She said: “I overheard someone saying it about me, as I came over to
speak to you: and it’s true! It’s true!”
I bounced off the foot on which I had sat doubled comfortably. “What of
it?”
She said: “I didn’t want it to get out on me. Oh, hell--where’s a
drink?”
James Pomeroy hastened to get the drink, and watched her with interest
as she tossed it down. “And----?” he encouraged.
Molly smiled languishingly up at him. “How long have you been leaning
over the back of the sofa?”
“Not long enough to hear much,” he reassured her. “Do finish it? You
were going to say----?”
“I was telling Dinah a lot of fibs because she is simple enough to
believe me.” She rose and sauntered off, swaying her hips.
Pomeroy said to me: “She’s a frustrated victim of her early
environment. She’s afraid she will die in the state of grace that her
mother would wish for her. She will be mortified when she faces God.”
I bewailed myself: “We’re vultures, aren’t we? We pick bones. I’m sick
of it--sometimes.”
“Dinah--darling!” said Pomeroy. “Don’t allow yourself to become a
virago.”
All around us, talk was served in tantalizing tidbits. Robed like a
vampire from some unconscious wish, Florence Quincy stood, with wispy
grey draperies flattened against the wall, moodily observing because
she lacked the desire that at this moment would have thrown her into
something. Her face in repose was never cheerful. We had always fallen
short in guessing what she was after. Pomeroy said to me: “It’s simple
to guess what Molly Underhill is after: she’s after a load of sin.” He
continued buzzing in my ear.
But in my ear others buzzed. “I myself shall try Africa next,” said
Justo Zermonte. “The only thing one cannot find in New York is a Negro
at home.”
Someone busily took down notes: I heard the scratching of a pencil.
“You don’t object if I use that in my column, do you? No one else has
thought to say it.”
Molly Underhill huddled in a distant corner with one of her youthful
admirers. She made me uneasy. But Pomeroy said: “She can’t harm them,
and they can’t harm her.”
A young Jew flung himself at the piano and played the “Rhapsody in
Blue”; his face, fiercely intent, wretched, worn, was removed, by his
music, from the people in the room. His fingers drew, through the
piano, all that was pent up in us. Thwarted passions, disillusioned
passions, passions that had leapt the fence: what did it matter,
when the result was suffering? I was softened in my judgments by the
“Rhapsody in Blue.” I enquired of Pomeroy if conventions had come out
of God’s way, or if God were Himself the product of conventions.
“Dearest!” said Pomeroy, putting up his eyeglass to look me over.
“Don’t be silly.”
I said to myself: “I won’t talk. I won’t speak another word from the
real inside.” And at once I said to Florence Quincy: “I’ve been working
it out--what we all need; and it looks as if it of course has to turn
us into hell cats--if we do it.”
“We are hell cats anyhow,” said Florence. “But what do you mean?”
I thought of Eva. “In order to do creative work one must have--and
preserve at all costs, even to acting as a slow poison on those who
come in contact with us--the heart of fire and the brain of ice. That’s
the working combination.”
We all thought of Eva, today. “It works both ways,” said Florence
fairly. “The unfortunates who take us over poison us. Why do they ever
want us?” she pursued pensively. “We never lapse into nice comfortable
bodies around the home fireside.”
James Pomeroy remarked that every now and then he, on his part, almost
bolted in the other direction. “There’s Priscilla Swords: upon my word,
I have to hold myself back from bolting in her direction.” He expounded
his reasons for never actually bolting to her. He had said to her that
he was about to give her up as hopeless; he had said: “I’ve taken you
everywhere; I’ve arranged for you to meet the most famous people in New
York; and what impression has it made on you? Not a dent!”
Priscilla Swords had given him her wide smile. She had teeth, he said,
that were purely white. “But I do appreciate it, Jimmie. I think they
are very nice.”
He said that at this there was nothing to do but break into a genuine
groan. “Oh, God, Priscilla! That’s the one thing they aren’t!”
We were laughing over this when the Van Suydams walked in; the smile in
Eva’s eyes as they met mine was part of my amusement and at the same
time apart from it. She paused long enough to whisper to me: “She has
put on her diamond earrings!”
The earrings winked merrily as the elderly lady turned her head. They
were large single stones pulling down by their weight the lobe of the
ear. On her very small hands heavy diamond rings glittered, and on her
bosom sparkled an imperious diamond brooch of the extinct sunburst
design. Hooked into her black velvet creation with the hereditary lace
after-thought, she trod the measure of a lady’s entrance. I heard her
say to Charles Glidden, who, somewhat dashed, met her as she advanced:
“A small glass of sherry, if you please.” She observed the party with a
detached interest worthy of her host. “Times are changing; and I hope
I am not narrow-minded,” she observed graciously. The _lorgnette_ came
into play. She appeared to be indifferent to the fact that we watched
her as she dissected us; she might have been oblivious of it.
Florence nudged me: “Too bad! And on top of that, too. But here is, at
last, the great unknown.”
The exalted one swept into the room on Glidden’s arm. She was at once
correctly arranged in a strategic position, and we began filing past.
Authors buzzed, near to the celebrity and watching her, a gigantic hive
of industrious bees. She was encased, as in a cuirass, with the aura of
undisputed fame. Armed with her knowledge that nowhere in the world of
the English language was she unknown, she beamed, as she could afford
to beam, on her court. She was kind, as the great are kind. And Glidden
smiled at his prize, and at his party, and enjoyed a three-ring circus
in his mind.
Someone said to Florence and me: “She’s a bit old-fashioned in her
style, but she can run for a while longer on her prestige, of course.
The old war horses can’t be killed off, worse luck.”
And Pomeroy chuckled: “So she got under your skin, with her formula?”
For the exalted one had dropped into a chant as the easiest way out.
Her voice trailing after every introduction performed by Glidden, she
turned like an automaton to meet outstretched hands. “So glad to meet
you. So glad to meet you. Let me see, now--what is it you have written?
So stupid of me to forget.”
“It’s a swell show,” said Florence. We found that still we were
accompanied by James Pomeroy. “And to think that I started to go to the
theatre instead!” gloated Pomeroy. We hung, enthralled, on the exalted
one’s lips, which continued to mouth her formula: “So glad to meet you.
What is it you have written? So glad to meet you.”
Getting away from her husband and mother-in-law, Eva fled across the
room. “I can’t bear another blow! Did you hear her? What does it come
to--that I’ve worked, and sold my soul--when that woman asks what I’ve
written?”
“Why can’t you laugh at it?” asked Florence.
However, to even Spencer Mapes’ suave interjections she merely shook a
despondent head.
“This won’t do,” said the sophist. “You will have to get up your
fighting spirit.”
She said nothing to this.
He pursued his theme. “If you are to beat her out, you must keep
yourself in the pink of condition--like a prize fighter, if you’ll
pardon the comparison. It’s no half-time job--building up a great
reputation.”
She said: “True.” Her voice was discouraged.
He pushed it. “For the reason that women let other interests get in
their way----” His pause was impressive. But his lips remained pursed
for another cunning effort.
She appeared to be lost in thought. Her eyes were now fixed on him.
I looked around for reinforcements; but Florence and Pomeroy had
sauntered off.
Mapes’ hesitation might have arisen from a noble wish to be fair.
Eva’s face was pale; her lips parted as if to speak, but she contented
herself with another shake of her head. He said: “You mustn’t think
for an instant that I’ve anything but your ultimate good at heart. I
feel--to return to our unworthy comparison--that, in a way, I am your
trainer.”
She said: “I know. It’s very good of you.”
He put a commiserating hand on hers. “Don’t be coddled the wrong
way--the injudicious way. Remember you’ve your great gift to guard, and
for the sake of that gift everything you may want to do yourself--as a
woman--must go into the discard.”
A strange exaltation took possession of her. Her cheeks once more
bright with the clear pink so characteristic of her beauty, she cried:
“Oh, thank you, thank you, Spence! You don’t know what a friend you’ve
shown yourself to be--today--at exactly this time!”
He stood looking after her as she went away; and I stood looking
fixedly at him. He said to me, surprisingly: “It’s desecration!”
“Ah you frighten me!” I almost wailed. “You frighten me! What are you
trying to do to her? You are revolting!”
“My dear Dinah,” he replied smoothly, “you never use the delicate
rapier; do you? Your weapon is the battle-ax.”
I said: “What a friend you are!” I pushed through the crowd in pursuit
of Eva. But she, on her part, searched for Nicholas. I caught her as
she said to him, excitedly, that her brain was on fire, that it burned
the inside of her head. She cried to him: “Do you realize that no one
considers me? Have you ever stopped to think that everyone conspires
to use up my strength?” Had he noticed, she enquired as if it were his
fault, that idiot Molly Underhill holding on to her while she told her
troubles? “People--” she almost raved--“should keep their troubles to
themselves.”
Nicholas was mild about it. “Early to bed, for you. You are working
yourself up.”
With her sudden compunction, she touched his arm. “Poor Nick! It was a
sad day for you, when you married me, wasn’t it?” For a time she stood
quietly, regarding him with kindliness. Then she shrugged. “But you
would do it, you know. All right! That’s that. Find your mother, and we
will go home.”
It was the next day when I heard from Eva the sequel to the evening.
Mrs. Van Suydam had sat erect in the taxi, resisting her natural
fatigue. “We shall have a lovely Christmas, children,” she had remarked
affably. “And I hope it may be a bracing, biting spell of weather, such
as we had--I recall it vividly--the winter Nicholas was born.”
Eva’s interruption had been abrupt. “It will be a Christmas of work,
for me.”
It appears that the elderly lady had protested. Eva had explained
with scant courtesy that she must start in at once on her next
book, whereupon her mother-in-law had called such a course, “in her
condition,” suicidal. “Think of your unborn child,” Mrs. Van Suydam had
persisted, driving Eva--so she told me--frantic with her insistence on
the necessary sublimation of Eva Litchfield to the child. “Don’t push
yourself,” said Mrs. Van Suydam in a voice of stern admonition.
Eva said that she herself spoke through set teeth; she was by now in an
agony of determination. “I’ll beat that dreadful woman if it takes me
years! And that is exactly what I’ve got to do--push myself,” she had
finished in a cry on this her instant response to her own doubts.
The little house was cozy, and Eva’s study heavy with the scent of
the roses that Nicholas kept on her writing-table. They stood looking
at each other. Nicholas smiled, she remembered, but she knew that her
own face was grave. He was still thinking, she assured me, of the
emotion of the day when she had told him that she was going to have a
child. Her hand, however, was at once raised against him. “Wait!” Held
suspended in his recapture of the lovely mood, he did in fact wait. He
was helpless, as are all men, in face of this mystery of the creation
of another human being.
With the exception of the springing flame in her gaze, she did not
move. She was arrested in any ordinary motion by the violence of her
purpose. “I am not going to have that baby!”
She reported to me: “I saw straight into his mind. It’s easy to see
into a man’s mind when you’ve been married to him.” He was conscious of
his face. He had felt the muscles drawing tightly--drawn back to his
ears, drawn around his nose--drawing his mouth into a new and strange
mouth. In his mind that Eva so easily read there was a crash, as if a
house that he had built had fallen.
She again spoke to him. “You might as well understand, first as last,
that I have no intention of going through with it.” She said she began
walking up and down the room. “I have my work to do. I have my career
to consider. Let other women have children.”
And again she was very sure that she saw into his head, and she was not
moved by what she saw. He looked at her with impersonal wonder; for
this much he had discovered--that she was ugly. But he realized that he
must say something. Eva reminded me that she had told me, upon another
occasion when she had reported one of their scenes, that when he was
exalted he was not under a compulsion to speak. He said, at any rate:
“You would do this--you?”
She said to me: “If you keep your head, and watch--and you are a
novelist--life is dramatic: isn’t it?” What she said to him was: “You
are being melodramatic.”