[Illustration]
I
“Darling, are you quite sure you’re comfortable?” asked Eva over the
telephone.
“You mean, because I don’t like a long-winded talk over the telephone?”
I demanded.
“Something of the sort,” she admitted. “Well, then, now that I know
you, too, are in a comfortable chair--I do think our expeditions from
one party to another on New Year’s Eve were so productive of what you
might call evil consequences that I must talk with you. And you are in
one of your crotchety moods and won’t come down here. If you would be
sensible and draw up a comfortable chair--or have you?”
I acknowledged that I was in a splendid chair. “What did you mean about
evil consequences resulting from the New Year’s Eve parties?”
She was prompt. “You wanted to look at all sides of the prism; so you
should wish to talk Nick over, now you’ve been out with the two of us
in conjunction. By the way, Nick has changed his opinion of you.”
I said that this could only be pleasant news, since according to her
account, recently given me, he had disliked me intensely. He had said
to her that I had the remains of the great predatory nose of the Middle
Ages; it was small but beaked, short and yet gave the impression of
being too long. Eva reported that for once he had been clever in the
way he put it: he had said that I was too small for my nose and my nose
was too small for its type. “He really was delicious!” she had exulted.
“Of course you don’t care what he says about you; and it is so seldom
that I get the chance to quote him to any effect. I mean, he’s a man
of few words. Sure you don’t feel badly over it?” I reassured her, and
heard the rest of it. He had said that all things about me were just
off something: my eyes were just off hazel and my hair was just off
red; and that to wear my hair in a long and heavy bang was just off the
right style for me, being at times too young for me and at times too
old for me. “And, Dinah--” had then said Eva on her own account--“and
this is my reason for telling you at all, darling--he said that all of
this would be, merely, amusing, if your fingernails weren’t so often
broken by the keys of your typewriter. I’ve implored you to give more
time to beauty shops!” lamented Eva, sincerely grieved.
I asked lazily: “At what part of the evening did he change his
mind, Eva? Because I remember that on the way to one or the other
of the orgies I overheard him say to you that my head was too big.”
I remembered, too, that Eva had flown to my defence with “She isn’t
conceited.” “I meant her skull,” he had said; and had had the grace to
flush when he saw that I had caught him out. “It was a joke,” he had
said lamely.
Eva’s voice came over the telephone, clear and sweet and excited in
retrospect. “Don’t you remember--” We went into every incident of New
Year’s Eve during which our moods had varied with the tricky weather.
The snow that with a gentle but deadly persistence swirled against my
windows served to detach my attention from the mechanical carrier of
Eva’s voice: we might have been once more in the taxi--Eva and Nicholas
and I--on our way uptown to the afternoon party which opened the
prolonged festivities of the day.
The park was white and phantasmal, the trees weighted with ice,
immovable, no longer part of New York; it was silent. But from the
sidewalk there rang out on the frosty air the cries of children who
snowballed each other. The taxi went muffled in a world of little
treble voices; and through the early winter dusk the street lamps now
pricked the way.
Nicholas’ spirit was cleansed by the sight of his city. He said: “When
we come back, the lights in the windows will give us the silhouette.”
He sat peacefully, a smile on his lips and glory in his eyes. I
wondered that Eva did not see that this was pure delight. I wondered if
he had it in him to love Eva as he so evidently loved his birth-place.
“It’s magnificent,” he said, as if to himself. “There’s nothing like
it.” For these white buildings were children of the womb of Manhattan.
He peered through the twilight to miss nothing of the serrated mass,
and I understood that his mind did not see that it was twilight, unless
it was a twilight of the gods. His mind was crowded with the city of
the future, austere, immense, but springing from the growth of the town
and of man’s necessities, as all great architecture does.
Leaning back with her half-smile, Eva said with forbearance: “How can
I be sure that you admire me, when you cling to your city? I am not of
your city.”
He turned to her. “Admire you? Why--never before in my life was there
the absolute! You’ve the great gift of beauty, Eva.”
She sighed gently. “No other gifts, Nick? I think I should like you to
add the greater gift of intelligence.”
Laughing, he tightened his arm around her shoulders. “That isn’t worth
a tinker’s damn beside your lovely face.”
She said: “You’ll spoil my coat.”
He glanced at me. “Isn’t Eva’s idea of sentiment an oddity?” Of her he
enquired meekly: “Where are we bound for? I cling to my old-fashioned
notion that I feel more comfortable if I know the name of my host or
hostess. The other night--don’t you remember?--Molly Underhill screamed
at a young man with a powdered face who was running as fast as he could
to the centre of the gathering ‘Whose party is this?’ And the young man
lisped ‘I’m thure I don’t know. I was bwought here by thomeone.’”
“Don’t be foolish,” said Eva.
He openly admired her. “Do you know, Eva, you can speak like a
gangster--out of the corner of a rigid mouth! You have so many
accomplishments.”
But Eva disliked being teased. She walked into the thickest of the
party well ahead of us; and Nicholas was indiscreet enough to follow. I
was to find, in the course of the night’s festivities, that he watched
her with the same teasing smile on his lips that already had put her in
a defiant mood.
The visiting Englishman was holding forth to a circle of cheerful
spirits. “Do you know how to live, you Americans?” surprisingly asked
the Englishman of these proprietors of the latest luxuries in the
world. “Or do you live? Did you see the flea circus?”
Charles Glidden, owning to having seen the flea circus several times,
requested to know if this chain of thought were kind. “Freye Remsen
bought one--in a glass box--named Emma. Emma dropped her party manners
in the home; the next morning she bit him.”
Freye Remsen’s eyes filmed with embarrassment. “What was wrong with
that?” he asked.
Glidden enquired: “What do you object to?”
Freye Remsen floundered: “The way you said it----”
“Did Emma bite you?” Winnie Conant shrieked. “Simply answer that.”
“Well, yes,” acknowledged Remsen. “But what does that signify?”
The editor of “Walhalla” interrupted eagerly: “I’d like you to write an
article on that for my magazine. Not over three thousand words. And--”
he hastened to qualify his enthusiasm--“we don’t pay much.” He embraced
the group in a flourish of an extraordinarily large cigar. “I think it
will be splendid. Perfectly splendid. So typical of certain aspects of
American life. Treated fantastically, of course,” His eyes danced. He
had a way of speaking in a series of exhalations.
The party foamed. One ran across one’s friends and said inane things
because in the presence of allies one rested, and encountered one’s
enemies and said sparkling things because if one were not pyrotechnic
it would look as if the last book had not done well. Outside the
windows, shut behind their own drawn curtains for their own parade,
everyone in New York pushed themselves through forced revelry.
Eva said in my ear: “Will you keep your eye on Nick?”
“What is he apt to do?” He looked peaceable enough.
Her funny frown, which furrowed her wide brow and would never wrinkle,
was bent upon me.
“Trying to get rid of him?” I asked.
“You are so unaccommodating,” she then sighed. “Of course I’m not
trying to get rid of him. But--you wait and see!” With this hint,
she walked off. I came upon her later on at the moment when Nicholas
himself spied her and turned on her so brilliant a smile of joy at
sight of her that she herself laughed. “Nick--you old dear!” Eva’s
love-making, half the time carried on amongst her friends, could as
well have been conducted on the sidewalks, so impersonal was it. Sweet
as honey, her eyes soft, she stood looking at him as a fond sister
might.
He said to me: “In another minute she will disappoint me. She has a way
of throwing cold water in a fellow’s face.”
She said impatiently: “You see, Dinah? All I want is to speak to
Spencer Mapes; he’s arranging for Henry Pepperel to interview me.”
People coming in struggled with those who were leaving. Snatches of
talk were cast upon the air and bounced back from the assault of other
glass bullets. As if evoked, Spencer Mapes bobbed up, and, being an
opportunist, utilized the accident of finding himself within hearing
distance of Nicholas. He said to Justo Zermonte: “I think your idea for
a caricature of Eva Litchfield is good. But do explain it again?”
Zermonte demurred. “It sounds so foolish; but I see her that way. I
should do her with her neck elongated, and her mouth without human
emotion, and her eye--just one eye showing--and looking, looking, so
watchful for those who make a move towards her. I should take all
humanity out of her. It would be the only way to do her--you see?”
I turned in order to inspect Eva as a stranger might. She would sail
away, over the surface of a lovely reflecting pool, if one made a
sudden ardent movement. Across the lovely reflecting pool of her
absorption, she went away from Nicholas to lean on the piano and
meditate. Her eyes were cast down, and her pensive pose, her lashes
resting so quietly on her cheeks, might have hidden any line of
reaction. With his incredible sinuosity, Spencer Mapes reached her
side. I heard him say, as if she were protesting something that had
offended her: “Hold on to yourself!” But I knew, as he knew, that she
was pleased because she did not wish to be anything but the swan that
sails away. I smiled at him, and for an instant his heavy-lidded eyes
flashed amusement. Then once again he was bending solicitously and
murmuring to her. “You see what is happening already? Your husband’s
people are sapping your belief in yourself. But--forgive me? I had no
right to say that. They are your people, now--so far as they will let
you go with them. However, I can’t help remembering that I had much to
do with making you--starting you on your career----”
She said nothing. She retained her charming pose.
“To see you treated as an experiment in sociology----” He seemed to
hesitate.
I glanced swiftly at Nicholas Van Suydam. His high-bridged nose might
be indicative of arrogance; it might be the outward sign of that inner
spiritual necessity which urged his mother to live on in Washington
Square, to drive behind a pair of horses, and to mope over Chinatown
now lying along streets named for the branches of her family.
I thought that he had made up his mind to say nothing about an incident
which must have affronted him. Or possibly he had not overheard. But
his eyes were more brightly blue than ever, and this I took for a
danger sign. On the mantle of the snow, which as we started downtown
no longer fell but lay in unbroken white, he must have seen Eva’s head
as Zermonte would caricature her. The picture so close to his mind’s
eye that he was unable to see around it to Eva herself, he said with a
forced gaiety: “We used to have storms like this when I was a boy. In
those days, they used to last a long while; but this one may be slush
by morning.” He expected no reply.
We had been accompanied downtown by Charles Glidden, who sat facing us
and glancing indifferently from one to another. We were cross, and
said little. I do remember Glidden wandering through a maze of words
unlike his usual precision. “I was thinking of life. It’s quite a
building, in itself--life. Take Eva: I’ve always been curious to see
what Eva would do with life. She makes such interesting experiments.”
And I remember that Eva cried out: “Stop it!” It was bitterly cold,
and the still air bit and scratched at our lungs as if filled with the
sharp white stars glittering above us in the hard blue sky. So still
was the world on this eve of a fresh new year that we heard the snow
snapping under the feet of the pedestrians. The taxi encouragingly
labelled “Heated” barely melted the powdered snow clinging to our feet.
Eva leaned forward and dragged at the front window. “Can’t you turn on
more heat in here?”
The taxi driver’s head protruded from his great coat collar, and craned
to blink at us. Clouds of frozen breath shot from his nostrils, and
from his mouth as he opened it to reply. “Sorry, lady. It acts up like
this when it’s cold weather.”
She at once began bewailing her fate. “Shut the window, can’t you,
Nick? You might have noticed that it was open.”
The taxi bumped over unyielding heaps of snow pushed together by the
street cleaners; we heard the rasp of their wooden shovels. “I must
say, Nick,” she resumed, “that in so far as climate goes your town is
awe-inspiring. If it were April, this heater would boil us alive. I
don’t see why anyone wants to live in this town.” She glanced around at
him. “Why don’t you defend it?”
I said to myself: “He may perhaps be a fool?” For he put a consoling
arm around her and murmured: “There! There! The poor girl is cold!”
She lifted her eyebrows at Glidden, who looked interested but only as
if he were at the theatre. She sat very stiff and unyielding, and said
unreasonably that she saw Nicholas considered nothing beyond the city
of New York.
His face close to hers in the comparative darkness of the taxi, he said
softly: “Wrong! I care for you. But you’re such a cold-blooded young
fish----” I watched him curiously: he must have wondered at the strong
tug of everything of which he disapproved. His roots were deep in the
soil of Washington Square: what matter that his flowering might come in
the little house around the corner? He met my gaze, and said: “She’s
prettier when she’s tranquil; isn’t she?” I began to like Nicholas Van
Suydam.
“You see?” cried Eva tragically. She was looking at Glidden; she seemed
to think that he was on whatever side she might select. He was leaving
us, ready to make the perilous passage of the slippery sidewalk to his
door; and he paused and looked from Eva to Nicholas with it plain on
his face that he had started none of it but that he saw no reason why
he should not enjoy the spectacle. I have never seen another man with
so profound an interest coupled with so complete an indifference. The
treacherous sidewalk was, in his eyes, quite as human in its attempt to
upset his equilibrium, as Eva and Nicholas at internecine war.
Nicholas had recovered his poise. In fact, looking back, I think I
never saw him wholly lose it. In his control of even his sudden flares
of rage against Eva he was disciplined; in this he showed his kinship
to his mother. He said, now, that he was hungry, and asked where they
were to dine, and when. “Oh, Nick, darling!” she exclaimed. “You can’t
possibly be hungry! We shall be nibbling at sandwiches all night!” His
reply, that sandwiches were not food, brought forth a statement which
she appeared to consider an explanation of all that bothered her.
“You’re a Dutchman,” she let fall, definitely final about it. But she
added--Eva always added: “So many things are more important than the
question of food.”
The taxi waited at my hotel, the door still shut, while they argued it.
“I can tell you this, my girl,” he propounded, “food is basically the
most important thing, for on its supply and general excellence hinges
what you have in mind.”
“What have I in mind?”
“Work!” He grinned at her. “To that, I’ll add love. And I should like
to ask you how either work or love would go on, on a basis of artistic
victuals?”
“I’m leaving you,” I interrupted firmly; for Eva was asserting, on a
higher key, that he was a Dutchman. I left him saying firmly: “And
what’s the matter with that? What’s wrong with Dutchmen? Who started
this city, I’d like to know, if not Dutchmen?” Through the now closing
door of the taxi I heard her, “I’m tired of hearing about it.”
I went draggingly through the lobby of the hotel. The desk clerk hailed
me with the abominable optimism of those who see the old year out: “It
cleared up for the New Year, didn’t it, Mrs. Avery?” I plodded past
the desk, my storm shoes flapping and my spirits going down into the
melted snow with which by now they were filled. I took the elevator up
to the new heights of Nicholas Van Suydam’s city. The curtains were
drawn back, as only an occasional venturesome bird peeped in. The view
at night was extravagant; spangled with lights heaped in pyramidal
form, the city might have been the scene of Cinderella’s party. But,
my mind inflamed by the supposititious plight of those of us who were
encroaching strangers, I ran across the room and pulled the curtains
together. Within the short space of time since my return the weather
had again changed; a few flakes of snow, large as feathers, blew
against the panes. Weather--and women, Nicholas would perhaps say,
and be correct in saying it--changed with no apparent reason. Man was
foolish to worry over either. Let storm, meteorological or human, come
when it would, but let man keep his safe course.
I admonished myself: “James Pomeroy would say that living on the
thirtieth floor is making a queer bird out of you, Dinah Avery. Get
back to normal and hurry to the next party.”
But I was so late that when I went by for Eva they had gone without
me. The desk clerk had telephoned to several cab stands before one of
the wheeziest vehicles still in the business pulled up at the kerb,
stalled its engine, started, and ran over the kerbstone and shuddered.
Dubiously, I entrusted my life to it. The wheels spun industriously,
but the short distance to the establishment of those two babes in the
wood known as the Little Metcalfs took nearly an hour. The drifts
were high and in the side streets would remain without the guiding
shovels of the street cleaners until another day. It was a hazard, to
get across the sidewalk when eventually I arrived. Snow banks gleamed
under the light from the opening door of the house. I climbed stairs,
fought through guests massed in the narrow hall, and stamped my own
contribution of snow on the rugs in Yancey Metcalf’s gay bedroom.
Another braving of the hall, where a misstep would precipitate a broken
body down the well of the stairs, and I was in the large studio and
already distinguishing Eva’s laughter. The studio was filled with
her friends; and she hugged to her heart the desire to believe that
humanity meant what it said.
Spencer Mapes met me; the glass of egg-nog that he pressed on me
might have been brewed in the warm friendliness of his smile. I found
myself seated with Eva on a black satin puff in the centre of the
floor. We were telling Mapes that we did not like egg-nog and would
take punch the next time. A very short time after, I heard one of us
say to Mapes that the punch was so weak that we should like more. The
Little Metcalfs flew about, picking smouldering cigarette butts off
their rugs, rescuing glasses that bade fair to tip over on books which
people plucked from the shelves. We wondered what they meant to do
with the books; after the third glass of punch no eyes saw print. The
room turned slowly, then faster, and we told each other that we were
sleepy from the cold outside. Mapes murmured solicitously: “Don’t you
girls want to go powder your noses?” We knew that he wished to get rid
of us; but even the recalcitrant I had no intention of getting rid of
him. And Eva giggled. “There’s Nick--and he’s tipsy!” Nicholas was
shaking cocktails that no one had time to drink. A pretty woman said,
her voice blasting one of the dead calms that occasionally fall on the
best party: “Lucullus Kahn reminds me of a fawn with fleas.” We watched
her husband scamper madly to her, his face a knot of apprehension. But
Lucullus Kahn remained unmoved.
Spencer Mapes dropped down on the puff beside us. He looked sadly at
Eva and said: “You poor little fish out of water!”
She said to me: “Do you remember what Nick called me?” and began to cry
bitterly.
Mapes said again: “Don’t you girls think it would be a good thing if
you went and powdered your noses?”
We told him that this was the last hope of all men who yearned to get
women off their hands. Smirking at him, we pulled out our vanity cases
and fixed our noses.
Bright fragments of the human race shifted, turned, twisted into
tangled groups and rearranged themselves in patterns of craziness. A
large police dog bounded from one forgotten glass to another, rapidly
lapping the contents. And Eva caught sight of Nicholas once more and
shrieked with laughter. “Nick! Nick! You’re gambolling! And it doesn’t
suit you in the least!”
He said: “Didn’t you want me to be a bohemian? All right! I’ll be a
bohemian--part of the way.” He appeared to be sober enough to know
the point at which invariably he would stop; and at once demanded to
be told how long she meant to let that fellow Mapes hang around. The
agitated clinking of ice in the cocktail shaker which he still held
made a tintinnabulation of ghostly menace. When we left, in groupings
that had come about casually, even the police dog was tight; he lay on
his back in the middle of the floor, ridiculously smiling.
Many people found themselves in one taxi. Nicholas enquired with
resignation “Where now?” We said that we were on our way to Florence
Quincy’s. “We can’t,” we assured him, “fail to show up there.”
“Why not?” he demanded to know.
We said piously: “Because we always go there on New Year’s Eve.”
Someone argued with the taxi driver: “Buddy, how about speeding up the
old bus?”
The driver said on his own sad note: “Say, listen! It may be Noo Year,
an’ de cops is slack fur de night; but I ain’t one er youse souses what
gits let off. I got my fam’ly ter t’ink about.”
The taxi ran in and out, weaving, between the posts of the Sixth Avenue
Elevated. We heard Spencer Mapes say that it would help us if we
stopped at one of the all-night Coffee Pot stands.
Nicholas said: “So you’re here again? The bad penny. No: what I think
you are is the dark angel.” He wagged his head.
Eva cried: “Oh, please?”
We climbed on high stools and urged the attendant to hurry with the
coffee. We decided that the attendant looked as if he took his drinks
from the Nedick Orange Juice stall on the corner, and laughed heartily.
Nicholas counted the assortment of Eva’s friends reflected in the
mirror behind the coffee urn, and counted us as we wavered on our high
stools. The attendant apathetically swabbed the counter as we spilled
our steaming coffee. It was all in the twenty-four hours of a day; and
what to him was a snowy New Year’s Eve but extra slush on the floor?
Nicholas asked him: “How many of us do you make it?” The man was not
interested; he would check the bill by empty cups. “Strange!” observed
Nicholas. “Very strange! In the taxi there were so many legs and arms
that I feared we’d brought along the entire party.”
Someone down the counter chuckled--a fat man’s chuckle. We discovered
it to be our taxi driver, telling about us to a friend who occupied the
adjacent stool.
Mapes suggested to Eva: “Another cup wouldn’t hurt him.”
She said in a stricken voice: “I never before saw him like this.”
Mapes reassured her: “His sort of old stock, one might say, do
everything to excess; they think it their privilege, don’t they? You
remember what you told me he said about food?”
She leaned over to me. “I wonder, now, if I told him that?”
“Of course you did,” I scolded her. “The thing to find out is what you
may have neglected to tell him.”
Our poet chanted: “I never saw such an amazing youth as this stage
decorator chap! Look here, young Guy--were your parents Little People?”
Young Guy pouted. He did not know how to take this poet. Always, he
had dreamed of meeting real poets. And this one was bald-headed, and
his eyes danced mischievously. “Are you guying me?”
The poet went into ecstasies. “Hear him, now! He puns by way of
starting the New Year right. Young Guy, where thou goest I will go: you
will never lose me.”
Said young Guy: “Aw, shucks!”
The poet rolled his eyes to where heaven must be lurking above the
embossed tin ceiling of the Coffee Pot. He said devoutly: “Thank God
for this marvellous New Year’s Eve!”
Aghast, someone--I think it was I--said loudly: “It’s the New Year
already! Listen!”
And the city blew up in hideous noise.
Throwing loose change on the counter, we rushed to the sidewalk. The
trodden snow splashed our ankles as we jumped up and down and added
our noise to the screams of every whistle in the harbour. We forgot
our driver who still conversed in the Coffee Pot: he seemed, all at
once, to be a sort of Father Time who came on the stage to cut off the
head of Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight. We commandeered a cruising
taxi whose driver left his hand on the throttle of what the poet said
thankfully was the most raucous horn in the world. “Never take your
hand off that horn?” he implored the driver. “It enables you to stand
out from the mob. You want to stand out from the mob, don’t you? Of
course you do. It’s the ambition of every intelligent being.”
“Aw!” said the thug-like driver. “Can’t a feller enjoy hisself when he
gets the chanst?”
The poet cast a benign smile on all in the taxi. “All human beings
together, on this glorious occasion!”
Eva held tightly to her husband’s arm as the crowd of us, refreshed by
the combined effects of the coffee and the long drive uptown to Sutton
Place, crossed the sidewalk in front of Florence’s house. “I know I’ll
have pneumonia,” she predicted. “But maybe not; we have the health of
whales.”
He wondered, Nicholas said, if we did truly have the health of
whales, which were warm-blooded animals in the wrong element. There
was question of how to get into the living-room where, presumably,
Florence Quincy stood to receive her guests. The man who had arranged
to interview Eva, Henry Pepperel, wedged between two stout females and
endeavouring to salvage what was left of his superior poise, called
out to Nicholas: “You’re an observer, too, aren’t you? Do you fancy
Miss Quincy is leaving me here, impaled, you might say, because I once
interviewed her?”
Eva no longer leaned on her husband’s arm. She stood alone and
sufficient unto herself. She said: “Watch me break through!”
Henry Pepperel crooned: “Oh, but you, Miss Litchfield--you can
accomplish the impossible, naturally. You are one for whom crowds make
way.”
One of the stout females advised her not to believe him. “He’s always
kind until he starts writing his interview.”
We stood in the hall whence a stair with a delicate iron rail spiralled
to the drawing-room floor. Behind us, amusingly, a fountain leaped
from the wall and fell tinklingly into a shallow basin; and young Guy
played with the startled goldfish and for the first time seemed at
home. Nicholas still had Pepperel to contend with; into his unwilling
ear the great interviewer dished up what he had found out from many
years of the game. “Isn’t it imbecilic,” he confided, “that they don’t
want to be interviewed unless it’s a grossly flattering spiel you turn
out? And yet, they die like flies if you don’t beg them for interviews.”
I judged from his face that Nicholas was in a better humour. On
the drive uptown Eva’s manner towards him had been intimate. She
had enquired playfully: “Didn’t I see you--the chaste and elegant
you--kissing Molly Underhill, down at Yancey’s?” He had rejoined that
he regretted it. “She’s kissing everyone. But I’m sure it wasn’t Molly
I kissed. Are you sure it was?” She had laughed, and had called him by
her most passionate term of endearment: “Nick--you old dear!” He had
been so pleased, so cheered, that I suspected this was nearly all he
ever got from Eva.
Men and women shoved through the front door, stormed the stairway, and
fell back on the little hall. I was washed up by this human wave to
the slight protection of a console, and found that again I was pressed
close to Nicholas. I told him: “I do feel like the wrath of God. I know
now why men pulling out of a spree just pitch in and get drunk all over
again.” I pushed my bang off my forehead, and heard myself say with
deep emotion: “Oh--hell!”
Bill Metcalf came to lean against the console, and found me in
possession and looked the other way. “I’m apologizing,” he said simply.
“For what?” Not that I cared.
“Yancey says I tickled you, down at our party,” explained the chastened
Bill. “Yancey says she never saw anything so disgusting. She says you
howled, and rolled up in a ball.”
I became indignant. “Why shouldn’t I roll up in a ball? I happen to be
ticklish.” Out of a pensive pause, I added: “I don’t remember a thing
about it.”
Bill fretted: “The point is, I don’t see why in the mischief I wanted
to tickle you. I wish I could understand how I came to do it. It never
entered my head to want to do it.”
Yancey, her vividly pretty face distorted by her resentment, bore
down on the more or less homely faces in the hall. She started in at
once: “What a night! Dinah, our place is all but demolished!” The big
Englishman had sat in a newly upholstered armchair, and the armchair
had creaked, had groaned, and had finally collapsed in the backbone of
its structure.
At this stage, I appear to have wailed: “If it were only a chair that
had been wrecked on the beach this night----!” I seem to have gone
further, and to have confided to them all that I had a weak character;
for here I was, at the tail of the evening and ready to drop with
fatigue, and nothing could induce me to go home before this party broke
up. In an effort to meet him half-way, I said to Nicholas: “This is
how we keep it up. Don’t you see that we can’t help it? Why, then,
come down hard on Eva?” I was indignant when he hit back at me with his
idea that we did not keep it up; he had noticed, he said, that we were
dropping by the wayside. The wayside appealing to me at this moment
as a tempting deathbed, I leaned more heavily against the console and
sighed: “I can’t follow out even a feeble thought.”
Someone laughed; it was James Pomeroy. He asked about the state of my
soul; but it was my legs which were in a bad way, I told him. “What you
need is to confess to me,” said Pomeroy. “What are your secret sins?
They must be black, for I’ve never caught you out in one.” I said that
we must have reticences. But I was studying the reticences of Nicholas
Van Suydam, who stood amongst us and was not of us. His frowning
concentration on the problem of Eva had been intensified by my remarks;
he stood in thought, his eyes the only sign that he recognized our
swarming presence.
Pomeroy said in an undertone: “I wouldn’t offer a penny for your
thoughts: I know them. If you will study the life of the outsider, why
don’t you take it lightly and get some amusement out of it? Watch how
I do it--for instance.” He had brought to this party a young girl,
Priscilla Swords, to whom God had given a face and called it a day,
according to Molly Underhill. Her widely smiling prettiness made us
uneasy, so that we had huddled away from her. Pomeroy said to her:
“Darling! Act pretty for the ladies?”
Priscilla said sweetly: “It’s such a nice party, Jimmie.”
He said to me: “You see? It’s beautiful ingenuousness that redeems
the casual stranger in our midst. Van Suydam hasn’t beautiful
ingenuousness.”
One could never tell whether Nicholas had overheard what he was not
supposed to hear, or whether from association with Eva he arrived at
the same point in his cogitations that we reached by talk: he had a
disconcerting way of chiming in. He said, now: “You’ve given me an
idea, Dinah. Eva can’t help it. Therefore I am taking her home.” He
pushed his way to the stairs, and was lost to our sight in the beehive
of the second floor.
“I might as well go too,” I announced; and relinquished the console.
It was dreadful, upstairs. Florence, allowing all to kiss her, found
time to tell me that she wondered what life was all about. Charles
Glidden danced with a cream-coloured siren and, whilst clasping her
with splendid histrionic ability, stared with his customary detachment
at the various piquancies of the crowd. Molly Underhill languished in
the arms of the young boy who had wanted her never to stop talking.
Winnie Conant danced with her Addis, and called out to me: “I feel
immoral!” I stood in the doorway feebly repulsing a powdered youth who
wished to confide his ideas on taste; I was not receptive to Glidden’s
suggestion, shouted to me as he whirled slowly past with the siren:
“Get out and stick pins in people and watch them kick. Everyone kicks
differently. It’s very amusing. The pins, of course you understand,
must be mental pricks.”
Someone at my elbow said distinctly: “This is a brothel.” It was
Nicholas Van Suydam. He had not yet found Eva. But through a rift in
the dancing crowd I saw her; her face was as white and exhausted as all
others in the room. Spencer Mapes made it plain that he looked after
her.
I had again lost sight of Nicholas. I reminded myself that there was
nothing I could do about it. And he came back through the crowd on the
stairs, Eva’s wrap over his arm. He pushed Spencer Mapes aside with his
elbow and held the wrap for his wife.
Winnie stopped dancing to ask if I were going with them. I said that I
was not; I added, still more disagreeably, that if they were luckily
let alone by all of us they might have a chance. “A chance at what?”
asked Winnie skeptically.
From the head of the stair-well, Spencer Mapes looked down on them as
they departed. Leaning thus over the balustrade, he seemed to embody in
his lean dark face, in his intent eyes, all mishaps of the year just
dead, all mishaps to come in the year just born; he might have been
juggling the two years, watching to see how he might toss and catch the
balls.
Thankful to be alone at last, I took a taxi and rolled swiftly down
Park Avenue, encountering no traffic lights. New York was supine,
played out by its merry-making. Dawn was in possession of the city.
There is nothing so disheartening as dawn that is not rosy.
From a position of relaxation in my splendid chair, I was by now
droopingly over the arm. But through the telephone came, sprightly and
interested, Eva’s dear little voice: “Now, darling, that you’ve seen
Nick and me together, what do you think?”
“I prefer not to say.” I was determined on this.
“H-m!” came over the telephone. I knew that she had drawn her small
mouth into a button-hole: she did this when resolved on something.
“Well, anyway, Dinah, you must acknowledge that he’s a heavy load to
carry on my shoulders when I am with my friends? You see that he’s
impossible at a party.”
[Illustration]