Chapter III: Part ONE: I (3)

Eva had, always, looked like an angel. Gossip, sticking to her like pitch, had not spoiled the loveliness of her face. The one woman among us whose love affairs were front page news, shrinking from it, hating it, and always adding to it, there was about Eva a helplessness that made me rush to her defense. I said, now, staring Molly in the eye: “You’ve been insinuating, and have told nothing--which, after all, I remember to be characteristic of you. Come out with it.”

“My dear!” she protested. “I’m as crazy over her as you are. How can you think I was going to tell something against her?”

“Oh, I’m not going to tell her what you say.”

“My love, what a spitfire you’ve become,” she said sweetly. She insisted that she knew nothing definite, that Eva was in no trouble, that, in short, the real trouble had fallen upon her friends; they found it difficult to keep the peace with her new husband, who was an unacceptable nuisance. “It’s a pity,” she commented, “that men no longer beat their wives; so much the most potent means of displaying connubial disapproval--and so much pleasanter for the casual guest, who doesn’t often find himself present during the performance.”

We had reached our destination, and stood with basement steps backing us and an iron grille forbiddingly confronting us; and in the flickering light from the lantern that threw over the speakeasy entrance the disguise of the picturesque, Molly’s long eyes shone like a wolf’s. The usual reserved orb peered at us through the locked grating; the customary smile greeted us upon our eventual admission; we scuttled the length of the narrow hallway to the rear of the house, squeezing past a fat policeman who lounged inside the barroom door and feelingly averted his gaze. The bar was crowded with our friends, our enemies, and those who had not yet made up their minds about us. They suspended the interchange of their code words, their juggling with words, and Molly seemed gratified at their silence and flattered by the affronted stares directed at her by those whose books she had recently reviewed. A book must be more or less open to ridicule in order to be reviewed by Molly Underhill. I thought: “How strange it is, that I didn’t notice silence, abroad.” But a different language is a barrier and at the same time a protection: if one speaks it, one is still guarded, by its ultimate strangeness, from too close an encroachment. As never in New York, one’s thoughts remain inviolably one’s own.

A fat Italian stood before us, beaming professionally. “Mrs. Avery! And Miss Underhill! But how sad it is to see you here without Miss Litchfield!”

“What did I tell you?” demanded Molly’s lifted eyebrows.

Whatever she intended telling me--and I doubted her ability, if not her willingness, to tell me anything definite about Eva Litchfield--was broken into by the approach of Winnie Conant and her husband, Addis Wickersham. Winnie gushed “Again we meet!” but plainly made mental reservations as to the benefit to New York of my return. In her torrent of words she contrived to nicely mingle sly digs at Eva with encomiums on the proprietor of the speakeasy. “What with living expenses being beyond reason, where would we be without him to cash our checks which we’ve no means of knowing to be good, to give us credit when checks are out of the question----” Having done her duty to the amenities, she fixed me with her glitter. “As I tried to tell you this afternoon--only Florence talks so much----” She went on to inform me that Nicholas Van Suydam was patently destined to ruin Eva’s career. “Such a shame, for a brilliant novelist, as Eva is now acknowledged to be----”

I received, squarely between the eyes, Molly’s glance. She enquired, but not as if she solely wished to give Eva her dues: “Does anyone deny that she’s outstripped all of you?”

Here, then, were two women who had it in for Eva. Winnie purred that it was not as if Eva had been starved for love; and laughed riotously, and administered a visual dig to her own husband. What can be expected of the husband of a jealous wife, besides a certain hint of duplicity? In the case of Addis Wickersham, this tinge of deceit was so blended with the suggestion thrown out by his sonorous voice, which rolled like an organ and, like an organ, seemed always to be accompanying the praise of God, that the impression left upon the listener was that of a man who was all but grandly noble. He might have been a great biographer; but he talked it out, he talked himself out, he talked not only his own ideas but the world itself into a frazzle from which nothing could be salvaged. His one passion was talk--his talk. He gave the impression of listening to his words with rapture; and his joy in the achievements of his larynx was so intense that in its glow his approbation of the content of his remarks dropped out of sight. He intoned. For minutes after he had lapsed into mute satisfaction the room would vibrate with the sound waves he had released. He said: “I was deeply gratified to see that Eva’s last book received from London the enthusiastic praise that we in New York had already given it.” He considered himself the discoverer of Eva Litchfield and dragged in New York from the kindness of his heart. Winnie was at once torn between her intense admiration of the show he made and her desire to shout at him “How dare you praise a beautiful woman?”

But there was present at the bar another discoverer of Eva Litchfield. Spencer Mapes rested his saturnine dark face on his extraordinarily long and thin hand and laughed at Addis. Molly wanted to know for what date the next discovery of genius in New York was scheduled: and yawned, and laughed at both of them. Leaning on the rail of the bar, she was so slender that her backward droop was almost a contortion.

A stranger slid along to stand beside her, holding on to the rail and facing her with a childlike eager appraisal. “My dear lady,” remarked this gentleman, “I never saw you before, and I haven’t the least idea who you are, but I feel sure you’re famous. I came down here because I was told that I’d see all the famous people. Damn it!” shouted the stranger, no longer able to restrain his disappointment, “I insist that you’re famous! And if you ain’t, then show me one of ’em? I came down here to look at celebrated persons. Show me the celebrated persons, will you, my good creature?” I judged that he had decided that none of us came up to his dream.

In the twitch of Molly’s sharp elbow there was a mental jog to my ribs. “Do--please--ask that question of the barkeep?” she modestly suggested to the strange gentleman. She had a trick of waiting, hanging on a man’s lips until he said something personal to her. Her long eyes languished, now, at the stranger. Triumph lit her face, and I saw that again she had misunderstood a man. She had a passion for translating all masculine glances into the caresses of love.

Winnie whispered to me: “Notice a change in her?”

“What’s it from?” I asked.

“Ah that’s what we don’t know,” said Winnie. “She’s trying her best to make us believe that she is involved in some affair. And of course her telling it makes it sound as if it were not true, and we know her so well that we are sure she’d tell it if it were true.”

“She looks wretchedly,” I said in the same low voice.

“You’ll find we all do,” said Winnie briefly.

I laughed. “Eva’s husband, I daresay you mean me to infer?”

“Wait till you see,” she told me ominously.

I asked her if Spencer Mapes were still Eva’s encroaching background. “Oh, encroaching!” she groaned.

As he came up to us, I endeavoured to hold my greeting to a friendly indifference. He looked as if he were concealing some deep anxiety, and said at once: “I am thankful you’ve at last returned, Dinah. I always feel that you can be counted on to stand by Eva.”

My recollections of Eva Litchfield, which before I had believed to be clear as daylight, had, through this confusion of innuendo, become a jumble of muggy half-tones. I thought: For God’s sake, Eva, why do you allow people to so use up your vital energy, blotting the flow of your inspiration as such interruptions must do some time if they haven’t done it already? From a long continued warm friendship, my attachment to her flared at this moment into idealization. I reproached myself that invariably I had been conscious of listening to her perplexities with avidity. I had said to her: “It comes down to this: one isn’t a novelist unless one has a consuming and all-embracing curiosity about people--all people--even those of whom one is fond--every human worm and every superhuman bore?” She had replied with her charming seriousness: “Of course.” And all the time I was conscious that she herself had no pure and cold-blooded curiosity about people whose problems did not touch her; when she listened to the recitals of those outside her life, she did it with warmth. Her good heart showed in her tolerance of the everlasting jabber of her friends--said I to myself, glancing forbiddingly at those whom Molly had invited to her little dinner in my honour. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I occasionally see when I am making a fool of myself. “Snap out of it, you hypocrite!” I began on myself. “You have every intention of hanging around Eva, of questioning, listening, and otherwise poking your nose--which Molly is right in dubbing a misfit--into things that are in no way your business, until you get at the bottom of this marriage. Don’t cavil at the right of others to do likewise.”

Doubtless my expression as I so took myself to task led Spencer Mapes on to say: “You must really go at once to see her. She has one of those little red brick houses in West Eleventh Street just off Fifth Avenue: did you know?”

I was surprised that she could afford a house. Her quality was too fine, too attenuated, to make of her a best seller. That the effulgently gifted Eva should live in a cramped apartment, under the almost sordid conditions with which the rest of us struggled, had always impressed us as an ironical twist of fate. Not that we consciously conceded these superior points to her; we did not, except in so far as we conceded the same to ourselves; but, looking back on the years that we had spent in New York--washed up on this beach from remote spots on the map of the country, brought together by our common interest in literature and held together by our fear of taking our eyes off each other’s development--our wish to succeed in juxtaposition with our desire for the other fellow to fail, or at the most to keep his distance a few paces in the rear--we all, I think, brought up points against Eva out of our conviction of her possession of every gift in the power of a fairy godmother to bestow. At least, so it seemed to me, this evening, standing looking intently and deceitfully into Spencer Mapes’ equally dissembling fixed stare. We had had a way of saying, or suggesting: “Oh, yes, she’s perfectly beautiful, and she writes like a seraph, but for God’s sake why does she do those things?” And Eva said of herself that she had not, at any rate, an immoral impulse; why then, she asked tragically, did people go out of their way to talk about her? Her offense lay in being too pretty to allow other women to forgive her her talents.

In the light of Spencer Mapes’ surface glassiness, I saw that the truth was that Eva needed a protection which so far life had not granted her. Children and animals saw this. Although she was only intermittently fond of children, and then almost theoretically, they invariably assumed towards her the indulgent fondness of very old and wise persons; they might have been watching through the play hour that this innocent should not harm herself. Her Negro maid hovered over her, quite simply assuming, so far as she could, the part of mother.

I scowled at Spencer Mapes. “Why don’t you keep away from her? She’s incapable of seeing through you.”

He was light in his reply. “And what do you see--you with your singleness of purpose?”

Afterwards, I regretted having replied; for I gave her away as I saw her. Also, his smile, which he preserved in its initial spontaneity, made me doubt my motive: was I pleading for Eva or solely striving to inflict a scratch on this immovable, taunting man? I told him that he played upon her weaknesses. I reminded him that, although she did the ugliest things, she was driven by a strong sense of harmony. Ridden by some nervous instinct that she had no great amount of time, she wasted much time in bewailing the world’s misunderstanding of her life: was it good for her that he should so deliberately add to this game of cross purposes? Having blurted out these lucidities, and thinking along lines thus engendered, I stood looking at him in that abstraction which throws a dulling veil over the sight but with the feeling in my flesh that a cat gives me. I wondered how he sprung. He would never do a thing so physically definite as to spring, I told myself. I was certain that he had not taken the constructive step of endeavouring to marry Eva, because, possibly, he had not been able to make up his mind that he could not do without her. His eyes gleamed at me with enjoyment of my suspicions. Doubtless he still devoted all his spare time to hanging around her. I should find him, as we had always found him, at the parties where he knew he would meet her, sitting in sight of her and directing his remarks at, or to, her. In this fashion he played the cat with the worried mouse, letting her out with praise, dragging her back with judiciously placed destructive criticism. He was always faintly derogatory.

Faint derogation was in his tone when he asked if I had ever met the man who was now Eva’s husband; his emphasis docketed the marriage with passing experiments. “She insists she did it for love of him,” he said with quiet amusement; his amusement was never hearty. James Pomeroy, who could say coarse things with impunity, once remarked that belly laughter had never escaped Mapes’ chiselled lips. “But, as you know and will never admit, there’s a good deal of the snob in our Eva. She thoroughly believes, poor girl, that what she wants of life is the social security which every now and then she so deliberately chucks overboard.”

I said that I had not come back to play blind man’s buff. “I intend to see her tomorrow; and I’ll find out for myself these equivocal secrets at which all of you hint. If there’s anything I detest--” I almost gnashed my teeth at him--“it’s to be played!”

His soft laughter, his “My dear Dinah!” brought me to the point whither he had wished to lead me: I asked him what he was trying to do about Eva’s marriage.

He looked, conventionally, shocked. “My dear Dinah!” he once more breathed. He was compassionate of my imbecility when he said that for no consideration would he throw a stumbling block in Eva’s path to the eventual stabilization of her life; but with every word he spoke I became more suspicious. “Try to be fair, old girl,” I admonished myself. “Try to come to conclusions as a man would, personal likes and dislikes aside.” Glancing along the bar, I amended this to: “Be as fair as men tell us they are.”

I said finally that it was his choice of words. “You know, and I know, that very deliberately you’ve confused the state of affairs, so that when I see Eva tomorrow--and I’ve every intention of seeing her as soon as I decently can, and shall tell her everything you’ve said----”

He asked pleasantly: “What have I said?”

This pushed me into the fury of a baffled woman. There was nothing left except to cry that I did not believe a word of it, a blunder which he promptly capped by remarking that he had said nothing for me to believe or disbelieve. “You won’t be helping Eva by fighting her other friends,” he concluded.

“Friends?” I came back at him. “Friends, Iago?”

He looked, if anything, pleasanter than ever. “Our own dear Dinah!” he murmured.

I listened, with determination, to the hubbub of the bar. The strange gentleman’s voice rose at measured intervals, as if he chanted. Winnie Conant screamed at Molly Underhill: “My good woman, you may be my hostess, but keep your hands off Mr. W. I won’t stand for personal liberties. Liberties with my spirit will go down all right; but just you lay off Mr. W.” Addis Wickersham cleared his throat; and even this prosaic act was in the grand manner.

Molly shouted: “Don’t be a wattled turkey gobbler. I’m your hostess, as you so graphically put it; and we’re going upstairs this minute and dine; and try to be a good Arab and eat my salt without spitting in my eye.”

Noise went up the stairs with us, entering into the dining-room and colliding with noise already established there. I had been out of it for so long that it occurred to me to wonder why we should assert that we gathered together because of our interest in each other’s talk, as seldom did we listen to what was being said. It came to our ears in a concatenation robbed of all meaning; only when a chance remark struck against a particular interest did one of us hear with the intelligence. Molly’s latest pet sat beside her, gulping down whatever she chose to say; he, of us all, was fresh enough to mourn over a lost word. “I work,” expounded Molly, “under the driving power of the most fundamental of all instincts. I mean--that instinct which draws men and women together. I mean,” she went into it more fully but still languidly, “I can’t--I simply can’t--work except under the influence of blasted love. When the affair is going on I give myself up to the sweep of the wings of the angels. Then, during the inevitable resulting blight, I work.” She drooped over the very young man. “It had occurred to me, on the spur of the moment, that the souse at the bar downstairs might treat me to a good blight.”

“Tell us more,” Winnie urged. “How did you lose him?”

Molly seemed already to have the blight upon her. “As usual with his sex, he wanted to see Eva Litchfield. Said he had gloated over her picture. That latest photograph doesn’t look like her in the least.”

I pinned her down. “She’s changed, then?”

Molly shrugged. “Wouldn’t she be showing wear?” she drawled. When in this mood she said something spiteful, one felt that the pauses between her words were insufferable. Her manner was a blend of the prostitute and the acidulated spinster. I thought of Eva, whose manner charmed me; hers was a tenuous aloofness that under a strain might give way but never descend. Hers was the cool pride of a head held high and eyes that looked straight. Her brows levelled, she threw at the world, by the power of this direct regard, that a vast disgust of all physical contact held her imagination.

The very young man begged Molly: “Go on talking? Don’t stop?”