Chapter V: Part TWO: I (2)

Eva said it was evident that he would deprecate any point of difference between them. “Ladies understand each other,” he seems to have murmured like a poltroon. Thus released from supervision of her admirer, the elder Miss Ingoldsby turned upon Mrs. Van Suydam the fine flame of her substantial backing. But Mrs. Van Suydam’s eyes clung persistently to what her hands were about. She stated firmly that she had expressed no opinion. “That,” Miss Augusta had then criticized, “is where you make your mistake, Lavinia. You hold off from directing these two young people. If you would listen to me----” And the younger Miss Ingoldsby had then incontinently burst into giggles. She clapped her plump hand over her mouth and rolled her eyes at her sister’s confident face. “How can Lavinia have a word to say about it, when it’s a question of Nicholas’ wife running away to get out of having a baby?”

“So that has come up!” I interjected. “I’ve been wondering when it would.”

“Oh, it bobs up like the spring flowers,” said Eva lightly. “But it wasn’t a remark that went down at the Van Suydam establishment. Miss Augusta bristled. She spoke from her chest when she said ‘As a topic of conversation between unmarried ladies and a gentleman, I should scarcely select that of--of----Ahem!’ With intolerant delicacy she dropped out of the chat the future of the Van Suydam family tree. ‘Enough!’ she decreed, when Miss Lois again pried into my affairs.”

Bored by desultory chatter, Eva talked as she wrote, painstakingly although with unusual rapidity. I saw the room into which she peeped, the hostess pouring tea with her nice attention to details. The open windows admitted the first soft air of spring; outside was Washington Square in its new raiment of pale green leaves. The setting sun cast lances of yellow light through the branches of the gnarled old trees. The winding paths were thronged with excitedly jabbering Italians, who made way for their children on roller-skates and closed in again like the sea. Even with this breath of outdoors, and with the room gay with cut hyacinths, Mrs. Van Suydam’s house smelled of lavender, of lemon verbena, and of dried rose leaves. “I always say that your house is the only place left in New York where I feel at home, Lavinia,” had almost sighed Mr. Tillinghast. His faded eyes became quite vacant, as if he looked inward at his memory of another house, now, alas, fallen. “Did you ever think that houses may have souls--souls as individual as our own immortal souls?” He was of a generation not ashamed to speak openly of the immortal soul which they took for granted resided temporarily within their mortal bodies. “Don’t you think the call of a house like this is a loud call? I sometimes wonder if Nicholas hears it--yet?”

“Wasn’t that too adorable, Dinah?” Eva interrupted her story to ask. “He so fitted in with the smell of lavender. And Miss Augusta briskly called him to task for being impractical. There’s a man who adores a woman in the right way! He said to her that when he spoke of creeping age he alluded only to himself! I almost ran in to hug him; but I thought I’d best wait and see what else they had to say about me. I could see that I only stood knee-high with the Misses Ingoldsby, who went into a squabble at this moment. They wanted to know why Nick was staying behind, permitting me to go unattended to Europe. They took the position that poor dear Nicholas couldn’t afford to go; and they left it to be inferred that I was bankrupting him. Miss Augusta threw a censuring look at Mr. Tillinghast and announced that I am far too pretty to go traipsing over Europe alone. ‘I never--’ she said--‘did trust Frenchmen.’ She sank into deep thought and open doubts. She stirred her tea, efficiently crushing the slice of lemon with her spoon and avoiding the splash that a more frivolous woman would have brought about. ‘Ahem!’ she finally produced triumphantly. ‘I could have told you the line to take, Lavinia. I’m very fond of young people, and have given time and thought to their ways; and I know that they need the guiding hand of more experienced persons through the pitfalls of their life together. One must gain the confidence of young people. Do you think that if I were to talk to Eva it would do any good?’ ‘I think,’ said my mother-in-law distinctly, ‘that it is none of your business.’ ‘Well!’ snorted Miss Augusta, sitting back in her chair. For my part--lurking in the hall and beginning to think what I should say if Miss Augusta did give me a rowing up salt river--I wanted to clap my hands when Miss Lois remarked to Mr. Tillinghast ‘Gussie talks too much.’ I walked in on them. I was very nice about it. But they were scandalized at my having listened.”

I was having a splendid time. “How about this matter of a child?” I asked, to keep her going.

She became merry over it. “It all came out of my leaving Nick alone in the summers. Poor old Nick! He’s sentimental. After the first summer, he told me that my study had gleamed with coppery flashes of a threat. The summer is dreadful, in New York, isn’t it?”

I laughed at her. “Had you no remorse at leaving him in a caldron?”

She said that she always arranged the house beautifully for him, with dust covers gay as a summer resort. The window-boxes, she stated virtuously, were festively in bloom. And there was always Mattie to see to his comfort. There was no excuse, beyond his sentimentality, for the habit into which he dropped of staying late at his office. Mattie had reported that he never came home to dinner. However, his explanation, given to Eva upon her return in the autumn, was the point upon which her sympathy for his plight laughingly rested. The fact that construction of the new city went on relentlessly, undampened by the weather, meant nothing to her; the fact that he worked under pressure brought forth from her the comment that American men were almost revolting in their frenzy over their drab business; but when he told her that he could better conceive of the ultimate in height when gazing from the high windows of his office at the panorama of the city by night she understood. Somewhere in the jewelled pattern of this city surrounded by water there lay, also brightly jewelled, the inspiration that he had felt to be failing him. Until the squares of light that were windows had turned black, he told her, he would lean from his own window and look down on this fabric of the latest assumption of man.

I interrupted: “Are you putting this into his mouth?”

She shook her head. “No. Isn’t it amazing? Why, it’s poetry, Dinah; and he’s just an ordinary sort of man!” He dreaded returning to the house, and every night put off until a later hour his dismal acceptance of its shadowy taunt. A man’s home--it was so dreadfully evident that Nicholas’ dominant instinct was that life must bring him a home--should be the expression of his hopes; but in this small house there was loneliness and a sense of frustration. It did not speak of the establishing of a family: there was no sound in the house. He had found himself listening to the Italian families as they straggled past on their way to bed; the lifted voices of the parents, wrangling with their children, began to be the deep voice of life. It brought what he supposed was a bewildered smile to his face, to realize that he wanted children. “Do you see how he got it into his head?” asked Eva of me. “It was being without me. Poor old Nick!”

The second summer had not helped to clear things up. He had got into the way of going to his mother’s: Eva suspected her of staying in town so that she might give harbourage to her son. She had not said so; but she had the faculty of saying things by refraining from saying them. Eva told me: “I reminded him that in the big house in Washington Square there is no sound; and he came back at me with the statement that in every nook and cranny it conveys that it has always cherished the sounds of the private life of a family. She is still gospel to him. It appears that she walked around here with him one evening; and all those things for the solution of which he had delved through agony of spirit, all the things that--undoubtedly from his life with me--he had begun dimly to see, were contained in his mother’s simple denial of individual liberty. She said to him: ‘Leave it to God, my child. He is still able to manage these questions. He--and nature--always have.’”

Eva was one of those women who, even through hard work, with loss of sleep, are themselves so shining that before the man’s jaded eyes, in a gloomy New York room, on a winter’s day, Aphrodite might have arisen from the foam all iridescent loveliness. She had a way of smiling wistfully. Whether outdoors the sun shone or not, she had the sun in her hair. I was impelled to ask: “Tell me this: is he still in love with you?”

“Oh, my God!” said Eva.

“It’s a funny thing, though,” she resumed, after a pause during which she smiled secretly. “He’s jealous of my fame.” Fame is a word that, self-applied, makes me wince. But she said it simply, surely, and un-self-consciously. “It started at a reception his mother gave for me when we were first married.” She looked at me curiously. “What is the matter, Dinah? It’s disconcerting, to have you burble with your amusement when I can’t see that this is so very amusing.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m making no mystery of it. But I am getting slants--oh, very different ones, I assure you!--on practically everything you’ve done since your marriage; I haven’t seen one person yet who hasn’t at once given their version.”

“I apologize for my repetitions,” she said huffily.

“Oh, don’t! I’m crazy to hear what you noticed at the parties and the like. You have no idea how fascinating it is, to get all the sides of the prism.”

She had a divine disposition. I had never known her to sulk. By the time Mattie had come in with tea for Eva and a cocktail for me, and Eva had called me a toper and had reminded me that hard liquor ages a woman, she was ready to go on sweetly with her tale. “And besides,” she crowed over the others who might have told me the same thing, “they can’t know what I mean to tell you. Wait and see! I was nervous about that reception, for I didn’t know how the two crowds--Nick’s and mine--would get on with each other. And--” with her half-smile--“I daresay I wanted to make a smashing impression on Nick’s crowd. And Nick made me frantic by continuing to tell me not to be nervous. I’ll not deny that I was hateful. I loitered upstairs in the dressing-room until he came for me; and he began running down the stairs, holding on to my arm; and he said he was sorry I slipped, but that he had forgotten I had not run, and slid, down those stairs since I was born. He may not have intended it, but he was superior about it. Of course I was furious; and I said I had forgotten to powder my nose and went back to the dressing-room.”

“Childish, wasn’t it?” I wanted to know.

“Um-m-m. I’m not so sure. I did deeply resent his manner. Looking back on it, I believe it was his own nervousness. He was more afraid of his mother’s scolding the nearer he got to it; and he glowered, and muttered at me to know if I didn’t realize that it was unpardonably rude to be late at a reception given for one. He said those things weren’t done, amongst his mother’s friends. What would you have said to that? I said ‘I’m accustomed to doing as I see fit and letting people wait for me.’ I was sure he’d take it, and that his mother wouldn’t. And,” she cried tragically, “he laughed at me! Quite gaily laughed at me! He got over his bad temper, and stood on the stairs laughing at me. He said ‘Wait until you see them! Look here, my dear: they haven’t the remotest--’ Of course I knew what he had intended saying. He had been about to say that those frumps had never heard of me until I married him. And after meeting them--and having them try to run my life for me, with the coolest assumption of omniscience--I can believe it. Their ignorance, my dear, of what goes on in the world----! Well: I lifted my eyebrows. But he whispered to me ‘Be a good girl, won’t you? And look perfectly beautiful, for my sake?’ And I knew that he was dreading what they would say about me.”

Eva said that Mrs. Van Suydam was an adept at the oblique rebuke. She had an eye like a naked blade that cut through any defense and withdrew itself into the scabbard of an old lady’s control. She wore a black velvet creation by Worth, made--so Eva afterwards found out--by the same design when its predecessor had served its day; and to this severely plain frock her maid had added snippets of old lace. Eva began to enjoy it. The smell of dying flowers was through the house; and, bathed in this sad aroma, Eva’s friends looked artificially bleached, dissipatedly fagged, while Mrs. Van Suydam’s old cronies were the dried rose leaves in the ginger jars. Charles Glidden had hung around the elderly lady, watching her like a cat at a mouse-hole; Eva saw in his eye that he meant to use her in a book. The orchestra, having eaten supper, had begun that tentative picking at strings which, in Mrs. Van Suydam’s girlhood, had indicated the resumption of the romance of posturing before respectful young men who wished to invite to the dance. Mrs. Van Suydam’s smile at Glidden was almost coquettish. The richness of her memories had, while attenuating this smile, at the same time warmed it. Fascinated, Eva drew nearer. But Spencer Mapes, with his silent pressure of attention, went with her; he talked into her ear upon impersonal subjects, and yet she knew that what he said was aimed at her marriage.

“Take Hamlet, as an example of the behaviour of a man who comes at the end of a played-out old family. Hamlet--” expounded Mapes.

“Bother Hamlet!” Eva had exclaimed impatiently.

“--Knew that he should have been man enough to kill--and what did he do? He used foul language to the women in the case. If he had acted on his impulse, and killed----”

She surveyed him with a passing contempt. “Would you kill? I doubt if you’d even use bad language.”

He said: “The mind is my weapon.”

I broke in with “What is Spence driving at?”

She sighed. “Oh, dear me! Nick is eternally harping on that same thing! And he’s driving at nothing.” She reminded me that she was endeavouring to lay before me the case of Nicholas’ jealousy of her reputation.

“It must be because he is, undoubtedly, old-fashioned. It sticks in his craw, one might say, that his wife works along a line quite independent of him,” I explained it.

“My eye!” said Eva, to settle that. “He, as an architect, is jealous of me as a novelist.” She said that Glidden had started it by his effort to boost Eva with her mother-in-law. His dictum had swept the rooms, so that in the end they had thronged around Eva with this new conception of her in their eyes. Except Mrs. Van Suydam: she held tightly to her own notions. The old lace at her throat and wrists was no more redolent of a cedar closet than her notions. “You know how, at a thing that has taken you aback, the muscles of your face slip, you think, for the rest of your life? Hers had slipped, at the shock of finding that there are those who consider me greater than the Van Suydams, into the inflexible front that she meant from then on to show. She, simply, won’t acknowledge it.”

In fairness to the absent Nicholas, I suggested that possibly he had had no pang of jealousy.

She gave me a long look. “I saw his face. He said to me--laughing it off: ‘A prophet in his own country, eh? A man’s reputation never exists in his family.’ The cronies were coming up to say goodnight; and they said ‘Nick, we never before realized what a famous woman you had married. You certainly did look high!’ Of course, the next morning I tried to smooth it over.”

I almost moaned: “Oh, Eva! Eva!”

She looked surprised. “Why not? Don’t you think it was the kind thing to do?”

I started to say “Kind?” But she was so kindly sure that she had been considerate!

She went on: “Nick is simple, sometimes. He began on a certain shame that he had got up over it; and naturally I realized how painful it would be if he acknowledged all of it--I had an idea that he’d brood over it--so I brought the talk to an end. He gave every evidence, besides, of getting hateful about it; for he said something about it not being so bad with my work. ‘With your flow of words--your beloved words--what’s to prevent your turning them loose on your book--finishing your book?’ He said that when a man wanted to build the greatest building of a great city, and the thing escaped, the fantastic idea was always beyond him because at the front of the poor man’s head was trouble and on the vision of the poor man’s strained imagination were the knocks of fortune: what was a man to do, in such case? The Devil, he reminded me, had helped the architect who designed the Cologne Cathedral; but the devils who were poking their fingers in this pie were not helpful visitants. He overlooked, you see, the self-evident fact that his mother’s friends are the bad visitants.”

I fear that I showed my astonishment. “He was appealing to you for sympathy. You wanted his understanding of the problems--the agonies--of your work, and he asked you to consider his problem. Don’t you feel this?”

None with so glassy a surface as Eva when she refused to be halted on a line of thought. “He has a way of saying things harshly. I can’t bear harshness. When things happen that hurt your heart, your brain doesn’t work. I had had a bad night--hopeless agony of mind because I couldn’t recapture a dream. And I said to him ‘You can’t understand!’ If he had said something! But how was I to know how he took it, when he didn’t say a word?”

I began explaining as if she were a child. “He wanted to say ‘Will you kindly, mercifully, put it into words--say, out loud, what you think of my work, of my potential ability to do great work?’”

She burst out laughing. “Dinah, darling: Nick isn’t at all like that. He’s a Dutchman. He’s solid and calm to the point of being nearly phlegmatic; he’s---- No, he isn’t stodgy, bless him! He’s a dear.”

“He might merely be reticent,” I suggested. I knew nothing about him. But I judged him by other reserved men. This desire of his, to know the worst, was something that was now, and would always be, a thing that in decency he would keep from her. The reticences of life were one thing; they were established by form; but, beyond and entombed, were the reticences of the heart, and of the spirit, and of these a man found it impossible to speak. I said: “You must often have rubbed it in on him that you don’t think much of his ability.”

Her knit brow revealed her difficulty over this. “I don’t see why you say such a thing. Look here: I’m going to tell you all we said, that morning. Then you can see for yourself. I tried to let him down easily. I said ‘I knew, last night, that something had gone wrong with you’.”

I sat watching her face. It was difficult to believe that she had carried on her part of the conversation as she now reported it to me. She had, however, so phenomenal a memory for conversations that it was impossible to doubt the essential truth of her complete misunderstanding. “He didn’t meet me half-way,” she complained. “He was rather mean. ‘Let us not bring it down to a struggle between us,’ he said to me. I said: ‘You know that I believe in you, don’t you?’ He came at me with one of those hateful counter questions: ‘Do you?’ So I looked straight at him and asked ‘You’ve never believed in me, have you?’ He said--as if this were quite sufficient: ‘I’ve loved you.’”

“Why wasn’t it sufficient?” I put it to her. A man loves a woman, I explained; this emotion does not presuppose belief in anything about her, beyond her fidelity. His belief in Eva was founded on the evidence of his eyes. A man would argue that behind a face so sweet there must lie womanliness.

She bit her lip. She was losing patience with me. “You don’t try to understand,” she complained.

“You’re wrong. I understand only too well.” I, on my part, was losing patience. Usually, I lost patience with Eva towards the end of a long talk. “You don’t want love; you want adoration--little Bodhisattvas sitting at your feet.”

She said angrily: “I shall lift him!”

She was devastating. “You mean, you will jerk him up?”

“Anyone would think,” she advanced plaintively, “that you were in love with him.”

“I scarcely know him,” I said shortly. But my sympathy was shifting towards him. As he was trying to make up his mind to let his work stay in a background made so much the richer for her work, so she had decided to put the force of her will behind and push him up. This much was plain. And nothing could well be more disastrous.

She said: “He laughed!”

I said: “Why shouldn’t he laugh?” It was impossible for them to bolster each other’s courage. And besides, Eva had never needed an outside influence to bolster her courage; her belief in herself would always hold her up. I asked: “What had you said, to make him laugh?”

“I told him that I was going to help him.”

“No wonder he laughed,” I replied.

Eva said sadly: “He used to seem so proud, and so completely happy. His very arm felt happy, when he put it around me as we showed the house to his mother. He had forgotten, Dinah,” she said, with her sudden understanding, “that he had chosen between his mother and me.”

I thought: “Poor man!” What had the choice been, after all, but the desire of a man for happiness at any cost? And--again after all--what is it to love a woman, except in one way or another to shed your life’s blood at her feet? I said: “Oh--let’s drop it, Eva; shall we? Why should we quarrel over it?”

It was dark, in the street outside. I had forgotten to stop to speak to Mattie.