In the light of half the things she did, Eva appeared to be an
unreasoning wretch. Influenced by her husband on the one side and by
her friends on the other side, she occasionally--they thought--kicked
over the traces and followed a line of her own choosing. But I doubted
if her outbursts had their origin in suppressed desires: she seldom
suppressed anything. Her actions were variable, seeming to spring from
nothing more profound, more remote from the trivialities of daily
life, than the casual speeches of her acquaintances. Most people are
influenced by their friends; but I have seen no one so instantly
changed, and so apt to be as instantly changed in the other direction,
as Eva Litchfield. A flower has little root.
That her husband was genuinely puzzled by her I had not for some time
doubted. Arriving at the tea for Molly, I had run into Eva and Nicholas
disputing outside the entrance. He detained her while he stated his
case. “Look here, you are a changed woman the instant you’re thrown
with your friends. I never saw anything so peculiar. It’s a fit that
comes over you. The fit--” he concluded bitterly--“is on you now.”
I had hurried past with the scantiest of greetings. As I reached the
door of the reception room, Molly’s voice rang out above the noise
of the already large gathering; it was like the unpleasant voice of
a peacock. I craned my head around the guests who now, a receding
tide, flowed back into the corridor. In the centre of the room Molly
sat enthroned; and behind her, on the piano, was the portrait bust
of Nefertiti. The experienced serenity of the plaster head, and the
strained expectancy of the living head, confronted me. Two pairs of
women’s eyes, filled with something above me, below me, behind me,
stared at me but did not see me. I was appalled. The invisible laid
hands on me, pushing me back with those who fled to the corridor.
The voices in the corridor were pitched against Molly’s voice in the
reception room. And the indescribable tautness of the nerves that her
speaking voice engendered, intensified by the pressure of this receding
wave of our friends and our foes, combined with the effect produced
upon me by the eyes of Nefertiti and Molly Underhill and blasted me.
I felt the imminent snapping of all control; and in the light of this
inner turmoil I saw how good a thing it was, on Eva’s part, to let go
in a so-called burst of artistic temperament authorized, by popular
consent, if one does it with conviction.
With pure conviction, Eva almost sobbed: “I don’t see why I should be
expected to bear it!”
And in the reception room, in the indifferent presence of Nefertiti,
Molly suffered purely. They had not listened to her poem, she wailed.
I sank deeper in my chair in the penthouse: one’s friends could be hard
to bear. Florence went on raging at Charles Glidden. “Do you blame
Eva’s husband for leaving her in the lurch and going home?”
“Oh--by the way--” gasped Winnie--“what made him do it?” She gave me a
sharply suspicious glance. “I shouldn’t be surprised if Dinah knows.”
I did. I remembered, in a series of sharp impressions, the horrid
happenings of the tea-party. But I shook my head.
From behind muffling velvet curtains there had sounded the clear
sweet voice that never failed to act on Nicholas like a call. It had
come like the song of some bird caught in a hen yard. Nicholas had
listened, rapt: it was a lovely sound.
So distinctly that I glanced in confusion at her husband, Eva had said:
“In regard to my next book, Spence, I’m quite sure that the subject of
passionate marriage can be so treated as to be without offense. I’ll
put ecstasy into it. It should be treated as poetry and not as a study
in flesh and blood.”
I had hastened to say to Nicholas: “She never has her feet on the
ground. Bear that in mind. She will write nothing raw. She dislikes
bawdy words.”
He had replied with profound disgust: “But in talking, she’d dissect
the Almighty.”
I had slipped away to stop Eva before he should overhear more. She was
indulging herself in an impersonal analysis of personal experiences.
I knew that in her case experiences became impersonal as soon as she
had stepped out of them. I heard her say: “I’ve found myself thinking,
in the midst of tenderness, that there can be nothing in the universe
without the right words to convey it. But I’ve found that the search
for the words ruins the emotion. Life is so awful.”
Mapes had asked disinterestedly: “Don’t you offend your husband?”
I touched her shoulder. But she had said--impatient of the presence
of both Spencer Mapes and me because we were not in the centre of
her preoccupation: “I’ve often told him what it was that made me so
thoughtful.”
Mapes had relapsed into his almost soundless laughter. “At times, I’m
sorry for him!”
I said sternly: “Your husband is waiting for you. I think he’s ready to
go home.”
She had turned away indifferently. “I won’t go yet.”
He had left without her. He must, however, have promptly realized that
he had set his feet on another stage of a progress the end of which
he himself did not yet see; for he entered the penthouse at about
this time. Beyond an indifferent nod, she paid no attention. She had
been over in a corner talking with Spencer Mapes, and they had been
joined by Addis Wickersham and James Pomeroy; we had heard Addis
Wickersham’s splendid voice intoning the service of literature. Over
our corner a silence fell at his entrance. I suspect that the others
were thinking, as I did, that Nicholas Van Suydam was in a position of
minor awkwardness. If he himself realized this he gave no sign. He had
a graceful manner; and on this occasion I frankly admired the kindness
which actuated his attention to Molly Underhill. Since our arrival at
the penthouse, Molly had lurked, prowled, and ostentatiously looked
over the books, but had seemed unaware of the presence of her friends.
Her wide smile of welcome for Nicholas was at the same time a challenge
to Eva, upon whom she at once turned a triumphant glare.
The irregularly shaped, low-ceiled room was already thick with tobacco
smoke, which wavered into a canopy over our heads, and joined the
banked shadows in the ell, and added to the nervous discomfort of
finding oneself in the silence of a penthouse. We would have sworn
that we heard the silence. The various groups of people broke up, and
formed again, and evidently gave it up as hopeless: they stood where
they found themselves, waiting for something else. In this way, Eva and
Nicholas were thrown together.
She asked lightly why truly he had come back, and shrugged when he
persisted that he had returned because he was responsible for her. “You
won’t stay,” she dropped, with as much acidity in her tone as she ever
employed. “You won’t stay, because you won’t approve of this party
more than you did of the one you so charmingly left.” She shrugged
again when he replied that he had every intention of staying until she
took her departure in his company. “As you please,” she agreed. “But I
want to say this to you: you can’t play fast and loose with me, Nick.
I don’t permit my friends to do so. My friends, however, have never
wished to treat me in a cavalier fashion.” With a nod that was almost
one of dismissal, she strolled away.
I hastened to say to him: “Have you thought about this room? It is
packed, I’m feeling, with evil influences.”
“The people in the room?” he enquired.
“It’s--it’s--bad. The room itself. The city outside the room. Oh--the
whole thing,” I finished lamely enough. But I started in again to keep
both his mind and my own from Eva. “I go through this year after year,
agreeing with everyone because it’s less troublesome than to hold
opposite views. There’s so much talk, if one doesn’t agree.”
“But there’s talk anyway, isn’t there?” he asked, his manner that of
one who knew the answer.
It was impossible to divert his attention from Eva; I saw them meet in
the middle of the room. She seemed, in fact, to have been seeking him.
“Suppose we go?” she urged. “I think there is going to be a scene.”
He responded to her appeal with “Then I feel sure you will stay.”
I heard her foot tapping on the floor. “I won’t make a laughing-stock
of myself by hanging around you,” she flung at him, and turned on her
heel and left him.
The scene which she anticipated started in by being, as usual, purely
a verbal one. I got out of it by retiring into the ell of the room and
settling with a book. If Molly Underhill stood pat under baiting, or if
she flung back at them, was none of my business. But she brought the
scene over to me, as I would not go to meet it: she ran to my corner
and threw herself down with such abandonment to her inner turmoil that
the chair creaked. In a passion of resentment she said through clenched
teeth: “That taunt!” She almost flung herself at me as she talked aloud
although to herself. “When I remember that, when I came to New York,
these were the people I wanted to impress----!” As spasmodically as she
had flung herself down, she leapt from the chair, snatched her coat and
ran from the apartment: we heard the thud of her feet as she hurried
down the stairs.
Nicholas Van Suydam said to several of us who stood stupidly looking at
the door through which Molly had bolted: “She was crying. It seems a
pity.”
Winnie Conant jeered: “Molly’s trying to live in a protracted emotional
crisis. She gloried in the recent unpleasantness. Save your pity until
she needs it.”
I felt Eva’s hand slip into my arm. “Help me out? Help me out, Dinah,
for the love of God? I can’t stand this!” At once she continued,
speaking imperatively to her husband: “Some of us are going down to the
Metcalfs’.”
I heard him say in a low voice: “You’ve behaved like a wild thing all
day.”
She pulled away from his detaining hold. “Are you coming, too, Dinah?”
He said: “Very well. I’ll drop you at the door. I shan’t go in. And let
me say this, Eva: you’re being discourteous to our hostess, who doesn’t
belong to the ‘union’.”
She said for the second time, and indifferently: “Do as you please.”
He told me, afterwards, that he hastened to undress and get into bed.
He knew that this was to offset any weakening of his purpose, any qualm
that might have urged him to hunt for Eva as she rushed through the
homes of her friends.
[Illustration]