AN EVENING'S ENTERTAINMENT
The dinner parties, so Paul told Lydia one evening a few days later,
would certainly be as successful and with but little more trouble. "Just
think of the dinners Ellen's been giving us for the last two months! I
don't believe there's another such cook in Ohio--within our purse, of
course."
Lydia did not visibly respond to this enthusiasm. Indeed, she walked
away from the last half of it, and leaned out of a window to look up at
the stars. When she came back to take up the tiny dress on which she was
sewing, she said: "I don't think I can stand more than this one dinner
party, Paul. I'm sorry, but I don't feel at all well, and this dreadful
nausea troubles me a good deal."
"Well, you look lovelier than ever before in your life," Paul reassured
her tenderly, and felt a moment's pique that her face did not entirely
clear at this all-important announcement. "Come, let's go over to the
Derby's for a game of bridge, will you, Lydia?"
This conversation took place on a Tuesday late in May. The dinner party
was set for Thursday. On Wednesday morning, after Paul's usual early
departure, Lydia went to her writing desk to send a note to Madeleine
Hollister. Paul had intimated that she and Madeleine were seeing less of
each other than he had expected from their girlhood acquaintance, and
Lydia, in her anxiety to induce Paul to talk over with her and plan with
her the growth of their home life, was eager to adopt every casual
suggestion he threw out. She began, therefore, a cordial invitation to
Madeleine to spend several days with them. She would try again to be
more intimate with her husband's sister.
She had not inherited her mother's housekeeping eye, and was never
extremely observant of details. Being more than usually preoccupied this
morning, she had no suspicion that someone else had been using the
conveniences for writing on her desk until she turned over the sheet of
paper on which she had begun her note, and saw with surprise that the
other side was already covered with a coarse handwriting, unfamiliar to
her.
As she looked at this in the blankest astonishment, a phrase leaped out
at her comprehension, like a serpent striking. And then another. And
another.
She tried to push back her chair to escape, but she was like a person
paralyzed.
With returning strength to move came an overwhelming wave of nausea. She
crept up to her own room and lay motionless and soundless for hour after
hour, until presently it was noon, and the pleasant tinkling of gongs
announced that lunch was served.
Lydia rose, and made her way down the stairs to the well-ordered table,
set with the daintiest of perfectly prepared food, and stood, holding on
to the back of a chair, while she rang the bell. The little second girl
answered it--one of the flitting, worthless, temporary occupants of that
position.
"Tell Ellen to come here," said her mistress.
At the appearance of the cook, Lydia's white face went a little whiter.
"Did you use my writing desk last evening?" she asked.
Ellen looked up, her large, square-jawed face like a mask through which
her eyes probed her mistress' expression. "Yes, Mrs. Hollister; I did,"
she said in the admirable "servant's manner" she possessed to
perfection. "I ought to ask your pardon for doing it without permission,
but someone was wanting Mr. Hollister on the telephone, and I thought
best to sit within hearing of the bell until you and Mr. Hollister
should return, and as--"
"You left part of your letter to Patsy O'Hern," said Lydia, and sat
down suddenly, as though her strength were spent.
The woman opposite her flushed a purplish red. There was a long silence.
Lydia looked at her servant with a face before which Ellen finally
lowered her eyes.
"I am sure, Mrs. Hollister, if you don't think I'm worth the place, and
if you think you can manage without me to-morrow night, I'll go this
minute," she said coolly.
Lydia did not remove her eyes from the other's flushed face. "You must
go far away from Bellevue," she said. "You must not take a place
anywhere near here."
Ellen looked up quickly, and down again. The color slowly died out of
her face. After a sullen silence, "Yes," she said.
"That is all," said Lydia.
* * * * *
Paul found his wife that evening still very white. She explained Ellen's
disappearance with a dry brevity. "That we should have continued to give
that--that awful--to give her opportunity to work upon a boy of--" she
ended brokenly. "Suppose he had been my brother!"
Paul was aghast. "But, my _dear_! To-morrow is the night of the dinner!
Couldn't you have put off a few days this sudden fit of--"
Lydia broke from her white stillness with a wild outcry. She flung
herself on her husband, pressing her hands on his mouth and crying out
fiercely: "No, no, Paul! Not that! I can't bear to have you say that! I
hoped--I hoped you wouldn't think of--"
Paul was fresh from an interview with Dr. Melton, and in his ears rang
innumerable cautions against excitement or violent emotions. With his
usual competent grasp on the essentials of a situation that he could not
understand at all, he put aside for the time his exasperated
apprehensions about the next day's event, and picking Lydia up bodily he
carried her to a couch, closing her lips with gentle hands and soothing
her with caresses, like a frightened child.
"Oh, you are good to me!" she murmured finally, quieted. "I must try
not to get so excited. But, Paul--I _can't_ tell you--about--about that
letter--and later, when I saw Ellen, it was as though we fought hand to
hand for Patsy, though she never--"
"There, there, dearest! Don't talk about it--just rest. You've worked
yourself into a perfect fever." If there was latent in the indulgent
accent of this speech the coda, "All about nothing," it escaped Lydia's
ear. She only knew that the long nightmare of her lonely, horrified day
was over. She clung to her husband, and thanked heaven for his pure,
clean manliness.
But in a vastly different way the next day was almost as much of a
nightmare. Lydia's father and mother were temporarily out of town and
their at least fairly satisfactory cook was enjoying her vacation at an
undiscoverable address. Lydia was cut off from asking her sister to come
to her aid by the fact that Paul had prevailed upon her to omit Marietta
and her husband from her guests. "If you won't give but one, we've just
_got_ to invite the important ones," he had said. "Your sister can take
dinner with us any day, and you know her husband _isn't_ the most--"
Lydia had picked up in the school of necessity a fair knowledge of
cooking, for which she had discovered in herself quite a liking; but she
had been too constantly in social demand to have the leisure for
advancing far into culinary lore, and she now found herself dismayed
before the elaborate menu that Ellen had planned, for which the
materials were gathered together. She was still shaken with the emotions
of the day before, and subject to sudden giddy, sick turns, which,
although lasting but an instant, left her enormously fatigued.
She went furiously at the task before her, beginning by simplifying the
dinner as much as she dared and could with the materials at hand, and
struggling with the dishes she was obliged to retain. For years
afterward, the sight of chicken salad affected her to acute nausea. The
inexperienced and careless little second girl lost her head in the
crisis, and had to be repeatedly calmed and assured that all that would
be asked of her would be to serve the dinner to the waiters for whom
Lydia had arranged hastily by telephone with Endbury's leading caterer.
Ellen had planned to serve the meal with the help of a waitress friend
or two, without other outside help; a feature of the occasion that had
met with Paul's hearty approval. He told Lydia that those palpably
hired-for-the-occasion nigger waiters were very bad form, and belonged
to a phase of Endbury's social gaucheries as outgrown now as charade
parties. But now, of course, nothing else was possible.
In the intervals of cooking, Lydia left her makeshift help in the
kitchen, to see that nothing burned, and in a frenzy of activity flew at
some of the manifold things to be done to prepare the house for the
festivity. She swept and wiped up herself the expansive floors of the
two large parlors, set the rooms in order, dusted the innumerable
wedding present knickknacks, cleaned the stairs, wiped free from dust
the carved balustrades, ordered the bedrooms that were to serve as
dressing rooms in the evening, answered the 'phone a thousand times,
arranged flowers in the vases, received a reportorial call from Miss
Burgess, gave cut glass and china its final polish, laid out Paul's
evening clothes and arranged her own toilet ready--it was five o'clock!
There were innumerable other tasks to accomplish, but she dared no
longer put off setting the table.
It was to be a large dinner--large, that is, for Endbury--of twenty
covers, and Lydia had never prepared a table for so many guests. The
number of objects necessary for the conventional setting of a dinner
table appalled her. She was so tired, and her attention was so fixed on
the complicated processes going on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her
brain reeled over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates and
glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal occasion.
They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal them into order. She
discovered that she had put forks for the soup--that in some
inexplicable way at the plate destined for an important guest there was
a large kitchen spoon of iron--a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in
her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety. When Paul came in,
looking very grave, she told him with a wavering laugh, "If I tried as
hard for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I've tried all day to have this
dinner right, I'd certainly have a front seat in the angel choir. If
anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it'll be because he's harder to
please than St. Peter himself."
"My Aunt Alexandra will be here," said Paul, the humorous side of her
speech escaping him.
Lydia set down a tray of glasses, and broke into open, shaking,
hysterical laughter. Paul surveyed her grimly. Her excitement had
flushed her cheeks and darkened her eyes, and her sudden, apparently
light-hearted, mirth put the finishing touch to a picture that could
seem to her husband nothing but a care-free, not to say childish,
attitude toward a situation of grave concern to him and his prospects
and ambitions in the world. His inborn and highly cultivated regard for
competence and success in any enterprise undertaken, drowned out, as was
by no means infrequent with him, any judicial inquiry into the innate
importance of the enterprise. He had an instant of bitter impatience
with Lydia. He felt that he had a right to hold her to account for the
outcome of events. If she were well enough to have rosy cheeks and to
laugh at nothing, she was well enough to have satisfactory results
expected from her efforts.
"I hope very much that everything will go well," he said curtly, turning
away. "Our first dinner party means a good deal."
But everything did not go well. Indeed, it is scarcely too much to say
that nothing went well. From the over-peppered soup (Lydia had forgotten
to caution her rattle-brained assistant that she had already seasoned
the bouillon) to the salad which, although excellent, gave out frankly,
beyond any possibility of disguise, while five people were still
unserved, the meal was a long procession of mishaps. Paul took up
sorrily his wife's rather hysterical note of self-mockery, and laughed
and joked over the varied eccentricities of the pretentious menu. But
there was no laughter in his heart.
Never before, in all his life, from babyhood up, had he been forced to
know the acrid taste of failure, and the dose was not sweetened by his
intense consciousness that he was not in any way responsible. No such
fiasco had ever resulted from anything he _had_ been responsible for, he
thought fiercely to himself, leaning forward smilingly to talk to the
president of the street-railway company, who, having nothing in the
shape of silverware left before his place but a knife and spoon, was
eating his salad with the latter implement. "Lydia has no right to act
so," he thought.
The hostess gave the effect of flushed, bright-eyed animation usual with
her on exciting occasions.
"Your wife is a beauty," said the street-railway magnate, looking down
the disorganized table toward her.
Paul received this assurance with the proper enthusiastic assent, but
something else gleamed hotly in his face as he looked at her. "I have
_some_ rights," thought the young husband. "Lydia owes me something!" He
never before had been moved to pity for himself.
Lydia seemed to herself to be in an endless bad dream. The exhausting
efforts of the day had reduced her to a sort of coma of fatigue through
which she felt but dully the successive stabs of the ill-served,
unsuccessful dinner. At times, the table, the guests, the room itself,
wavered before her, and she clutched at her chair to keep her balance.
She did not know that she was laughing and talking gaily and eating
nothing. She was only conscious of an intense longing for the end of
things, and darkness and quiet.
After the meal the company moved into the double parlor. The plan had
been to serve coffee there, but as people stood about waiting and this
did not appear, Paul drew Lydia to one side to ask her about it. She
looked at him with bright, blank eyes, and spoke in an expressionless
voice: "The grocery boy forgot to deliver the coffee," she said. "There
isn't any, I remember now."
He turned away silently, and the later part of the entertainment began.
There was to be music, one of the guests being Endbury's favorite
amateur soprano, another a pianist much thought of. The singer took her
place by the piano, assuming carefully the correct position. Lydia
watched her balance on the balls of her feet, lean forward a little,
throw up her chest and draw in her abdomen. As the preliminary chords of
the accompaniment sounded, she was almost visibly concentrating her
thoughts on the tension of her vocal chords, on the position of the soft
palate and the resonance of the nasal cavities. The thoughts of her
auditors followed her own. It came to Lydia some time after the
performance was over that the words of the song told of love and life
and tragic betrayal.
A near-by guest leaned to her and said, during the hand-clapping: "I
couldn't make out what it was all about--never can understand a
song--but, say! can't she put it all over the soprano that sings in the
First Methodist."
His hostess gave the speaker a rather disconcerting stare, hardly
explained, he thought, by the enigmatical statement that came after it:
"Why, that is how we are living, all of us!"
The pianist was an old German, considered eccentric by Endbury. He had a
social position on account of his son, a prosperous German-American
manufacturer of buggies, and was invited because of his readiness to
play on any occasion. The old man looked about him at the company with a
fatherly smile, and, sitting down to his instrument, waited pointedly
until all the cheerful hum of conversation had died away. The room was
profoundly silent as he brought his hands down on the keys in a
startling, thrilling chord. Lydia's heart began to beat fast. She felt a
chill run among the roots of her hair. She was so moved she could have
wept aloud, and yet, almost at once, as the musician passed on to the
rich elaboration of his theme, she lost herself in a groping
bewilderment. She had heard so little music! Her straining attention
mocked her with its futility.
She and Paul had been married for eight months, but they had found no
time for the serious study of music from which she had hoped so much.
When Paul was at home for an evening he was too tired and worn for
anything very deep, he said, and preferred to anything else the lighter
pieces of Nevin. She now gave ear despairingly to the mighty utterance
of a master, catching only now and then a tantalizing glimpse of what it
might mean to her. At times, there emerged from the glorious tumult of
sound some grave, earnest chord, some quick, piercing melody, some
exquisite sudden cadence, which reached her heart intelligibly; but
through most of it she felt herself to be listening with heartsick
yearning to a lovely message in an unknown tongue. Her feeling of
desolate exile from a realm of beauty she longed to enter, was
intensified, as was natural in so sensitive a nature, by the strange
power of music to heighten in its listeners whatever is, for the time,
their predominant emotion. She felt like crying out, like beating her
hands against the prison bars suddenly revealed to her. She was almost
intolerably affected before the end of the selection.
"That's an awfully long piece for anybody to learn by heart!" commented
her neighbor admiringly, as the old pianist finished, and stood up
wiping his forehead. "Say, Mr. Burkhardt, what's the name of that
selection?" he went on, leaning forward.
The old German turned toward him, and answered gravely: "That is the
feerst mofement of Beethoven's Opus Von Hundred and Elefen."
"Oh, it is, is it?" said Lydia's guest, with a facetious intonation.
"All of that?"
After that the soprano sang again, someone else sang a humorous negro
song, there was more piano music, rendered by the prosperous son of the
old pianist, who played dashingly some bright comic-opera airs. The
furniture was pushed back and a few dancers whirled over the costly,
hardwood waxed floors, which Lydia had cleaned that morning. She felt
vaguely that everyone was being most kind and that her good-natured
guests were trying to make up for the failure of the dinner by unusual
efforts to have the evening pass off well. She was very grateful for
this humane disposition of theirs. It was the bright spot of the
experience.
But Paul, who also saw the kindly efforts of his guests, felt that this
was the last intolerable dagger-thrust. Their amused compassion
suffocated him. He wanted people to envy him, not pity him, he thought
in mortified chagrin.
After an eternity, the hour of departure arrived. As the door shut out
the last of the smiling, lying guests, the host and hostess turned to
face each other.
Paul spoke first, in an even, restrained tone: "You would better go to
bed, Lydia; you must be very tired."
With this, he turned away to shut up the house. He had determined to
preserve at all costs the appearance of the indulgent, non-critical,
over-patient husband that he intensely felt himself to be. No force, he
thought grimly, shutting his jaws hard, should drag from him a word of
his real sentiments. Fanned by the wind of this virtuous resolution, his
sentiments grew hotter and hotter as he walked about, locking doors and
windows, and reviewing bitterly the events of the evening. If he was to
restrain himself from saying anything, he would at least allow himself
the privilege of feeling all that was possible to a man so deeply
injured.
Lydia sat quietly waiting for him to finish, her face in her hands,
conscious of nothing but fatigue, in her ears a wild echo of the
inexplicable, haunting Beethoven chords.
Suddenly she started and raised her head, her face transfigured. Her
eyes shone, a smile was on her lips like that of someone who hears from
afar the sound of a beloved voice. She made a gesture of yearning toward
her husband. "Oh, Paul--Paul!" she cried to him softly, in a tremulous
voice of wonder.
He turned, the light for the first time on his black, loveless face.
"What is it?" he enunciated distinctly, looking at her hard.
Before his eyes Lydia shrank back. She put up her hands instinctively to
hide her face from him. Finally, "Nothing--nothing--" she murmured.
Without comment, Paul went back to his conscientious round of the house.
Lydia had felt for the first time the quickening to life of her child.
And during all that day, until then, she had forgotten that she was to
know motherhood.