He made a helpless gesture with his hands, thereby loosening his hold
on his stick, which fell with a clatter and gave the excuse for bending
and so hiding from me any actual realization he might have had about
his wife. When he came up, a little red of face, he said indulgently
that she was a child about money. “And, you see, she’s got it in her
head that the falling away of my work is due to a corresponding falling
to pieces of my reputation.” This he also laughed off indulgently,
but not before I had seen that it had hurt him. And, still not having
discussed her with any intimacy of detail, he again waved it off with a
murmur that she was not adult when it came to a question of money. “She
keeps saying that she is so afraid to be poor.”
“She was poor, once,” I put in, “before she came to New York.”
“Ah?” He seemed surprised. “I know nothing of that old life before she
came to New York. Oh, I mean--naturally, I know the general outline.
But I mean to say--you people charge on New York, and show your most
sparkling side, and we take it for granted, you see, that you were
always, and everywhere, brilliant and prosperous and on the crest of
the wave.”
“That’s New York,” I said composedly.
“And then, too, it’s impossible to think of Eva as ever having passed
around the hat, so to speak,” he went on.
I held him to the subject. “The city is in such a blue funk, just now,
that it works on her; of itself, it would frighten her.”
But he was not frightened by New York. He knew that this city, of which
he was an integral part because he had been born of the stock that had
settled it--this city whose bold new growth had been conceived in the
brains of a body of men like himself--was a cruel city and would cast
him out if he lagged; but he was sure that he would not lag and that he
and the city understood each other. He gave a positively affectionate
glance from the window and said, under his breath, “The poor old town!
The poor bastard!” I knew that he thought us the monsters who did not
understand. And yet, Eva had hurt him through the medium of every brick
in every great new structure.
Through the smoke of my cigarette, I studied him. By his attitude
towards what Eva had done he was lying. With him, I fancied,
nervousness took the form of an inability to do any creative work
at all. But in what he next said he went back to our interchange of
remarks on the storming of the fortress by the authors. “You people
who come into New York are so marvellous! Such energy! Such apparent
ignorance that you could possibly fail to conquer! It’s amazing. I’ve
noticed about Eva that she can and does turn on to her work the full
force of her storming rages--I don’t mean that in the least the way
it sounds, however; but she does tear around the house and bemoan
herself--well, then,” he pushed on, now thoroughly involved and, I
saw, desperately taking the way out of telling all, “I remember once
when she had asked me to read proof sheets to her, and she was cutting
up over quite minor mistakes, I assure you--saying that the printers
had tampered with her words, and appealing to me in the most agonized
way to know if I hadn’t an ear--and the telephone rang in that awfully
annoying way it has, off and on, off and on; and she simply screamed to
the maid to tell Winnie Conant that she was out--to tell her she was
dead--to tell her anything. And, the point is, she gets ahead with her
work in, and as a direct result of, her emotional upsets. Sometimes I’m
appalled by her vital energy. But when it comes to turning some of that
energy into the minutiæ of living she’s horrified at the interruption.
She doesn’t,” he concluded helplessly, “open her mail for weeks at a
time.” He appeared to look upon this as one of the most inscrutable
things about his wife.
I asked lazily: “Why should she? You’ve just said that you’re
constantly surprised at the way in which her nervous force is made to
serve the needs of her work. Why try to reform her? She knows what
she’s about.”
He stared. “But it isn’t I who is up to reforming! She’s putting her
shoulder to the wheel of changing me!”
I said to myself: “We’re getting at it!” I asked aloud: “What can you
mean?”
He blurted out that she continually told him of how helpful the wives
of authors frequently were; these wives, it appeared from her caustic
comparisons, saw to it that during the writing of books they were
relieved of all annoyances; and she had always wound up by calling on
God to know what she would do if no one helped her. In his resentment
at this inference, he had, I gathered from what he did not say, studied
her with a new cold detachment. He had reminded her of her tantrums
when she fancied him falling off in his work. He had gone on to draw
her attention to the point of his being the man of the family: would it
be suitable for him to be at her disposal all of the working day? He
had said--he assured me that he had been dispassionate--“Do you realize
that if this goes on I shall be unfit for work?” He gave me a sidelong
glance, and said by way of excuse that our crowd talked to each other
of all details of our lives; he could not see that he was disloyal to
Eva in telling me this.
With no intention of entering into it, I said sweetly that he should be
able to manage his wife as men had always managed their wives, by the
power of a greater shout.
“Are you laughing at me?” he demanded. “For I assure you that it’s no
laughing matter. It has--got out of my hands.” He hurried on with a
rather feeble statement that it was not in any way the fault of Eva,
who was a particularly guileless creature; it was the fault of certain
persons who put things into her head.
“And now you want me to put something into her head?”
He hastened to deny this. He said, out of a clear sky but with immense
vindictiveness, that he should have kicked Spencer Mapes out of the
house long ago. “Why did I fail to kick him out? What’s lacking in me
that I never act on my impulses?” He laughed, then. “I seldom act on
my convictions, to tell the truth. This is because I stop long enough
to think it out--I want to be fair, you know. But a man shouldn’t stop
long enough to think out a crisis. Once it is thought out, a crisis
becomes an emasculated psychological situation. There’s something wrong
with the age,” he finished on a weak plea.
I said drily that it might be that he was deliberately trying to get
himself out of touch with the age. “You’re sorry that you aren’t
sorry that jealous husbands no longer flog gentlemen callers. You
feel it to be the correct impulse; and you haven’t been able to stem
the stream that’s swept our generation beyond it. You’ve turned the
clock back--perversely--and its ticks are muffled in your re-adjusted
hearing. I mean--you did, of your own accord, step out of Washington
Square. Why do you try, in your mind, to step back?” But his clock
ticked steadily, and he was helpless. He wondered, he said, if anyone
in our crowd had the chance, or wished for the opportunity, to lead
private lives. Chatter hit on every nerve in his body. The topics
selected applied to him, to Eva, to the two of them in conjunction--to
all life, he decided almost wildly. Life was dreadful because, when
one needed all strength, all intelligence, in order to see a way
through, one was weakened by the cumulative effect of idle remarks that
irritated already raw nerves. I said: “You shouldn’t be the one to feel
such things. This is your home town.”
He seemed numbed by statements such as this. It was necessary to
explain to Nicholas, always, I said to myself with annoyance. “New
York does something to us who come here from outside.”
He exclaimed with real indignation: “Eva married me. And a wife becomes
what her husband is. Eva is now a New Yorker.”
I contented myself with settling back in my corner of the taxi and from
my huddle remarking that at any rate most of us were bad off. “Our
gills have dried, you might say.” I liked this simile more than did he;
I noticed that he frowned. We went on our way in silence. The great
towers leaned over us, threatening us.
He took it up again. “I fail to see what you’re driving at.”
I drawled: “Maybe I don’t see, myself. It’s the result of the weather.
It’s depressing weather.”
Having let us in with his latchkey, he set me the example of tiptoeing
up the stairs. He might have spared me this anticipatory alarm, for Eva
was not at home. I saw that he was at once agitated. It amused me to
observe that through association with us he had developed a theatrical
attitude towards situations: he went straight to her writing-table, and
on his now pale face there was a look of terror. Had there been a note
propped against her typewriter, I was convinced that before opening it
he would have thought of shooting himself. There was, of course, no
note, and he glanced swiftly at me and smiled. I said, casually: “I
had feared, you know, that you had got the idea that you were in love
with Eva because you were dazzled by the fact of her being, as she
undoubtedly is, a famous person.”
He flung me a look of derision. “Nonsense! I was dazzled by her face.”
He spoke, however, with reservations: he was in no mood for tender
confidences. I wanted, as on many occasions I had wanted, to suggest
to him that Spencer Mapes kept his hold on Eva by telling her with his
eyes, and with a carefully dropped word or two, that she was a great
artist; but Nicholas, always disregarding this side of his wife, would
have wanted to say in reply that Mapes was possibly thankful that he
had not to chant this theme eternally, that the daily burden of Eva’s
mental rapacity was not his to shoulder. I ended by reminding myself
that it was an ungrateful task to maneuver between a husband and wife,
and that, with every intention of keeping out of it, I now found myself
much too deeply in it for my comfort and would do well to retreat.
While Nicholas went downstairs to mix a cocktail, I sat relaxed and
regretting that the better man failed to manage a very ordinary
situation. It might, I said to myself, be an instinctive balancing
of the question between this married pair; for Eva, with what she
considered her stern clear judgment, did not believe in Nicholas. I had
heard her tell him “I asked Spencer Mapes what he seriously thinks of
your work----”
Nicholas had said: “That was nice of you. Does the gentleman know
anything about architecture?”
Eva had an exasperating way of turning deaf to interruptions. “He said
that, while he hadn’t heard of you until we married, he had no doubt
but that, with inspiration----”
“Shall we agree,” Nicholas had said pleasantly, “that we don’t, and
never can, understand each other’s aims?”
I said to myself--lying back in Eva’s armchair and hoping to make my
escape before she should bring a scene in with her: “The real trouble
is that neither of them has a vestige of tact. Talk of eugenics! Two
tactless people shouldn’t be permitted to marry.” In this fashion I
tried to be light about it. It was a difficult task: the room carried a
whisper of desertion.
Mattie came in to light the lamps. The room leapt at me. The scent
of narcissus, from a pot of forced growth on the windowsill, was
overpoweringly sweet and heavy. It was the smell of spring, of the
quickening of the earth; and it was December, and this pot of narcissus
was unnatural. That Mattie in her own strangely natural way disliked
the thing was evidenced by the scorn with which she sniffed the perfume
that with the almost cosmic disregard of plant life fell upon her.
“I’ll jes’ open this winder a little ways so’s you won’t be kilt by
that stink, Miss Dinah,” she said. And into the scented comfort there
poured sound. The radio is the unfailing solace of the American family.
None so poor that they cannot turn it on at breakfast and turn it off
only when they go to bed. The air is free; but in order to hear the
variety of noise for which his soul may be said to yearn there were
jobs, even in hard times, to shout “on the air.” The latest breadline
of New York wound in and out the doors of the big broadcasting
concerns. I cried to Mattie: “Shut the window in a hurry! I’d rather
smother.”
Mattie said: “Yes’m?” She left the room with eloquent shoulders.
Nicholas came with the cocktails. “I think she will be in soon,” he
ventured. It was clear that he thought nothing of the sort.
“I’ve been thinking over things,” I threw myself into what I had but
now decided to avoid. “There’s reason in abundance for Eva being
worried, you know. I mean, I know she was very apprehensive about the
crashing of banks; and now that it’s happened----”
Busy with the cocktails, he cast at me an incredulous look. “My job is
to see that she’s not worried.”
“She sees it all around her,” I explained. “Her friends are worried
sick. The town is on the run.”
“New York?” He was still more openly incredulous. “But that’s only
temporary, of course.”
I was in the mood for considering his civic pride revolting. “So
nothing can open your eyes?”
“You think, then, that she is really worried? What,” he demanded, still
skeptical, “does she see, then, that would so upset her?”
“She might have run across what I found myself in the thick of,
yesterday,” I threw in the teeth of his laughter. “She didn’t, it
happens, see this particular thing; but it isn’t the only shocking
sight in town--your prosperous town!” I glared at him; and I saw only
the surface of his lightness. “It wouldn’t hurt you, to be thrown out
to hunt a job for yourself!” I said hatefully.
His mirth stopped as suddenly as if he had turned off a spigot. “Did
you never hear of keeping up one’s courage by making fun?” he asked
gently. “No, Dinah: I’m--I’m scared to death. And I’m frightened over
something so much more vital than money, so much more necessary than a
job: happiness with one’s wife.”
We exchanged a long look, at the end of which I told him,
commiseratingly trying to get his mind off his anxiety, that which I
had intended using as a cudgel to bruise him. “I got the chance to
see it,” I flung myself into it; “and now I’d give much if I hadn’t.
We crowded into a slit of a place, and peeked through a large pane of
glass let into the wall.”
He asked patiently in what wall the pane of glass was. “Don’t make it
sound like Alice and the looking-glass, for I don’t feel whimsical.”
I acknowledged to a corresponding lack of whimsy. “It was the
trying-out of applicants for the job of radio announcer. We looked
through the pane of glass as they admitted them one by one, like those
hogs that go sliding down a chute at a slaughter house. Only the hogs
don’t realize. And I assure you, Nicholas, that those poor wretches
took every conceivable test of their courage. I don’t doubt but that
they were hungry. The people on the street corners, selling apples,
have made us all hunger-conscious.” I attacked my cocktail with thirst
engendered by the hunger-consciousness.
“You have the rapt look of the literary sleep-walker,” he stated. He
had seen the look on various faces, and I judged by his accent that he
did not like it. He glanced at his watch, and frowned.
“Listen, Nicholas?” I urged. “Do listen? Behind the pane of glass we
were like fish in an aquarium. You know how fish goggle out at humanity
filing past their tank? We goggled.” The candidates for the one vacant
job were creatures outside the world of the fish in the tank. The fish
saw them, through the pane of glass, and heard not a word from them.
The voices booming at intervals through the loud speaker above the
control board beside us might have come from another dimension. Young
men, middle-aged men, blustering men and uncertain men, strode past the
pane of glass to their salvation or their doom. It had been a motley
lot, I reported to Nicholas. There had been a clergyman, an old man.
He interrupted: “Are you trying to drag me in spirit to the pane of
glass?”
“It wouldn’t hurt you,” I retorted. I wondered what detained Eva.
Looking at the heaps of apples spotting the streets with red, he might
feel that all was well and that Christmas was hot on the heels of a
town gone mad with apprehension. He was uneasy, but his uneasiness was
on account of Eva’s delay in getting home for the security of the night.
Again he looked at his watch. “Dinah, I must interrupt to say----”
But I rushed along. “Would you believe the cruelty of it? They gave
them, as the ‘humorous test,’ that ghastly thing about the man worth
while is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong! Are you
listening to what I’m telling you?”
He listened. But he listened for the sound of a key in the lock.
“Clutching the mike as if it might get away before they made good,
they smiled because this would prove them to be men worth while. Their
smiles were awful. They stretched their lips over their teeth and
didn’t dare draw them back into place. The poor clergyman tried to
believe that he was exhorting a congregation. His voice smiled, his
face was benevolent, his eyes beamed kindly down from an imaginary
pulpit. And because he fell into his old way of drugging his
congregation, no one listened to his words. But when he came towards
our pane of glass to say goodbye--they were punctilious about this
ceremony--he walked bravely; and he smiled. Oh, damn! Listen, Nicholas:
I’ve got to have another drink!”
Nicholas said: “You don’t think they are the only men in this town who
go on smiling because they don’t dare stop? She told me, a few days
ago, that she must get away. She told me that she couldn’t work at
home. She told me that I hadn’t the right to forbid it, because she
could always make the money to go with. She was sitting just there at
her writing-table, but she had whirled around so that her back was
to her typewriter; she didn’t seem to know why she was there. She
said that she felt me disapprovingly in the house. I asked her if she
realized that I might feel her disapprovingly in the house? She said
that she wanted peace; and I asked her if she didn’t grasp it that she
wasn’t giving me peace?”
I found that I had crouched back in my chair--crouching away from what
I had loosed in him.
“It’s difficult to talk to Eva; she isn’t logical in her talk. I
had all sorts of thoughts on what I’d say in order to clear things
up--arrive at a good and fair understanding with her; but, as always,
I no longer knew what I had wanted to say when I entered the room. I
could think of nothing but plain words, and so I said it outrageously:
‘It has seemed to me, lately, that we’re going on the rocks.’ And
she didn’t answer this, naturally. She had tears in her eyes, so she
couldn’t have been trying to hurt me when she said she wondered why
a woman might not claim the right to peace for doing her work. She
wondered why it is that only a man may say he will have it--that only a
man may fight for it, kill for it. And I urged her to sit down and try
to talk like a sensible woman. And she said that if ever again she had
to listen to that God-awful term ‘sensible woman’ applied to her she
would---- Oh, she left it up in the air what she would do!” He rapped
on her writing-table with strong fingers: it sounded like the roll of a
snare drum. “So you see it isn’t only her fear about money. We did have
this row.”
I saw that he had marked that in her bearing which had shaken him. It
was shocking for Eve, of all people, to show uncertainty of her powers;
but he had seen, as I gleaned, that it was uncertainty which was now
shaking the foundations on which her life had been built up. Without
her pride and joy in her talent, Eva would be a broken woman. He told
me that she had all at once cried, as if she had read his mind: “You
can’t take it in that something dreadful is happening inside me? You
can’t comprehend that an artist’s imagination is a delicate, brittle,
easily injured quality?” He had been thrown, by this, back to his cool
detachment; although it was not in a spirit of cool detachment that
he reënacted this scene for my benefit. He was immensely stirred by
the recollection of it. In his intelligence he understood only too
well that this was the pose of the creative worker in all arts save
architecture, but with his heart he realized that under her doubts
Eva’s beauty had faded. It began to seem to him that the conceit of
artists is a defence against their own fainting spirit, which otherwise
might cringe before the world’s neglect. But she had at once put it on
him; she had explained that she felt as if she were beating her head
against something more unyielding than the proverbial stone wall when
she tried to argue with him. She said it was the fixity of his smile.
“You don’t know how you stare at me!” she had said in what amounted to
a shriek.
“This was where I was cruel to her, Dinah--and I know it now. I suppose
I knew it then, and wanted to be cruel. You see, I don’t trust the
influence of that fellow Mapes. You can never put your finger on Eva’s
motives; they’re damned complex for a simple man to follow.”
“She is complex,” I put in. I wondered if he were going to regret
having told me this. But he had to tell someone: even men feel the
necessity to talk, I reflected derisively. “Her acts are necessarily
hard to understand, although I don’t doubt that they are simple, and
above board, if you could get at them.”
“Then what does she think--feel--about this Mapes fellow?” he asked
urgently, but looking ashamed of himself.