Depths and Heights
The complications which had followed his various sentimental affairs
left Cowperwood in a quandary at times as to whether there could be any
peace or satisfaction outside of monogamy, after all. Although Mrs.
Hand had gone to Europe at the crisis of her affairs, she had returned
to seek him out. Cecily Haguenin found many opportunities of writing
him letters and assuring him of her undying affection. Florence
Cochrane persisted in seeing or attempting to see him even after his
interest in her began to wane. For another thing Aileen, owing to the
complication and general degeneracy of her affairs, had recently begun
to drink. Owing to the failure of her affair with Lynde--for in spite
of her yielding she had never had any real heart interest in it--and to
the cavalier attitude with which Cowperwood took her disloyalty, she
had reached that state of speculative doldrums where the human animal
turns upon itself in bitter self-analysis; the end with the more
sensitive or the less durable is dissipation or even death. Woe to him
who places his faith in illusion--the only reality--and woe to him who
does not. In one way lies disillusion with its pain, in the other way
regret.
After Lynde's departure for Europe, whither she had refused to follow
him, Aileen took up with a secondary personage by the name of Watson
Skeet, a sculptor. Unlike most artists, he was the solitary heir of
the president of an immense furniture-manufacturing company in which he
refused to take any interest. He had studied abroad, but had returned
to Chicago with a view to propagating art in the West. A large, blond,
soft-fleshed man, he had a kind of archaic naturalness and simplicity
which appealed to Aileen. They had met at the Rhees Griers'. Feeling
herself neglected after Lynde's departure, and dreading loneliness
above all things, Aileen became intimate with Skeet, but to no intense
mental satisfaction. That driving standard within--that obsessing ideal
which requires that all things be measured by it--was still dominant.
Who has not experienced the chilling memory of the better thing? How it
creeps over the spirit of one's current dreams! Like the specter at the
banquet it stands, its substanceless eyes viewing with a sad philosophy
the makeshift feast. The what-might-have-been of her life with
Cowperwood walked side by side with her wherever she went. Once
occasionally indulging in cigarettes, she now smoked almost constantly.
Once barely sipping at wines, cocktails, brandy-and-soda, she now took
to the latter, or, rather, to a new whisky-and-soda combination known
as "highball" with a kind of vehemence which had little to do with a
taste for the thing itself. True, drinking is, after all, a state of
mind, and not an appetite. She had found on a number of occasions when
she had been quarreling with Lynde or was mentally depressed that in
partaking of these drinks a sort of warm, speculative indifference
seized upon her. She was no longer so sad. She might cry, but it was
in a soft, rainy, relieving way. Her sorrows were as strange, enticing
figures in dreams. They moved about and around her, not as things
actually identical with her, but as ills which she could view at a
distance. Sometimes both she and they (for she saw herself also as in
a kind of mirage or inverted vision) seemed beings of another state,
troubled, but not bitterly painful. The old nepenthe of the bottle had
seized upon her. After a few accidental lapses, in which she found it
acted as a solace or sedative, the highball visioned itself to her as a
resource. Why should she not drink if it relieved her, as it actually
did, of physical and mental pain? There were apparently no bad
after-effects. The whisky involved was diluted to an almost watery
state. It was her custom now when at home alone to go to the butler's
pantry where the liquors were stored and prepare a drink for herself,
or to order a tray with a siphon and bottle placed in her room.
Cowperwood, noticing the persistence of its presence there and the fact
that she drank heavily at table, commented upon it.
"You're not taking too much of that, are you, Aileen?" he questioned
one evening, watching her drink down a tumbler of whisky and water as
she sat contemplating a pattern of needlework with which the table was
ornamented.
"Certainly I'm not," she replied, irritably, a little flushed and thick
of tongue. "Why do you ask?" She herself had been wondering whether in
the course of time it might not have a depreciating effect on her
complexion. This was the only thing that still concerned her--her
beauty.
"Well, I see you have that bottle in your room all the time. I was
wondering if you might not be forgetting how much you are using it."
Because she was so sensitive he was trying to be tactful.
"Well," she answered, crossly, "what if I am? It wouldn't make any
particular difference if I did. I might as well drink as do some other
things that are done."
It was a kind of satisfaction to her to bait him in this way. His
inquiry, being a proof of continued interest on his part, was of some
value. At least he was not entirely indifferent to her.
"I wish you wouldn't talk that way, Aileen," he replied. "I have no
objection to your drinking some. I don't suppose it makes any
difference to you now whether I object or not. But you are too
good-looking, too well set up physically, to begin that. You don't
need it, and it's such a short road to hell. Your state isn't so bad.
Good heavens! many another woman has been in your position. I'm not
going to leave you unless you want to leave me. I've told you that
over and over. I'm just sorry people change--we all do. I suppose
I've changed some, but that's no reason for your letting yourself go to
pieces. I wish you wouldn't be desperate about this business. It may
come out better than you think in the long run."
He was merely talking to console her.
"Oh! oh! oh!" Aileen suddenly began to rock and cry in a foolish
drunken way, as though her heart would break, and Cowperwood got up.
He was horrified after a fashion.
"Oh, don't come near me!" Aileen suddenly exclaimed, sobering in an
equally strange way. "I know why you come. I know how much you care
about me or my looks. Don't you worry whether I drink or not. I'll
drink if I please, or do anything else if I choose. If it helps me over
my difficulties, that's my business, not yours," and in defiance she
prepared another glass and drank it.
Cowperwood shook his head, looking at her steadily and sorrowfully.
"It's too bad, Aileen," he said. "I don't know what to do about you
exactly. You oughtn't to go on this way. Whisky won't get you
anywhere. It will simply ruin your looks and make you miserable in the
bargain."
"Oh, to hell with my looks!" she snapped. "A lot of good they've done
me." And, feeling contentious and sad, she got up and left the table.
Cowperwood followed her after a time, only to see her dabbing at her
eyes and nose with powder. A half-filled glass of whisky and water was
on the dressing-table beside her. It gave him a strange feeling of
responsibility and helplessness.
Mingled with his anxiety as to Aileen were thoughts of the alternate
rise and fall of his hopes in connection with Berenice. She was such a
superior girl, developing so definitely as an individual. To his
satisfaction she had, on a few recent occasions when he had seen her,
unbent sufficiently to talk to him in a friendly and even intimate way,
for she was by no means hoity-toity, but a thinking, reasoning being of
the profoundest intellectual, or, rather, the highest artistic
tendencies. She was so care-free, living in a high and solitary world,
at times apparently enwrapt in thoughts serene, at other times sharing
vividly in the current interests of the social world of which she was a
part, and which she dignified as much as it dignified her.
One Sunday morning at Pocono, in late June weather, when he had come
East to rest for a few days, and all was still and airy on the high
ground which the Carter cottage occupied, Berenice came out on the
veranda where Cowperwood was sitting, reading a fiscal report of one of
his companies and meditating on his affairs. By now they had become
somewhat more sympatica than formerly, and Berenice had an easy, genial
way in his presence. She liked him, rather. With an indescribable
smile which wrinkled her nose and eyes, and played about the corners of
her mouth, she said: "Now I am going to catch a bird."
"A what?" asked Cowperwood, looking up and pretending he had not heard,
though he had. He was all eyes for any movement of hers. She was
dressed in a flouncy morning gown eminently suitable for the world in
which she was moving.
"A bird," she replied, with an airy toss of her head. "This is
June-time, and the sparrows are teaching their young to fly."
Cowperwood, previously engrossed in financial speculations, was
translated, as by the wave of a fairy wand, into another realm where
birds and fledglings and grass and the light winds of heaven were more
important than brick and stone and stocks and bonds. He got up and
followed her flowing steps across the grass to where, near a clump of
alder bushes, she had seen a mother sparrow enticing a fledgling to
take wing. From her room upstairs, she had been watching this bit of
outdoor sociology. It suddenly came to Cowperwood, with great force,
how comparatively unimportant in the great drift of life were his own
affairs when about him was operative all this splendid will to
existence, as sensed by her. He saw her stretch out her hands
downward, and run in an airy, graceful way, stooping here and there,
while before her fluttered a baby sparrow, until suddenly she dived
quickly and then, turning, her face agleam, cried: "See, I have him! He
wants to fight, too! Oh, you little dear!"
She was holding "him," as she chose to characterize it, in the hollow
of her hand, the head between her thumb and forefinger, with the
forefinger of her free hand petting it the while she laughed and kissed
it. It was not so much bird-love as the artistry of life and of
herself that was moving her. Hearing the parent bird chirping
distractedly from a nearby limb, she turned and called: "Don't make
such a row! I sha'n't keep him long."
Cowperwood laughed--trig in the morning sun. "You can scarcely blame
her," he commented.
"Oh, she knows well enough I wouldn't hurt him," Berenice replied,
spiritedly, as though it were literally true.
"Does she, indeed?" inquired Cowperwood. "Why do you say that?"
"Because it's true. Don't you think they know when their children are
really in danger?"
"But why should they?" persisted Cowperwood, charmed and interested by
the involute character of her logic. She was quite deceptive to him.
He could not be sure what she thought.
She merely fixed him a moment with her cool, slate-blue eyes. "Do you
think the senses of the world are only five?" she asked, in the most
charming and non-reproachful way. "Indeed, they know well enough. She
knows." She turned and waved a graceful hand in the direction of the
tree, where peace now reigned. The chirping had ceased. "She knows I
am not a cat."
Again that enticing, mocking smile that wrinkled her nose, her
eye-corners, her mouth. The word "cat" had a sharp, sweet sound in her
mouth. It seemed to be bitten off closely with force and airy spirit.
Cowperwood surveyed her as he would have surveyed the ablest person he
knew. Here was a woman, he saw, who could and would command the utmost
reaches of his soul in every direction. If he interested her at all, he
would need them all. The eyes of her were at once so elusive, so
direct, so friendly, so cool and keen. "You will have to be
interesting, indeed, to interest me," they seemed to say; and yet they
were by no means averse, apparently, to a hearty camaraderie. That
nose-wrinkling smile said as much. Here was by no means a Stephanie
Platow, nor yet a Rita Sohlberg. He could not assume her as he had
Ella Hubby, or Florence Cochrane, or Cecily Haguenin. Here was an iron
individuality with a soul for romance and art and philosophy and life.
He could not take her as he had those others. And yet Berenice was
really beginning to think more than a little about Cowperwood. He must
be an extraordinary man; her mother said so, and the newspapers were
always mentioning his name and noting his movements.
A little later, at Southampton, whither she and her mother had gone,
they met again. Together with a young man by the name of Greanelle,
Cowperwood and Berenice had gone into the sea to bathe. It was a
wonderful afternoon.
To the east and south and west spread the sea, a crinkling floor of
blue, and to their left, as they faced it, was a lovely outward-curving
shore of tawny sand. Studying Berenice in blue-silk bathing costume
and shoes, Cowperwood had been stung by the wonder of passing life--how
youth comes in, ever fresh and fresh, and age goes out. Here he was,
long crowded years of conflict and experience behind him, and yet this
twenty-year-old girl, with her incisive mind and keen tastes, was
apparently as wise in matters of general import as himself. He could
find no flaw in her armor in those matters which they could discuss.
Her knowledge and comments were so ripe and sane, despite a tendency to
pose a little, which was quite within her rights. Because Greanelle
had bored her a little she had shunted him off and was amusing herself
talking to Cowperwood, who fascinated her by his compact individuality.
"Do you know," she confided to him, on this occasion, "I get so very
tired of young men sometimes. They can be so inane. I do declare,
they are nothing more than shoes and ties and socks and canes strung
together in some unimaginable way. Vaughn Greanelle is for all the
world like a perambulating manikin to-day. He is just an English suit
with a cane attached walking about."
"Well, bless my soul," commented Cowperwood, "what an indictment!"
"It's true," she replied. "He knows nothing at all except polo, and
the latest swimming-stroke, and where everybody is, and who is going to
marry who. Isn't it dull?"
She tossed her head back and breathed as though to exhale the fumes of
the dull and the inane from her inmost being.
"Did you tell him that?" inquired Cowperwood, curiously.
"Certainly I did."
"I don't wonder he looks so solemn," he said, turning and looking back
at Greanelle and Mrs. Carter; they were sitting side by side in
sand-chairs, the former beating the sand with his toes. "You're a
curious girl, Berenice," he went on, familiarly. "You are so direct
and vital at times.
"Not any more than you are, from all I can hear," she replied, fixing
him with those steady eyes. "Anyhow, why should I be bored? He is so
dull. He follows me around out here all the time, and I don't want
him."
She tossed her head and began to run up the beach to where bathers were
fewer and fewer, looking back at Cowperwood as if to say, "Why don't
you follow?" He developed a burst of enthusiasm and ran quite briskly,
overtaking her near some shallows where, because of a sandbar offshore,
the waters were thin and bright.
"Oh, look!" exclaimed Berenice, when he came up. "See, the fish! O-oh!"
She dashed in to where a few feet offshore a small school of minnows as
large as sardines were playing, silvery in the sun. She ran as she had
for the bird, doing her best to frighten them into a neighboring pocket
or pool farther up on the shore. Cowperwood, as gay as a boy of ten,
joined in the chase. He raced after them briskly, losing one school,
but pocketing another a little farther on and calling to her to come.
"Oh!" exclaimed Berenice at one point. "Here they are now. Come
quick! Drive them in here!"
Her hair was blowy, her face a keen pink, her eyes an electric blue by
contrast. She was bending low over the water--Cowperwood also--their
hands outstretched, the fish, some five in all, nervously dancing
before them in their efforts to escape. All at once, having forced
them into a corner, they dived; Berenice actually caught one.
Cowperwood missed by a fraction, but drove the fish she did catch into
her hands.
"Oh," she exclaimed, jumping up, "how wonderful! It's alive. I caught
it."
She danced up and down, and Cowperwood, standing before her, was
sobered by her charm. He felt an impulse to speak to her of his
affection, to tell her how delicious she was to him.
"You," he said, pausing over the word and giving it special
emphasis--"you are the only thing here that is wonderful to me."
She looked at him a moment, the live fish in her extended hands, her
eyes keying to the situation. For the least fraction of a moment she
was uncertain, as he could see, how to take this. Many men had been
approximative before. It was common to have compliments paid to her.
But this was different. She said nothing, but fixed him with a look
which said quite plainly, "You had better not say anything more just
now, I think." Then, seeing that he understood, that his manner
softened, and that he was troubled, she crinkled her nose gaily and
added: "It's like fairyland. I feel as though I had caught it out of
another world." Cowperwood understood. The direct approach was not for
use in her case; and yet there was something, a camaraderie, a sympathy
which he felt and which she felt. A girls' school, conventions, the
need of socially placing herself, her conservative friends, and their
viewpoint--all were working here. If he were only single now, she told
herself, she would be willing to listen to him in a very different
spirit, for he was charming. But this way-- And he, for his part,
concluded that here was one woman whom he would gladly marry if she
would have him.