Looking back on that dreadful winter, I seem to have run across Eva
only upon occasions of disaster. I must have seen her in quieter
moments, but the memory of pleasant things is overlaid with misery.
I knew, when I started for the party given by Daniel Pentreath, that
the evening would be a sign-post along the way. It was not cheering,
upon my somewhat late arrival, to fall immediately into Florence
Quincy’s hands; her laughter was derisive, was mournful, was a brew of
all the sorts of laughter within the range of man. “You, too, searching
for the unattainable?”
“This is, then, one of your evenings in the grand manner,” I commented
with resignation. “I asked you a simple question: what’s doing?”
“And I answered you, perhaps less simply. For none of us know what’s
doing.” Her painted mouth set in a smile which was the antithesis of
her laughter: when she laughed, her face gave the impression of having
broken in order to allow sound to escape. “Doubtless you will get off
in a corner--and sit on your silly foot--and moon about your soul;
and if you had a soul would you be here? There’s the answer. It’s the
answer to everything about us, to every one of us and our questions
about everything.”
“And maybe I agree with you.”
I saw the shiver which ran along her fine skin, so that the heavy
powder she wore cracked, and rolled into ridges. “There’s something in
the air tonight--something bad!” With her vermilion lip-stick, and her
dead white thick powder, she was a tragic clown.
Annoyed by the sound of a man’s groans coming from the adjacent
bedroom, we moved away, although groans were not uncommon here.
Daniel Pentreath loomed over the studio, his gigantic chair, painted
as starkly vermilion as Florence’s lips, a throne lifted above his
mob of guests. He wore pyjamas, and his grey curls thrust themselves
independently into the air; except for his unusual size, he might have
been a bad boy escaped from bed. His great voice roared out from a
great mouth like a cavern. Pentreath was indifferent to the fact that
he had been born too late by many centuries. His behaviour was simply
direct and self-indulgent. Topping his guests by his great height, he
dwarfed them by his ruthless ability. “Hey!” he shot at someone, a
vocal projectile. As most of his teeth were gone, he spoke in short
sentences which he threw against his gums. “You gal! Keep your head
still!”
“He’s making a sketch of Eva,” Florence explained. “She kept well in
his sight until he did. She brought on herself whatever comes.”
For as he worked Pentreath muttered, and snorted, and called all women
kittle cattle. “Heugh! Hard as nails--mean as the devil--vain as
peacocks: all women! Ornamental, though--silly creatures! Strut like
peacocks. Prancing--proud of their tail feathers. Ain’t natural: ought
to leave tail feathers to the males, like the birds.”
Florence and I moved cautiously to a position whence we could see
Eva. She sat against the vast canvas of Pentreath’s latest study of
mountains: they were menacing mountains of black rock. She was very
pale. Occasionally she looked helplessly around the room. “I know all
about myself,” she said. “I wish you wouldn’t do me. You’re cruel.”
I thought: “Like the gods.” But if I had spoken aloud no one would
have heard, for Pentreath’s bellow again shattered the room. “Pretty
things--glaciers,” he remarked with a change of imagery; “cool, and
quiet--full of clear colour--know where they’re goin’ and get there!”
The groans from the bedroom were more insistent, rising, I made no
doubt, in order to beat out Pentreath at his own game of noise. A
gorgeous youth came up to Florence, his Greek profile magnificently the
only classic in the room. “Florence dear--do you mind?--I’m afraid that
this time Barney will truly do something desperate.”
Florence said waspishly: “Do I have to take care of everyone who’s
incapable of taking care of themselves?” She pulled aside the curtain
shrouding the bedroom door, and out gushed the lamentations of Barney.
Over her splendid shoulder, she grimaced for my benefit. “I take it
they’ve had one of their quarrels,” she remarked; and went inside. The
Greek profile rested picturesquely against the door jamb; its owner
said to me that he was afraid the trouble was Barney’s disapproval of
one of the boys.
Urged by a spiritual necessity for physical support, I went over
to lean against another door jamb; and from the next room I heard
Anthony Bloodgood making love to a New York girl whom we knew as one
of those who are “sometimes going to write because they must express
themselves.” Anthony’s voice was strange to me; it was as if his heart
were singing because he was with her, and I recalled having heard that
he had been in love with her since her school days. He said: “When
we’re married, Janny, we can have these people at our home.” If she
replied, I missed it; but Anthony’s sense of the magnanimity of his
conduct again caused his voice to ring out boldly. “You don’t know it,
Janny, but I’m not a brute. I know all about it, loveliest! I’m not
going to scold you. I’ve done it myself, you see.”
“You!” The girl’s laughter was convulsive. “You! Oh---- I can’t bear
it!”
Indulgently, he shared her amusement. “Carouse around a bit? You don’t
think a chap can reach my age without having racketed around town; do
you?”
All men spoke the same words to all girls; all men, in more or less
roundabout ways, boasted of their early peccadillos. I was mildly
amused. Glancing around for some answering smile--for this was the only
comic relief of the evening--I met the eyes of a woman who had that
instant taken up a position which enabled her to watch the pair. This
woman, an interior decorator, was herself the rarest decoration of any
room. She had a white face to which she added emphasis by her lack
of the slightest touch of rouge. Her hair was densely black with no
highlights and with not a trace of the blue sheen which is the beauty
of actually black hair. Her eyes, a burning black without glitter, and
exceptionally large, revealed at this moment a wild intensity. She
looked like some ancient conception of a goddess who takes away, but
never bestows, life. I remembered that her hand was small and like a
bird’s claw, and that it was always bone-dry. This woman, then, stood
looking intently at the girl Janny, and the girl left Anthony Bloodgood
and went to her.
The studio was more peaceful than this, although Florence had been
right about the tension in the air--tension flowing after me, catching
up with me, as I found a chair in a comparatively hidden nook behind
the piano. But in the midst of my burst of pure gratitude for the chair
I realized that my host held nicely suspended over the crown of my head
a beer bottle, or some such missile. The ludicrous feature of it--if
one excepts the character of the weapon--was that he looked thoughtful.
“Go on!” I instructed him. “Do it! You haven’t the idea that I care if
you bash my head in, have you?”
“Heugh!” Pentreath grunted, and made off down the room. I scrambled
from the chair. With elaborate carelessness I lit a cigarette; and I
noticed, with impersonal interest, that my hand shook. He had, then,
frightened me. I hurried to tell Florence, who had come from the
bedroom, also carelessly smoking, that he had made me see that bad as
existence was I liked it. “He knocked into a cocked hat all that Yoga
stuff you forever tease me about. I wonder what would be happening to
me now, if he’d come down with that beer bottle?” And she speculated,
but indifferently, on whether I was unstrung because of the beer bottle
being capable of causing pain, or because of the tottering of my belief.
Eva came up to us with a reproach. “Why didn’t one of you make me go
home? I have a feeling of something menacing. I can’t understand what
is going on. Tony Bloodgood is looking queer, and hunting for Nick: and
where--I want to know--is Nick? Oh, Dinah--you always take up for him;
but even you must acknowledge that he shouldn’t go off and leave me to
face this sort of thing alone! Some people may be able to bear this
sort of thing; but if you realized how things affect me----” She went
on about artists being extraordinarily sensitive to impressions.
Florence asked if she did not think we had to hear a lot of that; and
turned on her heel and left us. Enviously I gazed after her: I never
acted on my impulses, and they died quickly. With a sigh, I suggested
that we go down to the sidewalk and get some air.
On the steep and winding stairway another fugitive rushed past us and
flung open the street door. We reached the sidewalk as the girl Janny
was being handed into a cruising taxi by the night watchman on the
block. The watchman treated us to a leer. “Lor!” he remarked affably.
“I’m used ter ladies bustin’ outer that there house! I knows, when I
sees ’em atearin’ for the street, I better git ’em a taxi in a jiffy.”
We stayed out long enough for a cigarette. I think that we were both
reluctant to reënter the house. The watchman hung around, senilely
communicative. “It pays ter be a watchman, on some blocks of this here
town. You know this town well, ladies?”
The walls of the winding stairway were painted with beasts and birds
unnaturally entangled amid unnatural forests. With every step that
we mounted we became more apprehensive. But Eva said: “We’re being
foolish; aren’t we? There’s no bogy lying in wait for us. But I’ll own
up, Dinah, that there are times, of late, when I feel afraid in the
dark. It must be this damnable depression you forever talk about. I
feel---- Well, I don’t feel natural.”
As if in answer to her reassurance that no bogy-man was around the next
turn of the stairs, there was a crack, a thud, and outcries from the
studio. Past us, as we shrank back against the dreadful beasts on the
wall, they dragged a youth with a bloody head. “Heugh! Got him!” And
Pentreath returned to his seat on the piano bench where he played the
interrupted accompaniment to the song of a large woman with a large
voice. The woman’s voice easily soared above the febrile scale of
comments on the recent violence. She sang a thing that sounded angelic.
The damaged youth, supported on either side by youths who winced when
his blood spattered them, was being borne to the bathroom for repairs.
He opened his eyes and said he did not see what had made Dan so mad at
him. He called out: “Jonathan! Oh, Jonathan! Do please come and hold my
hand while they wash my head?”
The boy Barney shuddered. “My goodness! How can you have the nerve to
ask such a thing with a face all nasty and gory like that?”
“Jonathan?” the injured youth implored. “Do please come with me while
they wash my head? Please, Jonathan?”
“No, I won’t!” said the gorgeous youth with the profile. “I’m glad of
it!”
Through the now uneasy movement of his guests from room to room,
Pentreath played and listened to the song; his face was fine and rapt.
Eva’s spasmodic clutch was on my arm. “Pentreath isn’t human, is he?
But he’s great! Why should any of us mind what he does, or says? That
is what it is to be truly great.”
Many drank at the sideboard. Addis Wickersham pushed through the throng
to ask Eva if it were true that Nicholas had eloped with Gertrude
Cuyler. “And here am I, on my way to console my own wife, which you
will admit is a novelty.” He added that it had been reported to him
that his wife was in possession of Pentreath’s mammoth bedstead, from
the depths of which she declared her intention of ending it all. “A
side show to the greater show of the party,” commented Wickersham.
“You ladies are always upset, in this house; because Daniel steals the
spotlight.” His sonorous voice flowed to the bedstead in the adjoining
room. But something was missing from this splendid organ; who could be
the centre of things at Pentreath’s but Pentreath himself?
It occurred to us, belatedly, that we missed Molly Underhill from
amongst these excitedly moving women. And someone said: “She’s off
somewhere trying to get herself ruined.”
I found myself near Nicholas; and both of us had lost Eva. He said: “Do
try to find out what’s on Eva’s mind?”
I endeavoured to reply with comfortable assurance: “Oh, it’s merely the
times.”
And at this moment, through a gap in the throng which had again turned
delirious, we saw Eva’s little mouth going--going; and someone with a
pale face came up and said that Nicholas must get Eva home before she
should have a breakdown. I heard Nicholas mutter that this would be a
good chance to hit Mapes with a beer bottle, and saw that the man with
the pale face was he. But Mapes at once faded into the mass of people,
and Eva, her cheeks wet with tears, waited for him. But I thought
that she waited for anyone who would help her. People were crowding,
but I got the impression that they did not attend Eva. It was a man
around whom they clustered, necks stretching to see over each other’s
shoulders.
His pleasant face dead white, his gentle eyes glassy, his plump form
on the verge of collapse, this young man, Freye Remsen, felt no ground
under his feet. He who had talked to every desperately threatening
artist in New York--he who had believed these people to be the great
tragic characters of the century--had now looked on the face of
death by self-inflicted violence, and everything he believed had
been at once reversed. He babbled: “I was going to bring Molly here
tonight--and her apartment was filled with the police and they held me
up and pushed me out. I was going to bring her here tonight. The place
was full of policemen.”
Pentreath stepped down from his vermilion throne. He reared up like a
primeval statue. He bellowed: “Well? Ain’t that what we’ll all come to?
Ain’t we all mad as coots?”
[Illustration]