Anson never blamed himself for his part in this affair--the situation
which brought it about had not been of his making. But the just suffer
with the unjust, and he found that his oldest and somehow his most
precious friendship was over. He never knew what distorted story Edna
told, but he was welcome in his uncle's house no longer.
Just before Christmas Mrs. Hunter retired to a select Episcopal heaven,
and Anson became the responsible head of his family. An unmarried aunt
who had lived with them for years ran the house, and attempted with
helpless inefficiency to chaperone the younger girls. All the children
were less self-reliant than Anson, more conventional both in their
virtues and in their shortcomings. Mrs. Hunter's death had postponed the
début of one daughter and the wedding of another. Also it had taken
something deeply material from all of them, for with her passing the
quiet, expensive superiority of the Hunters came to an end.
For one thing, the estate, considerably diminished by two inheritance
taxes and soon to be divided among six children, was not a notable
fortune any more. Anson saw a tendency in his youngest sisters to speak
rather respectfully of families that hadn't "existed" twenty years ago.
His own feeling of precedence was not echoed in them--sometimes they
were conventionally snobbish, that was all. For another thing, this was
the last summer they would spend on the Connecticut estate; the clamor
against it was too loud: "Who wants to waste the best months of the year
shut up in that dead old town?" Reluctantly he yielded--the house would
go into the market in the fall, and next summer they would rent a
smaller place in Westchester County. It was a step down from the
expensive simplicity of his father's idea, and, while he sympathized
with the revolt, it also annoyed him; during his mother's lifetime he
had gone up there at least every other week-end--even in the gayest
summers.
Yet he himself was part of this change, and his strong instinct for life
had turned him in his twenties from the hollow obsequies of that
abortive leisure class. He did not see this clearly--he still felt that
there was a norm, a standard of society. But there was no norm, it was
doubtful if there had ever been a true norm in New York. The few who
still paid and fought to enter a particular set succeeded only to find
that as a society it scarcely functioned--or, what was more alarming,
that the Bohemia from which they fled sat above them at table.
At twenty-nine Anson's chief concern was his own growing loneliness. He
was sure now that he would never marry. The number of weddings at which
he had officiated as best man or usher was past all counting--there was
a drawer at home that bulged with the official neckties of this or that
wedding-party, neckties standing for romances that had not endured a
year, for couples who had passed completely from his life. Scarf-pins,
gold pencils, cuff-buttons, presents from a generation of grooms had
passed through his jewel-box and been lost--and with every ceremony he
was less and less able to imagine himself in the groom's place. Under
his hearty good-will toward all those marriages there was despair about
his own.
And as he neared thirty he became not a little depressed at the inroads
that marriage, especially lately, had made upon his friendships. Groups
of people had a disconcerting tendency to dissolve and disappear. The
men from his own college--and it was upon them he had expended the most
time and affection--were the most elusive of all. Most of them were
drawn deep into domesticity, two were dead, one lived abroad, one was in
Hollywood writing continuities for pictures that Anson went faithfully
to see.
Most of them, however, were permanent commuters with an intricate family
life centring around some suburban country club, and it was from these
that he felt his estrangement most keenly.
In the early days of their married life they had all needed him; he gave
them advice about their slim finances, he exorcised their doubts about
the advisability of bringing a baby into two rooms and a bath,
especially he stood for the great world outside. But now their financial
troubles were in the past and the fearfully expected child had evolved
into an absorbing family. They were always glad to see old Anson, but
they dressed up for him and tried to impress him with their present
importance, and kept their troubles to themselves. They needed him no
longer.
A few weeks before his thirtieth birthday the last of his early and
intimate friends was married. Anson acted in his usual rôle of best
man, gave his usual silver tea-service, and went down to the usual
_Homeric_ to say good-by. It was a hot Friday afternoon in May, and as
he walked from the pier he realized that Saturday closing had begun and
he was free until Monday morning.
"Go where?" he asked himself.
The Yale Club, of course; bridge until dinner, then four or five raw
cocktails in somebody's room and a pleasant confused evening. He
regretted that this afternoon's groom wouldn't be along--they had always
been able to cram so much into such nights: they knew how to attach
women and how to get rid of them, how much consideration any girl
deserved from their intelligent hedonism. A party was an adjusted
thing--you took certain girls to certain places and spent just so much
on their amusement; you drank a little, not much, more than you ought to
drink, and at a certain time in the morning you stood up and said you
were going home. You avoided college boys, sponges, future engagements,
fights, sentiment, and indiscretions. That was the way it was done. All
the rest was dissipation.
In the morning you were never violently sorry--you made no resolutions,
but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you
went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and
waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into
another party.
The lobby of the Yale Club was unpopulated. In the bar three very young
alumni looked up at him, momentarily and without curiosity.
"Hello there, Oscar," he said to the bartender. "Mr. Cahill been around
this afternoon?"
"Mr. Cahill's gone to New Haven."
"Oh ... that so?"
"Gone to the ball game. Lot of men gone up."
Anson looked once again into the lobby, considered for a moment, and
then walked out and over to Fifth Avenue. From the broad window of one
of his clubs--one that he had scarcely visited in five years--a gray man
with watery eyes stared down at him. Anson looked quickly away--that
figure sitting in vacant resignation, in supercilious solitude,
depressed him. He stopped and, retracing his steps, started over 47th
Street toward Teak Warden's apartment. Teak and his wife had once been
his most familiar friends--it was a household where he and Dolly Karger
had been used to go in the days of their affair. But Teak had taken to
drink, and his wife had remarked publicly that Anson was a bad influence
on him. The remark reached Anson in an exaggerated form--when it was
finally cleared up, the delicate spell of intimacy was broken, never to
be renewed.
"Is Mr. Warden at home?" he inquired.
"They've gone to the country."
The fact unexpectedly cut at him. They were gone to the country and he
hadn't known. Two years before he would have known the date, the hour,
come up at the last moment for a final drink, and planned his first
visit to them. Now they had gone without a word.
Anson looked at his watch and considered a week-end with his family, but
the only train was a local that would jolt through the aggressive heat
for three hours. And to-morrow in the country, and Sunday--he was in no
mood for porch-bridge with polite undergraduates, and dancing after
dinner at a rural road-house, a diminutive of gaiety which his father
had estimated too well.
"Oh, no," he said to himself.... "No."
He was a dignified, impressive young man, rather stout now, but
otherwise unmarked by dissipation. He could have been cast for a pillar
of something--at times you were sure it was not society, at others
nothing else--for the law, for the church. He stood for a few minutes
motionless on the sidewalk in front of a 47th Street apartment-house;
for almost the first time in his life he had nothing whatever to do.
Then he began to walk briskly up Fifth Avenue, as if he had just been
reminded of an important engagement there. The necessity of
dissimulation is one of the few characteristics that we share with dogs,
and I think of Anson on that day as some well-bred specimen who had been
disappointed at a familiar back door. He was going to see Nick, once a
fashionable bartender in demand at all private dances, and now employed
in cooling non-alcoholic champagne among the labyrinthine cellars of the
Plaza Hotel.
"Nick," he said, "what's happened to everything?"
"Dead," Nick said.
"Make me a whiskey sour." Anson handed a pint bottle over the counter.
"Nick, the girls are different; I had a little girl in Brooklyn and she
got married last week without letting me know."
"That a fact? Ha-ha-ha," responded Nick diplomatically. "Slipped it over
on you."
"Absolutely," said Anson. "And I was out with her the night before."
"Ha-ha-ha," said Nick, "ha-ha-ha!"
"Do you remember the wedding, Nick, in Hot Springs where I had the
waiters and the musicians singing 'God save the King'?"
"Now where was that, Mr. Hunter?" Nick concentrated doubtfully. "Seems
to me that was----"
"Next time they were back for more, and I began to wonder how much I'd
paid them," continued Anson.
"--seems to me that was at Mr. Trenholm's wedding."
"Don't know him," said Anson decisively. He was offended that a strange
name should intrude upon his reminiscences; Nick perceived this.
"Naw--aw--" he admitted, "I ought to know that. It was one of _your_
crowd--Brakins .... Baker----"
"Bicker Baker," said Anson responsively. "They put me in a hearse after
it was over and covered me up with flowers and drove me away."
"Ha-ha-ha," said Nick. "Ha-ha-ha."
Nick's simulation of the old family servant paled presently and Anson
went up-stairs to the lobby. He looked around--his eyes met the glance
of an unfamiliar clerk at the desk, then fell upon a flower from the
morning's marriage hesitating in the mouth of a brass cuspidor. He went
out and walked slowly toward the blood-red sun over Columbus Circle.
Suddenly he turned around and, retracing his steps to the Plaza, immured
himself in a telephone-booth.
Later he said that he tried to get me three times that afternoon, that
he tried every one who might be in New York--men and girls he had not
seen for years, an artist's model of his college days whose faded number
was still in his address book--Central told him that even the exchange
existed no longer. At length his quest roved into the country, and he
held brief disappointing conversations with emphatic butlers and maids.
So-and-so was out, riding, swimming, playing golf, sailed to Europe last
week. Who shall I say phoned?
It was intolerable that he should pass the evening alone--the private
reckonings which one plans for a moment of leisure lose every charm when
the solitude is enforced. There were always women of a sort, but the
ones he knew had temporarily vanished, and to pass a New York evening in
the hired company of a stranger never occurred to him--he would have
considered that that was something shameful and secret, the diversion of
a travelling salesman in a strange town.
Anson paid the telephone bill--the girl tried unsuccessfully to joke
with him about its size--and for the second time that afternoon started
to leave the Plaza and go he knew not where. Near the revolving door the
figure of a woman, obviously with child, stood sideways to the light--a
sheer beige cape fluttered at her shoulders when the door turned and,
each time, she looked impatiently toward it as if she were weary of
waiting. At the first sight of her a strong nervous thrill of
familiarity went over him, but not until he was within five feet of her
did he realize that it was Paula.
"Why, Anson Hunter!"
His heart turned over.
"Why, Paula----"
"Why, this is wonderful. I can't believe it, _Anson_!"
She took both his hands, and he saw in the freedom of the gesture that
the memory of him had lost poignancy to her. But not to him--he felt
that old mood that she evoked in him stealing over his brain, that
gentleness with which he had always met her optimism as if afraid to mar
its surface.
"We're at Rye for the summer. Pete had to come East on business--you
know of course I'm Mrs. Peter Hagerty now--so we brought the children
and took a house. You've got to come out and see us."
"Can I?" he asked directly. "When?"
"When you like. Here's Pete." The revolving door functioned, giving up a
fine tall man of thirty with a tanned face and a trim mustache. His
immaculate fitness made a sharp contrast with Anson's increasing bulk,
which was obvious under the faintly tight cut-away coat.
"You oughtn't to be standing," said Hagerty to his wife. "Let's sit down
here." He indicated lobby chairs, but Paula hesitated.
"I've got to go right home," she said. "Anson, why don't you--why don't
you come out and have dinner with us to-night? We're just getting
settled, but if you can stand that----"
Hagerty confirmed the invitation cordially.
"Come out for the night."
Their car waited in front of the hotel, and Paula with a tired gesture
sank back against silk cushions in the corner.
"There's so much I want to talk to you about," she said, "it seems
hopeless."
"I want to hear about you."
"Well"--she smiled at Hagerty--"that would take a long time too. I have
three children--by my first marriage. The oldest is five, then four,
then three." She smiled again. "I didn't waste much time having them,
did I?"
"Boys?"
"A boy and two girls. Then--oh, a lot of things happened, and I got a
divorce in Paris a year ago and married Pete. That's all--except that
I'm awfully happy."
In Rye they drove up to a large house near the Beach Club, from which
there issued presently three dark, slim children who broke from an
English governess and approached them with an esoteric cry. Abstractedly
and with difficulty Paula took each one into her arms, a caress which
they accepted stiffly, as they had evidently been told not to bump into
Mummy. Even against their fresh faces Paula's skin showed scarcely any
weariness--for all her physical languor she seemed younger than when he
had last seen her at Palm Beach seven years ago.
At dinner she was preoccupied, and afterward, during the homage to the
radio, she lay with closed eyes on the sofa, until Anson wondered if his
presence at this time were not an intrusion. But at nine o'clock, when
Hagerty rose and said pleasantly that he was going to leave them by
themselves for a while, she began to talk slowly about herself and the
past.
"My first baby," she said--"the one we call Darling, the biggest little
girl--I wanted to die when I knew I was going to have her, because
Lowell was like a stranger to me. It didn't seem as though she could be
my own. I wrote you a letter and tore it up. Oh, you were _so_ bad to me,
Anson."
It was the dialogue again, rising and falling. Anson felt a sudden
quickening of memory.
"Weren't you engaged once?" she asked--"a girl named Dolly something?"
"I wasn't ever engaged. I tried to be engaged, but I never loved anybody
but you, Paula."
"Oh," she said. Then after a moment: "This baby is the first one I ever
really wanted. You see, I'm in love now--at last."
He didn't answer, shocked at the treachery of her remembrance. She must
have seen that the "at last" bruised him, for she continued:
"I was infatuated with you, Anson--you could make me do anything you
liked. But we wouldn't have been happy. I'm not smart enough for you. I
don't like things to be complicated like you do." She paused. "You'll
never settle down," she said.
The phrase struck at him from behind--it was an accusation that of all
accusations he had never merited.
"I could settle down if women were different," he said. "If I didn't
understand so much about them, if women didn't spoil you for other
women, if they had only a little pride. If I could go to sleep for a
while and wake up into a home that was really mine--why, that's what I'm
made for, Paula, that's what women have seen in me and liked in me. It's
only that I can't get through the preliminaries any more."
Hagerty came in a little before eleven; after a whiskey Paula stood up
and announced that she was going to bed. She went over and stood by her
husband.
"Where did you go, dearest?" she demanded.
"I had a drink with Ed Saunders."
"I was worried. I thought maybe you'd run away."
She rested her head against his coat.
"He's sweet, isn't he, Anson?" she demanded.
"Absolutely," said Anson, laughing.
She raised her face to her husband.
"Well, I'm ready," she said. She turned to Anson: "Do you want to see
our family gymnastic stunt?"
"Yes," he said in an interested voice.
"All right. Here we go!"
Hagerty picked her up easily in his arms.
"This is called the family acrobatic stunt," said Paula. "He carries me
up-stairs. Isn't it sweet of him?"
"Yes," said Anson.
Hagerty bent his head slightly until his face touched Paula's.
"And I love him," she said. "I've just been telling you, haven't I,
Anson?"
"Yes," he said.
"He's the dearest thing that ever lived in this world; aren't you,
darling? ... Well, good night. Here we go. Isn't he strong?"
"Yes," Anson said.
"You'll find a pair of Pete's pajamas laid out for you. Sweet
dreams--see you at breakfast."
"Yes," Anson said.