Chapter II: Part ONE: I (2)

There are times when one is abstractly afraid. I wondered if I were really afraid of New York? I lapsed into thought so uncharted--so, really, a maze of instinct--that it came as a shock to be again accosted by her. I had been calling upon that abstraction usually neglected, God. And what she at this moment said was, whether purposely or not, a challenge. “She is obliged to talk about Eva, you see, because everybody talks about Eva.” Eva might have considered this the accolade: but I had been coming to the conclusion that she was badly in need of the help over which Charles Glidden had made merry. “Can’t you do something about it? Can’t you talk to her about it? Can’t you tell her that she will ruin Nick’s work?” Gertrude questioned in a thickened voice.

“Ruin his work?” I was deliberately stupid: if one were quick with her, she became confused in her mental processes.

“She will drive him crazy!” she gasped out of some deep resentment. “You haven’t the least idea of how she acts at home.”

I interrupted with the reminder that I had been given to understand that his people neither approved nor grasped his architectural ambition. I looked her in the eye, and she flinched, but not, I saw, for herself. “Oh, I--I----” She took a fresh start: “It amuses him to do it.”

Anthony Bloodgood now obtruded his view. “You see, Mrs. Avery, Nick is his mother’s only child; he’ll have enough money. And Mrs. Van Suydam--she’s old-fashioned, I’ve heard my father call her--she wanted him to do as the old codgers had always done--settle down to manage the estate, and all that. And I must say,” he concluded wisely, “that it’s a policy that’s worked to advantage in lots of cases, here in New York.” Having so done his duty by his absent friend, he twirled his little moustache and took a long breath.

Here was the crux of the matter, I decided: it was a question of the island of Manhattan. Eva--and the rest of us--were trying to take root on the rock of Manhattan, and we could take root nowhere because in leaving the land on which we ourselves had been born we had cut our tap roots. Was Mrs. Van Suydam the hierophant who would initiate Eva, or was she forever against her son’s wife?

“How does it feel to be a New Yorker?” I asked flippantly.

They bent upon me looks of alarm. I laughed. It was coming clearly into my head what the trouble was. The gigantic growth of New York was accepted by these condemnatory young people--and by their sisters and their cousins and perhaps their aunts--as natural, but it drove us beyond our nervous strength. If we stayed here we would die of attrition while Nicholas Van Suydam and his kin waxed fat. The soul’s food grows only on the land of one’s birth. “Did you ever read Genesis?” I asked Gertrude Cuyler.

“Why--no, Mrs. Avery,” she stammered. “Or--I probably read it when I was a little girl.”

“You might ask Mrs. Van Suydam if she agrees with the Bible that authors should stay at home. She will, of course--in this case.”

The Cuyler girl asked timidly if the Bible really said such a thing. She was losing the thread of what she had set out to say to me. I could see her fighting to hold on. “All of you make such jokes,” she advanced.

“One must joke,” I threw out carelessly. Especially, I added in my mind, when one is beginning to understand. I cautioned myself: “Old girl, you’ve got to understand. You’ve got to understand the two sides; for don’t you always drag in that there are two sides? There’s the side of Eva, and there’s the side of the Van Suydams: there’s the side of us, and there’s the side of New York. You might start--by way of a drastic change!--by understanding yourself. Why--for instance--are you about to be detestable to this good-natured young woman? Is it because you’re envious of her security? She gets that security from having always kept in touch with her home. You could have stayed at home; Eva could have stayed at home: your precious crowd could have stayed at home. Why didn’t you?” There we were: we were transplanted and sickly, and I was turning to bite the hand that fed me.

We paused at a street crossing, and the lights changed, and I felt Anthony Bloodgood’s hand at my elbow symbolically guiding me for the passage of the--Red Sea, I decided in despair: it had become vitally necessary that I laugh. Anthony looked down--very far down--to my face, and enquired solicitously: “Did I rush you too fast?”

“Yes!” I said. But it was the life that I had selected, and not Anthony Bloodgood, which was rushing me too fast. The Lord God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, back to the land from whence they had come. If one read the Bible when one was upset, it applied to the most modern of problems. An author takes colour from the land of his birth, but mainly, it seemed to me today, he derives from the land of his people the calm strength through which he is enabled to go on. I glanced at these two satisfied persons who, because they believed that nothing in the world was so good as New York, had never considered moving away.

Encouraged by my attention, Gertrude hurried on: “Eva has a way of saying to Nick ‘When I work, I work’.”

I objected: “Why would she find it necessary to say that to him? Doesn’t he grasp it that there’s such a thing as the privacy of work?” I could not be homesick: it was inconceivable that I be homesick. This was more fundamental than the rather slippery emotion called homesickness. We were here; and we were unaware of what worked against us. We believed nervousness was the excitement of inspiration when it was the excitation of sick nerves. We were defeating our own ends. With more tranquillity, with a greater simplicity, we might stay in the garden of Eden of peace. But in pushing myself into the problems of Eva Litchfield I was being forced to face my own. I knew that nostalgia was growing on us, destroying our correct self-appraisal, and that it would finally envelop our minds in a foreboding gloom that we would call our genius. I said to myself: “Laugh at it, you fool!” I laughed, at myself and every friend I had in the world.

Uneasy over my silences, racked by my laughter, Gertrude spoke with a catch in her breath: “Tony and I dropped in: we used to drop in on Nick when he lived at home. Eva didn’t come out of her study, just shrieked through the closed door that she’d go crazy if Nick interrupted her. We heard it so plainly, you see, because she lifted her voice and--and--yelled. I tried to look as if nothing was happening, and Tony, too, tried to pass it off for Nick’s sake. And then Nick opened her door and walked in. I whispered to Tony that we had better leave----”

“Was she working?” I cut across her flow of narrative: she told things as a child does, starting each sentence with a small intake of the breath.

She said that Eva had been writing, she imagined. “And I said to Tony that we had better go----”

Anthony shrugged. “I told you there would be no squabble. Nick’s loony over her. If I had a wife who didn’t so much as turn her head to speak to me when I went to her room, I’d give her a dose of her own medicine.”

“I should like to know what he did?” I murmured. “That’s the point you were thinking of making, wasn’t it? What did he do?”

“He went over and kissed the nape of her neck,” said Anthony with deep disgust.

“She is pretty,” Gertrude conceded.

Agreeing that this was the solution, he wagged his handsome head. “She knows it. She’s wise. Those tea roses she has around her study are becoming to her. But she is a strange woman: she gets the roses because they are so becoming to her, and then she doesn’t play up to them; she picks up papers from her desk and frowns and pretends she doesn’t hear a word you say.”

“She probably doesn’t,” I reassured him. “Look here, you two: you will have to make up your minds to it. Your friend has married a creature of mist and cobwebs, an--” I hesitated before their blankness--“an enchantress who throws spells and doesn’t take part in what her spells bring about.”

Gertrude was practical about it. “Then why did she marry him?”

“I wasn’t here,” I said drily; “but presumably she was in love with him.”

I knew that this time they did look at each other over my head. I heard them breathe their doubt. Anthony brought up a feature that he assured me would drive any man mad: she was not consistent. He had been in Nicholas’ own workroom, he told me, sitting idly by while another man discussed points of architecture with their host. Anthony acknowledged to having been bored, and floundering out of his depth which, he said, was not in the line of architecture; but men respected each other’s work, and he had of course kept quiet until they settled whatever had come up. But Eva had opened the door and had stood there until they were forced to look up from the plans spread out before them. Was that nice of her, he asked me: was that as she would be done by?

I remarked that she might have wanted to see him about something that could not wait. I added the nugget, for Gertrude to seize, that Eva had much ado to keep out of the way of men’s admiration; she had had, I explained, to fight for the time in which to work.

“Now, Mrs. Avery--” Anthony began to explain--“I didn’t mean-- Of course she had something to see him about. She told Nick that the Wickershams had telephoned for them to come around after dinner and talk.”

I looked sharply at him. But his face was blank. Tugging at his little moustache, he gazed down on me with honest good nature. “Oh, well! What then?”

He resumed: “Nick said ‘Why?’ I wish you could have seen how surprised she was! ‘To talk, of course,’ she said. And he said ‘What’s the use of that?’ And that was when I fancied that Gertie was right and that they were about to blow up. The funny thing is, that you can understand every word she says when she’s rattling like machine gun fire. She began to say, over and over like a mechanical doll, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ She told him flatly that she was a public character and owed a duty to society--to show up, I took it she meant. And she called poor old Nick’s attention to the fact that it didn’t matter whether or not he showed up in public, because no one knew who put up a building.”

“Where was the other man while this went on?” I wanted to know. The other man had taken a hasty departure. Then, I remarked, they should have followed his excellent example.

He stopped pulling his moustache. He explained lamely that he had feared such a course would dignify the scene into a serious affair. “A sort of reflection on Eva,” he concluded.

“Oh, nonsense!” I cried. “What is the matter with you people? Is he to be allowed to say what he pleases and she to be muzzled?”

The rock of Manhattan reared itself between us. “You don’t understand, then,” he said. He left it at that.

Gertrude took it up where he left it. “She is so fond of parties,” she criticized.

I said: “Now, look here--be reasonable. Be fair--if you can, to Eva. Aren’t you fond of parties?”

Gertrude reverted to her mother’s time. “She’s married!” She was stolidly virtuous over it, but she came back to what personally she turned the flat of her hand against. “And Nick is bored to death at those literary teas.”

I snapped: “How do you know he is?”

She stammered that she went to these teas herself, when invited. I saw that she went to look at Nicholas who went to look at Eva. I sighed for Eva: the phalanx was unbroken. She pretended to be drawn off the subject by one of our necessary ventures at street intersections, and I could not decide whether her immediate return to it was bravery or the tenacity which would finally dash out her moth life. She stated: “Nick detests the sort of person who hangs around Eva at those parties.”

“Aha!” I sniffed. “Considering that they are distinguished men and women----”

Pushed into a corner, she brought out what she had been driving at during the length of our stroll. “He dislikes Spencer Mapes.”

“He tells you these things against his wife?”

She was quick in his defense. “His mother told me. At the tea--you were talking about the tea at luncheon, Mrs. Avery--his mother saw Mr. Mapes for the first time; and I’m sure she has never stopped worrying about him since. Tony was looking for Nick--although he wasn’t really looking because we knew that he and Eva were talking. And Mrs. Van Suydam said to me ‘Who is that youngish man with the dark face who seems to be in expectation of something from the room beyond?’” She looked at me from the corner of her eye. “Mr. Mapes was waiting for Eva. Everyone knew that, except Mrs. Van Suydam.”

I saw the implacable lady sitting on her sofa without the feminine relief of tapping her foot on the floor and speculating about Spencer Mapes as he waited for Eva and Nicholas, saying to her heart that it was far-fetched to believe that he waited for Nicholas but knowing in spite of herself that he waited for something inimical to Nicholas. She must have said to herself: “But this is an enemy!” And she probably said aloud, surprised that the incident of discovering him had affected her voice: “Who is that?” She would have given full weight to each of her three words. Gertrude Cuyler was without the dramatic sense, and had used a more involved phraseology than Mrs. Van Suydam under the circumstances would have employed.

I regarded Gertrude with a quickened interest: was love, then, such a stimulus that she was becoming perceptive? For she said now: “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Avery, for repeating it--but Mrs. Van Suydam said something else. She said that she had always fancied artists were weak creatures, and that she was now afraid that Nick was weaker than his new friends. This was what frightened her, I suspect.” But her thoughts becoming confused, she gave her little gasp and started again. “She said that in Eva’s friends she seemed to have discovered a toughness of fibre, a tenacity of aim, and the will to succeed. This was what frightened her, I think,” she wound up.

Anthony Bloodgood was surprised. He expostulated with Gertrude: “I didn’t know she felt that way about that bounder Mapes. How could he affect her? It seemed to me that it was Eva who knocked her breath out. I remember I came up and told her that Nick was coming. I explained that he hadn’t known she was there because he was talking to Eva Litchfield. And she looked dashed, to me. I mean, the name, Eva Litchfield, seemed to do something to her. I give you my word, she almost jumped!”

They disputed above my head, leaving me free to do the thing that all along I had known I would do: I began attributing to Mrs. Van Suydam those reactions that she should have felt and that I was sure she had felt in the depths of her bosom so decently restricted by its buckram and black silk. The name, Eva Litchfield, tolling in her head when the young man had ceased speaking, must have drawn together into a design all her premonitions of disaster. This triumphant name took possession of her imagination, seemed, at once, to become part of her life because it menaced her son. So strong must this feeling have been--so swayed by it must she instantly have become--that the garish reception rooms might have darkened. I was sure that she felt old, and helpless, in face of this victorious name. She must have closed her eyes, in her temporary weakness, before opening them to gaze profoundly at her son. In my game of visualizing this fragmentary story, I said to myself: What a gorgeous scene! In her son’s bright blue eyes she must have seen what she had always seen in their sparkling depths, belief that life would be good to him. Sure that his mother adored him--sure that the girl walking beside him was the most exquisite creature in the world--convinced, as every man has been convinced at one time, that the two women he loved would love each other--Nicholas must almost have hurried in his eagerness to bring them together. But his mother’s mind, leaping beyond this appeal, fastened upon Spencer Mapes’ looming fixed regard. She sat, therefore, upon her sofa composed to all outward seeming, smiling at her son and his companion and meeting the eyes of neither; for she was engaged in her duel with Spencer Mapes.

Gertrude, who was watching me out of the tail of her eye, advanced tentatively: “Nick’s so fond of his mother. I heard him saying to Eva--at that same tea----”

I shut my ears to what Nicholas had actually said in favour of what he should have said. Holding Eva’s arm, urging her forward, his own eyes without reservation in his complete reliance on his mother’s devotion, “See!” he must almost have boasted. “Here is my mother!” I had no doubt that what he said was “Hello! How did you get here?” This was what Gertrude quoted--maybe: I did not listen; she was incapable of reaching out beyond five-finger exercises. But she told me fairly: “Eva was lovely about it. She said to Nick ‘But she’s splendid! She’s splendid!’”

It would have been a matter of indifference to Mrs. Van Suydam that Eva, seeming to shrink, to become in a moment blighted by this calculated inattention, had still fixed on the older woman eyes that expanded for a sight that charmed her. “Did Mrs. Van Suydam look at Eva through that _lorgnette_?” I asked.

Gertrude’s mouth fell open. “How did you know?”

I knew that she would have put up her _lorgnette_ that she might not be scorched by the flame of an approaching passion. I said: “Ah poor Eva!” Behind those glasses, narrowly but covertly, she would have inspected Eva. But on Eva’s bloodless little face, in her clear eyes, there would have been no flame; there would have been, as always under a challenge, only assertion of herself, only belief in herself. I was, suddenly, very wearied and said firmly: “This is a footless discussion. And here’s my street. Goodbye.” I extended a resolute hand and marched down a side street.

But floating helplessly after me came Gertrude Cuyler’s pleading voice: “Won’t you do something about it?”

III

Florence Quincy was a tall woman so blonde as to be almost albino. She had a large mouth which she made up to suggest danger; it became, under her lavish use of vermilion lip-stick, a fixed and sullen sneer. She wound her flaxen hair closely, and even in the house she usually wore a turban, also closely wound. These turbans ranged from the richest materials to her beige stockings, which one day we caught her twining and pinning into shape. “Nothing else in the place that exactly matched the shade of my frock,” she explained. Her eyes were greenish and grey and almost blue. The amusing negroid suggestion of her features lay in a certain drooping heaviness, and was contradicted by a positive hint of the equine. She had--in short--a face that could not be easily forgotten.

She sat looking into the fire. Spencer Mapes hung over her although he was seated beside her on the club fender; he always seemed to be a cloud descending on the earth and undecided when to smite with his thunderbolt. As I came in he was saying, with his nice mingling of wistful regret and detached cruelty: “Her spirit is too rare, isn’t it, for the things that help you and me to do her the least good? Life hurts her. And, if we grant this, can we censure her for what she may do--for what, I might say, I’m confident she’s planning to do?”

I said: “Poor Eva! For of course you are talking about Eva?”

“Precisely what I was saying,” he admitted. “Poor Eva was led astray by her admirations. She fancied that she would be happy because of the exclusiveness of the Van Suydams. In Eva’s eyes, exclusiveness is a beauty; she goes everywhere because she enjoys making an impression, she runs with everyone because she wants to hear what they say about her, and she would love to hate it all.”

As I suspected this to be profoundly true, I said: “I don’t agree with you.”

“After all,” he said to this, “you’ve just got back. Wait until you’ve picked up the threads.”

I shrugged it off with “At this rate, I’ll know all by the end of the day.”

The house boasted the dimmest corners in town. From one of these umbrageous retreats came Winnie Conant and James Pomeroy to greet the cocktails. The dapperness of Pomeroy at once permeated the room. He had a childlike smile and hinting laughter. When he spoke his mouth pursed into the semblance of a kiss, and his words were the more startling because under their caressing there was no kiss. His remarks were listened to because if one did not hear what he said one would be tormented over a suspicion that he had said it at one’s expense. The fact that he poked fun in his friends’ faces made it no more comfortable to brood over what he might have said upon the occasions when one did not listen. His face, even when flushed with laughter, conveyed an elegance, his enunciation a nicety, as flexible as his mind. He said: “But--Dinah darling!--of course you realize that Eva would be immensely pleased, if she knew how much we talk about her.”

I admitted that she would not resent the quantity of the talk, but I speculated as to whether she would like the quality of it. “I mean this: since I landed this morning I’ve heard talk about Eva on all sides, from every source, and with various interpretations put upon her simplest act. Now, there’s something I want to know: why?”

Winnie Conant said simply: “It’s on account of her marriage.” Winnie wrote juveniles. She had the lightness of fancy that children adored. She had no children of her own, did not want them, and in fact had no use for the budding mind. But with those who had never met her she was a by-word for her sweet motherliness. She lived with her husband, Addis Wickersham, in Macdougal Alley--why, no one knew, but we suspected that Addis had nowhere else found a library sufficiently vast for his books. “You know how Eva comes into a room--gorgeously dressed when she knows it isn’t a formal party?”

I argued that she had always done this; her marriage could have worked differences, but her love of fine raiment was her own. “She dresses for her own satisfaction; she takes a narcissus-like joy in being a picture.”

Winnie’s surprise at this was genuine. “I hadn’t expected you to be the one to call her a narcissist. Well, anyway, the effect of her entrances is more shattering than ever now she has her husband at heel. And how on earth can we talk, when he’s around? I’ll just tell you: you might as well see how things are going; and one party that that man’s presence spoils is like any other that he puts an end to. They don’t live so far from us, and every now and then they drop in after dinner. There are people at our place, usually, as you may remember. Well, anyway, one evening Eva sailed in looking like a Botticelli virgin in cloth-of-gold. Only--she was brittle. You know how she gets? She gives the impression, when in that mood, of choosing her words with care--as if they were going to the printer. Her husband followed her in; and he was laughing. It’s unusual, to catch Nicholas Van Suydam enjoying a good laugh when he’s with any of us. He wasn’t dressed, by the way; said she’d taken him by surprise with her ball costume. And, Dinah, doesn’t that one thing show how little he knows her? Anyway, she told me what he had said on the way to us. You know, of course, that if you get Eva at the right moment there’s nothing she won’t tell? He had reminded her that these studios used to be the stables belonging to his mother’s neighbours. And she had said it had atmosphere. He had come back at her with the reminder that that stiff and starched old coachman of his mother’s lives above his mother’s stable, which, as it happens, is two doors from us in the Alley. And, she said, she stamped her foot at him and remarked that he couldn’t make her lose her temper, because she simply adored his mother’s old-fashioned ways. She said that the old lady is a real literary character. ‘Good lord!’ he said, raising his eyes to heaven. Eva actually does admire that old woman. She said to him that his mother was a literary remains, that she had never seen anything like her, that she was an anachronism. She wound up by thanking her stars that she’d found such a thing in New York, of all places. And that’s when he again rolled his eyes and said ‘Good lord! She _is_ New York!’”

I waited to see if anyone else would comment. They did not; they had heard it before. So I put it to Winnie that I had got no impression of a scene in what she had told.

Winnie finished her cocktail in such haste that she was further delayed by a fit of choking. With a flap of her hand she begged me to wait a minute; she was coming to it. With the further flourish of her now empty glass she might have been dashing her challenge into the face of Eva’s defiant husband. “It seems that he made fun of our two names--Addis’ and mine--over our front doorbell. It seems that it’s a bone of contention between them that on her books Eva still uses her maiden name alone.”

Florence the unmarried smiled. “Why do you suppose Eva told you?” she speculated.

Winnie gloated over the fact that, so she said, one could always get things out of Eva. “And how can you take him, after all--that husband of hers? He’s made no attempt to fit into the circle of Eva’s friends. Eva told us that he said he believed marriage should be an abdication of this willingness to listen to the advice of friends. I do think,” Winnie exclaimed, “that smoking a pipe gives a man an advantage over us; and they know it, the nasty things! Nicholas Van Suydam stretched out his long legs and leaned back and clenched that pipe stem between his teeth and grinned at us; and when I asked point-blank what was on his mind he mumbled around the filthy pipe that he’d been saying to himself ‘My man, if ever there was a time in your life when you had better sit tight, this is it!’”

“Ah splendid!” murmured Pomeroy.

Winnie pushed her complaint. Eva, it seems, had said briskly “Nick darling, we’ve got to get used to things. And hadn’t we better start in by making up our minds to let each other’s work alone?”

I drawled: “I think he sounds rather attractive.”

“Oh well,” Winnie advanced uneasily, “I acknowledge that we were talking about Eva’s affairs.”

“With both of them present--of course?”

“Eva didn’t object,” said Winnie with relief. “You know her. Spence came in about that time, and said--you know, Spence, you can be counted on to say it!--that she was something-or-other-delicate and rare, and she positively purred. She was taken by the idea of having attributed to her an unapproachable perfection.”

Spencer Mapes said: “How do you know I don’t believe it?”

New York has a sliding scale of hours for cocktails. It was still early in the afternoon, although candles were lit in the neighbours’ living-rooms. The soft light of these numerous candles streamed through the windows on to the trees outside; for this row of houses had been remodelled and now faced the river. The branches of the trees leaned towards the windows, and almost brushed the panes, and where they came within the candlelight they were tipped with gold so beckoning as to be unearthly. The river ran at the foot of the garden, separating it from Welfare Island where recalcitrant women saw the error of their ways; and lights began flaring from the windows of the prison, for the sun, if one could have seen it, had moved over the Hudson. There would have been peace except for this suggestion of imprisoned suffering, and quiet except for the radios. The loud speakers of other people’s radios held New York in a deadened thrall. Our small company of necessity raised their voices, and above what we said rolled and bellowed what persons from all America said. Words clacked against our eardrums, songs assailed our taste; and this discordance so persistently knocked against me--as if someone were hitting me--that I wondered for how long a time I could hold out. I wanted to scream.

They were saying things--as people on the air were saying things--useless things. Florence said: “The only good thing about him is that he can make no use in his buildings of what I may chance to say in his hearing. I mean--it doesn’t pay to run around town saying absolutely good things; the first you know, you read your good things in other people’s books. That--” she concluded with her smile that directed her barbs to all in the room--“that is the reason authors are so stupid in conversation.”

“Meaning--?” suggested Pomeroy with interest.

“--That I may be planning a brilliant line on Eva’s husband. He irritates me.”

Pomeroy said: “I adore his mother. And let me tell you that men have adored old ladies for less worthy reasons than mine for my passion for Mrs. Van Suydam. She tells me that she’s disappointed in Eva’s books because they haven’t the rich meaty flavour of Moll Flanders. She’s added to the rich meaty flavour of my life. You should talk to her, Dinah.”

Everyone then told me what I should do. Florence said: “I tell you frankly, Dinah, that knowing your influence over Eva I felt sure you’d want to do something about it and asked you here in order to decide on something.” My influence over Eva being a new idea, and the last thing they would have acknowledged if they had believed it, she flung at me a guarded look. They felt, she said now, that I would see the seriousness of the situation so soon as they had fully gone into it with me.

“And then?” I prompted.

Florence shrugged. She said that she was making no suggestions; for, after all, how could she? She held to the notion that for Eva a divorce would be a disastrous thing. “But she’ll ditch herself yet,” she thought.

“Look here, my girl,” I called myself to account, “why can’t you make up your mind that an American is never happy? We’re a chronically dissatisfied race. You know that if any of us were happy we’d lose our celebrated feverish energy--we’d not be forced by a substratum of uneasiness to push ourselves--push, push, push ourselves--to an end that often we can’t see. It’s our dissatisfaction with life that makes us push. It isn’t going to injure Eva’s work, that she’s unhappily married--if she is.”

Pomeroy announced that I had been talking to myself for the last five minutes. “Have you ever thought, Dinah darling, of using yourself in a novel? But of course you wouldn’t use what really counts; no woman would.”

I said: “Shall we stop this? I’m sick and tired of talking about Eva.”

“My lamb,” interrupted Florence, “wouldn’t it be honest if we acknowledged that these days we get together solely to talk about her? And wouldn’t it be more open and above board if you acknowledged that you eat it up? For my part, I’m frank in my avidity. And I want to say, just here, that I know what Eva herself wants; above and beyond being talked about whenever men--and women--are gathered together in her name, she wants the greatest joy ever experienced by a human being, only, in order that she be not shocked, it must be the joy of creatures without bodies.”

Mapes stood at the window tapping on the panes his own reply to the beckon of the bare branches that mournfully swung in the wind from the river. He said, speaking over his shoulder as if he concealed his face: “She can’t help it. She’s powerless to change her nature--as are we all. Women with thin treble voices have no power of emotion.”

Pomeroy revelled in arguments about the nature of women. “What, then, keeps them going?”

“Their excited nerves.” Thus charitably excusing all possible charges against Eva’s treatment of her husband, Mapes at the same time suggested that this treatment was of a refined cruelty. With anticipatory relish, he glanced keenly from one to another of us, gathering up obscure reactions he might have brought about. I knew that he studied us, measuring our relatively tense muscles as indications of how we had drifted since his suggestion which might embrace so many. I noticed that the cocktail shaker made a swift round of the room. I said that I was tired. “It’s all too much. I can sort out some points, but not so many. Everyone of you has a different impression of everyone of--of--suppose we call them Eva and her opponents? And what you’ve been half-way telling is as jumbled as that statement of mine, and my mind is as jumbled as my statement, and--there you are!”

“Pray for strength,” Pomeroy advised me. “For this is nothing to how you’ll feel when Eva gets at you with her own inner secret side of it.”

They shouted at me that they had been right in assuming that Eva would have no objection to being dissected by us. And, advancing her apology for Eva more tentatively than was her habit, Florence took it up. “Sit down, Dinah,” she begged. “I’m not going to abuse Eva. And, incidentally, I don’t acknowledge the justice of your attitude of holier than thou. You can’t deny several points. You can’t deny that you never get on your ear until after you’ve heard all we have to tell you: and you can’t deny that Eva herself in her distastes is almost inhumane. She’s harsh in her condemnations of what life has brought out in others. And I think that part of the trouble now is that she’s afraid of the effects of life on herself if she lets go and turns human.” Leaning over in her favourite position, her elbows on her knees and her chin cupped in her hands, she stared into the fire with her sullen resentment against something that only she knew. The long, racy lines of her figure were so much lovelier than her face that at the moment Florence presented her greatest contradiction. “She’s harried--like a poor wild thing--and I, for one, am sorry for her. But to hell with it! Why should I worry myself?” When Florence cursed it was in a curiously deadened voice that carried her ultimate conviction. She continued to worry herself, of course. “Spence says--but I have my reason for stating that he doesn’t think it--that her fastidiousness is lack of feeling. It’s all in her head, he holds. And because she happens to have a thinnish voice he puts that, too, down to a thinness of temperament. And I don’t believe a word of it. To docket a woman isn’t so easy as all that.” She paused to smile at Mapes. “Don’t be ashamed of being in love with Eva, Spence. You’re a bloodless radish, and for you to so plunge into the maelstrom of human failings is a comfort to your friends. Wasn’t radish,” she mused, “what Eva’s husband called all you men? She told us about it--remember?”

Mapes was disdainful. “Of course he selected the wrong simile. He meant to say turnip. And if you want to recall what Eva told us, how about that bit to the effect that he said he’d see everything once, and her counter remark that her friends were never guilty of triteness? I seem to recall her repeating a quite long and fiery speech she made to him, in which she said that of course he was splendid in his own line but that we weren’t tolerant of platitudes. Which all of you might bear in mind, as it would be sad to fall below Eva’s praise.”

Florence’s mouth seemed to tear her face when she laughed, as she did now, with complete abandonment. “Add to that the one excruciating comment on us that Van Suydam has been known to make. He said--according to Eva--‘Then it’s a labour union, and I’m a scab and liable to get hurt?’ Eva said she didn’t speak to him for the rest of the way to wherever they were going. Eva, poor devil, doesn’t think it amusing that she tells us these things.” One would have taken her for a different woman from the brooding replica of the antique who so short a while ago had sat looking at who knows what in the fire.

I wanted to know, I said, what it all came down to.

It appeared, then, that upon several occasions Eva had attempted what amounted to explanations, or apologies, Florence reported. “She says, in extenuation of her irritation with him, that her husband has a trick of being verbally frolicsome, and it upsets her. Yet she was upset when, in the days immediately following their marriage, he insisted on making love to her whenever he caught sight of her. She told us, at the time, that the love-making made her fractious because it got in the way of her work. The truth is, she wants him to be always on tap, in a way of speaking: ready to follow her lead, turning on the flow of his adoration and turning it off as she indicates. But mainly, I believe, she objects to his being mentally frolicsome about things that she has said and done. She has a curious lack of all sense of proportion.” She meditated, again staring into the fire. “Do you know, Dinah, I think you won’t find her changed in any particular by this experiment. He--Van Suydam--is himself doing all the changing.”

I said that I took this absence of change in Eva for granted. “She has, absolutely, the correct objectiveness of the creative worker.”

“She has nothing of the sort. She worries all the time over her association with her husband,” rejoined Florence.

Spencer Mapes was once more at the window, tapping on the panes in a maddening way.

“Florence, dearest,” chuckled Pomeroy, “it’s so amazing that none of you see it! She knows that she’s a personage. Her peculiar charm would be spoiled if she were humorous about herself. She knows that her part is to skim through life like a bird, or to hang on the wall like a picture.”

Florence, however, was not light-hearted about it. “What Eva needs--what we all need, and what Nicholas Van Suydam has--is the feeling of family life, our own family life, just around the corner to walk in on any minute we feel the need of its spiritual boost. Mark my words: it won’t be Van Suydam who will smash in the end. He’ll change, but he won’t smash up for once and all. He doesn’t have to take a train to go home; he can put out his hand and touch it.”

This was disturbing: because I did not wish to believe those things which I did believe. “You think, then, that we’d all be better off at home?”

Her mouth stretched like a wound. “I don’t think it; I know it. But I shall stay, as all of us will stay.”

We were soap-bubbles, blown forward by winds that reached New York: no balance because we brought with us no weight of soil: no direction beyond that of the winds blowing towards New York: “You think that, too, Florence?”

Florence’s mirthless smile dominated us. “I think a lot of things, and the trouble is that my point of view shifts. I think a different thing each time I speak of it. What a crazy mess! No conviction about any of us--except in the case of Eva. She, God knows, has the supreme conviction--about herself. And she doesn’t let us forget it. A conviction as strong as hers must be uncomfortable to live with. Sometimes I’m taken by surprise to find myself sorry for the poor wretch who married her.”

I sighed with exasperation. “I’d give a lot to know what you really think. After all, I am trying to form a conclusion.”

Florence’s dead white face, which by right should have revealed no emotion and which hung out like a flag every twinge of her heart, now set into her noncommittal smile of a wry amusement that she would share with no one. “Look out, Dinah! You are going to be let down. Eva hasn’t a ‘story’ because her life has always been higgledy-piggledy.” I realized that she had discovered something on me only to discount it, and laughed. But for a moment, peering out from behind her powder, there was her complete disillusionment. “Oh, yes, my dear! I did say that she, of us all, has conviction and knows where she’s going; and still I say that her life is higgledy-piggledy. Work it out, darling!”

IV

I left Florence Quincy’s cautioning myself that i had come back to do a particular thing: the particular book was planned and waiting for tranquillity in order to be written. But already New York pounded on the door of my mind. New York teased that tomorrow would be time enough for work; today, if I knew what was what, should be given up to talk. And talk--until I had heard all that they had to say--would consist of fragmentary information about Eva Litchfield’s marriage. I had growled to Florence that I wondered why I had come back; and she had jeered that we had come here of our own free will, and that we all came back and would try to come back from the grave. It was true. New York is a contagious disease.

I hurried home to be ready when Molly Underhill should call for me.

I waited for her: one always waited for her: and eventually I forgot that I expected her. It took a great deal to erase Molly Underhill from a nervous woman’s consciousness. In this case, the great deal was the voice of the streets, which might be bellowing a threat to the creature leaning from a balcony thirty storeys above the sidewalk. The creature chid herself: “What business of yours is the growth of New York? You’re a small-sized widow-woman who had deliberately come back: now put up with it.” I had informed Florence Quincy’s guests that I had come back to discover what my friends were doing, who they were doing up brown, and what they would do to me. That they were briskly up to something I did not doubt; New York lends a spurious energy to those who stay long enough and not too long. We had rushed in from all sections of the country, to conquer the metropolis if it did not kill us first. It was growing faster than were we.

Gazing at a sky-line still largely composed of the bare steel ribs of buildings that tomorrow would be completed, this newest New York seemed, suddenly and devastatingly, an entity too powerful to cope with. My head swam from the immensity of this conception of a city. Here were buildings striving titanically to reach the skies, and a people battling to preserve an individuality already dwarfed by their own vast feats of masonry; and this mass of the structures erected by themselves was so mighty, this monster born of their ambition was so ruthless in its demands that they keep up with it, that these constructive pigmies would be terrified if the hurry of their existence did not sweep them irresistibly on. Seen from the height where I clung bewildered, they crawled like insects through the streets. The confused roar of their activities, and of the machinery set in motion by their intelligence, came up to me in a paean of praise of themselves. But these people who, thus defeated by their fate, rushed madly along the sidewalks, these poor things who, believing they held their heads proudly, lived their apology to the buildings that they themselves achieved, these victims maddened by their selected careers: even these beings might occasionally pause and listen to a silence. For at intervals there fell upon the dreadful bellow of the traffic a hush so profound that it was as if the hand of God had lifted in warning.

No need for me to remind myself that I was being melodramatic. I was frightened. Noise, to me, has always seemed a personal threat. My nerves rasped by the roar, my thoughts confused by the silences falling with the change of traffic lights, I would not have been surprised if on the now flaming sky the finger of doom had written. Against which of us would the finger trace its denunciation? I qualified my self-arraignment: I was becoming absurd. We could only be hurt by people and, mainly, by ourselves.

For a moment of glory, the city was bathed in a sanguine light. The sunset withdrew through the cross streets and left behind chasms spangled with lamps. But on the tops of the buildings, lingeringly, the ruddy light still frolicked; it might be the soul of New York playing with destruction, bantering ruin. This optimism sparkled on the towers, and glinted down towards the pavements and never reached the ground, and in the end, possibly, forgot that underneath the city there lay the earth itself. The land, foundation for this jubilance over the possibilities of man, might not exist. It was never seen. Before leaving for my temporary residence in France, I had said to Eva Litchfield that they were covering up the earth, and how, I asked, without the feel of the land under his feet could the New Yorker of the future write? She had replied, characteristically, that one could write with passion of England, for instance, if one came from Oshkosh where they make the trunks with the red bands around their middles. Intermittently, Eva liked New York. She had concluded her correction of my notion with the statement: “I’m frightened by nothing in the way of a town, a place. I’m only afraid of the things that men do to our spirits.” I decided to say to her, when I should see her: “It would be the right thing to hang one’s spirit so high that it can’t be reached: New York has the idea.” I would tell her about the soul of New York playing fitfully on the tops of the new tall buildings; and she would, of course, laugh at me as a dabbler in spiritualism. And Winnie Conant, with her aggravating tendency to manage the affairs of those few whom she liked--while she liked them: she would squawk with mirth and tell me to banish fear and adjust myself to grandeur. Winnie would say that some cities have souls, but that New York has strength for the struggle against the gods; her breath is vigour, her noise vitality, her every aspect that of superhuman effort; she is a lusty flout to the world, and often she taunts her own: who cares? Not those who are worthy of New York--would declare Winnie, who came here from Maine.

I must have stayed out on the balcony for a long time--I had watched the sky darken and the lights of late workers prick in until each office building was a paper cut-out--and my excitement might have been the effect of the cold that had penetrated my heavy coat. The jingling of the telephone broke a spell.

“Mrs. Underhill calling for Mrs. Avery, and she says will you please hurry as it’s very late?” came parrot-like from the hotel desk.

“I must say,” remarked Molly as I stepped into her taxi, “that if I’d realized you had located in such an inaccessible place I’d never have come by for you. Do you realize that I’ve wandered for hours?” But the meter did not bear her out. “Now--” she leaned back, and put her feet up on the folding seat, and lit a cigarette--“now we’ll talk over Eva Litchfield’s affairs.” She paid no attention to my possibly antagonistic reaction; the talk was the thing. And with Molly talk was a matter of personalities. She prated on aesthetics and told the baldest facts. The grunt that she now gave might have come from the lurching of the taxi, but I wondered if she did not derive a porcine joy from rooting and snuffling into private lives.

She had an uncanny way of reading minds which were being withheld from her. She said that she had a cold in her head. “Have you forgotten that no one can avoid colds in the head, in New York in the winter? It’s a feature of the brilliancy of the season.” Her nose was red.

The clangour of the traffic and the clack of her voice served to bring home to me that in counting on preserving my acquired attitude of detachment I had reckoned without the tentacles which now tightened around me. During our progression through the streets, our hitching starts and violent halts, our series of back-breaking jolts--the experience, I was to rediscover, of getting anywhere in town--and during the resulting nervous exasperation over what no one can remedy since they have built this city, I might have been shaking, stretching, straining to encompass the changes into which by easy stages my friends had slipped without shock.

She screamed persistent confidences above the din. Some of what she told me reached my ears and some escaped me, and it was only significant because it impressed me with the fact that I was again a member in good standing of a racket. I was not interested in what she told, for, in spite of her proposed plan of revelation in which she was to concentrate on Eva Litchfield, she told shattering details of the love life of persons with whom I had the barest acquaintance. And I had been away for so long that even the activities of my old friends had faded into the background of the trivial.

But she finally got around to it: she always did. She asked if I had seen Eva during the past summer, which she had spent in Europe.

I had not seen Eva since I had gone abroad. But it is not unethical to lie to another woman. I said--unnecessarily, for Eva was always shiningly beautiful: “She made a great sensation.”

Molly’s eyes shifted, on this. “Then you must have seen that something was wrong? And what sort of sensation do you mean?”

I said cheerfully: “Oh, in the way of her appearance, and also in the way of her books, which you must acknowledge one wouldn’t expect from so lovely a woman. London takes the position that they are fine enough to have been written by an ugly woman.”

Eva’s beauty was a slap in Molly’s face, her genius an affront to the lesser gift. She preserved a dashed silence. In the obscurity of the taxi I felt that she waited to spring. “It’s a fortunate thing that you and I didn’t start life as beauties,” she eventually assured me. “I’ve always thought, Dinah, that you don’t fit together. Have you ever noticed that your face isn’t the type that should go with your body--if nature happened to be squeamish, which she isn’t?” She then discounted my amusement. “No use in saying what you were thinking of saying. I know I’m a wreck. It’s only Eva who can work like a slave, and live on a tension, and come out of it looking like an angel.”