He dwelt on this in bewilderment. “She made it plain that she didn’t
need me around at all! How did I fail to make myself indispensable to
her?” And, in contradiction to his previous assertion, the quaver of
his voice proved that he still loved her.
I was kind when I replied to this; but I had decided that we had for
a long enough time beaten around the bush. “The truth about Eva was
that she couldn’t, constitutionally, combine work and marriage. And she
cared more for work.”
We were at cross purposes: he almost screamed: “But Spencer Mapes!”
“So this,” I said slowly, “is what you’ve been believing all this time?”
At this he halted, in his restless prowling of the room, and stood in
front of me. In his blazing eyes I read all that he had believed during
the brief interlude of his marriage. “What, then, did she write you?”
“Just what I’ve said: that at last she saw clearly--that at last she
had made up her mind to walk alone.” I added, letting him have it:
“That lets both you and Spencer Mapes out.”
He dropped into a chair. He looked beaten. He stared straight before
him, and his hands hung flatly, bonelessly, over the arms of the chair.
I noticed that he was older than I had thought.
I wailed: “Oh, Nicholas, surely you remember that she was a singularly
cool and aloof woman? Surely, with that in mind, you should have
understood?”
He was not listening, except to whatever might be echoing in his
memory. He had wished to be reassured; and he was now sure; and over
his spirit, like a smothering pall, had dropped the dreadful sense of
futility. And he said, finally, the most irrelevant thing. “I’m glad
your windows are above the trees. Trees are sometimes curious about
what’s going on in a room, and malevolent.”
The treacherous female instinct for taking care of the male when he is
in trouble overcame me, and I hurried to the kitchenette to mix him a
drink. But, to a greater extent than he seemed, he must have been aware
of his surroundings, for he said at once: “No whiskey! After I’ve told
you what now I must tell you, you will see that--that just this minute
I can’t stand the thought of whiskey.” Of what it had it in its power
to remind him, beyond what he had already told, I could not imagine;
and because I did not wish to hear it, and because my pity for him had
been short-lived, I said, outrageously, that he could then have gin.
This was wasted on him, I am glad to say; without further preamble he
swept into it.
Eva’s study had suffocated him, that night, and he had gone across to
the window and opened it to the fresh air. And the rain had driven
in on him, while the branches of the trees in the back garden had
whipped at him. He told me that he was thinking how no man would ever
possess her. Eva was a being of another plane, and he was looking in
at nightmare. He heard her say that she was cold, and replied: “What’s
needed in here is something natural. Air is the only natural thing left
to you and me.” He stood in the open window for a long time, and it did
him good, easing the tension of his nervous rage.
She muttered something about being chilled because it had been so very
warm in Los Angeles. And, his brain again inflamed by this mention of
the geographical location of Hollywood, he came back to the spiritual
significance of it and slipped the control for which he had fought.
“I’ve always known that Mapes would break us up.” These bitter words he
said so quietly that she settled down in her armchair with a sigh of
relief. She leaned back and closed her eyes. During the interval of his
trip downstairs for drinks, he brooded over that peaceful closing of
her eyes: so she trusted him! She wished to have him--the trustworthy
man--always in her background.
He had so far gone back in his mind that his voice, as he recounted the
following incidents of the night, was brutal.
He went upstairs with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He almost
took me step by step up the stairway, he so carefully told his tale.
She said: “It’s very late, Nick. Don’t you think we might finish this
at another time?”
He said: “We’ll finish it tonight.” He handed her a drink. She had
fallen back in the chair. Even when he stood over her with the glass
she did not look up from what seemed a pose of drooped eyelids. He had
thought her shamming--that is, he acknowledged, if he actually thought
about it. “Take a drink,” he said stridently. “We’ll drink over this
thing. I used to discourage your drinking. This shows! Take a drink!”
Her teeth, he remembered now, chattered as she said she did not want
the drink.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, with pleasure in his brutality. “Are you
afraid of me?”
She said: “It’s just that I’m so cold.”
“Take the drink; drinks warm one.” He had forgotten the open window. He
looked at her curiously. What was it she feared he would do to her? She
stared at him, fascinated as a bird in front of a snake. He lifted his
glass and glared at her over its rim. “Here’s to the cleaning of the
stables!”
She cried eagerly: “Oh, Nick--you do understand? That’s the way I feel
about it.”
He told me that, for the second time in the course of the night, he
roared: “God--Eva!”
She sighed: “You’re hard. You’re like a rock, and I dash my life out at
your feet.”
He growled: “Don’t be literary. I’m fed up with that tripe.” He sat
slumped in his chair. “I hope to God,” he said impressively, “that I’ll
never again run afoul of a literary person!”
He lifted heavy eyes to me. “You see? I was hard as a rock, as she
said. But I beg you to bear in mind that I believed Mapes to be
responsible. I said to her: ‘You need a heavy-fisted beast. You’d eat
the artist who got you--eat him raw. You need to be knocked down. I
wonder if Mapes knows how to knock anyone down?’ Oh--I sneered! She
was breathing in an odd way--shallow, you know. But I was tremendously
wrought up; I didn’t think, at the time, that this might not be fear of
my anger. And she shrugged, and said ‘What’s the use?’ I kept pounding
on her. I said: ‘I suspect you’ll say next that with your genius--the
claims of your genius, the right of your genius to devour every other
right in the world----’ And she said--she was all but supplicating, and
I’ll never forget it as long as I live: that she supplicated me and I
turned a deaf ear----”
There is a ghastly feature of tragedy: at one point or another the
listener laughs out loud--laughs with frenzy, with tears streaming
down the face, choking, gasping, beyond control in this confusion of
the physical with the emotional. I laughed because Eva would have been
disgusted with him for his phraseology.
He turned very pale. “What can you see to laugh at?”
I said: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I went on hurriedly: “You would never
understand why I laughed.”
He muttered: “You must have caught that from Eva.” But he went on. I
got the impression of a long and dreadful struggle on Eva’s part to
find relief--relief which, at first mental, finally turned physical.
She would attempt to speak, and he would talk her down. He would say,
his hand upraised against an interruption: “I know you’re good at
words. But they won’t help you now; you’ve got beyond words.” His hard
eyes rested accusingly on her. But what they saw was not Eva but life
in its futility, and what he felt was that life had no meaning, or, if
it had, it had long since escaped man’s understanding. He felt all at
once tired and old. Profound gloom enveloped him, touching his soul
with its chilly fingers. He began walking heavily up and down Eva’s
study; he did not know what to say next. He seemed, to himself, to have
put into words all of the festering thoughts that he now realized had
lurked within his mind for some time. And still he did not actually
see Eva, there before him: she was a symbol of the irony of life. But
he must have hovered over her as she shrank back in her armchair, for
she screamed. He said: “Oh, I’m not going to strike you. The time for
that has passed.”
He went downstairs. The rooms which were so pretty in the day, and so
softly alluring by lamplight, were inexpressibly sad in the cold and
struggling dawn which down the side streets fought for the right to
birth. The various pieces of furniture were as if shrouded in mourning
habiliments. The curtains at the tall windows, hanging in straight
folds to the floor, waved fitfully; and he was at first too startled
to realize that this was caused by the gusts of damp air coming down
the stair-well from the window that he had opened on the storey above.
He went, aimlessly, into the dining-room; it had the dreariness of a
banqueting hall in which no one had ever made merry over food and wine,
in which no flowers had ever graced the bare mahogany boards, in which
no voices had ever been raised in gay badinage. He shivered. This was
what he had left to him of his home.
He went back upstairs. The halls seemed to echo to his footsteps as if
never had happy people run through the little house; the stairs creaked
under his tread, which had grown sluggish with age in the lapse of the
last hour. As he climbed the stairway he looked back at the front door.
A door had closed in his face. But it was the door to a man’s life, and
it had closed him in, on the wrong side for youth and happiness and on
the side with creeping disillusion--the death of dreams.
Nicholas had told me this in jerky sentences. But he was more than
ever dogged in his determination to go on with it. He might have been
putting on a hair shirt. “I think I was what you might call out of
my head,” he concluded his estimate of his experience. “I’ve only
the vaguest recollections of it. I was profoundly shocked, you see.”
Careful, as always, to be accurate, he added: “I remember my feeling,
and not the links in what I did. And, looking back on it, I lose the
intensity of the feeling because no longer have I the intensity of
the conviction that then animated me. I actually believed, you know,
that----” He was silent for some time. “I can just recall going back
into her study to tell her to go to bed. Her head had dropped on the
arm of her chair, limp and with her hair hanging forlornly over the
chintz. I remember how bright the colours of the chintz were; I daresay
it was by comparison with her white face. She must have been very ill
even then. I thought: ‘She’s trying to put it over on me.’ I went
across the room and shook her arm. ‘Come, Eva. This argument is over.
Closed.’ She didn’t reply. She had fainted. I stood there looking down
at her. In her bids for publicity she had usually made a better show
than this, I said to myself. I saw that the whiskey was still in the
glass by her side, and forced enough down her throat to revive her.”
He had made nothing of what she murmured when she came out of her fit
of unconsciousness. She said: “Nick--help me! I feel so strangely----”
As he resumed his pacing of the room, he had, he told me, glanced
indifferently at her. She had put her hand to her head. “Nothing
hurts, especially, but--” she looked puzzled--“I seemed to slip
out----”
“You would,” he told her, at once brought back to the life that she was
leaving for his share--blank of all that he had hoped she would bring
to him.
She pushed her hair from her face. He remembered the time when he had
liked to call her hair the wings of an angel. Staring at me with his
tragic eyes, he said: “I know, now, that she looked like an angel
always.”
He went through to his own room. He could not breathe, and flung
open the windows. It was nearly morning. The dawn was trying to get
above the roofs of the city. In the cold half-light his drawing-board
mocked him. Life, for him, would now go on, drably, in the half-light.
Clutched by the frenzy that all night he had tried to conquer, he
rushed back to Eva’s study and seized her by the arm. He dragged her
into his room and up to the open window.
“What do you want?” she cried in terror.
“To show you something,” he said through his shut teeth. In these few
minutes the dawn had progressed. Over the sky there was now a wash of
faint apple-green. The sooty sparrows had begun to twitter. Another day
stared at them.
Over the tops of the buildings across the street arose the perfect
tower, New York’s latest defiant gesture to a god of vengeance. His
finger swept in an arc to encompass the city. He said to her--and it
was a deep cry of intolerable pain: “See that? I could have built that
if I hadn’t met you!”