She said curtly: “I’ve decided nothing. Will you, or won’t you, come
down here?”
“Soon after luncheon,” I therefore promised. “After all, I’m
endeavouring to get along myself, you must remember.”
“All right.” The click of the telephone being replaced on its stand was
almost simultaneous with the click of her words.
But she had spoiled my day’s work, and I made the best of it by going
to my agent’s office to clear up necessary sordid details of the ways
and means of living. I believe that I was not really surprised to find
Eva already with him: she had dominated my thoughts for many hours. I
scrutinized her with some anxiety. She was quite herself, and with the
firmest of mouths; and she displayed her customary business acumen in
regard to the terms of the contract. I had sometimes suspected that
Eva’s sense was of a more practical calibre than her husband’s; but I
knew her too well to laugh over it. I watched her, this morning--as
if her mind were on a switch-board, and she pressed a button for the
creative to turn off and pressed another button for the practical to
turn on--drive so hard a bargain that the agent was overcome with
admiration. She had said to me at once: “Dinah darling, you don’t mind
if I go on talking to Edgar? Then we can go straight downtown with my
conscience clear.”
Edgar, cool in the thick of his day’s hubbub, was only too evidently
busy reassuring an anxiety that I failed to discover in her mien. His
manner was a nice blending of his private irrepressible amusement and
his tactful insistence on the helplessness of his clients. In his
experience, authors were fated to suffer every kind of disillusion
and mortification whilst remaining sheathed in their inability to
understand how it all came about. The eye rolling at me might have
winked without change. Dapper, with the comfortable effect of bodily
heat of the dark man on a winter day, Edgar bustled along with what,
in spite of her flat statement of the morning, proved to be his final
arrangements with Eva. “I’ll draw up a water-tight contract. It will
be ready for you to sign tomorrow. I trust--” as if discussing a prima
donna’s husband--“I trust that Mr. Van Suydam is agreeable to your
going?”
“What I do,” she said brusquely, “is my own affair. Is that all we had
to talk over, Edgar?”
Edgar agreed that it was. “Didn’t you want to see me about something?”
he asked me.
Eva answered for me. “She certainly doesn’t! She’s coming with me.” We
left Edgar smiling like an impresario.
“Suppose we go down on the bus, and ride on top?” she suggested. “I
want to take a good look at the new buildings.” And when we thus rode
between them, she said “I wonder?” She continued gazing pensively from
side to side of the spectacular street. “Nick’s right when he says that
I can never understand what I feel until after my next reaction.”
I watched her next reaction flame in her cheeks and die down. And I
discovered that as I was watching her so she was watching me. She
arrested the hand that I extended towards the button which would summon
the bus to stop. “We’re going all the way to Washington Square.”
I said impatiently: “I can’t waste my time this way. A bus ride is
outside my schedule.”
She begged: “Dinah, you won’t fail me? You must go with me to see
Nick’s mother.”
Aghast, I refused sternly. “You do as you wish to do, and then you
expect your friends to get in on the inevitable scene.”
She sighed. “In a lot of ways, I don’t want to go!” And she left me
uncertain as to whether this applied to the call on Mrs. Van Suydam or
the Hollywood project. I sank back on the hard bus seat. I too, sighed.
“You manage it, one way or another,” was my capitulation.
We got out at the terminal in the Square and walked across, past the
Arch, and towards the row of fine old houses on the northern side.
She walked more slowly as she approached her mother-in-law’s door.
She said, almost to herself: “It always smells of the things I really
and truly like--lemon verbena, and lavender, and pot-pourri jars.”
As we drew nearer she walked as if her body, from the weight of her
admiration, grew heavier, as if it were not yet prepared for the house.
She said: “I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say to her.” But she went
doggedly up the steps and rang the bell; and she remembered, she told
me, that never had she been given a latchkey. A trifling thing, today
it worried her.
We were ushered into the drawing-room; and instantly the servant had
left she seized my arm. “Wouldn’t you think she would ask me to come
to her upstairs sitting-room? But she never has.” Never before today
had it appeared to her a simple and direct act of adjusting values. She
began to laugh, however, and whispered to me: “Have you looked at those
stodgy Van Suydam faces along the walls? If I’d become the mother of
one of them, I’d have had a latchkey!”
I sat stiffly, uncomfortable in mind because I had so weakly allowed
myself to be persuaded. I said: “You realize, I trust, that this is the
last thing I shall do for you?”
The curious light flicker had come into her eyes, and as quickly
passed, like the shadow of a cloud upon water. The tranquillity of
this old house pressed in on her as if it were trying to say “Shame
on you!” I saw that she was angry with herself over her vacillation;
and I knew that this would goad her into saying more than she had
planned. More and more I wished that I had not come. She whispered: “If
I liked this sort of thing, I could stay here and be a nice lady and
forget that I ever was an artist. I think I don’t know what I want.”
And as she felt her resolution falter, she invoked her spirit with
simplicity of belief: “Pick your hour upon the stage, Eva Litchfield,
and stick to it. And don’t be a fool, before this old woman, simply
because you admire her as a distinct literary find. That’s all she is,
really, Dinah,” she confided in a more natural tone. “I know--none
better!--that she’s stupid.”
Mrs. Van Suydam entered with a withheld question which was not her
conventional query about tea. “It’s so early that I wasn’t sure tea was
what you wanted.” She turned upon me a frigid face, extended to me a
stiff hand. “Ah Mrs. Avery! An unexpected pleasure.”