I
Martin did not see Joyce Lanyon for weeks after his return to New York.
Once she invited him to dinner, but he could not come, and he did not
hear from her again.
His absorption in osmotic pressure determinations did not content him
when he sat in his prim hotel room and was reduced from Dr. Arrowsmith
to a man who had no one to talk to. He remembered how they had sat by
the lagoon in the tepid twilight; he telephoned asking whether he might
come in for tea.
He knew in an unformulated way that Joyce was rich, but after seeing her
in gingham, cooking in the kitchen of St. Swithin’s almshouse, he did
not grasp her position; and he was uncomfortable when, feeling dusty
from the laboratory, he came to her great house and found her the
soft-voiced mistress of many servants. Hers was a palace, and palaces,
whether they are such very little ones as Joyce’s, with its eighteen
rooms, or Buckingham or vast Fontainebleau, are all alike; they are
choked with the superfluities of pride, they are so complete that one
does not remember small endearing charms, they are indistinguishable in
their common feeling of polite and uneasy grandeur, they are therefore
altogether tedious.
But amid the pretentious splendor which Roger Lanyon had accumulated,
Joyce was not tedious. It is to be suspected that she enjoyed showing
Martin what she really was, by producing footmen and too many kinds of
sandwiches, and by boasting, “Oh, I never do know what they’re going to
give me for tea.”
But she had welcomed him, crying, “You look so much better. I’m
frightfully glad. Are you still my brother? I was a good cook at the
almshouse, wasn’t I!”
Had he been suave then and witty, she would not have been greatly
interested. She knew too many men who were witty and well-bred, ivory
smooth and competent to help her spend the four or five million dollars
with which she was burdened. But Martin was at once a scholar who made
osmotic pressure determinations almost interesting, a taut swift man
whom she could fancy running or making love, and a lonely youngster who
naïvely believed that here in her soft security she was still the girl
who had sat with him by the lagoon, still the courageous woman who had
come to him in a drunken room at Blackwater.
Joyce Lanyon knew how to make men talk. Thanks more to her than to his
own articulateness, he made living the Institute, the members, their
feuds, and the drama of coursing on the trail of a discovery.
Her easy life here had seemed tasteless after the risks of St. Hubert,
and in his contempt for ease and rewards she found exhilaration.
He came now and then to tea, to dinner; he learned the ways of her
house, her servants, the more nearly intelligent of her friends. He
liked--and possibly he was liked by--some of them. With one friend of
hers Martin had a state of undeclared war. This was Latham Ireland, an
achingly well-dressed man of fifty, a competent lawyer who was fond of
standing in front of fireplaces and being quietly clever. He fascinated
Joyce by telling her that she was subtle, then telling her what she was
being subtle about.
Martin hated him.
In midsummer Martin was invited for a week-end at Joyce’s vast
blossom-hid country house at Greenwich. She was half apologetic for its
luxury; he was altogether unhappy.
The strain of considering clothes, of galloping out to buy
white trousers when he wanted to watch the test-tubes in the
constant-temperature bath, of trying to look easy in the limousine
which met him at the station, and of deciding which servants to tip
and how much and when, was dismaying to a simple man. He felt rustic
when, after he had blurted, “Just a minute till I go up and unpack my
suit-case,” she said gently, “Oh, that will have been done for you.”
He discovered that a valet had laid out for him to put on, that first
evening, all the small store of underclothes he had brought, and had
squeezed out on his brush a ribbon of tooth-paste.
He sat on the edge of his bed, groaning, “This is too rich for my
blood!”
He hated and feared that valet, who kept stealing his clothes, putting
them in places where they could not be found, then popping in
menacingly when Martin was sneaking about the enormous room looking for
them.
But his chief unhappiness was that there was nothing to do. He had no
sport but tennis, at which he was too rusty to play with these
chattering unidentified people who filled the house and, apparently with
perfect willingness, worked at golf and bridge. He had met but few of
the friends of whom they talked. They said, “You know dear old R. G.,”
and he said, “Oh, _yes_,” but he never did know dear old R. G.
Joyce was as busily amiable as when they were alone at tea, and she
found for him a weedy flapper whose tennis was worse than his own, but
she had twenty guests--forty at Sunday lunch--and he gave up certain
agreeable notions of walking with her in fresh lanes and, after
excitedly saying this and that, perhaps kissing her. He had one moment
with her. As he was going, she ordered, “Come here, Martin,” and led him
apart.
“You haven’t really enjoyed it.”
“Why, sure, course I--”
“Of course you haven’t! And you despise us, rather, and perhaps you’re
partly right. I do like pretty people and gracious manners and good
games, but I suppose they seem piffling after nights in a laboratory.”
“No, I like ’em too. In a way. I like to look at beautiful women--at
you! But-- Oh, darn it, Joyce, I’m not up to it. I’ve always been poor,
and horribly busy. I haven’t learned your games.”
“But, Martin, you could, with the intensity you put into everything.”
“Even getting drunk in Blackwater!”
“And I hope in New York, too! Dear Roger, he did have such an innocent,
satisfying time getting drunk at class-dinners! But I mean: if you went
at it, you could play bridge and golf--and talking--better than any of
them. If you only knew how frightfully recent most of the ducal class in
America are! And Martin: wouldn’t it be good for you? Wouldn’t you work
all the better if you got away from your logarithmic tables now and
then? And are you going to admit there’s anything you can’t conquer?”
“No, I--”
“Will you come to dinner on Tuesday week, just us two, and we’ll fight
it out?”
“Be glad to.”
For a number of hours, on the train to Terry Wickett’s vacation place in
the Vermont hills, Martin was convinced that he loved Joyce Lanyon, and
that he was going to attack the art of being amusing as he had attacked
physical chemistry. Ardently, and quite humorlessly, as he sat stiffly
in a stale Pullman chair-car with his feet up on his suit-case, he
pictured himself wearing a club-tie (presumably first acquiring the tie
and the club), playing golf in plus-fours, and being entertaining about
dear old R. G. and incredibly witty about dear old Latham Ireland’s aged
Rolls-Royce.
But these ambitions he forgot as he came to Terry’s proud proprietary
shanty, by a lake among oaks and maples, and heard Terry’s real theories
of the decomposition of quinine derivatives.
Being perhaps the least sentimental of human beings, Terry had named his
place “Birdies’ Rest.” He owned five acres of woodland, two miles from a
railroad station. His shanty was a two-room affair of logs, with bunks
for beds and oilcloth for table-linen.
“Here’s the layout, Slim,” said Terry. “Some day I’m going to figure out
a way of making a lab here pay, by manufacturing sera or something, and
I’ll put up a couple more buildings on the flat by the lake, and have
one absolutely independent place for science--two hours a day on the
commercial end, and say about six for sleeping and a couple for feeding
and telling dirty stories. That leaves--two and six and two make ten, if
I’m any authority on higher math--that leaves fourteen hours a day for
research (except when you got something special on), with no Director
and no Society patrons and no Trustees that you’ve got to satisfy by
making fool reports. Of course there won’t be any scientific dinners
with ladies in candy-box dresses, but I figure we’ll be able to afford
plenty of salt pork and corncob pipes, and your bed will be made
perfectly--if you make it yourself. Huh? Lez go and have a swim.”
Martin returned to New York with the not very compatible plans of being
the best-dressed golfer in Greenwich and of cooking beef-stew with Terry
at Birdies’ Rest.
But the first of these was the more novel to him.
II
Joyce Lanyon was enjoying a conversion. Her St. Hubert experiences and
her natural variability had caused her to be dissatisfied with Roger’s
fast-motoring set.
She let the lady Mæcenases of her acquaintance beguile her into several
of their Causes, and she enjoyed them as she had enjoyed her active and
entirely purposeless war work in 1917, for Joyce Lanyon was to some
degree an Arranger, which was an epithet invented by Terry Wickett for
Capitola McGurk.
An Arranger and even an Improver was Joyce, but she was not a Capitola;
she neither waved a feathered fan and spoke spaciously, nor did she take
out her sex-passion in talking. She was fine and occasionally gorgeous,
with tiger in her, though she was as far from perfumed-boudoir and
black-lingerie passion as she was from Capitola’s cooing staleness. Hers
was sheer straight white silk and cherished skin.
Behind all her reasons for valuing Martin was the fact that the only
time in her life when she had felt useful and independent was when she
had been an almshouse cook.
She might have drifted on, in her world of drifters, but for the
interposition of Latham Ireland, the lawyer-dilettante-lover.
“Joy,” he observed, “there seems to be an astounding quantity of that
Dr. Arrowsmith person about the place. As your benign uncle--”
“Latham, my sweet, I quite agree that Martin is too aggressive,
thoroughly unlicked, very selfish, rather a prig, absolutely a pedant,
and his shirts are atrocious. And I rather think I shall marry him. I
almost think I love him!”
“Wouldn’t cyanide be a neater way of doing suicide?” said Latham
Ireland.
III
What Martin felt for Joyce was what any widowed man of thirty-eight
would feel for a young and pretty and well-spoken woman who was
attentive to his wisdom. As to her wealth, there was no problem at all.
He was no poor man marrying money! Why, he was making ten thousand a
year, which was eight thousand more than he needed to live on!
Occasionally he was suspicious of her dependence on luxury. With
tremendous craft he demanded that instead of their dining in her
Jacobean hall of state, she come with him on his own sort of party. She
came, with enthusiasm. They went to abysmal Greenwich Village
restaurants with candles, artistic waiters, and no food; or to Chinatown
dives with food and nothing else. He even insisted on their taking the
subway--though after dinner he usually forgot that he was being Spartan,
and ordered a taxicab. She accepted it all without either wincing or too
much gurgling.
She played tennis with him in the court on her roof; she taught him
bridge, which, with his concentration and his memory, he soon played
better than she and enjoyed astonishingly; she persuaded him that he had
a leg and would look well in golf clothes.
He came to take her to dinner, on a serene autumn evening. He had a taxi
waiting.
“Why don’t we stick to the subway?” she said.
They were standing on her doorstep, in a blankly expensive and quite
unromantic street off Fifth Avenue.
“Oh, I hate the rotten subway as much as you do! Elbows in my stomach
never did help me much to plan experiments. I expect when we’re married
I’ll enjoy your limousine.”
“Is this a proposal? I’m not at all sure I’m going to marry you. Really,
I’m _not_! You have no sense of ease!”
They were married the following January, in St. George’s Church, and
Martin suffered almost as much over the flowers, the bishop, the
relatives with high-pitched voices, and the top hat which Joyce had
commanded, as he did over having Rippleton Holabird wring his hand with
a look of, “At last, dear boy, you have come out of barbarism and become
One of Us.”
Martin had asked Terry to be his best man. Terry had refused, and
asserted that only with pain would he come to the wedding at all. The
best man was Dr. William Smith, with his beard trimmed for the occasion,
and distressing morning clothes and a topper which he had bought in
London eleven years before, but both of them were safe in charge of a
cousin of Joyce who was guaranteed to have extra handkerchiefs and to
recognize the Wedding March. He had understood that Martin was Groton
and Harvard, and when he discovered that he was Winnemac and nothing at
all, he became suspicious.
In their stateroom on the steamer Joyce murmured, “Dear, you were
brave! I didn’t know what a damn’ fool that cousin of mine was. Kiss
me!”
Thenceforth ... except for a dreadful second when Leora floated between
them, eyes closed and hands crossed on her pale cold breast ... they
were happy and in each other found adventurous new ways.
IV
For three months they wandered in Europe.
On the first day Joyce had said, “Let’s have this beastly money thing
over. I should think you are the least mercenary of men. I’ve put ten
thousand dollars to your credit in London--oh, yes, and fifty thousand
in New York--and if you’d like, when you have to do things for me, I’d
be glad if you’d draw on it. No! Wait! Can’t you see how easy and decent
I want to make it all? You won’t hurt me to save your own self-respect?”
V
They really had, it seemed, to stay with the Principessa del Oltraggio
(formerly Miss Lucy Deemy Bessy of Dayton), Madame des Basses Loges
(Miss Brown of San Francisco), and the Countess of Marazion (who had
been Mrs. Arthur Snaipe of Albany, and several things before that), but
Joyce did go with him to see the great laboratories in London, Paris,
Copenhagen. She swelled to perceive how Nobel-prize winners received Her
Husband, knew of him, desired to be violent with him about phage, and
showed him their work of years. Some of them were hasty and graceless,
she thought. Her Man was prettier than any of them, and if she would but
be patient with him, she could make him master polo and clothes and
conversation ... but of course go on with his science ... a pity he
could not have a knighthood, like one or two of the British scientists
they met. But even in America there were honorary degrees....
While she discovered and digested Science, Martin discovered Women.
VI
Aware only of Madeline Fox and Orchid Pickerbaugh, who were Nice
American Girls, of soon-forgotten ladies of the night, and of Leora who,
in her indolence, her indifference to decoration and good fame, was
neither woman nor wife but only her own self, Martin knew nothing
whatever about Women. He had expected Leora to wait for him, to obey his
wishes, to understand without his saying them all the flattering things
he had planned to say. He was spoiled, and Joyce was not timorous about
telling him so.
It was not for her to sit beaming and wordless while he and his
fellow-researchers arranged the world. With many jolts he perceived that
even outside the bedroom he had to consider the fluctuations and
variables of his wife, as A Woman, and sometimes as A Rich Woman.
It was confusing to find that where Leora had acidly claimed sex-loyalty
but had hummingly not cared in what manner he might say Good Morning,
Joyce was indifferent as to how many women he might have fondled (so
long as he did not insult her by making love to them in her presence)
but did require him to say Good Morning as though he meant it. It was
confusing to find how starkly she discriminated between his caresses
when he was absorbed in her and his hasty interest when he wanted to go
to sleep. She could, she said, kill a man who considered her merely
convenient furniture, and she uncomfortably emphasized the “kill.”
She expected him to remember her birthday, her taste in wine, her liking
for flowers, and her objection to viewing the process of shaving. She
wanted a room to herself; she insisted that he knock before entering;
and she demanded that he admire her hats.
When he was so interested in the work at Pasteur Institute that he had a
clerk telephone that he would not be able to meet her for dinner, she
was tight-lipped with rage.
“Oh, you got to expect that,” he reflected, feeling that he was being
tactful and patient and penetrating.
It annoyed him, sometimes, that she would never impulsively start off on
a walk with him. No matter how brief the jaunt, she must first go to her
room for white gloves--placidly stand there drawing them on.... And in
London she made him buy spats ... and even wear them.
Joyce was not only an Arranger--she was a Loyalist. Like most American
cosmopolites she revered the English peerage, adopted all their
standards and beliefs--or what she considered their standards and
beliefs--and treasured her encounters with them. Three and a half years
after the War of 1914-18, she still said that she loathed all Germans,
and the one complete quarrel between her and Martin occurred when he
desired to see the laboratories in Berlin and Vienna.
But for all their differences it was a romantic pilgrimage. They loved
fearlessly; they tramped through the mountains and came back to revel in
vast bathrooms and ingenious dinners; they idled before cafés, and save
when he fell silent as he remembered how much Leora had wanted to sit
before cafés in France, they showed each other all the eagernesses of
their minds.
Europe, her Europe, which she had always known and loved, Joyce offered
to him on generous hands, and he who had ever been sensitive to warm
colors and fine gestures--when he was not frenzied with work--was
grateful to her and boyish with wonder. He believed that he was learning
to take life easily and beautifully; he criticized Terry Wickett (but
only to himself) for provincialism; and so in a golden leisure they came
back to America and prohibition and politicians charging to protect the
Steel Trust from the communists, to conversation about bridge and motors
and to osmotic pressure determinations.