I saw Eva once again before the summer flight from New York set in
for most of us. She went abroad with her husband, and I have always
believed that this was the direct result of Winnie Conant’s party
for women only. This party became famous as the Onion Party, and, we
suspected, influenced the course of several lives.
I stopped for Eva, and Nicholas walked with us to the studio in
Macdougal Alley. That they had not, at this time, come to an agreement
about what had been brewing between them was evident during this short
stroll. We started around the corner into Fifth Avenue in a silence
that was a thick wall between the two. Across the street, above the
mass of a terraced apartment house, the crescent moon hung in a deep
blue sky. Nicholas struck his stick against the trunk of a lone tree
surviving at the kerb; and it struck him, with the sharpness of the
blow he dealt the tree, that he had sold out his birthright: why had
he selected a profession whose present aim was to change New York?
Why had he not been content with what he had always known? Why had his
taste wandered afield? All of this we gathered from what he said to
us in his resentment of disillusion. Eva watched him, I fancied, with
amusement. “What is it?” she enquired with her air of detached interest
in the contortions of human beings.
Promptly he informed us that the city was ruining us. Looking
accusingly at his wife, he said directly to her: “It seems, of late
years, to inculcate a love of money.”
“Who doesn’t like money?” she asked flippantly. Her flippancy, as with
everything about her, even her anger, was dainty; her sweep of eyebrow
took a more airy flight, her small mouth was prim: it occurred to me
that in this mood she was more than ever dangerous to the peace of mind
of this man who acknowledged that he did not understand her.
He said: “People--nice people--don’t openly bay down the trail after
it.”
She said: “Oh, don’t they!”
He shut his lips down tight on a sentence that I was sure would have
been “Not the kind of people to whom I’m accustomed.”
“As I said,” she smiled, “you’ve the instincts of your family. Dinah,
do you know that they hold on to their belongings--in Nick’s case, it’s
his wife--as if they were increasingly valuable lots on the island of
Manhattan? I assure you, they look upon wives and children as ‘lots’.”
We had walked as far down as Eighth Street, and went through a crowd of
those who, Eva said, thought of wives as valentines. The street might
have been a penny arcade. Sauntering youths and maidens, for the most
part arm in arm, interfered with the continuity of the dispute. But
from Eva’s smile I knew that she meant to finish it. We turned into
Macdougal Street, illy lighted and grimy; and she came closer to him
and purred: “You are sorry you bought this lot?” She touched her breast
with her hand. “Too bad! You didn’t select the lot in the fashionable
section; eh?” She threw her head back and laughed: “Spencer Mapes
warned me!”
He said stolidly: “We’re not going to quarrel, you know.”
“Ah!” She shook her head. “I’m not so sure of that, Nick. You’ve begun
to insult me.”
“And you?”
They had forgotten me. I dropped behind.
She said quietly: “I’ve begun to be hurt.”
His voice was no longer firm. “I’m sorry.”
We had reached the Alley, and strove to keep our footing on the
cobblestones of its pavement. Ahead of us, under a small lamp, a little
terracotta god of love kept watch over the blue door of Winnie’s house.
“I daresay,” said Eva, “that this is the first time you’ve shown what
you really think of me.”
“Eva----?”
“Here we are,” said Eva. “And, my dear, I can tell you this: I prefer
my friends. Take that as you will. They have never so meanly criticized
me.”
I paused long enough to whisper to Nicholas: “What could you have said
to her before we started? You’ve--actually--hurt her feelings.”
He shook his head and went off through the obscurity of the Alley.
Eva and I stepped into a scene of feminine revelry; I had never seen
the Wickersham library respond to so high a note. The note was sharp,
as bright as parrots and as dubious as the talk of parrots. Thrown into
relief by the sombre background of the books which covered the walls
of the two-storey room were all colours and combinations of colours;
and the firelight picked out folds of silk, and was lost in folds of
velvet, and danced and flickered until there might have been even more
movement than was the case. Wickersham was soliloquizing: “It no longer
gives the impression of being the library of a scholar.” He appeared to
be broken by the sight.
Eva said to me: “Men are the trouble, in this life.” Already her eyes
were shining--because of Nicholas going home through the dark Alley, I
made no doubt. Addis Wickersham--apologetic in manner because he said
that he had only consented to serve one round of cocktails in order
that his wife’s dreadful idea would go over--tried to detain us in
talk; but Eva sailed past him and into the evolving matriarchy. She
confided to me that she felt like a galleon, with treasure in her hold,
because her frock was the prettiest in the room. To impress upon men
her standing as an artist she would rely on the quality of her work,
supplemented by her beauty; women could only be overwhelmed by clothes.
She saw that these women were divided between amusement and irritation
at the drama of her glorious entrance; but above the tumult in her
mind the galleon which was Eva’s high heart sailed with this brave
show of security on the land behind.
But that she was in the grip of tumult I soon gathered by what she
dragged me off into a corner to confide. “What happened at home before
you left?” I pressed her. “How can you expect me to understand,
properly to sympathize, or even to advise--as I do really make out that
you wish me to do--if I’m not posted?”
This I was never to know. She revolved in her mind--and in words to
me--what she would say to Nicholas, how she could manage the problem
of Nicholas, what part, in short, Nicholas could be permitted to play
in her life; but if any act of his, any speech of his, had brought
about a crisis she did not tell me. Upon her imagination there lay a
suffocating weight. Freedom--freedom from the flesh: this was what she
told me she must attain. As usual with her, when she began talking
about her work she strove to lift herself out of her body. She cried:
“You are free, Dinah! You are free!” And this envy of my unvalued
freedom mingled with the invisible presence of Nicholas which flooded
her body, and threw her into a frenzy of resentment against nature
which had trapped her. She felt the flame of her desire to reach the
top of her profession lick from her heart all love for Nicholas; and
she justified this infidelity of the spirit by what she believed to
be true, that never could her mind belong to a man, be obsessed by a
man. She began to hate her body because it had been the lure for the
attentions of men who would distract her mind.
We found seats comparatively away from the noise, and she sank down
for surcease from her pain; and at once it was harder to bear, for she
felt as if she were being physically torn to pieces. In her breast
there raged, gnawing at her, a demon of frantic desire to be allowed
by life to climb with her ambition. And she thought--watching herself
suffer, I noticed--of the boy with the fox at his vitals. “What shall I
do? What shall I do?” she moaned; but the irregular action of her heart
precluded her speaking aloud; I knew, merely, from the motion of her
lips what it was she said. I had seen her like this before, although
not over Nicholas.
“Come!” I said at last, rising and endeavouring to pull her to her
feet. “This is getting you nowhere.”
She did not dare, she said, to leave her corner, for she knew that
something of her emotion would show on her face. The span of life was
short, the pace rapid, and what was she to do when time flew past and
made her breathe in panting gasps of impatience? She felt a wish, she
said, to leap from her chair and get to work at once; and she would
have annihilated these people, in order to work now--work forever--if
the means for murder were within her grasp. People--always people, too
close to her, crowding her, cheating her of her chance! It was because
she was a woman. A man would not hesitate to kick anyone out of his
way. A man was ruthless. But, if a woman should dare to be ruthless,
some man was always in her life to hold her down, to turn the key on
her--the key of domineering masculine superiority. She began to wish
that she believed in a personal Deity: a Deity would be too great to
push down a creature he had made--a poor Eva would not be turned from
the Paradise of her ambition. But God was a man. There had never been a
supreme deity who was a woman. Always the goddess was an underling, a
subservient wretch, with a crescent moon on her head while the god wore
the sun.