He said: “She asked me here. She said she simply had to see me.”
The fact that we had reached the point where in concert we laughed at
his wife and my friend broke upon us at the same time, and we stopped
laughing to curiously inspect each other. But I knew that he was going
to tell me almost as much as she would have told.
He remarked inadequately that we had been seeing each other at teas,
and as I let this pass without comment he continued: “You look like a
meditative kitten. Have you been saying to yourself that I am a lazy
devil? But I’ve always found late afternoon in New York a maddening
time of day. I want to hurry home, and call out through the darkening
house ‘Where are you, Eva?’ And Eva goes to teas, at this eerie hour.
If I don’t go with her, I am assailed by loneliness. Dark, in the
street outside. You know how it looks, down there, very late in the
afternoon; I called your attention to it, the last time you were down.”
I remembered. Along the front of the apartment house across the street
the fresh summer awnings had been lifted to admit the cool breeze of
the end of the day, and through these unveiled windows heads thrust,
and looked up, and drew in again. There was rain in the air, but it was
across the river. I said: “You like to stay at home when you’re not
working. But we reverse it, you see; we are obliged to reverse it: we
stay at home when we work.” Everything about us was the reverse of all
things about him. I wondered if he had seen it, for himself, and that
it was at this he cavilled, in his mind, during his disputes with Eva.
He replied with his enforced light touch. “As to work--I spent a large
part of today leaning out my office window and contemplating the
city. Now, don’t, please, say what Eva would promptly say to confound
me--that I had led her to believe I worked while at my office. There
are times when a man must dream; and one dreams in the most tranquil
spot. I would fulfill a better purpose if I sat in the park, or on
Riverside, and absorbed the city rearing itself above me; but by doing
this wise thing I should be flying in the face of the convention
that a business man is always busy. A man, if a proper fellow, sits
behind his desk continuously, a portentous scowl on his face and in
his heart a mad desire to get off and go fishing. He’s the typical
business magnate: the scowl tells you so. Always on the job--a man
to be depended on.” He quirked one eyebrow in a way to which Eva had
called my attention; I had the idea that he was quirking his eyebrow
at himself because of more of an inner discontent than could be
accounted for by his differences with Eva. And he then came out with an
astounding question: “Do you ever dream--in private--you writing folk?”
I drawled: “At the last tea at which we met, I believe I remember
Florence Quincy at the wailing wall: ‘Haven’t I the right to my
privacy? Haven’t I the right to the time to work?’”
“All tosh,” he countered promptly. “It is in effect, the litany of
literary people: ‘Oh dear God, grant me the time for writing!’ You
aren’t angry, are you?”
I acknowledged that we were amusing. “Oh--I mean, unconsciously so.”
I was, at the same time, acknowledging to my sense of fair play that
I had not expected to find his attitude towards us so disparaging and
that I had no right to object to what he might say.
“You’re a breed set apart, by your own wish, from mankind: what are
your sources of laughter?” he asked with a faint uneasiness. “You
nervously organized sensitives--to quote my wife--who cling together,
working each other into tantrums, preying on each other, wrecking each
other: tell me, do you like each other?”
I had no reply to this. I did not know. Through a perturbation set
up by his question, I heard him explaining that we appeared unable
to stay away from each other except when we were deep in slumber; we
were, he said, banded against everyone besides ourselves. Architects
did not feel this overpowering urge to herd together every evening. On
the golf links, he had observed that lawyers mingled agreeably with
men who were neither lawyers nor judges, doctors with men who might be
potential patients but who had not yet fallen into their professional
hands. His friend Anthony Bloodgood, to take an example, could bear it
if the stock market were not mentioned during his hours of relaxation.
But always amongst us, he averred, there spatted back and forth our
technical discussions. “Do you never weary of it?” he wanted to know.
I murmured in extenuation that we did not always listen to what the
other said; we waited our own turn to say something. In this way, I
explained, we snatched a bit of rest here and there.
“Your private lives, in short,” he on his part expounded, “are lived in
the midst of turmoil?” He was, I suspected, thinking of something that
his words but overlaid.
I was proud of myself that I smiled good-naturedly. “You are in league
with Mattie, then?” As he was frankly puzzled, I explained. Having
finally found time for listening to whatever was preying on Mattie’s
mind, that competent maid had almost sobbed to me: “Miss Eva’s got some
friends what’s got looks like pizen. Yes ma’am, like pizen. But do dat
stop Miss Eva from listenin’ to ’em? No ma’am, it don’t. Lordy, Miss
Dinah, she ain’t got nothin’ but fancy sense. But she got a good heart.
She’s jes’ like a little chile with a good heart, an’ belief.”
He responded to this eagerly. “She has a good heart! The things she
does--Mattie knows about them; Mattie can tell you----” He almost
stammered in his desire to put his wife forward in a light that he
thought new to me.
I wondered: did he love her, except for her beauty? Because if he loved
her for nothing more he would not hold her. As if in reply to my silent
question, he said: “Even her imperfections are lovable.” But there was,
in his fond tone, in his defiant eyes, a perplexity that he as yet
denied. He was trying to change the foundations of his home, to make
use of a term of his profession; but when a building is erected on the
wrong plan there are two things only to be done: it can be put up with,
or it can be razed. “After she went away for the first summer of our
married life,” he continued his apology for Eva, “she wrote me that at
first she couldn’t bear to look at her typewriter because it had come
between us, you might say.” But Nicholas Van Suydam was not fatuous:
instantly he began to laugh. “She said that the little white keys were
teeth to devour her--little masculine teeth biting her heart. I say,
Dinah! What I said to her was ‘Why masculine? Feminine teeth can bite.’
And, speaking of the summer--have you any idea of what she is planning
to do?”
“None. But surely she would tell you?”
He said that she had begged him to guard her, during the remaining
weeks of spring, from the intrusion of the world. “Lock me up, if
I suggest going out?” she had requested. “Don’t permit me to go to
parties?” He had had what he called one of his ardent fits; he had said
to her: “There’s nothing I’d like better. I’d like to think of you, all
day, as safely at home waiting for my return. There’s happiness for a
man--to know that the woman he loves is watching out the window for his
return at night--waiting for him, beautiful and sweet, at the end of
his day in a man’s rough world. Oh, Eva----!”
I do not mean to say that, when telling these scattered incidents of
his life with Eva, he at once launched into the extended and shameless
dissertations which I time and again quote. Rather, he told his story
by his halts, his uneasy frowns, his jerky flaps of his hand which were
in some strange way appealing; had he not been of my own generation,
there were times when I should have felt maternal towards him. But I
have not Eva’s camera-like memory for conversations, and I have had to
put into words those things that partly I read from his disquietude.
He went floundering along. “She says things, sometimes--at home---- You
see, if it weren’t for these things she says and then, evidently, tries
to retract, I’d be so much less crazy about her. Can you see how that
could be? She said, the other day, that something is happening to her,
in her mind, so that at present she doesn’t know much about herself.”
“She doesn’t,” I agreed broodingly.
“She put it down to a real reversal of values. She thinks that maybe
she will get her bearings; and maybe not. She said she had found out
that one can’t force issues.” I judged that he had been rendered uneasy
by this. He had dimly perceived a change in her, so that her words had
been merely a confirmation. At times, during the last few days, she had
looked as if the breaking point with which he had frequently threatened
her were close at hand. This morning she had asked him to meet her
here; and he had demurred, because he thought it unsuitable for him
to intrude on her business relations. She had, he assured me, all but
begged him to come. “She said--it’s so foolish to repeat it!--but
she did say that she had about found that her need for me was not so
much---- I do feel that I’m drivelling!”
“Go on,” I encouraged him. “I’m tremendously interested. And do
remember that I’ve known Eva longer than have you.”
Thus urged, he fixed his eyes on a distant object--it happened to
be the frowsy female who still expounded the salient points of her
book--and, virtually, plunged. “You know, then, how carefully she
chooses her words--it’s almost as if she had got them on paper, she’s
so sure--so that what she says has an added weight of truth? She said
‘I found out, lately, that my need for you is not so much physical as
it’s spiritual.’” He laughed a little, and asked if I considered this a
complimentary remark for a wife to make to a husband.
“From Eva? Undoubtedly.” I left him in no doubt that I was positive
about it.
“I didn’t think of it in that way,” he then acknowledged. “I could
think of nothing besides what I put to her--a hot demand to know what
the devil she meant. I do feel apologetic for telling you this,” he
broke off to say. “I must be catching your literary urge to tell all.”
I overlooked the slur to again beg him to proceed. “I’ve been away
so long,” I told him, “that I myself know little to tell, and
possibly--undoubtedly--should tell it if I had any store of knowledge.
But, seriously, I am fond of Eva; and I want to hear everything that
you’re willing to tell me.”
He gave me a quick look. I detected an added stiffness in his manner
when, after thinking it over, he complied. “What she said next is
really my reason for bringing up the subject. I’m aware that you’re a
friend of hers, and I feel on my own part that you can be trusted.”
This I could take only as a rebuke, although he was unaware of its
hitting me hard: he had no way of knowing that I had been up to what
I could only call ferreting. However, my qualm of conscience did not
prevent my listening eagerly to what he had to say.
He told it with his hesitation augmented by the length of time it
had taken him to make up his mind. “She replied in a way that was no
explanation. She said ‘The sad part of it is, Nick, that no matter what
happens everyone will be sorry for you. No one will be sorry for me.
And yet, it seems to me that somebody should be able to see my side
of it. Somebody should be sorry for me. It’s very little to ask--that
someone be sorry for me.’ I’m sure that this is, word for word, what
she said; it made such a peculiar impression on me that I can’t forget
it. Her side of--what?” He had, I made out, come to this question
in his talk with her; for he said that he had eventually asked her
bluntly: “Then, if you don’t want me, what’s the matter with me?” And
she had asked: “Is that beyond a man’s comprehension?”
This was so characteristic of Eva that I enjoyed it heartily. It was
possible to talk in private, in this waiting-room: no one so much as
glanced at us.
“You will see, in a minute, that I went into telling you this rigmarole
because it bears on her as yet unspoken wishes for the summer. You see,
I shouted at her. There are times when she makes a fellow feel that
there’s nothing left but to shout at her. She has that dear little
smile that’s the most withdrawn thing in the world. I think--” and he
too enjoyed it--“that if once I brought myself to the pitch of shaking
the breath out of her I’d get my bearings. And at the present time, I
assure you, I am away off in my calculations.”
Again it had helped, that we had shared our amusement. “What did she
say when you shouted at her?”
“She withdrew!” His baffled shake of his head was comic. “And then
she announced, as a result of her cogitation, that she didn’t really
believe she wanted a man at all. You see? She started in by almost
making love, and she swung around to a statement like that--to her
husband! The fact,” he added slowly, “that I fail to understand a thing
about her is a constant fillip. I mean, I am crazy over her. I never
saw her equal.”