this to be true, she paid no attention. She said that
he would come into the house quietly, tiptoeing upstairs to his dusty
workroom; he must get to his drawing-table and sketch the vision that
shone, bright as day, in his head. Even the shining sight of Eva might
injure the delicate fabric of the as yet disembodied image. He would
feel sure, she said, that when the dark pressed on his windowpanes he
would see it as he had seen it in the first flush of his enthusiasm. “I
fixed up a workroom for him,” she explained. “And I let him keep it as
grimy with charcoal dust as he wishes. He’s comfortably slouchy, and
agreeably smutty, and this should please him, I’m sure. I don’t think
men care how they look when they work: as I do, and as I’m sure you
do.” She gave this a moment’s thought, and continued: “But he breaks in
on me when I’m working.”
“Do you break in on him when he’s working?”
She began to laugh at what she described as herself smudged with
charcoal from the injudicious embraces of her husband. “We’ve had some
queer love-making in that horribly ugly room.” She recalled one day in
particular when from his ravings, as she described it, she had pieced
together the tale of his experience; and, telling it to me, she fitted
these fragments into a story. How much of this was Nicholas, and how
much Eva, she herself could not have made out when she had finished;
but I suspected that in the end she would believe that it was all hers.
He had run down the steps of the Elevated station and emerged, with
the permanence of the solid flat ground again under his feet, on the
twisted line of Sixth Avenue. Although he had got off the train high
in the air at Eighth Street, he now found himself at Tenth, in front
of the Jefferson Market Police Court; for this is one of the spots
whereon Greenwich Village thumbs a derisive nose at the regularity of
geometric New York. He gave it no heed; he was used to it. He hurried
because he wished to reach home in as short a time as possible, and not
because Sixth Avenue smelled of butchers and grocers, of cobblers, and
of frying chops in all-night restaurants. His head was ecstatically
full of the thing that had occurred to him on the ride downtown from
his office. Staring in at, without seeing, the flying intimacies of
second storey life in squalid tenements along the way, he had seen in
his imagination the stateliest of pleasure domes. How to set-back a
tower and keep it from looking like an after-thought: this had been
holding up the design on which he had worked all week. It must go in a
mass, solidly from the ground--the fundamental earth. Suitably, there
should be no springing up, lacy like the Giralda Tower, in this city
which grew around him, piling above him, unlike anything the world
had seen before. There must be no more erections resembling factory
chimneys, stuck for utility on top of square structures no better
than a child might build with blocks. The city! What it would be, to
build a city--one man to dream, and build, an entire city! He hummed
to himself, as he did when ideas were fluid light, and not slow lava
which only moved for a short time before hardening. There were dreadful
days when his ideas were murky, black days when he doubted his ability.
To draw--to envision the city of the future--he had needed peace
and a reasonable seclusion, and at the same time he had needed the
gratification of his heart and of his senses; and all of this Eva had
given him, he assured himself as he hurried to the little house. Two
hours before dinner, and after dinner the night ahead; and by tomorrow
he would have his building, perfect, and suitable, modern and yet old
as the world in purity of intention, reduced to black lines on white
paper. He sang, whistled, and hummed through his teeth.
“He was off key,” she explained her subsequent behaviour. “He has no
ear.” She had called out to him: “Have you got to make that noise?”
She was working; in the pauses of his yelping, he must have heard the
clacking of her typewriter running along on a more insistent key.
From any inner joy, she reminded me, she was always quiet as a mouse,
life itself seeming to hang suspended for the work which went well.
But he howled cheap tunes while his charcoal slid over the paper
greasily slinking and sly. “I simply cannot understand how he can do
it!” moaned Eva to me. “It makes me doubt that he will ever be a great
architect.” She had had much ado, she said, to keep from moaning aloud.
And without warning he had come playfully into her study. “Playfully,
mind you! And after having brought me to the verge of collapse!” she
had not glanced up. “Do stay out of here,” she muttered. He mildly
enquired what was the matter. She acknowledged that she then spoke in
a voice sharpened by her fury. “If you don’t stay out of here when
I’m working----!” Bent over her typewriter, she was always cold and
concentrated, and her mouth was rigidly a part of a marble face.
“He came across the room and tipped my chin up,” she told me
indignantly. “When I was working! I said I wished he would keep out of
my sight. I said it over and over because he merely looked at me.”
“Why did he ‘merely look at you’? Was it displeasure? Because, really,
Eva----”
“No! No!” She was impatient at my interruption. “He has a way of
‘merely looking’.” He must have realized that in truth she was not
at the moment thinking of him as a being: he was an accident, of the
weather, of the fading daylight, of the world which persisted in
stinging her. But the unfortunate creature was a man, and he forced
her face back and bent to kiss her. “That--for--your--work!” it seems
he said; she was not clear about it, but she insisted that he said
something banal. She preserved the rigidity of her frozen face when she
leapt to her feet. And this cold face, this pair of eyes that conveyed
no hint of her ever having loved him, brought him to a cool judgment of
her attitude. He said: “So! That’s the way it is!”
She said that she was aware of her face shattering into agony. She
began speaking very rapidly. “You don’t deal in words. You can always
return--at once--to your work. You can pick up that piece of chalk
and go back to your lines. But the word--the right word--it’s always
dodging us; it’s always out of our reach; it’s the elusive essence
of art. My God!” she told me that she broke off with; “everything
intrudes!”
She told me that he was a Dutchman, through and through. “He can’t
possibly fly off his head. He glares. He asked me what I wanted,
anyway? Did I want him to sit in the hall, like a lackey--he would
say that; his mother would have said it--not to speak, not to move,
not to--exist, by Jove!--unless I pressed a button? He wound up by
remarking that I was asking a good deal of him.”
She glanced helplessly around her pretty room. What, after all, was a
woman’s work? This, she gathered, was his estimate. It is something
with which she is permitted--by her husband, and also, he admitted, by
the dispensation of providence--to wile away her idle hours; and it
could never be seriously considered in the arrangement of a household.
She was sure that his feeling was that this was his household, she his
wife: it was the feeling of property, of which, she acknowledged, she
had accused him at the end of all their quarrels. She seems to have
brooded over this after he left the room in dudgeon. At any rate, she
wound up by following him to his own room, standing in the door and
making a speech to him. “What do you want, if we come down to it? Why
on earth didn’t you marry Gertrude Cuyler? She wouldn’t have objected
to your kisses when her mind was at work, because she hasn’t a mind.”
She came back to it: she said that the quality in him which invariably
egged her on to saying more than she had intended saying was his trick
of silently looking at her. “He looks! He, merely, looks!” She said
that she was thinking to herself: “He should take me by my back hair
and sling me around.” She said that, standing in his door, she came
to the realization that she wanted him to dominate her, and she knew
that she would want to kill him if he did. She wanted him to be more
brilliant than she, and she knew that it would be frightful for her if
he were.
She broke her narrative to tell me that his hair was ruffled like
a terrier’s. “You know how I adore terriers?” she interpolated. It
occurred to her to think of describing him as he looked now to her
softened eyes. But she knew that the words at the back of her head
would not today come at her bidding: he had done this to her. She said
to herself: “I give up!”
To give up to Nicholas meant that he took it for granted she had given
up in everything.
What was the use of experience, if one could not find the words for
using the fruits of it in one’s books? Those prismatic words that had
glittered in her brain were gone. She had, at the time, made a frenzied
plea to her mind to remember. She seems to have spent the better part
of an hour at her writing-table, although she told me that it had been
a spiritual lifetime; Nicholas had faded--dimmed--gone into the past;
and she was a novelist who used words to portray emotions. She was
in despair. She told herself that creation is of two kinds, that of
the mind and that of the body; if she wished to use the creativeness
that came from her mind she must be careful how she prostituted it.
Resentment flared up against him. She should be on her guard against
him, if she wished to save the integrity of her work.
I interrupted to say that she was trying to sublimate herself; and as
I spoke I wondered if she had come into the world sublimated. She paid
no attention to my comment, but went on to tell me that she had finally
gone back to his room and explained all of this to him. That is, she
amended with her little gurgling laugh that was so much lower in pitch
than her voice, she had tried to make him see, but--naturally--he had
been unable to look at it in her way. “I do believe the silly man is
jealous of Spencer Mapes!”
“Why do you think that? How--” I enquired witheringly--“how could
anyone be jealous of Spence?”
“I know he is,” she told me, “because he is forever saying he isn’t.
But that isn’t of the slightest importance; why did you take me up on
it? I was going to tell you about the prophets crying in the wilderness
‘Repent ye!’ Nick’s crowd make the summer and the winter noisy with
their clamour.”
“You don’t think, then, that our crowd cry in the wilderness?” I was
unable to resist this dig at Eva, who, with her horror of realism, had
the most amazingly fatuous outlook on her immediate surroundings. She
vigorously denied the possibility. “Ah you are hopeless!” I sighed.
“But you were born a pessimist,” she pointed out.
I dropped it. “You were going to tell me of some interference on
the part of--which of your husband’s friends was it?” I asked with
resignation.
She laughed. Hers was never the coarsened laughter of those of us
who had a wider view of the meanness of life. Her merriment tinkled,
without a touch of childishness. It was the detached amusement of the
fairies. “Not interference, darling: comments. Comments on whatever
Nick and I decide to do. In this case, my last summer’s trip to Europe.
They share Nick’s obsession of the decency of a husband and wife
being continually seen in each other’s company. I went in to see my
mother-in-law, whom I adore; and I overheard this attack on me.”
“You mean, you listened?”
“I mean just that. Did you never listen when you shouldn’t?”
To everything that had been told me about Eva I had listened; and this,
while not eavesdropping, was prying. I contented myself with “What did
you hear?”
“They were drinking tea. It’s a rite in the good old manner,
at my mother-in-law’s. The Ingoldsby sisters and Mr. Tappan
Tillinghast--isn’t that a delicious name, Dinah, if one uses the
sonorous whole of it?--sat politely, watching my mother-in-law handle
the fat silver teapot. She has the grand manner when she pours tea;
and she’s intelligent enough to know it and to therefore cling to the
custom--although I believe she would scorn to play to the gallery of
even her intimate friends. It was delightful, and I stood around the
door jamb and admired it.” This was the only excuse she offered for her
nefarious act.
She made me see it, as she had seen it from around the door jamb. Mr.
Tappan Tillinghast had sat looking at the elder Miss Ingoldsby. He gave
the illusion of sitting, as now, his small head thrust towards her
and his mild eyes respectfully adoring her, for a greater length of
time than the lady would care to admit; and Miss Augusta had for years
pretended, as she pretended today, to be in ignorance of his regard
for her. His long hands, loosely clasped, drooped between his elegant
knees. Eva said she was convinced that the criticism he now made on
Miss Augusta was his first: “I think, Augusta, that you’re hard on her.”
The elder Miss Ingoldsby drew her handsome form up to its full
display of well preserved opulence, while her clear skin flushed with
annoyance. “And why, pray, do you think such a thing?”
Eva said it was evident that he would deprecate any point of difference
between them. “Ladies understand each other,” he seems to have murmured
like a poltroon. Thus released from supervision of her admirer, the
elder Miss Ingoldsby turned upon Mrs. Van Suydam the fine flame of her
substantial backing. But Mrs. Van Suydam’s eyes clung persistently to
what her hands were about. She stated firmly that she had expressed no
opinion. “That,” Miss Augusta had then criticized, “is where you make
your mistake, Lavinia. You hold off from directing these two young
people. If you would listen to me----” And the younger Miss Ingoldsby
had then incontinently burst into giggles. She clapped her plump hand
over her mouth and rolled her eyes at her sister’s confident face.
“How can Lavinia have a word to say about it, when it’s a question of
Nicholas’ wife running away to get out of having a baby?”
“So that has come up!” I interjected. “I’ve been wondering when it
would.”
“Oh, it bobs up like the spring flowers,” said Eva lightly. “But it
wasn’t a remark that went down at the Van Suydam establishment. Miss
Augusta bristled. She spoke from her chest when she said ‘As a topic
of conversation between unmarried ladies and a gentleman, I should
scarcely select that of--of----Ahem!’ With intolerant delicacy she
dropped out of the chat the future of the Van Suydam family tree.
‘Enough!’ she decreed, when Miss Lois again pried into my affairs.”
Bored by desultory chatter, Eva talked as she wrote, painstakingly
although with unusual rapidity. I saw the room into which she peeped,
the hostess pouring tea with her nice attention to details. The open
windows admitted the first soft air of spring; outside was Washington
Square in its new raiment of pale green leaves. The setting sun cast
lances of yellow light through the branches of the gnarled old trees.
The winding paths were thronged with excitedly jabbering Italians, who
made way for their children on roller-skates and closed in again like
the sea. Even with this breath of outdoors, and with the room gay with
cut hyacinths, Mrs. Van Suydam’s house smelled of lavender, of lemon
verbena, and of dried rose leaves. “I always say that your house is the
only place left in New York where I feel at home, Lavinia,” had almost
sighed Mr. Tillinghast. His faded eyes became quite vacant, as if he
looked inward at his memory of another house, now, alas, fallen. “Did
you ever think that houses may have souls--souls as individual as our
own immortal souls?” He was of a generation not ashamed to speak openly
of the immortal soul which they took for granted resided temporarily
within their mortal bodies. “Don’t you think the call of a house like
this is a loud call? I sometimes wonder if Nicholas hears it--yet?”
“Wasn’t that too adorable, Dinah?” Eva interrupted her story to ask.
“He so fitted in with the smell of lavender. And Miss Augusta briskly
called him to task for being impractical. There’s a man who adores a
woman in the right way! He said to her that when he spoke of creeping
age he alluded only to himself! I almost ran in to hug him; but I
thought I’d best wait and see what else they had to say about me. I
could see that I only stood knee-high with the Misses Ingoldsby, who
went into a squabble at this moment. They wanted to know why Nick was
staying behind, permitting me to go unattended to Europe. They took
the position that poor dear Nicholas couldn’t afford to go; and they
left it to be inferred that I was bankrupting him. Miss Augusta threw
a censuring look at Mr. Tillinghast and announced that I am far too
pretty to go traipsing over Europe alone. ‘I never--’ she said--‘did
trust Frenchmen.’ She sank into deep thought and open doubts. She
stirred her tea, efficiently crushing the slice of lemon with her spoon
and avoiding the splash that a more frivolous woman would have brought
about. ‘Ahem!’ she finally produced triumphantly. ‘I could have told
you the line to take, Lavinia. I’m very fond of young people, and
have given time and thought to their ways; and I know that they need
the guiding hand of more experienced persons through the pitfalls of
their life together. One must gain the confidence of young people.
Do you think that if I were to talk to Eva it would do any good?’ ‘I
think,’ said my mother-in-law distinctly, ‘that it is none of your
business.’ ‘Well!’ snorted Miss Augusta, sitting back in her chair. For
my part--lurking in the hall and beginning to think what I should say
if Miss Augusta did give me a rowing up salt river--I wanted to clap
my hands when Miss Lois remarked to Mr. Tillinghast ‘Gussie talks too
much.’ I walked in on them. I was very nice about it. But they were
scandalized at my having listened.”
I was having a splendid time. “How about this matter of a child?” I
asked, to keep her going.
She became merry over it. “It all came out of my leaving Nick alone in
the summers. Poor old Nick! He’s sentimental. After the first summer,
he told me that my study had gleamed with coppery flashes of a threat.
The summer is dreadful, in New York, isn’t it?”