She shook her head. “No. Isn’t it amazing? Why, it’s poetry, Dinah;
and he’s just an ordinary sort of man!” He dreaded returning to
the house, and every night put off until a later hour his dismal
acceptance of its shadowy taunt. A man’s home--it was so dreadfully
evident that Nicholas’ dominant instinct was that life must bring him
a home--should be the expression of his hopes; but in this small house
there was loneliness and a sense of frustration. It did not speak of
the establishing of a family: there was no sound in the house. He had
found himself listening to the Italian families as they straggled past
on their way to bed; the lifted voices of the parents, wrangling with
their children, began to be the deep voice of life. It brought what he
supposed was a bewildered smile to his face, to realize that he wanted
children. “Do you see how he got it into his head?” asked Eva of me.
“It was being without me. Poor old Nick!”
The second summer had not helped to clear things up. He had got into
the way of going to his mother’s: Eva suspected her of staying in town
so that she might give harbourage to her son. She had not said so; but
she had the faculty of saying things by refraining from saying them.
Eva told me: “I reminded him that in the big house in Washington Square
there is no sound; and he came back at me with the statement that in
every nook and cranny it conveys that it has always cherished the
sounds of the private life of a family. She is still gospel to him.
It appears that she walked around here with him one evening; and all
those things for the solution of which he had delved through agony of
spirit, all the things that--undoubtedly from his life with me--he had
begun dimly to see, were contained in his mother’s simple denial of
individual liberty. She said to him: ‘Leave it to God, my child. He is
still able to manage these questions. He--and nature--always have.’”
Eva was one of those women who, even through hard work, with loss of
sleep, are themselves so shining that before the man’s jaded eyes, in
a gloomy New York room, on a winter’s day, Aphrodite might have arisen
from the foam all iridescent loveliness. She had a way of smiling
wistfully. Whether outdoors the sun shone or not, she had the sun in
her hair. I was impelled to ask: “Tell me this: is he still in love
with you?”
“Oh, my God!” said Eva.
“It’s a funny thing, though,” she resumed, after a pause during which
she smiled secretly. “He’s jealous of my fame.” Fame is a word that,
self-applied, makes me wince. But she said it simply, surely, and
un-self-consciously. “It started at a reception his mother gave for
me when we were first married.” She looked at me curiously. “What is
the matter, Dinah? It’s disconcerting, to have you burble with your
amusement when I can’t see that this is so very amusing.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m making no mystery of it. But I am
getting slants--oh, very different ones, I assure you!--on practically
everything you’ve done since your marriage; I haven’t seen one person
yet who hasn’t at once given their version.”
“I apologize for my repetitions,” she said huffily.
“Oh, don’t! I’m crazy to hear what you noticed at the parties and the
like. You have no idea how fascinating it is, to get all the sides of
the prism.”
She had a divine disposition. I had never known her to sulk. By the
time Mattie had come in with tea for Eva and a cocktail for me, and
Eva had called me a toper and had reminded me that hard liquor ages a
woman, she was ready to go on sweetly with her tale. “And besides,”
she crowed over the others who might have told me the same thing,
“they can’t know what I mean to tell you. Wait and see! I was nervous
about that reception, for I didn’t know how the two crowds--Nick’s and
mine--would get on with each other. And--” with her half-smile--“I
daresay I wanted to make a smashing impression on Nick’s crowd. And
Nick made me frantic by continuing to tell me not to be nervous. I’ll
not deny that I was hateful. I loitered upstairs in the dressing-room
until he came for me; and he began running down the stairs, holding
on to my arm; and he said he was sorry I slipped, but that he had
forgotten I had not run, and slid, down those stairs since I was born.
He may not have intended it, but he was superior about it. Of course I
was furious; and I said I had forgotten to powder my nose and went back
to the dressing-room.”
“Childish, wasn’t it?” I wanted to know.
“Um-m-m. I’m not so sure. I did deeply resent his manner. Looking back
on it, I believe it was his own nervousness. He was more afraid of
his mother’s scolding the nearer he got to it; and he glowered, and
muttered at me to know if I didn’t realize that it was unpardonably
rude to be late at a reception given for one. He said those things
weren’t done, amongst his mother’s friends. What would you have said to
that? I said ‘I’m accustomed to doing as I see fit and letting people
wait for me.’ I was sure he’d take it, and that his mother wouldn’t.
And,” she cried tragically, “he laughed at me! Quite gaily laughed at
me! He got over his bad temper, and stood on the stairs laughing at me.
He said ‘Wait until you see them! Look here, my dear: they haven’t the
remotest--’ Of course I knew what he had intended saying. He had been
about to say that those frumps had never heard of me until I married
him. And after meeting them--and having them try to run my life for me,
with the coolest assumption of omniscience--I can believe it. Their
ignorance, my dear, of what goes on in the world----! Well: I lifted my
eyebrows. But he whispered to me ‘Be a good girl, won’t you? And look
perfectly beautiful, for my sake?’ And I knew that he was dreading what
they would say about me.”
Eva said that Mrs. Van Suydam was an adept at the oblique rebuke.
She had an eye like a naked blade that cut through any defense and
withdrew itself into the scabbard of an old lady’s control. She wore a
black velvet creation by Worth, made--so Eva afterwards found out--by
the same design when its predecessor had served its day; and to this
severely plain frock her maid had added snippets of old lace. Eva began
to enjoy it. The smell of dying flowers was through the house; and,
bathed in this sad aroma, Eva’s friends looked artificially bleached,
dissipatedly fagged, while Mrs. Van Suydam’s old cronies were the dried
rose leaves in the ginger jars. Charles Glidden had hung around the
elderly lady, watching her like a cat at a mouse-hole; Eva saw in his
eye that he meant to use her in a book. The orchestra, having eaten
supper, had begun that tentative picking at strings which, in Mrs.
Van Suydam’s girlhood, had indicated the resumption of the romance
of posturing before respectful young men who wished to invite to the
dance. Mrs. Van Suydam’s smile at Glidden was almost coquettish. The
richness of her memories had, while attenuating this smile, at the same
time warmed it. Fascinated, Eva drew nearer. But Spencer Mapes, with
his silent pressure of attention, went with her; he talked into her ear
upon impersonal subjects, and yet she knew that what he said was aimed
at her marriage.
“Take Hamlet, as an example of the behaviour of a man who comes at the
end of a played-out old family. Hamlet--” expounded Mapes.
“Bother Hamlet!” Eva had exclaimed impatiently.
“--Knew that he should have been man enough to kill--and what did he
do? He used foul language to the women in the case. If he had acted on
his impulse, and killed----”
She surveyed him with a passing contempt. “Would you kill? I doubt if
you’d even use bad language.”
He said: “The mind is my weapon.”