She said--admonishing herself: “Hold tight, Eva! Keep the reins!
You can’t afford to go off the deep end.” She looked at me, rather
piteously. “You know, Dinah, that I’ve gone off the deep end so many
times?” She knew that her cold intelligence must find the way out; and
with her body so shaken, she would have to put off the session with
her mind. She cautioned herself--striving to guard the thing in her
that was precious: “Hold tight, you awful fool!” Helplessness ran over
her like ice-water. What if she lost the command of that intelligence
which had always eventually seen her through? She jumped up and started
running across the floor to the only man in the room.
Addis Wickersham lingered behind the table on which he continued to mix
drinks for his wife’s woman-party. He mixed the drinks automatically,
his eyes fixed and glassy, staring at no woman in particular but
surprised by all, shuddering at no one incident but revolted by the
sum total of womankind in the raw. He murmured, as if to his secret
locked-away mind: “What a ghastly sight--a lot of women stuffing onions
down their gullets!” Onions disagreed with him. He continued, however,
in a spirit of masochism, to stare at the party, and his occasional
shudders rippled unperceived over the immaculate surface of his pose.
It was with what appeared to be amusement that he called out to his
wife: “Winfreda, my spouse, this is intolerable!”
Winnie Conant never cared whether she talked with a man or a woman,
for she wished to force either sex to spread before her excited eyes
the map of their emotions. Stating openly that only women comprehend
other women’s troubles, she also held that only men possessed the
gift of sympathy. She went through her party like a plow, forcing
issues, disorganizing what groups might have been headed in another
direction. For she considered human beings unable, from lassitude, to
help themselves. At her husband’s hail, she halted so suddenly that
her mouth remained open with the choked-off words that she had had
ready for an important woman with an heroic diaphragm--a star from the
opera and therefore new material for Winnie’s studies; she emitted an
infantile grunt.
The opera star, her own mouth distended to accommodate a slice of
Bermuda onion, spoke in her stead. “Onions,” pronounced the star, “are
good for the larynx.”
Addis Wickersham’s voice rolled through his splendid library, and
reverberated against his lofty ceiling, and fell upon the star. “Your
own larynx is a fine one, madame. I saw it distinctly.”
Eva stood tapping her foot on the floor. The sound of these light but
steady taps served to keep her shoulders from jerking; she listened,
and regulated the rhythm of her jazz-time tapping. It gave her
something to do. It was almost dreadful, to see the close attention she
gave to her rhythm. She had reached the point where she could no longer
sit and wait for the moment when the pressure of her agony would tear
her to pieces. She caught Winnie by the arm.
Winnie was immersed in a discussion with several women who, they said,
contemplated leaving their husbands. Her mouth open and ready for a
release of words, she got the chance to shout: “Why change the shape of
the man, when the new spirit is bound to be a duplicate of the old?”
As if she had been brought up short by Winnie’s general question, Eva
cried: “How can you invariably speak from your own standpoint? How can
you be so sure of what other people should do?”
Winnie went on with it as if she believed what she said. “I don’t
think, mind you, that any man is possible as a life companion; but
what’s the sense in changing?”
I contrived to get Eva off. “Keep quiet,” I admonished her. “They are
joking, and you aren’t.”
She was far from joking. The eyes that she turned on me were
haggard. For herself, there was no hope, she said to me. Nicholas
had impregnated the little house in Eleventh Street; and for her the
essence of the big house in Washington Square had got over all New
York. She assured me--and I feared that others overheard--that there
was no hope of escape from the exigencies of life.
Even in this room, the effect of the high notes of women’s voices was
shocking. We went back to our corner. “What’s the matter?” enquired
a woman, pausing in her run past to pry into silence. “What’s the
matter with you?” Her sharp eyes bored. “Here you are looking broken
down--absolutely broken down!--at the end of every season! Are you sure
you can still stand the pace? I certainly think you’re looking--well,
fagged.” And she left, up in the air but lively in their inferences,
more devastating terms than fagged. “You really should take more care
of yourself. You’ll be going off in your looks.” Her inflexion said
that already this had come about.
I was pleased to notice that the woman’s spitefulness had roused Eva.
She positively hissed: “The viper! Dinah, for God’s sake get off your
foot! You can’t imagine how it annoys me, that you always sit on one
foot. Someone told me she said I had the childlike vanity of all
artists, and had to be praised in order to exist; and now she comes
out with that vixenish thing, and the inference is plain, I think,
don’t you, Dinah? She means to do all she can to kill my work. Well,
she won’t be able to, I can tell you!” Instantly she was filled with
a calm security about her work. The recent rebellious surge of false
energy gave way to her icy judgment of values, her correct estimate of
what she could do. Inspired by the unpleasantness of this encounter,
she began telling me that she saw, as on a stage, the immense fatigue
of people who, having no repose in their restless hearts, no real
happiness in their homes, continued to tread the measure for all of
every winter season. And as I laughed at her inconsistency, she cried
with delight: “It’s a line of thought for a future novel! Have human
beings always trod the measure, do you suppose, Dinah?” And she went
over and over the idea so that she might not forget it before getting
back to her writing-table. Instantly, she was the author pursuing words
in which to clothe her thought; she was a novelist, an observer, a
connotator, and had not herself suffered the pangs of which she would
write. She began planning: “It must be a modern dance of life, as
opposed to the dance of death of that old bridge in Switzerland--you
remember, Dinah? You must have seen it, when you were taken to see the
sights upon your first trip to Europe?”
I was tired, and out of my weariness I demanded: “Why do we all hang
together, do you suppose? Are we afraid to be alone? Tell me, Eva:
are you afraid of loneliness because of what you might dig out of the
bottom of your heart?” At the moment I might have been wound up, like a
watch spring, and bound to go on until I ran down.
She gave me a perfunctory smile. “Cheer up,” she said carelessly;
“you’ve no troubles.” After a moment of apprehension, however, she
added hastily: “But don’t tell them, anyway. I’m not equal to hearing
troubles.” She began tapping her foot on the floor: tap, tap, tap. I
felt like shrieking. “Besides, do you know that there was something
indecent in what you said? Don’t let a tendency to rawness get the
better of you, Dinah. It’s of the crystalline purity of unspoken
thoughts that art is made.”
I relapsed into helpless laughter. “Eva, you are perfectly delicious,
and unexpected, and so provoking that I often wonder how a man can live
with you without blowing his brains out!”
She became brusque. “I’m in no mood for that sort of thing. You should
know it without my telling you.” Her attention, in short, could not be
diverted from whatever had taken place between herself and Nicholas,
with, superimposed, what was now taking place in the room. For that the
Onion Party was being directed against her we could no longer doubt.
The opera star, swimming in her path, paused long enough to say: “Why
not move around and show yourself, Miss Litchfield?”
Eva looked questioningly at her. I felt a surge of anger at the woman:
Eva had the resilient faith of a child who does not look for a blow.
The singer continued, speaking kindly: “There’s Florence Quincy,
thinking of herself as a blonde planet and waiting for adulation. Go
and catch an orbit around the planet and make her happy.”
I swore that I hated females. The opera star swam on, through the
firmament of stars, and collided with the Theatre Guild. I said aloud:
“Don’t mind, Eva!”
It occurred to Eva--and devastated her--that she had never faced the
question of how much sincerity there might be in these people, her
friends. Did they ever give whole-hearted praise to each other? Did
they--by her sudden pallor I knew that her heart skipped a beat--did
they believe in her? What, behind her back, did they say of her and
of her work? Never before had she speculated along this line. But
the atmosphere of the large room filled with women who were by now
stripped of the rags of convention, and their jibes, had shaken her.
For a ghastly moment, she wondered if this party would undermine her
faith in herself. Instantly, she answered her own query: “No! No, never
that! Without my faith in myself--without the knowledge of what I can
do--there would be no Eva Litchfield.”
And at once she found herself in the thick of it, talking in order
to avoid being left out. She heard her voice complaining, reciting
her grievances. She saw on their faces that they did not care; she
realized--she must have--that those outside her line of vision laughed;
but she went on, and on. She tried to stop talking: I saw that every
now and then she seemed to keep her mouth shut by muscular control
alone: and she knew that it had got beyond her mastery, and she feared
that she was losing hold of everything in her being; and this still
further alarmed her, so that she started running across the room: she
must get away--away from herself. “What was that awful speculation of
yours, Dinah--something about not daring to look within?”
She reached the table behind which, entrenched, Addis Wickersham still
philosophically contemplated his wife’s party. He gave her a forbidding
look. “Have you eaten onions?”
She shook her head. She leaned against the wall, her head thrown back.
Her long throat blended like a pearl with the grey wall. She had
come over here to cling to Addis Wickersham, to wring from him the
intellectual reinstatement she must have in order to go on existing. He
must be forced to say something definite about the one pure devotion of
her life, her work. The noise of these many feminine voices, untuned
by the bass of men’s voices, deafened her, took the fine edge off her
wits; and she found that she was staring at Addis Wickersham, like a
lost thing. She said to him, over and over--a child who has learned a
set of words: “What do you think of my work, Addis? I want to know the
truth of what you think. I’m strong enough to bear the truth.” And all
the time, I felt sure that she was experiencing a new wonder about the
truth.
Wickersham’s nerves had frayed; and he was held to the scene by a
horrible fascination. He was delighted to take it out on someone. “Has
it never occurred to you, Eva, that you write not so much for the
quality of literature as for the attention it wins for you?” This being
unfair, and untrue, he looked ashamed of himself; but he let it stand.
After all, Eva was trying.
She recoiled, pressing her hands against the wall for support. A man
had never before struck her. She might have been crucified to the wall,
her hands out on either side, holding her body upright; she seemed to
hang by her hands. I am sure that she heard what went on around her,
and that she could take no part because she had been deprived of her
reason for ever again speaking. He had smitten something which had held
her up; and this eventually she tried to tell him. But smiling women
pressed in on her, clawing at her with words--tearing out her eyes with
saccharine words--hurting her, defiling her. She heard them say to each
other that she wept because she was not the central light of the party.
She told me afterwards that she did not know how she heard these words,
for already she was running from the house; but under the strain of
her suffering she must have turned clairaudient. The party, becoming
too terrible for her spirit, transformed all gatherings of her friends
into horrors no longer to be borne; she must not see them again. She
said this many times, on her way home: she must never again see her
friends.
Gathering up her wrap and mine, I said to Addis Wickersham that I must
try to overtake her. “She looks very strange. She’s apt to do anything.”
“Nonsense,” he said comfortably. “She’s strange because she gets away
with it.”
I did not believe this to be a pose on Eva’s part. I insisted on going
after her. I found myself saying, many times, “She can’t help it.” She
walked rapidly. I saw her ahead of me, her thin frock blowing back in
the night breeze. She had almost reached the little friendly house in
Eleventh Street when I overtook her; she had walked more slowly as
she approached her home wherein her husband awaited her return. With
a final run, I caught her by the arm; and she seemed to come out of a
trance. “Oh, it’s only you,” she said.
She began telling me much of what I have just repeated, and the climax
of her rush towards her home. She had said to herself that she must
get off from the crowd and think. Her look turned in, and she began
to know fear in its decadence. She realized that she must uproot this
particular fear, if she was to go on. Time was what she needed--time in
which she would hear no unkind word: security in that time. She stopped
and leaned against the wall of a house. She tried to tell herself:
“It’s their jealousy.” But, her senses more than ever acute, as if
she had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, she looked
back and read on their faces everything they had not said, and her own
intelligence arose to defeat her. She heard herself groaning.
Everyday life pressed in on her: a policeman stopped to look curiously
at her. “Anything wrong, lady?”
She straightened. “No. Nothing.” She added: “Thank you, officer.”
Together we went the few remaining yards and she opened the door with
her latchkey. I knew that she hoped she would not see Nicholas. But he
came down at once. “What’s wrong?” he asked, looking closely at her.
The policeman had been kinder.
She averted her tear-stained face. Like a frightened child, she held my
hand. “Nothing. Nothing you would understand.”
“I never saw you look this way----” he speculated.
She threw herself face down on the day-bed and cried out that she must
be saved from her friends.
Nicholas stood looking down on her. If she had glanced up, and so seen
his smile, she would have recognized--behind the smile, where she might
never again see it--that quality the absence of which in him she had
deplored: irony, newly born to console him.
[Illustration]
V
New York in summer is the ideal place to work in; when once hot
weather has dropped on this spit of land the hardiest offenders stop
giving parties. Office workers who traverse the streets because they
cannot avoid it hold their hats in their hands and companion women
whose skimpy frocks expose blistered shoulders. Asphalt menders take
possession, and the pungent smell of hot tar mingles with smells more
intimate to the inhabitants. Close over the sweltering city comes down
a roof of brass.
The summer of Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-nine found New York preparing
to pay the piper, although no premonition of the end of a great orgy
had as yet got in the air. I finished my book, and hung over the
parapet of my terrace and watched the antics of aviators who always
seem care-free and who are known to be above suffering from the heat,
and wondered if Eva and Nicholas had arrived at a better understanding.
September set in with its usual recrudescence of a frazzled mid-summer,
and what plants were still in window-boxes lay down and died
gracelessly.
The sound of Eva’s voice over the telephone--high, sweet, and, I
noticed, in some way that I did not fathom very happy--was one of
the most irritating things that could have happened. She announced
their return at an unexpectedly early date and demanded my immediate
appearance at her house. There was nothing I wanted less to do. My
curiosity was like the plants in the window-boxes, dead or dying
and not caring to pick up. I wanted to go somewhere and tell my own
troubles. This bright and terrible day was not the curse which would
have been hurled by high heaven at a dancer, let us say, or a singer.
Only to a novelist, cooped up all day and every day, would the sun have
seemed so personally vengeful.
“Well,” I said to Eva, “I’m glad you are back, and all that: consider
it said: but what in the name of peace have you to tell that could not
have waited for a more merciful day?”
No matter what the weather, she remained cool and good to look at.
Nothing could have persuaded her to leave the house in the daytime.
She received me with bubbling mirth; she was, it shortly appeared,
vastly amused over her husband’s having fled the house. “He’s about
done in by the stage during which I corrected the manuscript; he
said my jabbering sentences over and over sounded like radios in the
distance. He said ‘What is the matter with it? That thing stands up. I
can understand it.’ Poor darling! And I said--” she looked askance at
me--“I said ‘Suppose I got at you with a comment on your working so
hard over a God-awful building that will stand up anyway?’ He thought
that this meant I was at last grasping his line of work, and he said
‘Angel girl!’ and was happy. He really doesn’t, you know, take in what
I mean when I say ‘I’ll die--die!--if it leaves my hands before it’s
as perfect as I can make it!’ Isn’t it odd, Dinah, that a man thinks
kisses--love-making--can heal the laceration of the heart over the
eternal fact that a book is never up to its conception?” Her lifted
eyes were breath-taking. Gazing into them, Nicholas had probably not
heard a word she said. And she might at this moment have been making
love to him, the tone of her voice was so thrilling.
But underneath her lightness, her gaiety--and no one could be more
lightly gay than Eva in certain moods--I felt that there was something
else. I waited.
“Did you know,” she questioned me, “that Nick is playing the stock
market? Oh, not plunging; he says he went in ‘not enough to ruin us if
I lose, but enough to make us if I win.’ Tony Bloodgood is managing it
for him. Nick says his mother is disgustedly shocked, believing as she
does that the only sound value is land. But as for me, when he told
me I rushed at him and kissed him. And would you believe it, Dinah,
although he is the one who is speculating, he was profoundly disgusted
by my delight! He accused me again of loving money. Oh--we aren’t
beyond quarrelling over everything that comes up, in spite of----”
“In spite of what?”
She threw her head back and laughed. I saw her long throat rippling
with mirth. “We shall come to that later. I want to tell you how
inconsistent Nick was about what he calls my love of money. Dinah, he
has never been poor; he doesn’t know what it is to want to be certain
that one will never again be poor. I knew what was the matter with him,
although he didn’t know what was the matter with me. He had to have
an interval in which to again enclose against me all of his mother’s
scorn, all of his mother’s resentment, of the blatant wealth of the
present New York. Oh, yes: I’ve been studying Nick, as I would study
a character for a novel: there is every reason, now, why I should
understand all his quirks and fancies. Not for the first time, he was
wondering why I alone have the power to rouse him to this admiration
of his mother’s tenets. And I saw his wonder, and his own--in spite of
himself--resentment of me.”
She looked worn and tired, and at the same time she looked deeply
satisfied. Was it because she had finished her book? Was it because she
had decided to understand her husband? She went on to say: “He can’t
see how, when a book is at last finished, one is played out, fagged,
and terribly glad.”
I glanced suspiciously at her. “You are glad of something else,” I
accused her. “What is it?”
She burst out laughing; and I noticed, now, a different quality in her
laughter; it lilted. “Well, then--if you will have it--I am going to
have a child!”