He dominated and attracted her, and at the same time filled her with
anxiety. Confused by his mixture of solidity and self-indulgence, of
sentiment and cynicism--incongruities which her gentle mind was unable
to resolve--Paula grew to think of him as two alternating personalities.
When she saw him alone, or at a formal party, or with his casual
inferiors, she felt a tremendous pride in his strong, attractive
presence, the paternal, understanding stature of his mind. In other
company she became uneasy when what had been a fine imperviousness to
mere gentility showed its other face. The other face was gross,
humorous, reckless of everything but pleasure. It startled her mind
temporarily away from him, even led her into a short covert experiment
with an old beau, but it was no use--after four months of Anson's
enveloping vitality there was an anæmic pallor in all other men.
In July he was ordered abroad, and their tenderness and desire reached a
crescendo. Paula considered a last-minute marriage--decided against it
only because there were always cocktails on his breath now, but the
parting itself made her physically ill with grief. After his departure
she wrote him long letters of regret for the days of love they had
missed by waiting. In August Anson's plane slipped down into the North
Sea. He was pulled onto a destroyer after a night in the water and sent
to hospital with pneumonia; the armistice was signed before he was
finally sent home.
Then, with every opportunity given back to them, with no material
obstacle to overcome, the secret weavings of their temperaments came
between them, drying up their kisses and their tears, making their
voices less loud to one another, muffling the intimate chatter of their
hearts until the old communication was only possible by letters, from
far away. One afternoon a society reporter waited for two hours in the
Hunters' house for a confirmation of their engagement. Anson denied it;
nevertheless an early issue carried the report as a leading
paragraph--they were "constantly seen together at Southampton, Hot
Springs, and Tuxedo Park." But the serious dialogue had turned a corner
into a long-sustained quarrel, and the affair was almost played out.
Anson got drunk flagrantly and missed an engagement with her, whereupon
Paula made certain behavioristic demands. His despair was helpless
before his pride and his knowledge of himself: the engagement was
definitely broken.
"Dearest," said their letters now, "Dearest, Dearest, when I wake up in
the middle of the night and realize that after all it was not to be, I
feel that I want to die. I can't go on living any more. Perhaps when we
meet this summer we may talk things over and decide differently--we were
so excited and sad that day, and I don't feel that I can live all my
life without you. You speak of other people. Don't you know there are no
other people for me, but only you...."
But as Paula drifted here and there around the East she would sometimes
mention her gaieties to make him wonder. Anson was too acute to wonder.
When he saw a man's name in her letters he felt more sure of her and a
little disdainful--he was always superior to such things. But he still
hoped that they would some day marry.
Meanwhile he plunged vigorously into all the movement and glitter of
post-bellum New York, entering a brokerage house, joining half a dozen
clubs, dancing late, and moving in three worlds--his own world, the
world of young Yale graduates, and that section of the half-world which
rests one end on Broadway. But there was always a thorough and
infractible eight hours devoted to his work in Wall Street, where the
combination of his influential family connection, his sharp
intelligence, and his abundance of sheer physical energy brought him
almost immediately forward. He had one of those invaluable minds with
partitions in it; sometimes he appeared at his office refreshed by less
than an hour's sleep, but such occurrences were rare. So early as 1920
his income in salary and commissions exceeded twelve thousand dollars.
As the Yale tradition slipped into the past he became more and more of a
popular figure among his classmates in New York, more popular than he
had ever been in college. He lived in a great house, and had the means
of introducing young men into other great houses. Moreover, his life
already seemed secure, while theirs, for the most part, had arrived
again at precarious beginnings. They commenced to turn to him for
amusement and escape, and Anson responded readily, taking pleasure in
helping people and arranging their affairs.
There were no men in Paula's letters now, but a note of tenderness ran
through them that had not been there before. From several sources he
heard that she had "a heavy beau," Lowell Thayer, a Bostonian of wealth
and position, and though he was sure she still loved him, it made him
uneasy to think that he might lose her, after all. Save for one
unsatisfactory day she had not been in New York for almost five months,
and as the rumors multiplied he became increasingly anxious to see her.
In February he took his vacation and went down to Florida.
Palm Beach sprawled plump and opulent between the sparkling sapphire of
Lake Worth, flawed here and there by house-boats at anchor, and the
great turquoise bar of the Atlantic Ocean. The huge bulks of the
Breakers and the Royal Poinciana rose as twin paunches from the bright
level of the sand, and around them clustered the Dancing Glade,
Bradley's House of Chance, and a dozen modistes and milliners with goods
at triple prices from New York. Upon the trellissed veranda of the
Breakers two hundred women stepped right, stepped left, wheeled, and
slid in that then celebrated calisthenic known as the double-shuffle,
while in half-time to the music two thousand bracelets clicked up and
down on two hundred arms.
At the Everglades Club after dark Paula and Lowell Thayer and Anson and
a casual fourth played bridge with hot cards. It seemed to Anson that
her kind, serious face was wan and tired--she had been around now for
four, five, years. He had known her for three.
"Two spades."
"Cigarette? ... Oh, I beg your pardon. By me."
"By."
"I'll double three spades."
There were a dozen tables of bridge in the room, which was filling up
with smoke. Anson's eyes met Paula's, held them persistently even when
Thayer's glance fell between them....
"What was bid?" he asked abstractedly.
"_Rose of Washington Square_"
sang the young people in the corners:
"_I'm withering there
In basement air----_"
The smoke banked like fog, and the opening of a door filled the room
with blown swirls of ectoplasm. Little Bright Eyes streaked past the
tables seeking Mr. Conan Doyle among the Englishmen who were posing as
Englishmen about the lobby.
"You could cut it with a knife."
"... cut it with a knife."
"... a knife."
At the end of the rubber Paula suddenly got up and spoke to Anson in a
tense, low voice. With scarcely a glance at Lowell Thayer, they walked
out the door and descended a long flight of stone steps--in a moment
they were walking hand in hand along the moonlit beach.
"Darling, darling...." They embraced recklessly, passionately, in a
shadow.... Then Paula drew back her face to let his lips say what she
wanted to hear--she could feel the words forming as they kissed
again.... Again she broke away, listening, but as he pulled her close
once more she realized that he had said nothing--only "_Darling_!
_Darling_!" in that deep, sad whisper that always made her cry. Humbly,
obediently, her emotions yielded to him and the tears streamed down her
face, but her heart kept on crying: "Ask me--oh, Anson, dearest, ask
me!"
"Paula.... _Paula_!"
The words wrung her heart like hands, and Anson, feeling her tremble,
knew that emotion was enough. He need say no more, commit their
destinies to no practical enigma. Why should he, when he might hold her
so, biding his own time, for another year--forever? He was considering
them both, her more than himself. For a moment, when she said suddenly
that she must go back to her hotel, he hesitated, thinking, first, "This
is the moment, after all," and then: "No, let it wait--she is mine...."
He had forgotten that Paula too was worn away inside with the strain of
three years. Her mood passed forever in the night.
He went back to New York next morning filled with a certain restless
dissatisfaction. Late in April, without warning, he received a telegram
from Bar Harbor in which Paula told him that she was engaged to Lowell
Thayer, and that they would be married immediately in Boston. What he
never really believed could happen had happened at last.
Anson filled himself with whiskey that morning, and going to the office,
carried on his work without a break--rather with a fear of what would
happen if he stopped. In the evening he went out as usual, saying
nothing of what had occurred; he was cordial, humorous, unabstracted.
But one thing he could not help--for three days, in any place, in any
company, he would suddenly bend his head into his hands and cry like a
child.
V
In 1922 when Anson went abroad with the junior partner to investigate
some London loans, the journey intimated that he was to be taken into
the firm. He was twenty-seven now, a little heavy without being
definitely stout, and with a manner older than his years. Old people and
young people liked him and trusted him, and mothers felt safe when their
daughters were in his charge, for he had a way, when he came into a
room, of putting himself on a footing with the oldest and most
conservative people there. "You and I," he seemed to say, "we're solid.
We understand."
He had an instinctive and rather charitable knowledge of the weaknesses
of men and women, and, like a priest, it made him the more concerned for
the maintenance of outward forms. It was typical of him that every
Sunday morning he taught in a fashionable Episcopal Sunday-school--even
though a cold shower and a quick change into a cutaway coat were all
that separated him from the wild night before.
After his father's death he was the practical head of his family, and,
in effect, guided the destinies of the younger children. Through a
complication his authority did not extend to his father's estate, which
was administrated by his Uncle Robert, who was the horsey member of the
family, a good-natured, hard-drinking member of that set which centres
about Wheatley Hills.
Uncle Robert and his wife, Edna, had been great friends of Anson's
youth, and the former was disappointed when his nephew's superiority
failed to take a horsey form. He backed him for a city club which was
the most difficult in America to enter--one could only join if one's
family had "helped to build up New York" (or, in other words, were rich
before 1880)--and when Anson, after his election, neglected it for the
Yale Club, Uncle Robert gave him a little talk on the subject. But when
on top of that Anson declined to enter Robert Hunter's own conservative
and somewhat neglected brokerage house, his manner grew cooler. Like a
primary teacher who has taught all he knew, he slipped out of Anson's
life.
There were so many friends in Anson's life--scarcely one for whom he had
not done some unusual kindness and scarcely one whom he did not
occasionally embarrass by his bursts of rough conversation or his habit
of getting drunk whenever and however he liked. It annoyed him when any
one else blundered in that regard--about his own lapses he was always
humorous. Odd things happened to him and he told them with infectious
laughter.
I was working in New York that spring, and I used to lunch with him at
the Yale Club, which my university was sharing until the completion of
our own. I had read of Paula's marriage, and one afternoon, when I asked
him about her, something moved him to tell me the story. After that he
frequently invited me to family dinners at his house and behaved as
though there was a special relation between us, as though with his
confidence a little of that consuming memory had passed into me.
I found that despite the trusting mothers, his attitude toward girls was
not indiscriminately protective. It was up to the girl--if she showed an
inclination toward looseness, she must take care of herself, even with
him.
"Life," he would explain sometimes, "has made a cynic of me."
By life he meant Paula. Sometimes, especially when he was drinking, it
became a little twisted in his mind, and he thought that she had
callously thrown him over.
This "cynicism," or rather his realization that naturally fast girls
were not worth sparing, led to his affair with Dolly Karger. It wasn't
his only affair in those years, but it came nearest to touching him
deeply, and it had a profound effect upon his attitude toward life.
Dolly was the daughter of a notorious "publicist" who had married into
society. She herself grew up into the Junior League, came out at the
Plaza, and went to the Assembly; and only a few old families like the
Hunters could question whether or not she "belonged," for her picture
was often in the papers, and she had more enviable attention than many
girls who undoubtedly did. She was dark-haired, with carmine
lips and a high, lovely color, which she concealed under pinkish-gray
powder all through the first year out, because high color was
unfashionable--Victorian-pale was the thing to be. She wore black,
severe suits and stood with her hands in her pockets leaning a little
forward, with a humorous restraint on her face. She danced
exquisitely--better than anything she liked to dance--better than
anything except making love. Since she was ten she had always been in
love, and, usually, with some boy who didn't respond to her. Those who
did--and there were many--bored her after a brief encounter, but for
her failures she reserved the warmest spot in her heart. When she met
them she would always try once more--sometimes she succeeded, more often
she failed.
It never occurred to this gypsy of the unattainable that there was a
certain resemblance in those who refused to love her--they shared a hard
intuition that saw through to her weakness, not a weakness of emotion
but a weakness of rudder. Anson perceived this when he first met her,
less than a month after Paula's marriage. He was drinking rather
heavily, and he pretended for a week that he was falling in love with
her. Then he dropped her abruptly and forgot--immediately he took up the
commanding position in her heart.
Like so many girls of that day Dolly was slackly and indiscreetly wild.
The unconventionality of a slightly older generation had been simply one
facet of a post-war movement to discredit obsolete manners--Dolly's was
both older and shabbier, and she saw in Anson the two extremes which the
emotionally shiftless woman seeks, an abandon to indulgence alternating
with a protective strength. In his character she felt both the sybarite
and the solid rock, and these two satisfied every need of her nature.
She felt that it was going to be difficult, but she mistook the
reason--she thought that Anson and his family expected a more
spectacular marriage, but she guessed immediately that her advantage lay
in his tendency to drink.
They met at the large débutante dances, but as her infatuation
increased they managed to be more and more together. Like most mothers,
Mrs. Karger believed that Anson was exceptionally reliable, so she
allowed Dolly to go with him to distant country clubs and suburban
houses without inquiring closely into their activities or questioning
her explanations when they came in late. At first these explanations
might have been accurate, but Dolly's worldly ideas of capturing Anson
were soon engulfed in the rising sweep of her emotion. Kisses in the
back of taxis and motor-cars were no longer enough; they did a curious
thing:
They dropped out of their world for a while and made another world just
beneath it where Anson's tippling and Dolly's irregular hours would be
less noticed and commented on. It was composed, this world, of varying
elements--several of Anson's Yale friends and their wives, two or three
young brokers and bond salesmen and a handful of unattached men, fresh
from college, with money and a propensity to dissipation. What this
world lacked in spaciousness and scale it made up for by allowing them
a liberty that it scarcely permitted itself. Moreover, it centred around
them and permitted Dolly the pleasure of a faint condescension--a
pleasure which Anson, whose whole life was a condescension from the
certitudes of his childhood, was unable to share.
He was not in love with her, and in the long feverish winter of their
affair he frequently told her so. In the spring he was weary--he wanted
to renew his life at some other source--moreover, he saw that either he
must break with her now or accept the responsibility of a definite
seduction. Her family's encouraging attitude precipitated his
decision--one evening when Mr. Karger knocked discreetly at the library
door to announce that he had left a bottle of old brandy in the
dining-room, Anson felt that life was hemming him in. That night he
wrote her a short letter in which he told her that he was going on his
vacation, and that in view of all the circumstances they had better meet
no more.
It was June. His family had closed up the house and gone to the country,
so he was living temporarily at the Yale Club. I had heard about his
affair with Dolly as it developed--accounts salted with humor, for he
despised unstable women, and granted them no place in the social edifice
in which he believed--and when he told me that night that he was
definitely breaking with her I was glad. I had seen Dolly here and
there, and each time with a feeling of pity at the hopelessness of her
struggle, and of shame at knowing so much about her that I had no right
to know. She was what is known as "a pretty little thing," but there was
a certain recklessness which rather fascinated me. Her dedication to the
goddess of waste would have been less obvious had she been less
spirited--she would most certainly throw herself away, but I was glad
when I heard that the sacrifice would not be consummated in my sight.
Anson was going to leave the letter of farewell at her house next
morning. It was one of the few houses left open in the Fifth Avenue
district, and he knew that the Kargers, acting upon erroneous
information from Dolly, had foregone a trip abroad to give their
daughter her chance. As he stepped out the door of the Yale Club into
Madison Avenue the postman passed him, and he followed back inside. The
first letter that caught his eye was in Dolly's hand.
He knew what it would be--a lonely and tragic monologue, full of the
reproaches he knew, the invoked memories, the "I wonder if's"--all the
immemorial intimacies that he had communicated to Paula Legendre in what
seemed another age. Thumbing over some bills, he brought it on top again
and opened it. To his surprise it was a short, somewhat formal note,
which said that Dolly would be unable to go to the country with him for
the week-end, because Perry Hull from Chicago had unexpectedly come to
town. It added that Anson had brought this on himself: "--if I felt that
you loved me as I love you I would go with you at any time, any place,
but Perry is _so_ nice, and he so much wants me to marry him----"
Anson smiled contemptuously--he had had experience with such decoy
epistles. Moreover, he knew how Dolly had labored over this plan,
probably sent for the faithful Perry and calculated the time of his
arrival--even labored over the note so that it would make him jealous
without driving him away. Like most compromises, it had neither force
nor vitality but only a timorous despair.
Suddenly he was angry. He sat down in the lobby and read it again. Then
he went to the phone, called Dolly and told her in his clear, compelling
voice that he had received her note and would call for her at five
o'clock as they had previously planned. Scarcely waiting for the
pretended uncertainty of her "Perhaps I can see you for an hour," he
hung up the receiver and went down to his office. On the way he tore his
own letter into bits and dropped it in the street.
He was not jealous--she meant nothing to him--but at her pathetic ruse
everything stubborn and self-indulgent in him came to the surface. It
was a presumption from a mental inferior and it could not be overlooked.
If she wanted to know to whom she belonged she would see.
He was on the door-step at quarter past five. Dolly was dressed for the
street, and he listened in silence to the paragraph of "I can only see
you for an hour," which she had begun on the phone.
"Put on your hat, Dolly," he said, "we'll take a walk."
They strolled up Madison Avenue and over to Fifth while Anson's shirt
dampened upon his portly body in the deep heat. He talked little,
scolding her, making no love to her, but before they had walked six
blocks she was his again, apologizing for the note, offering not to see
Perry at all as an atonement, offering anything. She thought that he had
come because he was beginning to love her.
"I'm hot," he said when they reached 71st Street. "This is a winter
suit. If I stop by the house and change, would you mind waiting for me
down-stairs? I'll only be a minute."
She was happy; the intimacy of his being hot, of any physical fact about
him, thrilled her. When they came to the iron-grated door and Anson took
out his key she experienced a sort of delight.
Down-stairs it was dark, and after he ascended in the lift Dolly raised
a curtain and looked out through opaque lace at the houses over the way.
She heard the lift machinery stop, and with the notion of teasing him
pressed the button that brought it down. Then on what was more than an
impulse she got into it and sent it up to what she guessed was his
floor.
"Anson," she called, laughing a little.
"Just a minute," he answered from his bedroom ... then after a brief
delay: "Now you can come in."
He had changed and was buttoning his vest. "This is my room," he said
lightly. "How do you like it?"
She caught sight of Paula's picture on the wall and stared at it in
fascination, just as Paula had stared at the pictures of Anson's
childish sweethearts five years before. She knew something about
Paula--sometimes she tortured herself with fragments of the story.
Suddenly she came close to Anson, raising her arms. They embraced.
Outside the area window a soft artificial twilight already hovered,
though the sun was still bright on a back roof across the way. In half
an hour the room would be quite dark. The uncalculated opportunity
overwhelmed them, made them both breathless, and they clung more
closely. It was eminent, inevitable. Still holding one another, they
raised their heads--their eyes fell together upon Paula's picture,
staring down at them from the wall.
Suddenly Anson dropped his arms, and sitting down at his desk tried the
drawer with a bunch of keys.
"Like a drink?" he asked in a gruff voice.
"No, Anson."
He poured himself half a tumbler of whiskey, swallowed it, and then
opened the door into the hall.
"Come on," he said.
Dolly hesitated.
"Anson--I'm going to the country with you to-night, after all. You
understand that, don't you?"
"Of course," he answered brusquely.
In Dolly's car they rode on to Long Island, closer in their emotions
than they had ever been before. They knew what would happen--not with
Paula's face to remind them that something was lacking, but when they
were alone in the still, hot Long Island night they did not care.
The estate in Port Washington where they were to spend the week-end
belonged to a cousin of Anson's who had married a Montana copper
operator. An interminable drive began at the lodge and twisted under
imported poplar saplings toward a huge, pink, Spanish house. Anson had
often visited there before.
After dinner they danced at the Linx Club. About midnight Anson assured
himself that his cousins would not leave before two--then he explained
that Dolly was tired; he would take her home and return to the dance
later. Trembling a little with excitement, they got into a borrowed car
together and drove to Port Washington. As they reached the lodge he
stopped and spoke to the night-watchman.
"When are you making a round, Carl?"
"Right away."
"Then you'll be here till everybody's in?"
"Yes, sir."
"All right. Listen: if any automobile, no matter whose it is, turns in
at this gate, I want you to phone the house immediately." He put a
five-dollar bill into Carl's hand. "Is that clear?"
"Yes, Mr. Anson." Being of the Old World, he neither winked nor smiled.
Yet Dolly sat with her face turned slightly away.
Anson had a key. Once inside he poured a drink for both of them--Dolly
left hers untouched--then he ascertained definitely the location of the
phone, and found that it was within easy hearing distance of their
rooms, both of which were on the first floor.
Five minutes later he knocked at the door of Dolly's room.
"Anson?" He went in, closing the door behind him. She was in bed,
leaning up anxiously with elbows on the pillow; sitting beside her he
took her in his arms.
"Anson, darling."
He didn't answer.
"Anson.... Anson! I love you.... Say you love me. Say it now--can't you
say it now? Even if you don't mean it?"
He did not listen. Over her head he perceived that the picture of Paula
was hanging here upon this wall.
He got up and went close to it. The frame gleamed faintly with
thrice-reflected moonlight--within was a blurred shadow of a face that
he saw he did not know. Almost sobbing, he turned around and stared with
abomination at the little figure on the bed.
"This is all foolishness," he said thickly. "I don't know what I was
thinking about. I don't love you and you'd better wait for somebody that
loves you. I don't love you a bit, can't you understand?"
His voice broke, and he went hurriedly out. Back in the salon he was
pouring himself a drink with uneasy fingers, when the front door opened
suddenly, and his cousin came in.
"Why, Anson, I hear Dolly's sick," she began solicitously. "I hear she's
sick...."
"It was nothing," he interrupted, raising his voice so that it would
carry into Dolly's room. "She was a little tired. She went to bed."
For a long time afterward Anson believed that a protective God sometimes
interfered in human affairs. But Dolly Karger, lying awake and staring
at the ceiling, never again believed in anything at all.